“—is gone,” he finished for her. “I don’t know how or why, and for these purposes, it doesn’t matter.”
He had a theory he intended to run by Poppy later, though. He hoped she’d prove impressed by his reasoning abilities and investigative prowess.
“No matter what happened with Mrs. Krackel, Ms. Wick is an invaluable asset to this school, and she is anything but grotesque. She’s kind and warm and talented.” Heaving himself upright once more, he stalked to the door, then turned to make one final, chilly statement. “You, on the other hand,aregrotesque.”
When he slammed out of the faculty lounge, two of his longtime colleagues staring aghast at him—their cold, controlled colleague, fuming and foul-mouthed—he dimly realized he’d lost his temper. At work. For the first time ever.
But it was for good reason. The best reason.
And quite honestly?
It feltamazing.
Bending over,Simon inspected Tori’s diorama-in-progress with a magnifying glass. “It’s a coffin. With bloody claw marks and a corpse inside.”
Becauseof courseit was a coffin with bloody claw marks and a corpse inside. Why had he expected anything else from one of the Goth softball players in Poppy’s class?
“It’s the first oftwocoffins,” Tori corrected with an easy grin. “I’m educating my teachers and classmates about a very special period in our history via my diorama, Mr. Burnham.”
He lifted a brow, and she took the gesture as the invitation it was.
“In the nineteenth century, people were very nervous about being buried alive.” Turning to her friend, she tucked some of her braids behind her ear. “Do you remember that project we did in Mr. Krause’s class, Stacey? About how that one woman in England in the 1600s—”
“Alice Blunden,” Stacey provided, face lit with excitement.
“—drank too much poppy tea, which was an opiate, and they thought she was dead, so they buried her, but then kids heard sounds from her grave, so someone exhumed her and saw she’d tried to escape, but they thought she was dead again, so they reburied her, andthen—
He pinched the bridge of his nose.
“—the next day, she really was dead, but there were signs she’d revived and struggled a second time before finally, totally, dying. For real.”
Jesus, he’d be having nightmares about that.
Tori beamed at him. “So people were scared, and they invented special coffins with ladders and air inlets and bells so if supposedly-dead people woke up in the grave, they could save themselves. My other coffin will be a miniature of that invention. It’ll show a woman safely climbing out of her grave, only half-dead, instead of all-the-way dead.”
Stacey frowned thoughtfully. “Did you consider including zombies in your diorama?”
“Of course I did.” Tori tossed her braids over her shoulder. “But Ms. Wick said zombies were insufficiently educational, and thus did not meet class objectives.”
There were many, many things he could say in response to Tori’s diorama, but Simon confined himself to one. The truth, however inadequate.
“Impressive work, Ms….” He trailed off, uncertain of her last name.
“Walker,” she supplied, then shook the hand he offered. “I’ll probably be in your calculus class next year.”
“Good,” he said, again with perfect honesty. “I look forward to it.”
Then he fled back to his accustomed table, before either she or Stacey could inspire further nightmares.
A few moments later, Poppy found him taking notes on his legal pad. “You doing okay, Mr. Burnham? You look…I don’t know. Kind of pale and nauseated?”
Her usual buns were slipping from the top of her head, but she was wearing a dress today, for some unknown reason. Rust-red and silky-looking, the material suited her coloring, and the hem flirted around her knees in a distracting way. The garment was also stained with fresh smears of paint and glue, which was exactly why she should have been wearing her jeans instead.
Although he’d been studying her almost nonstop, she’d been cautious around him the entire period. Meeting his eyes for fleeting moments before looking quickly away. Keeping her distance, so they never quite found themselves within arm’s length of one another. Addressing him with all the formality due a colleague.
He understood why, and if he had anything to say about it, that professional reserve would disappear within the next hour. But it still made him want to snatch her into his lap and thread his fingers through her hair and yank her mouth to his.
“Tori described her diorama,” he told Poppy.
