Page 33 of Devil and the Deep Blue Fish

Watching somebody flush after having as much work done as Bertha Dunkel, now known as Piper Lutz, was pretty entertaining. The parts of her face recently injected didn’t actuallyturnred—but the rest of her face blotched up nicely.

“I’m a stay-at-home mother,” she said. “My children take up most of my time, but I do try to dedicate a few hours a week toward Moms for Clean Living.” Her smile was back in place, and Ellery remembered his mother and sister fiercely advocating for stay-at-home moms. “It’s not somethingIcould do, Ellery,” his mother had said often enough, and Ellery tried to give this woman the benefit of the doubt.

It was harder, though, now that he’d read her dossier.

“Oh really,” he said, giving his scary smile again. “How old are your children?”

Piper’s hair formed two graceful wings framing what was probably a round face in an effort to create the “perfect oval” women seemed to chase. She carefully ran her third finger from her part, down her hairline, to her ear, where she flipped her wing of hair back—a tell of discomfort if Ellery had ever seen one.

“Oh, my youngest is a sophomore in UCLA,” she said, trying for an indulgent smile. “Which is why I have time to volunteer in this worthy cause.”

“And what is it, exactly, your organization does?” Ellery asked.

“We like to think of ourselves as public education’s watchdogs,” she said, with a slow bat of her eyelashes. “We’re a grassroots movement that sees the gaps of oversight in our public schools, and we try to add that extra layer of monitoring to protect our children.”

“So you help in the classroom?” he asked, pretty sure that was not the case.

“Oh no, our focus is more generalized than that.”

“So you raise money for school activities and enrichment?”

“Oh no—going outside the classroom to see the larger world is something that should be between students and parents only. We don’t believe in enrichment.”

Ellery knew his head tilt of disbelief had increased a few degrees, but God help him, that was a rough one to swallow.

“You help purchase materials?” Ellery asked. “Because it’s well known schoolteachers are already putting a great deal of their own money into classrooms, so I’m sure that sort of thing would be helpful.”

“But that’s their job!” Piper laughed, and Ellery fought the urge to lean over the table and grab her by the throat. “They signon knowing that they’re responsible for what the government won’t provide.”

Behind the door he heard a strangled sound of what might have been fury, and he politely coughed to cover Jade’s grunt of disbelief.

“So,” Ellery said carefully, “you don’t help the schools obtain resources, you don’t volunteer time to assist their personnel, and you don’t seem to be rallying for them to have more materials or to enrich their curriculum, have I got that right?”

The weird, uneven blotch had bled from her overplumped features, and what remained was an almost corpse white. “Well, we leave those things to the powers that be,” she said.

“So what exactly do you do?” Ellery kept his “pleasant” smile in place, and she did that smoothing the hair back thing again, so he knew it was working.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You say you’re a school monitoring system—what exactly do you monitor?”

“Well, we are particularly interested that teachers stick exclusively to the curriculum—”

“That you expect the government to buy materials for—”

“And in no way deviate from what is the acceptable list of standards and concepts that children should be learning.”

“But you’re not willing to help in the classroom,” Ellery summarized.

“We mostly look to make sure no foreign concepts enter the school system that parents don’t approve of,” she finished in a rush, as though she and Ellery had been racing to a conclusion.

“You ban books,” he said shortly, and that flush returned, this time with more force and intensity.

“Only the ones we feel—”

“Who feels?” he asked.

“What?”

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