like a laid-back sort of guy, but he’s all steel at the core, Jim Whitley is. Nobody’s ever been able to push him around, and you won’t be able to, either.”
Lucia hesitated for a moment, then nerved herself to speak. “He told me you’d promised to rent him the apartment on the…”
But June was no longer listening. She stared toward the vine-covered fence rails bordering the garden, her face pale beneath the tan.
Startled by the other woman’s intensity, Lucia followed June’s gaze and saw Willard Kilmer, standing in the back lane, holding a manila file folder.
Willard was a member of Lucia’s staff. In fact, he taught the other group of seventh-graders. Bella’s stepdaughter, Ellie Gibson, was in his class.
He was a tall, thin man in his early forties, with pale thinning hair and a slight stoop. Willard seemed utterly drab and inconsequential until you noticed his eyes, which were filled with gentleness and lively intelligence behind horn-rimmed glasses.
Lucia had always liked the man, and they’d worked efficiently together in the years since she’d come to the school. But Willard was painfully shy, and not easy to get close to. At faculty meetings and social functions he kept to himself, usually watching from a corner and saying little.
He lived with his ailing mother in a big, well-kept house a couple of streets over from June’s. Lucia often wondered about his personal life, and whether he was as lonely as he appeared to be.
“Hello, Willard,” she said, smiling across the fence in an attempt to set him at ease. “It’s a nice evening, isn’t it? Not quite so hot today.”
“It’s warm enough, but considerably better than yesterday,” he agreed, clearing his throat. The dying sunlight flashed off the lenses of his glasses, making him look remote and sad. “Mama tends to suffer a good deal in the heat, I’m afraid.”
“I reckon we all do,” June said with her customary bluntness, hammering at a stubborn clod of dirt with her hoe. “But we don’t talk about it all the time, because complaining won’t make it any cooler.”
“Hello, June,” the teacher said shyly. “Your pumpkins are looking great this year. I’ll have to remember to pick one up before Halloween.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll set a good one aside for you.” June turned her back and knelt to pull at a weed under one of the pumpkin vines.
“The sixth-graders are having a pumpkin-carving contest this year,” Willard told Lucia with a timid, luminous smile that made his craggy face light up. “They’re allowing me to enter, and I aim to win first prize.”
Lucia smiled back at him. “I’m sure you’re going to win. I’ve seen those artistic jack-o’-lanterns you carve.”
For a moment he seemed taken aback, almost panicky, as if he’d suddenly realized he was having a casual conversation with two women outside the safe confines of the school.
Lucia took pity on him and gestured toward the manila folder in his hand. “What have you got there, Will?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s…” He waved the folder nervously. “I just brought this over for you to look at. It’s a proposal for that new social studies curriculum we were talking about last week.”
“Thank you,” she said, a little puzzled, watching as he opened the gate awkwardly and came into the garden to hand her the folder. “I’ll have a look at it right away and let you know what I think.”
“Oh, there’s no rush.” He stood in front of the bench like a long-legged stork in his rumpled khakis and knitted vest. “We won’t be starting that unit until the next semester, anyhow.”
Then why did you come all the way over here to bring it to me tonight? Lucia wanted to ask.
But there was something strange in the air, an odd tension in the way he stood at the edge of the garden while June kept chopping at her weeds.
Finally Willard turned and made his way back toward the gate, casting a brief wistful glance at the garden and the silent woman among her pumpkin vines. He turned back to Lucia.
“Well,” he said, “I guess I should be pushing off now.”
She ached for him in his nervousness, and glanced around to see if June might be disposed to offer this unexpected guest a glass of iced tea or some of the blueberry tarts she’d made that afternoon.
Lucia could hardly invite him up to her own apartment, not the way this community watched and gossiped. If she did, it would be all over town by morning that Ms. Osborne was entertaining a male colleague in the privacy of her rooms.
Even the students would know, and be whispering about it…
But June was still wielding the hoe, her face impassive as she worked.
“Good evening, Will,” the landlady said with odd formality. “Don’t forget to stop by and pick up that pumpkin, will you?”
“I won’t forget, June.” He paused with his knobby hand on the latch.
By now Lucia was deeply intrigued, looking from June to Willard.
“Well, good night,” he said at last, his Adam’s apple jerking nervously. “I’ll see you at school, Lucia. Good night, June.”
Lucia murmured another farewell but June said nothing, just turned away deliberately and began to work along the fence line, her shoulders rigid.
Willard Kilmer trudged off, his thin back swallowed up in the hedges down the lane.
When he was out of sight, June rested her hoe against the fence, plodded through the garden and sprawled on the bench next to Lucia. She sighed wearily and rubbed one of her shoulders.
Lucia stole a cautious glance at her landlady, whose composure seemed badly unsettled for some reason.
“June,” she ventured at last. “Is something the matter?”
“That man just gets under my skin,” June said. “He makes me so mad I could scream.”
“Willard?” Astonished, Lucia thought about her mild-mannered colleague. “That’s not the effect he normally has on people. Most of the time,” she added, “it’s hard to even remember he’s in the room.”
“He can sing like an angel,” June said, surprising her again. “Did you know that? Will’s a true baritone, and he has perfect pitch.”
“No kidding. How did you happen to learn that?”
“He sings in the choir with me, down at the Baptist church.”
Though Lucia never attended church, she knew that June Pollock had a fine alto voice. But in the seven years of Lucia’s relationship with Willard Kilmer, this was the first she’d heard of his musical talents.
“And he has one of the best arrowhead collections in the whole state,” June went on, stretching her legs and letting her blond head rest against the back of the bench. There were some silver strands among the rich gold, and her face looked tired and strained.
“An arrowhead collection?” Lucia asked blankly.
“He goes out most weekends to hunt for arrowheads in plowed fields and washed-out creek beds. Whatever Will finds he catalogs and mounts, enters the information on a big computer file. Colleges and museums even contact him sometimes to borrow parts of his collection.”
“Imagine the man never talking about that at school,” Lucia marveled, then looked at her companion, still puzzled by June’s reaction. “But why does he make you so angry?”
“Because he’s wasting his life.” June frowned at the rustling branches above her, where a nighthawk fluttered and woke to set out on its evening hunt for insects.
“Willard is wasting his life?”
“He