“Will do. Oh, and one more thing.” The secretary nodded at the closed door to her left. “Mr. Bailey wants to see you in his office before classes start.”
Oh, wonderful! A private session with the Academy principal who also happened to be her brother-in-law and definitely not one of her favorite people. The day was off to a roaring start!
“You asked to see me, Tom?”
Tom Bailey looked up from the letter he was reading, his brow furrowed with annoyance at the interruption of Very Important Administrative Business. “This isn’t a family gathering, Ms. Winslow. If you’re determined to ignore professional protocol, at least close the door before you open your mouth.”
“Good morning to you, too.” Without waiting to be invited, she took a seat across from him. “What’s on your mind, Mr. Bailey?”
“Margaret tells me you managed to get yourself invited to the reception at the Burtons’ on Saturday.”
“I prefer to say I was coerced—as much by your wife as anyone else.”
He leaned back in his fancy swivel chair and fixed her in his pale-eyed stare, the one he used to intimidate freshmen. “Regardless, let me remind you what I said when all this mess with Penelope Harrington started. Our school prides itself on its fine reputation and I won’t tolerate its being sullied by scandal. Bad enough you’ve been on staff less than a month before your name’s splashed all over the front pages of every newspaper within a fifty-mile radius, without any more shenanigans now that the fuss is finally beginning to die down. I did you a favor when I persuaded the Board of Governors to give you a position here, because—”
“Actually,” Sally cut in, “I’m the one who did you a favor, Tommy, by stepping in at very short notice when my predecessor took early maternity leave and left you short one art teacher.”
He turned a dull and dangerous shade of red. Subordinates did not interrupt the principal of the Academy and they particularly did not challenge the accuracy of his pronouncements. “You showed up in town unemployed!”
“I came home looking forward to a long-overdue vacation which I cut short because you were in a bind.” She glanced pointedly at the clock on the wall. “Is there anything else, or am I free to go and do what the Board hired me to do? I have a senior art history class starting in ten minutes.”
If it hadn’t been beneath his dignity, he’d have gnashed his perfectly flossed teeth. Instead he made do with a curt, “As long as we understand one another.”
“I’ve never had a problem understanding you, Tom,” she said, heading for the door. “My sister’s the one I can’t figure out. I’ve never been able to fathom why she married you.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. She’d been known as a wild child in her youth, but she liked to think she’d matured into a better person since—one for whom taking such cheap shots wasn’t her normal style. But “normal” had been in short supply practically from the minute she’d set foot in town again, beginning with the morning she and Penelope Burton Harrington had happened to run into one another in the Town Square.
“Sally!” Penelope had fairly screamed, rushing to embrace her as if a rift spanning nearly a decade had never crippled their friendship. “Oh, it’s wonderful to see you again! It’s been like living in a tomb around here lately, but now that you’re back, it’ll be just like old times, and we can kick some life into the place.”
The cruel irony of her words had come back to torment Sally during the long, sleepless nights since the accident. But thanks to Tom’s having hired her, at least her days were too busy to allow for much wallowing in useless guilt, which made her parting remark to him all the more unforgivable. To satisfy her own sense of fair play, the least she could do was seek him out later and apologize.
She had a full teaching load that day, though, plus a meeting at lunch with the nit-picking head of the Fine Arts department, and an after-school interview with a furious student who didn’t understand why copying an essay on Henri Matisse from the Internet was plagiarism and warranted a big fat F on his midterm report.
Somehow, the events of first thing slipped to the back of her mind and she forgot about Tom. She forgot, too, about that morning’s phone call from the man who hadn’t left a message.
But he didn’t forget about her. He came to her classroom just as she was stuffing her briefcase with the assignments she planned to mark that evening. By then it was after five o’clock and the building was pretty much deserted except for the cleaning staff. In fact, when she heard the door open, she was so sure it was the janitor, come to empty the waste bins and clean up the sinks, that she said, “I’ll be out of your way in just a second,” without bothering to look up from her task.
The door clicked closed which, in itself, should have alerted her to trouble. “No rush. I’ve got all the time in the world,” came the reply, and there it was: the dark, gravelly voice which had so captivated the school secretary earlier.
It didn’t captivate Sally. It sent shock waves skittering through her. The stack of papers in her hand flipped through her fingers and slithered over the floor. Flustered, she dropped to her knees and began gathering them together in an untidy bundle.
“I’d no idea teachers put in such long hours,” Jake said, his cane thudding softly over the floor as he came toward her. “Let me help you pick those up.”
“No, thank you!” Hearing the betraying edge of panic in her voice, she took a deep breath and continued more moderately, “I don’t need your help. In fact, you shouldn’t be here at all. If Tom Bailey finds out—”
“He won’t. His was the only car in the parking lot and he was leaving as I arrived. We’re quite alone, Sally. No one will disturb us.”
She was afraid of that! “Oh, really? What about the cleaning staff?”
“They’re busy in the gym and won’t get down to this end of the building for at least another hour.” His hand came down and covered hers as she scrabbled with the pages still slipping and sliding from her grasp. “You’re shaking. Are you going to faint again?”
“Certainly not!” she said, scooting away from him before he realized how easily his touch scrambled her brains and stirred up memories best left untouched. “I just don’t like people creeping up and taking me by surprise, that’s all.”
“I’m not ‘people,’ and I didn’t creep.” He tapped his bad leg. “It’s a bit beyond my capabilities, these days.”
“No, you’re the wounded hero come home to bury his wife, but if you insist on being seen with me at every turn, you’re going to lose the public outpouring of sympathy you’re currently enjoying, and become as much of a pariah as I have.”
“I’m not looking for sympathy, my lovely. I’m looking for information.”
My lovely…that’s what he’d called her in the days when they’d been in love; when they’d made love. And the sound of it, falling again from his lips after all this time, brought back such a shock of déjà vu that she trembled inside.
Late August, the summer she’d turned seventeen, just weeks before he started his junior year at university, two hundred miles away…wheeling gulls against a cloudless sky, the distant murmur of the incoming tide, the sun gilding her skin, and Jake sliding inside her, with the tall grass of the dunes whispering approval in the sea breeze. “I miss you so much when we’re apart,” he’d told her. “I’ll love you forever.”
But he hadn’t. Thirteen months later, she’d spent two months studying art in France. When she returned, she found out from Penelope that he’d been seeing a college coed while she’d been gone.
She’d been crushed, although she really shouldn’t have been. As her weeks abroad passed, there’d been signs enough