Time to focus. To work.
So far she’d neither experienced nor witnessed any sign of preferential treatment in any of her classes, at the Montford library, the computer lab, or with campus food services. She’d signed up for the drama club, which was due to have its first meeting later that week, and she was considering rushing a sorority. She’d heard from the editor of the school newspaper. They were going to publish her article, right next to one with an opposing viewpoint.
Handled professionally.
Just as she’d have advised.
But the Randi Parsons Foster situation could be a problem. A baby sister who called in favors for athletic scholarships didn’t look good on a university president’s record. Nor did gross overspending without more than a written reprimand attached. Not when accompanied by a promotion to a head position before the age of thirty.
She still had files upon files to weed through. The rest of the personnel files. Financials. Student records.
She’d made it as far as the Ss in the personnel files and was determined to make it through the whole alphabet before she’d allow herself to head outside for a nightcap.
Matthew Sheffield. He was right after Barbara Schmitt. Hired at thirty-two as technical coordinator for the performing arts center thirteen years before, Sheffield was currently listed as the center’s director, a position he’d held for nine years. The quick promotion for a man in his early thirties was unusual enough for her to want to look into the situation more closely. The fact that his file was sealed had her even more curious.
Because she worked only the cases she handpicked and because she had her own practice rather than belonging to a firm, Addy couldn’t afford paralegals to do her research for her. Which meant she paid for access to secure information sites.
Signing on to a secure site where her law degree allowed her membership, she quickly found Matt Sheffield’s birth certificate and his known addresses. From there she moved on to other legal documents. The man had been married only once, to his current wife, Phyllis Sheffield, sister of Caroline Strickland, all of whom currently resided in Shelter Valley. Caroline Strickland—her landlord?
There’d been another Sheffield on the employee roster. Flipping quickly between documents, she confirmed that Phyllis Sheffield, formerly Phyllis Langford, was a psychology professor at Montford. And she remembered something else, too.
The file she needed was somewhere...on the right-hand corner of the table. Tory Evans Sanders’s file. The woman who’d impersonated her older sister and taught English for a semester before confessing what she’d done—the woman who’d never been charged—had lived with Phyllis Langford when she’d first come to town. Phyllis and Tory’s older sister, Christine, had been close friends. Phyllis had been responsible for Christine getting the job at Montford—all according to the newspaper article Will Parsons had written for the campus newspaper the semester following Tory’s tenure there. A follow-up to the original article published when Tory’s duplicity was first discovered.
None of which meant anything...
Phyllis Sheffield and Becca Parsons were friends—another fact she’d learned through numerous local articles regarding social functions involving the town’s mayor.
Sheffield’s file was sealed for a reason. On a hunch she called up criminal records. Three Matt Sheffields came up in response to her search. The first was eliminated by age and race. The second by age and location. The Matt Sheffield she was looking for wasn’t twenty-seven and living in Alaska.
The third listing fit.
Addy’s heart sank.
* * *
INTENDING TO STAY home from work Monday afternoon if he needed to, Mark pulled into the driveway right after his last class. Nonnie was in the living room sitting at the computer.
“What’re you doing home?” she asked.
“I live here.” Her color was good. And she was wearing one of her favorite dresses—a tie-dyed cotton thing. She and a couple of her friends had gone through a tie-dye faze about ten years ago. She’d made some T-shirts for Mark, too. They went straight into his drawer, and more recently into storage in Bierly.
“You’re supposed to be at work.”
“My shift doesn’t start for an hour.” He paused. “Will you be okay here by yourself?”
He bent to kiss her cheek. She lifted her face and then said, “Don’t worry so much. And don’t be bothering me right now. This is the first time I’ve had all week to play and I’m up two tokens.”
“What do you want for dinner?”
“The leftover chicken salad that’s in the refrigerator.”
“Chicken salad?”
“Addy brought it over. We had it for lunch.”
Addy. His body got a little hard just hearing her name. And he was standing in his kitchen talking to his grandmother.
Would he see her tonight?
“And if I didn’t want the chicken salad twice in a row, which I do, I’d have some of the goulash that Veronica dropped off this morning. Or the vegetable soup Becca Parsons left,” Nonnie was saying, without any signs of breathlessness.
“Becca Parsons?” He tried to focus on the conversation at hand, not the one going on in his brain. “Why do I know that name?”
“She’s the mayor of Shelter Valley. Can you beat that? The town mayor bringing soup to an old barmaid like me?” Nonnie chuckled. “I called Bertie and told her. She cackled so loud she ’bout burst my eardrum.”
Bertrude Green had been one of Nonnie’s best friends for as long as Mark could remember. And he didn’t share his grandmother’s humor. “Why shouldn’t the mayor serve you, you old bat? You’re royalty. And as far as I’ve seen, Shelter Valley doesn’t have any railroad tracks for you to get on the wrong side of so I suggest you don’t try.” But if she did try, he’d be right there, cleaning up the mess. Nonnie’s fire was a part of her.
“Nah, we’re starting a new life, boy. I told you that. In Shelter Valley, the Hebers are respectable folks.”
“They’re respectable in Bierly, too.” To anyone who mattered.
She turned from the computer. “You worked your ass off to make it so, Markie-boy, but it’s not right. You having to try so hard to prove what most people just take for granted—that you’re an honorable man.”
“I don’t work harder than anyone in Bierly. Times are difficult.”
“You did and you know it. Just to prove you was good enough. And you was better than all of ’em.”
Inside he cringed. On the outside, he smiled and helped himself to a glass of chocolate milk.
“Like I said, Nonnie, you’re royalty.”
“Good thing you ain’t as dumb as you are blind,” his grandmother snorted. “Now get off to work and leave me be for a bit. A girl can’t get any peace around here.”
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“Do I look okay?”
“Yeah. But that doesn’t mean anything other than you’re a great actress.”
Flinging out her arm she asked, “You want to take my blood pressure? Just to make sure I’m not lying?”
She was fine. Or she wouldn’t have offered. He pulled his keys out of the pocket of his jeans. “You win, crotchety old lady, I’m out of here,” he said, kissing her on the head as he passed.
And prayed all the way to work that he wouldn’t be subjected to a repeat of the last time he’d been there. A guy could only take so many of those calls.
* * *
> MATT SHEFFIELD HAD been in prison. Found guilty of statutory rape by a jury in Flagstaff, Arizona, and sentenced to ten years.
As she scrubbed the shower stall in her bathroom, Addy wrapped her mind around what she knew and tried to work off the tension that the knowing had caused. Water wasn’t just for listening to. It was for cooking, providing nourishment. It was for drinking, quenching thirst. And it was for cleaning. Taking away the grime of the world.
The kitchen was already sparkling. Faucet, a shiny silver without a single smudge. Beige sink looking like new. Formica counters smooth and spotless. Floor grout off-white, as it should be.
And Nonnie was fine, too; she’d checked on her every hour on the hour.
Spray from the shower splashed against the walls she’d scrubbed, filling the floor until it could slide down the drain. It splashed her hair and arms. The front of her T-shirt, the thighs of her jeans. She didn’t feel cleaner.
Mark’s front door closed. She felt the vibration and heard the muffled slam over the sound of the shower.
She’d heard him come in minutes before, so he must be leaving again. He’d be on his way to work.
Would he be joining her outside that evening? Was he wondering if she’d be there?
Hoping that she’d offer him more than tea?
Down on her hands and knees, she scrubbed at the tile. Rinsed and moved toward the garden tub a couple of feet away. She’d never had a garden tub before.
She liked it. And had already begun thinking about the remodel she’d do on her bathroom when she got home. It would be her present to herself for having made it through her time in Shelter Valley. With what Will was paying her, she could afford a new bathtub.
Statutory rape. Before coming to Shelter Valley, before going to prison, Matt Sheffield had been a junior high and high school theater teacher. One who, in his second year of teaching, at age twenty-four, had been convicted of having sex with a fourteen-year-old student in his office after hours. The girl had gotten pregnant.
Addy’s tub was clean. She wiped it out every time she used it and wished she hadn’t. She needed more to scrub. The toilet didn’t take long. The double sinks were wiped clean each morning, as well. Her old toothbrush in one hand and a bowl of clean, hot water in the other, Addy moved on to the grout on the bathroom floor.
Six months after the girl’s baby was born, a boy, a paternity test proved that he was not Matt Sheffield’s son. It didn’t prove that Matt had not had sex with his student.
Sheffield’s attorney motioned to appeal the conviction against him. Based on the new paternity evidence, a new trial had been granted.
Addy was a lawyer. She knew how these things worked. With a couple of phone calls and a pleading for expediency, she already had the trial transcript downloaded on her computer. She’d read the pertinent parts.
Sheffield had spent a lot of time alone with the girl. According to the girl’s testimony during the trial, Sheffield had told her that any man would be honored to have her as his wife. He’d praised her often, telling her that she had more to offer than most of the people he knew. He’d led the child to believe that he found her desirable. She’d told him she had a headache. He’d given her some pills. Told her she could use his office couch to take a nap. When she’d woken up, he’d been on the couch with her. Holding her in his arms.
The story itself, while sickening, wasn’t shocking to Addy. She worked in educational law and the reality was that teachers behaving inappropriately with their students was not as uncommon as people would like to believe.
Matt Sheffield was found not guilty at his second trial. The man was set free. But his getting off did not in any way mean that he hadn’t had sex with his young female student. It only meant that the prosecutor, given the fact that the girl had lied about previous lovers during the first trial, had been unable to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that Matt had sex with her. There’d been no evidence, only her word against his. And she’d admittedly been unconscious through the alleged act.
Matt Sheffield would never be able to teach in the public school system again. But he’d completed the education required to teach at the college level and moved to Shelter Valley. Addy scrubbed the floor until her nails were broken and her knuckles were scraped.
Montford’s hiring policies required that Will Parsons verify a criminal check on every single employee at the university. Will had to have known about Matt Sheffield’s criminal history, the exact charges that had been filed against the man. The years he’d spent in prison.
Yet he’d still hired the man to teach eighteen-year-old girls.
Addy sat up on her knees, her soapy hands holding a toothbrush in midair.
Wait a minute...
Dropping the toothbrush, she hurried from the bathroom, wiping her hands on her T-shirt as she made her way to her computer. A few quick keystrokes, a couple of returns, and she was back to the university’s personnel files, looking up Phyllis Sheffield’s history at Montford. The psychologist had been hired to start the fall 2001 semester. She’d given birth to twins, Calvin and Clarissa, in early June 2002. A few more clicks. Matt Sheffield was the father of twins, Calvin and Clarissa, born in June 2002.
He’d fathered Phyllis’s children less than a month after the woman had moved to Shelter Valley from the East Coast. Which sounded to Addy as if the man hadn’t learned how to be circumspect with his fly, although he’d chosen a conquest who was of legal age this time. The criminal charges should have been enough to prevent Will from hiring the man. Fathering children with a coworker he hardly knew should have, at the very least, been further cause for concern. But it was at that time that Will Parsons had approved a promotion for Matt Sheffield from technical coordinator to director of the performing arts center.
Addy added another task to her list. When she showed up at drama club later that week, she was going to come as a femme fatale, ready to give the club’s adviser, Matt Sheffield, anything he wanted.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THERE WAS A MARKED energy in Mark’s step as he made his way to his car after his shift Monday evening. Jon’s supervisor had looked Mark up to let him know the man he’d referred was performing beyond expectation. He hadn’t received an emergency call regarding his grandmother. He had, in fact, had a call from the woman herself to tell him good-night—and not to bug her with a pressure check when he came in from work. She’d also told him to drive safely on his way home—Nonnie’s version of “I love you.”
And...he was heading to the chair on his back patio.
After a shower. No way was he showing up smelling like cactus jelly. Or sweat.
It was too hot for jeans, too, he decided as he climbed into the truck and rolled down his window. September in Arizona might not be as hot as August or June or July, but it was still close to eighty degrees—and that was after the sun went down. He hoped he’d thrown his basketball shorts into the washer with his work clothes. And a T-shirt that matched would be nice, too....
The peal of his cell phone broke the peacefulness inside his truck. Tensing, he grabbed the phone off the holster on his belt, his gaze going instantly to the caller ID flashing on the screen. He’d heard from Nonnie less than an hour ago. If she’d failed to put on her nighttime undergarments before bed she could have tried to get herself to the bathroom and had problems....
Nonnie wasn’t calling. Nor was it the paramedics, or Addy. He pulled off to answer, anyway.
“Ella?” Holding his phone to his ear, he tried to ease the dread seeping into his gut.
“Hey.”
That was it after all this time? “Hey”? Not that it had been years. It just felt like that to Mark. So much had changed. He’d changed.
Just as she’d known he would.
Guilt fell like dead weight over him.
“How are you?” Lame. But he didn’t know what else to say. Why was she calling?
Because all she’d needed was for him to quit trying? Playing hard to get worked sometimes. But he hadn’t been playing. And wouldn’t. Thoughts tumbled one after the other. He wasn’t a game-playing type of guy, Ella knew that....
“I’m okay.” She didn’t sound normal. “I wasn’t sure you’d even speak to me.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“The way I treated you there at the end. Before you left. Going out with Rick. It wasn’t right.”
“Sure it was. You told me what you were doing. If you’d done it behind my back, that wouldn’t have been right.”
Two minutes ago he’d been heading home, to his new home, hoping like hell that he was going to make love with his new neighbor.
“I ignored all the texts you sent.”
“You told me you didn’t want to talk to me.” And he hadn’t wanted to harass her. He’d just wanted her to know that he wasn’t leaving her. That he’d be there for her if she needed him. He’d wanted to honor the promises he’d made to her. “Anyway, what’s done is done.” Or was it? God, he hoped it was. “Tell me what’s going on. How’s everyone doing? How’s work?”
He stopped short of asking her how she was doing, personally. It made him ashamed as hell, but he didn’t want to know.
“I’m... I don’t know how to tell you this.”
It sounded as if she was crying. He stiffened, his free hand wrapped tight around the steering wheel.
“You can tell me anything, Ella, you know that.”
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