Acceptance, The (27 page)

“I asked, didn’t I?”

“Better wait until we get to the bottom.” He sped up enough that she sat back in her seat and held on to the handle on the door.

“It’s that bad?”

He winced at the high pitch of her voice. “Why don’t you wait and decide after you hear what it is.”

“At least tell me whether it’s about Lacey or Peg.”

He made a purely masculine sound of annoyance. “Neither.”

Further prodding sent him into a deeper state of silent, heavy-lidded morosity.

Almost half an hour later, Kat spied an opening in the trees that signaled the end of the logging road, which came out on the edge of the small town right near Kat’s house. The second they emerged onto the highway, she tapped Evan’s shoulder.

“Spill.”

He took a long breath and let out a longer sigh. “The school board called the emergency contact number in your file—Peg Kelly.”

What would be so momentous that the school board would phone all the way to Craigmont? She’d cleared the protest with the board—and she hadn’t directly involved any students, so even though the higher-ups weren’t pleased about it, she was technically coloring within the lines. “And?”

“Kat, you were chained to a tree. The loggers couldn’t work. Half the school apparently decided if you didn’t have to show up, they didn’t.”

Her feet ground down on the floorboards. “And you know this… how?”

“From Peg. And at the gas station when I stopped to fill up.”

Of course.

“And the diner when I grabbed a bite to eat.”

Kat groaned. People in Mills Creek were like that, too. “I didn’t need to be rescued.”

“Matter of opinion.” Evan turned a corner, and the lights of her little house shone a feeble welcome.

“Look, I have a life and friends and a job I love. Why does that bother you so much?”

“Do you really think you still have a job after what you did up there?” He groaned. “Come on, Kat, you’re smarter than that.”

Her pulse hammered in her ears. “The whole time, you were helping get me out of the way so Billy and his guys can get on with their jobs.” Her fingers bunched the fabric of her coat into muddy wads in her lap. “I asked you if Lacey was okay, and you let me believe she was in trouble.”

“I knew you wouldn’t just walk away from something you believe in.” He clenched his jaw. “How else was I going to convince you to unlock the handcuffs?”

Hot fury blazed through her, and she punched his shoulder. “How dare you. How
dare
you?”

The Jeep swerved and fishtailed into the gravel of her driveway, then straightened. “See why I didn’t tell you back there?”

He pulled up by her front door and left the engine idling. She got out, slammed her door, and stomped toward the house. The window rolled down. She stopped and turned around.

“What could you possibly know about whether I still have a job?”

“I told you. Peg. The gas station. The diner.” His brow creased the way it did when he wasn’t trying very hard to be patient. “If you worked for me, and your protest caused an expensive piece of machinery to be wrecked, I’d fire you on the spot.”

“Well, I didn’t wreck any machines, and neither did my students. I’m sorry you thought you had to come all this way, but I’m fine. My job is fine. My life is fine. So you can go home now.”

She whirled to go. Oh, God. The machine
was
wrecked, and it was all her fault. Just like her family.

“Kat.”

“What?” He’d have to talk to her back. If she faced him, she’d start to bawl.

“The kid who wrecked that machine?”

Slowly she turned, the knowledge of what he was going to say inching up through her with more finality than a capital
F
on a report card. “Which kid?”

The rain that had started high on the mountain found its way to her yard to pelt her head and hammer her raincoat and the roofs of the Jeep and her house. It reminded her of her urgent need to use the washroom.

“I heard it was the school board superintendent’s kid.”

Her confidence melted away faster than the rain was washing the mud from the Jeep. She backed up, turned, stumbled up her front steps. Remembered her house key was in her purse. In her car.

“You okay?” he called.

“Just peachy.”

“You sure?”

She’d never been less okay in her life. “Yep.”

She watched him drive away, presumably to be subjected to yet another earful of details about her from the night clerk at the local motel.

Soaked and shivering, Kat couldn’t stand out here forever. She tramped around the perimeter of her house, jiggling windows and doorknobs. She’d locked the house up tight this morning, but maybe one of the locks was defective.

None was. And her bladder couldn’t wait a minute longer. Kat dashed behind the nearest tree and made a pit stop. Feeling marginally better, she headed back toward the house. The rain swept down in sheets, and the wind flung it one direction and then another. The eaves provided little shelter.

She could just slap herself for letting herself get all squishy over Evan instead of doing the reasonable thing and driving back down off the mountain in her own car, getting cleaned up, and talking to him over, say, dinner. Had she learned nothing from the way their engagement ended? Apparently not a whole lot.

She debated walking into town to find a warmer place to wait, but even if most of the people she knew here weren’t up on the cut block, she doubted she’d find a friendly face after the superintendent’s son had wrecked an expensive piece of logging equipment—for all intents and purposes because of her.

Deciding her best option was to wait for someone to bring her car, she huddled on her front porch with her collar pulled up over her head.

All this way from home, away from the only family she had left, with her career in ruins. Everything she’d done, she’d done for Lacey, tried to be the best sister she knew how to be—and her life kept snowballing into an ever-bigger disaster.

She wished she had known a better way to show Lacey how much she loved her. She wished her biggest dream hadn’t been demoted to a dirty family secret.

She wished she’d been brave enough to defy her parents and tell Lacey the truth.

The sound of an engine and the crunch of gravel filtered through her regret. She raised her head, blinking, and lifted her arm to block the bright glare of headlights. Nighttime? She realized she’d fallen asleep against the stair rail, and now every muscle mocked her for it.

As the vehicle pulled up to the house and parked, with another one close behind it, Kat stood to stretch out the kinks. She walked around to the side of the beams of light. The first vehicle was hers. Despite how stiff and cold she’d gotten, sleeping like a forgotten toy on her front steps, the sight of her car—with the promise of her house key and therefore a hot bath—sent a wave of warmth washing over her.

Then she got to the driver’s-side door and noticed the entire side of the car was smashed in. The side mirror dangled from its cable, and deep gouges scarred the paint from the front bumper to the back one. She wobbled and pressed her hands to her mouth.

The driver, one of her students, pulled ineffectually at the door handle. After a few seconds he gave up and crawled across to the passenger seat and exited through that door. He shuffled around the car and held out her keys.

“I’m uh… sorry.” His Adam’s apple bobbed, and he looked younger than he was, and terribly guilty. He scuffed his worn-out sneakers. “I—I—I’ll pay for it.”

“Are you hurt?” She scanned him from head to toe, scrutinizing his face and peering at his pupils. She held up three fingers. “How many fingers do you see? What’s your middle name? Tell me the date. Are you dizzy? Can you walk in a straight—”

“Ms. Cherish, I’m good. See?” He closed his eyes and touched his nose, then patted the top of his head and rubbed his stomach. He opened his eyes. “Three fingers, Christopher, September twentieth, no,” he said, walking backward in a straight line.

The driver of the second vehicle honked. Christopher gulped. “I really will pay to get it fixed.”

Her shiny new car. She’d saved for so long to buy it, picked out the one with the best safety features available. She couldn’t look at it anymore, so she fixed her gaze on the teenaged boy, whose family of eight drove a beat-up old cargo van, who seldom wore new clothes because his parents just couldn’t afford them, who couldn’t possibly have a clue how expensive the repairs to a new car would be.

Kat swallowed the urge to fall to her knees in the mud and beat her fists on the ground. “Don’t worry about it. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

His forehead wrinkled. “But—”

“I have insurance. It’s all right.” She gave a pointed glance at the other vehicle. “Your ride is waiting. Thank you for bringing my car home. Really. I appreciate it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. Go on and get some sleep before school. And I’ll bet you have some homework to catch up on after missing school today.”

His cheekbones flushed pink. “Yeah.”

“Shoo.” She flapped her hands at him and watched him lope away. Then she retrieved her purse and climbed the steps to her front door.

She’d never tell Christopher, but her insurance didn’t cover damage caused by someone else driving her car.

As soon as she was sure she was alone, she let out a shriek that echoed back from the forest and set a flock of crows flapping and squawking from the trees.

She fumbled the key into the lock and let herself in. When she rented this house, she picked it because the decor was beige and calm and soothing, and she thought that’s what she needed. If Lacey were here, there would be a neon-pink sock dangling from the lamp and a take-out container lodged between the couch cushions.

What she wouldn’t give to come home to a month worth of dirty, colorful socks strewn about the house.

She shrugged out of her raincoat and tossed her purse onto the counter. The clock on the stove said it was 9:00 p.m. Before she did anything, even get warmed up in the shower, she’d better call the school superintendent and smooth things over with him. She pulled up his cell number and hit the call button. As she waited for him to pick up, the muscles in her shoulders wound themselves tight as springs.

The call connected.

“You have some nerve,” he said in an acid tone. Apparently he had Caller ID. And had been expecting her call. “Using your position of authority, encouraging your students—my son—to vandalize logging equipment.”

As he ranted, she clamped her lips between her front teeth, got a towel from the bathroom, and rubbed her dripping hair. Finally, he took a breath.

Kat dredged up her school board meeting voice. “I have a signed permission slip from each of the parents, including you,” she reminded him pleasantly. “They agreed that the students’ role would be observational only and that they wouldn’t physically take part in the protest.”

“I never got one of those forms.”

“Are you sure? I checked them all against the class lists, and all the signatures were there.” She’d copied the forms and taken the copies home, and she paged through them now and found the one she was looking for. “I have it right here in front of me. It looks like your signature to me.”

“Then it’s forged.”

She tilted her head and studied the bold pen strokes. “If it is, it’s a good forgery.”

“Are you accusing my son of something, Ms. Cherish?” His tone lowered, and she had a mental image of him clenching his fists.

Who did he think he was? “No.”
School board meeting voice, Kat.
“I’m saying I was thorough in checking the signatures.”

The superintendent cleared his throat. “The board made it abundantly clear to you… if you chose to go through with this stupid political stunt, you would take steps to prevent the students’ involvement. Now my own son has been arrested. Arrested! How do you think that makes me look?”

Kat slapped the signed form down on her counter.
It makes you look like the parent of a vandal and a forger.
Why hadn’t she waited till after she had a shower and a hot meal, given herself time to think through possible responses to his reaction? She pulled the phone from her ear and stared hard at it, willing the superintendent to see reason.

“You’re being transferred. Immediately.” His voice blared through the sound of her pulse.

“Look, you’re stressed out right now.” A transfer because of a conflict between a principal and a board member? Oh, please—if district policy covered that, principals would transfer to a different school every few months. Now, if the parents had complained, it would be a different story. But they hadn’t. Well, except this one. “Let’s talk about it when we’ve all had a chance to cool down.”

“You’ll submit your request for a transfer”—his voice cracked—“by the end of the day.”

This was more than her job. She wasn’t a success in any other area of her life, but she was a damn good principal. She couldn’t lose this, not because of a petty disagreement with a man who didn’t have a clue what his child was up to half the time.