CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
In the middle of the night, I got a text from a blocked number. It said: Don’t take the job. Stay free. I knew who it was. Kecia. But I didn’t tell Deb or Connery. What we’d learned about the hardworking single mother, student, and temporary admin was that she had an IQ off the charts. Not only did she have a head for business, but she had taken enough programming classes for a minor in computer science, if she’d wanted.
I couldn’t help but remember how she’d said one of her goals was a good education. She hadn’t said degree. I wonder if she’d realized she would soon be turning her back on the degree, on the graduation ceremony, and the diploma that was the symbolic reward for all her hard work?
When Robert Quartermaine had been killed, her operation had been put into jeopardy — ironically not from anything she’d done.
The FBI geeks had decrypted the drive, arrested and interrogated all the operators who had sold the skimmed credit cards and stolen identities Kecia had supplied them. Not one of them had met her face-to-face. She’d been meticulously discreet.
James Connery said the geeks were certain that she had been winding down operations. They suspected that she had intended to graduate, end her criminal enterprise at the university, and move on to a new location.
I didn’t agree. I remembered her comment about early retirement. I was fairly certain she had retired somewhere to raise her daughter and live off the millions she’d stashed away. But I didn’t want to find out for sure. That would mean the FBI had caught her. That her daughter would be left without a dad, or a mom. And she was, for a criminal mastermind, a very good mom.
The question about taking the Admissions Counselor job had not been up to me, after all. Dr. Stubbs hired Penny, and one of the other applicants, after telling me I did not need to return to the office to finish out my temporary employment with the Admission Office.
She was never going to forgive me for finding that hard drive and using it to implicate her in the identity-theft ring.
I was, like a coward, relieved not to have to turn the job down. But I would have, even without the anonymous text advising me to do so.
I should not have felt so free, knowing that my working with the FBI had made me a pariah to the university’s HR department. Even Deirdre couldn’t fix what I had broken. She had already postponed a coffee date with me once. I hoped I’d be able to explain things well enough to gain her forgiveness.
I’d let Sue know I was back in the mystery shopping rotation, and she’d promised me that massage spa shop soon. I wasn’t going to hold my breath.
I’d also volunteered to work in Anna’s classroom once a week. I just wanted to keep a little closer eye on her, for a while.
When I arrived, the kids were running around the classroom like they’d had their sugar fix already and for a moment I worried that I’d gotten my day wrong. Until Mrs. Glenn approached me with the air of a drowning woman ready to cling on to her safety net. “So glad you could come.”
I was shocked to see the normally sanguine teacher so harried. “Late spring fever?”
“No. Zachary Taylor was expelled this morning in front of everyone and after an hour of numb silence, they’ve gone wild.”
“Oh.” I didn’t approve of all the expellings that were going on. And I knew Mrs. Glenn had to be very rattled to have told me the name of the child who’d gotten the axe this time. I knew Zachary. I didn’t ask Mrs. Glenn what happened, though, because she was very likely to realize she shouldn’t have said anything to me. I just said, “Tell me how I can help.”
“Why don’t you read to them for me, while I go talk to the principal for a few minutes.”
I realized, at that moment, that the student teacher was gone. Of course she was. It was exam week at the university. All the student teachers were finished for the school year.
No wonder the kids were running wild. “Go. I’ll get them reading.”
I didn’t watch to see if she went, I knew she had. I turned to the children and called out with a false lilt. “Story time!” They came running, skipping and Jeremy Sisson hopped until Serenity Smith hissed at him, “Stop that Jeremy or I’ll tell teacher and you’ll get expelled just like Zach.”
Jeremy instantly tamed his hop to a skip, but there was a look of defiance on his face that didn’t bode well for his future at the school.
I grabbed two books, and said I’d let everyone who was quiet and sitting in the next sixty seconds vote on which one to read.
Miraculously, every child sat and grew quiet.
I held up the first book. “How many want this one?” About half the hands shot up.
“Jimmy, you can only vote with one hand,” I said, waiting to count until he had put down one arm.
“Okay,” I held up the second book. “Who wants to read this one?” Two thirds of the hands shot up.
“I think we have a winner.” I sat down in the reading chair, and smiled at Anna, as I began to read.
I am not a teacher. I once thought of substitute teaching when Anna went back to school, but after a stint in the school industrial arts classroom where I found three students sneaking turns at the saw table, I quickly realized that was not for me.
But I am a good reader. I read the first book, pleased at how attentive the students were. I only started to get nervous when the book ended, and Mrs. Glenn had not yet returned.
In desperation, feeling the kids getting restless, I grabbed the second book, the one that had not received enough votes the first time. “Good news. We have time for a second book.”
The girls sat quietly with little sighs of contentment. The boys groaned.
I looked at the book in my hand. “Little House on the Prairie.” Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’d loved her as a child. Seth had loathed her.
I found the bookmark and began to read, trying not to watch the slowly crawling second hand in the big round clock over the classroom door. The door where Mrs. Glenn should be re-entering her classroom anytime now. I hoped.
Twenty minutes ticked by as Laura and Pa’s hands became bloodied from twisting haysticks to keep them warm during a frightful blizzard. The children, worn out from this morning’s fracas, and their tummies full of cupcake and milk, sat and listened to my ever hoarsening voice like catatonic little robots whose batteries had run seriously low.
At last Mrs. Glenn, looking her usual capable self, stepped back into the room. The children roused themselves and no one protested when I stopped reading mid-sentence, so I stuck the bookmark in at the beginning of the chapter I was halfway through. The girls would appreciate it, though the boys would hate me—if any of them noticed my dastardly deed.
“Recess!” Mrs. Glenn announced brightly and the children—batteries mysteriously recharged, rushed toward their cubbies in that half organized, half chaotic way of school children about to be freed into the playground.
Fortunately, the second grade classrooms all let out directly onto said playground, so Mrs. Glenn softened her normally iron-rigid rule that all children had to be lined up and quiet before she opened the door. She just opened it as soon as the first child appeared and gave Serenity a look that stopped the child cold with whatever comment she had been about to make about following the rules. With a little toss of her dark curls, the girl darted out the door, “I call the four-square court.”
“Thank you.” Mrs. Glenn smiled at me, her silent thanks making me feel like I actually had helped. “Have you ever thought of being a teacher? You’d be great.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” I lied.
The only thing that kept me from launching myself out the door like Serenity was the fact that it would get back to the PTA moms before I even left the parking lot.
“No problem. The kids were great,” I lied, suddenly realizing this could be the boost I needed to get me recognition as a responsible mom.
“I hope you won’t speak of this to anyone. It is all confidential of course.”
“I won’t say a word.” Except to Seth. And Deb. I didn’t feel much guilt about that, though. Mrs. Glenn had already talked to the principal and he had the loosest lips on the planet. His idea of discretion suggested to me he’d looked up the wrong word in the dictionary at some point in his school career. As a student, I mean, not as a teacher, or administrator.
“Zero tolerance, you know,” she said. As if that would be enough to frighten me into silence. Sometimes teacher forgot that they didn’t have any say over the parents.
Although, I suppose, since they hold our children hostage five days a week, that isn’t strictly true. “Lips are sealed,” I assured her, making the universal “zipped lips” motion to cement my vow of secrecy. Husbands and best friends do not count, after all.
I glanced at my watch. I had fifteen minutes to make the twenty minute drive to my next shop location.
It took me thirty minutes to get to the store, and five minutes to find a parking space close enough so that I’d be able to hurry out and pick up the kids.
As I gathered up my mystery shop tools, I realized I was smiling. Seth was just going to have to understand. I wanted to be a mystery shopper, and a mom, and a wife. I didn’t want to be an Admissions Counselor, or a teacher, or even an FBI agent. For now.