Till the End of Tom by Gillian Roberts Page A

to be still more patronizing. “Sorry to be dense,” I said, “but how do you spell benzo—”
    “Easier to just write one of its street names. Roofies,” he said.
    “Got it.”
    He either didn’t hear me, or didn’t believe me, or didn’t care, so he continued on. “Mackenzie will know. People call it a date-rape drug. Somebody takes it in a drink—can’t taste it, can’t see it in his tea, and he gets a kind of amnesia for whatever happens while he’s sedated. Gets bleary, a little out of it and if he takes enough, he can pass out completely.”
    I truly had known all that, I just hadn’t been sure of the scientific name. I’m the advisor to the school paper, the
Inkwire,
and we’d started this academic year with a bang—the first issue had a serious piece on drugs and their availability, a student-researched article that was exceptionally good because it was peer-to-peer straight talk. I was so proud of that article; I intended to enter it in a journalism contest.
    “Not normally lethal, not that it was here, either,” Edwards continued. “But if he had alcohol, say at lunch, and the autopsy’s looking like he did, it’d make it much worse.”
    “I thought the tea might be significant,” I said, blatantly offering my back for patting.
    “Sure was, and since traces of it disappear quickly, thank him for the heads-up.”
    I resigned myself to the idea that this was a guy thing, and life was too short to start working on this problem at the moment.
    “They’re checking Severin for it now, and they wouldn’t have otherwise. Or if they did tomorrow or the next day, it’d be too late. It becomes undetectable.”
    I knew that, too.
    “What was that all about?” Sasha asked as soon as I’d put the receiver back on its cradle.
    “Tomas Severin. Did you have wine with lunch?”
    “I had a glass. Tom did, too. And a vodka martini beforehand. He’d had some kind of disturbing hour before lunch. Separate from the phone calls.”
    “Did you by any chance get tea-to-go when you left the place? Or did he?”
    She shook her head. “It isn’t that kind of place. Really—just a tiny bistro. No take-out.”
    “When did your lunch end?”
    “An exact time? Amanda, I didn’t check my watch, but it wasn’t long. An hour, I’d say. We went our separate ways at one. He had another appointment. Very busy guy for somebody who basically didn’t even work. Why?”
    “It appears that somebody drugged him by dropping a date-rape drug in herbal tea he had in a Styrofoam cup.” And if it wasn’t at the café with Sasha, then where was it?
    “Too weird,” she said. “Why drug him? But why especially with that?”
    “Beats me. It would make him dopey, slow to react. Rape was surely not the goal in this case, but you could do whatever else you had in mind more easily, I guess.”
    “What? What could anybody have wanted to do to him at your school?”
    “In my classroom,” I added.
    “Tomas Severin, you don’t deserve to live,” Sasha said abruptly, startling me. “That was what the third phone call said.” She paused, then nodded, and when she spoke again, it was so softly I could barely hear her. “Somebody meant it,” she said. “Somebody meant it enough to kill him.”

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    Five
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    P ERHAPS the events at Philly Prep would have been newsworthy no matter who had died. After all, it’s shocking—though sadly less so all the time—when violent death hits a school. But it’s definitely worth a mouthful of sound bites when the victim’s the scion of a local dynasty, and it becomes lead-story time when the wealthy and prominent middle-aged dead man has an infamous date-rape drug in his system.
    Each time the media enjoyed another wallow in the story, they mentioned the “plucky”—absolutely not a word I’d want applied to me, ever—teacher who’d spotted the cup in her classroom.
    I was given credit for my housekeeping—for finding the thing, but not for brains. The stories made it