The Trapdoor by Klavan Andrew

Author:Klavan, Andrew [Klavan, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-11-14T19:00:00+00:00

18 My welcome to Grant County wasn’t as warm the second time. I holed up in the same hotel. Drove the same road to the same high school. I went to the same office to meet with the same principal. But the look on his face was not the same.

The firm, sincere, blue eyes of David Brandt looked sternly out of his pale handsome face. I would have quailed if I was the quailing type.

“Listen—” I said. I held up my hand.

“If you’re not off this school’s grounds in five minutes, I’m calling the police.”

I thought about Tammany Bird. I have to admit, I quailed a little then.

“Listen—” I said.

“This school—this entire community—trusted you. We trusted you with our stories. We trusted you with our grief. The way you handled that trust, the way you abused it … I can’t begin to tell you the potential for damage there.”

“Listen—” I said.

“But even if there were not that potential, simple moral grounds, I would think, would have precluded your handling these stories as you did.”

This, I could tell, was a man who had never worked with an editor.

There was no explaining either. He slammed his office door in my face. The secretaries eyed me crossly with tight lips. I thought one of them would shake a finger at me. I wondered where you showed up for detention around here.

I went outside. It was early in the morning. The kids were just filing over the front yard and into school. The sun was dodging the big clouds of November that surged over it and passed away again in the chilly wind. The wind also made the dying leaves fall and the fallen leaves whirl above the ground.

I stood for a moment and watched the traffic passing on the main road. I could sense the glares I was getting from the kids passing on every side of me. I had that nervous, excited feeling I get when I know I am in hostile territory.

And then the traffic disappeared from in front of me. In front of me there was nothing but the color blue. I stepped back. The blue was the blue of a school jacket. There was an orange G sewn on its breast. A very large young man was inside the jacket. Two other very large young men were in similar jackets behind him.

The large young man who had stepped in front of me was a trim broad-shouldered giant with a clean-cut handsome face, trim black hair, and a few pimples on his chin.

He said, “You’re that reporter.”

I nodded.

“I think what you wrote about Michelle Thayer stinks,” he said. “I’d like to bash your fucking head in.”

“The story was rewritten by my editor, Robert Cambridge,” I said. I gave him Cambridge’s home address.

“If you weren’t such an old fuck, I would bash your head in.”

“C-A-M-B-R-I-D-G-E,” I said.

“Go ahead,” said one of the large young men behind the large young man. “Go ahead, bash his fucking head in.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

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