Free Never Smile at Strangers by Jennifer Minar-Jaynes Page B

as she walked back and forth, teaching the importance of dialogue. The way her eyebrows became perfect V’s when she asked her summer class a question. And the genuine smile that spread across her face when a student answered correctly.
    More than once, Erica heard the boys discuss Rachel.
    “What a knockout.”
    “She’s hot, for an older chick.”
    “Hell, I’d do her.”
    Erica bet her mother was just as beautiful these days, if not more, if that were possible. She longed to see her again. To know for certain what she looked like.
    Erica could barely sit still. She’d had a breakthrough with her writing that morning. A
brilliant
new idea. An epiphany.
    Rachel glanced at her watch. “Let’s recap before moving on,” she said, peering up at the class, her slender hands clasped together. “Dialogue is so much more than words. In fact, it is one of the most important tools you will use in moving your stories forward. You will also use dialogue to help develop your. . .”
    Erica usually sat in the front of the class. But she was late that morning and now she sat in the back row. Earlier she’d gone to the little cemetery off Harper’s Road to brainstorm. It was another one of her mother’s writing traditions. Another of her muses. Sometimes her mother would sit there for long hours with just the dead and her thoughts, concocting macabre situations and worlds. So, Erica tried it, too. Like the woods, Erica felt a unique calm just being in the cemetery. The people who lay below her weren’t threatening, unlike the ones she had to interact with on a daily basis.
    But as she cut through the woods on her way back home that morning, she was met with the startling realization that someone else was with her. Someone unseen and very alive. Leaves had rustled, then she glimpsed someone about thirty feet away. She called out and the person began to run.
    But why would someone run?
    A knock on the classroom door. Rachel excused herself, then after a few hushed whispers outside the classroom, she poked her head back in. “I’d like you to begin doing the exercises at the end of chapter ten,” she said. “At 10:50, you’re all free to go.”
    “Think it’s the police?” a tall girl sitting in front of and slightly to the right of Erica asked a freckled girl.
    “The police? Why would it be the police?”
    “Because that girl was sleeping with her husband.”
    Erica quit thumbing her way to chapter ten. Her fingers slipped out of the text. She disliked where the conversation in front of her was heading.
    “What girl?” the freckled girl asked, scrunching up her forehead.
    “Where have
you
been? The
missing
girl. Tiffany Something.”
    Erica watched the girl’s jaw drop. “Oh. Mrs. Anderson’s husband was sleeping with her?”
    “Sure was.”
    The freckled girl looked skeptical. “How do you know that?”
    “It’s only public knowledge. Mrs. Anderson found out about it and freaked. And some people think maybe she’s the reason she’s missing.”
    “No shit?”
    “No shit.”
    Erica bit into her lower lip, willing herself not to say anything. These girls were stupid. What did they know anyway. She kicked the back of the tall girl’s seat.
    The tall girl turned.
    “Accident,” Erica muttered, staring at her text, not bothering to look up.
    She felt the girl gaze at her for a quick moment before turning back around.
    The freckled girl whispered, “She doesn’t look like a killer.”
    “Hel-lo? Did Dahmer? Bundy?”
    “Dahmer did.”
    The tall girl ignored her. “Well, Mrs. Anderson isn’t as perfect as she may look. She obviously had a motive. And get this, she kept visiting the diner in Grand Trespass where Tiffany worked. Like clockwork. Like some sort of stalker.”
    Erica kicked the back of her chair again.
    The tall girl turned.
    “Oops,” Erica said, her voice hard. Her eyes boring into the girl’s.
    The girl studied her for a few seconds, the expression on her face a mixture of anger and