A Child's Wish

CHAPTER ONE

“MS. FOSTER, are you alone?” Startled as the loudspeaker sounded in her third-grade classroom during her Thursday-afternoon planning period, Meredith glanced up from the sloppily scrawled math problem she’d been trying to decipher.

“Yes, Mr. Shepherd.” She used the formality, just as she always did when anyone else was around—or could possibly be around.

“Could you come down to my office?” The principal’s inner sanctum—the only place in the building where one could be guaranteed an uninterrupted meeting.

Meredith dropped the purple pen she’d been using to grade papers.

“Yes, Mr. Shepherd. I’ll be right there.”

The beautiful March day had just taken a nosedive. She was in trouble again.

“YOU’RE THE BEST teacher I’ve ever had, Meredith. Year after year, your students average higher scores than any other students in the district on both national and local aptitude tests.”

“I know.” Hands clasped in her lap, one thumb rubbing the opposite palm, Meredith added, “Thank you.”

“You’re also the teacher who brings me the most parental phone calls.”

She occupied one of the two wooden armchairs in front of the scarred but spotless desk while the principal, dressed in casual slacks, cotton shirt and tie, stood at the window behind it.

“I know.”

“Those parents pay my salary.”

“I know.”

“And yours.”

She nodded, pulling her hair in the process as her waist-length ponytail got caught in the corner of the chair’s arm.

“Some of them make up the school board and the superintendent who oversee us.”

It must be bad.

“They are the community that—”

“Mark, I get the picture,” Meredith interrupted. “Mr. Barnett called.” She was only guessing, but it didn’t take a psychic to figure it out.

“He got me at home last night—during dinner.”

“I’m sorry.” For what, she wasn’t sure. Causing him aggravation, certainly. Interrupting his dinner, of course. But for telling the boy’s divorced mother that she suspected Tommy’s father was emotionally abusing him—no.

“You not only created grief that we didn’t need, your conversation with Tommy’s mother yesterday afternoon resulted in a nasty fight between the boy’s parents.”

Unfortunate, to be sure.

“Which should be avoided at the cost of an eight-year-old boy’s safety?” She shifted and felt a sting as the back of her leg stuck to the wood. If she’d ever learned to tuck her skirt beneath her when she sat, as her mother had urged her to do for most of her life, that wouldn’t have happened. Instead, the long folds of colorful cotton flowed around her.

“You’re a third-grade teacher, Meredith, not the school counselor. Your job includes speaking to parents about scholastic concerns, reading problems, poor test scores or a lack of attention in class—not about unproved suspicions of suicidal tendencies.”

“So I should just let a kid kill himself or rip himself to pieces considering it? I should let his monster of a father continue to tear him down until he eventually believes there’s no point in being alive?”

“He’s eight years old!”

“A very mature eight years old.”

“There’s a protocol for these things. Professionals who are in place to help if you suspect trouble. People who are trained to deal with sensitive issues, with families and life tragedies.”

“I’ve talked to Jean twice. She talked to Tommy and said she didn’t think there was any need to call in the boy’s parents—or to speak with him again unless something else came up.”

“Jean’s been with us for four years. She has almost a decade of child psychology training and is highly respected in her field.”

That might be. But Jean Saunders lived completely in her head. If it wasn’t logical, if it didn’t fit a predetermined pattern, it didn’t exist. “She’s missing something with this one.”

“What did she say?”

“That he’s suffering from the usual apprehensions, guilt and insecurity of an only child pulled apart by divorce. That at most, his parents are using him to get at each other. Which they are.”

“Meredith…” The name was drawn out in warning. “You have no way of knowing that.”

She didn’t respond to his comment. There was no point. Mark wouldn’t listen.

“Tommy is considering suicide,” she said softly, instead. “His father has convinced him that he’s not a stable child and that he is the sole cause of his parents’ divorce.”

His father was rich, powerful and the current district attorney.

Mark’s eyes narrowed. “Has he said as much to you?”

“No.”

“But you overheard him talking to someone else? One of the kids?”

“No.”

He stood behind her and began to pace. “I’m guessing he didn’t write a paper on the topic.”

“He’s only in third grade. We’re working on learning cursive script, nouns and verbs, not creative writing.”

Mark settled against the edge of the desk, directly in front of Meredith. She wished he wouldn’t do that. His closeness made this all much harder. And it was hard enough already.

This was one of those days when she found it a tempting idea to turn her back on Mark Shepherd, walk right past his secretary in the outer office on the other side of the thick mahogany door and out of this Bartlesville, Oklahoma, school forever.

But she didn’t know what she’d do if she couldn’t teach. And there was Tommy—and others like him—to consider.

“I’ll call Mr. Barnett and apologize,” she said, glancing up at the man she might have dated if they hadn’t been working together, if sexual relations between colleagues at the same school hadn’t been against district policy—and if he’d ever asked. “And then I’ll call Mrs. Barnett and tell her I was out of line and to disregard what I said.”

“You know as well as I do that she won’t. The suspicion has been planted.”