Dear Mr. Middleton,
I needed to contact you regarding something I found in one of Terence’s notebooks. It was his composition notebook for English class, and apparently he had been writing in it as a sort of journal. Terence was fond of writing poetry, and it was in his poems that I discovered something disturbing. In two different entries, Terence makes references to smoking and one reference to “grass.” As you can imagine, this greatly upset my husband and me. We are trying to come to terms with our son’s death, and while we have no desire to disrupt the Blackburne community, which has been so gracious and supportive as we deal with our grief, we wish to understand as much as we can how this tragedy came to pass. Do you or anyone else at Blackburne have any idea if Terence could have been involved with smoking marijuana? Or how he could have had access to that shotgun? I apologize for being direct, but we must know the truth, or otherwise we shall be haunted by uncertainty. The police have conducted an autopsy, including a drug test, but the results will not be available for at least another week.
Of course, we wish for this to be investigated as discreetly as possible. These poems of Terence’s may simply have been creative exercises rather than evidence of any hidden truths, and we do not wish our son’s name to be blackened, nor do we want to do anything that could harm Blackburne’s reputation.
Any assistance you could give us would be most appreciated, as always. Thank you for your help, and I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Samah Jarrar
From: Ren Middleton
To: Samah Jarrar <[email protected]>
Date: Sunday, November 21, 2010, 12:38 p.m.
Subject: Re: Terence
Dear Mrs. Jarrar,
First, my deepest apologies for not responding earlier. I was away from campus and without Internet access for most of Saturday and did not return to Blackburne until a few minutes ago, when I read your e-mail.
I completely understand your need to know the circumstances, and the school and I shall do everything we can to assist you. I can tell you that, given the structure and amount of faculty supervision here, it is extremely unlikely that students could engage in such behavior. We have, as you know, a zero-tolerance policy for the possession of drugs or drug paraphernalia, which has been an effective deterrent for many years. I will speak with Terence’s English teacher, Mr. Matthias Glass, about the composition notebook, although I am sure that if Mr. Glass had had any concerns, he would have forwarded them on to me or his department chair. You are probably correct that the entries you read were of a creative nature. I will be back in touch with you by Monday afternoon at the latest.
Again, please accept my deepest sympathies. The entire school community stands ready to support you and your husband in any way we can.
Sincerely,
Ren Middleton
Associate Headmaster
The Blackburne School
I looked up at Ren, beginning to feel squeezed by a sense of dread. I tried to shake it off. “Seems like my theory isn’t so ridiculous.”
Ren ignored me. “This notebook,” he said. “Did you read it?”
I felt comforted for a moment, on familiar ground. “It’s a journal I ask them to write in occasionally—free writes, personal reflection, creative exercises, that sort of thing. I take them up every few weeks. I haven’t read them this month so far. I don’t recall reading anything like that in Terence’s notebook, or anyone else’s for that matter. Maybe if I could see the notebook again, I could—”
“No.” It was blunt as a hammer stroke. “You said yourself that students wrote creative exercises in these notebooks. We leave it at that.”
I blinked. “But—if he was stoned, and if Paul Simmons was with him, we ought to find out how they got the drugs in the first place so we don’t have another accident.”
“We won’t,” Ren said. “I learned today how they got the shotgun.”
“What?”
Ren leaned forward, putting his elbows on his desk. “Porter Deems came here today after lunch, to my office,” he said. “He confessed to being careless with his master key. He would let his advisees use it if they had to get back into the library for their backpacks or if they wanted extra toilet paper out of the supply closet. His advisees knew he kept it in his desk drawer. Two weeks ago, just before Porter took Terence and his other advisees to Charlottesville for a movie and dinner, Porter couldn’t find his key in his drawer. The next day, it reappeared in the drawer. He said he keeps nothing else in that drawer other than a legal pad and a few pens, so he’s positive the key had been missing. Porter now suspects that Terence took the key, had a copy made in Charlottesville, and then brought the original key back the next day when he stopped by Porter’s apartment with a question about his history homework.”
I sat back in my chair, floored. Porter? It seemed incredible. And yet he could be reckless in just this sort of way. “What’s going to happen?” I managed. “To Porter?”
Ren turned his laptop back around and shut the screen. “Porter resigned. Effective immediately.”
“That’s not . . . This isn’t all Porter’s fault.”
“He took responsibility for his actions. He is the one who suggested resigning.”
I shook my head, unwilling to let it go. “We have to talk to Paul. His father could get him to talk, maybe.”
“That will be between Paul and his father,” Ren said.
Then I remembered the shotgun cabinet. “What about the combination lock on the gun cabinet? Did Porter open that up for Terence, too?”
It was the only time I saw Ren look uncomfortable during that entire conversation. He blinked and glanced away from me for a moment before saying, “Terence must have found out the combination. Perhaps he watched Porter open it once and remembered the numbers.”
He was bullshitting. I knew it, and he did, too. Terence had gotten the combination from someone else. Maybe it was written down somewhere and he’d copied it. Or someone else knew it—someone like Paul Simmons, the headmaster’s son. “We need to talk to Paul,” I said.
“No.”
“Ren, I get that you want to protect the school. But—”
“I said no.”
“If you would just listen to me for—”