Heat Wave (3 page)

Caleb Solomon hadn’t
appeared to be hammered, so she assumed he wasn’t there to drink.
However, she did consider the tavern an odd setting for him to
conduct business, even if his office air conditioning had broken.
Couldn’t he meet with clients at Riley’s, or at the Starbucks down
on Route One? Or in the community center, or the library, or
anyplace
that wasn’t a
bar?

Still, he’d seemed sober. Without tasting
it, she couldn’t be positive that his drink was simply iced tea,
but it had certainly looked like it. She’d tried Long Island iced
tea once and nearly thrown up from the mix of liquors it contained.
She’d take a glass of Pinot Grigio or Chardonnay over that ghastly
concoction, any day. Or a tall, frosty tumbler of sweet tea. None
of this northern iced tea, where you had to add the sugar
yourself.

She slid behind the wheel of her car, turned
on the air conditioning, and let it blow for a minute before
wiggling her way out of the parking space. Had she thought living
in New England would spare her the oppressively sultry summers
she’d endured growing up in Savannah? Clearly, she’d been wrong.
This June afternoon in Brogan’s Point was hot enough to melt
steel.

“Like a heat wave,” she murmured, then
realized she was singing the refrain from the song that had blasted
out of the jukebox just before she’d left the tavern. She felt a
frown pinch the bridge of her nose as she steered her Prius away
from the curb and down Atlantic Avenue.

Heat
Wave
. What the heck had that been all
about? She’d had a productive chat with Caleb Solomon, he’d said he
would take care of her citation for her…and then that song had
started playing, and suddenly she’d felt as if her brain itself was
molten steel, softening into heavy, steamy goo inside her
skull.

Before the song, she’d thought Mr. Solomon
had seemed direct and confident, almost aggressive, the way lawyers
were supposed to be. She knew all about lawyers. She knew enough
about them not to like them. But if a person needed a lawyer, she
might as well hire a lean and hungry one.

Her minor imbroglio with
Brogan’s Point’s finest probably didn’t require the services of the
best criminal attorney on the North Shore, which was how Henry had
described Mr. Solomon when he’d recommended him. All she needed was
for this problem to go away. She needed someone to wave a magic
wand over it and—
poof!
—make it disappear like a wisp of smoke dissolving into the
air. She didn’t need a lawyer who could save her from the gallows
or a sentence of life without parole. All she’d done was expose her
breasts. Briefly.
Accidentally
. Because an obnoxious
boy had assaulted her.

She didn’t need the best lawyer in town.

But apparently, that was whom she’d gotten.
Something about Caleb Solomon—his posture, his sharp, hard
features, his decisive speech—implied that he knew exactly how good
he was, at least professionally.

Maybe it was arrogance. She’d grown up with
arrogant men, and she wasn’t fond of them.

Yet Mr. Solomon…

Like a heat
wave
. The song wafted through her mind. She
poked the button on her car’s stereo. The Dixie Chicks CD she’d
been playing on her drive from the high school to Mr. Solomon’s
office and from there to the Faulk Street Tavern resumed. Three
strong, beautifully blended women’s voices.

Just like the strong female voices belting
from the jukebox in the bar, singing “Heat Wave.”

The citation would be taken care of. Caleb
Solomon was probably overkill—going after a mosquito with a
flame-thrower—but he’d get the matter cleared up before it could
damage her chances of receiving tenure. She would pay him for his
services and this entire incident would be peaceably resolved. She
could put it, and that catchy song about a heat wave out of her
mind.

 
No, she couldn’t. Even
as the tender harmonies of the Dixie Chicks filled her car, as the
daylight dimmed and the sky grew rosier as the sun slid westward,
as Meredith cruised into Brogan Heights, the condo development
where she lived, and drove along the winding, weaving, neatly
landscaped road to her modest townhouse, she could not shut the
song out of her mind.

Nor could she banish thoughts of Caleb
Solomon, with his dark, intense eyes and his chiseled jaw and his
profound certainty that he could solve her problem. And the glint
of something—doubt? panic? fear?—that had flickered across his face
while they’d faced each other across the table, listening to an old
rock-and-roll tune that seemed to be about nothing more than the
weather.

***

By now, Meredith ought to
have known that nothing in life was ever as easy as it seemed.
Shortly after her third-period class, she’d received a text message
from Caleb Solomon with the single word:
Done.
Between her lunch break and her
ninth-grade composition class, she’d received a text message from
Stuart Kezerian, the school’s principal, that was twice as long as
Mr. Solomon’s message:
See me.

Henry stopped by her
classroom as she was dismissing her senior honors class at the end
of the day. Henry had quickly become her best friend on the faculty
after she’d been hired two years ago. He was from Mississippi, not
Georgia, but he and Meredith shared their Southern heritage. “We’re
two fish out of water here in New England,” Henry often joked.
“Two
crawfish
out
of water.”

He also joked that Meredith’s ancestors had
probably owned his ancestors, although she pointed out that her
ancestors in Georgia—who, as far as she knew, hadn’t been slave
owners—could not have owned slaves in Mississippi. But Henry was,
like her, a transplant, someone who’d chosen to settle in New
England and learned to tolerate snowy winters, maniacal drivers,
and iced tea you had to sweeten yourself.

Having spent twenty years teaching English
at Brogan’s Point High, several of those years as the department
chair, Henry was seasoned and steady. Nothing rattled him. When
Meredith had told him about her disaster at the beach on Sunday,
he’d patted her arm, recommended that she hire Caleb Solomon, and
assured her she had nothing to worry about.

“I think I have something to worry about
now,” she told him when he ambled into her classroom after the last
of her students had departed. She held her phone toward him so he
could read Stuart’s message on the screen.

Henry batted his hand through the air, as if
swatting at a gnat. “He probably wants to ask you to flip burgers
at the Senior Day barbecue.”

“I flipped burgers last year.”

“Last hired, first to flip burgers,” Henry
reminded her. “Wait ’til you’ve been here a while. Life’ll get a
lot easier then.”

“I won’t be here a while if
I don’t get tenure,” she muttered, sliding a stack of student
essays on
The Things They Carried
into her briefcase. She tried to take comfort in
Henry’s easy grin. The overhead lights reflected off his eyeglasses
and his bald scalp, and his leather sneakers were scuffed. He
dressed more casually than she did. But then, he’d been on the
faculty long enough that he no longer had to impress
anyone.

“Don’t sweat it, girl,” he said. “You’ll get
tenure. The department loves you.”

“The department doesn’t know that I flashed
everyone at the town beach on Sunday.”

“Stuart probably doesn’t know, either,”
Henry pointed out. “Go see him. Then buy yourself a ‘Kiss the Cook’
apron to wear at the barbecue.”

Managing a weak smile, Meredith preceded
Henry out of her classroom and strode down the hallway to Stuart’s
office, which was located near the main entrance. The high school
building was ten years old and had been designed by an architect
apparently determined to defy the logic that ought to inform school
buildings. Hallways slashed off at odd angles, sloping up and down
to be wheelchair-accessible, although it would have made more sense
for the floors simply to be level so ramps wouldn’t be necessary.
The classroom doors were featured glass sidelights, so people could
see in and out, but the glass was laced with meshy wires so
terrorists or vandals couldn’t break them. The lockers lining the
walls were the colors of bright balloons—vivid red, blue, orange,
green, purple and yellow—but a decade of sunlight seeping through
the skylights had leeched some of the color from them, so they
appeared to be wearing a thin film of dust. As teenagers raced past
her down the wide corridors, eager to escape the building, they
shouted at one another, and their voices echoed against the hard
surfaces and vaulted ceilings.

Ordinarily, Meredith or some other teacher
would have asked them to keep their voices down. But it was June,
just a few short weeks before summer vacation began. An epidemic of
spring fever had overtaken the school—faculty as well as students.
If the kids wanted to holler, let them.

Meredith reached the main office, waved at
the administrative assistant and the two parent volunteers who were
conferring around a work table, and continued past them to Stuart’s
office. As bosses went, he was all right. Not as young and dynamic
as the principal of the high school in Lawrence where Meredith had
worked for two years in the Teach for America program, where she’d
decided that she really, truly wanted to make teaching her life’s
work. Teaching in a struggling urban environment where many of her
students didn’t speak English at home had been challenging, and it
had demanded teachers and administrators who weren’t afraid to take
chances and try risky strategies. Compared to that school, Brogan’s
Point High School was safe and comfortable, if just a bit too
conventional. It had its share of at-risk students, but Stuart had
been the principal for longer than school building had been
standing, and he liked doing things the way they’d always been
done. Taking chances was not his style.

She pasted a smile on her face as she swept
through the open door to his office. “Hi, Stuart,” she said,
determined to be a good sport about any of the Senior Week
activities he assigned her to. There were worse tasks than flipping
burgers at the barbecue, she knew. Chaperoning the all-night sober
party that followed graduation was one; she’d gotten stuck with
that assignment her first year at the school.

“Meredith! Come on in!” In his early
sixties, Stuart exuded the kind of beaming good nature that hid an
array of deficits. He was no longer as sharp as most of his staff.
He probably didn’t understand half of what was taught in his
school’s classrooms. He saw his primary job as keeping the troops
in line, bolstering morale, and winning the battle, whether that
battle was having his students score high on the statewide
achievement tests or wringing extra money out of the town
budget.

Meredith’s smile began to ache as she
crossed his small office to his desk and settled into the chair
across from him. He resumed his seat. His smile looked as forced as
hers.

“Well,” he said, apparently struggling to
sound casual, “I heard there was an episode at the town beach this
past Sunday.”

How had he heard? Caleb
Solomon had texted
done
. She assumed that meant he’d made the episode disappear. The
lawyers in her family—her father, her brother, her
brother-in-law—all seemed to think their word was, well, law.
According to them, when a lawyer said
done
, he meant it was absolutely
finished, forever gone, no residue left behind
.

Perhaps Caleb meant
something different by
done
. Maybe he was
done
with her, but she
was not
done
with
the citation. “What did you hear?” she asked Stuart.

“A topless episode?”

Was she just imagining it, or was he
salivating slightly? “It was a minor mishap,” she said, keeping her
tone light and trying not to sound defensive. “Some boy—a student
from this school, I believe—dumped ice on my back. I was
startled.”

“Still…to expose yourself on the beach like
that?”

“As I said, it was an
unfortunate mistake. The situation has been resolved,” she added,
hoping to hell that was what Caleb had meant by
done.

“Resolved or not…” Stuart tapped his
fingertips together, striking what he no doubt considered a
thoughtful pose. “How can I put this without crossing any lines?
Please don’t take it the wrong way, but you’re an attractive young
woman, Meredith. I’m not speaking for myself, of course—I’m a
happily married man.” He let loose with a robust laugh and waved
the wedding band on his left hand in her face. Then he grew solemn
again. “But we have a lot of impressionable young men attending
this school. You’re the kind of teacher they get crushes on.”

Maybe they did. Maybe not. “I’m pretty
tough,” she said. “As far as I know, the kids aren’t exactly crazy
about me. I make them work too hard in my classes. No easy A’s. No
goofing off.”

“Which is wonderful!” Stuart exuded enough
enthusiasm for Meredith to choke on. “But I’m sure many of those
students have crushes on you, even if you’re a hard-ass. I’m sorry,
but that’s your reputation.”

“A hard-ass?” Meredith generally avoided
crude language, and the term did not trip easily off her
tongue.

“I wish they didn’t use the word ‘ass’ in
reference to you. It only emphasizes their awareness of your…well,
your physical assets.”

That this conversation was awkward and
embarrassing was bad enough. That—heaven help her—Stuart might not
recommend her for tenure because he thought some boys had crushes
on her was infuriating. “As I’m sure you know,” she said in as
stern and steady a voice as she could muster, “I do nothing to
encourage that sort of interest from the students here. I dress
properly. I don’t flirt. If I have to meet one on one with a
student, I keep the door open and have another teacher nearby.”