The Coming Future (A Castle Fanfiction)

Part Sixteen: Progressively Empty

"Melissa Burns! James Carpenter! So nice to see you both again," a forty-six year old woman said as she sat at her desk. For Melissa, it really was a pleasure to see Mrs. Olsen again, but Carpenter just faked a smile and nodded in her direction. The woman stood and hugged Burns, gesturing for them to sit in one of the chairs up front. "Don't tell me you two ended up together. Back then I would have never imagined."

Burns laughed, "No, no, Mrs. Olsen. We're just working a case together."

"A case? Don't tell me you became a cop." The woman was more surprised than anything, but she gave off an odd look of discomfort at the thought.

Carpenter replied with an edge, "She's in robbery."

"And he's a nark," Melissa informed their teacher, teasing James a bit. "Do you remember Lucas Harris or Kaylin Murphy by chance?"

"Of course, I taught them both as well. If you told me either of them was a cop or a criminal, I wouldn't be surprised," the joke went through them all, but by the cops' faces she could tell she was right. "Am I to assume you're working a case with them as well?"

Burns responded, "Yes ma'am. We're actually here to ask you about one of your other old students. Tanner Gerick."

The woman's face went to instant recognition and nervousness. "Is he in trouble? What has he done?"

Carpenter was suddenly interested. "He's a suspect in an ongoing investigation and we believe something that happened to him here might have something to do with it." The woman was frightened. It looked as though she'd seen a ghost.

"I-," she hesitated, then found her words, "Tanner was a very troubled kid. You- You must understand, back when he went here, I was brand new to the job. I was fresh out of college with zero experience and the drive to be a middle school teacher. Tanner was a bright kid with what seemed like a bright future. Then, things with him started getting weird. He stopped raising his hand in class all together just suddenly. I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn't talk to me. The only friend he really kept was his brother, and that relationship was... strained to say the least. They got along, but I got the feeling that there was a bit of trouble at home. When I asked Tanner's girlfriend, she told me his parents fought a lot and he was taking it hard. He always took his father's side apparently and James seemed to have a problem with that. Anyway, we eventually had to expel him because he hit a kid for calling his father a criminal. We never found out why a kid would use that as a slam against James and Tanner's father, but no one ever really asked because we really didn't want to know. If we didn't know, then we didn't have to get involved.

"But I have to admit, no kid has ever scared me the way Tanner did. He had every other teacher under the impression he was a sweetheart, but just having him in my classroom, watching every move I made, never looking away for even a second to take notes or anything, he just made my skin crawl. His eyes were just so... lifeless. It was like his soul was nonexistent the way he worked people. I never thought I'd say this about a child, but I was so relieved he was expelled that I nearly burst out in a Halleluiah when I heard he wasn't coming back and banned from school property." Her teacher's overly dramatic and whimsical ending made Melissa smile, but Carpenter was too focused to respond in such a way.

He looked to the woman, leaning forward in his chair and asked, "Did he ever draw any kind of interesting sketches in his notebook or write something that seemed odd? Maybe on that test you had us take, the who knows what love really is while reading 'Romeo and Juliet'. He might have seemed very distant from the subject matter or very cold and harsh in his responses. Or perhaps he just simply didn't show sympathy for someone who was hurt or upset about something, even if it was someone he knew."