His Second Chance

  “Me, neither,” Melissa piped up, releasing Cynthia’s hand and peering into the blender. “I love cheese.”

  **********

  Cynthia was about to get lost in Preston’s gaze again. Wondered if he was going to kiss her right then and there, despite Melissa standing only a couple of feet away.

  But then he suddenly turned. “Shall we eat now, or after the six o’clock news?”

  She’d almost forgotten about that. “After,” she and Melissa replied together. It was almost six o’clock anyway.

  They all walked into the living room, huddling together on the couch as Preston clicked the remote. He kept the volume low for a few minutes, while the three of them reiterated the events of the day, which consisted mostly of Cynthia sharing with Preston what Erin had told her. When a mug shot of Barry Munger appeared on the screen, Preston turned the volume back up and all three of them focused on the news clip.

  Because Erin’s video was now in police custody and considered court evidence, the anchor reported that it had not yet been released for public viewing. But the description of how the crime went down more or less fit what Erin had told Cynthia. And Erin herself got some air time.

  “I couldn’t let any more kids get hurt,” she said, looking and sounding almost as good as the reporter who was interviewing her. “So when a friend and I both saw Dr. Munger at Wainwright Elementary the same day the kids got sick after eating lunch, we put two and two together and decided to take action.”

  Cynthia felt a sick twinge in the pit of her stomach. She had no doubt that, within the next couple of days, everyone who was involved in the set-up would be discovered, and would be having reporters beat down their doors. She did not relish the idea of being put on the spot by a television reporter. Twice in one month was plenty.

  The report went on for another minute, and Cynthia grasped Preston’s hand and squeezed it in satisfaction when they showed Munger being led in handcuffs into the county jail.

  But her satisfaction didn’t last long. In the next instant, the reporter revealed a fact that they – she, Preston, Erin, and the Perezes – had all agreed on, but in the excitement of catching Munger in action, had completely forgotten.

  Barry Munger, admitting to all the recent food-tainting episodes, also told the police that he’d been blackmailed into it – by the St. Peter school district attorney.

  And that man was nowhere to be found.

  **********

  Melissa ate her meal with relish, asking Preston to give her mother the recipe, but neither of the adults did no more than pick at their food.

  Finally, Cynthia dropped her fork onto her plate and exclaimed, “I am so stupid!”

  Preston reached over and took her hand. “If you are, then so am I.”

  Melissa glanced at one, then the other, with furrowed eyebrows. “What are you talking about?”

  Preston looked at Cynthia. He was not about to get into criminal details with Melissa that might disturb her.

  Cynthia sighed. “You heard the news reporter say they can’t find the guy who hired Dr. Munger to mess with the food.”

  Melissa wiped raw tomato sauce off her lips with a cloth napkin. “So?”

  “So, he might hire somebody else. Or go to another school district.”

  Melissa’s brow slowly lifted. “O-oh.”

  Preston gave Cynthia’s hand a squeeze. “At least they know who he is. I don’t suppose he can hide forever.”

  “You could pretend you’re the Boxcar Adults.”

  Preston shot a frown at Melissa.

  “You know,” she said, making a vague, sweeping gesture with her hand, “instead of the Boxcar Children, the Boxcar Adults. There are even four of you, just like there are four Boxcar Children.”

  “Melissa, I don’t think Preston’s ever heard of the Boxcar Children.” Cynthia sent him an inquiring glance to confirm, and he shook his head in response. “It’s a middle-grade mystery series where four kids are the same age forever and run into a mystery every time they turn around.” Cynthia looked back at Melissa. “Besides, you’re miscounting. There are five of us, not four, including Mr. Perez.”

  Preston smiled at Melissa. “Ah-ha. Well, I think it would be best to leave this mystery to the police.”

  “Maybe Miss Halley could do something again.”

  He exchanged a glance with Cynthia. Convincing Erin that she was the perfect one to capture Munger on video had been like having a root canal. Whatever confidence she had exuded the day at the skating rink while lecturing him on the many reasons to eat natural foods, had vanished like a snowflake in summer at the Saturday meeting. She’d been afraid of losing her job, terrified of being hurt, sure that Munger would see her and run off, thereby escaping all just consequences for his cruel actions.

  “There’s one tiny flaw with that plan.” Preston let go of Cynthia’s hand and sat back in his chair. “We knew where Dr. Munger was, and how to get to him. We have no idea where this cockamamie lawyer is.”

  **********

  Great. Not only was she stuck in a job she didn’t like, now she’d let herself get talked into becoming a potential murder victim.

  Erin closed the window for the local television station website with a muffled cry of frustration. She was being a bit of a drama queen, she knew, but what if this Johnson lawyer guy saw her? Found out where she lived? Would he take revenge on Munger by blindly attacking anyone involved in the Food and Nutrition Director’s arrest?

  As much as she liked to tell herself at her loneliest times that she was just fine without a man, thank you very much, right now she felt a stab of envy for Cynthia Redman. Preston was a good guy. Good-looking. And, even though he’d just lost his job, most probably pretty wealthy.

  But just the fact that he was a good guy was enough. Erin wished she had a good guy to lean against right now, even if he picked up garbage for a living.

  She shivered – and it wasn’t just because her thermostat was set at sixty-seven degrees. At least the newscasters hadn’t made her look like an idiot. Or skewed her words. They had only broadcast a tenth of what she’d said, but it had communicated all the right things.

  She got up, turned on the radio, and sunk into the rocking chair in the apartment’s small living room after wrapping her one extra blanket around herself. She was always done eating by six p.m. – it was the healthiest way to go for both liver health and sleep quality – and generally spent a little bit of time online before settling down with a book and the Christian radio station until her nine o’clock bedtime. After viewing the live stream of the news program, she couldn’t concentrate on blogs or health philosophies or even easy fiction plots. She just wanted to rock.

  She considered calling Lucy, but she had Mario and at least one kid at home. Besides, unlike most women, Erin needed time and space to ingest emotionally disturbing information. She didn’t like to immediately hash everything out. It never got her anywhere.

  Ten minutes after she turned on the radio, the phone rang.

  It was Lucy. So much for not immediately hashing everything out. She almost didn’t answer it. But if she couldn’t have a good man to lean against during her current state of distress, she at least could have a good girlfriend.

  She answered.

  “Girl, you looked good on the news tonight.”

  “Thanks.” Erin sat back down in the rocking chair and asked Lucy to wait while she plugged the headset into her phone. She hated putting that radiation right next to her head.

  When given the signal, Lucy continued, “It’s kind of freaky that they can’t find the lawyer.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  A pause. Then, more gently, “How are you doing with everything?”

  Erin released a sigh. “Not very well. I probably just watched too much T.V. when I was a kid, but I keep wondering if I might not end up being the lawyer’s next target.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m the one who uncovered Munger’s barbaric ac
ts. He – the slimeball lawyer – probably isn’t very happy with me.”

  “Oh, deary, would you like me to come over and sit with you awhile?”

  Lucy was too sweet. “I’m fine. Anyway, you’ve got a family to look after.”

  “You need a man.” Lucy made the statement as if it were Bible truth, and without any hesitation, as if answering a question to which Erin was demanding an immediate answer.

  Erin wasn’t sure how to respond to that. It certainly fit her thoughts of the past few minutes. On the other hand…

  “Most of the time, I’m happy being all by myself.”

  “Two can put more enemies to flight,” Lucy countered. “Have you thought that you might be even happier with a life partner by your side?”

  Yes, Erin had, but she wasn’t about to admit it. Not right now. Besides, who would put up with all her finicky ways? She couldn’t marry just any mainstream-minded person. “Listen, Lucy, I appreciate you calling, but I’m really exhausted by everything that happened today.”

  “I’ve offended you.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “I have,” Lucy insisted, “but that’s okay. Now you’ll think about it until it starts to make sense. Call me, girl, anytime you need to talk about anything, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  The next day at school, the morning was wasted by her having to deflect a thousand questions from her students who had seen her on T.V. last night. She was called in to Mr. Wade’s office right after lunch to brief her on what she might say if she was contacted – God forbid – by any other reporters. Not only the principal, but the superintendent of schools himself was there.

  Of course, she couldn’t get off without being told what a dangerous trick she had played yesterday, and that from now on she should tell the police of any suspicious activity and leave it up to them. She was also advised that if she was not going to follow district policy, she’d better make sure she was current with her union dues.

  In other words, if she kept playing with fire, the district would burn her, and she’d need somebody on her side in order to keep her job.

  Which she wasn’t sure she wanted to do anymore.

  Her one bright moment in the day was when, a few minutes after she returned to her classroom, Melissa Redman poked her head in the door. Erin’s students were busy working on four-number addition problems, so she met the fifth-grader at the door.

  Melissa looked up at her with a shy smile. “I thought you might need a hug.”

  Erin accepted it, and for several seconds developed blurry vision. God must have spoken to this child, although Melissa probably wouldn’t have been conscious of it.

  A tap on her upper thigh is what finally caused Erin to release Melissa. She whirled around and glared at the offending second-grader. “Jordan, what is the rule about asking the teacher a question?”

  The boy sighed, hung his head, and slunk back to his desk. He flung his arm up into the air and twisted his head around to stare at Erin with pleading eyes.

  Erin turned back to Melissa and smiled. “Thank you. I needed that.”

  Melissa nodded. “Mom said to tell you to call her any time you want to talk about health or school stuff or anything.”

  “Tell her I said thank you.” Erin wasn’t one to make friends easily, or feel that she needed a lot of them, but she wouldn’t mind having a new one in her life right now.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  After Melissa’s remarks about the Boxcar Children, both Preston and Cynthia had relaxed enough to eat at least part of the…interesting…meal. It wasn’t that bad. But the sauce was runny – Carly had warned Preston that it would be better if set inside a dehydrator for an hour – and the raw garlic flavor strong, and the raw zucchini tasted like, well, raw zucchini. The organic mozzarella cheese he’d purchased during his very first trip to a health food store was the redeeming factor of the meal.

  All in all, he decided that Carly could keep her raw food diet. Cynthia told him that it was likely an acquired taste, after eating only cooked processed foods for so long, but Preston wasn’t so sure.

  They played a board game after supper, then he gave them both a hug and kiss on the cheek as they left. It just wasn’t the right time for a first kiss with Cynthia. Not only because of Melissa’s presence, but Preston felt that he still wasn’t quite worthy of his new lady friends.

  He had past issues to face. One past issue in particular. It had been weighing so heavily on his mind the past couple of weeks, that he dreamed about it in living color last night after the Redmans had gone home.

  “But you’ve only tried it for three days, Dad. She said it would take at least a week to start noticing results.” Preston, on the verge of starting his freshman year of college, stood by his father’s bedside, desperately praying that the older man would hear him.

  His father, propped up on pillows, looked at Preston with his ever-yellowing face. “The doctor said that’s all quackery. Chemo’s the only thing that can help me.”

  “Dad, we’ve been over this before. Chemotherapy kills. I thought you agreed with that.”

  His father sunk deeper into the pillows with a resigned sigh. “There’s more research on chemo. More evidence to support it.” He lifted his hand to stop Preston, who had opened his mouth to protest those statements. “I’m dying, son. Juicing and enemas won’t be aggressive enough. My only chance to live is modern medicine.”

  Preston woke up from the dream, reliving the frustrated grief at his father’s death a couple of weeks after that scene. He hadn’t been persistent enough. He should have had the old woman herself come and talk to his father.

  Instead, he had taken his father’s beliefs to heart, and decided that so-called “natural cures” were bogus, that if it was your time to die, it was your time to die, and nothing you did would matter, anyway.

  Preston sat at the table where he’d shared his first – and perhaps last – mostly raw meal with Cynthia and Melissa last night, nursing a cup of coffee, and thinking. His lackadaisical philosophy had served him well until a couple of months ago. Then the students in the local schools had started getting sick. One of them had died. Melissa had almost died.

  He couldn’t believe that mainstream culture lie anymore. He had decided that he could and would use his position at Delico to stop the tainting of school lunches, but now he no longer had that position. Moreover, he knew that keeping the position would not help anybody in the realm of health.

  In the back of his mind, the idea kept niggling at him that he had to do something to make up for all the lost years, the years when he ate whatever he wanted, wasted whatever he wanted, thought whatever was easiest to think.

  To make up for his father’s death.

  Finding that scumball lawyer would be a good start. First, though, he had to get a clue about where the man had hidden himself.

  Preston downed the last drop of his coffee and pushed the mug away. He assumed that the police would have looked for Johnson at his home and various school district offices. Did they have any leads as to where the man might have run to?

  The bigger question might be, why had he been poisoning kids in the first place?

  Exhaling with explosive force, Preston pushed away from the table and began pacing his spacious apartment, trying to recall every detail of the several meetings he’d had with Munger, and then with Munger and Johnson. During the latter meetings, he had been under the distinct impression that the pair had been trying to implicate Delico in the tainted food cases. But, why Delico? Why not one of the other companies that provided food for the school district?

  On the other hand, Preston was the one who had received the mysterious e-mail, the one against whom Munger had paid Karen to plant fraudulent evidence. Did Johnson have it in for him for some reason?

  Preston forced the image of the man with a permanent mocking expression back into his head, trying to bring up any recollection of it from his past life. He mentally unfiled p
ictures of high school and college classmates and various Delico employees at every level. He mulled over the several lawsuits that Delico had gone through during Preston’s years at the company. But Jeb Johnson did not seem to fit anybody from Preston’s past.

  Finally, frustrated beyond measure, he picked up the phone. There were two women he needed to talk to. First on the docket was Cynthia.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” he said when she answered. “Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

  “Sure. I needed a break, anyway. Are you okay? You sound upset.”

  “Have the cops contacted you yet?”

  “Yes. Just a phone call, though,” Cynthia replied. “They asked me to come down and make a statement this morning, so I did. What about you?”

  “Same.” Preston stopped his pacing at his bedroom door and leaned against it. “Got an interesting phone call from the national V.P. of Delico, apologizing profusely and begging me to come back.”

  Cynthia was silent for a long moment, as he had suspected she would be. “What – what did you say?” Her voice was a mixture of hesitancy and dismay.

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “Oh, thank God. I mean…”

  Preston chuckled. “I know what you mean. How about reporters?”

  “Not yet. You?”

  “I expect them at any moment.”

  Another pause. “Preston, you’re putting off telling me something.”

  That scary female sixth sense at work. “You’re right.” He was putting it off because as soon as Cynthia had answered the phone, he realized that she ultimately was not going to like where the conversation led. “Let me act like a man, and get straight to the point. I need to know every detail you remember from that meeting you had with Dr. Munger. That was the only one, right?”

  “Right.” Cynthia told him as much as she could about the meeting, including anything Jeb Johnson had said – which turned out to be not much – or had done as far as mannerisms.