Free Sacrifice Fly by Tim O'Mara Page B

and talk. Real. Slow.”
    “You’ve seen me do this?”
    “Whenever you feel the control is slipping away and you have to take it back.”
    “Elaine,” I said, “with all due respect, don’t talk to me like I’m one of the kids.”
    “I’m not,” she said. “I’m just asking how you spoke to him.”
    “I told him about our concerns and our responsibility to call in any suspected abuse.”
    Elaine waited before going on. I grabbed a couple of paper towels and wiped up the
     coffee from the table and the floor.
    “Do you think he hit Lisa?” she asked.
    “Are you asking me as a teacher? Or as someone who does that ‘cop thing’?”
    “Come on, Ray. I didn’t mean any—”
    “He said Lisa told him she got that bruise from a volleyball in gym.”
    She smirked. “Lisa’s biggest risk in gym is getting a paper cut.”
    “I told him that. That’s when he got defensive on me. I don’t know, Elaine. There’s
     a part of me that thinks he’s being straight. My gut says no, he didn’t hit Lisa.”
    “Is she in today?” I nodded. “I’ll talk to her. See what she has to say now that we’ve
     met with her dad.” The bell rang. “I’d hate to make that phone call and we’re wrong.”
    “Or,” I pointed out, “we don’t make that phone call and we’re wrong.”
    “Yeah,” Elaine said. “There’s that, too.”
    The sound of kids filled the hallway. I walked her back to the door.
    “It’s been a long year, Mr. Donne,” she said.
    I thought about Frankie. “It’s been a long two days, Ms. Stiles.”
    “Yeah. Let’s talk before you leave?”
    “Absolutely.”
    She turned and headed down the hallway as my students started to gather outside my
     door. Elaine took Lisa by the elbow and led her away. Eric Simpkins had a big grin
     on his face as he stopped in my doorway. He held out his hand to bump my fist.
    I ignored the gesture.
    “Take out your Lit books,” I said, ushering the kids into my room. “I want to see
     the Whitman homework out on your desks. Now.”
    *   *   *
    The final bell of the day had rung, the kids were gone, and I was standing at my desk
     going through Frankie’s notebook, page by page, when Elaine walked in.
    “Lisa told me that she got the bruise when she was hanging around with a group of
     neighborhood kids. They’re older, her parents don’t want her hanging around with them,
     so she made up the volleyball story.”
    “You believe her?”
    “No,” she said. “I called her mom, you know, a kind of end-of-the-year, let’s-all-get-through-this-together
     conversation. I mentioned the latenesses and the absences, asked how things were at
     home, and she said fine.”
    “So…”
    “So if she’s right and things are fine, a phone call to Children’s Services will screw
     with these people’s lives. The girls will be removed. You want to talk about gut feelings?”
    “Go ahead.”
    “It’s not perfect at the King house, but the family’s working. I don’t want to ruin
     any progress they’ve made if we both have doubts that her father hit her.”
    I sat down at my desk and turned a few more pages in Frankie’s notebook. “What if
     we’re wrong?”
    “I don’t think we are. We’re both kind of good at this sort of thing.”
    “Yeah.”
    I turned to the back of the notebook and looked at the picture of the house and the
     real estate ads.
    “Anita’s house,” Elaine said.
    “You know it?”
    “Frankie talks about it in our sessions. He loves that place.”
    “So does his sister,” I said. “There was a drawing of it on the fridge at her dad’s
     place. Looked just like the photo.”
    “You know,” Elaine said after a few seconds of silence, “that’s come up in our talks.
     Frankie said that house was the place he felt the safest.”
    I pointed to the cut-outs from the newspaper. “He’s already planning to buy a house.”
    Elaine smiled. Maybe for the first time that day.
    “Hey,” she said, “the police would know