Maid in Teaberry Read online

  “What about them?” Jax asked.

  “I mean, you don’t think there’s anything to them, right?” Seth asked.

  “Are you worried about Evan being there?” Jax asked with a grin.

  Seth shrugged.

  “I don’t know if I would let Jasmine go,” Trina said hesitantly.

  “Really?” Jax asked in surprise. He looked over at the building. Of course, he’d heard all the stories. He’d even made some of them up when he’d been younger.

  Jax turned to look at Trina quickly and thought about the laughing child he’d been getting to know now that he lived next door to Trina. Then he looked back at the old elementary school building and thought about all the stories he’d heard over the years.

  “Yeah, I see what you mean.” Jax started gathering up the debris from lunch.

  “They wouldn’t let kids come here if there was really anything to worry about though. Right?” Seth asked as he gathered his own garbage.

  “I did hear that the enrollment was really low for the Kids Camp,” Trina said as she passed her garbage over to Jax. He kept a bag in his truck to throw things away when they weren’t near a garbage can.

  “Yeah, I guess I heard that too,” Jax said. “Caitlyn said some people have asked Megan to look into it.”

  “Really? What can she do?” Trina asked. “I mean, I know she’s helped with some mysteries before.”

  Jax shrugged. “Maybe she can help this time too. Can’t hurt, right?”

  Seth looked back at the school and thought about Evan. “Well, someone should look into it.”

  Chapter Eight

  Vince DeKalb looked around his dining room and nodded with satisfaction. He was having guests for dinner and wanted the option of eating in with the air conditioning or out on the deck, depending on the wishes of his guests. If it happened to be too warm, he knew Bev would want to stay inside until it cooled down later in the evening. He had lights strung out on his deck and an outdoor fire pit with colored glass. There were bottles of chilled wine in the fridge.

  Vince was looking forward to a nice evening with friends. He and Bev Dempsey had been dating for several years but both had preferred to maintain their separate houses for now. Although Bev was a widow, Vince had never married, and it had taken him some time to realize that they might be able to merge their lives into one home. Perhaps that would be a discussion for the future. For now, both were content with the current situation.

  Vince went back into the kitchen. He’d always loved cooking. He’d prepped as much as possible for the dinner this evening including a recipe that he’d gotten from Megan. Both Megan’s father and Vince had retired from the postal service. While Megan’s father had immediately moved to Florida, Vince had remained in the area near Bev, who preferred to stay by family. Vince now spent his days gardening, cooking, reading, and enjoying his time with Bev.

  Vince, Bev, and Susan had gone to school together. Now that Susan had begun dating Ross McMann, Vince and Bev had been spending more time with them. Vince had come to like the intelligent man who was fast working his way into Susan’s heart. Vince sincerely hoped the other man had honorable intentions. Ross had moved to Teaberry to follow Jax because Ross had grown to think of Jax as a son. Vince knew that if Ross moved away from Teaberry now, his friend, Susan, would sorely feel the loss.

  The doorbell interrupted his thoughts but brought a smile to his face. He wasn’t surprised to find Bev on the other side of the door. She blew into the house full of energy and excitement from her first day of Kids Camp.

  Vince chuckled at her enthusiasm as he followed her to the kitchen and poured her a glass of wine. “I take it Day One went well?”

  Bev hopped up onto the tall stool next to the high island in the center of the large kitchen. It was a large workspace that included a sink and a glass electric cooktop stove. The stovetop was in addition to the high-end gas range on one wall. Bev was about to answer when the doorbell rang again. “Oh, I’ll get it,” Bev said as she quickly hopped down.

  Vince watched her go and wondered how long the high from the day was going to keep her buzzing around until she crashed. She returned a moment later, chattering a mile a minute, with Susan and Ross behind her. Vince offered Ross a beer or wine then poured two more glasses of wine and set them in front of his guests who had taken seats on the stools near the island.

  “Bev was just telling me about her first day at school,” Vince said as he placed the finishing touches on a tray of appetizers and set them on the island.

  “Yes, how did it go?” Susan asked.

  “It was amazing,” Bev answered. “The kids had a lot of fun and it was nice to have classes without having to worry about assigning grades.”

  “So, you didn’t have any unexpected students who weren’t listed on your roster?” Vince asked, amusement showing in his eyes.

  Bev rolled her eyes at him. “You mean ghosts? No, no ghosts today. I’ll check my roster again tomorrow.”

  Susan smiled. “Seriously though, were you concerned about teaching there?”

  Bev hesitated for a moment. “I didn’t tell Lauren this, but yes. I was concerned.”

  Ross raised his eyebrows. “Lauren was worried about the kids?”

  Bev and Susan exchanged glances. “It’s a mom thing. I can’t blame her, but I also didn’t want to fuel her concerns,” Bev said as she looked over the choices of appetizers. Vince did love to cook.

  “I know that my new house cleaner is terrified of going there,” Ross said.

  “Oh, you found someone?” Susan asked. “Who did you get?”

  “Ava Prescott,” Ross answered and watched both Susan and Bev nod in unison.

  “Good choice,” Susan said as she took a deviled egg from the tray.

  “Her daughter, Bella, is brilliant. She’s one of my students,” Bev said. “That girl is going to rule the world someday.”

  “I understand that’s why Ava took the cleaning job,” Ross explained. “So that her daughter could attend the STEM camp.”

  “So, she’s scared to death to clean the building but she’s doing it for her daughter,” Vince said with compassion.

  “She claims she heard voices one night,” Ross answered.

  Bev’s hand stopped halfway to her mouth with an appetizer. “Seriously? You mean recently.”

  “Yes, just the other night. She just began cleaning the building the week before your Kids Camp began,” Ross said as he reached for his own appetizer.

  “That’s horrible,” Susan said in surprise. “What did she do?”

  “She called the police, of course. But they didn’t find anyone.” Ross wondered how hard they’d looked. It was a large building, after all.

  “That must be awful for her, to feel she has to do something for her child that frightens her,” Vince murmured.

  “It’s after her regular work day, too,” Ross said. “From what I can tell, she works all day, has dinner with her daughter, and then goes out again at night to clean businesses.”

  “She sounds like a perfect candidate for your business incubator,” Susan suggested.

  Ross smiled at Susan with warmth. “I was thinking the same thing. She has a good reputation for quality work which is why she has so many contracts. But she’s at the point where she can’t reasonably handle them all by herself. If she started her own business and hired employees, she could take on more jobs.”

  “Have you spoken with her about it yet?” Bev asked.

  “No, but I plan to. I’ve been trying to develop some materials to help her better understand her options,” Ross explained.

  Vince raised his own glass of wine. “Sounds like a great business to launch. And, here’s to Bev’s first day at school. May the rest of her days at the Kids Camp be as unremarkable as the first,” Vince said.

  Chapter Nine

  Bev was the first one to enter the teacher’s lounge on Tuesday morning. The drive to the Kids Camp had been less tense than the previous mornin
g. Both Mia and Noah had been excited about their new friends and the things they had learned the day before and were looking forward to the new day.

  Bev was feeling pretty excited herself and she could tell by the smiles she saw as she walked toward the teacher’s lounge that she wasn’t the only one. Andrea came into the lounge next carrying a large coffee in a to-go cup.

  “I would never make it through the mornings without caffeine,” Andrea said. She was again dressed in capris. This time they were green and the beaded chain holding her reading glasses were chosen to match. “My math classes went well yesterday. How did your science projects go?”

  “We had a lot of fun, thanks,” Bev was saying as more teachers entered the room.

  “We did too,” Erin said as she entered the room dressed in her customary khakis and tee. “I can’t believe the difference. Everything seems so much easier when we don’t have to keep track of grades.”

  “Is this your first time teaching outside of a regular school?” Andrea asked.

  “Yes, and I would definitely do it again next summer,” Erin said as others around her nodded.

  “It cuts into my free time,” Bryan said. He was holding some sort of energy drink from Teaberry Tea & Thyme. “But the extra money is great.”

  Bev looked at the cup in Bryan’s hand. She didn’t know what the ingredients were, and she wasn’t certain that she wanted to. She’d never worked up the courage to try one of the energy drinks from Tea & Thyme herself.

  “Do you have any more competitions lined up for the rest of the summer?” Carlos asked him.

  “One more. It’s a distance trek and obviously I’m not working on my stamina while I’m here but I’m still going out in the evenings after classes are over,” Bryan said with a shrug. “Hopefully I won’t embarrass myself too much.”

  “Well, I’m enjoying the kids,” Bev said. “I know it’s not the same for me because I’m retired now. I don’t do this as often as you all do, so that makes a big difference.”

  “No, I think the classes feel different too,” Allison said. “I mean, I’m at the college level and not K-12, so things are different for me too because my students are usually older. But I’m really enjoying the enthusiasm of the kids.”

  “It reminds me of why I wanted to be a teacher,” Heather added as she easily pulled her hair up into a messy bun to get it out of her way for class. “And, I agree, not having to worry about tracking grades or covering specific material for an upcoming test is nice.”

  Carlos glanced at his watch. “Uh, oh. Looks like it’s time to get started,” he said as everyone begin filing out of the lounge.

  ***

  Andrea’s classroom was only a few doors down from the teacher’s lounge. She had left her lesson plan on the teacher’s desk at the front of the room the day before. She walked to the desk and opened the drawer to set her purse inside then sat down to review her notes. Opening the book to the proper page, Andrea was dismayed to see that the pages were torn and dirtied. It looked like someone had stepped on it with dirty boots.

  Andrea looked around the classroom and realized that the student desks also didn’t look right. It was almost as if someone had moved them all. Perhaps it was the cleaning crew, she thought with a shrug. But that still didn’t explain her lesson book. Of course, maybe they accidentally dropped it and then stepped on it.

  That would make sense. It was just an unfortunate incident. Andrea decided that she wouldn’t tell anyone. She was certain it was an accident and she didn’t want to get anyone into trouble. Besides, she was pretty sure she remembered what her plans for the day were anyway. And, it wasn’t like her real job. Normally, she’d have to submit the lesson plans to the assistant principal. That wasn’t the case with the Kids Camp, so no one needed to know that the cleaning crew wasn’t doing their job properly. Not from Andrea, at any rate. She didn’t want to be responsible for someone losing their job.

  ***

  Carlos walked into his classroom full of ideas about the activities he had planned for the day. They were talking about robots and he wanted to get some simple activities completed. They would eventually end up being smaller components of the final project. He’d stored the materials he needed in a filing cabinet at the front of the room.

  He’d need the materials early in the session, so he went over to the cabinet and discovered that the drawers were open. Concerned about theft, he pulled all of the materials out, set them on the teacher’s desk, and took stock of them. Everything seemed to be there, and nothing was broken. Carlos looked back at the filing cabinet, his eyes narrowed in thought.

  With his engineering background, he immediately began formulating an idea. Looking at the filing cabinet with the drawers opened the way they were, it looked like the drawers had been used as steps. Carlos walked over to the cabinet slowly and checked the drawers more closely. He saw white flakes in the bottoms of the drawers. Thinking back to when he’d put the materials for the robots in the drawers, he couldn’t remember them being there.

  What could have caused the flakes and why were they in the drawers? Looking up, Carlos thought he had his answer. The flakes resembled the composition of the ceiling tiles. The room had a drop ceiling. There were two by four foot tiles that comprised the ceiling held up by suspension. Above that would be open space with maybe electrical wires for the lighting system.

  It looked like someone had used the drawers of the filing cabinet as steps to reach the ceiling, so they could remove the tiles. But why?

  ***

  Heather carried her backpack over to the teacher’s desk at the front of the room and took out her laptop to turn it on. During her classes, she would connect her laptop to the data projector so that she could walk the students through activities by demonstrating the steps as they mimicked her. The classroom was set up as a computer lab and the students were each given their own laptops during the class to follow along.

  Those laptops were currently on a mobile cart where they easily could be transported but could also be charged up. The laptops were plugged into the cart and the cart was plugged into the outlet on the wall. Heather had distributed the laptops to the students once they came into the room yesterday and then both at lunchtime and at the end of the day she’d returned them to the cart and plugged the cart in, so the laptops would be recharged when not in use.

  Wanting to get a head start on the day, she walked over to the cart to start offloading the laptops and put them on the student desks. That was when she noticed that the cart wasn’t where she’d left it. It was several feet away. She was dismayed to see that the cart also had been unplugged. What she didn’t know was when it had been unplugged. If it had been before the laptops were charged up, she was in trouble.

  She picked up one of the laptops and turned it on, relieved to see that the battery was showing about a half a charge. She’d be able to get through her first hands-on lesson but then she’d need to plug the laptops back in before they needed to be used again. She could have the students work on something else in the meantime. With luck, it might all work out she thought, mentally crossing her fingers.

  But why did someone unplug the cart? Heather looked around the room. Who would do that? She took a breath. Maybe it was the cleaning crew? Maybe they didn’t realize that the cart needed to be plugged in? She chewed on her lip as she thought about it. She didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. But she didn’t want this to happen again. Maybe if she put a note on the cart asking that it not be touched?

  ***

  Bev walked into her classroom excited about the activities she had planned for her students. She stopped at the door of her classroom, surprised at what she saw. The student desks had been moved all over the room. Bev walked slowly into the room, looking around as she did. One of the desks was laying on its side, like it had been kicked over.

  Bev bent and picked it up, then quickly rearranged all of the desks the way they had been the day before. She went over to the shelf where she’d put
the hot air popcorn popper and stopped again. It was gone. She opened all of the cupboard drawers, questioning her own memory. Maybe she hadn’t left it on the shelf? Maybe she’d put it in one of the cupboards? It wouldn’t have fit in the drawer where she’d put the popcorn kernels.

  Bev shook her head. No, that wasn’t right. She was certain she’d put it on the shelf. So where was it now? And why were the desks scattered everywhere? Bev tried to think of possible answers. Could it have been Ava when she was cleaning? Bev shook her head again. Ava had been one of her students. Bev knew for a fact that Ava could never have left a room looking like this. Ava’s cleaning services were sought after because she was meticulous. She’d been the same way as a young student, often agonizing over assignments because she’d wanted them all to be perfect.

  So, who had torn apart her classroom? And what did they need with a popcorn popper? Bev went back to examine the shelf more closely. She found flakes of white on the shelf and a piece of broken plastic. She took a step to get closer and crunched something on the floor. Bending, she picked up another piece of broken plastic. Taking the pieces over to the trash can, she was about to throw them away when she found the rest of the popcorn popper.

  Chapter Ten

  Ava pulled out her worn notepad and made several notes about the jobs she had already completed for the day. She kept the notepad with her at all times. In it were all of her business notes including how much money she made and how much she spent on supplies. She gave all of the information to the accountant each year for her taxes.

  It also helped to keep her organized and that was something she was needing more and more. She’d been getting so many requests for cleaning jobs both during the day and in the evenings for businesses after hours that she was having trouble keeping up. She was lucky that Bella was helping out as much as she was.

  Since Bella was handling most of the cooking, Ava no longer had to do much for mealtimes. Ava wasn’t really worried about her own meals. Lately, there had even been times she was just too tired to think about eating. But she wanted to be sure that Bella was eating well.