“Right,” she said out loud. “Time to get the stove going.” Her words seem to flatten and disappear in the frigid air. Happily, Miss Keeling had brought wood in from the shed at the side of the school and piled it, along with kindling and some rolled-up newspapers, in the woodbox next to the stove. Lane had brought matches with her, just in case she found the place less organized than it proved to be. It made her think again of Miss Keeling. According to Angela, the children liked her. While Lane held loosely to the idea that if dogs and children like someone, they can’t be all bad, she cautioned herself not to jump to conclusions. After all, there had been no dog to confirm the judgment. Perhaps Miss Keeling was only good at making herself seem agreeable, while looking for the chance to steal Miss Scott’s life savings, for example.

  Reminding herself not to compensate in the other direction, she realized that Miss Keeling must have taken the teacher training provided by the province, or she wouldn’t have been assigned to the job by whoever it was that assigned teachers to tiny schools like this. Good, so she wasn’t a complete imposter, and the room showed a very tidy turn of mind. One thing seemed certain: Miss Keeling clearly expected to come to school on the Monday. The preparation of kindling and wood and homework for the various grades of the students on the blackboard showed this.

  With the fire making no inroads on the chill, Lane was obliged to keep her coat on. She tried a door on the north wall near the teacher desk. It opened into a small kitchen sort of room with a sink and, to her enormous relief, an indoor loo. She had seen only an outhouse at the teacher’s cottage and had harboured an anxiety that she and the children would spend the day popping in and out of winter clothes to visit the outdoor privy.

  There was a cupboard with some glasses lined up, a kettle that must be used on the wood stove, perhaps after the students had left, and a second cupboard that contained rudimentary first aid equipment: a bottle of Mercurochrome and one of iodine and a little yellow metal box of Band-Aids. It was here, as well, that the children were meant to hang up their coats. There was a bench along the wall opposite the sink, with pegs above it. And finally, there was a door to the outside. It was a relief to see a second exit in case of a fire or some emergency.

  Wondering if children ever got burnt on the stove, Lane went and collected the exercise books, and now feeling just about able to remove her wool coat, she sat down at the desk and set them up in a pile ready to read. Out of curiosity, she pulled open the shallow centre drawer in the wooden desk. An attendance book, some regular pencils and two red pencils, some pens, and loose lined paper. The upper drawer on the side of the desk revealed a box of chalk and some clean erasers. In the second drawer there was a neatly folded black hand-knit cardigan. She lifted this, and underneath she saw an envelope from the Department of Education, Province of British Columbia. Inside it, a letter addressed to Miss Wendy Keeling congratulated her on her assignment to the rural school located at Balfour, British Columbia, at an annual salary of $1,128. Someone had circled the salary in pencil and written, “$285 less than a man!”

  Realizing she didn’t know much about the average salaries for various professions, Lane thought this sum a little small. It was less than $100 a month to live on. A man would be doing little better when it was averaged out across the year. She remembered the bank teller in Nelson telling her that her inheritance, nearly $20,000 when converted from pounds, was the equivalent of a number of years’ salary for him.

  Lane folded the letter and put it back into its envelope and lifted the cardigan to slide it back underneath. She was about to close the drawer and get stuck into looking at the exercise books to see what lessons the children were doing, when she found she couldn’t close the drawer completely. She opened it and then tried to close it again, but something was certainly preventing it from closing. With a sigh she stood up and pulled the drawer all the way out and then saw that a wad of paper had somehow escaped the drawer and been jammed between the back of the drawer and the desk. She took it out and unfolded it. It proved to be an envelope that had been tightly folded and perhaps thrown in the drawer and forgotten.

  It had no addressee, but it had been opened and there was a folded letter inside. She unfolded it and gasped at the directness of the communication. “You aren’t fit to be around children. Don’t think your wicked secret is safe. You won’t be there long.”

  The exercise books forgotten, Lane reread the letter, printed in pencil in big block capitals, as if the writer had borne down on the lead. She turned the envelope over, hoping to find some clue about the sender or, she realized, even about the receiver. Had this been directed at Miss Scott or Miss Keeling? Was it sent by a man or a woman? Her instinct, she thought regretfully, was that it was a woman, but then she chided herself. Men could be hateful in print, after all, though she thought their methods would veer more along the lines of abusing a person directly to her face.

  She looked at her watch and realized the children would be descending on her in less than an hour. She went to put the letter in the drawer, and then thought better of it. This letter, and even the announcement of Miss K’s appointment, ought to get to the police. She looked along the walls of the room and realized there was no telephone. Who the devil doesn’t put a phone in a school?

  Well, she didn’t have time to leave her post to make a call, but she would ask Angela, when she dropped her boys off, to put in a call to the police station and mention—what? She couldn’t, she felt, share this evidence, if that is what it proved to be, with anyone but the police. Of course, she could ask Angela to tell them that there may be evidence at the schoolhouse. That would bring one of them out. For all she knew, they were already planning on a trip to the schoolhouse, depending on what they learned from Miss Scott when she regained consciousness.

  She didn’t want the police going through the drawers while the children were there, so she kept the letters in her handbag to hand over when they came.

  By the time she heard the first car door slamming outside, Lane had ascertained that the children were in roughly four grades, and their lessons were all over the map. All the exercise books had a section for penmanship, and she had thought that after the introductions, she might safely provide time to improve handwriting, a skill only two of the children seemed to be mastering at a high level.

  On the blackboard she had written the first and second stanza of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” judging it sufficiently visual for children to cope with, and something she had off the top of her head. The car door, and the high voice of a child saying, “Goodbye, Mommy,” made her stomach lurch and she admonished herself for a coward. You’ve jumped out of airplanes carrying weapons to the French Resistance, she reminded herself. These are little children.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DARLING WAS LOOKING GRIMLY AT the headline in the Nelson Daily News: “Balfour Teacher Near Death, Second Teacher Sought by Police.” The article that followed, while adhering to the factual rules of journalism, skated near the edge of implying that the second teacher was responsible, with its suggestive wording of “Miss Wendy Keeling, about whom little is known . . .”

  The knock on his door roused him from dark thoughts about journalists and how they bent public opinion and got in the way of investigations. “Come!”

  “Sir, we’ve had a call from Mrs. Bertolli up at the Cove.” Ames was holding a piece of paper on which he’d made notes. “She didn’t want to bother you directly,” he added, answering Darling’s unspoken question about why the call hadn’t been put through to him.

  “Yes, Ames. What is it?”

  “Your good wi . . . er . . . Miss Winslow asked her to call. Apparently she found something in the desk at the school that might be of interest. Can I ask, sir, why is Miss Winslow going through the desk? You don’t usually like to involve her in your cases, not that you can ever keep—”

  “Ames, I’m in no mood for your impertinence.”

  “Yes, sir, sorry, sir. Anyway. She has something and she thinks one of us ought to have a look.”

  “If you must know, in the temporary absence of a teacher, she has agreed to take on the job until someone turns up.”

  “Wow! She’s brave. But no surprise, eh, sir? That’s Miss Winslow all over.”

  “I think she’s utterly mad.” Darling rolled up the newspaper and tossed it into the trash can by his desk with a definitive thud. If Lane thought it important enough to have a call put through, “What sort of thing did she find?”

  “Mrs. Bertolli didn’t say. In fact, she said that of course she had no idea since it wouldn’t be appropriate to share information with anyone outside the police. But she did say that Miss Winslow thought it was important. Do you want me to go out?”

  Darling nodded. There was no point in his making the long drive. He was hoping to be Johnny-on-the-spot when the hospital called through to say Miss Scott was able to talk. His early-morning call to the hospital had confirmed that she had “stabilized,” whatever that meant, but was unconscious, though they were feeling optimistic.

  Ames stopped by Terrell’s desk downstairs to see if he wanted to come along, but he found him still on the phone.

  “Well, can you put me through to someone who does know something?” he was saying. He looked up at Ames, who was dangling the car keys, and shook his head. He put his hand over the receiver and whispered, “Bureaucracy.” Then he turned back to the phone. “Yes, this is the police. Constable Terrell of the Nelson Police, yes.”

  LANE’S MORNING WAS stuttering along. The children were variously skeptical or excited. The Bertolli boys were excited and traded on the fact that they knew her and she had solved a murder. Lane found herself grateful that they appeared not to be in possession of the full menu of her involvement with the law. Other children seemed to resent an interloper. “Where is Miss Keeling? Is she dead?”

  When she had invited them all to sit in their usual seats, and had read out their names, checking them off as Miss Keeling had done in the register, she found she had one missing. “Does anyone know Samuel Gaskell?” All the children put up their hands tentatively. Lane looked at the register. “Gabriella? Do you know if he is sick today?”

  The little girl shook her head and glanced nervously at the boy sitting next to her. Lane couldn’t tell if the girl meant that Samuel wasn’t sick, or she didn’t know, but there was certainly something nervous about the children’s response to his name. Deciding that would have to be good enough, she said brightly, “Thank you, Gabriella. Now then, I see that you were given homework. How does your teacher check that you’ve done it?”

  Philip put up his hand. “We put our homework on our desk, and the teacher walks around and puts a check in her book.”

  “Thank you, Philip. Could everyone do that, then?” While the noise of children opening their school bags and taking out homework unfolded behind her, Lane sought the attendance book and saw there was a column for homework checks with Monday, December 8, ready to be marked off. She made an entry for Tuesday and then walked solemnly by each desk, glanced at the work, and put a check mark next to the student’s name. Only a boy called Randy had not done his. Lane didn’t want to embarrass him by asking, and had just decided she would bring it up later when all the students were occupied with the poem, when he said, “I forgot to write it down, miss.”

  Lane nodded. “Thank you, Randy. Maybe there’ll be a moment later for you to catch up. Would you mind handing out everyone’s exercise books? Who would like to hand out the ink and pens?”

  There was another anxious shuffle, and then Philip Bertolli put up his hand and said, “Only the big kids get ink, miss.”

  “Ah. Well, raise your hand if you normally work in ink.” Several children responded. She was about to ask Philip to hand out the ink, when Randy spoke up. “What about the prayer, miss? We don’t do nothing till we pray the Lord’s Prayer.”

  “Oh, of course. Thank you, Randy.”

  He nodded, looking important. Perhaps his reminding the new teacher about the Lord’s Prayer made up for not having done his homework.

  “And who leads us in prayer, Randy?”

  “You do, miss.” He nodded at the other children and they all stood up, folded their hands in front of them, and put their heads down.

  “Oh, of course.” Feeling slightly hypocritical, Lane began. “Our Father . . .” All of the children joined in, pulling Lane to the preferred speed of very slow and well articulated. “. . . Forever and ever, amen.”

  “Right,” Lane said, when the correct booklets and equipment had been handed out. “I thought we would begin with a little penmanship today. I’ve put two verses of a poem by a famous English poet called William Wordsworth on the board. It’s about daffodils. I thought it would be fun to remember the yellow of daffodils in the middle of all this snow. You can copy down the poem in your very best writing, and then we can talk about it.”

  A hand went up. “My pencil isn’t sharp.”

  Lane looked around and spotted the pencil sharpener attached to the top of the low bookshelf. “Off you go, then, and sharpen it.”

  This invitation elicited several more blunt pencils, so the children lined up and the room was filled with the sound of wood grinding.

  Lane leaned back on the teacher desk and smiled at Rafe, who sat at the forward-most desk.

  “I’m good at arithmetic,” he said.

  “That’s splendid,” Lane said. “You can help me get everyone organized when it’s time for the lesson.”

  “Everyone is at a different level. Me and him,” he pointed at a boy also sitting at the front, “are at the same level, because we’re in the same grade. And Ralph is with Gabriella and Samuel, and Philip is on his own because he’s better than anyone, even though he’s only in grade five.” Wondering how Miss Keeling, or Miss Scott, or any of the miss or mister anyones, managed such divergent needs and levels in these small schools, Lane took in a deep breath and told herself, One thing at a time. Penmanship first; take cues from the children. The local board could not be long in assigning a proper teacher.

  The pencil sharpener was finally silent, and the children back in their places. “Can anyone read what I have written on the board?”

  There was a shuffling, then Gabriella spoke up. “Samuel is the best reader, miss.”

  “That’s very nice of you to say so. Since Samuel is sick today, would anyone else volunteer?”

  Finally, after an agonizingly long silence, Philip Bertolli put up his hand. “I guess I could, Miss Winslow.”

  “Splendid. Have a go.” Philip stood up and began, “I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high . . . I don’t know that word . . . or?”

  “O’er. It’s a kind of old-fashioned shortcut for saying ‘over.’ Carry on, you’re doing very well. Read to the end of the stanza, and we’ll see if someone else can read the second one.”

  Philip, thus encouraged, proceeded to the end, and sat down.

  “Why doesn’t he just say ‘over’?” asked Randy. “It’s easier to understand.”

  “You make a good point, Randy. The poem is over a hundred years old and poets then tended to use special language when writing poetry.”

  Gabriella volunteered the second verse, stopping firmly at the end of each line, though she balked immediately at “continuous.” “I know what it is when I read it to myself, but I never had to say it out loud,” she said, to stifle a giggle from one of the boys.

  “Thank you, Gabriella. That happens to all of us. I often encounter words in reading that I’m not really certain how to pronounce.”

  Gabriella folded her arms with a satisfied nod at the giggler.

  That done, Lane instructed them to write the poem down, using the lines in their scribblers to write as neatly as possible.

  “We usually do special circles and lines to practise,” said Rafe, holding up his book to show that, indeed, there were exercises completed before each writing assignment.

  Lane contained a sigh. “Good, then let’s do the exercises first. How many lines do you usually use for the exercises?” By the time the children were on to writing out the poem, Lane was wondering how she would make it through to lunch, never mind the end of the day.

  “WELL, I DON’T like the sound of it,” Gladys declared over lunch, a meal of chicken soup with bottled peas and carrots from their root cellar and great slabs of bread and butter. Mabel had baked the day before. They sat at their kitchen table enjoying the warmth of the wood stove upon which the soup had been produced. The white blankets of snow mounded over the flower beds outside the long bank of east-facing windows added to their sense of snugness. The two cocker spaniels were lying on the bench where the wood was kept, watching the lunchers hopefully, and the cat was curled up by the stove. “The way Robin was talking, that builder seemed to be suggesting that the new owner was nothing to write home about. And the van wasn’t local.”

  “Trust Robin to get the wrong end of any stick,” said Gwen. “I’m sure he’s perfectly nice. Maybe he just likes to keep himself to himself. That would suit most of us down to the ground.”

  “If he keeps himself to himself, it doesn’t matter if he’s nice or not,” suggested Mabel, in rare support of her sister.

  “What if he’s got some hare-brained scheme to log the place like Sandy had?” asked Gladys. “Life here wouldn’t be worth living.”

  Sandy Mather, the unpleasant only son of Reginald and Alice Mather, was serving time out on the coast for second-degree murder. He’d had plans to log his father’s property and had been in the process of trying to buy up some of Robin’s property for the same purpose, when he was arrested.

  “I’m actually interested to see what that builder does with the place, especially if he’s not local. He might be a fancy big city man from Vancouver,” Gwen said, rolling her napkin up and sliding it back into its ring. “I’m going to tackle the linen cupboard. Everything needs a bit of an airing. The sheets felt damp last time I changed the beds.”