Accordingly, he’d hoped to arrive in her classroom several minutes before the start of seventh period, allowing him enough time to speak privately with her and offer his regrets for his unguarded, hurtful remark. But one of his sixth-period students had appeared distressed at the results of the test he’d handed back earlier in the period, and he needed to talk with her at the end of class to reiterate the various ways she could receive extra help and/or raise her grade. His regular after-school hours for struggling students, for example, or extra credit work—or even the option of retaking the test at a future date, when she felt more confident in the mathematical concepts covered.
“You can rectify the situation,” he’d calmly promised, after outlining her various avenues for assistance. “I will help.”
By the time the student departed his classroom, no longer near tears, he had no hopes of a private discussion with Ms. Wick. In fact, he arrived at her doorway just as the bell rang for the start of seventh period. Closing the door behind him, he leaned against it and observed.
Her students had already settled at their two-person tables and were beginning to write in notebooks they’d evidently retrieved from the open cabinet near the doorway. On the whiteboard, Ms. Wick had written their initial task for the class, a five-minute writing prompt to settle them down and channel their thoughts toward the day’s lesson:What one topic do you wish people understood more fully? Why? What do you wish they knew about that topic?
He’d known, of course, what work awaited the students. Ms. Wick had e-mailed him her week’s lesson plans on Saturday, attaching the agendas and objectives for each day and listing the state standards her lessons satisfied.
Her thoroughness had surprised him, although perhaps it shouldn’t have. Not once he’d seen the orderliness of her classroom, despite all the potential for mess and chaos inherent in art classes.
He blamed those droopy buns for misleading him so badly.
Today, as she set up her laptop and prepared her presentation about Frances Glessner Lee, she looked much more professional in her clothing choices and overall appearance. Her black dress fell softly to her calves, swirling as she bustled around the room. Her chunky amber-colored necklace and dangling earrings framed her round, lively face.
Only one bun today, it seemed. It perched high atop her head, still messy, but in a way that looked somehow deliberate and neat nevertheless. Wavy, fine tendrils caressed her cheeks.
She was the prettiest witch in the forest.
Startled by his uncharacteristic flight of fancy, he jotted a note in his legal pad:Discuss faculty dress code.
Speaking of witchy, there was an unusual number of young women clad entirely in black in this class. If he wasn’t mistaken, all members of the state-champion girls’ softball team.
When Ms. Wick turned away for a minute, producing something large and cloth-covered from behind her desk and setting it on an empty table nearby, he heard one girl whispering to another.
“Freakin’ finally,” the student with cornrows hissed excitedly. “The murder unit.”
The other young woman, her skin powdered pale, extended her fist for bumping. “This is our moment, Tori.”
Then Ms. Wick called the class to order, and he watched over twenty years of teaching experience at work. Using a well-organized PowerPoint presentation, she relayed Frances Glessner Lee’s story with enthusiasm, covering various objectives while inviting student interaction and gearing it toward their interests whenever possible.
And their interests all appeared to tend toward one topic, and one topic alone: bloodshed.
“Dude,” Tori muttered to her friend. “Look at those stab wounds.”
In the current slide, projected onto the whiteboard, a male doll lay face-down on the floor of a meticulously crafted and detailed bedroom, red splotches marring his blue-striped pajamas. A female doll lay equally dead and bloody in the bed nearby.
“—included witness statements,” Ms. Wick said. “Her attention to detail was remarkable, as you can see. Let’s focus on another scene, which includes a calendar with flippable pages. Using a single-hair paintbrush, she would write tiny letters, one by one. And please note those amazing stockings on the victim here, knitted by hand with straight pins, as well as the working locks she created for windows and—”
Given the subject, Ms. Wick’s enthusiasm was inappropriate at best.
Nevertheless, her students seemed enthralled. Whenever she paused, various hands waved in the air, while other kids took feverish notes.
“Wasn’t it weird for a woman to do things like that, back in the ’40s and ’50s?” the pale-powdered girl asked.
Ms. Wick considered her answer for a moment. “Although forensic science was a relatively new field then, police work was dominated almost entirely by men. Some bristled at her intrusion into that domain, yes.”
A greasy-haired kid, slouched in his chair, raised his hand. “I bet it helped that she was rich.”
“You’re exactly right, Travis.” Ms. Wick smiled at him. “Because of her family’s prominence, she had influential supporters. Her money also allowed her to woo students to her week-long courses, complete with a concluding banquet at the Ritz-Carlton.”
Several students groaned at that, while one boy in a hoodie muttered, “The Ritz? Sweet.”
“But whatever encouraged investigators to take her classes,” she continued, “by the end of their week of instruction, after studying her dioramas, those students found themselves much better able to evaluate crime scenes in a systematic way, gather evidence, and draw logical conclusions from what they’d seen. And her work was so brilliant, her Nutshell Studies are used to train investigators to this day. That’s why the solutions aren’t publicly available.”
A girl at the table next to him twitched suddenly. As her hand shot into the air, her face alight, she began to grin.
Revelation. Watching it dawn on a student’s face was a privilege, one he didn’t take for granted. He’d been chasing that particular expression for over twenty years, day by day.
