Collapsible

by Buchanan, Ruth;

  Lee closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “Wait here.” He strode away and returned with a three-legged stool from the auditorium, a sheaf of grading sheets, and a pencil. “Be generous with your points,” he told her. “It’s just a one-credit class for most of them, and I like to err on the side of kindness.”

  Rachel and Lee worked their way down opposite sides of the room in silence. Lee stood well back from the projects and stared carefully at each of them for nearly a full minute. Next he stepped in for a closer look, closed his eyes, and appeared to be thinking. He then filled out the grading sheet, scribbling his responses all in one go. Rachel kicked the three-legged stool along in front of her with her right knee and perched on it while darting quick looks back and forth from the projects to the papers as she contemplated each question individually.

  Although it would have been faster to work in full light, Lee kept the hall lights off. Despite his gruff manners, quick temper, and generally rumpled ways, his innate appreciation for beauty dictated that he grade by twinkle light rather than a full fluorescent glare. No doubt the student projects improved under soft lighting.

  Every once in a while, Rachel spared a glance for Lee, now a work of art himself. With his beard gone, she could see that the boyishly handsome face of his youth had solidified into that of an intelligent but rough-hewn man. The strength of his chin and the flaring cheekbones were most likely thanks to his father, whoever he may have been.

  By twenty minutes before seven, families began to arrive for the show. Although some teachers would have required their students to arrive a full forty-five minutes early in order to run through their pieces one last time, Rachel found that bombarding her students with a flurry of last-minute instructions usually tended to do more harm than good.

  Lee came over to scoop up Rachel’s grading sheets just as a gaggle of girls caught sight of him.

  “Mr. Martin?” came a shocked squeal.

  “Help,” he whispered, his breath stirring the hair near Rachel’s ear. He executed a neat pivot and fled around the corner with the sheaf of papers and the stool. Rachel limped forward to intercept the girls.

  “What happened to Mr. Martin?” Denise stared fixedly toward the corner around which he had disappeared. “He looks—”

  Rachel held up a hand, “Remember, girls. Mr. Martin is a teacher at this school. He is not one of your peers. It’s not appropriate for you to make comments about his—”

  “It’s OK, Miss Cooper, I know he’s yours and everything, and that you don’t want other women creepin’ on your man—”

  “Denise…”

  “OK, OK, we know.” Denise slanted a shrewd smile before leading her little gaggle of friends toward the point of Lee’s departure.

  “Come back, girls. We’re getting ready to start,” Rachel called after them.

  At the sound of a light voice calling her name, Rachel turned.

  “Miss Day!” Rachel could think of no reason for the petite kindergarten teacher to turn up at a secondary school event. No reason but one.

  Sharon Day’s eyelids batted to the rhythm of a hummingbird’s wing. “Lee texted me this afternoon and said I should come tonight if I wanted to talk.”

  “Seriously?” Rachel bit her bottom lip.

  Sharon nodded, looking ready to bolt. “He said I could either come tonight or wait until tomorrow. So I thought that the last day of school is always busy, and we have kindergarten graduation tomorrow morning anyway, so it’s not likely I would have time to talk to him.” She took a steadying breath.

  Rachel nodded, unsure how to proceed. The conversational field seemed littered with emotional landmines.

  Sharon crossed and uncrossed her arms. “Do you know what Lee wants to talk to me about?” She crossed her arms again, then uncrossed them.

  Ugh. This was torture.

  Lee appeared, mercifully cutting the conversation short. If he were surprised to see Rachel and Sharon talking, he did not show it.

  “Ladies,” he nodded. “Shall we?”

  “Hello!” chirped Miss Day, amping up the wattage of her smile. As she took in Lee 2.0, her eyelids fluttered double-time. Rachel half expected the woman to lift off.

  “Hey,” Lee nodded to Miss Day. He turned to address Rachel, his voice light and professional. “We need to head in and get things started.” He snagged Rachel by the elbow, but she shook him off.

  “I can walk,” she said.

  “Suit yourself.” He turned to precede them into the auditorium.

  Miss Day edged around Rachel and sidled up next to Lee. “So, should we just, like, talk after?”

  Lee nodded absently. “That’s fine,” he said. “I’ll catch you at the reception.” As they passed through the doors, he turned to say to Rachel over his shoulder, “And make sure you see me before you go. I have something to say to you, too.”

  ~*~

  The performances went as well as could have been expected. Shayla missed a cue in her dialogue with Carl, Denise was predictably over-dramatic in her solo presentation, and the choral reading picked up speed until it was the verbal equivalent of a runaway train. But the curtain fell to loud applause, the parents seemed thrilled with their children’s efforts, and Yolanda Martinez commended Rachel and Lee publicly. In all, it had been a good night—one of the best Arts Evenings ever, everyone said.

  All that remained for a perfect night was for Lee to make it to the refreshment table before all the cheese was gone. And for him to forget that he was mad at her. And for Sharon Day to stop batting her eyelids so much. And for the FBI to announce that they had caught the Memento Killer.

  As everyone moved to the hallway for refreshments, Rachel spied Lee making his rounds among the displays. He congratulated students and shook hands with parents, taking some good-natured ribbing regarding his apparent makeover.

  Todd Perkins’s mother had volunteered to stay and lock up, meaning that Rachel was free to leave at any point. As families began to trickle from the building, Rachel looked to make her escape. She knew Lee wanted to have it out with her, but she didn’t have the energy tonight. She would text him once she was home. It was the coward’s way out, and she knew it, but she didn’t care. She slipped away and headed to her classroom to get her purse. Rather than flipping on all of the full overhead lights just for herself, she preferred to steal through the halls in the semi-dark.

  Ironically, Rachel found that she felt safer in the dark. Hidden. Untraceable.

  Dim light filtered through the hall windows from the parking lot. Rachel navigated with one hand trailing against the interior wall, wondering if this was how Edmund Rochester felt after he’d lost his sight. She thought about how the dark wouldn’t bother someone who was blind. About how the blind learned to navigate by touch. About how all of that touching must lead the blind to feel that they truly knew the shape of the world they would never see.

  After more than a decade stalking these halls during school hours, Rachel felt that she would be able to navigate them easily even in pitch blackness. The thought made her feel creepy and dramatic.

  At the door of her classroom, she fumbled with her keys. Once inside, she sat for a moment in the chair and leaned forward to open the bottom drawer where she had stashed her purse.

  That’s when she heard footsteps in the hall.

  Rachel froze, bent over behind the desk, ears straining. The footsteps seemed to be coming toward her classroom. Was she imagining them?

  She was not.

  Someone else was stealing through school halls in the dark.

  Soundlessly, Rachel slid from the chair to the floor and folded herself into the knee-hole of the desk. As an unseen hand tested the door and found it unlocked, she tilted her cane at an angle and drew it to join her in the tiny square of panic under the desk, clutching it with both hands and holding it in the opening like one half of an X.

  X marks the spot.

  Here I am.

  24

  Rachel held her breath as s
low footsteps crossed the classroom, pausing in front of the desk. Even in the dark, she closed her eyes, overcoming an insane urge to giggle.

  A quiet whisper of movement, a soft rustling on the desk, and the steps retreated.

  Rachel heard the door open and close. The footsteps receded. She could feel her heartbeats through her whole body, down her arms, in her face.

  Cautiously, she unfolded herself from under the desk. Using the cane as a brace, she leveraged to her feet and groped for her cellphone. Pressing the button to activate the screen, she lit the top of her desk with the soft blue glow. There, outlined in the dim light, was a small gift-wrapped box.

  The Fourth Memento.

  The light from the phone wavered as her hands began to shake. She turned the phone in her hands and tried to find Detective Smith’s number in her contacts list, but her numb fingers refused to cooperate. At length, she found the right screen and began to type. Memento here at school. Delivered fourth to classroom. As she tried to press send, the cellphone slipped from her shaking hands and dropped into her lap. She reached for it, but her hands weren’t the only thing shaking now. Full-body tremors worked their way from her heels to her head, rattling the chair. She fumbled the phone, and it fell, smacking hard against the floor. The screen shattered with a crack, and the wavering blue light went out.

  Rachel groped in the dark for the classroom phone, heedlessly knocking over dishes of paper clips and cups full of red pens. Her breath came in shallow gasps. She lifted the receiver and dialed 911.

  The footsteps were back. They were right outside the door.

  The call wasn’t going through. Rachel realized that in her haste, she’d forgotten to dial a 9 to reach an outside line.

  It was too late.

  Practically throwing the phone into the cradle, she launched herself toward the floor, ramming under the desk, bashing her left knee against the floor and twisting her hurt ankle in the process. She bit her lip, swallowing a sob.

  Slowly, the door opened.

  Rachel lost control of her breathing. She clamped one hand over her mouth and used the other to pinch her nostrils closed. She tucked her elbows and legs in close and attempted to keep her shaking limbs from jittering into the sides of the desk. Putting her face between her knees, she began to pray. The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want—

  In the silence, she heard footsteps. Quiet breathing.

  Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

  The shadow of death.

  The shadow of death.

  Rachel couldn’t remember what came next. Perhaps she was about to find out.

  She heard the crunch of a shoe stepping on the broken fragments of her phone. There was a soft exclamation, and the overhead lights snapped on. In a moment of pure horror, she realized that she had forgotten about her cane, which at some point in her panic had fallen sideways and now lay parallel to the desk, plainly visible from anywhere in the room.

  The hands that she had kept clamped to her face shook so hard that the suction broke, and her rasping breath sounded in a burst of frantic wheezes.

  “Miss Cooper…? Are you… under your desk?”

  At the sound of that voice, Rachel practically vibrated from her hiding place. She unfolded and stood in one swift motion, lunging forward awkwardly to barrel directly into Lee. She knew a moment of blinding pain radiating up through her leg, but she also knew that Lee was there, and that he would catch her.

  He did.

  Lee flung one arm around her middle and the other around her shoulders, almost going to the ground himself in his effort to keep her from falling.

  “Lee,” she rasped, her eyes streaming. She worked to catch her breath, to tell him. To warn him.

  “What happened?” he asked, his voice sharp. As he straightened them both up, his eyes darted around the room, taking in the fallen cane, the broken phone, the mess on the desk. “What were you doing in here in the dark? Did you fall?” He started to release her, but her right leg buckled. He tightened his hold.

  “He’s here.” She arched up on the toes of her good leg to hiss directly into his ear. “He’s here, he’s here. He’s just been here.” She turned to gesture toward the package on her desk, but realized that she could not pry her hands away from where they clutched at his shirt, ruining his perfect ironing job.

  Rachel felt Lee go absolutely still.

  “Who’s here?” he asked quietly, his hands smoothing down her arms, soothing her. “Rachel, who is it?”

  She dropped her forehead against one of his arms, her hands still holding on. “The Memento Killer,” she whispered.

  A wail of approaching sirens cut through the ensuing silence. Rachel went limp with relief. Her text to Detective Smith had gotten through. They were saved.

  And that is when Lee broke into a soft, helpless laugh.

  25

  Rachel had lost track of time. She sat in the darkened kitchen of the carriage house in a warm circle of light, surrounded by a constellation of concerned faces.

  Ann, who had met Rachel at the door with a cup of tea and an uncharacteristic lack of comment, had thrown a blanket around her shoulders and sat silently beside her throughout all of the ensuing drama.

  Alex and Ethan, shell-shocked and bleary-eyed at having been dragged here by Lynn in the middle of the night, sat just outside the pool of light and looked on with detached fascination.

  Lynn, standing over Lee like an angry Valkyrie, leaned down to talk directly into his face. She looked one step away from murder herself.

  Lee drooped against the table across from Rachel in the faded glory of his wrinkled blue shirt and took his verbal beating like a man. As Rachel stared at him, he lifted his gaze to hers. She looked away.

  Detective Smith, who had dealt with Yolanda and cleared the emergency responders, had driven Rachel back to the house. He now stood silently just along the edge of the light, leaning a hip against the kitchen counter, arms folded across his chest as he bore silent witness to the emotional fallout.

  “For the tenth time,” Lee’s voice cut wearily through Lynn’s ongoing tirade, “Miss Cooper was having a bad semester. She broke her ankle and then had some sort of mid-life crisis. I was just trying to do something nice. Something thoughtful.” He nearly choked on the last word. He scratched his chin with both hands and stared fiercely at the tabletop. “I was trying to cheer her up.”

  “By leaving anonymous gifts on her doorstep and in her classroom and on her car just as a psychopathic killer is doing the exact same thing?” Lynn asked.

  “Lynn,” Ann said quietly. “Calm down.”

  “I am very calm,” said Lynn, not breaking eye contact with Lee. She eyed him as if he were something that had recently crawled out of a storm drain.

  “Lynn,” Rachel said tiredly. “This isn’t helping.” She’d never seen Lynn like this. It was a little scary.

  Lee straightened, looking hopeful. He gazed at her pleadingly and opened his mouth.

  “Don’t even,” Rachel snapped at him. She may not want Lynn to go full mama-bear on him, but that didn’t mean that he could escape some sort of reckoning.

  His shoulders sagged.

  “Why did you do it?” Rachel asked.

  Lee stared back at her as the silence stretched.

  “The chase is on, Lee? Really?”

  “What?” He stared blankly.

  “The little silver foot,” she said. “What was that? And what did you mean, the chase is on?”

  “Oh,” he coughed. “That. I just meant that your cast was off and that the race to the end of the year was on…so now you could just look forward to that. I never—but now that I think about it…” He trailed off, looking tired and crestfallen. “I’m such an idiot.” He shook his head. “But in my defense,” he said, lifting his head, “how was I to know that you were going to build this whole thing up in your head?”

  Lynn looked as if she were about to interrupt, but to everyone’s surprise, it
was Detective Smith who stepped into the circle of light, quietly commanding everyone’s attention. “I don’t think anybody’s in the right frame of mind to work this all out tonight. I think the best thing that could possibly happen right now would be for all of you to get a good night’s sleep.” He set a hand on Lee’s shoulder. “I’ll drive you home.”

  Lee nodded wearily and half rose from the table, still trying to catch Rachel’s eye. “See you tomorrow?” he asked, his voice uncertain.

  Rachel’s face went blank. “Tomorrow?”

  “At school?” he reminded her. “It’s the last day.”

  Detective Smith cleared his throat. “During her debriefing, Ms. Martinez advised me to tell you that you both should get some rest. She won’t expect either of you to be in until third period tomorrow.”

  Rachel groaned and slid her hands over her face before lowering her head to the table. She heard Ann ushering everyone out and Lynn telling Alex to take Ethan home and that he could pick her up in the morning. She heard them come back to the table and sit down beside her, Ann on one side, Lynn on the other.

  “This is the stupidest thing that’s ever happened,” Rachel said into the tabletop.

  “Really?” Ann asked, her voice cool. “The stupidest thing that’s ever happened?”

  Rachel felt Lynn’s light hands adjusting the blanket across her shoulders. “Yes,” she said, and burst into tears.

  ~*~

  A few hours of sleep, a hot breakfast cooked by Lynn, and two pots of coffee later, Rachel felt her good humor begin to reassert itself.

  “I just don’t know what’s been going on with Lee,” she told Ann and Lynn from where she reclined on the soft couch, propped up by many pillows. She wiped her mouth with a napkin and handed Lynn her empty plate. “I mean, he’s always been sort of emotionally constipated, but this whole thing was weird even by Lee standards.”

  Ann shrugged. She dipped her spoon into a yogurt cup and scraped it meticulously around the edges. “He’s Lee,” she said, as if this were a sufficient answer.