Page 11 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Road Kill

“Club?”
“Actually, the Chanterelles are officially a service organization on
campus, but they function more like a sorority, as far as I can tell.
Most students, in or out of those groups, call them clubs. I do not
belong to one, and have no particular friends in that class, so I was
expecting to go it alone until Sherrie came along. She wouldn’t have
been much help in hunting for cacti, but I realized the advantages of
the ‘buddy system’ for working in rough terrain. Unfortunately Mr.
Ewidge was a kind of loner himself, and it probably never occurred
to him to pair us up before we set out. I last saw him at the parking
area as we were heading up a trail to the north. He was going off by
himself in the opposite direction. It occurred to me that he knew
where all the good specimens were to be found, and intended to
bring back a better collection than any of us, but I wasn’t going to
follow him.”
“Why not? Afraid of him?” Fassner was taking a shot in the dark,
maybe trying to rattle her.
Her face showed puzzlement rather than embarrassment. “No. He
was no physical threat to me. But I did want to get a good grade, and
I’m sure he would have penalized anyone he thought was cheating.
He was a sort of show-off, and liked to impress us with his clothes
and his car and his superior knowledge of biology, but when it came
to grades he was all business. That made it tough on some of the
students who had various ways of manipulating teachers into better
grades than they deserved.”
“Like, for instance, Sherrie Cook?”
Labelle flexed her left hand into a fist, but I guessed that she had
tumbled to Fassner’s technique. “I don’t know if I should repeat
gossip I hear on the lunch court. All I meant was that anyone who
wanted anything better than a C-plus in that class would have to do
the homework—and the fieldwork. Sherrie certainly didn’t want to
fail the class. She was trying to get into a college where grades weren’t
all that important, but an F would have made her parents angry. And
she seemed much more serious without Ronny Knowles around. At
any rate, she wasted no time going off into the park. I was always a
bit behind her because she was really just hiking, going too fast to see
what was growing on the ground and in the rocks.”

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