Free Heaven Beside You by Christa Maurice Page A

rock star, so madness might run in the family.
    “You look nice today, anyway,” Finn said, breaking into her thoughts.
    “Thanks, now get inside before you freeze to death.” She turned and walked away from him. He wasn’t stupid, just obtuse. She’d lain awake nights wondering if she should be mean to him so he’d get over it. The small amount of friendliness she gave only served to encourage him. She did like him as a friend, and he was an excellent accountant, but maybe in order to help him, she had to hurt him. She just couldn’t bring herself to do it.
    She pushed through the door of the travel agency and Sue looked up with the wild look of a woman with too much coffee and too little company.
    “Cassie! Did you hear?”
    At that volume, Cassie could have heard her from across the street. “That the school is planning on doing some events this summer?”
    “Small potatoes. Small, small potatoes.” Sue waved her hands in the air over her desk. “You will never guess who I got a call from. Trish, the marketing director from the ski lodge. They want to distribute our schedule, and gave me their events and activities list to add to ours. They want to join in. This is big. This is huge!” She flailed her arms, knocking over her oversized coffee cup. Coffee splashed up the wall behind her. “Even better. Well, you heard about the school.”
    “I did.” Cassie bent forward to watch coffee continue to dribble down the wall. “Don’t you need to clean that up?”
    “It’s fine. I was going to call you. I figured out how to put the schedule online. We can advertise to a whole new segment. This is really getting big.” Sue leaned over the counter conspiratorially. “Have you heard about the Donaldson Funeral Home? Wegman’s are going to buy it and make it into a B&B.”
    “I heard.”
    “I hope Maddy doesn’t poison anyone. But you came in to get the stuff to do the schedule, right?” Sue started shuffling through the piles of papers on her desk. She snatched up a red file folder, rifled through it, picked up a couple of papers off her desk, jammed them in and held it out. “This is everything. Absolutely everything.”
    And it would be. Under that chaotic and hyper exterior hid an organizational genius.
    “Thanks, Sue. I’ll send you the schedule as soon as I get it worked out.” Cassie backed through the door, slightly exhausted by the encounter.
    Outside, she paused to investigate what her mother had started.
    The music teacher at the high school had a full schedule of evening concerts in the pavilion on the town hall green. Nothing could be more divine than listening to an out of tune, out of sync high school jazz band playing under the stars while being attacked by mosquitoes the size of helicopters.
    Not to be out done, the drama-slash-English teacher offered plays, different ones every month for the whole season, Friday and Saturday nights. Their own little taste of Broadway in the high school gym yet, where the scent of floor wax, sweaty sneakers and chalk dust could complete the experience.
    The middle school gym would be used for nightly dances, and Irma and Bob Tompkins were giving dance lessons in the afternoons. Irma and Bob were lovely people, but they could hardly walk anymore, let alone dance. Their daughter, the middle school principal, was probably behind that.
    The shop teachers were organizing their own robot wars for Sunday afternoons on the football field, which made her wonder how the football coach felt about having his field torn up, or if perhaps they had misrepresented what robot wars involved. Of course, the football boosters were selling refreshments so maybe he knew.
    And the PTA planned a rubber duck race for Labor Day Weekend. She really should start going to the school board meetings. Something was going on with those people.
    She leafed through the rest of the papers. The usual suspects: nature walks, Civil War site tours, star gazing, church dances, a quilt show,