Crowned and Moldering

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Early Thursday morning, as I was drinking my second cup of coffee, Ms. Barney called. “You got the job! You won the bid. I’m so happy.”

“Are you kidding?” I said, not quite believing my luck. “That was so fast.”

“Well, it’s been three months,” she said with a laugh. “But I know what you mean. We were just talking about it yesterday.”

“I’m completely thrilled.”

“Good. Me, too. If you’re available, why don’t you swing by my office in the next two hours? We can sign some forms to make it official.”

“I can be there by ten.”

I arrived on time and we gave each other a quick hug before I sat down to sign some boilerplate waiver forms. She handed me a tentative schedule for completing the work on the parking lot. I thanked her again for the opportunity and she gave me a high five.

I walked out to the hall, chuckling to myself and mentally sca

Without thinking, I scurried down the hall to see if I could talk to Tommy. He would tell me what the police were doing here. Was this about Lily? Of course it was. So who were they here to question? Were they going to arrest anybody?

By the time I reached the doorway leading to the offices, the short i

Back in the main hall, I took a quick look at the brass plate on the door. It listed the three high school counselors who had offices down that hall, and I saw a name that sent chills up my spine: DARREN DAIN. So he was still working here, still giving bad counsel to the poor students assigned to him. Thank heavens there were two other counselors to choose from—a good thing, since the school enrolled almost five hundred students from all around the county.

“I can’t believe it,” I muttered. Darren “Dismal” Dain had been the world’s worst counselor, even back in my day. There was no way he’d improved, because besides being a stupid man and a bad counselor, he was a condescending prig who hated teenagers. I’d had the bad luck to be assigned to him when I first started high school. I couldn’t count the times he’d ridiculed me for thinking I could ever make a living working in construction. He thought that with all my hair, I should consider going to beauty school and becoming a hairdresser. I could just picture Whitney and her pals having a field day with that news. I mean, the man was a clod. I remembered leaving school in tears one afternoon when he pulled me into his office to tell me I should wear a dress once in a while so the boys wouldn’t be so turned off by me.

What kind of a creep said that to a teenage girl, especially when that girl worked a construction job every afternoon with her dad? My father finally had to complain to the principal, and I was reassigned to Mrs. Sweet, whose personality fitted her name. I still sent her a Christmas card every year.

Why would Ms. Barney continue to allow Dismal Dain to counsel students? Did school counselors get some kind of tenure? Maybe he was blackmailing her. There was no other reason I could think of. The man was a horror show. There had to have been hundreds of complaints by now.

I glanced up and down the hall and realized it wouldn’t be smart to be caught snooping around here, so I walked away.

I didn’t know which office Eric had gone into, but his visit must have had something to do with Lily. Which meant that one of those three counselors had to have advised Lily all those years ago. And on the off chance that she’d been stuck with Dismal Dain, I fully intended to visit Eric that afternoon to let him know why that despicable man belonged right at the top of his suspect list.

Chapter Six

I reached my truck, still flipped out about Dismal Dain. It had been almost fifteen years since I’d been stuck with him. I had to think that in all that time he must have been warned at some point to clean up his act. I hoped he’d been forced to take sexual-harassment training and psychological counseling so he no longer came across like the sexist troglodyte he’d been when I knew him. One could always hope. But the real issue with him went deeper than that. Dain’s real problem was that he hated people, especially teenagers. I wondered just how bad his own school counselor had been to steer him toward a career working with the very people he most despised.

I drove through town on my way to my friend Emily Rose’s new home, the former Rawley mansion, where several of my guys were already at work. Sean would be assigned there for the time being, until we could get back inside the lighthouse mansion. Although now that I thought about it, it would be better to switch him with Douglas. I doubted Sean would want to work every day in the place where his sister’s remains had been found.

As I stopped at the light across from the Cozy Cove Diner, my cell phone rang. I clicked the button on my Bluetooth and said hello.

“Sha

“Hi, Teddy. What’s up?”

“It’s Aldous again,” he said, his tone apologetic. “Do you have time to come by the office this morning? I need your help talking him down off the ledge.”

“Off the ledge? Is he about to . . .” Was Aldous threatening to kill himself? The Pla

“No, no, it’s nothing like that,” he rushed to add. “But I just ran into him in the hall and he’s all riled up again. He’s still got that bug up his bum over the lighthouse-mansion rehab and he won’t let it go. Can you talk to him?”

I didn’t resist rolling my eyes, since no one was there to see me. From the first day I’d met with the Pla

“Is he there right now?” I asked.

“Yes. I swear he’s going to have a heart attack over this thing if he doesn’t calm down.”

“We don’t want that, but I’m not sure I can do anything to help. We’ve gone around and around on this issue.”

“I know, but I’d appreciate your coming by if you can.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Thanks, kiddo.”

As I drove to City Hall, I thought about the best way to handle the crotchety old man. Aldous was at least eighty-five years old, and besides his long-held seat on the Pla