I reached into the inside pocket of my coat and pulled out a skullcap, which I also placed on Ren’s desk. Inside the skullcap was another plastic bag. It, too, contained marijuana buds, two of them, along with a handful of white oval pills. I looked at Paul, who had gone very still.
“I found this outside of Saint Matthew’s,” I said, still looking at Paul. “In a planter off to the side of the entrance. Where you put it before I caught you in Vinton.” I had thought saying this, making a big J’accuse! statement, uncovering a truth, would give me a small rush of triumph. Instead, I felt resentful and a little sad.
Ren stared at Paul. “Is this true?” he asked.
Paul worried at his thumbnail for a moment and then said, “I want to talk to my father.”
There was a pause. Ren set his jaw. “In due time,” he said. “First, I want to know if what Mr. Glass said is true. Did you put this bag in the planter by Saint Matthew’s?”
Paul looked at him, malevolence now rolling off him like heat from pavement. “No,” he said. I thought this is what the police must feel like after interrogating someone they know is guilty and the suspect smiles, sits back, and says he wants a lawyer.
Ren looked at me. “Did you see him do it?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t. But he did get to the chapel before I did, and instead of running away and hiding somewhere before I came up the Hill, he made sure he’d gotten rid of it. Probably thought he could pick it up tonight after chapel. Be pretty easy to do in the dark.”
“I didn’t do it,” Paul muttered.
“You said that in Vinton,” I said. “Several times. ‘No! I didn’t do it! I swear!’ But you weren’t talking about that,” I said, pointing at the bag. “Or about opening a door into my face. You were talking about Terence, weren’t you?” Paul stared at the floor, picking incessantly at his thumbnail. “Did you go down to the river with him last weekend? Did you take the shotgun out of the locker?”
Paul shot me a look of such loathing, I almost stopped. Ren was sitting forward. “Mr. Glass—”
“Did you smoke with him down at the river?” I said hurriedly. “Is that what happened, Terence was stoned and the gun slipped—”
“That’s enough!” This time Ren’s voice was a whiplash. “Paul, go across the hall and sit outside your father’s office, next to Mrs. Robinson’s desk. Do not move from there, not an inch. Go.”
After a moment, Paul got to his feet and went to the door, not without another poisonous look at me. Then he was gone.
As soon as the door shut, Ren said, “I don’t know what the hell is going through your mind, but it will stop, right now.”
“Look, I’m sorry that I interrupted you —” I began.
“Interrupted me? Sweet Jesus, man, you all but accused Travis Simmons’s son of manslaughter.”
“I made an inference based on a gut feeling—”
“A gut feeling?” Ren looked incredulous. “You shouldn’t be listening to your gut. From where I sit, your judgment is seriously clouded. You find marijuana hidden in a student’s room, and you hold on to it for over a week, without telling me or anyone else. Then you make this baseless accusation—”
“It’s not baseless.”
“This baseless accusation about Paul Simmons somehow being involved in Terence Jarrar’s death.”
I took a breath. “That boy knows something about Terence’s death,” I said. “He was panicked when I grabbed him, Ren. Not angry, or scared of me. He was panicked.”
“You pulled him out of a window. I’m not surprised he was panicked.”
“I pulled him back in through a window because he was trying to climb out onto the roof! You can’t tell me he did that because he was scared of detention.”
Ren sat back in his chair and gave a disgusted sigh.
I continued. “I think he feels guilty over Terence’s death. He knows something, Ren. I think he and Terence got stoned, and Terence shot himself, accidentally or otherwise. The marijuana in that bag I found outside Saint Matthew’s looks an awful lot like the marijuana I found in Terence’s room. I’m no botanist or pot expert, but I know there are different kinds, like different brands of beer. Both of these look the same. That means they might have gotten it from the same place. And those pills? They’re Vicodin. Look, you can see it stamped into the pills.”
Ren looked at me through narrowed eyelids. “You still haven’t explained the marijuana you supposedly found in Terence’s room.”
Now it was my turn to be incredulous. “Supposedly found?”
“You didn’t bring it up until now. According to you, you’ve held on to it for a week.”
I shut my eyes briefly, trying to regain my equilibrium, and then opened them again to look evenly at Ren. “I tried to bring the bag to you when I brought that box of Terence’s stuff over to your office. I wanted to give it to you then, but his parents were here. I couldn’t tell you what I’d found in front of them.”
“And what kept you from telling me later?” His voice was withering. “Is your schedule so busy you couldn’t stop by my office once this entire week to let me know that you had found drugs on campus?”
I thought of meeting Deputy Briggs at the Fir Tree, listening to what he had to say about Fritz’s disappearance and his suspicions about the Davenports. If I offered this up as an excuse to Ren, he would think I was even crazier than he did now. “I just . . . Other things came up,” I said lamely. “I made a mistake, clearly. And I’m sorry.”
Ren reached forward and jabbed at a key on the laptop computer on his desk, bringing it out of sleep. “Let me tell you about the consequences of your mistake,” he said. “On Wednesday afternoon, I received an e-mail from Mrs. Jarrar. She was quite upset. She had been looking through her son’s things, including his composition notebook. A notebook he had for your English class.” Ren looked at his computer, seeming to search for something, and then turned the laptop around so I could see the screen. “Read this,” he said.
Reluctantly, I leaned forward. On the screen was an e-mail exchange between Mrs. Jarrar and Ren. Ren had scrolled down to the bottom of the screen so I could read the first e-mail, from Mrs. Jarrar.
From: Samah Jarrar <[email protected]>
Date: Friday, November 19, 2010, 8:52 p.m.
To: Ren Middleton <[email protected]>
Subject: Terence