I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia by Gillian Roberts

  Praise for I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia

  Dedication

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia

  By Gillian Roberts

  Copyright 2012 by Gillian Roberts

  Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1992.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Gillian Roberts and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Caught Dead in Philadelphia

  Philly Stakes

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia

  An Amanda Pepper Mystery

  By Gillian Roberts

  Praise for I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia

  “This new case for schoolteacher Amanda Pepper sparkles with wit on every page and may be the most amusing mystery of the summer… Roberts generates more witty one-liners and pithy social commentary than many authors achieve in a lifetime of trying, as well as a respectable number of deliciously loony secondary characters.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Here’s the Dorothy Parker of mystery writers, laughing even when—especially when—it hurts, and giving more wit per page than most writers give per book.”

  —Nancy Pickard

  “Chilling and warm, heartbreaking and sidesplitting. From the unfolding of its intriguing premise, it shines with the narrator’s sensitivity, charm, and intelligence. The author has worked a rare and satisfying magic that makes us think and makes us laugh. Gillian Roberts is a mystery reader’s dream come true.”

  —Lia Matera

  “Roberts has mixed us a light and tasty mystery, garnished with a message of social and moral significance that will leave readers gently stirred, but not shaken.”

  —Mostly Murder

  “A tightly plotted, constantly spry series…I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia moves along at a brisk clip.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Witty and humorous… Fast paced…. The author handles a serious subject with compassion and intelligence, creating a successful blend of a murder mystery, tragedy, and humor.”

  —The Journal (IL)

  “Amusing and entertaining, this is a nice addition to the earlier books in this series. Roberts keeps it light and spins a complicated but plausible tale. She also makes some tellingly chilling observations on domestic violence and abused women…. This book is a good candidate for a cold day and a cozy fire. Let’s hope Amanda has further adventures in the city of Brotherly Love.”

  —The Louisville Courier-Journal

  “Roberts’ prose is wry and witty, and the likably nosy Amanda is a gem of a heroine.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “Entirely plausible and terrifying.”

  —Philadelphia Daily News

  This book is dedicated to the woman who wrote in the library book. I hope you have found safety, peace, and joy. I wish I could have found you.

  Introduction

  People often ask writers (especially mystery writers) where they get their ideas. Most times, I can’t answer. Ideas come in bits and pieces—something overheard, read, imagined—and are suddenly stories with people and events. But I do know where the idea of I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia originated.

  Many years ago, while doing research, I borrowed a book from my local library about spousal abuse. The book was interesting, but the underlines and notes in the margin were terrifying. Somebody—a neighbor?—was a desperately frightened, anonymous battered woman. I tried to find her, but of course, one cannot trace who took out a library book.

  I copied out her notes and kept thinking about her. Finally, since I couldn’t find her, I gave her book (though this time it wasn’t a library book) to Amanda Pepper.

  A note about the “now” of this book: like the rest of the series, I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia was set in an unspecific “now.” I wanted to avoid anything that would date the books, but the laugh was on me as I failed to consider the huge and rapid changes technology had in store.

  This version you’re reading on a device Amanda couldn’t have dreamed of, is as it was written, so the school’s new computer is a useless mystery to her, good only for keeping lists. People listen to music on phonographs, use payphones to make calls, and schoolrooms still smell of chalk dust.

  But for better or for worse, human nature remains the same, and people are still bundles of problems, passions, fears, joys, and sometimes, murderous impulses. The dreadful problem of domestic abuse continues—but sometimes the woman who wrote in the book can be found.

  Enjoy I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia!

  Gillian Roberts

  February 2012

  One

  T.S. ELIOT SAID APRIL WAS THE CRUELEST MONTH, WHICH PROVES HE NEVER experienced February in Philadelphia.

  February is when Mother Nature has PMS, and I didn’t feel terrific either. On a Monday afternoon, enduring a standard-issue winter cold, with only one of the five teaching days completed, I considered the nasty little month the longest one on the calendar. Winter could come and spring be agonizingly far behind, no matter what a dizzily optimistic poet had claimed.

  Several stories below my classroom, students poured out of school, emitting happy noises that floated up to me while I tidied my room and let the VCR rewind. Above the blackboard, the likenesses of Willie Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and Mark Twain looked annoyed or disdainful.

  Perhaps they were offended by my declining standards of teaching. The shorter the days, the longer my cold, the less enthusiasm I was able to muster.

  The VCR whirred in reverse. My seniors, suffering last-semester ennui, had received their final transfusion of Shakespeare intravenously, through film. I didn’t even feel guilty about it.

  I would someday like to meet the warped curriculum designer who inflicted halting, amateur readings of Hamlet on English teachers already coping with seniors and February.

  If I ever find him, I’ll make him sit through Moose Moscowitz’s portrayal of the Prince of Denmark. That’ll give him a new definition of tragedy.

  I had tried to present Shakespeare in the orthodox manner. Nevertheless, after a few wretched scenes, during which Moose’s classmates rolled their eyes like dying horses, we switched to th
e Couch Potato version. Moose was replaced by Laurence Olivier. I did it all for the Bard.

  But then, because we had zipped through Shakespeare and because I was still coughing and sneezing, I tossed in a “bonus” play, a comedy this time, The Taming of the Shrew, which happened to be available in the resource library. Now I waited as it rewound itself.

  “I’ll do a better job tomorrow,” I muttered to the literary icons above the board. Tonight, however, was devoted to feeling sorry for myself. I’d drink chicken soup and mint tea and wear woolly socks and contemplate the fact that my gentleman friend was occupied with a former girlfriend and that it was still February. In fact, there was no need to wait until tonight. I started pitying myself on the spot.

  My delicious wallow was interrupted by discreet throat-clearing. I turned and saw two senior girls, each standing with one hip out, head tilted, waiting for me.

  I knew I was on the verge of having even more to feel rotten about. Seniors didn’t linger after school to share glad tidings. “Hi,” I said, “I didn’t realize you were still here. What’s up?”

  Rita, the more aggressive of the two, stood with hands on hips and chin in the air in eloquent and challenging body language.

  I steeled myself.

  She nodded, head bobbling forward in preagreement with whatever she had to say. “Wanted to talk about…”

  “About your paper, I guess.” Every senior had to write a research paper in order to graduate. No senior wanted to.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “About that.” She pointed her thumb toward the VCR. “That shrew play. You like it, Miss Pepper?”

  Truth is, The Taming of the Shrew makes me queasy. I have trouble with the premise that there’s something wrong with a headstrong woman. Is a headweak woman the ideal? I wouldn’t have chosen the play if it hadn’t been sitting on the English Department shelf.

  “He’s a pig!” Rita said.

  “You mean Petruchio?” I asked.

  “Shakespeare! He’s the pig.” Rita looked to her companion and yesperson, Colleen, for confirmation, but got none, because Colleen was busy shoving papers into a lime folder ornamented with the metallic stars elementary teachers award spelling tests. Gold for perfection. Silver for one error. Red for two, as I recall, but Colleen’s stars spelled an Anglo-Saxon word that never appears on vocabulary lists.

  Shakespeare is a pig. I mulled this over. I hadn’t expected my seniors to stay awake through the movie, let alone react to its philosophic nuances. Bad enough that the class met the last period of the day, but it was also suffering advanced senioritis, an affliction of those about to be sprung, or graduated, as we prefer to put it. Grades had been sent to less selective colleges everywhere. Nothing mattered from here on except not getting thrown out of school, and it’s nearly impossible to be thrown out of Philly Prep if your parents have already paid your tuition. Our seniors know that if they remain in suspended animation, the finish line will come to them.

  “I coulda puked when Kate says nice wives should put their hands below their husbands’ feet!” Rita could talk and growl at the same time. “A perfect wife my—! I wouldn’t get married if that’s how it was. Right? Am I right or what, Coll?”

  “Well…” Colleen said noncommittally.

  I felt obliged to present the official academic defense. “It’s a farce. Light, funny, not to be taken seriously.”

  Rita’s hands balled into fists. “But it’s not funny what he does to her! And what kind of happy ending is that supposed to be? She’s got no spirit left—no mind, even. He says it’s night, so she says it’s night. He changes his mind and says it’s day, so she says it’s day. He breaks her, and that’s supposed to be funny? Am I right or what, Coll?”

  “Well…” Colleen looked wistfully toward the gray out-of-doors.

  Despite Colleen’s indifference, I felt light-headed, and not from my cold. Philly Prep is where people who don’t want to go to school do go to school, so an after-hours, voluntary debate of Shakespearean sexism was cause for giddiness.

  “If a guy ever treated me like that—” Only a suicidal male would treat Rita any way she didn’t want to be treated. For starters, she had a large housefly tattooed on her face. For whatever comes after starters, she acted and dressed the way you’d expect somebody to who etches an insect on her cheek. “I been telling Colleen.” Bad English was Rita’s second language. Her father was a lawyer, her mother a professor of education at Penn. Sometimes, when agitated, Rita accidentally slipped into English Queen Elizabeth would envy.

  “Colleen’s boyfriend’s so tough,” Rita continued. “Macho, you know? She lets him get away with murder. He pushes her around and says he ought to teach her a lesson, like the creep in the play.”

  Colleen shrugged and finally looked directly at me. “Maybe you could explain to Rita how guys are,” she said.

  “Me?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I’m not certified in that subject area.” Thirty years old and I still didn’t have a handle. It was embarrassing to be such a slow learner.

  I busied myself tidying the desk. Philly Prep is easy on its students, exacting of its physical plant. We stand for the highest educational values: clean blackboards, neatly aligned window shades, cleared desks.

  “I’m sure your guy isn’t a wimp,” Colleen said to me.

  “Well, I’m sure Miss Pepper doesn’t let him push her around and tell her what to do like you let Ronny,” Rita said.

  “About whom are we talking?” I asked.

  “Ronny Spingle.” Colleen looked honored to say his name. “He doesn’t go here. He’s twenty and—”

  “No. I meant you were asking me about somebody who doesn’t tell me how to act. Who?”

  “Hell, Miss Pepper, we know teachers are people, too.” Rita sniggered, as if despite her words, she considered the idea ludicrous. “And we know that you and the cop, the cute one who was here that time…well, you know.”

  I didn’t know much—not even the cute cop’s given name.

  But one thing I did know was that I wasn’t about to discuss C.K. Mackenzie or my romantic life with a seventeen-year-old in black lipstick and a woodpecker hairdo.

  In any case, my shaky love life didn’t include the kind of testosterone-poisoned man the girls were talking about. I had never been attracted to Rambo types, the Stanley Kowalskis who look likely to knock around their women. Besides, we had wandered far afield from the play Rita had stayed to discuss. “Don’t forget,” I said, packing papers into my briefcase, “circumstances were different in Shakespeare’s time. Women were chattel.”

  “They were cows?” Colleen’s mouth hung slightly askew.

  Rita sneered. “She didn’t say cattle, stupido. No wonder Ronny says you’re dumb. No wonder—”

  “Chattel,” I repeated. “Personal, movable property. Husbands owned their wives.” I thumbed through the text of the play, still thunderstruck that an idea had outlasted a class period. I found the spot and read:

  “She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,

  My household-stuff, my field, my barn,

  My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing…”

  “My ass, my ass! I mean really!” Rita waved a menacing fist and cracked her gum. “Where does that pig get off calling her a shrew?”

  “And what is a shrew, anyway?” Colleen sounded whiny, like a child afraid of being called stupid again.

  “It’s a tiny animal. Kind of like a mouse. A fierce fighter who takes on animals bigger than itself.”

  “Is that why they call Kate a shrew?” Rita’s hands were back on her hips. “The big animal she takes on is a man? Is that what it means?”

  We were talking semantics. We were upset about etymology. Incredible. “She takes him on with words,” I said. “Nagging, temper tantrums.” The weapons of the weak and hopeless.

  “Why shouldn’t she get angry?” Rita’s gum cracked. “Her father was selling her to whoever paid! You wouldn’t treat your dog that way
!”

  “I agree one hundred percent.” These girls had hibernated in my class for seven months, and the abrupt activation of their dormant gray matter was awe-inspiring. I would have gone on admiring the transformation had not the wall clock advanced with a hiss and a click. I checked it and realized I had to leave. “Let’s talk about this in class tomorrow, and after school, too, if you like.” I buckled my briefcase and moved toward the door.

  The Shakespearean scholars stayed in place. They looked at each other, then at me, gulping, sighing, shuffling their feet. Maybe I had been too abrupt. “I want you to know something,” I said. “It’s been a genuine thrill talking about ideas instead of hearing complaints about term papers!” I wasn’t kidding. My mood had lifted, my head felt clearer, and even the sun seemed to come out of retirement.

  Colleen bit at her lip and stuck a finger into the recesses of her hair to scratch. “Yeah,” she said. “Well actually, now that you mention term papers…” She nudged Rita and swallowed hard.

  A few seconds passed while I absorbed the fact that my lovely after-school encounter had been carefully orchestrated with me in the role of dupe. The illusion of sun dissipated and my sinuses reclogged. I had been set up, softened with Shakespeare, and now I was ready for the kill.

  “No offense,” Rita said, “but the subjects you suggested? They’re no good.”

  I had tried to be innovative and untraditional, to make the idea of research fun, to provide unscholarly, unanswered questions for which the students could formulate theories. I had obviously failed. My spirits sank even lower.

  “They’re like for idiots,” Rita added.

  Could she be right and publishing empires and supermarket checkout stands wrong? Did only idiots care about the existence of Bigfoot, pregnant ninety-six-year-old women, UFOs landing in Wichita backyards, and—the number-one concern of America—whether or not Elvis was actually dead?

  “Boring,” Colleen said.