Heat Wave (15 page)

A woman like Gus, with a few miles on her,
with all that character in her face, all that compassion in her
eyes… Definitely more his speed.

He heard Solomon call out, “Meredith?”

The woman kept walking past Solomon’s booth,
heading straight for the bar. Straight, it turned out, for Ed.
“Detective Nolan?” she asked.

“That’s me.”

“Officer Sulkowski told me I might find you
here.”

“Drinking a coffee,” Ed said in his defense.
He held up the mug, evidence of his innocence.

“No—I mean…” She let out a breath and bit
her lower lip. She had a lilting southern drawl, not something
heard very often in these parts. “I was hoping I could talk to you
about a…a situation. Officer Sulkowski said you might be better
suited to assisting me. He said it was beyond the expertise of a
patrolman.”

That sounded interesting. Ed raised his
eyebrows.

Before she could continue, Caleb Solomon was
at her side. “Meredith? What’s going on?”

“You told me to forget the video and it
would disappear,” she said, her voice low and level, but definitely
straining, like a wire stretched taut. “It hasn’t disappeared.”

“It can take a day or two for the furor to
die down and people to move on.”

“I don’t think I can survive
another day like today, Caleb.
Everyone
in the school has seen that
video.
Everyone.
”
She turned her big, blue eyes to Ed. “I need your help.”

She hadn’t expected to see Caleb at the
tavern. Then again, she hadn’t wanted to enter the tavern. Every
time she went there, she heard “Heat Wave” and lost another little
sliver of her mind.

But she was desperate. She’d risk
dementia.

She had barely survived a wretched weekend,
the high point of which had been running several loads of laundry.
Hauling a bag of trash to the dumpster, she’d encountered Marty
Avendel, a neighbor with whom she’d spent a tedious evening a few
months back, picking at a cobb salad at Riley’s while he’d regaled
her with anecdotes illustrating what a bitch his ex-wife was.
Meredith had politely but firmly declined two subsequent
invitations from him, and there, standing beside the dumpster in
the Saturday afternoon heat, inhaling the smell of roasting garbage
and listening to the buzz of swarming flies, Marty had asked her
out again. Did that qualify as stalking?

No matter. She’d declined
once more, less politely and more firmly, and escaped back to her
condo, wondering why she was all by herself, swatting physically at
trash-seeking flies and verbally at an obnoxiously persistent
neighbor, instead of with Caleb, enjoying the spectacular ocean
view from his apartment, enjoying a meal or a glass of wine with
him. Enjoying
him
.

The answer to that question was clear to
her, if not terribly satisfying. She hardly knew Caleb—and yes,
spending more time with him would give her the opportunity to know
him better—yet despite hardly knowing him, she’d made love to him.
More accurately, she’d had sex with him.

Wild, resplendent sex. The best sex she’d
ever had in her admittedly limited experience.

What kind of woman had sex with a man who
was practically a stranger? Good women, sure. Fun women. Easy-going
women. But not women like Meredith, who might be good but wasn’t so
sure she was fun and was absolutely certain she wasn’t
easy-going.

Also, there was the whole lawyer-client
situation. He wanted to foist her off on one of his colleagues so
he could bed her. She admired his ethics, but what if she didn’t
want to be the client of Heather and Neal, or whatever their names
were? Caleb was the lawyer Henry had recommended to her. He was the
one she wanted to help her navigate through the ghastly mess caused
by her moment of toplessness.

Monday morning, however,
threw even that previous certainty into doubt. When she’d last seen
Caleb—before she’d seen
all
of him, when he’d still had his clothing on—he’d
suggested that she might view the video and try to identify the
idiot who’d dumped ice on her. But he’d recommended that she forget
the whole incident and let it fade away. Perhaps it would fade away
someday, but someday seemed a long way off.

Things started turning ranker than the trash
at the condo dumpster with her first class of the morning. Her plan
was to review the books the class had read over the past school
year to help them prepare for the department-wide final exam. She
stood at the front of the classroom, smiling with an enthusiasm she
had to fake after her dismally lonely weekend, and said, “One way
to remember novels is to organize them by theme. What are some of
the themes we’ve discussed in our reading this year?”

“War,” someone called out.

“Okay. War novels. What are the war novels
we’ve read?”

Students started shouting titles. Meredith
turned her back to the room so she could list them on the
white-board.

“The Red Badge of Courage.”

“The Things They Carried.”

“A Farewell to Boobs.”

Meredith froze. The words struck her like a
sharp rock between her shoulder blades. The voice shouting out that
perversion of Hemingway’s title was male, arising from the back of
the classroom where the class clowns usually sat. The ensuing
snickers, male and female, spread throughout the room, like ripples
across the surface of a pond would if that sharp rock had landed in
the water.

She remained facing the
white-board until she was able to breathe again, and wrote
A Farewell to Arms
on the
board.
Ignore the video
, Caleb had said.
Assume it’ll be
forgotten.

Clearly, it hadn’t been forgotten yet.

But she couldn’t think of a better strategy
than to disregard the student heckling her. She’d keep her cool,
maintain her poise, pretend everything was fine.

Drawing in a deep breath and hoping her
cheeks weren’t flaming with embarrassment, she turned back to the
class and forced another smile. “What’s another theme we’ve
discussed this year?”

“Race,” Ashley Stamos said from her seat in
the front row. Ashley, bless her heart, wasn’t a class clown.

“Right. Race and—”

“Class,” said Ashley’s best friend JoJo,
seated one desk over.

“Race and class.” Meredith nodded and
scribbled those words onto the white-board. “Give me some books
that would fall under this theme.”

“The Color
Purple
.”

“Huckleberry
Finn
.”

“The Help.”

“Invisible
Tit.
”

The same male voice, the
same snickers. Meredith wrote
Invisible
Man
on the board, snapped her marker shut,
and rotated to face the class, no longer caring if she was
blushing. “Tommy Lynch?” she asked, guessing the source of the
mockery. “Is there some reason you want to disrupt the
class?”

“No reason,” Tommy said, feigning an
innocent expression.

“If you have no reason, kindly stop.”

He did stop, but the damage had been done.
Meredith was rattled. She was chagrined. She acknowledged that
ignoring the video was not an option.

The rest of her day had not gone much
better. No student was as brazen as Tommy Lynch, but she’d felt
eyes on her wherever she went, whispers in her wake, the atmosphere
warping around her. Walking down the corridor, she’d noticed
students gawking and heard giggles. Entering the cafeteria, she’d
felt a barrier surround her like a large, transparent bubble,
separating her from the students wolfing down their salads, breaded
drumsticks, and veggie-burgers. They could see her. They could
point at her and smirk. She couldn’t hear what they were saying,
but she could easily guess.

By the time the last bell sounded, she was
wrung out. She staggered into Henry’s classroom and let out a moan.
“That bad, huh,” he said, giving her a gentle smile and an even
gentler hug.

“Has everyone in the entire school seen the
video?” she asked.

“Probably. But the good news is, if they’ve
all seen it, it can’t get worse.”

“It
can
get worse.” Disengaging from
Henry’s arms, she tapped her cell phone, checking for messages. “I
haven’t heard from Stuart yet.”

“Maybe our fine principal hasn’t seen
it.”

“Or he
has
seen it, and he’s lining up the
school board, giving them rifles, and looking for a blindfold and a
cigarette for me.”

“Fortunately, you don’t smoke,” Henry joked.
Meredith wished she could laugh, but after a long day of forcing
herself to smile and hold her head high, laughter was beyond
her.

“I need to see this video,” Meredith said.
“I’m the only person in the entire school, other than possibly
Stuart, who hasn’t seen it.”

Henry shook his head. “It’ll upset you.”

“I’m already upset.”

He sighed. “I haven’t got it on my
phone.”

“Tommy Lynch must have it on his.”

“Tommy Lynch?” Henry scowled. “I had him in
my freshman English class. He was a little turd.”

“He’s a big turd now,” Meredith said, then
allowed herself a weary grin. It was so unlike her to use such a
word. “Isn’t he on the baseball team?”

“Probably. Or the football team. One of
those jock things.”

Her grin grew. Just talking to Henry gave
her strength. With a farewell wave, she strode out of his
classroom, slid the straps of her tote over her shoulder, and
marched down the corridor in the direction of the gym complex,
which opened out to the field where the baseball team was sure to
be practicing or warming up, or whatever it was they did in
preparation for the division playoffs.

She didn’t make it to the
field, though. A buzz emanated from her purse, and when she pulled
out her cell phone and swiped it for new messages, she saw one
she’d been dreading:
Meredith, please come
see me in my office ASAP. Stuart.

“Shit,” she said. She had graduated from
“turd” to “shit,” and this time the profanity was accompanied not
by a grin but by a grimace.

U-turning, she headed back up the corridor
toward the front of the building, where the administrative offices
were located. In the spacious front area, one of the secretaries
was deep in conversation with the school’s choral director and the
band conductor. Scraps of their voices floated across the room to
Meredith, mentions of the program their ensembles would be
performing at the school’s commencement exercises in a few
weeks.

Almost graduation for the seniors. Almost
finals period for all the other students. Surely Stuart could let
her ride out these last few weeks. It would be a bumpy ride, but
once everyone was gone for the summer, students would forget the
video even faster than they forgot what logarithms were, or what
year Martin Van Buren became president, or what Alice Walker and
Ralph Ellison had to say about racial discrimination in
twentieth-century America.

The music teachers and the
secretary glanced her way, then fell silent, their expressions
mixing concern with amusement and…yes. Schadenfreude
Better you than me,
they
were thinking as they regarded her from their end of the
room
.

Meredith didn’t curse, though she was
tempted. She only nodded a greeting and continued down the short
hall to Stuart’s office.

“Meredith! Hi!” Stuart had been seated at
his desk, but as she entered, he leaped to his feet and beamed at
her as if she were a long-lost relative.

His smile roused her suspicions. She
swallowed, did the head-held-high thing she’d been doing all day,
and crossed his office to his desk.

“Please. Have a seat.” He gestured to one of
the chairs across the desk from him. The visitor chairs were small,
upholstered in a scratchy tweed fabric. His chair was leather, with
arms and a high back. Just in case anyone doubted who was the most
important person in the room.

Once she’d sat, he settled back onto his
throne. His smile didn’t flag. “Rough day today?” he asked.

“It was fine,” she said warily. “Lots of
year-end review. My senior honors class is in great shape, but I
reckon that’s no surprise. The underclassmen—”

“You need to take a leave of absence.”

Surely she’d misheard him. “What?”

“A leave of absence.”

She took a few seconds to collect herself.
“The school term ends in less than three weeks.”

“I know. And as you said, it’s mostly review
at this point. We can hire a sub to cover for you.”

A substitute teacher overseeing the finals
reviews for her classes? That would place her students at a severe
disadvantage—to say nothing of placing Meredith at an even bigger
disadvantage. Not only would it remove her from the school at a
time Stuart and the English department chair would be initiating
her tenure decision process, but her students would score lower on
the departmental exams, which would increase the odds of her being
terminated.

“You can’t do that,” she said, although, of
course, he could.

His smile faded. “Meredith. You know what’s
going on. That video of you running around naked has gone viral
here at the school.”

“I wasn’t naked,” she said, struggling to
keep her panic at bay. She should have brought a union rep with
her. She should have left the building without checking her
messages. What if she’d gone home without glancing at her phone?
What would Stuart have done?