by Liz Jasper
“Aaargh!”
He grabbed my shoulders to steady me. “Are you all right? Did something happen in there? What took you so long?”
I took a gulping breath. “Natasha.”
A single word was enough. Gavin headed for the ladies’ restroom at a run. I followed, and when he would have gone in after her, I grabbed his arm and held him back.
“What are you doing? You can’t go in there!”
“What?” He strained against my hold.
“There’s half a dozen high school girls in there.”
“Then I definitely need to get Natasha out of there.”
I shook my head. “She’s long gone. She was right behind me when I left.” Besides, if I read Natasha right, the last thing she’d want was a bunch of nubile sixteen-year-olds hanging around the love nest back at the castle, or wherever it was they called home.
Gavin led me back to our table in the food court and we both wordlessly turned our chairs so our backs were fully against the wall. I sat down with a thump. My knees were still shaking. The carnival music that had so charmed me earlier jarred my ears with its frivolity.
The food court was in the middle of everything and had floor-to-ceiling windows. It was an ideal location to hunt for someone—wayward children, potential dates, vampires—and had probably been designed with just that attribute in mind. “What did she want?” asked Gavin.
“Oh, I don’t know, to kill me?”
“She won’t hurt you.”
I made a noise of disbelief. “Says you.”
Gavin stopped scanning the room for a moment to focus impatient gray eyes on me. “I told you. She can’t. Not unless Will allows her, and he won’t. He won’t let another vampire finish off his work, especially a lower ranked one. It would make him look bad. She’s just trying to scare you.”
Natasha had said as much, but she’d also suggested an easy way around such restrictions. “Know that for a fact, do you? Well, you’re free to believe what you want, but I don’t think she’s harmless. Besides, Will probably doesn’t even know she’s here. She could have knocked me over the head in the ladies’ room and no one would ever have known it was her. You wouldn’t have, would you? You’d probably think it was just some gang banger. You are ridiculously closed minded when it comes to vampires killing people the regular way.”
“Back on that again, are you? I told you, they don’t work like that.”
“And I told you, however much you believed in your theory, it’s just that. A theory. Pardon me if I choose not to believe Natasha’s filled with good intentions when it comes to me.”
Gavin reached for his phone.
“Who are you calling?”
“Backup. If she’s still here, there’s a good chance she hasn’t killed yet, and I’m tired of finding bodies.” He broke off to speak with the person at the other end of the line.
When he was done, he turned back to me. “I’ll have another officer take you home. In the meantime, why don’t you give me as detailed a description as you can. I think I have a pretty good idea of her physical description from the last time you saw her. So why don’t you start with what she was wearing.”
As little as possible. “A dark blue miniskirt and a lighter blue camisole. Trust me. You’ll know her when you see her. She’s every man’s fantasy.”
“Not every man’s.” His phone beeped. “They’re here.” He stood up. “C’mon.”
Chapter Sixteen
* * *
I balanced my jumbo cup of coffee atop a thick stack of handouts that were still warm from the copy machine, pushed my classroom door open with my shoulder and stopped dead on the threshold. “What the hell?”
Every surface gleamed. There wasn’t a paper out of place or a book out of line. Even the glue gun gone wild dioramas were as tidy and well-behaved as a row of altar boys on a Sunday morning. The headmaster must have ordered the janitorial staff to give the room an extra scrub over the weekend, and boy had they. The room was clean. Too clean.
The place looked like a morgue.
But if there’s one thing I’m equal to, it’s a clean room. In no time at all I had the room messed back up to my usual level of casual housekeeping. I re-cluttered the counters with handouts and papers I’d graded over the weekend, dragged the dioramas back to their usual spots and hid as much of the gleaming desktops as I could with dusty trays of soil samples that probably hadn’t seen the light of day since 1965. When I was satisfied my room looked its usual lived-in self, I popped down to the faculty lounge to check my mail, leaving my classroom open for the early birds as had been my habit. I wanted things to be as normal as possible for my students.
In the faculty lounge, Roger was holding court near the coffee maker. By his side was a small mousy woman I judged to be in her mid-thirties. Roger beckoned me over to meet her.
“This is Mrs. O’Neill. She will be taking over for Bob.” His voice rang out as if introducing royalty and then dropped to just above a whisper as he introduced me like I was the poor stepcousin. “Jo teaches eighth-grade earth science, and is new to the profession. I’m sure she’ll appreciate any tips you can give her.”
His words had me seeing red but she held out her hand in a friendly gesture and I forced my tight lips into a smile.
“Hi Jo, I’m Leah.” She spoke quickly, in a cheerful rush. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, and I hope you’ll be the one to teach me things. As it stands, I can barely find my way to my classroom. And it’s Ms. O’Neal,” she corrected Roger nicely. “I’m a single parent.”
Roger frowned at this unexpected broaching of what he considered an indelicate subject and steered her firmly away from me—as if I were poisoning her—toward a group of English teachers. I left to the sound of Roger reciting Leah’s credentials (they were impressive) in a pompous voice and puffing out his chest at their nods of respect, as if he was the one with the master’s degree from Harvard.
I had been away from my classroom longer than I had planned and hurried back, taking the upper hallway at a run when I heard all the noise coming from my classroom. I arrived wheezing for breath at my doorway to find two of my more “challenging” homeroom kids having a sword fight. And not just any sword fight—one of the boys was lunging at the other with a giant six-foot lance made from two meter sticks stuck together with duct tape.
“Knock it off!” I grabbed hold of the “sword” just in time to prevent a decapitation. “Take the tape back off the meter sticks and put them away.”
“Aww!”
“But we found them this way!”
“Right. And the meter sticks just pulled themselves out from under the sink and tied themselves together.” I raised my eyebrows and made an untying gesture with my hands and they sullenly began pulling off the duct tape. I didn’t kid myself that they heeded me out of any respect for my authority. I’d spent the past five months establishing a useful system of bribes or punishment, and they knew better than to be the reason no one got doughnuts on Friday.
The bell rang, cutting off the rest of their complaints as they shuffled off to their classes. My first period students arrived on the heels of their departure and I instructed them to get out the homework I’d assigned over the weekend. Lots of grumbling and whining about the workload accompanied the zipping of backpacks, sounds of shuffling paper, and loud thunks of earth science texts being dropped onto desktops. As I made the rounds, I overheard a lot of gossipy speculation about where exactly in the classroom Bob had died, but the urgency about Bob’s death had clearly faded over the weekend.
It was a little sad, how quickly he was becoming a memory. But it had been almost a week since his death—and they still thought Bob had died by accident.
And that wouldn’t change unless the police arrested someone, but they were no closer to finding his killer. Nor was I, for that matter. Maybe it was time to step up my efforts? I would, I promised myself, but later. I pushed all thoughts of Bob’s murder to the back of my mind and forced myself
to focus on my students.
I finished my rounds, put my grade book on my desk and went to the whiteboard in the front of the room. “All right,” I said, uncapping a blue marker. “Now.” I looked out at my students and saw…complete and utter disinterest. These were good students. They’d read the chapter on minerals and answered the questions at the end of it—or at least taken the trouble to copy someone else’s—and knew what was in store for them. Unit 3: Rocks and Minerals. They didn’t like it. Neither did I. I don’t know what brilliant minds decided eighth graders were the proper recipients for long chapters on ore deposits and glaciers, but they should be hauled out back and shot.
I’d be happy to hold them down, and by the looks of it, quite a few of my students would volunteer as well. I turned to face my class and projected as much enthusiasm as I could muster into my voice. “Minerals,” I said. I wrote it on the board in big blue letters and examined my handiwork. Maybe I should have chosen a more lively color. Didn’t blue put people to sleep? I held up a rocket-shaped rose crystal; a thin, flaky sheet of pale gold; and a shiny, metallic cube made up of hundreds of smaller cubes. “Rose quartz, mica muscovite, and galena.” I passed them around. “All minerals, all different. Can anyone tell me what they have in common?”
A hand shot up. “Ms. Gardner?”
“Yes?” I tried to keep the sound of desperation out of my voice.
“Do we get to set anything on fire today?”
I sighed quietly. “No.” They sighed quietly. It was a long class. When three girls in the front row started passing notes back and forth, I could hardly blame them.
Now that the third quarter had begun, I lost my second period prep to second-period study hall. Yippee. Thankfully, the group was so small I was able to hold it in my classroom instead of the cavernous room off the library that had lots of pillars for students to hide behind and doodle on. I had a reasonable chance of controlling them. Even so, Maxine had arranged for me to have an aide, a nice Junior boy who needed some charity work to buff out his college applications. He made all the difference in the world.
I might lack that essential gravitas seasoned teachers have—that ability to walk into a room and command attention with The Teacher’s Look. But my aide had something nearly as good—it worked effectively on half my charges, the female half. Christopher was a decent-looking young man, and one who would need a prom date in a couple months. If you thought that state of affairs would escape the notice of twelve-and thirteen-year-old girls, due to something so trivial as age difference, school rules or gross unattainability, you have thought wrong.
With Christopher’s help—he leaned against a counter and smiled—I got my study hall relatively under control and went to the back to set up the mineral trays. Christopher followed me back and volunteered to help. I took him up on his offer before he could change his mind.
“What’s this?” Christopher held up a nondescript brownish gray mineral.
How the hell did I know? “The names of all the minerals are on the container lids.” I may not have mastered The Teacher’s Look, but I had gotten very good at temporizing.
He held up a chunk of quartz about the size of his fist. “That one’s huge. You don’t want it in the trays do you?”
“No, that’s a demo specimen. It belongs on the counter there, next to the amethyst—that big purple one.”
Our conversation—or rather the proximity of Christopher—had not gone unnoticed by the girls seated near the back. They hadn’t done a lick of homework since Christopher had entered the room. One of the braver girls spoke, pitching her voice just above a whisper to match ours. “Oooh, I like that one. It’s pretty.” She flipped her hair and pointed to a golden knob of pyrite.
Chris was immune to the hair flip but responded to her comment. He really was a nice boy. I don’t know how he’d made it to eleventh grade. He held up a rather nondescript hunk of rock that looked as if it had had rusted on one side. “This one’s ugly.”
I frowned and leaned forward for a closer look. It hadn’t had that stain last week. And it hadn’t been hidden away in a cupboard. It had been out in the open, on my desk.
I stared at it for a long second before I pulled myself together. “Can you put that down on the counter for a second, Christopher? I just remembered I need to contact the middle school principal about something. If you wouldn’t mind taking a note for me?”
“Sure.”
I refocused the girls’ attention back on their homework and went to my desk in the front of the room to write a note to Maxine. I stuck it in an envelope and sealed it. He was probably too nice a kid to read the note, but under the circumstances I wanted to make darn sure.
Three minutes later, Christopher returned with a note from Maxine requesting that I come to her office during the morning break. I was to leave the rock for the police. As soon as the bell rang, I shooed out the students, carefully locked the door behind me and headed for the administration building. As I rounded the corner toward Maxine’s office, Becky flew by me at a run.
“What’s the rush?”
She spoke over her shoulder. “Gotta finish prepping for my double lab. See you at lunch.” She barreled through the door and disappeared around the corner toward her classroom.
I knocked on Maxine’s door. It was open and she was waiting for me, but something about the administration building brought out my polite gene. “Hey Maxine, it’s Jo. I got your note—” I stopped on the threshold in surprise. In Maxine’s brown leather chair, sitting behind the large, well-polished cherry desk as if he belonged there, was Gavin.
He glanced up briefly from the notes he was making and spoke rather formally, as if to a stranger. “Come in, please, and shut the door behind you.”
Surprise made me do exactly as bid, and I took a seat in one of the cushy blue chairs opposite him. “How did you get here so quickly?” It had been a scant ten minutes since I’d sent the message.
“Never mind that.” Gavin dismissed me in a gesture and bent to his notes.
I regarded his neat, down-turned head in confusion. Why the sudden cold shoulder treatment? After all we been through surely we were…maybe not friends, exactly, but something!
“Were you already here for some reason?” I asked.
His only response was the scratching of his pen across paper. Fine. Be that way. “You must have been,” I mused aloud. I recalled my run-in with Becky, who wouldn’t normally have left the prep for her double period chem lab to the last minute. “Ah, I have it. The timing of finding that rock in my classroom was mere coincidence. You’re here on an official visit, something to do with Bob’s death? Re-questioning everyone, are we?”
I plucked a tiny Krackle from the dish of mini candy bars Maxine kept on the corner of her desk and relaxed back against the plush fabric of the chair. It crossed my mind that ten-thirty might be a little too early to start eating chocolate, like drinking before noon, but I decided I didn’t care. It seemed a little like closing the barn doors after the horse had gone to try to hide an embarrassing chocolate habit from a man who’d seen me lick the juice off raw hamburger packaging.
Gavin ignored me so studiously I knew I was right, and I couldn’t resist needling him. “Poor Detective Raines. Did his boss send him to the principal’s office? Are we in twou-ble?”
Gavin’s mouth stretched taut in a grim line, and somehow, despite the fact that his square jaw was cleanly shaven and his button-down shirt still crisp across his large, trim frame, he looked as if he already had put in a long day. “I’d like to ask you a few questions…”
“I’m right, aren’t I?” I said, leaning forward. “A few concerned, well-connected parents called your boss and complained that no one had been arraigned for Bob’s murder yet, so he told you to get over here ASAP before they started complaining to his boss. Hah! Welcome to my life, puppet!” I sat back in my chair and grinned widely.
“Are you quite through, Ms. Gartner?”
“Please,” I said gra
ciously, with a small elegant wave of my hand, “call me Jo.” I popped another Krackle bar in my mouth and chewed happily.
“Dammit, Jo!”
I decided I liked him better when he was acting like a big brother and buying me sundaes. “Okay, okay. I’ll behave. I assume you want to know about the rock Christopher found in my room.” Thinking about it had a sobering effect, and I put down the next Krackle only partly unwrapped. I explained briefly how we’d come across the rock.
Gavin continued scribbling a few moments after I finished. When he was done, he regarded me from across Maxine’s desk, a frown darkening his face. “Show me.”
I led the way back to my empty classroom. Here.” I pushed aside a glitter-encrusted foam comet and pointed to the rusty-looking specimen I’d stowed behind it. “Christopher found it, in a box of quartz, on the shelf up there but it’s feldspar.” I realized I was starting to babble and forced myself to focus. “The night Bob died, it was on my desk. I used it as a paperweight.”
“Looks like we found the murder weapon.” Gavin turned to face me. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to kick you out of your room again.” He didn’t even try to sound sorry.
Chapter Seventeen
* * *
The next morning before work I hesitated like a coward in the administration building’s elegant parquet hallway before slinking through the back door into the faculty lounge to get my mail. I didn’t think I could handle more of the ostracism I’d experienced after Bob died.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to. My colleagues just went about their business as usual, yawning, bustling, filling coffee cups, reading mail, and generally ignoring me, for which I was truly and ridiculously grateful. I never thought I’d be so delighted to be ignored! It was so much better than being avoided, and had Gavin been in the room I would have thrown my arms around him in gratitude. He had managed the impossible and kept my discovery of the murder weapon quiet. It was just as well he was back at the station—he probably would have hurt himself trying to get away from me, and my reputation as a treacherous fiend would have been cemented for good.