Cutting Teeth(37)

“I can’t even believe we’re still doing science fair projects,” says Darby. She’s been feeling protective of Lola’s now-dead preschool teacher. She’s been struck by the frequent urge to jump around and wave her hands and say, Hello, what are we doing exactly? Are they just, like, accepting this? Miss Ollie is dead. Oh well. Take it in stride. Life moves on.

Darby isn’t sure she’s ready to move on. She has questions. So many questions that keep her up at night, staring at the ceiling fan, staring at her husband.

“They still have to learn. They have to be prepared for kindergarten.”

“I guess,” Darby grumbles. “Lola’s doing octopus. I haven’t bought the poster board yet.” Because poster board requires a trip to an actual real-life store, and yet for some reason she is expected to acquire poster board on top of dealing with an eighteen-month-old and a four-year-old and a job and a murder and the provision of a steady supply of her own blood. Pause for applause. Anyone, anyone? She didn’t think so.

“Octopus what?” Mary Beth clicks open an X-Acto knife.

“She wants to learn about octopi—what? She’s very into marine life. I thought it was good. What’s yours?”

“Noelle’s doing a storm in a glass. It’s just a small demonstration, nothing fancy.”

Darby shrugs because, in her opinion, storm in a glass doesn’t sound any better or worse than octopus. It does, however, sound less native to a four-year-old. “Hey, why aren’t Lola and Noelle sitting together, do you think?” Darby asks.

The one positive is that Lola was thrilled to see Darby in the classroom. It was like being a celebrity, for both mother and daughter. All of Lola’s classmates shouted things like, “Lola, your mommy is here!” and “Where’s my mommy? Is she coming?” And Lola wanted to hold her mother’s hand and show her activity centers all the way up until it was time for everyone to take their seats for craft time.

“Hm. Not sure,” Mary Beth says distractedly.

“I keep wondering what that meeting would have been about,” Darby says. “So strange. I think it’s going to bug me forever. Like an unfinished sneeze.”

“I’ve been trying not to think about it.”

So has Darby, but no use. It was one of the only things she could think about, in fact. Why didn’t Miss Ollie show up to their meeting? Was she already dead by then? Did something come up and she changed course to deal with something or someone somewhere she shouldn’t have been?

There are extra security features in place. Parents and staff wear badges. Kids have wristbands. The parents are paying for an off-duty officer to stand outside the building during school hours. But the parents are talking. What if the killer has a badge? Darby shudders at the thought, at what it could mean.

So far none of the children have come forward with any new revelation. The image of tiny footprints in blood feels more and more like a product of the rumor mill than genuine news.

“Do you have any idea, though?” Darby asks about the meeting.

“Not really.”

Darby watches her friend. “Miss Ollie didn’t give you any kind of hint when you picked up Noelle?”

“No.” Mary Beth looks up from the cartons and out the window. It’s a nice view over the garden from here. Beyond it, the iron-cross steeple of the church’s independent chapel cuts into the sky.

“What came up?” Darby asks without agenda. Or without much of one. “I mean, why’d you have to cancel?”

Again, Darby pictures her feet on the cream-colored sidewalk, her winding path through the campus, through the church building, faster and faster she went until she had nearly broken into a run. By the time she returned to the classroom, sweating and disoriented, there was no adult present, just a lingering scent of something that Darby remembered distinctly smelling like eucalyptus.

“I had a doctor’s appointment I forgot about,” says Mary Beth. “And my head, you know, not cooperating.”

“Oh,” Darby says. Though Mary Beth keeps a calendar. A pretty, floral day planner. Not just the impersonal one on her iPhone. “Is everything okay?”

Mary Beth sighs, as though for the first time ever Darby has finally succeeded in cracking her nice-lady exterior, as though Darby has annoyed her. “Everything’s the same,” she says.

Darby bites her tongue for a full five seconds, but it’s no use, she has more to say, Darby always has more to say. She’s what’s referred to as a verbal processor. A therapist once told her, so she knows it’s true. “It just, it makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it? Do you think she’d still be alive?”

Mary Beth fiddles with getting the X-Acto knife through a pulpy section of the carton. “I don’t know. I can’t think that way.” Her eyes glisten.

Fantastic. She’s upset Mary Beth. She’s a monster. Because Mary Beth actually is this nice, deep down, underneath it all. Darby has run tests.

“You know, I think I’ll go ask the girls why they’re not sitting together,” offers Darby.

Technically speaking, she’s abandoning Zeke, but his sloth truly is beyond all hope. “It’s kind of fun being part of the class,” she says as she makes her way over to Lola when, out of the blue—

“SHIT!”