A Violent End at Blake Ranch Read online

  I’m still mulling this when the phone rings. It’s Charlotte Blake. “I was on the phone with the telephone company for an hour trying to get our phone log.”

  “Did you get it?”

  “Yes, it turns out I can look online anytime and find it. Who knew? Anyway, I took a look and there was only one number I didn’t recognize. So I called it and it was a company I forgot I’d contacted to get car insurance rates. So Nonie didn’t make any phone calls that I can see.”

  CHAPTER 7

  When I telephone Lottie Raines, she tells me she was only a schoolteacher for five years before she got married and later started having kids, and she never went back to teaching. She says she’s always involved in school events, though, since she has a pack of children in the school system. She and her husband live not too far from me. I know her to say hello to. She’s a talker—a skinny, jolly person, always surrounded by people whenever I see her.

  I tell her what I’m after, and she says she’ll be glad to tell me whatever she can remember about Nonie Blake. She says I can come over right away. “I was cleaning my house. Weekends, things get pretty torn up around here. But I’d rather talk to somebody than clean house any day.”

  Her husband has a good job as an engineer with the county, and they have a sprawling house with a big fenced-in yard. From the street you can see a tree house in the backyard and various climbing structures. The front yard is well kept, and when I step inside I can tell right away that Lottie was exaggerating about the mess made over the weekend. It’s obvious that she’s house-proud. Kids’ toys are kept in bins instead of strewn all over the place and the entry floor is gleaming.

  “I’m going to get you some coffee, and we’ll sit in the living room,” she says. She shows me in and disappears. It’s one of those rare living rooms where a lot of living gets done. There’s a big TV and lots of chairs of various sizes and a whole wall of family pictures. The furniture is sturdy—meant to be used.

  She comes back in carrying a giant-sized mug of coffee, for which I’m grateful, and a plate of sugar cookies. She sets the plate of cookies in front of me and plops herself down with a big sigh. “I don’t know how we ended up with five kids. I love ’em dearly, but they keep me running from morning ’til night.” One of the effects is that she doesn’t have an ounce of fat on her. But she looks happy, with laugh lines around her eyes.

  “You look like you’re up to the task,” I say.

  “Some days, yes, some days, no. Now. You wanted to ask me about Nonie Blake. I can’t believe what happened to her. Such a sad story. I mean, what she did way back then was awful, but it seems to me she had paid her dues. I’ll help any way I can. What do you want to know?”

  “I’m going through her files from back then, and I found a reference to you as a teacher who thought she showed signs of mental unbalance.”

  She nods. “That puts it mildly. She was a little hellion. I bet they didn’t say that I recommended to the principal that he tell the parents they ought to send her for psychiatric evaluation.”

  “It says in her file that the school did talk to the parents.”

  Her eyes narrow. “Oh, they might have hinted around that she could use a little discipline, but the principal would never have suggested a therapist. Perish the thought! He told me that the parents would be better served by taking the girl to church. He said she had been overindulged at home and all she needed was a guiding hand. That was plain hogwash.”

  “The file did say that you told the police that you recognized similar behavior to your sister’s.”

  Her face clouds over. “Poor Allie. At least she had the benefit of my folks, who recognized that there was something wrong and took her to a psychiatrist. Of course we lived in Sugarland and it wasn’t so hard to find someone close by. The doctor put Allie on some drugs and recommended a special school for her, but they couldn’t afford it.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “My mamma home-schooled her and she seemed to get better for a while. But when she was in her twenties she took her own life. I know this is going to sound awful, but in some ways it was a relief. She was a sweet girl, but when she was depressed she was hard to be around. A burden to my mamma in particular.” She shakes her head as if to rid it of her thoughts. “Anyway, I was so caught up in her problems that I took a few psychology courses in college, thinking I might want to be a therapist. Turned out not to be a good fit for me, but I did learn a few things, and one of them was that it’s the teenage years when some of these problems start to manifest themselves. I believe I saw that in Nonie.”

  “Do you remember anything in particular?”

  “She exaggerated things. I wouldn’t say she deliberately lied, but she said things that couldn’t possibly be true. Kids made fun of her behind her back. I remember once she said her mamma was going to buy her some kind of fancy car—I can’t remember what kind—when she was sixteen. Another time there was some rock concert in Houston that all the kids wanted to go to, and she told everybody that she went to it. They were silly things, but they added up. One of the problems for her teachers was that she refused to do what she was told in school. She flat out would not do homework. She told me her parents told her she didn’t have to—which I knew wasn’t true.”

  “That doesn’t sound like such a big behavior problem.”

  Lottie leans across and takes a cookie and shoves the plate closer to me, so I take one, too. She nibbles the cookie and says, “You’re right. I cut her some slack because I figured it wouldn’t do any good to make a federal case out of it. But some teachers can’t deal with a child who won’t follow the rules. And they have a point. The problem is it sets a bad example. If one student gets away with refusing to do homework, pretty soon others think they should be able to get away with it, too. Nonie made good grades, so it didn’t matter if she did homework, but if a student was struggling and decided to follow Nonie’s example, it could hurt their grades.”

  While she talks, I take a bite of cookie, and it’s delicious. “Did you call her parents?”

  “Of course I did. But they didn’t seem to be able to control her.”

  “Did she refuse to take tests, too?”

  “No, in fact she liked them. I think it gave her a chance to show off.”

  She sees that I’ve polished off the cookie. “Have another one.”

  I take another cookie. “How did the other teachers handle it?”

  “The math teacher—what was his name? Alvin something—graded her down for not turning in homework, even though she made one hundreds on her tests. He said she told him she didn’t care, she wasn’t going to do it.”

  “So no homework. Anything else?”

  “Refused to go to assemblies. Said it was a waste of time. Instead, she’d go to town and get a soda or something and wait outside until it was over. Refused to go outside during fire drills . . .” Suddenly her hand comes up. “Wait. I remember one of the things she said that I found a little disturbing. One day I came into class and I heard her telling some girls that she had a way to get a lot of money. They called her a liar and she said, ‘You wait. I know something that somebody is going to pay me not to tell.’ They were impressed by that and wanted to know what she knew and who it was. Of course she wouldn’t tell. I didn’t think there was anything to it.”

  “Did anything more ever come of it?”

  She sighs. “No. I had a class full of rowdy teenagers and I let it go. I probably should have taken her aside privately and tried to get her to tell me what she meant, but I imagine even if I’d done that she wouldn’t have told me.”

  She picks up a manila envelope from the table and hands it over. “I don’t know if this is anything you’d be interested in. After you called, I went and fished these out of my files. I kept the class picture from each class I taught—five years in all. I taught Nonie two years—I had her in sixth grade and then again in eighth grade.”

  I take out two eight-by-ten black-and-white p
hotos. She points out Nonie in both of them. You can’t tell anything from either photo. Nonie is a face hidden among eighteen other youngsters, and not a particularly memorable face either. In both, she’s standing in the middle row, and you can only see her face. In the eighth-grade photo, she’s scowling, but so are several other students.

  “Did you ever hear anything that might indicate why she tried to kill her sister?”

  “Not anything credible. Once the kids found out what had happened, they made up all kinds of things—that she was a Satan worshipper or that she wanted to get in the newspaper and that’s why she’d done it.” She snaps her fingers. “Oh, this was a good one. There was a rumor that it was actually the brother who had tried to kill Charlotte, and he blamed it on Nonie. And my personal favorite, that Nonie was a vampire and that her sister found out and Nonie had to kill her.”

  We both laugh, but I do take note of the idea that Nonie’s brother might have been to blame and he put the blame on Nonie. But there would have been no reason for Nonie to go along with it. Besides, there’s plenty to indicate that Nonie was troubled and perfectly capable of doing what she did. What I want to know is why she told the doctor who examined her that she had done the deed deliberately. She must have known it would mean that she would be in terrible trouble.

  “How did all of Nonie’s trouble affect her siblings? With all the rumors, did they have problems in school afterward?”

  “They suffered from all the talk, but not for long. Charlotte was a sweet girl, and eventually all that died down.”

  “And her brother?”

  She smiles. “He reminds me of my middle boy, Dan. Quick with his fists. Not that I hold with boys fighting, but sometimes that’s the most efficient way for them to settle their differences. What can you do? Anyway, Billy had a couple of fights and after that he was right back in with his friends. It didn’t hurt that the idea of him being something of a hero made him a subject of great admiration among the girls. Girls are so silly at that age.”

  She catches the look on my face and laughs. “Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Some of them stay that way.”

  We both laugh.

  “Did Nonie have a boyfriend?”

  “Not that I know of. That doesn’t mean she didn’t. It’s amazing what kids can get up to, no matter how much you try to keep an eye on them.” She narrows her eyes, caught up in the past. “I’m thinking back, and I can’t say that Nonie was one of the precocious ones sexually. Some of these girls . . .” She shakes her head. “Let’s just say there are a couple every year who could do well with a chastity belt. I pray that my girls aren’t in that category.”

  I like Lottie. She’s outspoken but without a hint of malice. “Any idea how Nonie would have had contact with any man outside her family or her classmates?”

  “I don’t know in particular. But I know some of the girls babysit at that age. And of course there are the men teachers.”

  When I get up to leave, she tells me to wait. She leaves the room and comes back with a plastic ziplock bag full of cookies.

  “I’ll take it,” I say. “They may be the best cookies I ever ate.” I hope Loretta doesn’t hear that I said that.

  I thank her for her help. She really has been helpful, especially with her suggestion that Nonie might have known something she claimed somebody would pay her to keep quiet. That fits with what the Curtis couple told me. More than ever I want to get my hands on that psychiatric evaluation. If Nonie bragged to her fellow students, she might also have bragged to the psychiatrist—maybe including names.

  CHAPTER 8

  Nonie’s school records indicate that she had two male teachers—the math teacher, Alvin Haley, and the science teacher, Otto Schneider.

  “Alvin is still with us,” Jim Krueger, the school principal says, “but Otto left halfway through that same year.”

  We’re in Krueger’s office. I’ve told him I want to find out who Nonie’s male teachers were. Krueger is a good principal, popular with students and teachers alike. To look at him, with his paunch and a sparse crop of hair that he combs over, you might think he could be the object of ridicule, but he’s known as a fair man, and that goes over well.

  “Why did Otto Schneider leave?”

  “He said it was either get out of teaching or end up murdering one of the kids. He said he realized right away that he wasn’t cut out for teaching. I wasn’t principal at the time. I was a coach, and we used to talk some.”

  “You know where he went?”

  Krueger settles back in his chair patting his remaining strands of hair, thinking. “That’s been a while. I seem to recall he went to work for a chemical company down on the coast. I don’t remember which one. Kind of left the school in a lurch for a teacher. I ended up taking one of his classes, though the only science I knew was what I got in my year of ‘jock science’ when I was in college.”

  Krueger tells me he doesn’t know anybody who might have kept up with Schneider. “He was from Bobtail and took the job here because we were hiring. Maybe somebody from there knows what became of him. Why are you asking about Nonie’s male teachers? Is there some suggestion that she was interfered with?”

  “Not as far as I know. It’s something I’m following up on.”

  “I was going to say, if you looked to Schneider for that, I think you’d be better off looking elsewhere. If I’m not mistaken, he played for the other team, if you know what I mean.”

  That gets my interest. “Is there any chance that Nonie found out he was gay and tried to use it against him?”

  Krueger ponders the question and shakes his head. “I don’t know how she’d find out. He was a quiet guy, kept to himself. He wasn’t here that long.”

  “Any rumors that he might have been interested in any of the boys? If she’d found that out . . .”

  “Look, you know as well as I do, if there had ever been the slightest hint, there would have been an uproar.”

  Not only that, but if Nonie had been intending to blackmail him when she returned home, she would have been disappointed, since he’d been gone from Jarrett Creek for a long time.

  Before I leave to go talk to Alvin Haley, I tell Krueger I’d like to get a look at Nonie’s school records.

  “I’ll have her file ready for you tomorrow. Older records are kept in another building,” Krueger says.

  Alvin Haley’s last class ends at four o’clock, and I find him in his classroom, sitting at his desk, head in his hands.

  “Excuse me.”

  His head jerks up. “Yes? What can I do for you?” He’s a small man with an old-fashioned crew cut and wire-rim glasses. I can tell he’s trying to figure out where he knows me from.

  I introduce myself. “Wonder if I can have a minute of your time?”

  “What’s this about?”

  “I want to ask you about one of your former students, Nonie Blake.”

  “Oh yes. I heard what happened. Let me get a chair for you,” he says. “Those student desks will break your back.” He’s back in a minute with another chair like the one he’s sitting in. “I don’t know what I can tell you,” he says, fussing over the position of the chair as if it matters. “I hardly knew the girl.”

  I sit down and cross my ankle over my knee. “You had her in your math class when she was in the eighth grade?”

  “That sounds right.”

  “As I understand it, she refused to do homework. You recall that?”

  He looks startled. “Who in the world told you that? I’d completely forgotten.”

  “Lottie Raines remembered it.”

  “Of course, it stands to reason she’d remember.”

  “Why is that?”

  “She quit teaching when she got married, so she only had four or five years of classes to remember. When you’ve taught as long as I have, the students start to blend into one big wriggling mass of chaos in your mind. Except for the exceptional students, of course, and they’re rare.”

  “So nothing
about Nonie stands out for you?”

  “Now that you mention the homework situation, I do remember because it was unusual. Sometimes you get students who won’t do the homework because they’re ashamed to admit they can’t do it, or because their home situation is a problem. But as I recall she wouldn’t do it because she got it in her head it was beneath her.”

  “Do you remember how it came up?”

  “She announced it the first time I handed out a homework sheet. I remember she said it loud enough so all the students could hear her, that she wasn’t doing homework. I told her that was fine, but she had to understand that it was part of her grade and if she didn’t do it, I’d grade her down.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “Said she didn’t care.” He takes off his glasses and pinches the ridge of his nose. “This is coming back to me. I remember being surprised. Something like that hadn’t happened to me before—I was a new teacher. I didn’t know whether to take her seriously. I didn’t know her, so I thought maybe she was trying to impress her classmates. I asked some of her teachers from the previous year, and they said they hadn’t had that problem.” He puts his glasses back on. “But she was serious. Never turned in homework. ’Course she was only in my class for a few months before she . . . well, you know.”

  “I understand she was a good student.”

  He nods and lets out a sound of exasperation. “Like I said, I was new to teaching. If something like that happened nowadays, I’d probably ignore it until I tested her. Then when I saw that she tested out on the material, I’d let the homework slide.”