Page 33 of A Deeper Darkness

Ally spied Susan and her face crumpled. Good God, what had the girl done?

“Ally? Are you okay?” Susan knelt on the floor in front of the chair and gathered her eldest child in her arms, smelling her still-babyish scent. Clean. Ally always smelled so clean and fresh.

“I’m sorry, Mommy. I didn’t mean to.” She began to cry, tears building up like water drops from a leaky sink.

“Didn’t mean to what?”

A throat cleared. Susan looked up to see the headmaster, all five foot six inches of him, rattling with displeasure.

“Why don’t we discuss that in my office, Mrs. Donovan?”

“I’d like to hear it from Ally.” She turned back to her girl. “Sweetheart, what did you do?”

“She’s broken the honor code. Cheated,” the headmaster pronounced. “And you know the penalties for cheating. Don’t you, Alina?”

“My kid? No way in hell.”

“Mrs. Donovan. Language.”

Ally broke into fresh wails, and Susan stood and looked the headmaster in the eye.Language, my ass.

“Hey. Threatening her isn’t the way to handle this.” He took a step back. Susan pulled a tissue from her purse and knelt down to wipe Ally’s eyes.

“Sweetie, tell Mommy what happened?”

“I didn’t cheat. I saw someone in the window. I was looking outside, not at Rachel’s paper. I swear.”

Susan watched her daughter for a moment. Ally wasn’t prone to lies. Yes, she’d gone through a stage, like all children do, testing the boundaries of what was allowable, but that had been last year. She’d broken one of Susan’s small Swarovski crystal figurines, and hid the evidence in her sock drawer. When Susan found it and asked her, she’d calmly said she didn’t have any idea what had happened. Ten minutes later, she’d appeared at the laundry room door, face streaked in tears, and admitted her fabrication. Ally had been put on restriction for a week. Her first real grounding. It had made an impression. Now she was forthright and up front about everything, almost to the point of embarrassment.

“Who did you see outside, baby?”

“I don’t know. It was a stranger.”

Stranger danger. Drilled into their precious heads along with SpongeBob and Cinderella.

“A woman or a man?”

“I don’t know. It was fast, like they were peeking. Like a ghost.” Her little face began to waver again. “They had a baseball cap. Like yours, Mommy. The red one from the football game. The one you were wearing…”

The day Eddie died. Susan had thrown the hat in the garbage, not wanting anything that would be such a ready reminder of the day they’d lost him.

Susan glanced at the headmaster, who had his arms crossed and was looking dubious.

“Mrs. Donovan, please. Can we talk in private?”

Susan nodded and kissed Ally on the forehead. “Hang on just a second, sweetie. I’ll be right back. Do you want to color?”

Susan reached into her rapacious handbag for a pad and crayons, but Ally shook her head. “I’m fine, Mommy. I’ll just wait and think.”

A budding Zen master, her child.

She followed him inside the cool office and sat heavily in the chair across from the headmaster’s desk.

“I don’t believe she cheated, Headmaster. Ally is many things, but she’s not a liar.”

He shook his head, his glasses swinging on the cord around his neck in time, a little metronome of disapproval. “Mrs. Donovan, no one else saw this phantom at the window. And she and Rachel Bennett both misspelledmisconstruethe same way.”

There was irony for you. “Isn’t it entirely possible that Rachel cheated off of Ally’s paper?”