The Word of a Child

Mariah looked surprised and as innocent as he suspected at heart she was. “Nobody is talking about Tracy yet.”

What he’d meant was that they might whisper about her. He didn’t say so. “Good. I want to get to her friends before she can. Her mother promised she wouldn’t let her call any of them until I say it’s okay. I’ll do some interviews here at school, others tonight in the kids’ homes.”

Her brow creased. “I’m not sure I know who her best friends are. Her crowd, sure, but if she had a really close friend…”

“I’m sticking around school today to talk to some of her other teachers, too.”

“Oh. Of course.” She tried to smile. “Poor Gerald.”

“Maybe.” Connor hadn’t made up his mind yet.

He left, then, to hit up the next teacher on his list.

The consensus among the faculty, he found, was in agreement with Mariah’s brief sketch of the girl. “A smart mouth,” the math instructor said. All equivocated when asked about her academic potential. “She’s got the ability,” conceded the social studies teacher grudgingly. “If she’d ever pay attention.”

Several had also had meetings with her mother. They were guarded in their assessment, but having met Sandy Mitchell, Connor could read between the lines. She was apparently still married to the long-missing husband, which didn’t stop her from replacing him with a rotating succession of men. She claimed to want the best for her daughter, but she let Tracy baby-sit until the wee hours on school nights, wrote excuses for skipped classes and apparently paid more attention to her current boyfriend than she did to whether her daughter had missed assignments or flunked tests.

When asked how truthful they thought Tracy was, each and every teacher hesitated. But once again, there was general agreement. “Hard to say,” the social studies instructor said at last. “She’s darned good at making up excuses for late assignments. I bought a few of them before she tried one too many.”

Her art teacher was a standout. This was the one class where Tracy excelled. Even Connor could see real talent in the sketches Jennifer Lawson showed off. “Look at her clay project compared to the other kids’,” she said, leading him back to a worktable beside a kiln.

He studied the rows of squat pots, as yet unglazed, constructed with coils. Only one had character and unexpected grace; it was both taller and narrower than the others, the neck taking an intriguing curve. Connor indicated it, and Ms. Lawson nodded.

“She’s very focused in here. I don’t get the excuses from her I know the other teachers do.” She added simply, “Tracy Mitchell really has artistic ability. I hope she chooses to use it.”

Tracy’s mother had given permission for him to read her daughter’s school file, starting with a pre-kindergarten assessment—“bright and eager”—and ending with the sixth-grade report card, which consisted of Bs and Cs. There had been up years and down years, he discovered; teachers who had seen promise in the girl and worked hard to cultivate her enthusiasm and ability, and teachers who had disliked that “smart mouth” and early budding of sexuality.

Nobody particularly noted lying as a problem. Yeah, she probably made up excuses for undone homework, but what kid didn’t? Connor knew he had.

His one interview with the girl had left him undecided. Usually he had a gut feeling. Strangely, this time he didn’t. Sitting in the living room of the apartment where she lived with her mom, she had told her story in a disquietingly pat way. But then, Connor had reminded himself, this was the third time in one afternoon she’d been asked to tell it. Wouldn’t be surprising if it didn’t come out by rote after a while.

If she was lying, she was smart enough not to let any smugness or slyness seep through. He had detected some real anger at the teacher, but not the distress a girl raped at her age should feel. If she was already sexually active, the actual act might not have disturbed her as much as it would have your average thirteen-year-old. Even so, how much experience could she have? Shouldn’t she be traumatized?

But he wasn’t making assumptions too quickly. Sometimes the trauma was buried. It could take time to claw its way to the surface. Or, hell, maybe she’d seen her mother trading sex for favors over the years, so this swap, a grade for a quickie, had seemed normal to her, something a girl did.

Could she, at thirteen, not be traumatized by forced sex with a man three times her age?

Connor was more depressed by that possibility than by any of the others. Damn it, a thirteen-year-old was a kid. A little girl, who shouldn’t be seeing R-rated movies, far less be numbingly sophisticated about sex.

Anyway, assuming she was that sophisticated, why had she decided, after the fact, to tell her drama teacher what had happened? Because she was upset? Or because Gerald Tanner hadn’t kept his side of the deal? Say, he’d decided she should put out a few more times if she wanted that passing grade?

The bell rang. Knowing better this time than to try to force his way up three flights of stairs against the lemminglike plunge of the middle-schoolers toward their next classes, Connor waited outside in a covered area. Shoulder propped against a post, he watched thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds flirt, gossip with friends, struggle to open ancient metal lockers and act cool.

On the whole, they hadn’t changed since his day. Haircuts and clothing styles were a little different, but not the basic insecurity that was the hallmark of these young teenagers.

He didn’t see a girl hurrying by who would have been as calm as Tracy Mitchell, talking about the first time her computer teacher exposed himself to her.

The crowd was thinning out, the next bell about to ring. Connor shoved away from the post and through the double doors into the tall A building with its Carnegie-style granite foundation and broad front entrance steps. Stragglers on their way to class cast him startled looks. He was an alien in their midst, an adult who wasn’t a teacher or a known parent. He smiled and nodded when they met his eyes.

Tracy could be lying, all right. She wouldn’t be the first teenager who’d decided an allegation of sexual molestation was the way to bring down an adult she hated.

But Gerald Tanner was also the classic nerd who had probably been hunched over his computer when his contemporaries were developing social skills. Not to mention fashion sense. Even Connor, who didn’t give a damn about clothes, had shuddered at his polyester slacks, belted a little too tight and a little too high on his waist, and the short-sleeved white dress shirt and tie. Okay, Tanner didn’t have a plastic pocket protector, but the black-framed glasses made him slightly owl-eyed. Who wore a getup like that these days? Hadn’t he ever heard of contact lenses?

The point was, Gerald Tanner fit the profile of a guy who felt inadequate with women his own age. Here were all these teenagers, as awkward as he was with the opposite sex, the girls developing breasts, experimenting with makeup, learning to flirt and to flaunt what they had. What could be more natural than the realization that he was more powerful than they were? That he could fulfill his fantasies without having to bare himself, literally or figuratively, with a real woman?

Connor reached the top floor and paused briefly outside a classroom with its door ajar. The teacher was talking, but damned if any of the kids seemed to be paying attention. Some of them were studying, one girl was French-braiding a friend’s hair, a couple of guys were playing a handheld electronic game, while others drifted around the room. Connor shook his head in faint incredulity. In his day, you were in deep you-know-what if you were caught passing a note, never mind openly playing a hand of poker in the back.

The teacher raised her voice. “Everybody got that assignment on their calendar? Remember, the rough draft is due Tuesday.”

One or two students appeared to make notations in open binders.

Still shaking his head, Connor moved on.

What kind of teacher was Gerald Tanner? Did he wear any mantle of authority? Or did the kids see him as a computer geek, too?

Connor’s stride checked as it occurred to him that maybe times had changed. This was Microsoft country, after all, and Bill Gates was the Puget Sound area’s biggest celebrity. Hell, maybe jocks weren’t the only object of teenage girls’ lust these days. Maybe visions of the next computer billionaire danced in the heads of thirteen-year-old girls.

He’d have to ask Mariah.

Her door stood ajar, too. She sat behind her desk, papers spread across the surface, a red pen in her hand. Her concentration seemed complete. Connor wondered if she’d forgotten he was coming back.

But, although he didn’t make a sound, he was no sooner framed in the doorway than her head shot up. For a moment she stared at him with the wide-eyed look of a doe frozen in car headlights. Was she afraid of him?

But then she blinked, her face cleared, and he told himself he’d imagined the fear.

“Detective. I thought maybe you’d gotten lost.”

“Just avoiding the rush.”

“Smart.” She started stacking the assignments, her movements precise, the corners all squared. “What can I do for you?”

“Tell me what you know about Tanner.”

“Gerald?” Her hands stilled momentarily, then resumed their task. “Well…not very much, actually. As I said in Mrs. Patterson’s office, I didn’t even know whether he was married. We simply haven’t become that personal.”

Connor sat as he had that morning on a student desk in the first row. “Is he shy?”

“Um…” She considered. “No, not really. He’s friendly in the teacher’s lounge. He’s surprisingly funny.”

Okay, Connor thought, torpedo the stereotypes. Horn-rimmed glasses did not mean a man was humorless; skinny arms did not mean he was pathologically shy.

“We’ve sat together to eat lunch several times, especially since we’ve started a discussion on doing a joint project coupling writing skills with Internet research.”

“Have you seen him teach?”

She pursed her lips as she thought. Connor was annoyed to find himself fixated on the soft curve of her mouth. Scowling, he tore his gaze away.

“Only briefly. Generally, of course, he isn’t lecturing like I might do. The students work on computers, beginning ones on keyboarding skills, more advanced on computer animation or simple programming. So he tends to be wandering, looking over their shoulders, responding when they ask for help.” She shrugged. “That kind of thing.”