Sleeping With the Enemy (30 page)

She stepped into his arms, felt a thrill as they closed around her.  Taking his face in her hands, she placed a tender kiss on his lips.  “Then get out there,” she whispered, “and start kicking.”

***

When Paula answered the phone, he jumped in feet first.  “I need you to do a favor for me.  It’s a big one, and if it backfires, we could all end up in hot water.  You, me, and Chuck.  If you don’t want to do it, I’ll understand.”

“If there’s one thing I love,” Paula said, sounding as cool as a tidal pool on a summer day, “it’s a challenge.  Will it get me disbarred?”

“Not if we get away with it.”

“Well, then, suppose you tell me what we’re getting away with before I commit myself.”

“Chuck has a free period right now.  I want you to call him at school and ask him to borrow Jolene Hunter’s student file.  Then I want you to bring it to me.”

“My, my,” Paula said.  “We are walking on the wild side today, aren’t we? Is there any particular reason that you’ve stooped to pilfering the academic records of your students?”

“It’s only one student, and we’re only borrowing it.”

“I’m sure,” she said dryly, “that the court will take that into consideration at your sentencing.”

“I want to do a little investigating into Jolene’s past.  Find out just what she’s been up to for the past couple of years.”

“Just remember, pookie, if we get caught, your ass will be in an even bigger sling than it’s already in.” She paused, then said bluntly, “How’s Rose?”

He met his wife’s eyes across the room.  She smiled at him, and he smiled back.  “Rose,” he said heartily, “is just fine.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard today.  By the way, Jesse? Welcome back.”

***

He had the file in his hands within a half-hour, and while Rose and her sister drank coffee in the kitchen, he sat in his study and read it cover to cover.  In her first two years of high school, Jolene had pulled a straight 4.0 average, taking a number of heavy-duty courses that included calculus and advanced biology.  Then, between the first and second quarters of her junior year, her grades had taken a serious slide.  She’d barely made it through third-year German, and her English and math grades had dropped significantly.  The only course in which she’d maintained an A had been stage band.

Jesse drummed his fingers on the desktop and gazed thoughtfully at Jolene’s transcript.  Something had happened during her junior year to cause this near-fatal downward spiral.  But what? A family crisis? A serious illness? A thwarted love affair? He leaned back in his chair, swiveled around to look out the window.  Outside, on the hard crust of snow, a pair of mourning doves pecked at the seeds scattered beneath the bird feeder.  A girl like Jolene, he thought, absently tapping the pen in his hand against the folder in his lap, wouldn’t have a lot of friends.  Too plain to be sought after by the boys, too brainy to be popular with the girls.  A mutant to her peers who walked the hallowed halls of Catherine McConaughy High School.

But her teachers, at least the good ones, would have respected that mind of hers.  Male and female alike, they would have made friendly overtures, encouraged her to learn, presented constant challenges to her intellectual ability.  Chances were good that she would have been somebody’s pet.  And if that somebody had been a man, it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine that she might have overstepped the boundaries with him.

He pulled out a legal pad and jotted down the names of Jolene’s junior-year teachers.  Kent, Hastings, Phelps, Racine, Garcia.  No first names, only surnames.  He tapped the pen against the file while he thought some more.  And then he went to find Rose. 

“Do something for me?” he said.  “Call this number—” He’d scribbled the school’s phone number across the top of the page.  “—and find out which of these teachers are men.”

Rose took the paper from him, glanced at it, and frowned.  “What do I tell them?”

“It doesn’t matter.  Make something up.”

She spent a moment studying the paper in her hand, then marched to the kitchen phone and dialed the number.  “Hello,” she said.  “My name is Drusilla Goldwater, and I’m making up a mailing list for a women’s studies conference we’re holding in April.  My boss gave me a list of McConaughy faculty she wanted to send flyers to, but she’s a little flaky, and she forgot to give me their first names.  Do you think you could help me out?” She paused, listened.  “Wonderful! Okay, the first one is Kent.”

Thirty seconds later, she hung up the phone.  “Voilà!” she said.  “Your list, Mr.  Lindstrom.”

The corner of his mouth quirked as he looked at her with new respect.  “I had no idea you could be so devious.”

“I’m devious? I’m not the one who stole a student file.”

He glanced at the list.  Garcia, Kent, and Hastings were all women.  That left Lucas Phelps, who taught math, and Philip Racine, the band director.  Jesse called McConaughy High and left a brief and cryptic message for both of them: 
Call Jesse immediately at 207-555-3738 regarding Jolene.  Urgent. 
He might not have been a psychology major, but he liked to believe that he knew a little bit about human nature.  If anything funky had gone on last year between Jolene and one of her teachers, he was almost certain that the man in question would call back.

“Now what?” Rose said when he hung up the phone.

“Now,” he said, “we wait.”

With the cordless phone tucked into his coat pocket, he and Rose walked the property, arm in arm, coats buttoned high against the wind that blew in off the icy surface of the river.  And they talked.  He told her how difficult it had been when his wife had left him with a ten-year-old son to raise alone.  “I should have seen it coming,” he said, “but I was too wrapped up in my own problems to notice how unhappy Colleen was.  I was a mess for a while.  The writing kept me sane.  That and Mikey.  I had to keep things as normal as possible for his sake.  I was all he had.”

While he held her trembling hand and listened silently, Rose told him how, at the vulnerable age of fifteen, she’d allowed Alan Coughlin to lure her into an illicit love affair that she’d been sure would last until the end of time.  “When I found out that I wasn’t the only one,” she said, “that there were other—that there’d always been others—I wanted to die.  I really, really believed he loved me.” She hunched her shoulders.  “Instead, he took away my innocence and then he tossed me aside, the same way he’d tossed aside a dozen other girls before me.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“If it hadn’t been for Eddie…” She paused, shrugged.  “For all his faults, there was a time when Eddie loved me.  And I loved him.  And it all felt so damn normal.  Maybe that’s why, when things started going sour, I put on blinders and pretended everything was all right.  I wasn’t ready to give up normal, not after what I’d been through with Alan.”

After a time, the cold drove them indoors, where they both wandered aimlessly about the house, waiting for the phone to ring.  While Rose kept herself busy watering plants and dusting knick-knacks that didn’t need dusting, he rearranged books in the floor-to-ceiling bookcase in his den.  It was nearly noon, and he’d just come into the kitchen for a cup of cocoa, when the phone rang.  At the sound of the ringer, they both froze.  Their eyes met, and for a moment, they were both perfectly still.  And then he went to pick it up.  “Jesse Lindstrom,” he said.

The voice at the other end was young, male, and more than a little suspicious.  “This is Phil Racine,” it said.  “Just who the hell are you, and what do you want?”

Across the room, Rose stood in front of the stove, soup ladle in hand, her eyes questioning.  Jesse gave her a quick nod, and she turned away from him and began stirring the cocoa.  “Thanks for calling,” he said into the phone.  “I teach English at Jackson Falls High School, and I want to talk to you about Jolene Hunter.”

“Why?” the voice demanded.  “What’s she been saying about me?”

“Nothing.  I’m just following a hunch here.  She had two male teachers last year.  I left the same message for both of you.  You’re the one who called back.”

The silence on the other end of the line wasn’t promising.  “Look,” Jesse said, “I’m in danger of losing my job because Jolene told the school we had an inappropriate relationship.  It’s not true, but I have no way of proving it.  It’s her word against mine.  I’m hoping there might be something you can tell me that will help me out of this mess.  If I’m wrong, I apologize for bothering you.”

At the other end, Racine sighed.  “Oh, hell,” he said.  “I was hoping I’d never have to hear her name again.”

His heartbeat quickened.  “Then something did happen.”

“Oh, yeah.  Or maybe I should say that Jolene tried her damnedest to make something happen.  I went through four months of hell because of that girl, four months I’m not about to forget anytime soon.”

“Pretty intense, was it?”

“Intense?” Racine snorted.  “Man, you don’t know the half of it.  I made the mistake of eating lunch with her once, out on the playground.  I was just being friendly, you know? I mean, hell, she’s a personable kid.  Easy to talk to.  After that, it was love notes tucked into my saxophone.  Phone calls to my apartment at all hours.  She and her friends even started showing up at my gigs on Friday nights.  God only knows how they got in, every damn one of them was underage.  Jolene was unbelievably persistent, wouldn’t take no for an answer.  She’s smart, and she knows just which buttons to push, and how hard to push them.  She kept threatening to run her mouth to anybody who’d listen if I didn’t do what she wanted.”

“What did you do?”

“You have to understand,” Racine said.  “I’m low man on the totem pole here, the most junior member of the faculty in an elite private school where people spend thirty grand a year to send their kids.  It was my first year of teaching.  If either one of us had gone to the administration with this, it would have been her word against mine, and with her parents’ money, who do you think the school would have believed? The Hunters would have steamrolled right over me, and old Phil would’ve been out on the street without a day job.  So I decided that two could play at her little game.” Racine paused.  “I blackmailed her.”

Jesse let out a hard breath.  “Blackmail?”

“It was during the spring band trip to New York.  She came to my hotel room, declaring her undying love, and I couldn’t get rid of her.  She was being bratty and obnoxious, and I was at the end of my rope.  I have one of those little mini-recorders.  I mostly use it to tape my private lesson students so they can hear what they sound like, gauge their progress.  I spied it sitting on the desk, and when she wasn’t looking, I turned it on.  I taped the whole conversation, everything she said to me, everything I said back to her.  When I figured I had enough, I rewound it and played it back to her.”

“And that worked?”

“It worked.  I told her that if she ever bothered me again, I’d play it for her parents, the principal, the school board…”

“Tell me you still have the tape.”

“I’ve still got it.”

Excitement raced through his bloodstream.  “My lawyer and I are meeting with the Hunters and the school administration tomorrow morning.  Can I borrow it? I’ll pay for overnight delivery.”

“That girl,” Racine said, “made my life a living hell.  I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand by and watch her put the screws to somebody else.  I’ll go you one better.  You pay my airfare, I’ll hand-deliver it to you.  I want to see her face when you play it for her.”

***

Gathered in the high school conference room, they were  a somber-looking crew:  Paula in her lawyer clothes, Henry Lamoreau, looking as if he’d rather be having a root canal; a hard-eyed and defiant Jolene; the Hunters and Terry Johnson, their attorney, all three of them wearing identical expressions of smug disapproval; Leslie Higgins from the Department of Human Services Child Protective Unit, and of course, Jesse and Rose, hands clasped beneath the table, both of them surviving solely on gallons of Maeve’s hi-test coffee and three hours of sleep.

Seated in the chair to Jesse’s right, Paula stood up.  “Thank you all for coming this morning,” she said.  “As I’m about to show you, the charges against my client are totally unfounded.”

“That remains to be seen,” Terry Johnson said smugly.

Paula smiled cryptically and made a production of setting her briefcase on the table, unsnapping it, and pulling out a small tape recorder.  “Excuse me,” she said.  Every eye in the room followed her as she walked to the door and opened it.  “You can come in now.”

All eyes were still focused on the door when Phil Racine walked into the room.  Jesse shot a quick glance at Jolene.  At the sight of her former band instructor, all the color drained from her face.  “Hello, Jolene,” Racine said, and nodded his head at her parents.  “Mr. and Mrs. Hunter.”

The Hunters looked confused.  “Who are you?” Terry Johnson said.

Racine leaned over the table, cool as the proverbial cucumber.  “Phil Racine.”  He shook the attorney’s hand.  “I was Jolene’s band instructor last year.”

Paula popped open the door on the cassette player.  “Phil?”

“Oops.  Almost forgot.” Racine patted his pockets, found what he sought in the breast pocket of his navy blazer.  With a flourish, he handed the tape to Paula, and she popped it into the machine.

“This tape,” she said, “will prove that my client is not the first teacher to whom Jolene Hunter has formed an obsessive attachment.” And she pushed the button on the recorder.

“How many times do I have to say it, Jolene?”
Racine’s voice said. 
“How many different ways? I’m not interested.  Go play with somebody your own age.”

“I don’t believe you!”
Jolene said. 
“I haven’t forgotten the way you looked at me the day we had lunch together.  Like you wanted to eat me up.”

“It’s all in your head.”

“And we agree on so many things.  We even have the same tastes in music.  Early Motown and Tchaikovsky.  Don’t you see? We were meant to be together.”