Consequences

“But it all comes down to Lucia Osborne.” J.T. made a wry face as he accepted a dish of low-fat ice cream from Lettie Mae Reese, the Double C’s longtime cook.

“Why does it all come down to her?” Jim asked, thinking about the slim quiet woman behind her big desk.

“Lucia’s the one who’s got to rally the town and convince these people her school and her job are worth saving,” J.T. said. “With somebody like Gloria Wall nipping at her heels, she’s going to have to watch herself every step of the way. She sure can’t afford to make any mistakes this winter.”

CHAPTER THREE

ON FRIDAY, the autumn day continued warm right into the evening. By twilight, Lucia’s little third-floor apartment was stifling.

She opened all the windows to let in a breath of air, then wandered downstairs and out to the garden where June Pollock was weeding her pumpkin patch.

“Hello, Lucia.” June looked up briefly at her as she sank wearily onto a wooden bench at the edge of the garden in the shade of a rustling pecan tree. “How are you tonight?”

“Well, I’m not feeling so great. Suffering from the heat, I guess.” Lucia watched June’s strong arms as she wielded the hoe.

Everything about June was strong, from her square shoulders to her sturdy brown legs in denim shorts. She had waist-length blond hair that she wore in a thick braid pinned on top of her head, and blue eyes so level and steady that most people had a hard time looking at her directly.

June Pollock was probably close to forty, and had lived all her life in Crystal Creek, except for a long-ago fling with an oil wildcatter that had ended her high-school career, broken her heart and left her with a baby girl to raise alone.

June’s daughter had been born with a club foot, but Carlie Pollock was a sweet girl, beloved by everybody in the town. At nineteen, after numerous surgeries, Carlie was able to walk and run normally, even ice-skate, and was off at college studying marine biology.

Lucia suspected that June missed Carlie a great deal, though with characteristic stoicism she gave no sign of her feelings. But it was probably loneliness that prompted her to rent parts of her house to strangers. Since her financial windfall a few years earlier, when June sold a valuable antique carousel horse that had been hidden in her cellar for more than sixty years, she no longer had any need of the rental income.

“You’ve got a good crop here,” Lucia commented, watching June work the hoe carefully around the ripening globes of pumpkins. “This looks like it could be your best year ever, June.”

“It will be if the nights ever start to cool down a bit.” June paused and brushed her forehead with a tanned arm, then resumed her task. “How’re things at school these days?”

Lucia looked up in surprise. Her landlady hardly ever initiated conversation of any kind, and certainly didn’t ask about Lucia’s job.

“It’s…fine, I guess.”

“Really? Well, I heard at work today that damn Gloria Wall is fixin’ to dump you,” June said with her usual bluntness.

Lucia gave her landlady a wan smile. “Yes, it appears she’s going to try. But I intend to do my very best not to get dumped.”

“Well, you’re gonna have your work cut out,” June said. “Lots of folks around this town just gotta hear ‘lower taxes,’ and they’re lining up to sign on the dotted line no matter what they stand to lose. Damn idiots!” she added, pounding away at the dried soil.

Lucia watched the woman’s muscular arms for a moment as they moved in steady rhythm. At last she ventured a question.

“June…”

“Yeah?”

“What can you tell me about James Whitley?”

June smiled, showing strong white teeth. “Jimmy Whitley? He grew up in this town, right down the street.”

“Really?” Lucia asked, startled.

“His daddy was the middle-school principal when I was a girl, worked in the very same office where you’re sittin’ nowadays. Little Jimmy, he was just the nicest kid,” June said thoughtfully, leaning on her hoe. “All big eyes, curly hair and dimples, and so smart nobody could believe it. We all thought he’d go to the moon someday, or grow up to be president. But he got bit by the rodeo bug as a teenager, and that was pretty much the end of him. It gets to a lot of boys that way.”

Lucia picked up a trailing vine and wrapped it around her finger, absorbing all this information.

“What happened to his father?”

“Well, that was a sad case.” June plied her hoe again, frowning. “Sarah Whitley, that’s Jim’s mother, she died of cancer quite young. After that, Carl Whitley just sort of lost his spirit. One day down at Lake Travis he swum out into the water and never came back. They found his body next day, tangled in some weeds.”

“And Jim…”

“He follows the rodeo circuit some years, and teaches school whenever he stays in one place long enough. My cousin up in Lampasas says they had Jim Whitley for a term with their eighth-graders, and he was the best teacher ever to set foot in that place. But he wouldn’t stay another year, even when they begged.”

“So you think he’d make a competent teacher at my school?”

June looked at her shrewdly.

“For God’s sake, Lucia,” she said. “Just hire the man and quit fretting over it. If Gloria Wall’s on your case, you’ll be having yourself a tough enough year ahead without passing up the chance to get a real fine teacher.”

“Well, I guess your recommendation is good enough for me.”

“Just be warned,” June said, “that you can’t make the man do anything he doesn’t want to. He may seem like a laid-back sort of guy, but he’s all steel at the core, Jim Whitley is. Nobody’s ever been able to push him around, and you won’t be able to, either.”

Lucia hesitated for a moment, then nerved herself to speak. “He told me you’d promised to rent him the apartment on the…”

But June was no longer listening. She stared toward the vine-covered fence rails bordering the garden, her face pale beneath the tan.

Startled by the other woman’s intensity, Lucia followed June’s gaze and saw Willard Kilmer, standing in the back lane, holding a manila file folder.

Willard was a member of Lucia’s staff. In fact, he taught the other group of seventh-graders. Bella’s stepdaughter, Ellie Gibson, was in his class.

He was a tall, thin man in his early forties, with pale thinning hair and a slight stoop. Willard seemed utterly drab and inconsequential until you noticed his eyes, which were filled with gentleness and lively intelligence behind horn-rimmed glasses.

Lucia had always liked the man, and they’d worked efficiently together in the years since she’d come to the school. But Willard was painfully shy, and not easy to get close to. At faculty meetings and social functions he kept to himself, usually watching from a corner and saying little.

He lived with his ailing mother in a big, well-kept house a couple of streets over from June’s. Lucia often wondered about his personal life, and whether he was as lonely as he appeared to be.

“Hello, Willard,” she said, smiling across the fence in an attempt to set him at ease. “It’s a nice evening, isn’t it? Not quite so hot today.”

“It’s warm enough, but considerably better than yesterday,” he agreed, clearing his throat. The dying sunlight flashed off the lenses of his glasses, making him look remote and sad. “Mama tends to suffer a good deal in the heat, I’m afraid.”

“I reckon we all do,” June said with her customary bluntness, hammering at a stubborn clod of dirt with her hoe. “But we don’t talk about it all the time, because complaining won’t make it any cooler.”

“Hello, June,” the teacher said shyly. “Your pumpkins are looking great this year. I’ll have to remember to pick one up before Halloween.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll set a good one aside for you.” June turned her back and knelt to pull at a weed under one of the pumpkin vines.

“The sixth-graders are having a pumpkin-carving contest this year,” Willard told Lucia with a timid, luminous smile that made his craggy face light up. “They’re allowing me to enter, and I aim to win first prize.”

Lucia smiled back at him. “I’m sure you’re going to win. I’ve seen those artistic jack-o’-lanterns you carve.”