Just Like a Man (3 page)

In any event, one of them was going to spontaneously combust if she wasn't careful. And then she'd have to completely redecorate her office. And she, for one, rather liked the British Empire feel of the place. It made her feel… imperial. And she had precious little of that in her life, despite her position as the One in Charge at the Emerson Academy. Because when one was in charge of children, one was reluctant to act like an empress. Mostly because it went right over the little tykes' heads, since so few of them had read up on their Queen Victoria.

Michael Sawyer was dark, too—and not just outwardly, either. There was something of the cryptic and confidential, the mystique and mysterious about him. He was just dark all over, from his clearly expensive, extremely well tailored, charcoal suit—which, at the moment, was in a flagrant state of rumple, no doubt due to his position as Father of the Liar—to his bittersweet chocolate hair, to his espresso eyes that his black-rimmed glasses did nothing to diminish. .

And handsome? Oh, yes. He was that, too. With his dusky complexion and features that appeared to have been hewn by the hands of the gods, there was more than a drop or two of the Mediterranean in his bloodline, Hannah was certain. A name like Michael Sawyer really seemed too generic a moniker for him. Actually,
he
would have fit perfectly into a Howard Hawks
film noire,
cast as the enigmatic antihero who felled the femme fatale with one brutal, burning kiss.

CPA, sure,
Hannah mused as she studied Michael Sawyer again, nudging her thoughts back on track. She could believe he was one of those. Provided, of course,
CPA
stood for
Can't Prove Authentic.

The last of the usual suspects was Alex Sawyer's language arts teacher, Selby Hudson, who was dressed today in her usual—and quite suspect, really—way, a way that Hannah had cautioned her about before. Selby was fresh out of college, embarking on her very first teaching assignment at Emerson, but she had somehow been tugged back in time, fashion-wise, to the 1960s. Today she had the bulk of her chin-length black bob pushed back from her face with a vinyl, hot pink headband, though her bangs still hung down nearly into her eyes. And she wore the grooviest—and briefest—miniskirt Hannah had seen since… well, she had never seen one that groovy or brief, having missed the sixties herself by being born as they were winding down.

Even so, Selby's parents must have only been children during the sixties, and Selby hadn't even been around for the seventies, so who knew why she was so attracted to the skin-tight, crazy-daisy-patterned, long-sleeved T-shirt and hot pink mini? Hannah was going to have to be a bit more stern in explaining to the young teacher that the Emerson Academy dress code concerning skirt lengths extended to the staff, as well as the students. Selby could almost pass for one of their high school seniors. Except that none of their high school seniors would have dared come to school dressed that way, because they knew they'd be sent home to change.

Honestly, an overworked, overextended, overdressed, but egregiously underpaid—not that she was bitter or anything—director of a tony private school's work was never done.

"Now, then, Alex," she began. "Can you tell me why you're here today?
Again?"
she elaborated, just to make clear to the boy that she'd kept track of his numerous visits to her office in his short time at the school. After all, it was only the first week of October. At this rate, Alex was going to end the year being voted Most Likely to Be Living in a Box in the Director's Office for the Rest of His Natural Life.

"No, Ms. Frost," Alex said. "I don't know why I'm here."

She glanced at Selby, who had turned to gape at Alex in disbelief. "Oh, yes, you do, too, know why you're here," Selby told her student in a firm but gentle voice, declining to actually vocalize the
buster
with which Hannah felt certain she wanted to punctuate the remark.

Selby knew, after all, that firm-but-gentle was the one requirement Hannah demanded from all of her teachers. Because firm-but-gentle went a long way with the kind of children who attended Emerson—the kind who were terribly spoiled and even more terribly neglected by self-centered, conspicuously consuming parents who were too busy climbing the social ladder to remember that they had children who needed nurturing and love.

And considering Alex's monstrous fabrications and his father's apparently incessant traveling, Hannah was reasonably confident the boy suffered from the same sort of home life.

Really, sometimes she just wanted to round up all the Emerson parents in the gymnasium, line them up single file, and then go down the line, one by one, smacking each of them upside the head and yelling, "What the hell is the matter with you?"

But she digressed.

She turned her attention back to Alex. "Miss Hudson seems to think you should know why she requested this meeting between her and you and your father and me. Did she not explain the problem to you?"

"Problem?" Alex asked innocently.

"About this latest… ah, news… regarding your father that you've been telling your friends."

"Oh, that. Miss Hudson thinks I made that up," Alex replied in a voice of complete unconcern. "She thinks I'm not telling the truth."

"That's the problem, all right," Selby confirmed, turning back to look at Hannah, her expression indicating that what she was really thinking was something along the lines of
Do you believe this kid?,
which of course, Hannah didn't, and that was why there were all here.

"But I didn't make anything up," the boy insisted. "I didn't make up any of the stories you've talked to me about. I never make up stories, Ms. Frost. I always tell the truth."

Oh, and there were four more whopping black marks against him in
God's Big Book of Lies,
Hannah thought. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

"Ms. Frost," Michael Sawyer interjected, peering at her over the tops of his glasses in a way that might have been benign in a less uberish man, "if I might have a word with Alex in private?"

Hannah arched her brows at the request, and not just because his voice was as dark and enigmatic as the rest of him. "I can't imagine why you would need to speak to Alex alone," she said coolly. Though how she managed to keep her voice cool with that spontaneous combustion thing happening again was a mystery. "Is there something you want to say to Alex that Miss Hudson and I wouldn't find helpful in some way?"

Michael Sawyer pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, opened his mouth to say something, evidently decided against whatever it was, and closed his mouth again. Then, "Never mind," he muttered, obviously chastened.

And Hannah tried not to feel too smug that all the time she'd put in on her overworked, overextended, overdressed, but egregiously underpaid—not that she was bitter or anything—director of a tony private school voice hadn't been wasted.

Michael Sawyer turned to his son. "Alex," he said, "we've talked about this before. About how you shouldn't say the kinds of things that you've been saying. This happened at your other school, too, and you know what happened there."

"But the things I say are true," Alex insisted.

"Alex," his father repeated in a stern voice.

As his father had done only a moment before, the boy opened his mouth to object to the warning, seemed to think better of it, and closed his mouth again. Hannah mentally applauded the elder Sawyer. She'd heard it was possible for parents to master a brook-no-argument voice and posture, but she'd never seen it in action before—certainly the vast majority of Emerson parents hadn't achieved it. Probably because most of them paid other people to raise their children. But never enough so that those other people actually cared about their children.

Not that she was bitter or anything.

Michael Sawyer's voice gentled as he continued. "Look, Alex, I know this is a new school, and I know you think saying stuff like this is a good way to make the other kids notice you and want to be your friend. But that's not the way you make friends. We've talked about this, too. You make friends by
being
a friend first."

"Mr. Sawyer," Hannah said, "it isn't just the frequency of Alex's, oh, shall we say,
inventions,
that concerns us. Though certainly he does seem to, oh, shall we say,
invent,
more often than the average child his age. But it's also the… what's the word I'm looking for?" she asked the room at large and no one in particular.
"Enormity,"
she finally settled on when neither the room, nor anyone in it, replied, "of the things he makes up that have us most concerned. I mean, telling his friends that his father has hacked into the computers of the International Monetary Fund? Even putting aside momentarily the fact that most children his age don't even know that the International Monetary Fund exists, let alone what it is—"

"It's an international organization of a hundred and eighty-four countries," Alex offered in as matter-of-fact a voice as Hannah had ever heard. "It was created to help everybody work like a team exchanging money and stuff. And to make business grow and make lots of jobs. And to give help to countries who owe lots of money to other countries."

Both Hannah and Selby stared at Alex openmouthed in amazement. But Michael Sawyer seemed not to be astonished at all, because he only nodded in dispassionate agreement at his son's explanation. There was no beaming pride, no atta-boy to make Hannah think Alex's father had coached him in any way. No, if Alex Sawyer knew that much about the IMF, then she was confident he'd come by the knowledge through natural curiosity and his own research. It wasn't the first time she'd been amazed by his knowledge. But she'd had no idea he could comprehend political and global subject matter that eluded many adults.

"I see," was all Hannah could say in response. And she tried not to think about how she was lying when she said it. Because the truth was, she didn't see at all how such a big brain could fit into such a little boy. "I didn't realize you had such a good grasp of politics, Alex."

Although Alex opened his mouth to reply, it was his father who spoke—so quickly, in fact, that Hannah got the impression he was trying to cut his son off. "Alex and I are both what you might call news junkies and political fanatics. It's kind of a hobby around our house. We watch CNN more than any other channel."

"Well, then, you both must be very excited about the presidential debate Indianapolis will be hosting at the end of the month."

Michael Sawyer smiled. "Already have our tickets."

Hannah smiled back. "I'm planning to attend, too," she said. "All the members of the board of directors of Emerson will be attending, as a matter of fact. Adrian Windsor arranged it for us, since he's a board member. I thought it was very nice of him."

"Especially since he doesn't even have any kids attending the school," Michael Sawyer pointed out.

Hannah was surprised at his knowledge of the school's board of directors. Not that the doings of the board of directors was any secret—on the contrary, she did her best to make parents aware of what was going on with every aspect of the school. But most of the parents just didn't bother to familiarize themselves with such things because most of the parents just didn't care.

Which was why, in addition to ensuring diversity, Hannah had sought board members from outside the school community. CompuPax, Adrian's employer, was the city's largest business, so it had made sense to try and recruit someone in a higher-up position there to sit on the school's board. Adrian Windsor had come highly recommended by none other than T. Paxton Brown himself, the reclusive billionaire who was the founder and CEO of the company.

Adrian's addition to the board had been extremely beneficial, and attracting him had been a substantial coup for Hannah. And if part of Adrian's attraction to the school had resulted from an attraction he had to Hannah herself, well…

What was the harm? It was only a little crush, one Hannah had no intention of encouraging, even if she might, from time to time, take advantage of it. She could be shameless when it came to promoting the welfare of her students and her school, but there was no way she would become personally involved with
anyone
connected to the school, including Adrian. And she would never do or say anything that might lead anyone, including Adrian, to think otherwise. But if he wanted to believe he had some small chance of winning her, so be it. Hannah could take care of herself. She always had.

"Adrian's also invited me to attend a reception CompuPax is hosting for the candidates the night before the debate, but I'm not sure yet whether I'll be able to make it."

And why on earth was she telling Michael Sawyer
that?
Hannah wondered. It was none of his business, and she was stepping around the truth with that last remark. She was actually quite sure she wouldn't be able to make the reception, since she already had plans that night. Granted, her "plans" consisted mostly of avoiding Adrian Windsor, since she didn't want him to think he had too much of a chance with her. Even if he
was
a thoroughly respectable local businessman, and even if he
did
have buckets of money, and even if he
had
been voted one of the the city's most eligible bachelors by
Indianapolis
magazine, and even if he
was
handsome and charming and intelligent. He still sat on the board of directors of the Emerson Academy.

And why was Michael Sawyer looking at her as if she'd just told him his eyebrows had turned into caterpillars and were crawling off his face?

Oh, dear, she thought. Michael Sawyer was concluding exactly what she
didn't
want any of the parents to conclude—that she and Adrian Windsor were an item.

"But getting back to the matter at hand," she quickly circumvented before Michael Sawyer could pursue his suspicions, "what's important, Alex, is that you never, ever, make such outrageous allegations again. Do you understand?"

"I've never made allegations, Ms. Frost," the boy said. "Everything I've said is true."