Sugar and Spice Chapter 4

 

Chapter Four

October 17 Friday Morning

Elise Hanson’s House

Howard James Private School

Cambridge Massachusetts

ELISE HANSON HELD her tea mug, enjoying its warmth on this the first cold October morning. Until now, she hadn’t put the heat on, wearing sweaters and covering herself with a fuzzy blanket when she read or watched television.

When she woke, she hoped yesterday’s horror had been a dream, but it wasn’t. As she stepped out of bed, she shoved up the thermostat located just outside her bedroom door. She would lower it when she left for work. Although the school paid for her heating there was no sense in wasting money. Frugality was left over from being raised by a single mother who worked on the factory line making shoes for Endicott-Johnson.

Her mother made sure that Elise could go to college and lived long enough to see her daughter get her Master’s and start her Ph.D. Elise wished her mother had survived the cancer to see her daughter walk across the stage and for her to be addressed as Dr. Hanson.

The heat would be on her in a different way. As much as she hated clichés she was between a rock and a hard place as headmistress of Howard James Private School.

The police told her not to contact any of the parents involved in the incident, but if she didn’t the board would be down her neck faster than a greyhound after the mechanical rabbit in a race. Not a cliché. It should be.

She’d been headmistress only since August. Before that for five years, she’d been an assistant headmistress at Coopers Private Girls School in New York City. The HJPS board had recruited her after they saw an article she had written in Independent School Magazine on better communication with parents. The previous HJPS headmaster had been retired early because of his failure in that area. Elise knew that meant she would be dealing with entitled parents, arrogant parents and a few reasonable ones.

One of her first goals was to get acquainted with the students one on one. She didn’t want them to think they’d done anything wrong if they were called to her office. Watching the kids in the hall, none seemed like potential killers, but then she didn’t know what a potential killer looked like. Ted Bundy had been really charming according to the mythical they.

And what had Clay Franklin done to inspire such hatred that four girls wanted to kill him? He seemed like a normal boy.

She had stayed in her office late last night reviewing the folders of those involved in the plot. When she took over the job, the outgoing headmaster handed her a file, with a profile of each child that included those that needed to be coddled because of their parents or in spite of the parents. “Keep this secret,” he’d said.

Amanda Lander was nine years and four months. An average student, she hung out with the other three girls involved. From notes by her teachers in grades one through four, the girls were almost inseparable except when bickering over something which was never explained. Her best subjects were math, geography and science. Some messages from her parents, especially her mother, that she’d like to see more English and reading assigned to her daughter. Amanda’s older brother had attended the school then went on to Phillips Academy Andover last year.

There was a note in the file that Amanda’s uncle, Paul Lander was the City Manager.

Her mother had started her own company, something to do with AI, but had recently sold it and was no longer working or maybe she worked from home. Her father was a banker, a CEO of an old Bostonian bank which probably existed since before the Pilgrims arrived. There was something about hedge funds too, but it wasn’t clear.

She also noticed Amanda had often been picked up in a Tesla and at other times in a Mercedes. However, the way some people ran up debts, their wealth couldn’t be proven just by the cars they owned.

The Landers were generous contributors to the school in time and money, their donations were over five figures, annual gifts. Considering that the Landers had been paying double tuition at HJPS for four years and now added Phillips costs, she hoped the donations would continue but who knew. How they handled their daughter’s accusation might make a difference.

What a horrible person I am, she thought, to put donations before what could have been a terrible tragedy. And worse, put herself above everything. Why should the school come first and not the students? She tried to console herself that they were the same, but she only half believed it.

Admittedly, since she started teaching twenty-one years before, her attitude toward children had changed. In the beginning she’d loved them all, but the more she dealt with some of them, she could no longer say “I love all children.”

Some were little monsters, selfish, bullies, destructive creatures. In most cases, she blamed parents for not giving the kids behavioral limits or being too busy to have time for them. Granted, she dealt mostly with middle and upper middle-class children.

She’d done her student teaching in a slum school where the kids were often hungry. A few were the offspring of drug addicts, but there was one girl, Jasmine, whose mother was a hooker. Jasmine was always well behaved and never seemed to be hungry. Her clothes, jeans, T-shirts and sweaters were clean and perfectly pressed.

Jasmine had won a scholarship to Tufts and had disappeared from her life, except for a Christmas message. She wasn’t her worry now, Elise thought as she rinsed her cup and started her morning routine of showering and make up, not too much, just enough to accent her eyes and put a little color in her cheeks. Her tendency was to look pale to the point people might ask if she felt alright.

Although she wanted to stay in the shower with its warm water massage, Elise knew that was not possible even if she half multitasked by thinking of Clay Franklin. She had yet to speak with him one on one. In the hallway, he would act like any other boy his age, sometimes being reminded to walk and not shove others. When she started, he was not on the list that school had branded as troublemakers or problem children. His grades were mainly Bs but it was sports that interested him the most, the report said.

Overall, the school only accepted bright children, children where parents had put their money into lessons for this and that, took them on vacation to resorts or European holidays where villas were rented or even owned. A real problem child, after some support had been offered, would be asked to leave. Clay was definitely not one of those boys.

If one listened to faculty scuttlebutt, they would hear how Clay’s mother was a trophy wife who had snagged the CEO of a major envelope manufacturing company after Clay’s mother had died. He already had two grown sons who were HJPS graduates.

Elise listened to the morning news as she dressed. WBZ issued a breaking news bulletin. What was wrong now? She heard the announcer say, “In Cambridge an exclusive private school for grades one through six has found four girls plotting to kill another student. We will have more on this when we have the details. Stay tuned.”

By the time she left her house, she saw the local news station cars with their numbers 4, 5, 7 on them just outside the school gate. One of the ground staff must have closed it. A camera crew emerged from a car marked for Channel 7, opened the gate and drove in only to be stopped by security. A CNN truck parked behind the other cars and SUVs.

Elise made it into the building where she had her office before anyone identified her through the gate.