I turned back to Carol. “So, should I just cancel the class, then?’

“You don’t have to do that,” she said quickly.

“No one has signed up.”

She didn’t say anything, just went back to tapping her pen against the table.

“I’ll go pull the sheet,” I told her. “But I’m not paying for my kids. I offered the class, which should cover their enrollment. Not my fault you’re all afraid of me.”

“Oh, of course,” Carol said, relief flooding her face. I knew she was thrilled that I wasn’t going to push the issue any further. “And, don’t worry. We’ll get it figured out.”

As I walked to rip my sheet off the table, I wondered if she was agreeing to that because it was the right thing to do or if she was lying.

Because I was pretty sure it was more than just the other people in the room who thought I’d offed Olaf.

I was pretty sure Carol Vinford believed it, too.

SEVENTEEN

Emily was coming in the door from school at the same time we arrived home and she looked as unhappy as I felt.

“Where were you guys?” she snarled as she dropped her backpack on the dining table.

“Co-op,” I said.

“Mom can’t teach,” Will said, brushing past us on his way to the stairs.

“Yeah, they think she did it,” Sophie said. She’d grabbed a cheese stick from the fridge and was in the process of pulling down the wrapper.

“But she didn’t,” Gracie announced. She looked at me. “Right, Mommy? You didn’t?”

“No, I did not,” I said.

The two girls exchanged looks and Sophie shoved half the cheese stick in her mouth. Grace grabbed the other half out of her hand, popped it in her own mouth and they both scurried upstairs.

“What are they talking about?” Emily asked, slouching into one of the chairs at the table.

She’d done her hair in a French braid that morning and, with her hair pulled back from her face, she looked stunning. Of course, I’d never tell her that. A flattering remark from me was a surefire way to ensure she’d never repeat what had initiated the compliment.

“My class was cancelled,” I told her. “No one signed up.”

She squinted at me. “What? Your classes are the only ones people look forward to.”

“That was before dead bodies started turning up in our basement.”

Emily folded her arms across her chest, chewing on her lip. Her brow furrowed and I could tell she was angry. I just wasn’t sure if it was because of what had happened at co-op or if there was some other reason.

I sat down across from her. “How was your day?”

“Terrible,” she said. “Pretty amazingly terrible.”

A knot formed in my stomach. “Why?”

“Remember how I asked about going to the game on Friday?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you don’t need to worry about it now,” she said. She wouldn’t look at me.

“Why not?”

She cleared her throat. “Just because.”

“Emily. Why not?”

Small tears emerged in the corners of her eyes. “Nathan…he said he’s not going to go now.” She paused and winced. “But I think he really is. He just doesn’t want me to go.”

I took a deep breath and exhaled. “What do you mean?”

She wiped at her eyes. “Well, he came up to me in history and he asked if I was still going and I said I thought so. And then he said well, I don’t think I’m going now. I asked why and he said something about his dad needing him to do something. It was totally weird and he was all mumbling and he never mumbles because I hate mumbles, but whatever. So I said okay, thanks for telling me or something lame like that.” She paused and she winced like she was being pinched. “But then after lunch, Bailey told me that she heard he was still going and that he told me that just because he didn’t want me go.”

My hand balled into a fist as my mother hen instincts kicked in and I wanted to punch the face of a teenage boy who was being a butthead to my daughter. I knew that dealing with boys was going to be an ongoing process for her and she needed to deal with butthead boys in order grow up, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to grab the little weasel by the nose and tell him to stop being such a butthead.

“Who did Bailey hear that from?” I asked, trying to poke holes in what was hopefully maybe just a rumor. “And why would he say that?”

She wiped at her eyes again and then folded her hands tightly in her lap. “She heard him talking to Josh in math. And he said it was because of the whole dead body thing and it freaked him out.”

The knot in my stomach retied itself.

“He told Josh that he thought it was creepy and he didn’t want to hang out with some serial killer girl,” she said, wincing again.

I forced myself to breathe and unclenched my fist, stretching out my fingers. “Okay. Two things here. One, you are not some serial killer girl.”

“Well, duh.”

“And, two, if he is basing his decision to hang out with you or like you or whatever on something he knows nothing about, then he is not a boy you want to be wasting your time on,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment. I was pleased with my response. It was reasonable, rational. It made sense. I was able to impart a little life wisdom on my daughter and maybe some day she would look back on this conversation and thank me for helping her wade through the cesspool that is teenage boys.

“Thanks for the Disney show advice,” she grumbled, her voice full of disdain.

Or maybe not.

“I don’t want people to be weirded out about hanging out with me,” she said. Her shoulders slumped and she closed her eyes.

“Is Bailey?”

She thought for a second. “I don’t think so.”

“How about your other friends?” I asked. “Girlfriends, I mean.”

She thought again. “Not that anyone has said, I guess.”

“So your friends aren’t making assumptions,” I said. “They’re still your friends and aren’t jumping to ridiculous conclusions. They’re still your friends.”

She made a non-committal shrug that seemed to be especially teenaged in nature.

I reached out and laid my hand on her forearm. “I’m sorry Nathan is lame. But if that’s really what he said and why he told you he wasn’t going to the game, then he is lame. There are plenty of boys who won’t be lame. And I’m sorry that all of this stuff going on is affecting you. It’s affecting all of us. But it won’t last forever. It will all get sorted out.”

“When?” she asked.

“I can’t answer that,” I said. “Hopefully, sooner rather than later.”

She stood and grabbed her backpack from the table. “Okay.”

“Or we can just have Jake wait for Nathan after school tomorrow and, like, rough him up or something,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “Mom.”

“I’m serious,” I said. “He’ll do it. He could hide behind a trash can and jump out and throw him in the back of the car—”

“Whatever,” she said, her eyeballs doing another lap.

“We could give him some rope—”

“Oh my God,” Emily said. “Stop.”

She hoisted the backpack on her shoulder and headed for her room.

I sat there for a minute. I did believe that if that was indeed what Nathan had said, then he really was a little weasel who no doubt had trouble spelling his own name and wanted nothing more than to get Emily alone behind the bleachers. Or something like that. But it also bothered me that what was going on at home was having an effect on her at school. That wasn’t fair to her. High school and teenage-hood were hard enough without any extra wrinkles. Finding a dead body in your home when you lived in a small time was more than a small wrinkle. It was massive and I felt bad that it was going to make Emily’s classmates whisper about her. I didn’t want her to be known as the serial killer kid.

I thought about what had happened at co-op and how no one had signed up for my class. The other three kids hadn’t been ostracized during sign-ups but maybe that was just around the corner, too. I didn’t know if that would be waiting for us on the first day of co-op and I didn’t want to wait to find out.