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He waited while she made the call, left a message, and then listened to Marg’s voice mail—just a confirmation of the two o’clock.
Elizabeth gathered her purse and together she and Gil walked past the reception desk to the outside where the weak rays of a winter sun were piercing the high clouds. Hallelujah, the rain seemed to be staying inside the clouds, for the moment. As she slid a pair of sunglasses onto her nose and into the passenger seat of Gil’s Lexus, she saw Pat still watching her through the glass doors, not even bothering to hide her stare.
Her nosiness knew no bounds.
“I’m glad you could come,” Gil said as they drove out of the lot and she directed him to take a left.
“Me too,” Elizabeth lied. But she couldn’t stand being alone with her own thoughts. Pat’s watchfulness and Connie’s greed only exacerbated the problem.
“Your cousin, you say?” the school clerk asked from behind a glass partition near the front door of Van Buren High School.
“Yes.” Ravinia offered up her most innocent smile. “We’ve lost contact with Elizabeth and her family and I need to get in touch with her. Family crisis.”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t give out information about students.” The woman, gray-haired and stern, eyed her through huge glasses that gave her an owlish appearance. Her name plate read MRS. LOREEN DIXON.
A younger woman seated at a computer screen looked up in interest.
“You must help people, if . . . if it’s a situation of life or death,” Ravinia said to the clerk.
“Is that what this is?” Clearly, the woman didn’t think so.
“It’s a serious situation, believe me,” Ravinia said soberly.
Mrs. Dixon’s gaze scraped Ravinia up and down and in that moment she realized the clerk had seen it all, every scam that a kid had used, trying to get out of school. Ravinia took a second look into the woman’s heart and saw that she was a lonely woman, dedicated and honest, but jaded. She wouldn’t give an inch.
As if she felt some unfamiliar sensation race through her, perhaps an intrusion into her soul, the clerk’s eyes widened more. Her lips parted and she stared at Ravinia, placing a fluttering hand over her chest at the same moment.
Before Ravinia could ask about Bernice Kampfe, a door opened behind the clerk and a woman in her sixties strode into the office. Dressed in a long skirt and boots, gray hair clipped at her nape, she said to the girl at the computer, “I need to schedule time off. Next week, can you get me a sub for Thursday? From noon on. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment and it can’t be pushed back until after school.”
Loreen Dixon’s attention strayed. “Look on schedule B,” she said a little distractedly to the younger woman, wiggling her finger at the computer monitor.
“Got it. No problem, Mrs. Kampfe. You’re in”—she checked a computer screen—“room 226, right?”
Ravinia’s attention zeroed in on the woman, the person she needed to talk to.
“Wait, no, not Thursday. I’m in the computer lab.” Bernice Kampfe pulled a face as she mentioned that particular duty and slipped a pair of glasses onto her nose that had been resting in the neckline of her shirt. “Thirty years at this school and I still get assigned to the lab on my prep. Thanks very much, budget cuts.”
The girl laughed a little nervously, her fingers flying over her keyboard as she made a note while Bernice Kampfe looked over her shoulder at the screen, presumably confirming her mission had been accomplished. Satisfied, she walked out the way she’d come in.
“I can’t help you,” the clerk was saying, eyeing Ravinia as if she were some exotic reptile. “I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
The girl at the computer stared, her mouth dropping open at Dixon’s rudeness, but Ravinia took it in stride. Occasionally, when she looked into a person’s heart, she got this reaction, and besides she’d fallen into the information she needed.
Turning from the clerk to the girl
at the computer with a Can you believe this? expression, she left through the glass doors by which she’d entered.
As soon as she was down the outside steps, she made as if she was leaving the campus, walking across the street to disappear around the block, then doubling back to skirt the high school campus where she spied a huge building with a domed ceiling, probably the gymnasium. Attached to the gym was a wide staircase walled in glass. A bell sounded and soon students filled the stairwell, a clamorous horde talking, laughing, and shoving as they poured through the doors on ground level in a heavy stream. Once outside, most of the older teens headed to a parking lot where their cars were parked.
Lunch.
Perfect.
Ravinia didn’t hesitate. She slipped inside through the open doors and like a salmon swimming upstream, fought the current of kids flowing ever downward. On the second floor, she quickly assessed, taking a hallway that connected from the gym area to the classrooms. The locker-lined hallways had emptied, only a few straggling students slamming their locker doors. Eyeing the room numbers, she passed by a set of restrooms and a water fountain as she made her way to room 226.
At the open doorway, she peeked inside and spied the same teacher she’d seen in the office less than fifteen minutes earlier. “Mrs. Kampfe?”
“Yes?” Head bent over a stack of papers, Bernice glanced upward over the top of her reading glasses. Her graying eyebrows lifted and she stared at Ravinia as if she were trying to place her. “Can I help you?”
