I didn't see it myself until fourth period, when a colleague, a gentle eighth-grade math teacher named Hal Brightwater who had never in four years spoken to me about anything but the copier, came into my room while the kids were at lunch and closed the door behind him and said, "Grady, I think you need to see this, and I'm sorry."
It was on the Kestrel Run Neighbors page, which had about four hundred members, and which, through the magic of people who had moved out of Kestrel Run but never left the group, reached about a third of the parents at my school.
PSA FOR ALL KESTREL RUN RESIDENTS, PLEASE READ, it began. Sheryl wrote all her important posts in capital letters at the top and sentence case below, like a newspaper. Early this morning, police responded to a report of the theft of personal undergarments from a backyard on Kestrel Court. The items were recovered from a neighboring property. I will not name names out of respect for the ongoing investigation, but I would urge every family, ESPECIALLY those with daughters, to secure laundry and to be mindful of who in this neighborhood maintains extensive camera surveillance of other people's yards. The Board has been raising concerns about this for over a year. Please stay safe, and please trust your instincts.
She hadn't named me. She hadn't had to. There were a hundred and forty comments, and by about the twelfth, people were naming me for her.
Isn't that the teacher with all the cameras on Kestrel Ct?
Owl guy. The one with the owl cameras. My son had him for science.
Wait the middle school teacher??? He's around kids all day?
Do NOT jump to conclusions people, innocent until proven guilty. (That one had four likes.)
I'm not jumping to anything, police were literally at his house this morning, I drove past.
Someone should call the school.
Someone did. I found out who later, and it doesn't matter; it was a parent, not Sheryl, and she was frightened, and I've let it go. At 2:15 that afternoon the front office called my room phone and asked me to come down to see Dr. Crandall when the bell rang.
Renata Crandall had been my principal for six years. She was a former band director with a voice that could reach the back of a gymnasium without effort, and a habit of saying "Okay. Okay," while she thought. She had once covered my class for an entire afternoon so I could get to Pippa's school play. She had a framed photograph on her office wall of Pinecone the owl, printed from our classroom feed, that my students had given her for Principal Appreciation Day.
She did not look at the photograph while she talked to me.