Murder in the French Teacher's Garden Read online

  1

  I guess it all started the morning I met Madame Gallard.

  It had rained the night before and a heavy fog was covering the town of Cold Creek. The football field at St. Ignatius High School looked like a misty moor in the English countryside, the kind where King Arthur would have fought his fatal battle against Modred.

  If you haven’t been to Cold Creek, you probably will get up here eventually – it’s a common weekend getaway in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California. You might come up for the Mountain Days music festival at the end of August. Or you might come for a meditation retreat at the Shambhala Center, or maybe you’ll come to visit your kid at McCarthy College, a small and well-ranked liberal arts school in town where you can get a solid English degree or a BFA. You might come to Cold Creek in the spring or summer for the hiking, boating, or fishing, or in the winter for skiing. You might come up for one of the many conventions we host at the Cold Creek Convention Center, or just to shop for antiques at “Antique Row.”

  If it were the 1950’s, the only thing bringing you up here would be the St. Ignatius Catholic Seminary, which is now the high school where I teach, or the logging industry. Now we are a fairly bustling small mountain town, with a nice mix of college kids, retirees, hippies, old mountain men, and weekend visitors from the flatlands.

  That morning I got out of the car and looked at the ivy-clad, brick buildings of Saint Ignatius High School. The campus was wet and gray and quiet. This was my favorite time – when students were just trickling in, and I could go and make a cup of coffee in the faculty lounge in peace. I took my bag and walked through the front gate and entered the quad.

  It was a big green lawn, surrounded by classrooms on two sides, the chapel on the third side, and the administration building on the fourth side. Two enormous oak trees shaded the lawn and provided a home to the school’s famous squirrels. Some joker had years ago decided that the squirrel should be our mascot, and I guess it stuck. Through a passageway in between the two classroom buildings you could get to the football field and the gym, and beyond that were the mountains, standing above us in their foggy majesty. Over by the admin building the students were filtering in through the front gate as their parents dropped them off on the street out front. When the wind was right you could smell the fresh bread from the Cold Creek Bakery across the street. We were in the middle of town, just a two minute drive from my house, thank God. For Southern California, my commute was so short it was like a gift from the gods – something that, once you have, you can never give up.

  I might have to run over to the bakery and get a ham and cheese croissant during my break, I thought to myself. I walked past the chapel where Father George was doing the morning mass. I peered inside and saw him at the front, in his white robe, leading the mass, with five or six people inside sitting in the pews. I smelled the familiar scent of incense. In one of the pews I recognized Jim Garcia, the 9th grade theology teacher who’d taught here for twenty-seven years, as he reminded us in the faculty room all the time.

  I didn’t know what was going on in there, since I’m not Catholic, but I had grown to appreciate the rituals of Catholic school and I thought it was a good thing for people to take time out of their busy schedules every day to worship, meditate, be thankful, and that kind of thing. I should probably try it some day, I thought vaguely as I walked past.

  I got to the faculty room and started making a giant pot of coffee. I took my mug out of the cupboard and looked out the window at the fog-covered football field. I saw a woman walking across the field with a watering can, talking to herself angrily. Was that the French teacher? Madame what’s-her-name? It was only my second year teaching at this school and I still didn’t know everyone’s name. She was around sixty years old, a thin, aristocratic-looking French woman whom I’d never spoken to. She always seemed to be busy and she was in the Foreign Languages department, so I just hadn’t gotten to know her.

  I went over to the faculty directory on the wall. Gallard. That was it, Madame Gallard. She taught French I, French II, AP French, and two sections of AP Art History. I watched as she approached the faculty room and braced myself.

  The door swung open.

  “These steew-pid gophers are ruining my gar-DON.”

  I took a moment to process this.

  “The gophers are ruining your garden? I didn’t know you had a garden, Madame Gallard.”

  “You see what I have to do to water it,” she said, bringing the watering can over to the sink. She started to fill up the can. “It is barbaric to be forced to water a garden like this. They will not even give me a hose.”

  “Where’s your garden?”

  “Come with me and I will show you, when your precious coffee is ready. Or can you do anything without your big American caffeinated beverage?”

  I laughed. “No, not really. Wait a minute.” I filled up my mug when it was ready, and left with her. She took me across the field, carrying the watering can, and showed me a field behind the gym that was in the process of being converted into a large vegetable garden. She began watering the plants.

  “You see what they force me to do? At this age!”

  “What have you planted here?”

  She smiled. “Over here is my herbs,” she said, gesturing to a large planter. “I have thyme, oregano, basil, mint. And here I have all the ingredients for ratatouille,” she said with a large grin. “We have bell pepper, tomato, eggplant, zucchini. I think I will put a sign, ‘Ratatouille Garden.’” With this she chuckled to herself.

  “Madame Gallard, this is amazing.”

  “Please, call me Pauline. And you are Thomas, no? The new chair of the English department.”

  “Well, I have big shoes to fill,” I said, referring to Dr. Horton, the old lady who’d been the chair of the department for years.

  “Yes, they were big and snobby shoes. If you are asking me,” she said quietly, “I say ‘good riddance.’”

  I laughed harder than I’d laughed in awhile. I’d always thought the old professor was a pretentious bore. No one else at the school spoke this frankly.

  “Yeah, I think I’m going to lighten things up a bit,” I said.

  “Good. She ran your department like a dictator. She ran her class like that too. You know, the students are liking you. They tell me they are having much more fun in your class than in hers. They are actually liking the literature.”

  “Thanks, Pauline. I’m still figuring things out. Are the students helping you with this?” I motioned at the garden.

  “Of course they are. You know that we have a Gardening Club, yes?”

  “Oh yeah, I guess I’ve see the signs around campus.”

  We started heading back across the field.

  “We could use some help,” she said as the first bell rang. “The Green Campus competition is coming. Every year Kennedy High School win this competition, and I think they cheat because I have seen their campus and I am not impressed. I fail to see how their campus is green. This year, we will win. The judges arrive soon.”

  “Maybe I can help,” I said.

  “Good, because we are needing.” Her face became very grave. “This diocese does not care for making the campus green. The administration give me no help – NO HELP, I tell you. I am fighting a solitary battle against well-funded enemies at the public school.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, Pauline,” I smiled as we parted ways and I walked to my classroom, shaking my head.

  “SO let’s talk about exposition,” I said to my Mystery Fiction class. I sat in my chair and leaned back, looking at the circle of students in my room.

  “I want to focus on how a mystery
is set up. Now, you’ll notice that a lot of these mysteries might start with an initial mystery, which is quite inconsequential. Later, of course, the mystery becomes much bigger and more disturbing. Let’s talk about The Third Man. What was the initial mystery?”

  “He just wanted to find out what happened to his friend,” said a football player named Mike.

  “And then what?”

  “He just wanted to find out who was the third guy who carried his friend out of the street when he was run over.”

  “But also,” said a girl named Jessica, “it was weird how so many of his friends were right there when it happened.”

  “Okay, good,” I said. “So he starts looking for this third man.”

  “And then he thinks his friend was actually murdered, and the plot thickens,” Jessica said.

  “Very good, and then the mystery becomes, ‘Who killed my friend?’ But then, what is the real mystery?”

  “Well, they dig up the body and see that his friend isn’t even buried there,” Mike said. “And then it’s like, whoa. It’s like, ‘why did he fake his death?’”

  “And then he runs into his friend,” I said. “And he is played by…?”

  “Orson Welles,” said a quiet little guy named Sean who was the resident film nerd.

  “And what is the real story?”

  Sean continued: “Orson Welles has been stealing penicillin and diluting it, and reselling it and everyone has been getting really sick and brain-damaged because of it. So he faked his death because the cops were onto him, and then Martins runs into Lime and he learns the whole story, and Martins tells the police and they have that amazing chase scene in the sewers.”

  “Okay, good. So you see how some mysteries tend to start with a throwaway, initial mystery which is quickly revealed to be just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not even a real mystery. Sometimes it’s even part of the title of the book. Sometimes it was created on purpose, to mislead someone. Which brings us to Sherlock Holmes: The Man with the Twisted Lip. What is the initial mystery?”

  “The lady just wanted to find her husband,” said Sean, again, “and it seemed like the man with the twisted lip killed him and dumped his shirt full of coins in the ocean.”

  “Okay. And what makes Holmes think that this is in fact a diversion?”

  “That letter that Neville St. Clair sent to his wife, and the way the ink was blotted.”

  “Yes. And what else?”

  “The way Neville reacted when he saw his wife on the street.”

  “Okay – and the truth is in fact much stranger, isn’t it?”

  “Oh yeah,” said a blonde girl named Olivia. “That’s the one about the guy who pretended to be homeless so he could beg for money on the streets even though he had a house and everything,” she laughed.

  “Yes, very good. It turns out that the man with the twisted lip IS Neville St. Clair.”

  I let the class think for a moment.

  “Okay – now, talking about the setup, let’s go back to Chinatown. Remember the initial job that Jake is given?”

  “Yeah, that lady wants to see if her husband is cheating on her.”

  “And how does he react?”

  “Kinda bored because he’s tired of taking pictures of people doing it.” The class laughed.

  “Exactly! Remember what he tells her?”

  “Yeah, something like ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’”

  “But she hires him anyway, and how does this job reveal the rest of the iceberg?”

  “Oh man, it was so complicated,” Jessica said. “That girl who hired him was pretending to be…what’s her name, Evelyn something.”

  “Evelyn Mulwray.”

  “Yeah, and she was hired to get Jake to take the pictures of her husband Hollis, so that he would be embarrassed in public. But the girl wasn’t even his girlfriend, it was his wife’s daughter, and the guy who set up Jake was Noah Cross, who then killed Hollis.”

  “Okay, and what is the original crime that all of this reveals?”

  “Originally it was the incest,” Sean said. “Between Noah Cross and the real Evelyn Mulwray. But then it becomes Noah Cross privatizing the water department, and stealing the water from those farmers so he can sell their land really cheap and sell it for a huge profit once they add the water rights.”

  “Nice!” I said. “So when you guys are reading the Hound of the Baskervilles I want you to look at the initial mystery, and pay attention to these red herrings that the author is giving you to trick you. It’s all about the element of surprise.”

  LATER that day I was parking at my house and taking my stuff out of the car when I heard a familiar voice from the street.

  “So this is yours,” said Madame Gallard, who was in her car with the window down. “I have admired this garden for some time,” she gestured at our front yard, where we’d removed the lawn and planted drought tolerant native shrubs and trees.

  “I did not know you live here,” she said. “I am just down the street.”

  “So we’re neighbors! I’m glad you like the garden.”

  “Your wife does the planting?”

  “We both do it. It’s kind of our little project.”

  “So you have no excuse to not help me with the Green Campus!” she smiled. “I am recruiting you, Mr. Jenkins. You are officially in the Gardening Club.”

  And with that she sped off. I stood for a second, looking at her car, and then looked at my house. It was an old hunting cabin from the forties, with a big wood stove that we’d kept burning all winter long. The back yard was my favorite part, a large meadow that sloped down to a creek. A little bridge crossed the creek and led to a trail that led up to the Pacific Crest Trail a half mile up the hill. Covering the property were massive sugar pine, oak and white alder trees, which covered the whole mountain range. Besides my job, this house was my favorite part of moving up here. And of course, there was my barbecue equipment, which was the other great thing about finally having a yard after all these years of living in apartments in LA. I had a whole side area to put my smoker and my grill and all the equipment, so I could make brisket, steaks, burgers, ribs, whatever the occasion called for. My dream was to have big backyard barbecue parties, with kids running around and music playing, and I would be flipping burgers and doing the whole suburban dad thing. I hadn’t grown up with the traditional small-town family lifestyle, and I was curious to try it out. I supposed I would have to learn it from scratch.

  Later that afternoon my wife Katie got home from her job at her family’s business, the Big Bear Resort and Spa, where upscale visitors from LA and Orange County stayed when they went skiing. Her grandpa had built the resort as a lodge for boaters and skiers in the fifties and now the whole family, including both her parents, an uncle, several cousins and both of her sisters, worked there.

  She came inside with the familiar look of exhaustion and nausea. She was two months pregnant.

  “Rough day?” I asked.

  “I basically wanted to vomit all afternoon. And I can’t have coffee, so I was falling asleep at my desk also.”

  “Guest issues?”

  “Yeah. One room had an overflowing toilet that got everywhere, and the guests were not very happy about it.”

  “But you don’t even work in that area. Aren’t you just dealing with the website and the social media and everything?”

  “Yeah,” she said, lying down on the couch with a groan. “That’s what I’m supposed to be doing. But Todd was out all day and my dad just told me to quarterback the situation.”

  I laughed. Her dad was always using business-administration terms like “quarterback” and “circle back.” He was an intimidating guy if you didn’t know him, but once you were part of the family he was a slap-you-on-the-back, have-a-cigar father in law, and I’d grown to appreciate his style.

  “He just kind of put you in charge of the overflowing toilet, then.”

  “Yeah, and I had to track down Jorge and get him to deal with it. And
then the guests wanted to be comped, which my dad hates doing, and…could you get me the Triscuits? Sorry, I don’t want to get up right now.”

  I did my husbandly duty and she thanked me, then turned on Netflix and started watching some show about the Royal Family.

  “Tomato soup okay?” I asked.

  “That’s great,” she said. “It’s the only thing I can stomach. And can you do a grilled cheese too?”

  “No prob.”

  “So,” I said, “I know we talked about girl names, you know, Charlotte and Emma. But for a boy I’m thinking, what about either Arthur, or Conan, or Doyle?”

  “Arthur is okay. Doyle is kind of cute actually.”

  THE next morning, a Saturday, Madame Gallard came strolling past the house as I was coming out to the get the paper.

  “Do you two want to get a coffee at the Cold Creek?”

  “That sounds good, let me ask Katie,” I said, and went inside to ask her.

  “Is that the French teacher? Madame Lafarge or something?” my wife asked from the couch.

  “It’s Madame Pauline Gallard. Do you want to walk down to the bakery?”

  “No, I feel so sick. Could you get some more Triscuits?”

  “Sure. Do you want anything from the bakery?

  “Just a baguette maybe.”

  I left and walked with Pauline. It was overcast and breezy, but the sun was peaking through the clouds.

  “I was at school last night,” she said solemnly. “Keeping my vigil.”

  “Last night? Why?”

  “You know that fool Screbbles?”

  “Jim Screbbles?” I’d heard her mention him, but I didn’t know who he was.

  “Yes, Jeem Screbbles from Kennedy High School, the guardian of their sacred garden and head of the Environmental Club, who has been sneaking onto our campus to destroy my garden.”

  “No, Pauline, I can’t believe that.”

  “I catch him one time before.”

  “When?”

  “This last week. I was at the school late, and he come to the garden to look at it. He warn me, can you believe it? He say, ‘Watch out, Frenchie, or something will happen to your garden and maybe you will not win the competition this year.’ So now I have to go and wait, and protect the garden since the diocese will do nothing. I even complain to them and they said they cannot do anything. I speak to the police and they say that unless he enters school property there is nothing they can do.”