Occult Suspense for Mothers Boxset: The Nostalgia Effect by EJ Valson and Mother's by Michelle Read (2 ebooks for one price) (3 page)

Unable to have children of her own, Kate cherishes every moment with her favorite niece.  She thinks every fit is adorable and spoils her exceedingly.  I cringed at the memory of Kate’s phone call
two years ago, after a long day of doctor visits, informing me that she would never be able to carry a child.  I always wondered how the doctors could look someone in the eye and tell them “You won’t be able to have children.  We’re sorry,” and then go on with their day.  Kate was heartbroken, and it crushes me to think that I wasn’t there for her that day.  That’s not something I would want to hear on my own.  She always says that she and her husband will adopt, but I think she’s really just holding out and hoping for her own.

She’ll be a wonderful, wonderful parent someday.  I want that for her.  Her kids would have the cleanest house to run around in and Mommy Kate would be able to sew all of their clothes, make bake-sale cookies . . . the whole nine yards.

THREE

I pulled into the school parking lot at ten minutes ‘til eight.  Early— what a great way to start the day.  I’m all about the good karma.

It was only the second time I’d been to the little school, but I already loved everything about it.  It was a fairly new building, only a couple of years old, and it had all the beauty of new construction.  The outside looked like a well-kept home; Elizabeth probably had something to do with that. 
PTO Queen
, I thought jealously.

The whole place was framed in beautiful shrubberies with contrasting ground cover, and there were the most adorable little stone sidewalks that twisted artfully to every entrance.  I felt very proud that this was where I would be working.

My eyes creased in an excited little smile as I climbed out of the car.  Violet’s first day of school pictures would be so adorable here!  I’ve been waiting five years to take first day of school pictures . . . and make sack lunches . . . and sign permission slips.  I would have to get a picture of her next to the shiny flag pole.  And one by the front door with the hanging plants and the little cottage-y bench.

Yay!

When I reached the front door, I pulled a tiny piece of scrap paper from the pocket of my slacks and punched in my new alarm code.  I let the door close behind me and waited for the alarms to tell me that I had done it incorrectly.  When I heard nothing, I started down the hall.

Amazing.
  I couldn’t remember at all where Charlotte’s office was.  I was just here last week for Vy’s enrollment and was already lost. 

I’ve always been directionally impaired – so frustrating.  I can barely get around downtown and I
have lived here most of my life.  John’s family loves to joke about who’s going to get me a navigation system for my car for Christmas, so I can find things like
my house
and
the grocery store
.  Ha Ha.  Very funny.  I wish someone would actually buy me one and stop joking about it . . .

“Oh yeah, in and to the left,” I mumbled to myself.  The many,
many
hallways here would most likely be my biggest problem.  In fact, I would probably be late this morning, even though I’d gotten here early.  Great first impress—
oh.
  Here we go.

Charlotte was staring closely at her computer screen when I rounded the corner and
she didn’t notice when I came in.  I walked quietly until I was in front of her desk, trying to wait until she spotted me.  In fact, her brow was so twisted in contemplation that I was a little embarrassed to interrupt her.

“Ahem.”

She looked up at me—frustration enveloping her face, then beamed.

“Er-bear!”  (I always had a soft spot for the nickname she had given me when we were younger.)

“Hey Charlie,” I smiled, poking the scrap paper back into my pocket.  “Um, sorry to interrupt.”

“Solitaire,” she scoffed, rolling her eyes.  “I never win!  Let me show you around.”

We strolled through corridor after corridor of adorable classrooms that were all decorated for the big day next week.  Every hallway corkboard awaited a “first day of school art project” and it looked like there was already some contest in play to see which second grade class would be able to memorize the Preamble first.

The maze of hallways was intimidating for someone who gets easily turned around in a department store, but I vowed to study a map of the school when I got home so I wouldn’t embarrass myself on the first day.  Otherwise I
would be asking the
students
where to go.  Very professional.

Charlotte
showed me the lunchroom, clean and inviting.  (“I’ve never seen tables fold
that
way before.  Cool!”)  Then we made our way around to the teachers’ lounge, Violet’s soon-to-be classroom, the nurse’s office, and the janitorial closet.

I took it all in as
Charlotte prattled on about my new duties as building assistant.  Apparently my new position was “gopher” . . . to get anyone what they needed.  If a teacher was sick, or away for some other reason, I would take on all of their duties for that day
except
teaching the class.  I would take her place for recess or cafeteria duty, stand in the bus line and monitor boarding children, make copies, and so on.  I would even have my own walkie-talkie, which I thought was pretty exciting.

Charlotte
was in the middle of explaining just how valuable I would be – “Everyone’s lifesaver,” she was saying – when we came across my favorite room in the school.  The resource room.

Everywhere I looked in the large room, there was shelf after shelf of colored paper, paints, stencils, and several crafty mechanisms that I didn’t know how to use.

“What’s this?” I asked, pointing to a good-sized machine that looked like some sort of torture device.

“That’s the die-cut tool
,” she answered, as if that should explain everything.  When she saw my look of interest, coupled with the
I have to know how to use that?
face I was making, she demonstrated.

She spun around and opened up the smallish double-doored cabinet behind her, pulled out a wooden block with a star on it, and poked it into the machine.  Then she grabbed a piece of construction paper, folded it in quarters, and scooted it in.  She pressed down twice on the long lever and pulled the paper out.  Four identical stars fell onto the table.

“Much faster this way,” she chimed, chunking the scraps into the trash.

“Fancy,
” I mumbled, making use of Kate’s favorite word.

“You’ll love this little guy come Valentine’s Day, when every teacher has you cutting out enough hearts to cover every square inch of the school!”

She took a quick look around, probably wondering what
else
I wouldn’t know how to use, and continued on.

“ . . . and here’s the copy machine, you’ll be spending a lot of time here . . .”

We ended our tour back in the kindergarten hallway and Charlotte allowed me to mull around in Violet’s classroom for a while.  Mrs. Autry’s classroom, actually, as it stated on the ladybug sign outside her door.

I quickly took in all the sweetness of the little classroom – with its cozy miniature reading nook and large work-station tables – and then followed Charlotte back toward her office.

“So what do I do on the first day?”  I asked, still nervous to be out in the real world where things were expected of me.  “What should I be prepared for?”

“The first day will be kind of crazy,” she laughed.  “Just show up ready to be told what to do.”

“Got it.”

As we sauntered toward the front of the school, I noticed the intoxicating smell of mulled cider wafting through the halls.  I knew it well because it was one of my favorite fall scents.  It always put me in the mood to clean or decorate.  There was also
a faint thumping from a radio down the hall that was growing louder as we strolled.

As we came up on the delicious smelling room, I peeked around the door, ready to smile at whoever was working in it.  My enthusiastic smile quickly turned into a look of shock, then to disbelief, as we kept walking.

Charlotte had been rambling on about the crazy “first days” they’d had in the past and didn’t seem to notice that I had stopped and back-tracked a little.  Trying to figure out what I had just seen.

The teacher inside, a
tiny
thing as far as I could tell in a glance, was rearranging the tables in her room.  She’d had a giant, half moon work table – easily seating eight or ten children –
over her head
.  It had to have weighed sixty pounds, at least, and was horribly awkward.  It should have taken two people and several minutes to move it
any
where.  Yet she had it lofted over her head and was walking carelessly to the other side of the room with it—whistling.  Charlotte continued babbling as she walked.

“ . . . and then little Missy Newart’s dog walked to school with her one day and every kid in school was chasing it up and down the hall!  Erin?” 

Finally noticing that I had stopped, she turned around, looking confused.

Clearly, I
had frozen with a look of horror on my face because Charlotte suddenly looked worried.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, walking back to where I’d halted and putting her hand on my shoulder.

I immediately snapped out of my initial surprise and tried to think about what I had witnessed.

“Erin, honey?”  The question mark on her face
seemed to match the one in my brain.

I glanced up at the name
plate on the wall next to me.

“Um . . . Mrs. Thayer . . .”  I was once again stopped in alarm, my wide eyes taking in her new expression.

Charlotte shot a fierce look into the classroom, which we were standing nearly in front of.

“
Danna
.”

It was not a greeting, or even a question.  It was an accusation.

The tiny young woman, no more than five feet tall, froze at the calling of her name.  Her expression went seamlessly from panic . . . to that of a child being caught red-handed . . . to being reprimanded.  All in the moment it had taken Charlie to breathe her name.

I looked up to meet
Charlotte’s glare. She now bore an arrogant guise that seemed to say
What now?
as she looked at Danna, then at me.

“I . . . I- didn’t know she was coming this morning.”  Danna’s crystal blue eyes were flitting back and forth between our boss and myself.

“Maybe if you turned your stereo down, you could pay more attention to your surroundings,” Charlotte accused.  It looked as though she was drilling through the woman’s skull with her eyes.

Clearly, there was much more conversation going on between them than I was getting.  Charlotte turned back to me, her hand still on my shoulder, and beamed her perfectly soothing smile.  I was pretty sure
my
face still looked like I’d been jammed in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Charlotte
tightened her grasp on my shoulder and threw her free arm around my waist.  Glaring once over her shoulder, she pulled me down the hall.  I walked effortlessly next to her – very curious of the exchange I’d just witnessed, but also a little miffed that they had talked about me like I wasn’t there.

First Elizabeth, now these two.  How many things this week was I going to come across that were none of my business?  Maybe I was just too curious.  A little over zealous in assuming that their confrontation actually had anything to do with
me
.

Charlotte chuckled forcefully and dropped right back into the story she was
mumbling moments ago.  “...so we finally offered it some beef surprise from the cafeteria and shut the poor, over-excited mutt in the janitor’s closet.  It was so wound up by the time Missy’s dad came to pick it up that it had peed all over the floor!”

All I could muster was a blank stare as she snickered to herself.

Noticing my blatant bewilderment, she grinned again and hugged me tightly when we reached the end of the hallway.  “I’ve missed you.  Rest up and I’ll see you on Thursday.”  A fleeting burst of air passed through my lips – she’d been squeezing me pretty intensely.

I blinked twice.

“Did, uh, I
miss
something back there?”

“Pshh,” she said with an absentminded wave of her hand.

I waited, but apparently that was all the answer I was going to get.

“I’ll see you Thursday,” she repeated.  And with one final clap on the back, she sauntered down to her office and shut the door.

What . . . is . . . going . . . ON?!

Was
I was losing my mind? 
Clearly
.  I had seen it
clearly
.  Mrs. What’s Her Name had heaved a gigantic table clean over head and walked around with it.  I couldn’t even pick Violet up over my head, and she didn’t weigh
half
of what that table must have.

And even if I could look past Superwoman’s sheer strength, what was that little tiff in the hall about?  “
I didn’t know she was coming today . . . ?”
  What was that supposed to mean?  I know I consider myself invisible sometimes, but that’s really just a sarcastic figure of speech when I’m feeling sorry for myself.  Why were they talking like I actually
didn’t exist
?  And why did it bother me so much that I had no idea what was going on?

Just then, it dawned on me that I was still standing in the middle of the hallway, thinking about how offended and confused I was.  Also, in that moment, I realized that my ears had begun to turn red.  I could feel it.  I was quite put out at the way my first impression here had become the opposite of what I had expected.  And I certainly wasn’t too thrilled to be going into a working atmosphere – somewhere I hadn’t been for years,
a place that was definitely out of my comfort zone – with so much apprehension.