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They didn’t know about the zebras, which, once having escaped, had eluded capture for days, then weeks…and then forever. Long after the monkeys and the lion had been recovered, long after the circus owner had decided to cut his losses and move on, the clever zebras remained at large.
For months, people reported sightings of zebras galloping in the woods, zebras strolling in the park, zebras grazing along the highway. But the two animals danced in and out, taunting their would-be captors, and eventually the fairy tale of freedom caught the public eye.
Newspapers as far away as D.C. wrote stories. “Zebras Have a Heyday,” the first story proclaimed. And the little town of Moresville, tired of being “Boresville,” saw its chance to reinvent itself. On the Fourth of July, nineteen hundred and three, the mayor had gleefully knocked down his gavel on a five-to-one vote, and Heyday was born.
Every Fourth of July since, the city had sponsored its Ringmaster Parade. Most people didn’t ask why. They merely accepted that the city would elect a Ringmaster and Ringmistress, just as they accepted that the Big Top Diner had a roof like a circus tent, and that the bartenders at the Black and White Lounge wore striped tuxedos topped with zebra ears on a headband and springs.
“So.” Winston shifted from one foot to the other and was apparently having trouble deciding where to look. Linda Tremel’s rather large chest seemed to take up too much of his field of vision. “So, Kieran, what time do you head for Richmond in the morning?”
Oh, hell.
Kieran could feel the curiosity emanating from Linda. But what could he do? If he told the truth, that he was going to spend the weekend in Richmond, she’d be giddy with speculation. If he evaded or lied, it would look suspicious.
And it wasn’t suspicious. That he should be heading for a conference in the city where Claire Strickland now lived was a minor coincidence, yes. But Richmond was a big city. Probably two thousand people went there every day without running into Claire Strickland, either deliberately or accidentally. He’d just be number two thousand and one.
“Actually, I’m leaving tonight,” he said as blandly as possible. “The conference starts early in the morning.”
“You’re going to Richmond?” Linda had begun to smile. “Richmond?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m speaking at a coaching conference. I’ll just be there overnight.”
“Are you planning to—”
“No.”
She chuckled. “You don’t even know what I was going to ask.”
“Yes, I do. And the answer is no. It’s purely a working trip. I won’t be making any social calls while I’m in town.”
Winston looked confused. “But you’ll have the evening free, Kieran,” he said. “You know that time’s your own to do whatever you want. Social calls are fine.”
Kieran laughed. This was becoming the conversational equivalent of gum on your shoe. “Linda’s joking, Win. I don’t want to make any social calls.”
Linda grinned. “Yes, but if you do—”
“I won’t.”
“Okay, fine. But if you do.” She winked at him. “Give her a kiss for me. Anything beyond a kiss, well, then you’re on your—”
Kieran groaned and turned away, which meant he was in the perfect position to glimpse the incoming missile just in the nick of time.
He called out the standard warning. “Heads up!”
Winston, who was seasoned in the ways of mischievous high-school boys, sidestepped instantly. Unfortunately, Linda, who wasn’t, stood there looking confused.
“What—?” She frowned.
A pop, a splat, a splash. And suddenly her lacy white cover-up was splattered from neck to knee with sticky orange liquid. She looked down, horrified.
Somehow Kieran managed not to laugh. He didn’t even smile. He actually tried to feel sympathetic. He didn’t allow himself to believe it had been fate, intervening to spare him any more of Linda’s lip-licking curiosity.
But it had been a lucky shot, hadn’t it?
Principal Vogler, on the other hand, was furious. A courtly man himself, he obviously found pegging a woman with a water balloon to be an outrage. He reached out and snagged the nearest teenage boy, a kid with dark hair and deep blue eyes. “Bedroom” eyes, in fact.
“Come here, young man,” Winston bellowed.
He didn’t wait for the poor kid to say a word. He dragged him by the collar and forced him to face Linda.
“Ms. Tremel, this is Mr. Eddie Mackey. I believe he has something he’d like to say to you.”
THERE MUST BE A LINE from Hamlet for a moment like this. Claire studied her sedate navy-and-white spectator pumps and considered the issue. How about the one that said a person could “smile and smile and be a villain?”
It seemed apt enough. Mrs. Gillian Straine, the principal of the Haversham Girls’ Academy, never stopped smiling. It was how she wooed the best parents, the best girls, the best alums, the best college recruiters. But after almost two years teaching seventh grade here at HGA, Claire had learned how sharp the steel was that lay behind that smile.
Today the metal was in full, lethal force as Mrs. Straine sat at her huge mahogany desk, in her magnificent wood-paneled office, and read a letter of complaint that had just arrived. The letter stated that Miss Claire Strickland was teaching the girls from texts of questionable morality.
The letter was apparently very long—or else Mrs. Straine was a very slow reader. Claire adjusted her modest navy skirt and tried not to be nervous. But Mrs. Straine’s smile was so tight right now her lips had almost disappeared. Not a good sign.
Maybe the better quote was “To be or not to be.” To be or not to be fired.
Finally Mrs. Straine looked up. “This is very troubling,” she said softly. She said everything softly. It forced other people to be perfectly quiet, and to lean in slightly, in a deferential pose, in order to catch her words.
“Is it true, Miss Strickland? You have unilaterally decided to teach Hamlet to your seventh graders?”
“Not the entire play,” Claire said. “Just some of the famous speeches. It’s part of a larger unit on Shakespeare.”
Mrs. Straine took off her reading glasses and tapped them against the letter. “It says here you’ve been telling the children there are such things as ghosts. It says you’ve told them about fratricide and suicide.” She shook her head. “They even accuse you of using the I word.”
Claire frowned. The I word? What on earth was the I word? Insanity? Iago? No, that was Othello.
Iambic pentameter?
Mrs. Straine closed her eyes, apparently grieved that Claire was forcing her to utter it.
“Incest,” she whispered.
Oh, for heaven’s sake.
“I didn’t call it incest,” Claire said. “Shakespeare did. Or rather Hamlet did. It’s just a small part of the overall story. You see, Hamlet’s mother marries his uncle—”
“I know what happens in Hamlet, Miss Strickland.”
Claire leaned back in her chair. “Of course you do. I’m sorry.” She’d swallowed her pride in this job so often she’d almost gotten used to the bitter taste. “Then of course you know it isn’t incest with the same connotations we might have today.”
“I don’t believe any of that word’s connotations are socially acceptable,” Mrs. Straine said. She was sitting up so straight her back wasn’t touching the chair. “I honestly would have thought you understood that vocabulary like that has no place in an HGA classroom.”
Claire tried one more time. “But this is Hamlet, Mrs. Straine. This is Shakespeare. Hamlet is taught in classrooms all over the world every day, and—”
Mrs. Straine waved her hand. “We do not judge ourselves by everyone else, Miss Strickland,” she said. “At HGA, the standards are far higher.”
Higher than Shakespeare?
“I’m afraid we must insist that our teachers meet those standards. Every teacher, every day.”
So was this it? Was this where Claire would be told to take her copy of Hamlet and go home? She realized suddenly that she didn’t care very much. Since Steve died, she hadn’t cared about much of anything. But she tried to look earnestly concerned. She did have to earn a living, and HGA at least had the virtue of paying well and recruiting bright, well-behaved students.
“However,” Mrs. Straine went on, “I don’t think we need to overreact. Overall, your performance since coming to HGA has been exemplary. I think it will be adequate merely to place you on probation.”
“Probation?”
Mrs. Straine folded up the letter and placed it in a file marked Strickland, Claire. “Yes. It should not be construed as punitive. It’s merely precautionary. I’ll be keeping a close eye on your work. I’ll need to see your lesson plans daily, of course. After six months, we’ll review the matter and see where we stand.”
Claire understood she’d been dismissed. She stood and nodded—though she drew the line at thanking Mrs. Straine for her tolerance. She looked at the other woman—at her high, tight, extremely sophisticated French braid, her severe Armani suit, her Tiffany-set diamond wedding ring—and she wondered whether there really was no Mr. Straine, as the other teachers sometimes suggested.
It was possible. Claire’s own mother had pretended she was a “Mrs.,” and she undoubtedly wasn’t the only woman who did. Mrs. Straine’s reasons would be different, of course. She wouldn’t be trying to protect her two illegitimate children. But whatever the reason, living a lie took its toll.
As she left the school, Claire thought how much nicer it would be if she could go home and tell Steve about all this. What fun they’d have parodying Mrs. Straine’s Victorian syntax and ridiculous whisper. If Steve were there, this would seem hilarious in no time. They’d laugh away any sting, and then they’d sit around and think up absurd new meanings for the school’s initials. She could almost hear him now. Humongous Growling Amazons. Hippos Gathering Acorns. Hot Greasy Aardvarks.
But Steve wasn’t there, of course. Her half-furnished apartment would be empty when she finally got home later tonight. She had a meeting after school, which she would go through like a robot. Then she’d stop by the grocery store, and then drive to the apartment.
When she got in, she’d ignore the five or six messages on her machine—it was easier to ignore an invitation than to turn it down, and the result was the same in the end. She’d read a little. And then, as soon as she possibly could, she’d go to sleep.
To sleep. Perchance to dream. Yes, Hamlet knew where the real dangers lay. Claire still dreamed about Steve at least once a week. They were cruel dreams—the kind that woke you up with your heart in your throat. In the dreams, she always drove down Poplar Hill one second too late. Steve always died in her arms while Kieran McClintock stood over them and smiled.
But that night her meeting ran long and it was after ten before she got home. All in all, it had been an exhausting day. Maybe she’d be too tired to dream.
She pulled into the complex parking lot, gathered her books and papers and purse and groceries and made her way to her second-floor apartment.
And, there, on her elegantly lit landing, she came face-to-face with a man she had thought she’d never see again.
The smiling man of her terrible dreams.
CHAPTER THREE
KIERAN WAS SHOCKED by how different Claire looked. How much older.
He hadn’t seen her in two years, but still…
Part of it was her hair. She had beautiful hair, a deep, shiny brown. She used to wear it almost to her waist. When she taught, she just whisked it up into a casual twist that always had adorable bits and pieces escaping from it. Now it was cut in a sleek, chin-length bob that fit like a helmet.
And her outfit. It was the pencil-thin uniform of a corporate lady-shark. What had happened to the flowing cotton jumpers and soft pastel T-shirts?
But most of all, it was her face. Even in the worst days of her first grief, she hadn’t looked this tight and closed-in. Her brown eyes, round, large and long-lashed, had always reminded him of some gentle woodland creature.
Not any more. Now she just looked tired and strangely distant. She didn’t even seem interested enough to be shocked to see him standing on her front porch.
“Kieran,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
That was a damn good question, actually. What the hell was he doing here? Back in his hotel room, he’d told himself a thousand times to quit being such a fool, put down his car keys, order room service, raid the minibar, turn on the television, anything. But none of it had stopped him.
“I’m in town for a conference.”
She shifted her packages so that she could see him better over the groceries, but she kept her fist tightly closed around her keys. She seemed to have no intention of opening that door.
“Not here in Richmond,” she said. “I meant here. What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to say hello.” Was that true? Actually, he had no clear idea why he had come. He’d just opened the telephone book, found her name and found himself getting a map from his laptop. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”
She shifted again, her keys clinking against a glass bottle, or maybe a can. “I’m doing fine.”
No, you’re not, he wanted to say. Any fool could tell she was lost. But he didn’t have the right to say anything like that. Hell, he didn’t even have the right to be standing here.
One date. That was all they’d ever had. One night when he’d sat across from her, eating salmon and salad and some stupid little bonbon dessert, and quietly going wild with wanting her.
One night—compared to Steve’s death, for which she had always blamed him. No, he’d say he had pretty damn few rights in this situation.
“I just—” He cleared his throat and began again. “I thought maybe we could talk for a while. Maybe I could take you out for coffee. I haven’t eaten dinner yet. I just got into town. Are you hungry?”
She looked at him with those shallow eyes. “We don’t really have anything to talk about, Kieran. We don’t have anything in common except Steve. And I don’t talk about Steve.”
You don’t? Oh, Claire…that’s not healthy. But of course he didn’t say that, either. He just looked at her sober face in the silvery light from the carriage lamp and wished he could go back two years and start over. God, the things he’d do differently!
“It’s been two years, Claire. Isn’t it time to let old—” But her face warned him to stop, so he did. “All right, then, how about if I promise we won’t talk about Steve?”
Her fingers must have clenched a little. The brown paper bag made a brief crinkling noise. “What topics would be left, then? Politics? The weather?”
“I could tell you about Heyday. It’s grown since you left. They’ve put in a new multiplex movie theater. Stadium seating. Four whole screens. The kids all want jobs there.” She wasn’t interested, but he kept going, determined to hit on something. “The bookstore expanded. And they put in a new traffic light.”
“Did they really. Where?”
Oh, hell. He hesitated just a second too long, as he recognized his mistake. She was smart. She knew what the hesitation meant.
“Where?”
He took a deep breath. “On Poplar Hill.”
“So much for that topic.” She turned away firmly. “I don’t mean to be rude, Kieran. I appreciate the effort you made to come. But I really think it’s better if we just say good-night.”
She fumbled with her key, trying to insert it into the lock.
“Claire.” He touched her shoulder, and she twitched away quickly. Too quickly. The oranges on the top of her grocery bag began to teeter. She shifted them, reaching out with her other hand to try to balance things, but at that very moment the door swung open, and she lurched forward.
Fruit and fresh vegetables spilled everywhere, and a box of spinach spaghetti hit the landing with enough force to split open. Thin green straws hopped and tumbled crazily, covering the concrete and bouncing down the stairs.
He caught the bag as it fell, just in time to save the sparkling water.
She knelt immediately and began scooping up bits of broccoli. “I’ll get it,” she said. “It’s okay. I’ve got it.”
