The plain fact was that Miss Wisp did not want them searching Faith Wright’s locker.
“Why, the hubbub will distract the students for a week at least, and us with the exit exam coming up,” she said.
“We could come back after school,” Slade said.
“Yes, I suppose you could,” Miss Wisp said, as if he’d just said the most obvious thing in the world. “But the students would find out anyway. And so would the school board. I wouldn’t want to have to explain this to the school board.”
Kane leaned forward in his chair.
“I’ll be happy to explain this to the school board,” he said, fighting to keep his tone reasonable. “A girl is missing, and we have her father’s written permission to search her locker for clues to her whereabouts. Any more delay only adds to her jeopardy. How do you think the school board will like it if it turns out that she could have been helped, but the delay in searching her locker prevented that?”
“You don’t know that Faith is in any trouble,” Miss Wisp snapped.
“And you don’t know that she’s not,” Kane said reasonably.
The principal sat glaring at Kane, her jaw working as she sorted through her options. She’s certainly got that look down, Kane thought. They must be related.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to call the school district’s attorney and confer,” Miss Wisp said. “I’m not even certain we know the locker’s combination.”
“That’s enough,” Slade said. “I want Faith Wright’s locker number and I want it now. If anything other than that number comes out of your mouth, I’m locking you up for obstructing an official investigation, and you can talk to the school district’s attorney through the bars.”
What’s gotten into him? Kane thought. Aloud, he said, “I don’t think there will be any need for that, Jeremy. I’m certain that Miss Wisp only wants what’s best for her students.”
He poured a little more verbal oil on Miss Wisp’s wounded feelings, and after looking in a file, she gave them the locker number.
“But I was serious about the combination,” she said. “I’ll have to see if anyone knows it.”
Kane knew she was bluffing and decided to call her on it.
“That won’t be necessary,” he said. Leaving Slade in the office, he walked out through the accumulating students.
It felt good to do something, to move forward, to let the role of the detective settle over him and armor him against his fears and doubts. This was a job he knew how to do, and he could feel his confidence, confidence that he could and would do this job, growing within him.
He went to his truck, took the bolt cutters he’d bought in Anchorage out of the back, and walked into the school.
Devil’s Toe Regional High School was a rectangle of one-story boxes with peaked roofs around a central court-yard. The front box was divided by a two-story entrance module with a cathedral ceiling that housed the library, administrative offices, faculty lounge, and cafeteria. In the middle of the rear box was a two-story block that Kane assumed was the gymnasium. The school housed about 250 students, Miss Wisp had told them, eighteen teachers, and an administrative staff of six. They really needed more teachers and staff, she said, but the legislature was being tight-fisted.
The first bell rang as Kane reentered the building. Some of the students began drifting toward classrooms. Others gave Kane and his bolt cutters the fish eye. They’re probably worried that it’s their lockers I’m after, he thought. He walked back into the principal’s office, where Slade and Miss Wisp sat regarding each other like boxers waiting for the bell.
“These will get us into the locker,” Kane said to Slade, holding out the bolt cutters.
“But the lock?” Miss Wisp said. “Who will pay for the lock?”
Kane extracted a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and laid it on her desk.
“This should cover the cost of the lock,” he said.
Miss Wisp looked at him with pursed lips.
Sister Mary Perpetua, Kane thought. That was her name. At least, her nun name.
“We don’t have any way to take in cash from strangers,” Miss Wisp said. “Besides, I’ve just remembered. We have a list of locker combinations somewhere.”
“Too late,” Kane said. He wondered if he was being high-handed because she looked so much like the nun. To Slade, he said, “Let’s go.”
“I’m going with you,” Miss Wisp said.
“Fine,” Slade said, “just don’t get in our way.”
Miss Wisp led them down one hallway, then halfway down the next. Students were still putting things into lockers and taking things out. Miss Wisp stopped in front of a closed locker.
“This is it,” she said, “number one-seventeen.”
“What’s going on?” asked a young man dressed, as were half the students in the school, in dirty jeans and a flannel shirt. He had a knit cap with a Carhartt label on his head.
“Nothing that need concern you, John,” Miss Wisp said. “Go to your classroom.”
“It does concern me, Miss Wisp,” the young man said. “Faith is a friend of mine.”
“You Johnny Starship?” Kane said. The boy looked surprised and nodded warily. “Maybe you’d better stick around. We’ve got some questions for you.”
“Mister—what did you say your name was?—you can’t just question underage students,” Miss Wisp said. “It’s against the law.”
Slade gave the principal a disgusted look and opened his mouth to speak. Kane cut him off.
“I’m sure this young man wants to help us find his friend,” he said, smiling. “And I’m sure that the school board would want you to let him help us. But if you’d rather wait until he can get a lawyer here from from Fairbanks or Anchorage, I’m certain the girl’s father and everyone else will understand that you are just looking out for the boy. They might question why you put his rights before her safety, but you can explain that, can’t you?”
Miss Wisp’s glare would have melted concrete, but he had her and they both knew it.
“Go ahead,” she said in a voice that dripped icicles.
“Give me the bolt cutters,” Slade said.
Kane handed him the tool.
“You stay right where you are, pal,” Slade said to Johnny Starship.
The locker was secured by a cheap combination lock run through holes in its handle. Slade gripped the locking bar with the jaws of the bolt cutter and strained. The lock broke.
“Good bolt cutters,” he said, handing them back to Kane. Then he swiveled the locking bar to one side, pulled it through the holes, and snapped open the locker.
The second bell rang.
“Students should go to their classrooms,” Miss Wisp said, but none of the students who had formed a semicircle around the locker budged. Kane saw a couple of teachers in the crowd as well.
“Move along,” he said, raising his voice. “This has nothing to do with you.”
The teachers started herding the students away.
“Have a look,” Slade said to Kane.
The locker was as neat as everything else that belonged to Faith Wright. The walls were undecorated gray metal. No clothing hung in it. Textbooks stood in a line on the top shelf. On the floor sat a pale-blue plastic step stool supporting a dark-blue plastic crate. The crate contained binders of various colors, arranged spine up. A pair of sensible-looking shoes sat beneath the stool, to be exchanged for boots, Kane figured, and worn inside the building.
“Clean enough to do brain surgery in here,” Kane said. “You take the books, and I’ll take the binders.”
He picked up the crate and turned to Johnny Starship.
“Go ahead to your first class,” he said. “It’ll take us a while to go through these. Come and see us when it’s over. We’ll be . . .” He looked at Miss Wisp. “Where will we be?”
Miss Wisp pursed her lips so hard that they disappeared. She said nothing.
“Surely you have an empty room we can borrow for a couple of hours,” Kane said, keeping his tone light and reasonable. Miss Wisp looked like a cartoon figure of anger. All that was missing was steam coming out of her ears.
“Miss Wisp,” Slade said, his tone neither light nor reasonable.
“I suppose you can use the counselor’s office,” she snapped. “The counselor only visits once a week. This way.”
“Come and see us in the counselor’s office,” Kane told Johnny Starship, then followed Miss Wisp’s rigid figure down the hallway.
Miss Wisp opened a room with a key, turned on the lights, and walked in. The room was small and windowless, as homey as Faith Wright’s locker. Kane and Slade put their loads on the metal desk.
“Thank you, Miss Wisp,” Kane said. “We’ll find you if we need anything else.”
Kane’s words set the principal vibrating with indignation.
“This is my school,” she said. “Faith is one of my students. I have an obligation to be here while you search her belongings.”
“You have an obligation to cooperate with the police,” Slade said, none too kindly, “and an obligation not to obstruct an investigation. Good-bye.”
Miss Wisp looked from one man to the other, spun on her heel, and marched out of the room.
“There goes someone to make telephone calls to get us in trouble,” Kane said with a smile.
Slade laughed.
“Let her,” he said. “It won’t be the first time I’ve gotten into trouble with a principal.”
The men pulled chairs up on the opposite sides of the desk. Slade slid the first book off his pile and began leafing through it. Kane did the same with the first binder. It was red, and its spine was labeled “Civics.” It contained nothing but notes and other papers relating to the class. The notes were in a clear handwriting, feminine but unadorned by the curlicues Kane associated with teenage girls. Each of the test papers in the binder bore an “A” written in blue ink, and several pages appeared to be notes for what seemed to be an ambitious term paper on the separation of church and state.
The next binder, a green one labeled “Trigonometry,” was just as well organized, clear, and comprehensive. Kane, who didn’t remember a single bit of his high school math, couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The blue one labeled “Spanish IV” was just as bad. The marks in both were all A’s.
“This is one formidable young lady,” he said.
Slade set the last of the textbooks on the pile.
“There’s nothing in these,” he said. “There’s writing in some of them, but it’s all different and none of it looks like the handwriting in the notebooks. Probably used books.”
Kane took binders labeled “English” and “Chemistry” off the pile and slid them over to the trooper.
“Check these out,” he said, then opened one labeled “PE.” There wasn’t much in that but some handouts on exercises and a couple of physical evaluations that said Faith Wright was in good shape indeed. Kane turned to the last binder, “Extra C.” He leafed through fliers for dances and student-body elections and copies of the school newspaper.
“The only thing I see in here,” Slade said, sliding the English binder onto the pile, “is notes on a lot of feminist literature: Simone de Beauvoir, Nancy Hardesty, Catherine MacKinnon. Plus a bunch of stuff about feminism and sexuality. That’s a little unusual for a Christian girl, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” Kane said, “but a young woman who wants to go to the Ivy League probably needs to know that stuff. How do you know those are feminist writers?”
Slade laughed.
“I took a course on feminism in college,” he said.
“Know thine enemy?” Kane asked.
“I suppose,” Slade said, “but I don’t remember a thing about that class. Except that it put me next to a lot of women anxious to demonstrate their sexual independence.”
Kane turned a page announcing tryouts for the school’s production of
The Taming of the Shrew
and stopped.
“I’ve got something,” he said, sliding the binder over to Slade. “Tell me what you make of this.”
What Kane had found were a pair of statements from an Anchorage bank addressed to Dorothy Allison at a Devil’s Toe post office box that showed weekly deposits of a thousand dollars or more.
“Looks to me like Dorothy was making pretty good money doing something,” Slade said.
The two men sat looking at each other.
“Suppose it’s an alias?” Kane said.
“Could be,” Slade said. “Why else would she have these statements?”
They were silent again for a few minutes.
“So if it is an alias,” Kane said, “how could Faith Wright have been earning one thousand dollars a week?”
Slade looked uncomfortable and said nothing.
“Hard to think of many legal ways,” Kane said. “But the illegal ways are completely out of character, at least the way I read her character. Maybe Johnny Starship can shed some light on this.” He paused. “I think the conversation might go better if I talked with him myself.”
Slade looked at Kane for a moment, then nodded.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m sure the investigators could use my help questioning the workers up at the mine.”
“You might stop at the post office first,” Kane said, “and see who rented that post office box.”
Slade didn’t look happy about the suggestion. But he nodded, got to his feet, put on his coat, and left.
Kane finished leafing though the binder while he waited, finding nothing else the least out of the ordinary. When he finished, he leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, trying to blank his mind and let this new piece of information settle into the mosaic he was composing of Faith Wright. The ringing of the school bell didn’t stop his reflection, but a knock at the door did.
“Come in,” he called, and Johnny Starship stepped into the room.
“Please sit down,” Kane said, motioning to the chair Slade had vacated. “Thanks for coming.”
The young man sat on the edge of the chair, looking like he might take off at any moment.
“I’m not sure my dad would want me to talk to you,” he said.
“Okay,” Kane said, “but all I’m trying to do is find out what happened to Faith Wright. I’m told you are friends. Don’t you want to help find her?”