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“Can you remember anyone in particular? An enemy or even a friend they might have double-crossed or something?”
One side of Ida’s mouth quirked up, forming a parentheses mark on her cheek. “They were quite a pair. Frequent visitors here. Like I said, plenty of people had reason to dislike them.”
“I spoke to someone who attended school around the same time. Ryan Bledsoe.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“He told me they were expelled after a chemistry lab fire.”
“I can’t talk—”
“I know you can’t talk about their records. Can you confirm a rumor? Was someone killed in that fire?”
She looked at me.
“Ryan Bledsoe told me they were expelled, and said there was a rumor that someone died in the fire. Is this true?”
She continued to look at me, her expression thoughtful. “No. But you’re on the right track.”
It took a moment for me to realize what she was saying. “Someone was hurt?”
She nodded.
“
Badly?”
She nodded again.
“A student?”
More nodding. It felt like a game of twenty questions.
“What happened to the student?”
“She dropped out of school. Don’t know what happened after that.”
A girl, I thought. “I don’t suppose you’d remember her name?”
Ida smiled. “I figured you might get around to that.”
“Do you remember?”
“The mother sued the school. The case settled. The school board wanted to keep it quiet. Legally, I don’t think anything prevents me from talking about it, but I’ve been, um, encouraged not to, in the interests of this person’s privacy.”
Or the school board’s interest in sweeping the matter under the rug, I thought. “So you can’t reveal the name?”
“I’d prefer not to.”
“Even if this injured student might have killed two people?”
She didn’t say anything.
I tried another tack. “This fire—it happened when Knudsen and Schaeffer were juniors?”
“Yes,” she said, throwing aside all bureaucratic pretense of not discussing the matter.
“The student—also a junior?”
