Angie moved the phone back to her ear. “I really sympathize with your problem but Tyson and I couldn’t possibly do it right now. We’re up to our ears in the October production.”
There was a long moment of silence where the guilt didn’t just grow; it multiplied like a flu bug. It was a tactic Jarvis use on suspects, and sometimes on her. He knew if he waited long enough, she’d give the answer he wanted. Well, she would not let herself fall into that trap with Randy Reynolds.
Finally he said, “All right, I understand.”
They uttered a couple of platitudes then hung up. The creepy crawly feeling edging up Angie’s spine indicated two things, guilt plus a sure knowledge that she hadn’t heard the last of the subject.
* * * *
“Marie, please.” Angie urged the woman off the stage and into the wings. Not that she expected their conversation to be private; every sound carried in here—that was why she and Tyson bought the building in the first place. Marie Jason: five foot nine, bushy hair, and blue eyes. Except for her penchant for arguing, always arguing, Marie was perfect for the part of the leading lady. Angie stepped closer. Perhaps a little one-on-one would help. Help what she wasn’t sure because the only problem was this woman’s disagreeability. “Marie. You have been given the leading role in this play. It’s a position of great honor that can—will—make or break the production. We need the character to be convincing.”
The close proximity seemed to make Marie uncomfortable. She backed a half-step. “My character
is
convincing. The trouble is, your…your…narrow-mindedness won’t let me make her come truly alive.”
Angie slapped the manuscript against the nearest solid object, the wall separating the stage from the rest of the auditorium. The report was like a gunshot. Tyson came running. Which made Angie smile for the first time today. She eased back a step, giving over the floor to her partner.
He moved between them. “Okay, here’s how it’s going to be. Your character is supposed to be assertive and forthright but not bitchy. When you put that tone in it, all we hear—all the audience will hear—is bitchiness. You will—”
“I don’t agree. I think the character, in this particular scene, needs to be even more assertive. And while we’re talking about it, I think the line should be changed from, ‘Look David, I asked you to bring in the groceries,’ to ‘I told you to…’”
The words, “You’re fired,” erupted onto Angie’s tongue. To keep the words from leaving her mouth, she bit down hard enough to draw blood, turned on a heel and walked through the hallway to the green room. Behind her, Tyson must’ve been performing his own stare-down. He had a weakness for pretty women, especially redheads, though Angie had to admit, till now he’d pretty much been able to handle them. Okay, okay, be honest; it wasn’t all Tyson’s fault. Angie had wanted her too. Marie Jason had talent, charisma and, best of all, could project her voice to the upper recesses of the theater.
Marie’s words echoed down the hallway. “It’s because you don’t like me. I know it. They all know it.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Then why did you change two lines for one of the others yesterday?”
Tyson’s, “Because, I—” was followed by an
I told you so
harrumph from Marie, who said, “
Because
you don’t like me, that’s why.”
“I’m done arguing with you. The line stays the way it is,” Tyson said.
It wasn’t too late to fire the woman. They were only two weeks into the production. Inconvenient, but not too late to replace her; the understudy was friendly and agreeable. The only trouble was, the understudy couldn’t project worth a darn. It would take hours of extra lessons to teach her to propel her voice up and out.
Suddenly, music started. Loud booming music—the Stones’
Moonlight Mile
album, one of Tyson’s favorites—rattled the factory-turned-theater walls. Was this to drown out the shouting? Or had he sent everyone home? Whatever. A mountain of paperwork waited on her desk. Tyson could handle the staff. Angie sat at the scarred desk, a relic from the past that had been here when they bought the old factory building. Too heavy to haul out, she’d adopted it for her own in this dark, windowless room. Thankfully she didn’t have to spend much time here. Someday, when they got the second floor finished off, she’d be in a great office—at the back of the building overlooking Alton Bay. Though being on water made Angie seasick, she loved looking at it.
She tapped a pen against the checkbook, reminded of the last time the same music played in this building…the day, to the pounding beat of Wild Horses, Jarvis made love to her for the first time. No. Wrong words. He’d plundered her. Like a pirate boarding a captured ship.
Angie pushed the bills aside, stood up and paced twice around the desk. She made a mental effort to tune out the music, grabbed up a manuscript from the cardboard box on the worn flower patterned sofa against the far wall, and flopped beside it. The box—an identical one sat on Tyson’s desk—contained at least a dozen manuscript submissions, mostly from local authors, though there was one promising script from a man in London. From this collection she and Tyson would select two or three plays for the first quarter of next year.
She’d no sooner drawn the first clipped stack of paper from the wrapper when a curt knock sounded on the door. It wasn’t Tyson. He rarely knocked. In his get-things-done-now manner he always burst into a room.
Diva Marie. Had to be her. Tyson fired her and she’d come to Angie for solace. The knock came again, this time a rapid-fire trio. Probably not Marie. She wouldn’t wait this long for a reply. Either way, Angie would bet her next paycheck that big-time trouble sprouted on the other end of that knock.
The door opened. In stepped Randy Reynolds.
TWO
Monday morning, Kiana Smith set the backpack gently on the locker floor. Even so, the soft bump sounded like thunder in the empty school hallway. She hung her jacket on one of the hooks and pulled a wadded bundle of tissues from the right front pocket. She wiped her nose, blotted at the river of tears, then shoved the tissues in her skirt pocket. How could anybody kill Gwen? Not only was she a fabulous teacher, she was a great person, a mentor, and…well, Gwen was more. Just more. She was the only teacher in the whole school who treated kids like people, not children they were forced to babysit five days a week. This school was Gwen Forest’s whole life. And Gwen Forest was Kiana’s whole life. At least it felt that way.
Kiana forced herself to walk with her usual determined step toward the teachers’ lounge. The idea to infiltrate the off-limits space came in the deepest darkest part of last night, mere hours after learning of Gwen’s death. Kiana’s parents tried insisting she stay home today. But she couldn’t. It would be like abandoning everything Gwen did for Kiana and the school.
She sniffled and swiped the wetness with the back of a hand. Darn, she would’ve thought she’d cried out every H
2
O molecule by now. But last night, as the tears flowed, so did ideas on how to uncover the murderer because, sure as the sun would set in the west, the murderer was somebody from this school. Had to be. Ms. Forest spent all her time here, hung out only with people related to the school. The one exception, her best friend, Cilla Philmore, wasn’t much of an exception at all because she was the English teacher’s wife.
The teacher’s lounge lay between the school office and the principal’s office, just steps from the wide, glass front doors—through which twenty-five hundred students would soon rush. It would be hard to explain her presence in school this early in the morning, especially since she was more frequently late than anything else. Kiana tucked the key into the lock. More difficult than explaining her presence though, would be explaining how she came into possession of a key to this particular room.
The door opened on silent hinges. A peek verified that the place was empty. It would be. Teachers didn’t come to school over an hour early. Kiana stepped inside and locked the door.
On the right, two long leather sofas faced each other rather than the wide screen television attached to the far right hand wall. To the left, near the windows, was a small kitchenette. At her far left, beside the door where she’d come in, were spaces for teacher’s personal belongings. The spaces looked like what she had back in nursery school, rectangular wooden cubbyholes with black magic marker names written on tape under each.
Kiana checked first for Gwen’s compartment, but it seemed she didn’t have one. It wasn’t really surprising; she spent very little time mingling with the rest of the staff. Since Kiana had no idea what she was looking for, it would be best to look at everything, though time was of the essence. She reminded herself to be methodical. That way you didn’t miss anything. She would start at the top left, with Mr. Philmore’s compartment and work across the row. His cubicle contained only a Michael Bublé CD.
Michael Bublé
?
The oh-so-ordinary looking Mr. Philmore wasn’t a very good teacher; he stuck strictly to curriculum, never veering away to add lessons from real life or take them on field trips. As a person he was an okay guy, a little pushy but maybe teachers had to be that way sometimes. Kids weren’t always on their best behavior in school. She used to be in that group, talking back, playing pranks. But in the summer between junior and senior high, major changes had happened in her life. Discoveries, she guessed they might be called. Things that put the words life and future in better perspective. Kiana had done some big-time soul searching and come out of it determined to apply herself, to make a future her mother would be proud of.
She moved left to right performing a systematic search. Some of the spaces contained bottled water, stacks of microwavable meals, books—gee, the prim and proper sociology teacher read science fiction!
So far, none contained what she sought: something, anything that might lead to Gwen’s killer. Disappointed, Kiana shoved away the chair with the backs of her knees and examined the lowest row of cubicles. The first on the left was Mr. Chalmers’. Though they kept it quiet, he and Gwen had been seeing each other for almost three years. Kiana never saw the attraction. Mr. Chalmers was a slob and Gwen a perfectionist. He was ordinary looking with the thinning hair and thick calves. And those perpetual sweatsuits! Kiana thought Gwen was beautiful. Her cocoa color skin and dark eyes made her look sultry and mysterious. To Kiana’s mind, she and Mr. Chalmers were as unsuited physically as cats and mice. His compartment sat empty.
As Kiana turned to put the chair back where she found it, her foot kicked something. The object shot like a bullet under the microwave table, clanking off one of the casters. She knelt and groped through the awful cobwebs—what did the janitors do with their time anyway? She reached left. Nothing. She probed right. Where was it?
She leaned down, bracing herself on the lowest shelf that held a mishmash of microwavable containers. With her left ear almost touching the floor she squinted underneath. It took a moment to adjust to the dim light, but there it was—about three inches long and two inches wide—almost invisible against the far right side caster. She’d just wrapped her fingers around it when a key rattled in the lock. Kiana shot to her feet trying to jam the thing into her pocket. But it wouldn’t go!
The door opened. Someone came in. She dropped into the chair she’d been standing on. The object stuck part way out but there was nothing to do about it now except hope it didn’t drop out on the floor.
Kiana drew the wad of tissues from the other pocket then leaned forward and buried her face in her hands. Someone shut the door. And spotted her. Man, was she in trouble. She kept her head down and faked a sob. A pair of shiny loafers and the bottoms of a pair of gray slacks appeared next to her new Charlotte Russe flats. Fingers touched her shoulder. Kiana’s heart thrummed out a battery of irregular beats. For a second it sounded like the Johnny Cash tune A Boy Named Sue. If she’d been with Evan instead of trapped in this room she would’ve laughed.
“I guess you heard the news.”
She didn’t recognize the low voice though she probably should. Kiana nodded and sniffled, bunching the tissue under her nose.
The hand flattened on her shoulder. “Awful thing. Bad enough to be one of our own. Ms. Forest will be missed. Unfortunately all this will bring undue attention to the school.”
Kiana burst into tears. Real ones. The person knelt beside the chair. Oh man. Surely he’d recognize her now. And he did. “Kiana Smith! What are you doing here?”
She swiped the tissue back and forth a few times, gaining time to think. She looked up to see an angry Mr. Philmore. “I was w-walking down the hall and saw the door open.”
“The door wasn’t open.”
“Yes it was. H-halfway. My n-nose was running something awful. I figured the janitor was in here and I could ask for a tissue. I couldn’t go to class like this. And I couldn’t use that brown stuff in the bathroom. It r-rubs your nose all raw.”
“Where’s the janitor?”
“I don’t know. There was nobody here.”
“No one was here,” he corrected.
“Right.”
Out in the corridor came the shushing sounds of shoes on the freshly polished floor. Kiana rose from the chair, her right hand bracing the thing in her pocket. “I guess I’ll be headed to class.”
Mr. Philmore stood also. His hand dropped from her shoulder. “I think we’d better go see Mr. Reynolds and let him know how lax the janitorial staff has been.”
She lumped the tissue in her other fist. “I was going there anyway, t-to see if I could go home. I should’ve listened to my parents and not come here today. I could let Mr. Reynolds know about the door for you.”
“Good.”
The relief in his voice said he really hadn’t wanted to veer from his original objective. Kiana stepped into the hallway, dodging two boys she didn’t know, in Goth clothing. She waited till the teacher’s lounge door closed then beelined for her locker, holding the found item in her pocket. Moments later, head inside the dark metal cubicle, she took a moment to calm her racing heart and dry two very sweaty palms. Kiana drew the object from her pocket. It looked like an eyeglass case but smaller. She popped open the hinged top. Inside was a plastic case she
did
recognize as a contact lens holder. She replaced the plastic container and shut the lid. During lunch break, she would take it to lost and found. She reached up to place it on the top shelf. That’s when she spotted the name on a piece of tape on the underside: Evan Harris.