Seven

Monday morning was the usual blur of sandwiches made and bagged, drink boxes, water bottles, snacks and apples placed in lunch bags and boxes, clothing located, teeth brushed, cereal poured, medication dispensed (Ethan gets 15 milligrams of Ritalin every morning), hugs, kisses, hair brushed, shoes lost, shoes found, more hugs, and pushing the kids out the front door. All before eight in the morning.

I had an assignment from the Newark Star-Ledger about new video products sold in New Jersey. I work quite frequently for the Star-Ledger’s “Today” section, which concerns itself with lighter, feature material. Travel, parenting, consumer issues, that sort of thing. In this case, the section was about advances in video technology (there hadn’t been any lately, so I was making it up), and I’d been given a list of four people the paper would like me to interview. I had reached two, and needed to make a visible effort at the other two before writing. The deadline was Wednesday, today was Monday, so I assumed this would be no problem.

Still, it was only eight in the morning, and you can’t count on anyone being in their office before nine, so I started my day, as I usually do, with the New York Times crossword puzzle. I make a big show, when asked, about how it helps me to think about words and increases my vocabulary, but the fact is the puzzle is a good way to kill time and postpone having to do anything that approaches work. Does it improve my vocabulary and get me thinking about words? Sure. Does that make even a one-percent difference in what I would write about video technology for “Today”? Get real.

So, I was attempting to find a six-letter word for “dummies,” and failing miserably, when the phone rang. Our newly installed Caller ID box informed me that the incoming call was from the Buzbee School main office, and at 8:30 a.m., that is never good news.

I’m used to getting calls from the school. Ethan suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, a neurological disorder like a high-functioning form of autism, which manifests itself in many ways, almost all of them socially unacceptable, or at least odd. The school calls often, if just to let me know when he’s having a rough day. A paraprofessional named Wilma Coogan follows him around all day, and will frequently call me with a question, or when a situation arises she hasn’t seen before. So I breathed a long sigh to gird myself for what was clearly going to be a rough day.

“Hi, Aaron, it’s Anne Mignano.” Uh-oh. The principal herself. Now I was really in trouble.

“Who did he set on fire, Anne?”

“Don’t worry,” Anne said. “Ethan’s fine.”

That stumped me. If Ethan was fine, what did Anne want to talk about? “Is Leah okay?”

“Yes. In fact, this doesn’t have anything to do with either one of your children.”

Well, that made sense. If it doesn’t have anything to do with my kids, clearly the principal should get on the phone to me immediately. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“Can you come over here for a few minutes?” she said. “I have something I need to ask you about.” I was surprised, but didn’t say anything to indicate it. It was a short walk to school.

Five minutes later, having given up on “_od__s,” I found myself seated in a chair in front of Anne Mignano’s desk. And our principal, who takes great pains to be unflappable, looked very flapped. Not that the casual observer could tell, but I was an old hand: Anne’s dark blond hair was just a bit mussed. Her left hand was playing with a paper clip on a desk that rarely, if ever, saw a paper clip out of place. And she was leaning forward in her chair just a little more than she should, giving me the intimation of urgency.

“Is something wrong, Mrs. Mignano?”

“No, not really,” she said, her voice brittle. “Well, maybe. It’s something I need some help with.”

Whoa. If Anne Mignano, who can stare down five hundred seven-to-twelve year-olds on a rainy day with no movie, is admitting she needs help, there must be a catastrophe of biblical proportions on the way. I gave passing thought to whether Home Depot carries Do-It-Yourself Ark kits.

“You know I’ll do what I can.”

“Good.” She stood, and closed her office door. There was so much silence in the room, Harpo Marx and Marcel Marceau would have screamed to break the tension. Anne sat back down, and leaned forward again. “I need you to investigate something for me.”

“Anne, you know I’m not. . .”

“This has to be done discreetly, Aaron, and can’t be seen as an official inquiry. I need someone who knows how to ask questions without giving away too much information, or drawing attention to himself.”

It occurred to me that a guy who practically dares murderers to a duel usually draws some attention, but I held my tongue. Turned out my tongue was slippery and disgusting, so I let go.

“What is it that needs investigation?” I asked.

“You understand, then, that what I’m about to tell you can’t leave this room?”

“Anne, stop talking like The Spy Who Came in from the Cloakroom. You know you can trust me—now, what are you trusting me with?”

She searched my eyes for a few seconds, then drew in a breath. “Aaron. We have had a problem with stink bombs.”

Surely, I’d heard her wrong. Maybe she meant “sink bombs.” Perhaps a sink in the boy’s room had blown up, and she wanted me to find out who the culprit might be. Or Anne might have said she had a problem with Simba, which would mean a vicious tiger loose in the halls of the school.

“Stink bombs?”

“Yes.”

Okay, so I’d heard right. “Stink bombs.” You can never be too sure.

“Someone threw a stink bomb into the girls’ locker room during soccer practice on Friday. It was the third one this month— there was one in the boy’s bathroom on the second floor and one in the gymnasium. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it.” Anne seemed disappointed, already, in my investigative abilities. “We spent the whole weekend fumigating in there, and the other two still haven’t been entirely eradicated.”

“So you want me to. . . what? Go around sniffing kids to see who smells bad?”

She smiled, but not sincerely. And Anne isn’t as good at insincerity as a real politician. “I know it doesn’t sound like much,” she said.

“It doesn’t sound like much? We have schools in this state where kids walk in every morning through metal detectors, and we’re getting all bent out of shape over a few stink bombs?”

“I’m afraid so,” she said softly. “One of the boys in the bathroom when the bomb went off has a mother on the Board of Education. A girl in the locker room’s father is on the Board of Assessors, and, well, the science teacher was quite angry himself.” I knew Mr. Marlton—he wore a lab coat wherever he went and was last pleased with something around the time Madame Curie discovered radium.

“. . . And they’re putting pressure on you to bring the culprit, or culprits, to justice? Is that it?”

In Midland Heights, where New Age parents keep their kids away from red meat and the lack of organic tomatoes at the supermarket is a major scandal, three unanswered stink bombs could be enough to put a principal’s job on the line, if—as seemed to be the case here—the wrong people’s children were somehow involved. Put enough children with enough connections in the line of fire, and anything could happen. Word had it that a former health inspector was once fired for getting annoyed by a resident’s constant calls about spiders in her neighbor’s apartment because he told her to “teach them to tap dance and get them on Letterman.” Anne could investigate, but her hands were tied. An independent observer (like a freelance writer, for example) could, in theory, use methods that weren’t exactly in the Marquis of Queensberry's rulebook, and if I were caught or killed, the principal could disavow all knowledge of my actions. Clever.

“Something like that,” she said. “Can you help? Will you help?”

“How much time do I have?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t seriously believe the board would act against an administrator on something like this, but. . .” Anne let her voice trail off.

“I assume I’m not on the school’s payroll,” I said.

“No. I’m asking for a favor,” said Anne.

“That’s my going rate,” I said. “Tell me what you know.”