The Night Shift(41)

ELLA





Mr. Steadman looks tired. He’s probably had little sleep since Ella saw him at the hospital yesterday. Could that have been only yesterday?

Like most educators, Steadman’s job doesn’t end when the bell rings. Terrible hours, but at least the pay is bad, he always jokes. To make ends meet, he has a couple side hustles, including tutoring and running a driving school.

He agreed to meet with Ella at their usual spot, Daisy’s Delights, a cupcake store in downtown Linden. They’d been meeting in this spot on and off for fifteen years, though for the first ten Daisy’s had been a coffee shop. Mr. Steadman brings two cupcakes to their table, a red velvet and a vanilla.

“How are you holding up?” he asks.

“I should ask you the same thing,” Ella says, watching him peel the cupcake’s paper shell. This has to be his only vice.

He shrugs. Typically, these meetings resemble therapy sessions, but with Ella as the patient. Mr. Steadman isn’t one to go under the microscope, and he usually ends up filling all the time asking her loaded questions, never talking much about himself. It’s an occupational hazard, a principal of a high school needs to be beyond reproach, and keeping life close to the vest helps.

She knows he isn’t married. A year ago he let slip that he had gotten back on the horse and had started seeing someone. He used the pronoun “she,” so that answered another one of Ella’s long-standing questions. She also knows he lives in Asbury, far enough from the school district to allow some privacy. And she knows that he spends summers traveling, typically to African countries.

“How’s Bradley?” Steadman says.

“Don’t ask.”

“How’s your mother?”

“Really don’t ask.”

Steadman doesn’t push. The restraint and patience of a man who’s spent years dealing with demanding parents and mouthy teenagers.

Ella considers telling him about her night with Jesse. What the girl told her. But Steadman is a straight arrow. She knows what he’ll say: she needs to tell the authorities everything, for her own good and Jesse’s. She needs to establish boundaries with Jesse. Start acting like a therapist, or at least an adult, not the girl’s friend.

Instead, she asks what he knows about Jesse’s background. The incident at her old school.

“You know student information is confidential,” he tells her.

Ella frowns.

“I suppose since you’re working with her, it’s okay to talk about it. But I don’t know much.” Steadman glances around the shop to confirm no one is eavesdropping. “When she transferred, I was told there had been an ‘incident.’” He makes air quotes around the word with his fingers. “I saw that her test scores were off the charts, so I was curious, and I called the principal at her old school.”

Ella waits, anxious to hear what he learned.

“The principal told me that her parents died in a car accident when she was in middle school. I asked about ‘the incident’ and he clammed up. Said there were legal issues.”

“How are you supposed to help a student if they keep it from you? I mean, I think Jesse is a good kid. But what if she’d been violent or troubled?” Ella recalls the homeless kid from last night. You broke his nose.

“You’re preaching to the choir. It’s just how it is with these things.” Mr. Steadman scratches his chin, creases his brow like he’s debating something internally.

“What is it?”

“I can’t. It’s just gossip.”

Ella holds his gaze, not letting him off the hook.

He wipes his mouth with a napkin, then looks around again to see if anyone’s within earshot. In a quiet voice, he says, “The gossip mill says the incident involved a teacher.”

Ella doesn’t like where this is heading. “An improper relationship or something?”

Mr. Steadman shrugs.

Ella gives him another long look. A classic Phyllis move. Say it with silence and your eyes.

Mr. Steadman lowers his voice. “I can’t talk about it, Ella, you know that.” He pauses. “But schools like Middlesex East have online directories. It wouldn’t be hard to compare last year’s staff with this year’s…” He holds her stare.

Ella grins. “And see who might be missing.”

Steadman shrugs again. She didn’t think he had it in him to break the rules.

“Ella,” he says, his tone serious.

“Yes?”

“Are you okay?” He says it like he’s regretting bringing her in to help Jesse. That he’s thinking it’s too much, too many memories.

“Okay? When have I not been okay?” She smiles.

Mr. Steadman does not.





CHAPTER 34


KELLER





Keller and Atticus stop at a greasy spoon for lunch, and Atticus eats a burger that looks absolutely delicious while Keller picks at a salad and forces down the green sludge smoothie from her thermos. Over the meal, Keller runs down their thin leads. First, the new piece of information, that one of the victims, Katie McKenzie, had been pregnant. Second, Katie was from a strict, religious family and was keeping her boyfriend, presumably the father of her unborn child, a secret. Third, the guy she was seeing was being obsessive, abusive, according to Tawny O’Shaughnessy. Fourth, at least two of her coworkers at the Blockbuster, Candy O’Shaughnessy and Mandy Young, were having none of it and planned to confront the guy. Perhaps doing so resulted in him killing Katie in a rage, then the rest of them to cover his tracks. Finally, the other new bit of intel: the Union County task force buried the fact that Katie had been pregnant. And they did so, according to Grosso, because Katie’s mother was tight with a detective.