The Academy (51 page)

“Ed,” he said.

“Thank you, Ed. Thank you all.”

“Do you think she’s dead?” Myla asked, looking back at the closed door.

Dead.
It was a harsh word, a final word, but in this instance she liked it and was glad that it fit.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

She took a deep breath. “Now let’s find a phone and call the fire department before this whole place burns down.”

Epilogue

It took over a week to sort everything out. As far as anyone knew, Jody Hawkes had disappeared, along with several hundred thousand dollars of the school’s money, reason enough for the district to revoke Tyler’s charter status and reestablish control.

After Jody, Linda thought, even those rabid fundamentalists didn’t seem quite so bad.

Besides, there was an election coming up.

Janet Fratelli had disappeared as well, and to Linda, her whereabouts were a complete and utter mystery. Her office in the library had been cleaned out, stripped of anything personal, and no one knew where she had gone or why.

Bobbi Evans had been found dead by her own hand in the horrific hellhole that had been Jody’s office. In a cruel irony, Bobbi was listed both in an article in the
Orange County Register
and in an obituary in the
Santa Mara Sentinel
as a “secretary” rather than an “administrative coordinator.”

Although things were gradually getting back to normal on campus, it would be quite a while before all was as it should be. Several teachers had quit, several more had been fired and it seemed at times as though there were more substitutes on campus than full-time employees. An interim principal had been hired, an old district hand coaxed out of retirement, and he not only had disbanded the Tyler Scout program but was conducting an investigation to determine whether any of the former scouts should be suspended or expelled.

Both Linda and Diane, as well as most of the other remaining teachers, had been questioned extensively regarding what exactly had gone on at Tyler, not just on that last day but for several weeks prior, and though they hadn’t met ahead of time to get their stories straight, their accounts must have been similar enough that no red flags were raised.

It would have been very difficult to talk about ghosts and moving shadows and anything supernatural to the law-enforcement officials and district bureaucrats to whom she’d spoken, so Linda kept it simple and direct, leaving most of that out—although she did bring up the missing students and teachers. After what she’d seen in that schoolhouse, she doubted that any of them would ever be found, but she felt she owed it to them to make sure that someone in authority made the effort.

Brad, Myla and Ed had filled her in on what they’d discovered through their own research, and Linda was astounded by their knowledge of the school’s history and their description of John Hawkes and his academy. She had not known about any of this, but hearing it now made pieces of the puzzle start falling into place. She was very impressed by the students’ fact-gathering skills, which put those of many teachers to shame, and she vowed to talk to their other instructors about awarding them extra credit. Initiative like theirs deserved to be rewarded.

By the end of the second week, life was starting to get back into a more normal routine, and while Linda was still far more tired than she had any right to be, she was very glad that the worst of it was behind her.

The horror was over.

Snuggling close to Frank as they lay in bed watching Bill Maher on HBO, she touched him under the covers, her hand sliding down his bare chest and under the elastic band of his underwear. “Want to do it?” she whispered.

“Okay,” he said, looking over her shoulder at the television. “But can we wait until the show’s over?”

She gave him a quick kiss. “Sure we can,” she said. Leaning back on the pillow, she smiled, feeling good, feeling happy.

Feeling safe.

About the Author

Born in Arizona shortly after his mother attended the world premiere of
Psycho,
Bentley Little
is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of numerous previous novels and
The Collection,
a book of short stories. He has worked as a technical writer, reporter/photographer, library assistant, salesclerk, phone book deliveryman, video arcade attendant, newspaper deliveryman, furniture mover, and rodeo gatekeeper. The son of a Russian artist and an American educator, he and his Chinese wife were married by the justice of the peace in Tombstone, Arizona.

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