Rancher's Deadly Risk

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“Marian, I need Les right now. Someone left a dead rat on my desk and I’m not going to be able to let the students in.”

She heard Marian talk to someone. “He’ll be right there with the janitor.”

She stepped outside and locked her door again, standing guard, trying to keep her breakfast down. Ugly. Ugly. The thing had had its throat cut, there was blood all over her desk pad, and from the odor it had been left to rot all weekend.

The message was unmistakable, and almost enough to make her double over and heave. She could feel a cold sweat breaking out all over her body, and the nausea was overwhelming. She wanted to leave and never come back.

She kept drawing deep breaths to steady herself, leaning against the wall for support, and telling herself not to be hysterical. It was a nasty, messy, ugly message, but that’s all it was.

If they wanted to frighten her off, it wasn’t going to work. She promised herself that even as she felt the urge to leave and not come back. How would she ever sit at that desk again without remembering that rat?

She hated to think what kind of a person would have done that. One of those bullies? God, if it had been one of them, then James Carney could be in serious trouble.

For that matter, so could she.

Several students arrived before Les. “Sorry,” she told them, “you’ll have to wait in the library or lunch room. There’s a bit of a mess that needs cleaning.”

Did she imagine it, or did one of the boys actually smirk? Anything was possible, but she told herself not to see everyone as a potential enemy in this. She was likely being hypersensitive.

The nausea had mostly passed by the time Les arrived with the janitor on his heels. Amazingly, Linc wasn’t far behind.

Les eyed her critically. “How bad is it?”

“Bad enough that I’m sending my homeroom to the library or cafeteria. Someone is going to have to take attendance. It’s a mess.”

“Well, let’s see it.”

She turned to unlock the door. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t go in there again.”

Linc went in, though, and she noticed he took out his cell phone and snapped a few photos. Les gagged. The janitor even paled, and he must have cleaned up some real messes during his tenure.

“This goes way beyond a prank,” Linc said flatly. “I think we need to call the sheriff.”

Les nodded, putting his hand over his mouth and hurrying toward the door. “Don’t touch it. I’ll get Gage out here.”

“I need to hold class,” Cassie said, trying to cling to some semblance of normalcy or routine. Focusing on the one thing she could do.

“I’ll arrange for a blackboard in the cafeteria,” Les said as he hurried up the hall. “And I’ll call the sheriff.”

The janitor, a guy who preferred to be called Gus even though his name was Madson Carson, just stood there shaking his head. “What’s the world coming to?” he asked. “Who the hell got in here?”

“It’s been here at least since Friday,” Linc remarked. “Let’s get out and wait for the sheriff. I doubt he’ll find anything useful, but we don’t want to contaminate it.”

Once the door was locked again, he drew Cassie to one side, holding her elbow gently. “Are you okay?”

“I will be. How could somebody get in to do that?”

“Remember, you can always get out of the building. All someone had to do was lay in wait until the place was empty.”

It was true, she realized. All the doors were fire doors, and would open from the inside even when locked. As for her classroom … master keys could be had from several places. Or the lock could be picked easily enough. It wasn’t exactly a vault.

She bent and looked at the keyhole. “Someone picked it,” she said as she saw some deformation around the lock.

“Maybe.” Linc sighed. “Damn, what’s happening around here?”

She had no answers. Straightening, she looked at him. “Reality. Like you said, every place has its bad apples.”

The hall was becoming crowded with students, and the PA system burst into life, announcing that Ms. Greaves’s classes would be held in the cafeteria today.

“It bothers me how fast this had to have happened,” Linc said. “The incident was Friday at noon. It’s possible that when I opened the school to let the team in someone snuck in with them, but that’s still the same day as the bullying, and probably a short time after Les called parents.”

“How many people were in here Friday night?”

“The boosters, the team, some other parents, a few teachers. The cheerleaders. There’s always a crowd before we leave for an away game.”

“In short, too many suspects.”

He nodded, but frowned at the same time. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right? You could take a sick day.”

“And spend all day at home thinking about this?” She shook her head. “No, thanks. What’s that they say about after you fall from a horse?”

His frown turned to a faint smile. “You’ve got some backbone. Okay. But depending on how much of a threat the sheriff thinks this is, maybe you should take care not to be alone.”

As if she would have a choice.

The sheriff arrived with his crime scene unit, and Cassie was grateful that the students had all vanished into classrooms. Not that they wouldn’t hear about this, not that word wouldn’t get out, but they didn’t need to be clustered around and hearing gory details, or getting in the way.

The sheriff, Gage Dalton, whom she’d met a couple of times before casually, was gentle and kind with his questioning of her. He started with that morning, but inevitably he worked back to the possible motivation for this treatment.

She looked at Les, who sighed and nodded. “We may as well talk about it all, even though we’re going to do our part, perhaps the most important part. You do have plans?”

“We’re working on them. Linc and I have both started.”

“With what?” Gage asked.

So she explained the bullying incident. Linc refused to let her skip over the phone call she had received. When they fell silent, having explained their plans for dealing with bullying, Gage’s face was dark.

“So,” he said, looking at Les, “you thought it was a good idea to hang your teacher out on this?” He turned to Linc. “What about you?”

Cassie spoke first. “Our main concern was not to get James Carney into more trouble. We were trying to protect him.”

“So you get blamed for the detentions? You become the focus of this gang?”

“I don’t like it,” Linc said bluntly. “In fact, it concerns me a whole lot, and more now than it did on Friday. The fact remains, the Carney boy wasn’t the only one bullied. Cassie was bullied, too. So it seemed we needed to deal with that immediately, without getting Carney into more trouble. We can’t have students making implied threats by pushing teachers and ignoring them or we’ll have anarchy, and we won’t be able to control anything.”