“Anyone can speak to me!” She was alone with the men in the teachers’ lounge. The grubby vomit orange sofas sagged in patches like rotting fruit. Inspirational posters urging them to strive for their dreams had faded to anemic tints of jade green and beige. No one sat down. Instead she swayed a little, staring from one glossy, polite face to the other. Both the suited men met her gaze with bland determination. Both had empty blue eyes and freshly shaved cheeks. “You can’t actually be FBI! That is, of course you can speak to me, but . . . I couldn’t possibly have anything to say that you might find interesting . . .” She trailed off, then glanced up at them with new sharpness. “I hope none of our students is in trouble.”

“No one is in any trouble, ma’am.” Mrs. Muggeridge’s eyes were darkening with a feeling of aversion for the tall man, though she couldn’t justify her dislike. He was perfectly well-mannered. “There was an incident in your third-period English class?”

That bewildered her, again. “Certainly nothing I couldn’t handle without help from the FBI!” She gaped at them. “Don’t you have more important things to worry about than an outburst from a fifteen-year-old boy?”

“In this case, ma’am, we think it might be important.”

“A tenth grader didn’t care for T. S. Eliot. Send in the feds!” Her voice was heavy with sarcasm. The agents were glowering at her.

“Just describe the incident. Ma’am.” The politeness was slipping now.

“Well . . . It was only that we were reading ‘Prufrock’ in class. We reached the closing stanzas, about the mermaids. And Dorian Hurst became very upset, for some reason. He jumped out of his seat and started yelling. But he’s generally been a very good student since he enrolled here.”

The two men were obviously trying to keep their faces smooth and vacant, but something excited and a little disturbing started to show in the quick pointed looks passing between them.

“And what did Dorian say?” It was the smaller man speaking now. He had hanging jowls and a high, almost girlish voice. Mrs. Muggeridge thought it contrasted unpleasantly with his blocky gray face.

“He said that if Prufrock had really heard the mermaids singing, he wouldn’t have lived to talk about it.” An eager twitch passed through the shoulders of the taller agent. He leaned in on her, and his blue eyes were as brittle as hunks of ice. But why on earth did he care? “It was a peculiar detail to quarrel with, but Dorian seemed very passionate about it. He accused Eliot of pretending we don’t have to die.”

“I thought you said the name was Prufrock?” It was the shorter agent squeaking again. Mrs. Muggeridge looked at him with fresh outrage.