Chapter 2

I was tired when I got back up – I'd gone back to bed shortly after Darlia had, while Cecelia was still drinking her coffee – but functional. I used to get just three or four hours of sleep a night for nights on end, and then crash for 12 hours or so for a couple of days in a row and then right back to the night owl stuff. Cecelia taught me that mornings are a lot easier to take when you've had enough sleep, and so I go to bed at reasonable hours now – though I'll never be a morning person. But I haven't forgotten how to function on very little sleep, and I did it that morning.

There's no telling how Cecelia made it – I was gone with Darlia before she got up. I'd checked her alarm clock – we each have separate clocks, and have learned to ignore the one that's not ours – and she'd set it so that she'd still be able to get to court on time, so that wasn't a worry. She is a morning person, but after a terrible nightmare, a cup of caffeine, and little sleep, she might for once not be bright and chipper when she got up.

Darlia wasn't grouchy, but she wasn't bright and chipper either. She said almost nothing while at the house, and nothing at all on the drive to school. The reason it's so far out is that when Dr. Chalmers bought the land, it was cheap up there, because nothing had developed in that area. Now Paseo del Norte is fashionable, and if he were to sell the school he could get oodles of bucks, both for the land itself and for the improvements he's made on it – or the school has, though there are still bits of the school which he did with his own hand, like the grove of pines on the west side of the campus, which he planted with a shovel when they were just seedlings.

I parked in the visitors' lot and watched Darlia head for her first class, and then walked over to the administration building, my boots clomping on the pavement and the sidewalk. It was a nice spring day, and though I did have my sleeves rolled down I had no jacket on – just my boots, jeans, cowboy shirt, and bullrider hat, the kind that Charlie Daniels wears. There are all sorts of cowboy hats, but when I was growing up in Lanfair Valley one of the cowboys on the OX Ranch wore a battered old bullrider, and I instantly loved the broad brim, which from the side has a curve like a banana. I got my aunt and uncle to buy me one, and when I was older and had my own money I always got a bullrider when I needed a new hat. These days I've got three – a brown one with dust and sweat stains on it, and the signs of use, that I wear for every day; a black one that's for special things like church and which I'd worn with the department hat device when I was police chief in Red Hawk; and an old gray one that I've had since I lived in Oklahoma, and which I almost never wear anymore.

Dr. Chalmers' secretary told me that he knew I was coming but he was on the phone, and would fit me into his schedule as soon as the call was done. Since I hadn't actually made an appointment I couldn't complain – and I knew that if I had made an appointment, he would see me at the appointed time, even if it meant hanging up on someone or throwing someone out of his office. A secretary he had years back who scheduled one appointment to begin before another was supposed to end, expecting that like everyone else Chalmers would see the second appointment late, wound up leaving a letter half finished in her typewriter, fired on the spot. I wish doctors were so insistent on seeing patients at the appointed time, instead of 45 minutes late.

At that I didn't have to wait long – it was only 15 minutes or so after I'd gotten there that Dr. Chalmers came out and ushered me into his office. He sat down behind his desk – a nice one but not up to what Cecelia bought for my study, since he doesn't have Cecelia's money to spend – and I sat in one of the chairs in front of it. "How can I help you, Mr. Carpenter? Mrs. Carpenter said, if I understood her message correctly, that you wish to absent Miss Carpenter from school for at least a month?" He'll call Cecelia by her first name to her face, but never to someone else; he's almost as formal as she is, and with an even greater tendency to keep a wall between himself and other people. I suppose that's why they're such good friends ... why he and Darlia have become good friends is beyond me.

"Yeah, that's what we're looking at. You know that we spend a month every year in Alabama at her parents' place. And I suppose you know that we helped the police out with that serial murderer who was so busy earlier this year – in fact, we were on the scene when the cops arrested him, though we had no part in the actual capture. Anyway, that seems to have exacerbated Cecelia's memories of when she got shot, and she's decided that she needs to go home and just rest and relax." I know how to speak good English, and do it too when it's appropriate.

"And you would like the faculty to arrange some sort of study program for Miss Carpenter, so that she can maintain her learning and grades while away from school."

"Precisely."

"Mr. Carpenter, in the recent past there have been two such instances – an entire year when you were in Oklahoma, and this past February when Miss Carpenter was in Washington on the reservation. And now you are proposing a third – the second in the same year. I appreciate that Miss Carpenter has an active mind which is capable of learning – and of adhering to our scholastic standards – while away from the physical campus, but part of school here is presence in the classroom, with the attendant interaction with teachers and other students."

"I know – and I wouldn't propose this if Cecelia weren't so adamant. But she made it clear that we are going to Leanna, with or without the school's agreement. And when it comes to her wellbeing, I don't argue – I just move heaven and earth to help her out. I don't want to fight you, and I know for a fact that Cecelia doesn't. But family comes first – even before this school, which I am very glad is here, since Darlia could never get the education elsewhere that she's getting here. I don't know that there's another school in town that teaches Latin, or would let her help the Spanish teacher, or has kids in the lower grades discussing the solar system as more than just names, and I know for a fact that there's not another school like that which also agrees with our theology. I'd bet, if I hadn't given up gambling years ago, that she's already capable of passing the tests they hand out in APS high schools – and she's only in eighth grade. But like I said, this is about Cecelia, and she comes before the school."