Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega #4)(47)

Anna winced as someone blew a shrill whistle on the playground. Charles didn’t even twitch as he held the door open for her. She wondered how he managed it.

There was a big sign on the door immediately to their right as soon as they entered the building. It said PRINCIPAL EDISON—ALL VISITORS PLEASE CHECK IN. It amused Charles. A day care was really just an efficient way to provide babysitting and not actually a school.

Anna knocked on the closed door and Charles stepped back to let his wife interface with the public. People liked her, and, as a bonus, she didn’t scare them. People talked to him because they were intimidated. Anna could usually get more and better information from people because they honestly wanted to make her happy.

The woman who opened the door of the principal’s office looked tired and a little startled to see them, though she tried to cover it over with a big, and mostly sincere, smile.

“Hello,” she said, recovering. “You must be Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I’m Farrah Edison. Welcome to Sunshine Fun. You said you have a four-year-old and a five-year-old, right?”

“We’d like to talk to the teachers of the four-year-old and the five-year-old classes,” Anna said.

Charles took the opportunity to sample the air in the principal’s office. He didn’t notice that it smelled particularly of fae-anything. But he wouldn’t, because the principal wore Opium, one of the perfumes that tended to kill his ability to scent things.

Anna looked at a ragged piece of paper she carried. “We’d like to see Miss Baird and Ms. Newman. You told us this would be a good time to speak with them both.”

Anna’s voice rose at the end, as if she weren’t sure they were here at the right time, seeming to allow Ms. Edison a graceful way to reschedule things if she needed to. It was a tactful response to the surprise Ms. Edison had displayed; she’d obviously forgotten they were coming.

“Yes. You can talk to Ms. Newman first. Her children are in music for another fifteen minutes. When they get back, Miss Baird’s students will go and you can sneak over to her room.”

Students and teachers at a day care? Charles weighed the vocabulary. He supposed children were learning a lot between the ages of two and five. He pursed his lips and regarded the sign again. Maybe this was a school.

As they followed the principal down the hallway, she told them about how they planned the meals they served, their hours, and their rates, which were very high. She assured them, without looking at Charles, that they did not discriminate on the basis of race or religion. Every teacher had an assistant teacher for every ten children.

She told them about weekly outings to nearby parks, and that once a month each age group went to a local private swimming pool, where the students would learn to swim. Two-year-olds en masse at a swimming pool sounded to Charles like a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe the remarkable thing was not how many children, teachers, and parents associated with this school had died, but that there had not been more.

Ms. Edison talked a lot, and he rather wished she’d chosen different perfume. He trailed behind Anna and the principal in order to save his nose. Generally the more expensive the perfume, the better it smelled; most chemical re-creations of scent smelled like their chemicals to him. Opium, the perfume Opium anyway, smelled fine; he just couldn’t scent much of anything else after he’d been around it very long.

Just before she opened the door, Ms. Edison gave Anna a sharp look. She’d avoided looking at him, Charles had noted, though that might have been because he followed about ten feet behind them. More probably it was the usual response people had around Anna: as long as he didn’t draw attention to himself, they grew so focused on her that they forgot about him.

“As I’m sure you know, Miss Baird is new to us this month. Who gave you her name in particular?”

“My sister-in-law,” lied Anna smoothly. “But it was a friend of a friend of hers who had children in your day care. I don’t know their names, I’m sorry. Just the names of the teachers.”

“In all honesty,” said Ms. Edison somberly, “I should tell you that we have given her notice. She is new and on probation and there have been some unacceptable disruptions in her classroom.”

“I see,” said Anna. “I’d still like to speak with her.”

“Yes, that’s fine. I just didn’t want to mislead you.”

Anna smiled. “I appreciate that.”

Ms. Edison introduced them to Ms. Newman, an Energizer Bunny of a woman wearing too much makeup and perfume that made Brother Wolf sneeze in disgust. It only smelled bad, though, and wouldn’t keep him from detecting other scents the way Ms. Edison’s did.

Ms. Edison’s phone buzzed; she glanced down at a text message, frowned, excused herself, and then abandoned them to their fate with the teacher of four-year-olds.

Ms. Newman talked at them for fifteen minutes without letting Anna get a word in edgewise. In contrast to Ms. Edison, Ms. Newman had no trouble at all paying attention to Charles. Ms. Newman told them, or rather told him because she ignored Anna, about her BS in child psychology and about her philosophy of education. While she was doing that, she managed to sneak in a lot of information about her divorce three years ago and how it was so hard to find nice men who weren’t already in a relationship.

Anna cleared her throat.

“I believe,” said Ms. Newman, still without so much as looking at Anna, “that children benefit from order. Every day they come into my class exactly at seven thirty and we all get out our crayons and set them on the tabletop for inspection. They have to tell me what color each crayon is and something that is that color.”