“I’ll try her in the classroom. They go outside for exercise around ten thirty. I might just catch her before that.”
She picked up the receiver and winked at me, I suppose to indicate our partnership in locating Bea. She covered the receiver and said, “How old is your little one?”
For a moment I didn’t understand what she meant and then realized she was talking about my nonexistent preschooler.
The only “little one” I had was Baxter and he almost outweighed me.
“He’s three,” I said and immediately felt guilty.
“Such a delightful age—” She broke off as someone on the other end picked up the phone.
“Bea, do you have time to speak with a potential preschool parent?” Gladys nodded to herself while listening to Bea’s response.
“Okay, I’ll let her know.” Gladys replaced the receiver in the cradle and smiled at me.
“She said you can meet her out on the playground. They’re just getting their coats on to go outside.” She pointed in the direction of the new addition.
“Thank you,” I said and backed out of the room. Something about Gladys made me want to keep my eye on her.
*
I found Bea and her small charges in a tiny play area surrounded by a metal fence. Plastic climbing structures took up most of the space and the children swarmed the pieces and fought for turns on the seesaw.
“Oh, it’s you; you don’t have a preschooler, do you?” Bea said as I approached the fence.
“Sorry, Gladys just assumed I was a parent and then I didn’t really get a chance to convince her I just wanted to talk to you.”
Bea nodded as if Gladys’s habit of conducting her own conversations was well-known.
“It’s just as well. The children are cranky today; it wouldn’t have set a good example for a new parent. What can I do for you?”
I decided to skip over the preliminaries and get straight to the issue. The swarming mass of small people was making me nervous.
“I saw you at Rafe Godwin’s memorial reception last night.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she took a step back.
“I didn’t see you there. But, yes, I came with some of the members of the congregation.” She crossed her arms.
“This may seem like it’s none of my business, but why were you there protesting when your daughter was a member of his coven?”
“Shh!” Bea looked back at her class to see if any of them had heard. “We don’t talk about things like covens and witches in front of the children. And you’re right. It’s none of your business,” she hissed.
I lowered my voice. “Does your church know about Skye?”
She hesitated and held my gaze for a moment. Then her shoulders relaxed. “Some do, but most don’t. My husband and I have been hoping she’ll give it up and come back to the church. Especially now that . . . he’s dead.”
“You think that Skye was only a member of his . . . group . . . because he was the leader?”
“Skye is a very impressionable girl. She has romantic ideas. I thought she might realize her mistake now that he’s gone, but she seems as committed as ever to this . . . cult.”
I was starting to feel like it takes a cult member to know one when one of the kids came up to us, crying. He appeared to have fallen and scraped up his hand.
“It’s okay, Aiden, we’ll get some ice for it when we go inside.”
Aiden sniffled and ran back to his friends.
“I really have to get back to the children.”
She turned and waded into the waist-high crowd, who attached themselves to her while lodging complaints and begging for more time outside.
I turned to go and looked down to see a short blonde girl staring at me with her thumb in her mouth.
“Hello,” I said.
“Your eyes are weird,” she said around her wet digit.
“Um, thank you?”
“Do you have a kid coming here?”
I shook my head.
“Does your kid have weird eyes, too?”
“No, I don’t—”
“Tiffany! Come along and get in line,” Bea shouted.
The little girl waved with her free hand and skipped over to the rest of the group, but I was sure her normal eyes followed me all the way to the parking lot.
30
I backed out of the parking spot and drove to the road. Left would take me back home; right would take me toward Rafe’s house. I felt like there was more to see in his house and the likelihood that I would be interrupted by Mac was low. I decided to take a chance and drive over there for one more look in his office. I hoped to retrieve the family tree I had seen if the police hadn’t discovered the secret drawer.