Written In Blood (9 page)

 
The front cover of the brochure displayed a glossy photograph of the old mansion that had long ago been converted to a private school for wealthy young women: climbing roses on cream-colored walls, twenty-five-foot-high entryway, fountain burbling in the courtyard. All the charm of a fairy-tale castle.

A fairy-tale castle with the requisite goblins and ogres,
Claudia thought, closing the brochure and returning it to the antique side table.

Paige’s fear that she would lose her case to the Sorensen children had prompted her to schedule Claudia’s talk to the student body the week after the hearing.

The last witness had left the stand, the lawyers submitted their evidence, and Judge Krieger took the case under advisement. Now all that remained was for him to notify counsel of his determination.

Claudia waited in the lobby, reviewing the handwriting samples she’d chosen to present: Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton. Pop stars would grab the students’ attention faster than Hillary Rodham Clinton or Condoleezza Rice, whose handwritings she would also show.

She got up and crossed the foyer to study a photo display that decorated one wall. Groups of students dating from the early days of the Sorensen Academy—girls dressed in wartime fashions. Hippie peaceniks of the sixties in empire dresses. Gen Xers and sophisticated young women of the new millennium with old eyes in baby faces, daring the photographer with defiance—captives of the camera, refusing to smile.

Claudia glanced through the foyer doors and saw that it was raining again. She was glad she had dressed warmly. Black wool jacket, dove gray cashmere turtleneck, long skirt, and ankle boots—dressed up enough to command respect, but not so formal as to distance her from the girls. She had pinned her favorite prop on her lapel—a gold cloisonné fountain pen.

A door at the back of the building swung open and Paige ran in from the rain, laughing. The man following close behind her was laughing, too.

“Hi, Claudia. You are the
best
, showing up in this crappy weather. I was afraid you might cancel.”

The man helped Paige out of her neon-yellow slicker, his hands lingering on her shoulders. Paige took the dripping garment from him and hung it on a coatrack by the door. “This is Cruz Montenegro, our athletics director,” she said over her shoulder. “Cruz, this is Claudia Rose.”

Cruz was exactly as she had described him. Inky hair and indigo eyes. The faded line of a scar showed up against his tanned skin, slightly disfiguring the full lips, but not unattractive. His nose was crooked enough to suggest broken. Tanned biceps bulged from the sleeves of an athletic shirt with
Sorensen Academy
emblazoned in two-inch white letters across the front.

“Yo, Claudia,” sounding like Sylvester Stallone. “Gladdameetya, gotta run.” He stretched out his hand to give hers a quick pump, slowing but not stopping. Running up the staircase, leaving her a view of a firm butt with thigh muscles that made his shorts look too small. A Greek god, had Greek gods hailed from New Jersey.

“See what I mean?” Paige whispered, her brows forming a question mark.

“Not bad, Paige. Not bad at all.”

“Yeah, he’s pretty popular around here.” Paige dragged her gaze away from the receding figure of Cruz Montenegro and beckoned Claudia to follow her. “We’re all hyped about your talk. Need any help?”

“I’ve got it covered, thanks. Lead on, MacDuff.”

Claudia grabbed the handle of the luggage cart she had loaded with her notebook computer and LCD projector, and followed Paige along the passage toward a pair of double doors.

The high-pitched chatter of teenage girls intensified as Paige drew open the doors and they entered a room that seemed to have been designed as a grand dining hall or perhaps a ballroom.

Claudia’s eyes were drawn upward to vaulted ceilings decorated with frescos of plump cherubs that could have originated in a seventeenth-century Italian palazzo. Several rows of folding chairs had been grouped around a lectern and screen. Forty or so teenaged girls in uniform navy skirts and white knit shirts sat and stood in knots, chatting with each other or on mobile phones.

Claudia set up her laptop and digital projector while Paige called for order. In her khaki jumpsuit with her hair worn loose, the principal looked young and carefree, not like a woman terrified that a court judgment would tear this place away from her.

“We’re very lucky to have a special guest with us today,” Paige began in the girlish voice that had struck Claudia in their first phone call.

Claudia’s eyes roamed over the assembled girls. Which one was Annabelle Giordano, the girl whose attempted suicide had landed her at boarding school?

She held up a blank sheet of paper. “This is a symbol of your environment. When you pick up your pen and begin to write, you leave a trail of ink on the paper that shows how you behave within your environment.

“Your handwriting reveals how you’re feeling at the moment—whether you’re happy or sad, confident or shy, optimistic or feeling down. It shows how you think, how much energy you have, and many other things that make up who you are.”

Their faces were rapt as Claudia spoke, projecting the handwritings of the pop stars onto the screen, explaining how their handwriting mirrored their emotions and experiences, and how it would change as they developed over their lifetime.

She dictated a sentence for the students to write. In seconds their voices had swelled to a crescendo, rivaling the sound of paper being ripped from composition books. Then she instructed them to switch hands and write the sentence again.

The room filled with groans and giggles as they struggled with the assignment. Then, above the chatter, a young voice. “This sucks
ass.
”

Silence fell like a stage curtain. Heads twisted to the back of the room where the challenger stood just inside the door.

Her face was a pale oval, dark brows knit in a scowl. Long black hair fell over her shoulders, blunt cut, the bangs touching her eyebrows. One sock had slipped down to her ankle. She didn’t bother to straighten it.

Despite her provocative words, there was something fragile about her.

Claudia raised an eyebrow at the rude comment. “An interesting observation,” she said when no one made a move to set the girl straight. “What makes you think it sucks?”

The girl lifted one shoulder. Calculated nonchalance. “It’s just a bunch of marks on paper. It doesn’t mean anything. This is so retarded.”

Claudia looked back at her, unsmiling. “There was a point to the exercise we just did. I wanted to demonstrate that we have a
natural
writing hand and an
unnatural
one. Sometimes, when an accident or illness causes a person to lose the ability to write with their natural hand, they have to learn to use their unnatural one.”

She went to the laptop and clicked the mouse to project a sample written by a man who had become paralyzed by polio and now wrote holding a pen in his mouth.

“Would you be able to write this well, using your foot?” Claudia asked the audience. “Writing with your unnatural
hand
was difficult enough. But after he practiced for a few months, this man’s writing became similar to the way he wrote before he was paralyzed. Any guesses why?” Her eyes scanned the audience. The girls were all staring at the screen. All but the girl at the back of the room, who gave a loud, contemptuous sigh and rolled her eyes.

Ignoring her behavior, Claudia continued to speak. “When someone passes you a note in class, how do you know who the note is from?” She waited for an answer, noting the renewed disdain on the face of the girl by the back door.

Several hands shot up and a girl in the front row called out, “Because you know their handwriting.”

Claudia pointed at her. “You’re exactly right. And you know their handwriting because it’s unique to
that
person. Why? Because we all have different experiences, and we react to them differently, and the way we react is reflected in the way that we write. And that’s because handwriting starts in the brain, not in the hand.”

As she wrapped up her presentation, she couldn’t help noticing that the girl at the back of the room ducked out before the enthusiastic applause died away.

“That was
awesome
,” Paige said, still in girlish mode as the girls and their teachers filed out of the room. “But I have to apologize for Annabelle.”

Claudia glanced up from powering down the laptop. “The girl with the snide remarks? I thought that might be her.”

“Yeah, we just ignore it when she does things like that.”

“I noticed no one told her to sit down and button it.”

“Our school psychologist, Dr. McConahay, says she does it to get attention, and when we react, it encourages her to do it all the more.” Paige coiled the laptop’s electrical cord, snapped a rubber band around it, and handed it to Claudia. “I don’t agree, but
she’s
got the psych degree, not me.”

“It doesn’t look to me as if Miss Annabelle is likely to be interested in graphotherapy.”

“But she stayed for your whole talk. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

“Remains to be seen.”

“Let’s go up to my office. You can meet her and we’ll see what she has to say for herself.”

Paige asked the young woman at the reception desk to locate Annabelle. Her name tag said
Brenda
. Anorexic thin, mousy-brown hair, and pasty skin. She looked out of place in a setting where tuition for one semester was probably higher than her annual salary.

Brenda said, “I saw her go outside. It stopped raining a while ago.”

“Would you send someone to find her and bring her to my office,” said Paige.

She took Claudia up the wide, sweeping staircase, stopping at a door about twenty feet along the landing. As she opened the door, the bichon frise sprang out of a basket next to the desk and danced over to his mistress, barking happiness.

Paige’s office was more like a cozy sitting room, Claudia thought, taking in the old-fashioned love seat and overstuffed chairs. It looked like a place where a teenager with a problem to discuss might feel comfortable.

“How about some coffee?” Paige asked, stooping to ruffle the little dog’s fur and mother him with baby talk.

“Thanks, that would be great.”

While she called down to the kitchen and ordered refreshments to be sent up, Claudia drifted to the window and looked out at the grounds below. As Brenda had said, the rain had let up, leaving miniature reflecting pools on the asphalt.

They were at the rear of the mansion and the windows overlooked a soccer field that must have once been a broad lawn. A path wound around the field, ending behind the goalpost at a pocket-size house nestled in a row of eucalyptus. From across the field, the windows sparkled in a sudden burst of sunshine.

“Is that house part of the school?” Claudia asked as Paige replaced the phone on its base.

“The cottage?” She nodded. “We use it as a guesthouse. Cruz is staying there. Bert’s not too happy about that. He’d like Cruz to live off-site, like him.”

“Bert doesn’t have his own cottage?”

“He used to be in that one, but when Cruz came on-board a couple of months ago I moved him out. Bert needed more space for all his stuff, so I gave him an office over here, next to me, and he moved into an apartment on the Westside.”

“Looks like Cruz had a visitor.”

Annabelle Giordano had emerged from the cottage and started walking back toward the school. As she approached, Bert Falkenberg met her on the path. Claudia could see that the girl was talking rapidly, her face animated, unlike her earlier sour attitude.

Paige joined Claudia at the window. “Damn! I don’t want her pestering Cruz.”

“Will Bert bring her up here?”

“Uh-huh, I expect Brenda cornered him for the job.”

“At least Annabelle seems to like him.”

“I guess you could say he’s kind of a father figure. His first wife took his two daughters out of state and he doesn’t even know where they are. It makes him sad sometimes. I guess he’s—what do they call it? Substituting?”

“Sublimating.”

“That’s it. He’s
sublimating
his fatherly instincts by being kind of a counselor for the girls.”

“How does Dr. McConahay feel about that?”

“Look, most of these girls have fathers who don’t pay them much attention,” Paige said, sounding defensive. “They can use a nice man to talk to. I know, because I grew up that way, too. Well, not that my father was rich like theirs, but he worked all the time to support my mom and me. Young girls
need
an older man to talk to.”

“You put a lot of trust in Bert.”

“Absolutely. He’s like a favorite uncle around here.”

Paige must have read Claudia’s silence as disapproval. “I did speak to Dr. McConahay about
you
,” she said. “She gave the go-ahead for Annabelle to do the handwriting exercise program with you.”

There was a sharp rap on the door and Annabelle slouched in, having reacquired her earlier sullen demeanor. Bert came after, followed by a heavyset middle-aged Hispanic woman wearing a pink and white maid’s uniform and a big smile. She wheeled in a tea wagon with a silver coffee service and a plate of pirouette cookies.

“Thanks, Maria,” Paige said, then turned to Annabelle with a stern expression that aged her.

“Annabelle, I think you have something to say to Ms. Rose after the way you behaved downstairs.”

The girl’s mouth dropped in disbelief. “For
what
? I didn’t
do
anything.”

“You know you
did
.”

Annabelle narrowed her shoulders, stared at the carpet, mumbled something unintelligible. Claudia would rather have let it go. She might deserve an apology, but forcing Annabelle into one would be counterproductive to her plans.