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stink bombs?”
    “I’m afraid so,” she said softly. “One of the boys
in the bathroom when the bomb went off has a mother on the Board of
Education. A girl in the locker room’s father is on the Board of
Assessors, and, well, the science teacher was quite angry himself.”
I knew Mr. Marlton—he wore a lab coat wherever he went and was last
pleased with something around the time Madame Curie discovered
radium.
    “. . . And they’re putting pressure on you
to bring the culprit, or culprits, to justice? Is that it?”
    In Midland Heights, where New Age parents keep their
kids away from red meat and the lack of organic tomatoes at the
supermarket is a major scandal, three unanswered stink bombs could
be enough to put a principal’s job on the line, if—as seemed to be
the case here—the wrong people’s children were somehow involved.
Put enough children with enough connections in the line of fire,
and anything could happen. Word had it that a former health
inspector was once fired for getting annoyed by a resident’s
constant calls about spiders in her neighbor’s apartment because he
told her to “teach them to tap dance and get them on Letterman.”
Anne could investigate, but her hands were tied. An independent
observer (like a freelance writer, for example) could, in theory,
use methods that weren’t exactly in the Marquis of Queensberry's
rulebook, and if I were caught or killed, the principal could
disavow all knowledge of my actions. Clever.
    “Something like that,” she said. “Can you help? Will you help?”
    “How much time do I have?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t seriously believe the
board would act against an administrator on something like this,
but. . .” Anne let her voice trail off.
    “I assume I’m not on the school’s payroll,” I
said.
    “No. I’m asking for a favor,” said Anne.
    “That’s my going rate,” I said. “Tell me what you
know.”

Chapter

Eight
    I t turned out the
six-letter word for “dummies”—the crossword puzzle item that had so
stymied me—was “dodoes.” That crazy, whimsical New York
Times .
    I spent the rest of that morning on the two phone
calls for the Star-Ledger story and trying to absorb my
other two current assignments. For one, I was being asked to find
out who killed a relatively major political figure, and write about
it because I knew him and his now-widow in high school. I had just
about no experience doing such things, but was being paid $10,000
for my on-the-job training.
    On the other hand, I had plenty of experience in
finding out which little kid has been mischievous, because I have
been a parent for twelve years. So discovering who had chucked the
stink bombs into various rooms in the Buzbee School was
considerably better suited to my talents. Of course, for this I was
being paid nothing. The fact that I’d been asked to do it at all
(or that anyone had been asked) was the hardest part to
believe.
    I decided to start on the paying job first, and put
in a call to my friend Mitch Davis, who works for USA Today in the Washington, D.C. area. But Mitch was out, so I settled for
his voice mail, and sat down to ponder.
    Pondering is what I’m best at in the morning. Before
two in the afternoon, I’m useless as a writer unless there’s a
deadline to meet. So I thought, and I put music on (since I’m not
allowed to play what I like while the kids are home), and I had a
Healthy Choice frozen lunch while watching a rerun of Hill
Street Blues on Bravo. Then, I reread the scene I’d written
yesterday on my latest screenplay.
    Screenwriting isn’t the kind of thing you do because
you want to—it’s the kind of thing you do because if you don’t, the
story will leak out through your ears. I’ve been writing
screenplays for upwards of 20 years in the increasingly vain hope
that some maniac producer will read one, decide I’m worth throwing
some money at, and eventually make a movie. So far, I’ve been