by Susan Napier
Ten minutes had been a macho exaggeration on the boys’ part, for it was a full fifteen minutes at strictly legal speed before Anya reached the cluster of shops, houses and agribusinesses that made up the small township of Riverview.
She eased up on her speed, not even glancing in the direction of her darkened cottage, set back from the road in the large, overgrown garden which had become her personal challenge and private pleasure. Before she had gone away to school she had spent most of her childhood in a succession of inner-city hotels and apartments where the closest thing to a garden had been a potted palm.
They passed the community’s one and only petrol station at the far end of the shops, its neon sign switched off and forecourt pumps locked. As buildings gave way to wire fences and trimmed hedgerows again Anya planted her foot back down on the accelerator, eager to get the coming ordeal over. She hoped that Cheryl and Emma would have the good sense to be co-operative when she fetched them away. She wanted the rescue operation to go as smoothly as possible, preferably without any dramatic scenes that might stir up more trouble than she could handle.
She didn’t fancy having to deal with two recalcitrant, and quite possibly drunken, teenagers on her own, let alone a whole partyful. Although she was fit, and considered herself reasonably strong for her build, at little over five feet three inches in height she was often dwarfed by her senior students and relied on intelligence, compassion and humour to command their respect, rather than a dominating physical presence.
Her tension tightened another notch as they came over a curving rise in the road and a row of trees loomed up suddenly on the left, towering triangles of stiffly outflung branches etched darkly against the night sky in the classic Christmas tree shape. Even expecting the familiar sight, Anya felt an unwelcome leap of her pulse.
‘Is this it?’ Jessica’s excited query was redundant as Anya braked sharply and turned off the road, the little car vibrating as its tyres rumbled over the wooden planks which bridged the deep, open drainage ditch running along the grassy verge.
At the end of a long, steeply rising sealed driveway lined with overlacing trees, they could see the big, white weatherboard house, multi-coloured lights glowing dimly behind the drawn curtains of the downstairs windows. Even with the car windows closed they could hear the heavy, rhythmic throb of a bass-beat reverberating through the walls of the house.
‘No wonder they didn’t hear the phone ring,’ murmured Anya, pulling up behind the haphazard scatter of cars parked on the paved turning circle in front of the house.
After a brief hesitation she removed the keys from the ignition and stepped out of the car, bending down to speak through the open door. ‘You two stay where you are. Lock the doors and don’t open them for anyone else but me…or Cheryl and Emma. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Don’t get impatient if you have to wait a while, and don’t get out of the car!’
Having made her point as forcefully as she could, Anya slammed the door and locked it, dropping the key into the hip pocket of her cargo pants and slipping her folded glasses into the breast pocket of her shirt as she hurried towards the sheltering portico that framed the front door.
Pushing on the doorbell brought no response. Frustrated, she tried knocking, then twisted at the ornate brass doorknob and found that it opened easily. A tentative push allowed her to step inside, where the muffled pounding which had filtered through the exterior walls escalated into an ear-crashing assault that made Anya wince.
There was little doubt she had come to the right place. There was one hell of a party going on!
Lithe young bodies were everywhere—gyrating to the music, propped against walls, sprawled over the furniture and floors; some were entwined in eye-popping embraces, others conducted point-blank conversations at shriek-level in competition with the musical cacophony. Bottles, cans, glasses and the remains of snack packets and pizza crusts seemed to litter every available flat surface. The atmosphere was hazy with cigarette smoke and thick with an aromatic combination of perfume, warm beer and sweat.
Anya threaded her way from room to room, searching for Cheryl’s golden-blonde mane and the iridescent black tank-top that Kristin had said Emma was wearing, her task made more difficult by the red-and purple-coloured light-bulbs which had been screwed into the lamps, casting a murky glow over the seething figures, blending the youthful faces into an amorphous mass.
At last she spotted a familiar figure scrunched in the corner of a couch, being leered at by a lanky youth who looked unattractively worse for wear. She was grimly satisfied to note that Emma didn’t appear to be enjoying herself very much.
The girl looked up as Anya approached, her pale face registering shock, disbelief and fleeting panic, swiftly superseded by an unmistakable flicker of relief.
‘Come on,’ Anya mouthed against the music, taking hold of her unresisting wrist and tugging her off the couch, ignoring the boy’s slurred protest as she dragged his hapless companion off through the crowd.
‘Where’s Cheryl?’ asked Anya, when she had steered her to the front door, where the noise level was slightly less brain-crushing.
Emma bit her lip, her frightened gaze darting nervously over Anya’s shoulder. ‘She went upstairs—a-about ten minutes ago…She said we weren’t going to separate…but—but then she went up there with one of the boys who asked us to the party—Sean, he said his name was…’
A chill went down Anya’s spine and a cold weight coalesced in her stomach. ‘Jessica and Kristin are outside in my car. Go and get into it. Do it now!’
She paused only long enough to make sure the girl headed out of the door before she turned and raced up the staircase, which was clogged with people sitting on the narrow rises.
Once at the top she sped along the central hall rattling doors. Some of the rooms were locked, and in one that wasn’t she flushed out false game: a giggling pair whom she sent smartly on their way. When she tried the next door it was flung open by a lone young girl with brutally short black hair bleached at the tips and a prominent nosering. Padded headphones hung around her slender neck, the wire trailing down to her bare feet.
‘What!’ she barked, hands planted on the skinny hips encased in scruffy denim jeans, her black-glossed lips peeled back in a ferocious snarl.
Anya’s single-minded focus momentarily slipped at the startling image of bristling hostility.
‘Ah…I’m looking for Sean,’ she faltered, and was rewarded by a contemptuous narrowing of cobalt-blue eyes.
‘A bit old for him, aren’t you?’ was the insulting response, followed by an uninterested jerk of the head. ‘His bedroom’s down at the far end—but the idiot’s probably too trashed by now to do you any good!’
The door was slammed in her face just as suddenly as it had been whipped open, and Anya shook her head over the odd encounter as she raced down to the end of the hall.
Charging through the unlocked door, she pulled up short at the sight of the rumpled single bed where Cheryl knelt, her mouth betrayingly swollen, her clothing disarranged but thankfully still in place. Beside her on the edge of the bed sat a shirtless male in unsnapped jeans, listing heavily to one side as he drained the dregs of a small bottle of vodka and lemon mix.
Sean Monroe was one of the stars of Hunua College’s first XV rugby team and had the build to prove it. Even though he was still only seventeen, his broad shoulders and thick muscles were more suggestive of a man than a boy, but the sulky defiance that appeared on his handsome face when he saw Anya confirmed he still had a lot of maturing to do.
They knew each other by sight only, since history wasn’t one of his subjects, but Anya could have done without this kind of introduction. He would never forgive her for ruining his fun.
‘Cheryl, are you all right?’ For the second time that night Anya observed an unexpected spark of relief in the humiliated gaze of her quarry.
The girl nodded jerkily as she scrambled awkwardly off the bed, raking her tangled hair back from her face.
‘He tried to make me share his drink but I didn’t like the taste,’ she said in a rather wobbly voice. She gave her companion a nervous look as he flopped back on the bed with a groan. ‘I don’t think Sean’s feeling very well, Miss Adams.’
‘I wonder why?’ said Anya with crisp sarcasm, devoid of any shred of sympathy.
Her gaze shifted to a beer can which was doubling as an ashtray and she took a closer look at what she had assumed was a relatively innocent cigarette.
‘I suppose he tried to make you share that with him, too,’ she said, her voice tight with anger as she pointed at the smouldering joint.
‘I only had a couple of puffs,’ Cheryl defended herself. ‘It just made me feel dizzy and sick to my stomach.’
Much as she longed to rail at the trembling girl for her stupidity, Anya forced herself to swallow her blistering words. Her first priority was to get them all back to camp as quickly and quietly as possible.
She ordered Cheryl down to the car and watched cynically as the girl grabbed up her shoes and bag and scampered out, unable to believe her luck in getting away without an on-the-spot lecture. Just you wait, young lady, thought Anya grimly. Cathy was going to be furious when she was told. A lecture would be the least of Cheryl’s worries!
She turned to the young man lying on the bed, intending to vent her repressed anger with a pithy few words on the subject of loutish behaviour. ‘Do you realise what you were risking? That girl is under age—’ she began heatedly.
Sean swore thickly and catapulted suddenly to his feet, almost knocking Anya over as he dived for the adjoining door. Incensed by his rudeness, Anya dashed after him, realising too late that she had followed him into the bathroom.
When he fell on his knees and vomited noisily into the toilet bowl she felt the first pangs of compassion, and filled a glass of water at the hand-basin to hand to him when he finished. However, when he finally staggered to his feet and took a few sips from the proffered glass he was promptly sick again, and Anya wasn’t quite quick enough on her feet to prevent the front of her shirt and one leg of her trousers from being splashed.
Cursing under her breath, she grabbed a towel from the rack and scrubbed at the stains while Sean rinsed out his mouth and stumbled drunkenly back into the bedroom. Her mouth compressed as she used a second towel to quickly clean up the mess on the tiled floor, annoyed at herself for the compulsive act of neatness.
Anya’s own gorge rose as she plucked at her soiled garments, her delicate nose wrinkling in fastidious horror. She couldn’t sit in a small car with this sickening stench clinging to her clothes—both she and her passengers would likely be ill themselves!
Glancing out to see that Sean was slumped back on the bed, Anya bolted the bathroom door and swiftly stripped off her outer clothes. She flushed the stains in cold water, rubbing some pine-scented soap into the affected patches for good measure. The soaking pieces of fabric would be uncomfortably clammy against her skin but it was better than the noxious alternative!
She was about to wring out the excess water when she heard a crash and muffled moans on the other side of the door. Afraid that Sean had been sick again and was choking as a result, she snatched the nearest dry covering—a man’s shirt that had been tossed on top of the laundry basket—and shrugged it on as she shot back into the bedroom.
She was disgusted to see Sean pawing at the rumpled covers of the bed, scrabbling for the smouldering joint which he had somehow knocked off the bedside table.
‘Ah-ha!’ he said, rolling over with his trophy held high, his glazed eyes barely focussing as Anya marched over, shirt flapping, and snatched the burning brand out of his clumsy fingers.
‘Here, I’ll take that,’ she said sternly, intending to flush it down the toilet.
‘Hey, no way, bitch!’ He reared up and tried to grab it back. Anya jerked her arm away—he lunged, she twisted—and for a few seconds they were locked in a bizarre kind of dance at the edge of the bed, brought to an abrupt end by a deep voice, taut with outrage.
‘Dammit, Sean, I thought we agreed no parties while I was—What in the hell is going on here?’
Anya spun around and the man who had appeared in the doorway stiffened incredulously, his cobalt-blue eyes widening in shock.
‘You!’
The stunned monosyllable dripped with nameless accusation and Anya froze, her whole life flashing before her eyes.
She clutched at the gaping shirt and stared at Sean Monroe’s supposed-to-be-away-for-the-weekend uncle.
Scott Tyler. Her personal demon. The man who had strongly opposed Anya’s application to join the staff at Hunua College.
The legal adviser to the school board who thought that she wasn’t competent to do the job she loved. The man who had admitted that he was just waiting for her to make a mistake that would prove him right!
CHAPTER TWO
IN A distant, still functioning corner of her brain Anya became aware that the music had stopped and there were sounds of high-pitched voices, car doors slamming and engines revving outside.
The party was definitely over and the reason was standing in front of them, storming mad.
She had heard via staffroom gossip that Scott Tyler had been unexpectedly landed with his sister’s children while she and her husband were overseas and guessed that a thirty-two-year-old workaholic bachelor would find living with two teenagers caused a severe disruption to his formerly smoothly-running life.
Fifteen-year-old Samantha, who was in Anya’s fifth-form class, was a good student but chocolate-box pretty and wildly popular with the boys, and as for Sean…well—if he had been expressly ordered not to do something then naturally he would have disobeyed, simply on principle!
Anya cleared her paralysed throat. She had no intention of being made a scapegoat for a bunch of irresponsible kids. Or shielding Sean, who had sunk back to the bed, gaping stupidly at his uncle’s thunderous face.
‘I can explain—’ she said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the hapless youth.
The piercing blue eyes shifted from Anya’s face to the sweeping movement of her hand and she was horrified to realise that it was the one in which she held the smoking cannabis joint. She hastily whipped it behind her back.
‘Don’t bother. I think I get the picture—unpleasantly graphic as it is,’ he said. ‘How unfortunate for you that I worked double-time to complete my business early and managed to get on the last flight back from Wellington. If I’d returned tomorrow as planned you might actually have got away with it.’
The tight drawl did nothing to conceal Scott Tyler’s controlled fury and Anya fought not to feel threatened by the daunting combination of his forceful personality and dominating physique.
He seemed impossibly tall from her perspective—big-boned and thick-muscled, his double-breasted grey suit accentuating his powerful build, his loosened tie hanging from the unbuttoned collar of his starched linen shirt. His sheer presence made the spacious cream-painted room feel suddenly claustrophobically small. His dark brown hair was thick and unruly, spiking over his wide forehead, his face an aggressive congregation of hard angles, with broad, high cheekbones surmounted by deep-set eyes and a handsome Roman nose that had been broken at some stage of his life. Not surprisingly, Anya thought. She had been tempted to take a punch at that arrogant nose a time or two herself…if she had been able to reach it!
He had intimidated her from their very first meeting at her personal interview with the Hunua College Board of Trustees six months ago, and in retrospect she could see that he had deliberately set out to undermine her composure. He had lounged in his seat at the end of the table, arms folded, staring at her with an unsettling intensity all through the initial part of the session, interrupting with a series of probing questions about her lack of co-educational experience just when she had begun to feel confident that she was making a good impression on the rest of the interviewing panel.
His obvious disapproval and sharply critical comments h
ad caught her off guard and Anya had found herself floundering on the defensive. Then he had smiled—a cruelly self-satisfied curve of his hard mouth—and her innate stubbornness had kicked in. Her slender spine had stiffened as she revealed her grace under fire, retaliating with a calm, level-headed self-assurance combined with a dry sense of humour which had clawed back the lost ground. For a while, though, she had felt like a prisoner in the dock, and she hadn’t been surprised to later find out that Scott Tyler was one of South Auckland’s leading barristers, with a reputation for winning difficult cases on the strength of his ruthless cross-examinations.
From the brief research she had done after applying for the job, she knew that, although he wasn’t a voting member of the board, his role as legal consultant and a personal friendship with the Chairman gave him a considerable amount of influence.
Fortunately, the headmaster, Mark Ransom, had firmly thrown his support behind Anya as the best of the three other candidates already interviewed, and a majority of the board must have concurred, for several days later Anya had been overjoyed to receive the job offer that had precipitated her move to Riverview.
To her dismay, accepting defeat graciously was evidently not one of Scott Tyler’s famed accomplishments, and at each successive encounter, despite her strenuous efforts to be pleasant, they’d seemed to end up on opposite sides of an argument.
Which made it even more important that this silly incident not be blown out of proportion.
‘I know what it looks like, Mr Tyler, but you’re jumping to the wrong conclusions—’ she protested as he turned his attention back to his slack-jawed nephew, grimly assessing the extent of his intoxication.