Dying to Teach Read Free

couldn’t project worth a darn. It would take hours of extra lessons to teach her to propel her voice up and out.
    Suddenly, music started. Loud booming music—the Stones’ Moonlight Mile album, one of Tyson’s favorites—rattled the factory-turned-theater walls. Was this to drown out the shouting? Or had he sent everyone home? Whatever. A mountain of paperwork waited on her desk. Tyson could handle the staff. Angie sat at the scarred desk, a relic from the past that had been here when they bought the old factory building. Too heavy to haul out, she’d adopted it for her own in this dark, windowless room. Thankfully she didn’t have to spend much time here. Someday, when they got the second floor finished off, she’d be in a great office—at the back of the building overlooking Alton Bay. Though being on water made Angie seasick, she loved looking at it.
    She tapped a pen against the checkbook, reminded of the last time the same music played in this building…the day, to the pounding beat of Wild Horses, Jarvis made love to her for the first time. No. Wrong words. He’d plundered her. Like a pirate boarding a captured ship.
    Angie pushed the bills aside, stood up and paced twice around the desk. She made a mental effort to tune out the music, grabbed up a manuscript from the cardboard box on the worn flower patterned sofa against the far wall, and flopped beside it. The box—an identical one sat on Tyson’s desk—contained at least a dozen manuscript submissions, mostly from local authors, though there was one promising script from a man in London. From this collection she and Tyson would select two or three plays for the first quarter of next year.
    She’d no sooner drawn the first clipped stack of paper from the wrapper when a curt knock sounded on the door. It wasn’t Tyson. He rarely knocked. In his get-things-done-now manner he always burst into a room.
    Diva Marie. Had to be her. Tyson fired her and she’d come to Angie for solace. The knock came again, this time a rapid-fire trio. Probably not Marie. She wouldn’t wait this long for a reply. Either way, Angie would bet her next paycheck that big-time trouble sprouted on the other end of that knock.
    The door opened. In stepped Randy Reynolds.
     

TWO
     
     
    Monday morning, Kiana Smith set the backpack gently on the locker floor. Even so, the soft bump sounded like thunder in the empty school hallway. She hung her jacket on one of the hooks and pulled a wadded bundle of tissues from the right front pocket. She wiped her nose, blotted at the river of tears, then shoved the tissues in her skirt pocket. How could anybody kill Gwen? Not only was she a fabulous teacher, she was a great person, a mentor, and…well, Gwen was more. Just more. She was the only teacher in the whole school who treated kids like people, not children they were forced to babysit five days a week. This school was Gwen Forest’s whole life. And Gwen Forest was Kiana’s whole life. At least it felt that way.
    Kiana forced herself to walk with her usual determined step toward the teachers’ lounge. The idea to infiltrate the off-limits space came in the deepest darkest part of last night, mere hours after learning of Gwen’s death. Kiana’s parents tried insisting she stay home today. But she couldn’t. It would be like abandoning everything Gwen did for Kiana and the school.
    She sniffled and swiped the wetness with the back of a hand. Darn, she would’ve thought she’d cried out every H 2 O molecule by now. But last night, as the tears flowed, so did ideas on how to uncover the murderer because, sure as the sun would set in the west, the murderer was somebody from this school. Had to be. Ms. Forest spent all her time here, hung out only with people related to the school. The one exception, her best friend, Cilla Philmore, wasn’t much of an exception at all because she was the English teacher’s wife.
    The teacher’s lounge lay between the school office and the