THE WORD OF A CHILD

by Janice Kay Johnson

  "Then tell him again," Mom snapped, and went back into the living room.

  Tracy said the F-word and got out of bed. Down the hall she heard her mother laughing as if he'd made some incredibly funny joke. She probably wanted him for her next boyfriend. After the big fight, Jason hadn't been back. Mom couldn't live without a boyfriend.

  "Just because I like having a man around," her Mom always said when Tracy complained because some jerk was going to move in.

  Tracy did put on her bathrobe and brushed her hair. Eyeing herself in the bathroom mirror, she decided she looked sweet and pretty without makeup and with her hair all shiny and loose. Alice in Wonderland.

  Clutching the robe around herself, she went barefoot to the living room and curled up on one end of the couch.

  He started to rise from where he already sat in the recliner that matched Mom's and belonged to whichever boyfriend lived here. Both of them faced the TV.

  Whenever Mom was home, the TV was on. Soaps or talk shows in the daytime, whatever stupid sitcom she could find in the evening. Even if she was cooking dinner or on the telephone with a friend, the TV would be on.

  "I like the company," she'd say.

  But she had turned it off for the cop.

  Tracy looked at him and waited.

  He smiled easily at her. "I talked to some of your friends today."

  She hugged herself. "Yeah? So?"

  "Tracy!" her mother said sharply. Her face looked pinched. Yesterday she'd been all maternal and worried and mad at that SOB who had touched her little girl. Today she just wanted it all to go away, so Tracy could go back to school and be out of her hair.

  "One of them remembers you saying Mr. Tanner was a creep," the cop said.

  She tucked her feet under her. "He is."

  "She says you were discussing which male teachers were 'hot.' Do you remember that?"

  "Kind of. I guess." She tossed her hair. "Does it matter?"

  "Just curious what he'd done or said at that point to make you think that."

  She gave a shudder. "He's always helping you at your computer. Which means he can hang over your shoulder and breathe on your neck and 'accidentally' bump his mouth against your cheek. Any of the girls can tell you."

  It was true. She was grossed out when he came up behind her and practically hugged her so he could put his hands on the keyboard to each side of her hands. He smelled. And the other day, when he helped her, she suddenly wanted to scream. It reminded her— She gave another shudder. He was a creep. After the way he had totally humiliated her in front of everyone, he deserved to lose his job!

  "When did Mr. Tanner first—" Detective McLean seemed to choose his words carefully "—become interested in you?"

  "I don't know." Tracy looked down at her hands. Her knuckles were white, and she realized her fingers were clenched on the bathrobe. She couldn't seem to relax; it was like her hands were frozen in a death grip. "School only started September third."

  "Uh-huh." He waited.

  When? "Um … I don't know. Like, maybe after the first week or two, he kept wanting to help me. And talk to me after class."

  "Did he have any legitimate reason to keep you after class?"

  "What do you mean, legitimate?" Weren't babies legitimate if their parents were married and bastards otherwise?

  "Real. Something he could defend to the principal. Say—" his gaze was sharp "—missing assignments, or a bad attitude in class, or…"

  "I'm really slow at keyboarding. Mr. Tanner claims I'm not doing enough of his little tests, where you type like DFG over and over. Or something. I can't help it if I'm not very good at it. Who wants to type anyway?"

  In this honeyed voice, Mom said, "Now, Tracy, you know how many jobs require typing and computer skills. What do you think you're going to do, become a movie star?" The last had a little snap, like the end of a whip uncurling.

  Tracy stared at her sullenly. "I want to be an artist."

  "We've talked about this. You have to be practical…"

  The cop interrupted her. "Ms. Lawson showed me some of your work. You have talent."

  She was angry at herself for feeling a flush of pleasure. All he was doing was buttering her up. I'm your friend, he was saying. Trust me. I'll help you get out of this mess. Just admit that you're lying.

  He led her through her story again. Three weeks ago, Mr. Tanner had touched her breast when he kept her after class. He told her she was really pretty, so much more grown-up looking than the other girls. He was having trouble thinking of her as a student.

  The next time, he took her hand and made her feel him and then unzip his pants and do other things. When she tried to make an excuse to leave, that's when he said she was flunking his class, but that could change.

  She tasted blood and realized she was gnawing on her lip. "And I thought, it wasn't so bad. For a good grade."

  Her mother said absolutely nothing.

  Tracy swallowed. "Only then, the next time, he made me do it. And it hurt, and I hated it. And so I told."

  He asked her why she'd chosen to talk to Ms. Stavig, and she said because she didn't know any of the teachers that well, but Ms. Stavig seemed nice and an eighth-grade friend told her Ms. Stavig was the best if you ever needed help.

  Finally, after what seemed forever, the cop got up to leave. His eyes serious, he said, "I know this is hard for you. I'm sorry, Tracy. Please believe me. But sometimes people do lie, and Mr. Tanner is telling me one thing and you're telling me another. My job is to be absolutely certain who is telling the truth. So you'll have to be patient with me."

  She nodded numbly.

  "Then we'll be talking again," the cop said, and left.

  Tracy and her mother sat without talking or moving for a long time.

  Tracy broke first. She jumped to her feet, screamed at Mom, "There! Are you happy?" and ran to her room.

  * * *

  Chapter 5

  « ^ »

  Monday morning, when Mariah walked into the teacher's lounge, a dozen low-voiced conversations stopped and then started again only after everyone checked out the new arrival. She'd never seen so many of the teachers and staff in here at once except for special luncheons.

  Pouring a cup of coffee, pretending to a casualness she didn't feel, she asked Jennifer Risotti, the Family Life teacher, "Why the buzzing?"

  The tall brunette sipped her coffee. "I hear you know more than the rest of us."

  "Oh, dear," Mariah said involuntarily.

  "Is Gerald really being investigated?"

  "I'm afraid so. And, no," she said hastily, forestalling the next question, "I really can't say anything else."

  "So you do know."

  "I know Noreen hoped it could be resolved over the weekend."

  Resolved, she thought with distaste, escaping the lounge and taking her coffee up four flights to her classroom. What an unemotional, euphemistic word for the completion of an ugly process that would leave everybody involved forever tainted. For Gerald Tanner, none of this would ever be resolved.

  By lunchtime, she knew he wasn't teaching today.

  A substitute had taken over his classes. Tracy, too, was still missing from her desk in Drama.

  Mariah was just taking her brown-bag lunch from her tote bag and debating whether to go to the office and find out what was going on, when Noreen Patterson came in.

  "Do you have a minute, Mariah?"

  "Of course." She continued unwrapping her egg salad sandwich.

  The principal shut the classroom door and came to her desk. "I wanted to keep you abreast of the investigation. Perhaps you've heard that Gerald isn't here today. I felt it best to suspend him with pay for the moment."

  How quickly a man's life could be destroyed.

  Hiding the flash of mingled anger and guilt, Mariah asked, "Do you know any more?"

  "No, and I made plain to him that I was taking this action primarily to protect him from whispers."

  "You heard from parents all weekend
," Mariah said dryly.

  Noreen Patterson grimaced. "Unfortunately." She chose the same desk as had Detective McLean and sat, her green-and-blue broomstick skirt pooling around her. "There's simply no way I can have him continue to teach with this kind of allegation outstanding. It's terribly unfair to him, I know. But what can I do?"

  Mariah was silent for a moment. "There wasn't anything else you could do, I suppose."

  "I don't know him well. I can't even say, 'Look at this man's record in his twenty years of teaching in the Port Dare district.'" She looked unhappily at Mariah. "My instinct is always to back up my teachers, but this time…"

  Mariah nodded. This time, the allegation is too ugly. The students too vulnerable. That was what the principal meant. And it was true.

  "In this country, we're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty." She made a sound. "That's a naive thing to say, isn't it?"

  "No." Noreen Patterson looked her age and more today. "No, it isn't. This is the only crime where the accusation alone has almost as much weight as a conviction."

  Mariah made herself take a bite of her sandwich. When she'd swallowed, she asked, "Is he angry?"

  "Oh, yes." The principal gave a heavy sigh. "How do you know if a man is capable of something like this?"

  She tried to sound detached. "From the outside, I'm not sure you can ever tell. Even if you think you know him well."

  She must have given herself away, because Noreen looked at her strangely. "You sound as if you've experienced something like this before."

  Mariah bit her lip. "My ex-husband was accused. It was never proved. Simon said…" She tried to smile. "Well, you can guess. It was pretty much the same thing Gerald said. The word of a child against his. How can anyone ever know?"

  Compassion in her eyes, Noreen said, "How painful for you."

  "For all of us," she said quietly. "At least Gerald doesn't have a wife and child to lose."

  "No." Expression troubled and soft, the principal said, "I'm sorry you got involved in this. I didn't realize."

  "I'm okay." She ate another bite, didn't taste it. "Has the police officer learned anything?"

  "He says it can easily take weeks for this kind of investigation."

  "Weeks." Mariah imagined Gerald Tanner's torment. What was he doing, sitting home in some bleak apartment staring at the wall, scared, envisioning the loss of his teaching certificate and his reputation? Seeing jail bars closing behind him?

  Noreen sighed and struggled out of the student desk. "I'd better let you finish your lunch. I just wanted you to know what was happening."

  Mariah nodded numbly. "Thank you."

  "If you need … support, come and talk to me."

  She tried another smile and nodded.

  By the end of the day, she'd heard other rumors. Detective McLean was on campus talking to students and teachers again. Kids were getting called to the office so he could ask them questions about Mr. Tanner and Tracy and the dance last week.

  Somehow, she wasn't surprised when he appeared shortly after her last student of the day gave up explaining why he'd been too busy that weekend to write his book report and left in a sulk.

  She was turning off the overhead when he said from the doorway, "Ms. Stavig?"

  "Detective McLean," she said resignedly, and released the screen to roll up.

  In absentia, he was an imposing presence on the campus. People were scared, awed. He turned heads and provoked whispers wherever he went. Turning, she half expected him to be diminished in person: smaller than she remembered, less commanding.

  But, no. He strolled into the room as though he intended to make himself unthreatening. Hands in the pockets of corduroy slacks, he held his shoulders slightly hunched and his expression was conciliatory. Somebody should tell him it didn't work, she thought unkindly. He was a big man, with the shoulders of a laborer. And yet he moved with the grace of an athlete and the wariness of the cop he was. His head was always turning, his eyes sharp. He'd scanned the room, missing nothing, before looking at her with that amiable, I'm-a-regular-Joe look.

  "More questions?" she asked.

  "Nah." He paused to read a quotation on the wall and gave a brief laugh. "Mark Twain is one of my favorite writers."

  "Is he." She erased the page numbers of an assignment from the board.

  "Not Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi. And his essays. There's nothing like laughing even as you're wondering if he didn't just insult you."

  She was almost disarmed. "A literate cop?"

  "You're surprised?"

  "I would have said it was an oxymoron."

  He winced. "Ouch."

  Mariah sighed. "You want something."

  "No." He picked up and set a student desk back into the row. "Just wondered how you are. Have you been fighting off the curious all day?"

  "No, I've succeeded in hiding up here." She put her hands on her hips and nodded at the second desk he was pulling into place. "The janitor will do that."

  He carefully aligned it with the others anyway. "Are you leaving?"

  "As soon as I gather some papers to grade tonight."

  "May I walk you to your car?"

  So formal! Mariah eyed him with suspicion. "Think of my reputation," she said, only half kidding.

  Did he actually look crestfallen? "Being seen with me would blacken it, huh?"

  "No." She straightened a pile of papers unnecessarily, squaring the corners. "At least among the faculty, it seems to be common knowledge that I have inside knowledge. Maybe a secretary in the office talked. Or, heck, maybe people have noticed how much you've been hanging around up here."

  He moved another desk. "Are you a pariah now, too?"

  "I can't tell," she said frankly. "I fled into hiding before I could get a real sense."

  He moved his shoulders restlessly and prowled the room. "What do the kids think?"

  "That the idea of an old guy like Mr. Tanner making up to one of them is gross." She frowned, her hands going still in the act of gathering student papers. "You know, I couldn't really tell whose side they're coming down on. Gerald is generally known as funny and pretty nice…"

  "And he has those cool programs."

  She smiled ruefully. "Right. While Tracy is popular only with a certain segment of the kids. Some of the others think she's…"

  "Slutty?"

  Mariah made a face. "What an awful word."

  "But one suggested to me by a girl I interviewed."

  She sighed. "Tracy does come across that way, I'm afraid. Well, I suppose you noticed."

  The detective crossed his arms. "Actually, no. Remember, both times I've talked to the girl, she was at home. The first time, she was wearing jeans and some little T-shirt—skimpy, but all the girls wear ones that look a size too small to me. Her hair was in a ponytail, she had on a little makeup…" He shrugged. "Just a regular teenage girl. The second time, her mom said she didn't feel very well, and Tracy came out in a bathrobe, face scrubbed clean. She could have been ten years old."

  "Is she okay?"

  "Tracy?" In his roving, he paused to glance out the window. "I don't know," he admitted. "Tension seems to be seething between her and her mother. Maybe it always is. She's thirteen, right? Isn't that the teenage version of the Terrible Twos?"

  "So it's reputed to be," Mariah admitted. "I kind of like kids this age."

  "Why?" he asked, studying her. Since he seemed genuinely to want to know, she answered.

  "They're half child, half adult, gawky and graceful, naive and wise, foolish and sensible, all big feet and skinny legs and exaggerated posturing, but you can see in each of them the promise of who he or she will become."

  "The English teacher speaks," he mocked, a smile in his eyes.

  "The English teacher?"

  "Who he or she will become."

  "Oh." He made her sound so pedantic. Warmth crept into her cheeks. "I particularly dislike mixed singular and plural."

  "Just
kidding." His smile was friendly. "I particularly admire the proper use of language."

  Her heart did a funny hop and skip. She said the first thing that came to mind. "I'm, uh, ready to go."

  "To go?" His brows rose. "Oh. Yeah. Sure. Can I walk you?" He lifted one hand. "No, wait. May I walk you?"

  "Yes, you may," she said primly.

  His smile teased her. "Kids are gone by this time, anyway. No one will see us."

  She knew better but, feeling strangely light-headed, didn't care. What did she have to hide? She'd done no more than any teacher was required by law and conscience to do, however she might agonize over her decisions.

  Mariah closed her desk drawer, swung her purse strap over her shoulder and lifted her tote bag full of papers.

  "Let me carry that." His tone was polite but determined. "I'll look like a cad if I let you lug that down all those flights of stairs."

  "I thought no one was going to notice us." Good heavens, was she teasing him? Detective Connor McLean, the man who had shattered her serene world?

  He took the bag, his knuckles brushing her hand. "Hey, I'm a cop. 'Always be prepared,' is supposed to be our motto."

  When the classroom door clicked shut behind them, Mariah realized how uncomfortably close Connor stood. Although he wasn't touching her, the hairs on her nape stirred when he let out the soft exclamation.

  This was insane. She was painfully aware of him as a man. Her hand where he'd inadvertently touched her felt hot and tingly, as if she'd burned herself. The smile glinting in his eyes had created a fizz of bubbles in her chest, anticipation and excitement for something that could not be. Even assuming he was … well, interested, she could never, ever forget how she'd met him, the way he'd unrelentingly driven doubts between her and Simon as if they were crude, pointed stakes in the ground.

  She heard her own harsh whisper. You believed her.

  Yes.

  He knew no more now than he had then, but he still wouldn't say, Maybe I was wrong.

  Oh, how she wanted him to be wrong!

  Except, if her doubts were erased, then all she would be left with was her own apparent inability to feel the kind of faith and love a man deserved from his wife.