“Miss Langford, you and I need to have a discussion.”
She turned back wearily to face her towering boss’s stern face. He had that glint in his eye, she noticed. The one that always spelled trouble. For her.
“Have a seat, Mr. Nivens. I’ll just clean up a bit as we talk.” She avoided his eyes as her hands busily picked up the shuffle of papers on her desk, brushing the bits of twigs and crushed leaves into the garbage.
“I would prefer to speak in my office. In a more formal setting.” He was still standing, Gillian noted.
“Oh, why bother to walk all the way down there?” she murmured airily. “We’re both here now. Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind?” Smoothly, without a pause in action, Gillian slipped the books into order on her shelves, removing a bubble gum paper from Jonah’s reader. When he didn’t speak, she finally glanced up and found his remote stare fixed firmly on her. “Well?”
“Miss Langford, do you ever read the notifications I leave in your mailbox?”
He brushed a hand gingerly over the edge of the table, checking for stickiness before reclining against it. It was the most relaxed she had ever seen him, and the sight was very appealing. As she watched, Jeremy brushed a hand through his hair, destroying the immaculately arranged strands. “Miss Langford?”
She jerked her gaze away from the silky softness of his hair and focused on his frowning face.
“Of course I read them,” she muttered finally. Her thought winged back over the past few weeks, trying to recall which particular missive he could be referring to. If the truth were known, she barely glanced at his memos lately. She had been centering every bit of time and attention on her students.
Jeremy crossed his arms over his chest.
“Then I’m sure you noticed that I asked teachers to be particularly aware of permission notes and the necessity of having parents sign if their child was to be taken off the school property,” he said smugly. “May I have the notes?”
“But we only walked through the land right next door,” she told him wide-eyed. “Surely we don’t need a permission slip for a little nature walk.”
“I take it that you didn’t bother to procure the signatures then,” he bit out, shaking his head angrily. “Miss Langford, you cannot keep ignoring the rules that are part of the function of this school.”
“Oh, but surely for a little nature walk…”
“Your little walk may have engendered a lawsuit,” he rasped, standing straight and tall before her.
“What?” Gillian stared at him, half-amused. “Why would anyone sue the school?”
“What if Jed’s cut becomes infected and requires further treatment? What if one of the children had been badly hurt? What if you were injured and they were without a leader?” His eyes were icy as they glared at her.
Gillian shook her head. “We didn’t go to Siberia,” she said softly, peering up at him in confusion. “We walked not fifty feet beyond the school property. Any one of them could have made it back safely, without trouble.”
“Deidre Hall couldn’t,” he said angrily, standing directly in front of her. “What about her?”
Gillian thought about the young girl in the wheelchair whom she’d pushed through the undergrowth. She shrugged. “All right, Deidre needed my help. And I was there. Nothing happened. No big deal.”
“Not this time, no.” His jacket was unbuttoned, and Gillian could see the missing button on his vest as his hands planted themselves firmly on his hips. For some reason that lost button gave her encouragement; maybe Jeremy Nivens was human after all.
“Fine,” she murmured softly, staring up into his stern face. “I admit I should have checked with you first. I’m sorry I didn’t advise you of my plans or get the childrens’ parents to sign permission slips. I’ll ensure that it doesn’t happen again.” Gillian smiled placatingly. “Is that all right?”
“I don’t think it is. You have perverse ideas on teaching that seem to dictate constantly removing the children from the classroom. I cannot condone that. The classroom is where they should be doing their learning, not in the woods.”
Gillian tried to control the surge of rage that flooded through her at his words. How dare he criticize her efforts! She was a good teacher, darned good. And she focused her attention on teaching children to learn in whatever situation they found themselves.
“My students,” she began angrily, “are learning to be aware of the things around them, whether or not they are in the classroom. Today they experienced all five of the sensory perceptions of fall. They saw things in a different way than they would have looking out the window at the woods.”
“Five senses?” He jumped on her statement immediately, his voice full of dismay. “What did they eat?”
“We peeled the outer shell off acorns and tried to crunch the centers. They tasted the flavor of the woods,” she told him proudly.
If it was possible, Jeremy Nivens’s body grew even tauter as he stood glaring down at her. His hands clenched at his sides, and his jaw tightened.
“They’ll probably all get sick,” he muttered angrily. His voice was cold and hard. “Why can’t you learn to just follow the rules?” he demanded angrily.
“Why can’t you learn to live with a few less rules and a lot more feeling in your life?” she flung at him. “This isn’t a prison. It’s a school—a place of learning and experimentation meant to prepare the children for the future. If you constantly deny them the right to find things out for themselves, how will they solve the problems of their world? You can’t keep them under lock and key.”
He stood there fuming, his anger palpable between them. Gillian could feel the tension crackling in the air and tried not to wince when his hard, bitter, exasperated tones stabbed at her.
“In the future you will okay all field trips with me, whether the students go fifty feet or fifty miles. Do you understand, Miss Langford?”
Gillian stifled the urged to bend over at the waist and salaam to him. He would find nothing funny in such an action, she knew.
“Yes, Mr. Nivens,” she murmured softly. “I understand completely.” Her voice held a nasty undertone that she did not attempt to disguise. “Would you also like to sit in on my classes and make sure I’m not teaching my students political activism or the making of pipe bombs?”
He turned to leave, stopping by the door for a moment His eyes glittered with something strange as he smiled dryly at her. “Thank you, Miss Langford,” he murmured slyly. “I may yet find it necessary to do that.”
She could have kicked herself for offering, and spent the next hour mentally booting herself around the room for falling into his little trap. “Odious manipulator,” she mumbled, checking her daybook for the plans she had made. “As if I’d let him in here to check up on me. No way.” Of course there was really nothing she could do to stop him, Gillian knew. And if he decided she wasn’t doing her job, he could call for a review on her work.
Why did Michael have to die? she asked God for the zillionth time. If he were alive, they would be married, and she would be in her happy, carefree position at St. Anne’s, blissfully oblivious to the presence of Mr. Jeremy Nivens and his immense book of rules.
But there was nothing to be gained by going down that road. She would just have to learn to accept it and get on with living. The past was no place to dwell, and time was flying by.
Gillian laid out the work she had planned for the next day and checked to see there were enough copies of the Thanksgiving turkey she planned to begin in art class next week. At least