Page 85 of Second Start: Family
The first person she saw when she entered was Adam. Pleasure at seeing him came immediately, a conditioned response. It slowed her reaction to the other signals. The headmaster’s grim face and gruff voice. Adam’s averted eyes. The presence of the school psychologist, along with Billie.
Bret had accused her of sexually abusing him.
He had awakened his father during the middle of the night and said he couldn’t keep the secret any more.
According to Bret, she seduced him last school year, and they had been having sexual encounters ever since.
Dark, viscous fluid swamped her in a second, dragging her under. She fought it, flailing to the surface to gasp out a disjointed denial.
“We don’t want this to reach the media — for everyone’s sake,” the headmaster intoned. “But there will need to be an inquiry into these serious charges. And, I need not add that you should have no contact with Bret or his family — of any sort — until this matter is resolved. The issue of your unwise decision to engage in a relationship with the father of a student—”
“Former student,” murmured Billie Raston.
“—we will leave to deal with at a later date. As of this moment, you are on leave. You will leave the premises immediately, without returning to your classroom.”
The next days were a nightmare — no a series of interconnected nightmares that never ended.
Billie Raston insisted she hire a lawyer, and found her Lee Stamford, a short, round black man with a cheerful manner. She would discover that the cheerfulness made it even more impressive when he shifted to chilly ferociousness. She was grateful that chilly ferociousness was always on her behalf.
“You’re an unwilling passenger on a runaway freight train that’s heading toward a bridge that’s gone out,” he told her at that first meeting. “My job is to put the brakes on. Any way — every way — I can think to do that.”
Bret’s accusations were involved and detailed. He wove the real experiences of that night on her patio into an elaborate fabric. He described her townhouse, her patio, her garden.
Her lawyer dismissively pointed out that anyone who took the time to find her address could do that.
Bret described her caftan, the color of her bedroom walls, that she’d signaled him it was all-clear by adjusting her mini-blinds.
A Peeping Tom would know — or fantasize — as much, responded Lee Stamford.
He cited her underwear, the mole below her collarbone, the way her skin paled down her throat to her chest.
No more than an attacker would know.
Adam had jerked at that word — attacker. She’d seen his motion without turning her head.
Lee later said that was the moment he’d felt the freight train start to back up.
He called in Billie Raston who recounted Kenzie’s phone call, and what she had observed when she arrived at the townhouse, including footprints in the garden, with dirt tracked onto the patio but not in the house, the torn caftan, and the broken light bulb.
She also described Bret’s emotional issues.
And then Bret had gone another step. He’d previously said he didn’t remember specific dates of any of their other supposed trysts, but now, under the pressure of increasing doubts of those investigating, he produced days and times for four.
She had no idea where she had been for one. But one had overlapped with a doctor’s appointment, a second was at the time of a faculty meeting that every other member of the staff could vouch she attended, and the fourth was an evening she had spent with Adam.
Kenzie looked up from her appointment app as she listed that last and met Adam’s eyes. From a momentary regret, he turned to Bret.
His son screamed, “No! She was with me —me. Not him!”
*
“…The investigation cleared me completely. I was very fortunate.”
“Fortunate,” Bodie repeated with heat.
“Yes. Other people are unjustly accused and never get it put right. They have their jobs taken away, their lives taken away. I could have gone back to Dalverston — they wanted me to. I know they knew I hadn’t done that. I know they knew it was the result of an emotionally troubled boy who didn’t want his place in his father’s life disrupted.”
“More likely he didn’t want to lose control over his father,” Vicky said.
