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“But it all comes down to Lucia Osborne.” J.T. made a wry face as he accepted a dish of low-fat ice cream from Lettie Mae Reese, the Double C’s longtime cook.
“Why does it all come down to her?” Jim asked, thinking about the slim quiet woman behind her big desk.
“Lucia’s the one who’s got to rally the town and convince these people her school and her job are worth saving,” J.T. said. “With somebody like Gloria Wall nipping at her heels, she’s going to have to watch herself every step of the way. She sure can’t afford to make any mistakes this winter.”
CHAPTER THREE
ON FRIDAY, the autumn day continued warm right into the evening. By twilight, Lucia’s little third-floor apartment was stifling.
She opened all the windows to let in a breath of air, then wandered downstairs and out to the garden where June Pollock was weeding her pumpkin patch.
“Hello, Lucia.” June looked up briefly at her as she sank wearily onto a wooden bench at the edge of the garden in the shade of a rustling pecan tree. “How are you tonight?”
“Well, I’m not feeling so great. Suffering from the heat, I guess.” Lucia watched June’s strong arms as she wielded the hoe.
Everything about June was strong, from her square shoulders to her sturdy brown legs in denim shorts. She had waist-length blond hair that she wore in a thick braid pinned on top of her head, and blue eyes so level and steady that most people had a hard time looking at her directly.
June Pollock was probably close to forty, and had lived all her life in Crystal Creek, except for a long-ago fling with an oil wildcatter that had ended her high-school career, broken her heart and left her with a baby girl to raise alone.
June’s daughter had been born with a club foot, but Carlie Pollock was a sweet girl, beloved by everybody in the town. At nineteen, after numerous surgeries, Carlie was able to walk and run normally, even ice-skate, and was off at college studying marine biology.
Lucia suspected that June missed Carlie a great deal, though with characteristic stoicism she gave no sign of her feelings. But it was probably loneliness that prompted her to rent parts of her house to strangers. Since her financial windfall a few years earlier, when June sold a valuable antique carousel horse that had been hidden in her cellar for more than sixty years, she no longer had any need of the rental income.
“You’ve got a good crop here,” Lucia commented, watching June work the hoe carefully around the ripening globes of pumpkins. “This looks like it could be your best year ever, June.”
“It will be if the nights ever start to cool down a bit.” June paused and brushed her forehead with a tanned arm, then resumed her task. “How’re things at school these days?”
Lucia looked up in surprise. Her landlady hardly ever initiated conversation of any kind, and certainly didn’t ask about Lucia’s job.
“It’s…fine, I guess.”
“Really? Well, I heard at work today that damn Gloria Wall is fixin’ to dump you,” June said with her usual bluntness.
Lucia gave her landlady a wan smile. “Yes, it appears she’s going to try. But I intend to do my very best not to get dumped.”
“Well, you’re gonna have your work cut out,” June said. “Lots of folks around this town just gotta hear ‘lower taxes,’ and they’re lining up to sign on the dotted line no matter what they stand to lose. Damn idiots!” she added, pounding away at the dried soil.
Lucia watched the woman’s muscular arms for a moment as they moved in steady rhythm. At last she ventured a question.
“June…”
“Yeah?”
“What can you tell me about James Whitley?”
June smiled, showing strong white teeth. “Jimmy Whitley? He grew up in this town, right down the street.”
“Really?” Lucia asked, startled.
“His daddy was the middle-school principal when I was a girl, worked in the very same office where you’re sittin’ nowadays. Little Jimmy, he was just the nicest kid,” June said thoughtfully, leaning on her hoe. “All big eyes, curly hair and dimples, and so smart nobody could believe it. We all thought he’d go to the moon someday, or grow up to be president. But he got bit by the rodeo bug as a teenager, and that was pretty much the end of him. It gets to a lot of boys that way.”
Lucia picked up a trailing vine and wrapped it around her finger, absorbing all this information.
“What happened to his father?”
“Well, that was a sad case.” June plied her hoe again, frowning. “Sarah Whitley, that’s Jim’s mother, she died of cancer quite young. After that, Carl Whitley just sort of lost his spirit. One day down at Lake Travis he swum out into the water and never came back. They found his body next day, tangled in some weeds.”
“And Jim…”
“He follows the rodeo circuit some years, and teaches school whenever he stays in one place long enough. My cousin up in Lampasas says they had Jim Whitley for a term with their eighth-graders, and he was the best teacher ever to set foot in that place. But he wouldn’t stay another year, even when they begged.”
“So you think he’d make a competent teacher at my school?”
June looked at her shrewdly.
“For God’s sake, Lucia,” she said. “Just hire the man and quit fretting over it. If Gloria Wall’s on your case, you’ll be having yourself a tough enough year ahead without passing up the chance to get a real fine teacher.”
“Well, I guess your recommendation is good enough for me.”
“Just be warned,” June said, “that you can’t make the man do anything he doesn’t want to. He may seem like a laid-back sort of guy, but he’s all steel at the core, Jim Whitley is. Nobody’s ever been able to push him around, and you won’t be able to, either.”
Lucia hesitated for a moment, then nerved herself to speak. “He told me you’d promised to rent him the apartment on the…”
But June was no longer listening. She stared toward the vine-covered fence rails bordering the garden, her face pale beneath the tan.
Startled by the other woman’s intensity, Lucia followed June’s gaze and saw Willard Kilmer, standing in the back lane, holding a manila file folder.
Willard was a member of Lucia’s staff. In fact, he taught the other group of seventh-graders. Bella’s stepdaughter, Ellie Gibson, was in his class.
He was a tall, thin man in his early forties, with pale thinning hair and a slight stoop. Willard seemed utterly drab and inconsequential until you noticed his eyes, which were filled with gentleness and lively intelligence behind horn-rimmed glasses.
Lucia had always liked the man, and they’d worked efficiently together in the years since she’d come to the school. But Willard was painfully shy, and not easy to get close to. At faculty meetings and social functions he kept to himself, usually watching from a corner and saying little.
He lived with his ailing mother in a big, well-kept house a couple of streets over from June’s. Lucia often wondered about his personal life, and whether he was as lonely as he appeared to be.
“Hello, Willard,” she said, smiling across the fence in an attempt to set him at ease. “It’s a nice evening, isn’t it? Not quite so hot today.”
“It’s warm enough, but considerably better than yesterday,” he agreed, clearing his throat. The dying sunlight flashed off the lenses of his glasses, making him look remote and sad. “Mama tends to suffer a good deal in the heat, I’m afraid.”
“I reckon we all do,” June said with her customary bluntness, hammering at a stubborn clod of dirt with her hoe. “But we don’t talk about it all the time, because complaining won’t make it any cooler.”
“Hello, June,” the teacher said shyly. “Your pumpkins are looking great this year. I’ll have to remember to pick one up before Halloween.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll set a good one aside for you.” June turned her back and knelt to pull at a weed under one of the pumpkin vines.
“The sixth-graders are having a pumpkin-carving contest this year,” Willard told Lucia with a timid, luminous smile that made his craggy face light up. “They’re allowing me to enter, and I aim to win first prize.”
Lucia smiled back at him. “I’m sure you’re going to win. I’ve seen those artistic jack-o’-lanterns you carve.”
For a moment he seemed taken aback, almost panicky, as if he’d suddenly realized he was having a casual conversation with two women outside the safe confines of the school.
Lucia took pity on him and gestured toward the manila folder in his hand. “What have you got there, Will?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s…” He waved the folder nervously. “I just brought this over for you to look at. It’s a proposal for that new social studies curriculum we were talking about last week.”
“Thank you,” she said, a little puzzled, watching as he opened the gate awkwardly and came into the garden to hand her the folder. “I’ll have a look at it right away and let you know what I think.”
“Oh, there’s no rush.” He stood in front of the bench like a long-legged stork in his rumpled khakis and knitted vest. “We won’t be starting that unit until the next semester, anyhow.”
Then why did you come all the way over here to bring it to me tonight? Lucia wanted to ask.
But there was something strange in the air, an odd tension in the way he stood at the edge of the garden while June kept chopping at her weeds.
Finally Willard turned and made his way back toward the gate, casting a brief wistful glance at the garden and the silent woman among her pumpkin vines. He turned back to Lucia.
“Well,” he said, “I guess I should be pushing off now.”
She ached for him in his nervousness, and glanced around to see if June might be disposed to offer this unexpected guest a glass of iced tea or some of the blueberry tarts she’d made that afternoon.
Lucia could hardly invite him up to her own apartment, not the way this community watched and gossiped. If she did, it would be all over town by morning that Ms. Osborne was entertaining a male colleague in the privacy of her rooms.
Even the students would know, and be whispering about it…
But June was still wielding the hoe, her face impassive as she worked.
“Good evening, Will,” the landlady said with odd formality. “Don’t forget to stop by and pick up that pumpkin, will you?”
“I won’t forget, June.” He paused with his knobby hand on the latch.
By now Lucia was deeply intrigued, looking from June to Willard.
“Well, good night,” he said at last, his Adam’s apple jerking nervously. “I’ll see you at school, Lucia. Good night, June.”
Lucia murmured another farewell but June said nothing, just turned away deliberately and began to work along the fence line, her shoulders rigid.
Willard Kilmer trudged off, his thin back swallowed up in the hedges down the lane.
When he was out of sight, June rested her hoe against the fence, plodded through the garden and sprawled on the bench next to Lucia. She sighed wearily and rubbed one of her shoulders.
Lucia stole a cautious glance at her landlady, whose composure seemed badly unsettled for some reason.
“June,” she ventured at last. “Is something the matter?”
“That man just gets under my skin,” June said. “He makes me so mad I could scream.”
“Willard?” Astonished, Lucia thought about her mild-mannered colleague. “That’s not the effect he normally has on people. Most of the time,” she added, “it’s hard to even remember he’s in the room.”
“He can sing like an angel,” June said, surprising her again. “Did you know that? Will’s a true baritone, and he has perfect pitch.”
“No kidding. How did you happen to learn that?”
“He sings in the choir with me, down at the Baptist church.”
Though Lucia never attended church, she knew that June Pollock had a fine alto voice. But in the seven years of Lucia’s relationship with Willard Kilmer, this was the first she’d heard of his musical talents.
“And he has one of the best arrowhead collections in the whole state,” June went on, stretching her legs and letting her blond head rest against the back of the bench. There were some silver strands among the rich gold, and her face looked tired and strained.
“An arrowhead collection?” Lucia asked blankly.
“He goes out most weekends to hunt for arrowheads in plowed fields and washed-out creek beds. Whatever Will finds he catalogs and mounts, enters the information on a big computer file. Colleges and museums even contact him sometimes to borrow parts of his collection.”
“Imagine the man never talking about that at school,” Lucia marveled, then looked at her companion, still puzzled by June’s reaction. “But why does he make you so angry?”
“Because he’s wasting his life.” June frowned at the rustling branches above her, where a nighthawk fluttered and woke to set out on its evening hunt for insects.
“Willard is wasting his life?”
“He lives with that awful mother of his, and she’s got him wrapped around her little finger. She’ll never let loose of him. Willard Kilmer doesn’t have the courage of a mouse or he’d tell her where to get off, the nasty old dragon.”
“But how can you…” Lucia paused, genuinely shocked by this harshness. “Faye Kilmer’s an invalid, June. She can hardly get out of her chair to walk across the room. Everybody knows that.”
“Invalid!” June snorted, her face hardening. “Liar is more like it.”
“I can’t believe you’d say that. Willard brought her to the staff Christmas party last year, and she was so sweet to everybody. I thought Faye Kilmer was a lovely woman.”
“Oh, sure, everybody thinks Faye’s such a lovely woman.” June got to her feet and began to chop aimlessly among the vines again. “She’s so little and dainty, with her big eyes and lace dresses and that I’m-so-delicate-I-might-break act of hers. But the woman’s made of iron, let me tell you.”
“She spends a lot of her time in the hospital, you know,” Lucia said gently, watching June’s tense broad shoulders.
“Sure she does,” June said. “Whenever it looks as if Will might be getting a life and planning to move out on her, Faye has some kind of attack. And then she’s just way too helpless to look after herself, so he creeps right back into line.”
“You think Faye Kilmer is using her medical condition as some kind of emotional blackmail over Willard?”
“I think she’s a truly selfish woman. It’s my opinion,” June said, “that Faye will never let go of him as long as she lives. And,” she added darkly, “mark my words, Faye’s likely to outlive all of us. Those kind always do, you know.”
“Have you ever told Willard what you think about any of this?”
June turned to look at her directly, and Lucia was stunned by the depths of pain and sadness in those level blue eyes.
“It’s hardly the kind of thing I could say to Will. Never in all this world. But dammit, Lucia, sometimes I wish I could.”
“You care a lot about him,” Lucia said gently. “Don’t you, June?”
A bit of color filled June’s tanned cheeks. She waved her hand in an abrupt, dismissive gesture, then let her shoulders drop, leaning on the hoe.
“Well, I guess maybe I do,” she said. “He’s such a nice man, you know. There’s times,” she added shyly, “when I hear him sing and it purely gives me goose bumps all over.”
She turned away, clearly embarrassed by this revelation, and knelt to tug at a weed near one of the biggest pumpkins.
