Chapter 73 – Suppressing Secrets – Holly Hayfield

Getting called out of class on school business was becoming a daily occurrence for me. It was fortunate that I was ahead of studies in all of my classes or my grades would be affected. These days the teachers didn’t even need special notice for me to leave the classroom. I was free to go whenever I had plans outside of class. Usually that only meant a counseling session with someone.

Today, I wasn’t being called out of class for a counseling session. This was something far worse. My counseling sessions often ranged between boring and fascinating on the interest scale. No matter how the session turned out I always found the insight into someone else’s mind insightful. Today, however, was going to be painful. The reason I was being called out of class was to talk to Detective Richardson about my private meetings with Ms. Logan. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

Detective Richardson was a lot like me in the sense that we had both become an semi-official part of the staff. The speculation surrounding the nature of Ms. Logan’s death was slowing down, but not gone yet. Richardson had been placed into a semi-permanent position here at the school to continue investigating the case. He had been given his own office of sorts inside the school. It was really just a repurposed unused classroom. It gave him the space he needed to talk to people he deemed important to his investigation.

Ms. Sampson was dreading the whole idea. She still looked like his prime suspect and there was little she could do in the way of distancing herself from his focus. In lieu of any real alternatives, she came to me on Club Recruitment Day to talk about ways that I could pay her back. According to her, it was her influence that sold the new club system to the principal. Never mind the fact that the system was good on its own. She made a point of talking up just how much I owed her.

That left me in a precarious position. If I were to turn it down then what would happen to this new club system? Would she walk it back out of spite? I couldn’t risk that. The new club system was an absolute force of good in this school. People were feeling uplifted thanks to the connections that they made on Club Recruitment Day. I knew it was vain of me, but I felt incredibly proud with the results. I was proud enough that I was willing to defend this new system no matter what.

So that meant going along with whatever tasks she setup for me. That meant more spying for her. Over the next few days she arranged meetings of people for me to ‘counsel’. She explained it to these people as random student psychological studies, but I knew it was more than that. Thanks to a little help from Naomi’s girlfriends, I learned the real reason these students were chosen. These were the same students that Detective Richardson had questioned.

Naomi’s girlfriends found out after following some of these girls on my request. It took a while to place the connection, but I learned what Ms. Sampson was aiming for. She was using the notes I was making to create profiles on these students. She wanted to know how dangerous they potentially were to her. Some of the questions she had me ask them were of a personal nature, but I guessed Ms. Sampson didn’t care. It took a great deal of finesse for me to work with them.

This meeting with Detective Richardson himself was going to take even more.

“Welcome, Miss Hayfield! Come, have a seat in front of my desk.” He said as I walked in.

This entire room had been converted into a two-part office. One side, the side he was currently at, was set up like an interviewing area. There were chairs on either side of the desk. The chairs were something he had brought in, not school equipment. The other side of the room was more traditionally office-oriented. It had a regular work desk, filing cabinets, a computer table, printing machines, and a few other modern office amenities. I tried not to gawk too much at it as I took my seat in front of him.

“You wanted to speak to me, Mr. Richardson?” I asked. “Or should I call you Detective Richardson?”

“Mr. Richardson is just fine.” He said. “I wanted to speak to you about Ms. Logan. I’m told that you had a close relationship with her.”

“I don’t know that I’d go that far. I tried to counsel her into a better state of mind. I couldn’t. I failed. Her inability to move forward was at least partly my fault.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that.” He said. “I’ve learned through an extensive investigation of her house, and conversations with her family, she’s been like this since her high school years. There was little in the way you could do in terms of repairing her broken mind. Actually, that’s why I wanted to talk to you today. I’ve been told you’ve become a junior counselor here at this school?”

“Yes, that’s a recent state of affairs.” I said, “I might’ve failed with Ms. Logan, but I still hope to do counseling into the future. Maybe I’ll be able to actually save someone in similar dire need once I get better at talking to people.”

“It seems like you have the academic aptitude for it. Angelica has told me a lot about you.”

“She has…?”

“She told me that you nursed her over the course of the summer? Do you have a natural inclination to help others? Or is that something recent also?”

“Hmm… I don’t know. I never thought much about it. I mean, I try to empathize with people but I still hold my grudges and whatnot. I’m not an angel. If I were then I wouldn’t be here.”

“Of course, of course,” He said, “I want to know the exact reason that you reached out to Ms. Logan in the first place.”

“Do I need a reason? She was in a broken mental state and needed help.”

“Sorry, but I find that difficult to believe.” He said in a gruff voice, “According to what I’ve seen of your school schedule you’ve never had her as a teacher. This is your first year at this school and it’s still early in the school year. Is it possible to build that sort of close relationship with a teacher you don’t have over the course of a few weeks or couple of months?”

While his questions were well founded, I couldn’t help but to be slightly offended.

“For the record, we met through my history teacher, Mr. Hudson. Ms. Logan would always bother him for help to catch up on grading. Since I was always finishing ahead of the class, he’d send me over to her classroom to help out. She had her planning period during the same time I had history class.”

He rubbed his chin inquisitively.

“I see… So Ms. Sampson didn’t have anything to do with it?”

“Excuse me…?”

“There’s another school counselor here, Mrs. Douglass. According to her, Ms. Sampson asked her multiple times to help keep an eye out on Ms. Logan. Mrs. Douglass says she never had any success talking to Ms. Logan. In fact, she says Ms. Logan downright hated her. However, it doesn’t sound like that was the case with you.”

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“What are you getting at?”

He exhaled tiredly and shifted in his chair before just deciding to come out with it.

“I think when Mrs. Douglass failed to bring about results, Ms. Sampson sent you. She needed someone to try keeping the lid on her coworker, and you must’ve been a good candidate. However, Ms. Logan proved to be too much of a problem for even you to handle.”

I couldn’t hold back an annoyed scoff after hearing his theory.

“I tried my best with Ms. Logan!” I practically shouted, “Ms. Sampson didn’t send me there to keep a lid on her! Ms. Sampson didn’t care about her enough to send someone to talk to her the way I did. You’ve got the wrong idea about their relationship. You’ve got the wrong idea about Mrs. Douglass, too. That woman can hardly be called a real counselor.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She’s mean! She’s judgmental! Of course Ms. Logan would never open up to someone like that…”

“You mean the way that she opened up to you?”

This tripped me up a little. Here I was running my mouth off disrespectfully, and he stayed stone-cold throughout my little rant. His expression hadn’t even changed much since the moment I walked into the room. I wasn’t sure what he was aiming for, but I wasn’t going to let myself be treated like a fool. I sat up straight in my seat and met his unflinching gaze.

“Yes.” I said determinedly, “I do mean the way that she opened up to me. Mrs. Douglass doesn’t have a bone of compassion in her entire body.”

“Is that a trait you’re proud of, compassion?”

“Shouldn’t I be…?”

“The people that are overly proud of their sense of compassion have a tendency to be vain and self-absorbed. They’re worried about the way people see them and their own self-image. Is that why you were willing to help Ms. Logan outside of class? Did you want people to know you were helping her?”

“Only a few people knew I was talking to her, and none of them were keen on it. None of them were keen on Ms. Logan to begin with. No one liked her. I didn’t do it because I was thinking of how people would receive me. I did it because I felt it was the right thing to do at the moment. I thought for a time that she was becoming less depressed…”

“You mean she wasn’t?”

“No.” I said in disappointment, “There were things she was keeping from me. Even recently I learned that I didn’t know nearly as much about her as I thought I did. I was never able to form a decent bridge between us and she suffered all the same.”

“How do you know that? Did you see any signs of regression?”

“I saw a lot of signs. She was always harming herself. She took precautions to hide it from others, but I saw the signs. I had a friend, Ellie, who used to cut her wrists when she was depressed. It took a lot of work, but I was able to help Ellie out of that state. Ms. Logan, however, never stopped. She never said anything outright about killing herself, but I could read between the lines well enough to know that it was on her mind.”

“So your history of helping people goes back beyond helping Angelica?”

“Ellie was the first one…” I said, feeling a tinge of pain in my chest. “I had been friends with her since middle school but never knew how much she was suffering until high school. It’s thanks to her that I learned how to read people. After that I’ve always known that I’ve wanted to help people as a professional pursuit. I just didn’t know how.”

My heartfelt story didn’t have any visible effect on him. He just sat back in his chair and gave me a long, hard look.

“You have to understand my suspicion, Ms. Hayfield. It’s not that I don’t believe that you’re a caring young woman, it’s just that the timing is… strange. You’ve recently become an intern here just after your primary client was murdered. I can’t believe that Ms. Sampson has nothing to do with this.”

“I didn’t say that.” I noted, “She made me a junior counselor, but not for the reasons you suspect. She promoted me because she wanted to make use of my abilities for her own purposes.”

He leaned forward.

“What abilities are these?”

“She knows that I’m good at talking to people and understanding their perspectives. She, just like you, wants to know the mysteries that Ms. Logan was keeping. When she realized I couldn’t tell her anything new in that regard, she decided that I’d help her out in other ways. Were you at the assembly I spoke at shortly after the Fall Festival?”

“Yes, I was in the gymnasium.”

“I was the one that organized that. I also wrote the speeches for me and for the vice principal. You may have also heard the school buzz about a new club system?”

“You organized the Club Recruitment Day?”

“More than that, I came up with the entire outline of the club system. The initial draft was a work of the Student Council’s Correction Authority, but I led the charge.”

“She needs you for your people managing skills?”

“I guess that’s the more direct way of putting it. If my working mother has taught me anything, part of being a successful adult is making your skills useful to the right people.”

For the first time Detective Richardson’s hard expression changed. His lips curled into a smile and he let out a subtle laugh.

“That seems to be the gist of it, yes.” He said, “I think I can cross out any affiliation you may have had with Ms. Sampson before Ms. Logan’s death. I’ll let you return to class now. Thank you for coming to talk to me today Ms. Hayfield.”

“It’s no problem.” I said as I started to stand up.

As I got up out of my chair and began to walk away, he waved one hand out towards me to get my attention.

“Oh, there’s one more thing I wanted to ask you.”

“Yes…?”

“Just how close would you say Ms. Sampson is with Officer Angelica Morelli?”

My meeting with Detective Richardson was bumpier than I expected it would be. It wasn’t too bad, all things considered. I just didn’t expect him to attack me on a personal level. After thinking about it for a few minutes, it made sense that he did. It was part of his job. He had to. He needed absolutely anything he could use as information in his case. That was something that Lilith had gone through great lengths to teach me on her hunt for information surrounding Malorie.

As expected, I was called to the front office shortly after returning to class. The moment I returned to class the teacher told me that I was wanted in the office. I never even had the chance to sit down. My classmates laughed at my little walk-in dance as I came in and spun right back around. It figured. Ms. Sampson would want to know every little detail of how my meeting with the detective went. I was the only student questioned so far that she could personally call to her office without raising eyebrows.

Ms. Sampson was happy to hear that Detective Richardson’s suspicions of me were dropped. That was a relief for Ms. Sampson because he still didn’t know the full details of my situation with Ms. Sampson. I didn’t want to outright lie to the man, but I wasn’t going to volunteer any extra information. My goal was to skirt the truth just enough to appear sincere. From how it turned out it seemed like it worked. Ms. Sampson’s only concern was about Detective Richardson questioning me about Angel.

“So, what did you end up telling him?” Ms. Sampson asked me.

She sat down in her office chair across from me. She had been pacing around the room the entire time I relayed everything that had happened in Richardson’s office. She was so coolly unconcerned that I wasn’t expecting any trouble. It wasn’t until she sat down that I saw how tense she was. Her hands were shaking slightly atop her desk. She was trying to hide it by holding her hands together tightly, but I had enough experience in counseling to notice such body language.

“I told him the truth. I told him that I knew you two were friends from high school.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” I said. “Angelica hasn’t really talked to me much about her high school days. There wasn’t much for me to add.”

“Hmm…” Ms. Sampson hummed as she sat back into her chair. “The fact that he asked you means that he’s probably looking in on Angel too. This could be troublesome.”

She was lost in thought with her hand rubbing her chin. She was so quiet for so long that I was about to get up and leave without her permission. Before I had the chance to move she snapped her vision back up to me.

“We need to stay on top of this. I’m going to need your help.”

“Haven’t I already done enough?”

“Ha!” Ms. Sampson said mockingly, “After what I’ve done for you? If you’re going to have a future at this school then you’re going to have to learn to work with me. I’ve given you your club system. Now I need more in turn.”

I sighed.

“What do I have to do?”

“Nothing too bad, I just need you to keep up your counseling efforts for me. These notes you’ve made have helped me out a lot. I get a sense of why he’s interviewing these students. They’re mostly Abby’s former students with generally positive views of her.”

“So you only need me to take more notes?”

She smirked.

“That and I need your phone number. If I get any other ideas I want to be in touch.” She said sinisterly.

I was getting the feeling that I wasn’t going to be let off the chain anytime soon.