Murder of a Bookstore Babe

are chinchillas, and they didn’t get loose. She, or one of her minions, let them loose.”

Oops! She had forgotten to tell Wally about that episode, as well as what Charlie had said about Rise. She’d have to call him as soon as she was out of her meeting.

“I don’t give a damn.” Homer swept his desktop with his arm, sending the offending clipboard along with various other items, flying to the floor. “Just make Corny stop, so the parents quit calling me about this shit.”

“Why don’t you order her to stop?” Skye made a scornful noise and answered her own question. “Oh, yeah, she’s tenured, so you can’t, because you don’t have much to hold over her head, right?”

“So what?” he snapped. “It’s your job to convince her to quit being a pain in my crack. You’re the shrink. Counsel her about her evil ways.”

“Right.” He’d tried using that tack before. “The fact that you blatantly don’t believe in all that ‘psychobabble,’ as you put it, makes it pretty obvious your real motive is to pass the buck.”

“Have it your way.” Homer folded his hands across his paunch and leaned back. “Do it because I’m ordering you to, and because, unlike that lunatic English teacher, you do not have tenure.”

Skye opened her mouth to protest but closed it without speaking. He was right. Since she was considered a part of neither the teaching faculty nor the administration, she had none of the protections most of the staff enjoyed. She’d tried to join the union, as many of her fellow school psychologists in other school systems had, but so far the matter was still being considered.

“Any suggestion on how I can prevent Pru from acting within her constitutional rights?” Skye asked. Not that she didn’t want the teacher to cease and desist harassing the bookstore, but she had no idea how to make her stop.

“Nope.” Homer scratched behind a hairy ear.

Skye wondered whether she should get him a flea collar for Christmas this year.

“Just don’t mention I told you to do it.” Homer pointed his finger at her.

The ringing of the phone saved Skye from responding.

Homer snatched up the handset. “Yes?” He paused, then said, “No. No. Tell him I’m not here. . . . Hello, Shamus. What can I do for you?”

Skye flinched, hoping this call wasn’t about her. Dr. Shamus Wraige was the superintendent of the Scumble River School District, and not one of Skye’s biggest fans.

She unashamedly eavesdropped and heard Homer say, “No, I didn’t sanction that petition.” He listened, then whined, “Pru Cormorant sent it to her students’ parents without telling me.” He listened again before bleating, “I do have control of my staff. In fact, I just asked our psychologist to talk to Mrs. Cormorant about her concerns and suggest she not involve the school in her personal issues.” After a long pause, he said, “Ms. Denison assures me there is no merit to Mrs. Cormorant’s fears. Yes, sir. She’ll take care of it today.” He banged down the receiver and told Skye, “Dr. Wraige does not want to get one more call about this matter.” Homer dug a roll of antacids out of his desk drawer.

“And you told him I could stop Pru?”

“Yes, so hop to it.” Homer threw a handful of Tums into his mouth.

The white fizz around his lips made him look like a wolf with rabies. Normally Skye might have found that amusing. Not now. Not considering that he had just offered her up to the superintendent as a sacrificial lamb.

“You know”—Homer suddenly froze, and beads of sweat popped out on his forehead—“if Corny finds out I told you to stop her, she’ll hound me to hell and back.”

“I promise not to mention your name.”

“You’d better not,” Homer warned, then threw two more antacids into his mouth. “Because if that happens, I’m making you twice as miserable as she makes me.”

“I’ll do what I can, but truly, I have no idea how to get her to quit.”

Homer appeared to make a sudden decision. “I’ve got to make a call.” He picked up the phone. “You can go now.”

As she was gathering her things, Skye heard part of Homer’s conversation. “It’s me. I’ve decided we should go to the cabin this afternoon. Start packing now. I’ll be home in a couple of hours. I’ll call in sick for the rest of the week.”

Apparently, Homer wasn’t taking any chances that Pru Cormorant would turn her attentions to him.

He looked up from the file he had opened. “Are you still here? I thought you had an appointment at seven fifteen.” He looked pointedly at the clock on the wall behind her. “You’re late.”

Great! Skye yanked open the door and dashed out of the office. As she jogged down the hall toward the library, where the meeting was being held, she ran through Homer’s list of commands: Stop finding bodies, stop finding murderers, and stop Pru Cormorant from riling up parents against the bookstore. Nope. She had as much chance of doing any of them as she had of winning a million dollars.

CHAPTER 12

Crime and Punishment

After the meeting, which went well despite her tardiness, Skye spent a few minutes talking to Trixie about the murder, then retreated to the relative safety of her office. She sank into the chair behind the desk, let her tote bag fall to the floor, closed her eyes, and murmured to herself, “I totally take back all those times when I was a kid and I said I’d never need a nap.”

Shaking off her fatigue, Skye turned on her computer and found the document containing the teachers’ schedule. The first of Pru Cormorant’s two planning periods was second hour. Skye had forty minutes to figure out how to tame Scumble River High’s own Cruella De Vil. Too bad Skye felt more like a Dalmatian puppy than the Teacher Whisperer Homer expected her to be.

After some thought, Skye decided the best way to approach Pru was unofficially, which meant she needed to run into the mulish woman by chance rather than appear to have sought her out. Unfortunately, there was one major obstacle to that scheme.

Pru had one of the nicest classrooms in the school. Not only did it have actual walls instead of folding curtains—it had windows and an exterior door. So, when the weather was pleasant, the best place to find Pru when she wasn’t teaching was right outside her room sitting in a lawn chair. This made casually bumping into her difficult.

Concentrating, Skye tried to come up with a plausible reason for being outdoors and near the English teacher’s room. A few minutes before the second bell rang, the solution came to her. She could claim to be exercising. In fact, she could credit Pru with motivating her to work out, saying that after their chat about wedding pictures in the faculty lounge last Friday, she’d had a change of heart.

Skye hated to encourage the older woman’s narrow-minded idea of beauty, but if it helped the bookstore and got the principal off her back, she was willing to do so—but only this one time. After all, a man may have to do what a man has to do, but a woman has to do what he can’t. And clearly, Homer couldn’t handle Pru.

Having decided on a plan, Skye exchanged her black pumps for the tennis shoes she kept in her bottom drawer—a good school psychologist was prepared for any occasion—tied her hair back into a ponytail, and took the bottle of water from her lunch bag. At the last minute, thinking it might add an air of authenticity to her disguise, she grabbed the stopwatch from her WISC-IV test kit and put the lanyard around her neck. She just hoped she remembered to put it back when she was finished, as it was impossible to administer the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children without a timer.

When Skye walked out of the building, she turned left and saw Pru in a lounge chair with a copy of Cosmopolitan tented over her face. Skye wondered how the teacher could consider romances porn, yet buy a magazine with a cover that contained a scantily clad woman and a promise of an article inside titled, “Six Sex Positions for the New Millennium.” Not that Skye cared what the older woman read, but it did seem a tad two-faced. Of course, being hypocritical had never bothered Pru in the past.

A snore drifted out from under the periodical, and Skye wondered how she could wake Pru without making it obvious she wanted to talk to her. Shrugging, she decided she’d have to “accidentally” run into her chair.

Backing up out of sight, Skye started to jog. As she rounded the corner, she increased her speed and banged into the lawn chair. Pru snatched the magazine from her face and gazed up at Skye, an angry expression twisting her features.