Cold River (21 page)

MANDY UNCLENCHED HER
hands when she heard the sound of Grange’s pickup leaving the parking lot. With two firm keystrokes she got rid of his calendar page. Then, noticing the stack of folders, she was reminded of the failed staff meeting. She opened the empty file drawer in her desk and dropped them in. “Take that, Mr. Timberlain.”

“Dr. Steenburg?”

She looked up to see Elizabeth peeking through her partially opened door. “Yes?”

“Um, could you come down to the reception desk for just a moment? There’s something… I’ve got a couple… I’d like to, like, talk to you about something.”

Mandy closed the file drawer. “Right now?”

“If you could. I’ll be leaving in a few minutes, and I kinda wanted to, you know, see about some stuff.”

Mandy leaned back in her chair. “What kind of stuff?”

Elizabeth cleared her throat. “Lots of stuff. Will you come down so I can, like, show you?”

Intrigued, Mandy said, “Certainly.” She followed the young woman across the mezzanine, and as they descended the stairs, she said, “I remember the first night I saw you at the Qwik-E Market. I thought your smile lit up the room.”

Elizabeth stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at Mandy. “You did?”

“Yes. It was a dark and rainy night, and I was a stranger. Your smile was particularly comforting to me. I haven’t seen it much lately. Is everything all right in your world?”

The young woman paused for just a moment as if she would say something, and then she turned to go around the reception counter. “Everything’s fine,” she said as she opened the lower cupboard doors. “Here’s what I wanted you to see.”

Mandy bent down so she could see the stacks of T-shirts and sweatshirts. “Yes?”

“We need a cabinet at the high school where we can put these on display. We’d sell a lot more and have a lot more school spirit if they were out where everyone could see them.”

“I agree.” Mandy straightened up. “That’s an excellent notion. Do you have an idea of where this cabinet should be?”

“No. But I thought maybe I could look around the high school to see if there’s a place we could put one.”

“If you will do that and draw up a sketch with measurements of what you envision, we’ll talk about the next step in getting one.”

“I figured that, at first, the profits could pay for the case, if the district would put up the money to build it.”

Mandy nodded. “Good thinking.”

“And we might be able to get someone from the shop class to take it on as a senior project.”

“Even better thinking! I’ll look forward to seeing your design. Are you here on Monday? Good. Can you be ready to meet with me about this time?”

Elizabeth nodded.

“I’ll put it on my calendar.”

At that moment, Willow Timberlain put her head in the door. “I’m going to be late for class, Elizabeth. Come on!”

Elizabeth got a stricken look on her face. “All right, Willow,” she called. She closed the cabinet doors and grabbed her books. “I’m sorry, Dr. Steenburg,” she said, brushing past her. “I’ve got to go.”

Puzzled, Mandy watched Elizabeth hurry to the door. The teenager paused there, turned, and almost said something, but must have thought better of it.

It wasn’t until Mandy left work that afternoon that she understood Elizabeth’s odd behavior. She understood, too, the bursts of laughter that had come floating up from downstairs periodically as people came and went. As she walked around the corner to where she parked her car that morning, she stopped in her tracks when she saw what someone had done to it.

Cleverly attached to the top of the Miata were wings made of lime green fabric stretched tightly over kite-stick frames. They were held in place by Velcro straps that went through the windows and fastened inside. On the front, between the headlights, were two huge antennae, fastened with suction cups. “I’ll learn to lock my doors,” Mandy muttered.

She walked around the car, examining it from every angle. It really did look like one of the stinkbugs in the box left on her doorstep. All of a sudden, she understood that Elizabeth’s conversation about a cabinet for clothing with the Tarheel logo was a ruse to get her out of her office while Willow dressed her car in a bug’s costume. Mandy didn’t know whether to be angry or admire the inventiveness and audacity of the deed. Admiration won out, and she smiled as she broke the seal on the suction cups and stowed the antennae in the front seat. The wings were a more complicated situation, but she figured how they came apart and folded up. As she put them in with the antennae, she said to herself, “That girl needs to be channeled.”

The smile stayed with Mandy all the way home. She looked forward to Leesie’s return so she could laugh with her sister about it. But Leesie was so late that, by the time she got home, the smile had faded and Mandy had passed through anger to worry. She had the phone book out and was looking up Rael’s number when she heard the familiar sound of Jake’s pickup outside.

When Leesie came in the door, she took one look at Mandy’s fierce countenance and said, “What’s wrong?”

“Do you know what time it is?”

Leesie’s eyes moved to the clock and back. “It’s ten o’clock? Is that the right answer? What’s wrong?”

“What were you doing out until ten?”

“I told you this morning. I had practice.” Leesie went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and poured a glass of milk.

“What kind of practice?”

Leesie took a drink. “Band practice,” she said, raising her glass. “We were making moosic.”

Mandy didn’t smile at the pun. All of a sudden, she was out of gas. The staff meeting, her reading program presentation, the round of sparring with Grange, even the stinkbug incident, had all taken a toll, and now she was done. She closed the phone book and put it away in the kitchen cupboard. “I’m going to bed,” she said wearily.

“I’ve got some homework to do,” Leesie said. “See you in the morning.”

Mandy climbed the stairs and got ready for bed. She brushed her teeth and read a few pages from the book on her nightstand, but her eyes grew heavy and she turned out the light. Floating up from below she heard the muted sound of Leesie playing scales on Jake’s guitar, and her last thought before she drifted off to sleep was,
This is homework?

MANDY CAME DOWNSTAIRS
the next morning to find the kitchen table transformed into a stinkbug. Leesie had apparently found the wings and antennae where Mandy dumped them by the door and had reassembled them.

Leesie looked up from the pot of oatmeal she was now stirring. “What did you think of your car?”

“I thought it was terribly clever,” Mandy admitted. “In fact, I looked forward to sharing it with you all the way home, and then you weren’t here.”

“Oh, Sweetiebug, I’m sorry. It’s awful to have something to share and not be able to, isn’t it? Well, move a wing and sit down. I’ve got breakfast fixed.”

Mandy undid the apparatus and put it back in the corner before sitting at the table. “That Willow is really talented, isn’t she? Did you see how ingeniously this was put together?”

Leesie set a bowl of steaming cereal in front of Mandy. “So you know it was Willow?”

“Yes. I wish you could have seen it on the car. It actually looked like one of those shield bugs.”

“I did see it— or a picture of it, anyway. There was one hanging in the hallway on the bulletin board.” Leesie paused, clearly wondering how her sister would take the news.

Mandy was quiet for a moment. She spooned some sugar in her bowl, added some milk, and stirred. “Leesie—” she began.

Her sister waited for her to go on.

Mandy didn’t look up. “What if I gave up my contract here? What if I didn’t stay?”

“You mean what if you didn’t stay next year? That wouldn’t make any difference to me, because I’ll be off to college anyway. Although…”

“Although what?”

“Jake’s going to do his first two years at the community college downriver, and I’ve been thinking of that, too, rather than New Mexico State. If I did that, I’d want to stay here with you. If I could, that is.”

“But what if I decided not even to stay the rest of this academic year?”

Leesie frowned. “What are you saying? You mean just give up? Because someone dresses up your car like a stinkbug?”

“It’s not that. There are lots of things going on in the district that you don’t know about.” She sighed. “Everything is a battle. I can’t think of a day when I haven’t had to go toe-to-toe with someone over something.”

“Like who? Who’s battling you?”

“Principally Grange Timberlain.”

“Mr. Timberlain? You fight with him?”

“Is that so unbelievable?”

“Well, yeah.” Leesie laughed. “All the girls are just a little bit in love with him. He’s such a hunk.”

“Leesie!”

“Or at least since his face got back to normal, he is. It was a little like Halloween at first— weird and creepy. But he’s been good humored about the whole thing. He’s really a crack-up.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Mandy said.

Leesie stirred her oatmeal. “I do see what you mean, though. You’re not the most popular person at the bus garage. And by the way, I don’t know that I want to go back there for just that reason.”

“You went to the bus garage?”

“Hello? You asked me to. I showed up to organize Mr. Berman’s office yesterday morning, and he was so grouchy and ungrateful.”

Mandy’s brows shot up. “What did he say to you?”

“I can’t remember all the things he said.” Leesie chewed thoughtfully. “It was, like, everything was fine before you came to town. One of the lady bus drivers told me not to worry, that he was just mad because someone came and repossessed his boat, and he’s blaming that on you. But how could that be your fault?”

“It can’t,” Mandy said. “Let me find someone— an adult— to go with you. I promised him some help. I have to deliver, but I don’t want him using you as a scapegoat for his frustrations.”

“I had already decided not to go back.” Leesie cleared the dishes and put them in the sink. “Oh, I brought your clay.”

“You did? Good girl. I forgot I asked you to get me some.”

“Willow got it for me.” Leesie grinned, taking a plastic grocery bag out of her backpack. “You’d better check to make sure it’s clay and not a bag full of snakes.”

Mandy looked inside. “Did Willow know the clay was for me?”

“Sure. Why?” Leesie went into a peal of laughter as Mandy pulled a long, venomous-looking clay snake out of the bag. “I assure you, I didn’t know what she had done when I said that about snakes. That’s too funny!”

“Pardon me if I don’t laugh.” Mandy coiled the snake up and put it back into the bag. “You didn’t answer my question. What if I don’t stay?”

Leesie paused in the act of zipping up her backpack and set it on the table. “It’s not that I can’t go back home. I can do that now, and I’d be all right. But I don’t want to. If you don’t stay, I think I’d see if Granny Timberlain would let me stay with her. Maybe I could work for my board and room. Or maybe Fran would give me a job, so I could pay Granny.”

Mandy frowned. “You’ve only been here five days. In five days you’ve decided you want to stay?”

Leesie grinned. “Crazy, isn’t it? There’s my ride. I’ll be home late again. Practice tonight.” She opened the door, stepped out on the deck, and put her head back through the doorway. “Oh, and I told Rael that we’d go trang with him and Jake and Willow tomorrow. I said you make a mean pot of chili, so you need to make one to take with us. Okay?”

“What’s trang?” But Mandy spoke to empty air. She watched Leesie bound down the stairs and saw Willow smile as she opened the door for her. “Well, what do you know,” Mandy muttered. “She does know how to smile.”

Mandy found her purse, picked up the bag of clay, and went out the door. The sky was its usual gray, but the clouds were high, so she didn’t wear another coat over her suit jacket. She got to work ahead of everyone else and spent some time on the Internet looking for possible grants to fund part of her reading program. “Just in case I decide to stay,” she murmured. She found one site that had something almost tailor-made for what she wanted to do, and she was so intent on reading about the application process that she didn’t hear Grange until he stood in her doorway and rapped on the doorframe.

“May I come in?” He had a file folder in his hand.

She eyed him warily. “Yes, of course. I thought you were at the high school all day today.”

“Checking on my whereabouts?” he asked lightly.

She tried to match his tone. “I had a question. I looked to see if you were to be in today. Your calendar said not.”

“What was the question?” He sat down in one of the chairs in front of her desk, leaned back, and crossed his legs. His jaw was dark with a two-day’s growth of beard.

“I wondered if the district had someone on staff who’s good at writing grants. Or perhaps a parent?”

“Midge has taken a shot at it a time or two, but she’s never had much success.” Grange tossed the file folder on her desk. “This is more of a sure thing.”

“What is it?”

“Levy.”

“I don’t understand.” Mandy pulled the folder to her and opened it.