An Unusual Occupation Read online

  Bob finished his scribbling just as the tardy bell rang. A few students spun around each other and dove into the classroom like a couple of halfbacks diving for a touchdown.

  “Good morning,” Bob said. There wasn’t much of a response from his students. In Bob’s experience, the presence of a substitute was usually a sign for students that it was clear sailing until the regular teacher showed up. “First, I’d like to thank all of you for getting those letters to your parents and back to me signed,” Bob said. “Next, it occurred to me that our classroom lacks a certain ... individuality.”

  The students looked up at Bob with curious faces.

  “So, you have ten minutes,” he told the class. “As long as you keep my classroom neat and show me you can pay attention, you may arrange your desks however you like.” No one moved. A few students looked at each other to see what they would do.

  “You can sit where you want,” Bob said with a sigh. “I’d like it if you put two, three, or four desks together, so you can work with each other on the homework.”

  Bob hardly got the second part of his instructions out before the students leaped out of their desks and began dragging them around. Groups quickly formed, and students clanked their desks together and started talking.

  Ten minutes passed, and Bob called for their attention but failed to get many responses. “OK!” Bob didn’t actually shout, but the power in his voice caused the students to turn their heads. “Now for the other terms of the current arrangement.”

  A few students scoffed, as if they had expected some sort of catch.

  “It’s time you were all treated as adults. I will give you that respect as long as you show me you can keep it. When class begins, you’ll have five minutes to set up your desks however you’d like. In return, I expect you to be ready at exactly 8:20 for class to begin. That, to me, shows you’re returning the respect I’ve given you. I trust you can sit where you want and still do your job.” Bob told the students he expected the class to be reorganized into rows before the bell rang; otherwise, the students could stay late to finish.

  One student, David Taylor, raised his hand.

  “Yes, Mr. Taylor,” Bob said.

  “What’s that?” David asked with a laugh as he pointed in the direction of the whiteboard. He appeared to be sixteen or seventeen years old, but he had a small frame, and Bob might have been off by a year or so. David had straight, black hair, which was combed in a sort of organized mess. It didn’t look neat in any way but appeared purposefully cockeyed. The sophomore wore a plain, white T-shirt and a necklace that looked like several steel balls tied together so closely that Bob worried that David might choke. The shorts David wore were down to his ankles because the waist of the shorts was pulled halfway down his butt.

  Bob looked in the direction his student pointed and saw the equation scribbled across the entire whiteboard. “Well, thanks, Mr. Taylor. I’d hoped someone noticed my little challenge. Has anyone heard of a boy named Carl Friedrich Gauss?”

  None of the students responded.

  “I thought not. It’s a shame.” Bob smiled as he pulled a large candy bar from his pocket and began to eat it. “I was going to give this to whoever knew the answer to that one.” He made it a point to talk with his mouth full of chocolate.

  Several of the students groaned and complained. He let them complain for a few moments before he walked to his desk and pulled a bag of chocolates from a drawer and held it up. He had to stifle a laugh as his students suddenly got quiet.

  “This is for whoever can win my little challenge here,” Bob said as he held up the bag. The equation was long, but it was only connected by a series of plus signs: one plus two, plus three—all the way up to one hundred. “Mr. Gauss was ten years old. It seemed his teacher didn’t think too highly of his poorer students. He gave them this problem to solve, thinking it would take them all day to find the answer.”

  “Could they use calculators?” another student, Karen Beachwood, asked. She had blue eyes, and the bangs of her glossy, black hair framed her face. Bob remembered that when the students moved their desks, Karen made it a point to put hers next to David’s. David scratched at a pencil mark on his desk as Karen spoke.

  “Miss Beachwood, it was 1787, more than two hundred years before the first electronic desktop calculator was invented.”

  “Where do you get all of this?” David asked, his question more of an accusation than a request for information.

  “I read a lot,” Bob answered. “You all are more than welcome to use a calculator if you so choose, but a ten-year-old boy did it in less than three minutes without a calculator.”

  “No way!” Karen shouted. “I can’t even type that fast.”

  “I won’t hold you to young Gauss’s standard,” Bob told the class. “The reward goes to whoever finds the correct answer first.”

  “How’d he do it?” David asked.

  Bob smiled. “Well, I’m glad you asked. I get to give the hint. Remember what multiplication is. Oh, and just to get you started, one plus one hundred is 101. Begin.”

  “What kind of a hint is that?” a student Bob didn’t see whined.

  “That’s the same thing Gauss asked himself before he started working on the problem.”

  Bob wasn’t finished answering the question before his students feverishly started punching numbers into their calculators. Bob wasn’t shocked at the number of students who chose to use a calculator, but he was pleasantly surprised to see David working without one.

  Bob hoped that if he could go back to the basics, he’d be able to help David catch up with the other sophomore students.

  In the middle of his thoughts, Bob saw David raise his hand.

  “Yes, Mr. Taylor?” Bob asked. David’s face was scrunched, as if he smelled something he didn’t like.

  “Um ...” David started.

  “Confidence is the first step to excellence, David,” Bob said.

  David looked like he was about to ask who said that, but he decided against it.

  “Is the answer 5,050?”

  The class suddenly became still as students stopped working to listen. Bob smiled. “What do you think?”

  “The answer is 5,050,” David said, a bit exasperatedly. Bob imagined it was bad enough for the boy to have to work on some “impossible project,” much less for him to be taught how to answer it.

  Bob lobbed the small bag of miniature candy bars at David, causing it to fall directly into the astonished student’s lap. The class chuckled a little bit.

  “Tell me, David, how is it that you found the answer before all of these ten-key masters with TI-85 calculators?” Bob asked, which brought a bit of silence back to the room.

  “Well, I wondered why you told us what one plus one hundred was,” David said.

  “Go on,” Bob encouraged.

  “Well, why not start at one plus two or five plus ten?” David asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not really. I guess they add up all the same no matter which way you do it.”

  “So why did you think one plus one hundred mattered?” Bob asked as he wrote the phrase “Associative Law of Addition” on the whiteboard.

  “Well, you started at the ends, so I did too,” David continued. “The answer was always 101. Two plus ninety-nine, three plus ninety-eight, and whatever, all equal 101.”

  As soon as David said it, Bob noticed the other students checking his math.

  “Then there was that thing you said about multiplication,” David said. “That’s what took me a minute to figure out.”

  “You remembered that multiplication is repetitive addition?” Bob asked.

  “No,” David answered. “I remembered that 101 plus 101 is the same as 101 times two.”

  Bob couldn’t help but laugh. “Sorry, Mr. Taylor,” he said. “Sometimes I forget to keep things simple.”

  “So I thought, well, there’s fifty pairs between one and one hundred,” David said without acknowledging
Bob’s apology. “So, like, fifty times 101 equals 5,050.”

  Bob copied down the math as David explained it. A few students sighed as the math on the board started to make more sense.

  “Exactly,” Bob said with a smile. “Does anyone have any questions?”

  It only took a few more minutes to explain how David found the answer to everyone in the class. They gasped when Bob added that the entire class had just done their homework for the day. They didn’t complain, but Bob made sure to go over the lesson in detail.

  He asked the students about the order of operations and the laws of addition and multiplication. When the students, chosen at random, answered his questions correctly, he explained that they’d learned the objective for the day.

  “Mr. Drifter,” a young boy, Peter Nelby, said with his hand in the air. “Are we gonna do more stuff like this?”

  “I thought this might be a bit more interesting than you having to listen to me talking for an hour,” he answered.

  A group of students said a number of phrases that Bob took to mean they liked the new lesson plan.

  “But only one of us gets any candy out of it,” Karen said.

  Bob went back to his desk, opened another drawer, and pulled out a bowl of individually wrapped chocolates. The class cheered as Bob began randomly asking students questions and rewarding correct answers with candy. He let the students work together on some of the questions. Karen and David teamed up on a few occasions, but Bob only gave Karen the reward. David already had a bag of chocolate, and Bob didn’t want any parents calling the principal because their kid was in a sugar coma.

  Bob made sure everyone got a prize before he told his class to clean up and put their desks back in order. Bob couldn’t resist a chance to read a paragraph from his newest book, The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud, so he did just that as the students cleaned up.

  After a few moments, a shadow cast itself over Bob’s book. He looked up and saw David standing across the desk.

  “Hey,” the teen said. “That was OK today.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” Bob said honestly. “You caught on quickly.”

  David shook his head. Despite his emphatic gesture, not a single hair managed to move. “I suck at math.”

  “I could tell by your grades from last semester,” Bob said. David looked a bit surprised and more than a bit angry at the comment. “Mr. Taylor, I’m not much for lying or sugarcoating things. I think people who are honest, even when the truth hurts, show great respect to the person to whom they’re talking. I also think that you would be a lot better at math with a little extra help.”

  David looked confused. “What are you saying?”

  “I think if you give me a bit of time after school, I could help your grades improve to the point to where you’ll be able to skip Algebra II next year.”

  “No way!” David shouted excitedly.

  “I can’t make promises,” Bob cautioned. “It’s really up to you.”

  “Why just me?” David asked.

  “I’m willing to help anyone,” Bob said. “But you’re the one who came up and told me you suck at math. I’m just giving you an option.”

  “I don’t know,” David said. “I guess I could ask my parents.”

  As the bell rang, Bob silently congratulated himself on another job well started.

  3

  An Unwanted Mess

  September 23, 2006

  There’s never any rest for the weary or for the wicked. I’m trying very hard to focus on one particular project, but other tasks always seem to pop up. It’s never the way I’d like it to be. I never know what to expect, but when I’m called, I must answer.

  Today, I met Magdalen. She suffered needlessly, and I blame myself for it. I’m starting to get too tense. I’m only doing what I’m meant to do. Before I started this job, I was happy with my work. What’s changing?

  Magdalen Wallron was terrified. The 76-year-old woman woke up surrounded by flames. The heat was already so bad, it was hard to breathe. It seemed she had left the gas for the stove on when she went to lie down for a nap. A spark, so small and life-changing, was just enough to start the fire. The short burst of ignited gas caught on the curtains.

  The kitchen was well on its way to ash, and the living room was engulfed, all from a simple spark. The thick and pungent smoke filled her lungs. The heat was so intense that she could feel the sweat of her body run hot down her face and back.

  The flames blocked her path to the door, so she huddled herself on the couch and beat furiously at the window. She screamed for help, but she was too weak to break the glass.

  She thought she had imagined him for a moment. A young man walking down the sidewalk was an answered prayer to her. But why did he stop? He was ... watching?

  She screamed at him and pounded on the glass. The skin on her hands broke, and spots of blood smeared the window. The man grimaced, as if it hurt him to watch, but he didn’t do anything else.

  “God, please help me!” she called to him.

  More smoke billowed into her lungs and caused her to cough. She sucked in a deep breath. It was the wrong choice. Her lungs tried to bring in more air, but the smoke continued to make her gasp. She gasped, and smoke flooded her lungs again. Each cough forced her body to reflexively inhale, and each new breath only caused her to suck in more smoke. She felt light-headed. The whole time, she never took her eyes off of the stranger. She tried to plead to him with her stare, but he only stared back. She wondered why his gaze held so much regret. He could have saved her, if he only wanted to. Why didn’t he want to?

  With each fateful gasp, she took in less and less air. She took one final breath before she fell onto her couch, which had just started to burn. The last thing she saw was an arm burst through the glass. Wonderful, she thought wryly, angrily. A hand grabbed her. Now he grows a conscience. She knew the stranger was too late.

  Bob winced at a piece of glass that cut into his arm when he forced his elbow through the window, but he considered it a very mild punishment for waiting so long.

  She was already dead. Her glazed eyes begged the question why, and Bob was glad he didn’t have to explain. She was dead, and she had suffered. Bob didn’t have to let her suffer, or at least he didn’t think he had to. But, she had died, and he had been there to watch as it happened. That much comforted him.

  Bob made sure none of his clothes had caught on the glass. He picked up the shard with his blood on it and the surrounding bits just to be sure. He took off the cut vest and wrapped the glass inside of it. He’d have to burn it. He’d throw the glass out after he washed it.

  It never went the way he thought it should, and to him, it always left a mess he didn’t want to clean up.

  4

  Accidents and Murder

  Sergeant Richard Hertly was at a loss. He worked in a quiet neighborhood. Surprise was peaceful. The green grass and rows of Victorian homes were what had drawn him to this district. Earlier that day, a black mark burnt its way onto one calm, quiet city block. A woman’s home had burned down.

  It seemed an accidental death, and there used to be some sort of odd if not terrible sense of rightness to accidents. They were terrible; they were sometimes even tragic, but Richard could tell himself that when an explanation couldn’t be found, it must be some higher power’s wish. Who was he to question that?

  He wanted to. He imagined that any higher power or God would take pity on how he took an old woman.

  There was something else that bothered the short and slightly overweight detective. Accidents just happened, but a few days ago, one had happened where someone died who didn’t have to. Witnesses reported seeing a man standing over the victim. It was all fine and good if God, or whoever, decided to call someone to heaven, or wherever, but this one could have been saved.

  Oddly enough, no one could really describe the stranger. An accident where another’s presence could have caused it was murder. Richard was sure that didn’t fall into any h
igher power’s plan.

  A flash of guilt brought him back to the old lady’s home. What was her name? Wallron. He’d walked around the house. It hadn’t burned to ash. The fire had died before it even made it to the back room, but it made it far enough. She died a foot from her living room window. Richard considered the information while bouncing a silver dollar in his hand. He had it out, ready to hand over to his partner, but it looked like he wouldn’t need it.

  “Looks like an accident,” a fire investigator said.

  “Sad thing, she managed to break the window, but not enough to escape,” the investigator finished.

  Sure enough, in the blackened living room, just behind a curtain that had turned into an ash veil, was a small hole in the glass. He found himself wishing his partner, Kyle, were there. Kyle was the one with the eye for details.

  Richard plopped the silver dollar he’d been fiddling with back into his pocket. He bet that silver dollar, the same silver dollar he and his partner used for every bet, that Kyle wouldn’t make it to the scene before the investigator gave his preliminary findings.

  Unfortunately, that meant Richard was left to look at the facts. He could follow a lead better than most, but Kyle could always find something someone else missed. Richard was better at analyzing the evidence after the fact. Of course, if Kyle had as much talent for being on time as he did with diagnosing a crime scene, he probably wouldn’t need a partner.

  “What do you imagine she used to break that window?” Richard asked. He scratched the thinning brown hair on his head while he thought. The hole in the window wasn’t much bigger than a basketball. A chair, Richard knew, would have shattered the whole thing.

  “Won’t know for a while yet,” the investigator said. “We need the medical examiner to check her for cuts. Maybe she kicked it.”