Cutting Teeth(95)

“I’m even worse. Last semester, I sent Bex to school a couple hours after she threw up because I had a lunch date with friends I didn’t want to miss.”

“We gave up on sleep training in two days and I’m pretty sure that’s why they’re all terrible sleepers,” says Asher’s dad about his kids.

“I feel like going to the grocery store alone is a vacation,” adds Megan. “I eat every bit of mac ’n’ cheese left on my kids’ plates even if I’ve already eaten dinner.”

“I let George watch a full hour of television every single morning before I even get up.”

A wave of murmurs grows as everyone adds their two cents, one over the next. Someone hasn’t kept a photo album of her second kid. Someone else never got around to planning a birthday party. Another one only bathes her child twice a week. The list goes on. A lock clicks open in Rhea’s chest. Maybe this is what Mary Beth’s been prattling on about all this time. Perhaps there’s something to be said for community.

Where is Mary Beth, by the way? And Darby?

Rhea takes a deep breath and raises her hands, quieting everyone before someone confesses to feeding their child Purina Puppy Chow or something gross like that. If she were going to admit that she also solved the mystery of Poodini now would be the time. She hesitates.

The silver A is the weight of a pebble at the bottom of her pocket. Somebody else in here hasn’t been telling the truth either. And now it’s time to figure out who that is, no matter what it means for Rhea. The truth’s got to come out sometime.

With the charm halfway out of her pocket, she stops. “Does anyone else hear that? Listen.” They do. They listen—the sound of sirens rolling up on Little Academy after dark.





FORTY-TWO




Darby’s phone battery was at 3 percent when she arrived at school with the intention of joining the meeting in the multipurpose room and revealing to everyone what she learned.

Only an hour ago, she sat across from Marcus at a round coffee shop table not quite meant for two and asked with grave seriousness, “Are you sure?”

Earlier, she told Griff—she did not ask—to pick up the kids from Little at the end of the day. She’d fill him in later; it’s been a day and it’s not even over.

“I’m sure,” Marcus told her, but he went through it again, explaining the numbers slowly, the profits and losses and what they meant. He told her that he was reasonably certain that someone, based on the figures, was embezzling money from the church and that Rhea had a strong suspicion that someone was Erin Ollie, née Nierling. “She thought, given everything with Lola, that you should be the first to know.”

Darby got a sticky lump in her throat. “I’m really not a crier,” she said, which is a bald-faced lie.

Darby sat back and thought about what to do. When Erin, a young, vibrant woman with a PhD, took the job at Little Academy, the parents all thought it was something of a miracle. Preschool Poppins had appeared out of the clear blue sky, not with an umbrella, but a rainbow-colored maxi skirt, and who were they to look a gift horse in the mouth? But here lies the reason. Erin Nierling changed her name to Erin Ollie to conceal her identity from a pastor at the RiverRock church. It made sense. He wouldn’t recognize Erin even if she used a name that would honor her dead brother. He might not even know Ollie Nierling had a sister. He wouldn’t put the pieces together until it was too late.

“It’s for the youth center,” Darby told Marcus. It felt like she was turning a camera lens, turning it and turning it and she was finally finding the right focus. “Which means Erin wasn’t stealing money from the church, really. I think she was taking it from Ben, that it was Ben who was siphoning it off already.”

Now what? She half expected confetti to rain down from the ceiling as if she were on a game show—you’ve done it, Darby Morton! Achievement unlocked. But she finds instead that the ends are still loose and floppy and her fingers are too thick and clumsy to tie them together into a bow. Detective Bright is apparently unreachable in Tulsa and Officer Princep still carries the firm belief that a child—most likely Lola—killed Erin. Will Marcus’s evidence be enough to sway him?

It will, she thinks, if she can recruit backup.

Golden hour sinks over the empty playground and the climbing stalks of wildflowers in the garden and the handprint path and its stone steps, and the whole place has the smell of freshly cut grass. Somebody’s left a basketball out on the court, where it sits still and forgotten, and she thinks she hears the faint voices of a choir practicing inside one of the church buildings. So when she climbs out of her car, she experiences a silly, inexplicable little moment in which she’s filled with warm, gooey, heartrending love, the kind that strikes her every so often and without warning and which she always watches and appreciates, like a particularly impressive bubble blown by one of her children that either floats off or pops immediately.

She hasn’t prayed since she was a teenager, but she gives it a try, channeling her inner Mary Beth. She asks God (if he’s up there) to help her discredit Ben Sarpezze, the pastor who—she’s now 100 percent sure—has had every reason to turn on not just her child, but all the children affected. When Darby thinks about the way that man used four-year-olds, with their terrible teeth and bloody tongues, sure, but also their sweet questions about whether ghosts are real and what kind of animals make bacon and whether people can be pets, all the love built up in her heart drops like a stone.