Death Dangles a Participle (Miss Prentice Cozy Mystery Series) (4 page)

“Sorry, Amelia. Looks like Sam escaped.” He led me to the screen porch and behind the large rolling trash bin. “See?” He fingered a curling edge of screening that had come loose from the corner frame. “He must have squeezed out through here. Look.” He pulled out a tuft of gray fur.

A sick, sinking feeling filled my middle. “I didn’t see that earlier.”

Vern nodded. “It’s hard to spot.” He looked out at the field of snow. “No tracks. He must have left before the snowfall this afternoon.” A long arm wrapped around my shoulders. “I’m so sorry, Amelia. I really liked the old boy.”

Despite the cold of the porch, my eyes filled with hot tears. “Don’t use the past tense, please,” I whispered.

“What’s going on?” Gil asked from the back door. The warm air from the house drew us inside.

Vern told him.

Gil led me gently inside. “Are you all right?”

I gave him a watery smile. “I don’t know why this is upsetting me so. It’s not like I even liked that awful old bag of fur. Sometimes, it actually seemed that Mother loved him more than she did me.”

Gil pulled me to his chest and hugged. “He’s your link to her. To her and your dad, that’s why.”

“How did you get so smart?” I murmured into his shirt.

He kissed my forehead.

Vern gave a polite cough. “I’m too young to see this, I think,” he announced. “Besides, I’ve got a paper due. Don’t worry, Amelia. He’ll come back.” He disappeared into the abyss that was his room, leaving Gil and me to our cuddling.

“Miss Prentice? Are we going to have to do a Shakespeare paper this term?” was the poignant plaint from sophomore Hardy Patschke as I made my way through the hallway teeming with teenagers.

“‘It must follow as the night the day,’ Hardy,” I quoted over my shoulder, not bothering to correct his use of my old name. There would be time enough for that later.

Despite Sam’s disappearance, there was a smile on my face today that I couldn’t control by muscle power alone. It was nice to be married, I thought, and the mornings with Gil—even in a drafty pre-dawn bedroom—were the nicest.

The first day back at school after Christmas vacation had never been my favorite, and I wasn’t alone in that sentiment. In September, students are at least temporarily happy to be back, resuming friendships and plunging once again into the familiar routine, but things are different in January.

The two-week taste of freedom during the holidays serves merely as a cruel reminder of the imprisonment to which they must soon return. Of course, my students never asked me whether I was happy to be back. They probably pictured me rubbing my hands and cackling with glee at the prospect of renewed opportunities to torture them.

I hung up my coat in the classroom closet and headed for the teachers’ workroom. In the now-packed hall, there was a steadily intensifying din from slamming lockers and assorted mating calls of the Human Adolescent. My ears caught random vignettes as I shouldered through the crowd.

“So what’d ya get for Christmas?”

“Yeah, we broke up. I can’t believe he’s taking her to the ice festival.”

“—skiing at Whiteface. He’s in a hip-to-ankle cast.”

“Amelia! How are you?” said someone, inches from my right ear. It was Judith Dee, the school nurse, shouting above the racket. Her helmet-style hairdo was unscathed in the churning throng. I doubted if even a hurricane could dislodge a single strand.

Funny,
I thought,
it has never occurred to me before, but her hair is the same color as Sam the cat’s: a flat blue-gray.

Saving my lung power for the classroom, I smiled and bobbed my head back and forth in response, then beckoned for her to follow.

We entered the workroom together. The place was empty, I observed gratefully. I had lots of copies to make before the class bell rang. Because of painful memories, I no longer made copies at the public library.

Judith shut the door with a sharp rattle. “Whew! It’s wild out there! Say, did you hear about the Eisler boy? Broke his kneecap skiing. And Mrs. Brannon’s psoriasis is back.”

I frowned. I’d already seen Jimmy Eisler’s well-decorated cast and didn’t want to know about the Latin teacher’s skin problems. Judith had a bad—and, I was sure, unprofessional—habit of discussing the medical condition of members of the populace at large.

I opened the top of the copier. “Would you like to copy anything?”

She smiled archly. “No thanks. I’m just waiting out the traffic jam.” She waved her hand toward the hallway. “But don’t mind me. You go right ahead.”

While I busied myself at the copy machine, Judith pulled a compact from her purse and began dabbing at an already well-powdered nose.

“Did you have a nice Christmas?” I asked, making conversation.

Judith squinted into her compact. “Just lovely, thank you. I went skiing in the Laurentians,” she said, referring to a popular Canadian vacation spot. “I always promised myself I’d learn to ski someday, and I did. Of course, I’m no expert, but I know how it’s done now.”

“That’s marvelous, Judith.”

I was surprised. Such a trip was expensive. How on earth could she have afforded it? As a part-timer, she earned even less than I did.

Her eyes slid over toward me. “How’s married life treating you?” she asked, returning her compact to her purse.

“Just fine, thanks.” I left it at that, but I could see by her expression that she wasn’t satisfied.

I was fishing about in my mind for another evasive answer when the door rattled open, and science teacher Blakely Knight strode in. The din from the hallway was abruptly cut short when he slammed the door unceremoniously behind him, muttered something unrepeatable, and headed for the row of message boxes on the back hall.

Judith, deterred neither by the racket nor my vagueness, probed some more. “How was the honeymoon?”

“Honeymoon?” Blakely demanded as he shoved his dome-topped lunchbox into his cubbyhole and pulled a sheaf of notes from his memo box. “Who had a honeymoon?” He held his messages up like a hand of playing cards and peeked over them to leer at me. “You?”

Before I could throttle her into silence, Judith blurted, “That’s right. She married Gil Dickensen over the Christmas break. You know, the newspaper editor.”

“Really?” He tossed most of his notes into the wastebasket and one dark, sardonic eyebrow lifted as he looked me up and down. “I’m disappointed, Amelia. I thought you might wait for me to finish sowing my wild oats.”

I gave him the cold stare such a comment deserved. “Your oats and anything else of yours, for that matter, is—I mean, are—no business of mine.”

I flounced out the door, followed closely by Judith and the sound of Blakely’s mocking laughter.
So much for trying to make a snappy rejoinder.

The hallway was quieter now, and Judith’s voice carried, though she spoke
sotto voce
. “Blakely can be a bit of a rascal at times.”

Boor is more like it.

“It’s almost understandable when you know his family background. His father grew up here, and he was quite a dog in his day, if you know what I mean.” She tittered in a flustered manner. “I knew his mother too. She named Blakely after a hero in a romance novel, and I must say, he is intelligent and attractive.”

As we parted company at the foot of the stairs next to the nurse’s office, she rolled her eyes provocatively. “You two might have gotten together if you hadn’t gotten married.” Her tone implied that I’d missed a golden opportunity. She sighed. “We’ll never know now, will we?” Smiling regretfully, she closed the door of her office.

“No, we won’t, thank goodness,” I muttered and headed down the hall.

“Miss Prentice,” said Hardy Patschke accusingly as I entered my classroom, “the late bell just rang.”

I smiled at him and pointed to the blackboard where I had written, “Mrs. Dickensen.” “That’s my new name. Five extra points on Friday’s quiz for everyone who remembers to use it.”

There was a chorus of greetings. “Good morning, Mrs. Dickensen.”

“Are you gonna give us homework, Mrs. Dickensen?”

“What does Mr. Dickensen look like? Is he cute?”

“He’s adorable,” I said dryly, “Now get out your lit books and turn to the poem, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’ ”

At lunchtime, I used the pay phone in the dining hall to do what I had been putting off for days: keep my promise to Alec, regarding Lily.

Lily answered on the first ring. “Oh, you’re back, then,” she said coolly.

“We’re back. We’ve been back since last week. Question: what on earth were you thinking, telling Marie that a student of mine was suicidal?”

“What? Oh, that. I just wanted her to tell me where you were, that’s all.”

“I know that, but it was wrong.”

“What if it wasn’t?”

“Huh?”

Lily went on, “I mean, what if it was true; wouldn’t you want me to get in touch with you?”

“Well, yes, but—“

“And it could have been true, you know, so what’s the difference?”

I sighed. What was the use? I changed the subject. “Listen, Lily, about Alec—”

“How’s Sam doing?” she interrupted. She’d always been inordinately fond of my cat, and spoiled him at every opportunity.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told you, I don’t know. He disappeared while we were out of town. I feel terrible about it, but right now, what I called for was—”

“You should feel terrible. I could have told you that that idiot nephew of Gil’s wouldn’t take proper care of him.”

“It wasn’t Vern’s fault. He just—ran away. Lily, Alec called last night and I think perhaps—”

“Don’t change the subject. What are you doing about Sam?”

“We called the Humane Society and Gil put an ad in the paper. It’s been in there for days. Look, I understand your concern, but it’s not really your business to—”

She interrupted me yet a third time. “What? Sam, not my business? How dare you, Amelia. I love th—that dear creature. And that makes it my business!”

“Lily, of course you’re right, but right now I wanted to talk to you about Alec.”

There was a pause. I could hear her drawing a long breath. “That, Amelia,” she said at last, “is none of
your
business.” She hung up.

~~~

“Put away your books,” I ordered, rising from my desk at the beginning of the next class, “and pass these back.” I handed a stack of test papers to the front person in each row.

There was a collective groan.

“You’ll have until the end of the period. Don’t finish too quickly. This is a tough one, but there’s an extra-credit question.”

Quiet descended on the room, and I returned to my reverie.

“Why are you smiling?” an accusing voice murmured.

I looked over at Serendipity Shea, slumped in the front row seat I’d assigned to her. Her high-gloss lipstick gave her mouth a curious pouting prominence. Now it was firmly turned downward.

“I love my job,” I said pleasantly and held up a copy of the exam.

I could tell by her expression she thought my answer revealed me to be the vilest sort of sadist.

“Everyone should love her job as much as I do,” I added sweetly.

Serendipity scowled and hunched once more over her paper. A wing of her white-blonde hair flopped down, concealing her face, but from her body language I could guess that she was having trouble with this test.

I fervently hoped not. In fact, I longed for the girl to get all A’s, especially if it meant I didn’t have to meet with her mother again. Mrs. Brigid Shea was a strident, assertive woman who refused to concede that homework was actually a good thing, not a torture devised by yours truly to ruin her daughter’s social life.

Think positively,
I told myself, scanned the room for paper-peekers, then returned to pleasant thoughts of Gil.

“There’s the bell,” I declared unnecessarily thirty minutes later. “Put your papers on my desk as you leave, please.”

Hardy Patchke was the first to leave. “Piece o’ cake,” he said as he handed his test over, and swaggered out the door. I was happy to see most of my students had relieved expressions on their faces as they filed out.

Serendipity, however, was in a foul mood. She slammed her paper on my desk, hitched her designer purse over her shoulder and stalked out in as dignified a manner as her low-slung designer jeans would permit.

Every day after school, it was my habit to walk to Chez Prentice. As a partner in the business enterprise, it was my duty to check on things. Besides, I needed the exercise.

On this particular afternoon, as I stepped carefully over the icy patches, I thought about the students’ reaction to my new name and married status. It had obviously never occurred to them that a teacher would have a personal life, especially someone as ancient as I. Many times recently, I’d found myself blushing at the speculative stares.

“Well, hello there, married lady,” a male voice said behind me, and Blakely Knight fell into step at my right. “How are the happy honeymooners?” he asked in that insinuating tone I found so annoying.

None of your business
,
I wanted to say, but I had been raised to be polite. “We’re doing well, thank you, quite well.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look well.” Blakely commented. “Let me help you carry that.” He reached for my black leather book satchel.

I stopped walking and backed away. “No, thanks.”

Blakely shrugged. “Okay, whatever.”

We resumed walking.

“Actually, Amelia, I caught up with you because I wanted to ask a question.”

“Yes?” I said as politely as I could.

I was feeling a trifle guilty over my curt rejection of what was, after all, a relatively kind offer. What was it about Blakely that made my skin crawl so?

“Do you know if Lily Burns is seeing anyone?”

“Lily Burns!” I said, fairly shouting the name in my surprise. Of all the possible questions I might expect from Blakely Knight, this hadn’t been one of them.