Collapsible

by Buchanan, Ruth;

  “Yes, I know. But he usually doesn’t give me this much emotional whiplash.” Rachel reached down to adjust the frozen veggies resting against her freshly swollen ankle. “I’m beginning to wonder if he needs counseling.”

  Lynn and Ann stared at her.

  “I mean, it might help. I think his mother really messed him up."

  Ann shook her head and continued scraping yogurt out of the plastic cup. “Leave it alone, Rachel. You can’t fix everything.”

  “I’m not trying to fix everything,” Rachel frowned.

  Ann gave a noncommittal grunt and dropped her empty yogurt cup and spoon onto the coffee table. Lynn headed back to the kitchen.

  “What that boy needs,” Rachel clapped her hands together, “is a girlfriend.”

  “This is a horrible idea,” Ann groaned. “Just stop.”

  “Rachel!” Lynn called from the kitchen. “Don’t do it!”

  “I haven’t done anything!”

  Ann narrowed her eyes. “You haven’t done anything yet. But I know you. I know the way your tricky little mind works.”

  “My tricky little mind?” Rachel gaped.

  “Lee’s way too nice to have you messing with his love life.”

  Rachel snorted. “Lee doesn’t have a love life.”

  Ann stared at her as if she were patently insane. She then pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a slow breath. “You,” she said slowly, “are the most emotionally tone-deaf person I know.”

  Rachel ignored this, having sudden flashes of the barista’s impeccable cheekbones and Sharon Day’s fluttering eyelashes. She shook her head to clear them. “He doesn’t,” she said firmly. “I’m sure of it. Lee tells me everything.”

  “Except that he’s been the one leaving you anonymous gifts,” Ann pointed out. “So not everything.”

  Rachel sipped her coffee, ignoring them. “I wonder what Noelle has been up to?”

  Lynn entered the living room with a fresh cup of coffee and her own breakfast. “Who’s Noelle?”

  “Here we go.” Ann rolled her eyes.

  “What!” Rachel tried to look innocent. “All I said was that I wondered what Noelle is up to! That’s all I said!”

  Ann pointed an accusing finger at Rachel. “That’s not all you’re thinking.”

  “Guys, who’s Noelle?” Lynn asked again. She loaded a fork with scrambled eggs.

  “A student I used to teach. I always thought that she and Lee would make a great couple,” Rachel went on. “But they were both too shy to do anything about it, and then Noelle went away to college and never came back, so it was all a waste.” She closed her eyes and tried to picture the exact curve of Noelle’s cheekbones. Surely they were acceptable. If Rachel hadn’t packed her yearbooks in a box and stored them out in the spider shed, she could have checked right then.

  “Here’s a theory,” Ann said slowly. “Maybe they didn’t like each other.”

  “Nonsense. He’s an artist. She’s a writer. What’s not to like?”

  “I give up,” Ann said.

  After Ann left the room to get dressed and Lynn went to wash the breakfast dishes, Rachel opened her laptop. With a few clicks, she reached Noelle’s social media profile, noting with satisfaction that Noelle still listed herself as single. She opened the messaging system and sent Noelle a private note. She did not mention Lee directly, of course. She was not a complete idiot. She just told Noelle that she had been thinking about her, and that it would be great to reconnect some time. Next time she was in town, she should stop by the school and say hello.

  Rachel smiled and steepled her fingers while staring down at the impeccable line of Noelle’s dainty cheekbones.

  ~*~

  Alex came over mid-morning to pick up Lynn. On the way home, they dropped Rachel at school. Lynn offered to come pick her up at the end of the day, but Rachel reminded them that her car had been left there the night before.

  “I should have thought about this when Detective Smith drove us to the house that night,” Rachel said, “but honestly, I wasn’t thinking clearly at that point.” She wondered, somewhat absently, how Lee had gotten to work.

  “This Detective Smith,” Alex put in. “He seems on top of things.”

  “And that’s another thing,” Lynn said, as if they had been interrupted in the middle of a running argument. She turned around from the front seat to stare back accusingly at Rachel. “I thought you said he was just ordinary.”

  Rachel stared at Lynn, surprised. “Who, Detective Smith? He is.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with your eyes,” Lynn said as Alex pulled crookedly into a space and let the car idle while Rachel gathered her things, “but that man is far from ordinary.”

  26

  Even though it was the last day, Rachel’s fourth-period English class behaved perfectly. Perhaps they could sense that she still felt fragile. They helped her clean the classroom and insisted that she sit with her foot up while they took care of everything.

  Although she suspected that Chris and Ryan only volunteered to clean the ceiling fans for the chance to stand on the tops of desks, Rachel overlooked their questionable motives in order to check one more item off Yolanda’s end-of-term classroom checkout sheet. Fan blades wiped down with a damp rag. Check.

  During Rachel’s lunch break, as she sat at her desk furiously grading term papers, she jumped to the shrill ring of her classroom phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Do you have things that need to be taken out to your car?”

  “Lee? Oh, hey.” Rachel reached to keep the phone cord from swinging into her salad dressing and worked to ensure that her voice sounded normal. “Yes, actually, and I wanted to talk to you—”

  “We’ll be right over,” he said and hung up.

  “Hello?” Rachel asked the dial tone.

  Moments later Lee entered, trailed by three tall sophomore boys. They all looked unaccountably subdued. Rachel was keenly disappointed to see Lee back in his wrinkled khakis, sporting one of his frayed plaid shirts with the bulging fisherman’s vest overtop. However, the clunky glasses and the bushman beard had not reappeared overnight.

  Lee cleared his throat. Although he was smiling, he didn’t quite meet her eyes. “I found these gentlemen in the staff parking lot looking for something constructive to do.” Since the school did not have an open campus, whatever the boys had been doing in the staff lot had been unsanctioned and most likely no good.

  “That’s so fortunate,” Rachel answered lightly. “I have some boxes that need to be loaded into my car.” She pointed with her fork. “They’re right over there.” She fished out her keys and tossed them to Lee, who caught them in midair with a quick downward snatch.

  “I’ll bring these right back,” he said, jangling the keys before turning to motion the boys toward the boxes. He looked everywhere but at her. “Gentlemen?”

  When just a few minutes remained before the end of the lunch hour, Rachel heard Lee jogging back down the hall toward her classroom, his rubber-soled shoes squeaking against the floors.

  “What happened to the wing tips?” Rachel took a light tone, as if just over twelve hours ago she had not hurled herself into his arms in this very room. “No need to dress up today?”

  “No,” he said lightly, pausing in the doorway to toss her the keys. “I don’t have a job interview today.”

  Rachel’s lips formed an O. “Did you have one yesterday?”

  “Yes.” He still hadn’t looked directly at her. His gaze currently fixed itself on a back corner of the room.

  “What? Lee!”

  “I haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to do yet,” he said quickly, “but I had a job offer from Stryker Industries for their senior graphic design position—”

  “Graphic design?” Rachel reached for her cane and struggled out of her rolling desk chair, nearly toppling sideways in the process.

  “Calm down, Miss Cooper,” Lee said wearily. “It’s going to be OK.” He chanc
ed a glance at her face. “Probably.”

  The warning bell rang. Rachel heard the rowdy sound of students returning from lunch.

  “You,” she hobbled toward Lee and jabbed at him with her cane. “You need to tell me what’s going on. Are you working here next year or not? If not, why didn’t you tell me you were applying for other jobs? Have you applied for other ones too? Are they all around here? Are you moving? And oh yeah, why did you pull that dumb stunt and leave me all those presents?” She tried to slip this last one in casually, but her voice landed on it with too much force, needlessly underscoring it. “You owe me an explanation.”

  Lee stood very still before her, looking older and more tired than she had ever seen him. “You’ll get one,” he said, glancing at her with a ghost of his characteristic wry smile, “but not now. I have a class. As do you, by the way, so you’d better go clean that salad off your desk. And check your teeth. I think you’ve got something stuck right there—” He pointed a finger toward his own mouth as if to demonstrate where, but broke off as Rachel swiped at him again with her cane. Unfortunately, she nearly hit Todd Perkins, who chose to enter the room at that precise moment.

  “Oh!” Rachel exclaimed as Lee slipped away. “I’m so sorry, Todd!”

  “It’s OK.” Todd pushed up his glasses by scrunching his nose. He sounded resigned. “I’m getting used to it.”

  ~*~

  As expected, the final car line of the year went pear-shaped. The students were so busy hugging teachers and friends that forcing them into their cars turned out to be a major chore.

  After they had gotten the first rush of cars through with no major accidents, Sharon Day and Rachel were able to relax. Sharon came over to stand beside Rachel. For this last day, she had dressed down in a pair of linen pants and a fitted school polo. How she managed to get her hands on a polo that actually fit was a complete mystery. Rachel’s school shirt always made her look as if she were wearing a blue potato sack with arm holes cut in the sides.

  “How did kindergarten graduation go?” Rachel asked.

  “The usual,” Sharon smiled mistily. Since this was only her second year teaching kindergarten, how she found justification to judge “the usual” made Rachel want to roll her eyes. A short, uncomfortable silence fell between the two women. Rachel decided to mind her own business concerning Sharon and Lee, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t curious. Finding a way to bring the topic up in conversation, however, could take some tricky maneuvering.

  “Who cried more?” Rachel asked, breaking the silence. “The kids or the parents?”

  “I think maybe I did.” Sharon sounded embarrassed, but also proud. She pushed back her hair and swiped at the jewels of sweat beading up on her perfect little nose.

  Rachel smiled.

  Sharon smiled back. Her eyelids fluttered in a million rapid-fire blinks.

  “So,” said Sharon.

  Rachel braced herself. One question about last night’s disaster, and Rachel felt that she would probably sink right down through the ground.

  “What’s your favorite book?” Blinkity blinkity blinkity blinkity.

  “My what?”

  “Your favorite book.” Sharon bit her lip.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Because you are an English teacher and you like to read and—” she broke off. “This isn’t going well, is it?”

  Rachel felt that she’d been caught completely flat-footed. “What isn’t going well?”

  Sharon let her hands fall to her sides. She tilted her head back, blinking toward the sky. For a horrific moment, Rachel thought Sharon might cry.

  “Excuse me for asking,” Rachel continued, keeping her tone carefully neutral, “but what exactly is going on?”

  Sharon turned her gaze from the sky toward a point just over Rachel’s right shoulder. She re-crossed her arms. “Lee said I should try to get to know you,” she said. “He said if I got to know you, I might learn to like you.” She paused to gulp, blushing, “But I don’t know how, because every time I talk to you, I get really nervous and end up feeling really stupid.”

  Something inside Rachel shifted. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, that would make it right.

  But Sharon turned away suddenly, saying, “Hi, there. Can we help you find someone?”

  Striding across the parking lot, holding out his hand to introduce himself to Miss Day, was Detective Smith.

  27

  “I really am fine,” Rachel told Detective Smith once they had reached the air-conditioned sanctum of her empty classroom. She perched on her desk with her foot up on a student chair and her cane across her lap. He stood in the middle of the room with his arms folded. “I’m just really embarrassed by the whole thing, to tell you the truth. I spent all day hoping none of my colleagues would bring it up.”

  “And did they?”

  “Actually, no. Yolanda probably told them everything this morning before I got here and made them promise to leave me alone or something like that. That’s her general M.O. in situations like this.”

  “You’ve been in situations like this before?” Detective Smith asked, sounding interested.

  “Not exactly,” Rachel admitted. “You know what I mean.”

  “Ms. Martinez seems a very capable woman,” he commented.

  “She is.”

  Silence stretched between them. Rachel wondered why he had come.

  “You shouldn’t be embarrassed,” Detective Smith said, regarding Rachel seriously. “The way I see it, you reported what could have been a possible crime and called the authorities instead of trying to solve the case yourself or by taking matters into your own hands. If we had more citizens who were as proactive as you, our job would be a lot easier.”

  “You don’t have to try to make me feel better about this.”

  “I’m not trying to make you feel better,” he said. “That’s not why I came.”

  “Why did you come?” she asked. “Does it have something to do with the case?”

  “Actually, no,” he regarded her levelly. “I’m sorry to tell you this now, but we never thought that anything you told us had anything to do with the case. I still wanted to talk to you, and other than showing up at your house, this was the only other sure way I had of getting in touch.”

  “Did you need to ask me something?”

  He stared at her. “You’re really not good at picking up on clues, are you?”

  “So they tell me.”

  She studied him critically, thinking of what Lynn had said about him being far from ordinary. He met her gaze coolly, arms crossed over his chest. Even from across the room, she could see that his eyes were not brown after all, but a cool, light grey.

  “Whatever it is you want,” she said at length, “you’re going to need to spell it out for me.”

  “So it would seem.”

  Rachel waited, perched on the desk, back straight, eyebrows raised.

  “I wanted to know if you’d like to go to dinner some time,” he said.

  Rachel couldn’t help it. She laughed. “Seriously?”

  “That’s not a good sign,” he said, giving nothing away.

  “May I ask you a question first?”

  “Sure.”

  She thought of Call-Me-Matt in the waiting room, leaning forward to smile into her eyes, his arm brushing hers. She thought of how she’d wielded that invitation to church like a weapon, assuming it would drive him off. She thought about every dumb thing she’d said and done in this man’s presence and wondered why on earth he would ever want to have dinner with her.

  “Do you believe in God?” she asked abruptly.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a Christian?”

  “Yes. And I’m assuming that since you work at a Christian school, you are too, although I planned to ask you more about that when we had dinner. We can talk about it now, if you like.”

  “Do you go to church?”

  “I do.”

  “Where?�
�

  He told her. “I lead a junior boys’ Bible study on Sunday mornings,” he volunteered. “If that helps in my favor.”

  “Ah.” She reeled a bit at this.

  “You asked me three questions,” he pointed out. “Are you going to answer mine?”

  “I don’t know what to say,” she admitted.

  “You have a few options.” He unfolded his arms and crossed them the other way. It did not seem defensive when he did it. It merely made him seem more present in the room. More solidly there, somehow. Braced for anything. “You could say yes, or you could say no,” he told her.

  “I think I’m going to have to say no.”

  “You don’t sound happy about it,” he observed.

  “I’m not, actually.”

  He waited for her to continue.

  Rachel wondered how to put it into words. She wasn’t even sure she understood herself. At least, not yet. “It’s come to my attention recently that I’m not very good at reading people.”

  He raised his eyebrows, but said nothing, waiting for her to continue.

  “You seem nice,” she said, “but what do I know? You could be a murderer.”

  His eyes lit. “I’m not.” He unfolded his arms and slid his hands into his pockets. “I’m actually a nice guy.”

  “Right, but if you were a murderer, I wouldn’t realize it until after you’d already cut me into little pieces, would I?”

  “I’m sure it wouldn’t come to that,” he said, which made her laugh.

  “I’d like to say yes,” she admitted, “but I think I have some things to work out first.”

  “It’s just dinner,” he said.

  “I know. But still.”

  “I see.”

  When she volunteered nothing else, Detective Smith reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He walked toward where she still sat atop her desk. She saw a flash of his badge as he pulled something from his wallet and extended it toward her.

  A business card. He flipped it over and pointed to a row of digits scrawled on the back.

  “This is my personal number. How about when you figure it out,” he said, “you call me.”