Jane pulled a paper towel off the roll by the stove and handed it to Marjory.
Marjory held it under her eyes. “Thank you. I need to keep it together until the funeral.” She dabbed with the towel to mop up the tears that were beginning to smudge her mascara. “And I need to pull myself together for the business meeting. The board wants to run away with the business before Jake and Phoebe have a chance to make any decisions. I can’t let that happen.” Marjory looked up at Jane with a grim face. She folded her paper towel into quarters and slid it into the pocket of her suit jacket. “Thank you for thinking of a nice breakfast, Jane. We’ll have to try again another morning.” Marjory wrapped her hands around her mug and left.
Marjory didn’t seem to relish running the business. Jane thought it was impossible that she would have killed her best friend for any reason, much less to get control of a business she didn’t like running.
Jane dumped her potato mess in the scrap bucket. She considered taking it out to the compost when there was a knock at the back door. Killing two birds with one stone, she grabbed the scraps and went to the door.
She opened it to find Isaac on the other side of the screen with a sheepish grin on his face.
“Want to play hooky with me?”
Jane looked from Isaac to the scraps. “I can’t.”
Isaac opened the screen and took the bucket of scraps. He walked beside her to the compost. “I missed you yesterday, but I don’t blame you for not wanting to see me. I kind of overstepped.”
Jane gave him a bit of a smile. “Agreed. You kind of overstepped, but I didn’t mean to miss class. I fell asleep reading the sociology report on teen suicide in resource-poor-communities that you sent us home with.”
“I agree. Very dull paper.” Isaac tipped the scrap bucket, letting the potatoes, et al, spill into the compost bin.
“It’s not that. It wasn’t a thriller, but I was just exhausted. It’s been a rough couple of weeks.” Jane took the scrap bucket back from him and headed to the house.
“That’s why I thought it might be a good idea to play hooky together. I skip class, you take a day off. We do something relaxing. Just hang out. Get to know each other. No pressure, no murder solving, no discussions of your future plans.”
“No illicit flirting?” Jane nudged him with her elbow.
“I’ll do what I can, but I am only human.” Isaac sprinted ahead of her and opened the screen door. “We could go to the park and kick a ball around. You do play soccer, right? It’s a prep school staple.”
“I played field hockey. Don’t kill me.”
“Kick the ball around?” Phoebe was in the mudroom in her very short, very thin nightgown. Her tall, curvy figure displayed in detail. “I’m game.” She smiled at Isaac, cute dimples popping out in her cheeks.
Isaac put his arm through Jane’s. “Sorry,” he said to Phoebe. “This is one on one practice. Jane is in desperate need of help.”
Phoebe yawned, and stretched so that her nighty pulled a little tighter and got a little shorter.
Isaac kept his face on Jane. “I’ve got a ball in my car. Get your tennies.”
Phoebe scowled and slumped out of the mudroom.
Jane wanted to apologize for Phoebe’s inappropriate clothes, but kept her mouth shut. He was ignoring it, so she would too. “You know what? Let’s do it. I can play hooky for an hour anyway.”
“Perfect.” Isaac dropped her arm and pushed her towards the house. “Go get your shoes.”
“Why don’t you follow me, just in case.” She nodded towards the door Phoebe had just exited.
“Yeah. That’s a good idea.”
As Jane passed the office she heard Marjory in deep conversation. The other voice sounded familiar, so she paused by the door. It was Vargas, the same man who had been at the abrupt meeting the week before. She held her finger to her lips to keep Isaac quiet.
“You believe we can make Wally agree to this?” Marjory asked.
Wally Walker. Jean knew she had known that unnamed man at the last meeting. He was Wally Walker, the head of franchising.
“If you can keep Fitch out of things, I believe between the two of us we can make Walker see that patience is a virtue.”
“Don’t talk in riddles. I don’t have time for it. Will Wally agree to wait on the sale or not?”
“Yes, he will, but I am serious about Fitch. He’s not on the board and he has no business at these meetings. I don’t care if he agrees with you.”
Isaac frowned at Jane. “Eavesdropping?” His voice was a low whisper.
Jane repeated the international sign for “hush” and nodded yes. There seemed to be more than just paperwork keeping Marjory away from breakfast.
“I only invited the people who were on the minutes at the last meeting. Fitch is nothing to me, but if Bob wanted him involved, I thought I had better as well.”
“Bob?” Vargas laughed. “It wasn’t Bob’s idea to involve Fitch. It was Pamela’s. He was her protégé while Bob was recovering. I never got the impression that Bob appreciated it.”
“Neither here nor there. If keeping Fitch out of the meetings is all you need me to do, I’ll do it. All I want is to wait until the estate is settled. Sign nothing, agree to nothing, change nothing, until then.”
Jane tiptoed past the door with new questions on her mind. What future job had Pamela been grooming Fitch for, and did it have anything to do with the murders?
Up in her room, she posed the question to Isaac.
“How should I know? I know less than nothing about corporations, small, large, or otherwise.”
“What if Fitch hated the job he was being groomed for and so he killed Pamela?” Jane was on her knees digging through the stuff she had shoved into the small closet. She looked to Isaac for his answer.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to just quit?” Isaac scratched his chin.
“In this economy? If he was unstable for any reason he could have seen murder as an easier option than finding a new job.”
“Before you make wild leaps, ask yourself this question: What job in the restaurant industry could have been so horrible that he would rather kill two people than perform it?”
Jane rocked back on her heels, a pair of cross trainers in her hand. “There is that. I suppose someone who managed several locations had already done everything humiliating and disgusting at that point. There’s no job worse than cleaning the public restrooms after the little league team comes to celebrate their season.”
“So we can agree it wasn’t Fitch, and we can go play soccer. Right?”
Jane looked back at her closet, her shoes resting on her knees. “We can agree that if it was Fitch it wasn’t because his new job was awful. And yes, we can go kick the ball around the park. I make no promises that it will look anything like this game you call ‘soccer.’”
Chapter 19
It was Friday, the day after what had been a very fun, if not exactly flirtation free, hour of soccer in the park, and the day before Jane and Isaac would have had their date had it not been against school policy. If she could muster the energy, she thought she might like to dress up just a little for school.
A hot shower had loosened her shoulders and relaxed her back, not completely but at least she was more comfortable. She stood, towel wrapped, in front of her closet, disturbed by the state of her clothes. Bleach stained house cleaning clothes and church dresses. That was all. Nothing in between. She felt the need for a pair of skinny jeans and a…she scrunched her mouth. She couldn’t imagine what kind of shirts were considered cute and “in” right now, but whatever they were she wished she had one. After her lean winter the closest jeans she had to skinny were pretty baggy still. She didn’t even want to look at her shoes. Two choices. Bleach stained converse or the black buckled Mary Jane style flats she’d been wearing since she was a sophomore at prep school. She grabbed a vintage Roly Burger t-shirt from one of her dad’s promo events in years past. It wasn’t too bleach speckled yet.
And what did it matter? It really wasn’t a date, after all. Just school like any other day. She threw a light sweater over it and called it good. Not stylish, but good.
At school Jane settled into her seat, in the clothes she had settled on. Settled. The word had a depressing sound to it, like a dirt mound sinking into the ground after a heavy rain. How badly had she settled?
It wasn’t like she had settled on Harvest School of the Bible. She had graduated high school with high honors. Her parents had given her carte blanche to pick a school. This one, this little school with its missions focused Bible program, was the one she had felt called to. Had felt. Past tense. When, exactly had her feeling changed? Or was the problem that it had always just been a feeling, and nothing more? Had she truly been called or had she merely made an adolescent, emotional decision?
Jane crossed her arms on her desk and laid her head down, stretching her neck. With only three months left until “graduation,” if you could call it that, the “feeling” of being called to Harvest hardly mattered. She certainly wasn’t going to quit this close to the finish line.
Isaac stood at the front of the class shuffling his papers. After exchanging a brief, rueful smile, she avoided making eye contact, and he seemed to avoid her as well. Whoever had been telling tales to Pastor Barnes needed to get the message that she and Isaac were trying to be above reproach.
Or were they?
Graduation was coming. Last year’s graduation had been fun. She had started at Harvest a year after her high school graduation so that she could have a stash of money saved up to allow her to work less as she went to school.
Still, though she had started the program as a part time student, only taking the night classes, she had had plenty of her friends from high school with her. The graduation ceremony had been emotional, knowing that several of her friends were leaving straight from the ceremony to short-term overseas missions. She sat up and looked around the room. Her fellow students this year were not her friends the way they had been the year before. Even though she had grown up with some of them. Was it because they were so frivolous or was it really because her attitude had changed over time?
Would she have been better off to do one of the short term missions with her real friends?
Isaac began his lecture. His microphone crackled and Jane sat up.
He caught her eye, and despite her internal moaning she felt a smile creep across her face. Her heart fluttered, against her better instincts.
No, she was glad she hadn’t gone on a mission this year. Not exactly because she had met Isaac, rather, because meeting Isaac had pointed out an important flaw in her character. She felt like she ought to have been lost in thought over how to serve the grieving and seemingly unsaved Crawford family, leading them to Christ, helping them during their time of crisis, figuring out who was behind the murders. But what was she doing instead? Moping. Decrying her current life situation because she was sad that she didn’t have anything cute to wear for Isaac. Clearly she wasn’t mature enough to serve overseas yet.
The smile disappeared. If she wasn’t mature enough to go overseas yet, what was she going to do after graduation?
Class dragged on forever.
At the end of class—Isaac had not given them a mid-way break—Sarah grabbed Jane by the elbow. “Your futon has become the center of female social life here on campus. Come enjoy it with us.”
Jane allowed herself to be pulled away, but gave a fleeting glance in Isaac’s direction. He was engaged in conversation with three of the more studious boys in class.
In the girls dorm community area Sarah settled Jane on the futon with a mug of herbal tea and a fleece blanky. As Sarah had promised, most of the forty girls who lived in the dorm were lounging with them.
“Spill.” Sarah leaned against Jane’s knees with her own cup of tea.
“I assume you don’t mean literally.” Jane blew on the top of her cup to cool the hot liquid.
“What is going on with you two?” Mina asked. She lay on her stomach on the indoor-outdoor carpeted floor painting her nails. “We know he likes you, so, like Sarah said, spill. Are you and Mr. Daniels an item or not?”
Jane took a drink of her tea.
“Come on, Ice Queen, we demand to know!” Trinity, one of the youngest at the school squealed as she spoke.
“Ice Queen?” Jane rested her cup on her knee. Moments ago, sitting at her desk, she had felt like a twelve-year-old, but now she might as well be forty.
“Too cool for school, Ice Queen. Too cool for boys. Just plain Jane, the Ice Queen.”
“Plain, I can understand, but since when have I been icy?”
“This is the first time you’ve ever sat in the lounge, Ice Queen.” Mina finished her nails off with polka dots.
“No it’s not. What are you talking about? I—” Jane stopped, mid-defense. She was about to say she hung out in the communal room all the time, except that it had been last year, with the other class. She had stayed here past curfew most nights, last year. Mina was right. This was the first time all year she had sat in the lounge to hang out with the girls. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be cold.”
“Forgiven. Now, tell us what is going on with you and that handsome devil who teaches our class.” Mina sat up. She waved her hands back and forth in front of her to dry.
“Nothing.” Jane took another drink, heat rising to her cheeks.
“Because of Pastor Barnes?” Trinity asked.
Jane chewed on her bottom lip. If these girls had been last year’s girls they would have known everything by now. “Yes, because of Pastor Barnes. There are rules against instructors dating students.”
“Not fair!” Trinity cried. “Totes not fair, like, really, really totes not fair. He is so into you.”
Jane’s smile came back. She couldn’t help it. He was into her. So much so that the other kids noticed.
“So what are we going to do about this grave injustice, my friends?” Sarah asked.
The girls began to giggle, all of them at once.
“Oh no.” Jane didn’t like the sound of the giggles.
“We have a surprise for you, Jane.” Sarah stood up and motioned to Mina.
Mina stood up, and fluttered a long, thin scarf out in front of her. “Stand, Jane.”
Jane did not stand. She did not like the looks of that scarf, but Trinity and Sarah and a couple of other girls dragged her off the futon, with minimal tea spillage.
Mina wrapped the scarf around her head.
“You are coming with us.” Sarah used her most ominous voice, the effect slightly ruined by the sheer volume of giggling.
Jane allowed them to lead her away. She had done something similar to a student last year. A girl who was in love with a quiet, shy boy who sat at the front of the class. Jane had helped sneak her friend into the boys’ dorm hall so that the love-struck kids could have a little bit of privacy to “talk” about their feelings. It had worked. Jane had received an invitation to their upcoming wedding shortly before she was evicted, but where were these girls taking her?
They were outside. They walked so far that Jane was certain they had left the school grounds. It was cold, and Jane knew it was very dark.
And then it was warm, and smokey. The crackle of a fire filled the air. Sarah had taken her to the fire pit. Then she helped Jane sit down on a log.
The secret fire pit. Jane remembered it well.
Sarah pulled the scarf off and ran.
Jane was completely alone. She leaned forward and stared into the fire. Last year, when she had taken the time to make friends with the other students, they had come to the secret fire pit in the woods. She missed them. Part time school had been a bad idea.
She could hear footsteps crunching on the forest floor, and then Isaac sat down on the log next to her. He sat close, his arm warming hers.
“The guys told me there was a student out here who needed some advice.”
“They were right.” Jane leaned he
r head over on his shoulder. “What was I thinking, Isaac?”
“I think you were probably thinking about using your life to grow God’s kingdom.”
“Yes, I was, but my idea was bad. I should have done everything differently.” Jane kept her eyes fixed on the crackling flames.
“Maybe, but isn’t that true for all of us? We never know what the best idea really is until after we’ve done something.” Isaac wrapped his arm around her shoulder.
“What a shame. I can’t go back now and make the right decision.” Jane leaned forward and picked up a stick. She poked into the fire with the green wood, sending sparks into the night air.
“But you can use this experience to help you make the next decision.”
“I don’t know what the next decision is anymore.” Jane poked the fire again. The larger log rolled off the burning pile. The fire dimmed with the loss of contact, but the white coals glowed.
“I have an idea, but it’s going to sound really stupid, and you probably aren’t going to like it.”
Jane doubted it would be a stupid idea. Isaac, in their short acquaintance, had never sounded stupid, but from the serious set of his mouth, she thought she might not like what he had to say.
“Never mind.” Isaac tossed the stick he had been toying with onto the fire.
“You’ve got to tell me now. It’s only fair.” Jane cracked the thin bark of her stick with her fingernail and began to peel away at it.
“This is going to be a really long spring.” Isaac lifted the hem of her sweater. He let the thin knit fabric fall between his fingers.
“Isaac, I didn’t ask the boys to bring you here to counsel me.” Jane peeled another long, thin, strand of bark off of her stick. “I’m just moping right now. I swear my life—and I—aren’t usually this dramatic. Everything will calm down after the funeral.”
Plain Jane Mystery Box Set 1 Page 15