Free Melanie Travis 06 - Hush Puppy by Laurien Berenson Page B

and comes over here during the day when she’s supposed to be in school.”
    “Why would she do something like that?”
    I had no answer, so I didn’t offer one.
    After a moment, Russell said, “You say she calls herself Jane? Any idea of a last name?”
    “None. Krebbs laughed when she told me her name was Jane. He seemed to think she was making it up.”
    “They’d met before, then.”
    “Apparently so. Krebbs was yelling at her when I came across them. I gathered it wasn’t the first time they’d had a confrontation.” Even though the man was dead, I didn’t try very hard to hide my annoyance, and Russell picked up on my tone.
    “Krebbs wasn’t always the easiest man to get along with,” he said wearily.
    It wasn’t my place to question the headmaster’s policies, but good sense has never stopped me from blurting out a question before. “Then why did you keep him on? From what I could see, the man hardly did any work.”
    “I had no choice in the matter. Nor did either of the headmasters before me. Krebbs had preceded all of us, and his job was guaranteed by the school for as long as he chose to work. Whether I agreed with the terms of Krebbs’s employment or not, there was nothing I could do about the situation but make the best of it.”
    I sat back in my chair, letting my body relax along the curve of the warm leather. “That sounds like an unusual arrangement.”
    “In the public-school sector, perhaps. But not here. You have to remember what things were like when Howard Academy was founded. Joshua and Honoria lived a life of great wealth and privilege. Often such families employed large numbers of servants, and it wasn’t unusual for valued retainers to hold a position for life.”
    I quickly counted back the decades and shook my head. “I know Krebbs was old, but—”
    Russell smiled slightly. “It was his father, Arthur Krebbs, who worked for the estate as Joshua’s butler. I gather Krebbs grew up on the Howard family compound in the company of Joshua’s children. I suppose it seemed only natural that he, too, would go to work for the family. As far as I know, Krebbs has always been a fixture here.”
    “I guess that explains his attitude,” I said under my breath.
    “You and he had problems?”
    “No,” I said quickly. “We’d never even spoken before last week. But I didn’t like the way he treated Jane, and I told him so. He said I was the one who didn’t understand how things worked.”
    Russell’s mouth flattened into a straight line. “You might have come to me about that.”
    “I wish I had. Then maybe none of this would have happened.”
    “Are you saying that you think the girl might have had something to do with Krebbs’s death?”
    Until the headmaster voiced the thought, I hadn’t allowed myself to think it. But it did make a certain sort of sense. I knew that Jane and Krebbs had argued, probably more than once. I’d also seen him threaten her. I knew she’d been on the school grounds earlier in the day, and she’d been the one to report the caretaker’s death.
    Mrs. Plimpton had described Jane as breathless and agitated. Had the girl’s state been due to the shock of stumbling over a dead body, or could it have been caused by the even greater shock of having just committed murder?
    “No,” I said fiercely. I wasn’t sure which one of us I was trying to convince. “She’s only a child. She hardly looked more than ten. She couldn’t have done something so awful . . .”
    “Even so, you need to tell this to the detective. Have you spoken with him?”
    “I tried, but he didn’t want to hear about it.”
    “Try again,” Russell said firmly, rising from his seat. “The sooner the police figure out what happened, the sooner we’ll all be able to get back to normal. I’ve issued a memo on the subject, it’s probably sitting in your mailbox right now. Everyone is to cooperate with the authorities to the fullest extent of their abilities.”
    “Of