Read Online The Suicide Club by Gayle Wilson - Free Book Online Page B

words what she had been thinking. But since she’d started this…“I think when they saw me with Nolan, they thought I’d sold them out.”
    “You know something about the fires you haven’t told us?”
    “Of course not. Until Jace said it, I’d never had any reason to think about my students in connection with them.”
    “Jace?”
    “Nolan,” she amended, catching the look in Rick’s eyes. “I had dinner with the guy. During the course of the meal, we exchanged first names. It’s…” She shook her head, realizing she’d gotten off track. “Look, I probably wouldn’t have put any of this together except yesterday my seniors made such a thing about seeing me with him.”
    “Give me some names, Lindsey.”
    “I’m not saying there’s a correlation with the kids who brought it up. They were just the ones who saw us. But you know how things like that get talked about. And then tonight…Tonight, when every kid in that high school knows where I’m going to be and when I’m going to be there, I come home and find a rattler in my laundry basket. I can’t help thinking—”
    The front door opened, and the deputies and the guy with the sack and the pole came out. Although she didn’t want to look at the bag, Lindsey could tell there was now something inside.
    As the older man headed toward his pickup, one of the deputies started across the lawn to where she and Rick were standing. On the way, the deputy nodded to her neighbors, slowing to answer a question one of them asked, before he continued toward her. Neither she nor Rick said anything as they waited for his arrival.
    “I don’t think you’ve got anything else to worry about, Ms. Sloan. We poked around in there pretty good.”
    Despite the cringe factor inherent in having people look through her closets and less-than-orderly cabinets, she had pleaded with them to check out the rest of the house. While that wasn’t as reassuring a message as she’d hoped for, they’d probably done all they could tonight. Whether that made her comfortable enough to go back inside and crawl into bed…
    “She thinks somebody put the snake into that hamper.” Rick raised his brows, shrugging slightly. “I don’t see how it could have got into a closed basket otherwise.”
    In spite of her own conviction that that’s what had happened, hearing him put it into words created a sickness in the pit of Lindsey’s stomach. Never in her life had anyone deliberately tried to hurt her. To think that one of her students might be involved in this made her question every day of the ten years she’d spent in the classroom.
    “You see any sign of forced entry?” Rick asked.
    “No, but we weren’t looking for them, either. You got any idea who might have done something like that, Ms. Sloan?”
    She remembered what Shannon had said. In a town like this even the suggestion of wrongdoing could taint a kid’s life.
    “No.” She didn’t dare look at Rick.
    “Lindsey.”
    She turned her head, meeting his eyes. “I don’t. I told you I don’t have a name. Anything else is just speculation.”
    “I’d say it’s a little more than that.”
    “Not really. Besides, what I’m willing to tell you as a friend is very different from what I’m willing to put into a police report.” She looked back at the deputy who’d responded to her call. “Thanks for taking care of the snake and for searching the house. If I think of anything, I’ll call you.”
    “You teach at the high school, don’t you?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Think this could have been some of your students? Some version of the old puttin’ a frog in the teacher’s drawer.”
    She should have expected the question, once the subject was broached. “I can’t think of a child I teach who’d do something like this.”
    She heard Rick’s snort of disbelief, but she wasn’t being dishonest. Whether she bought into the idea that her students were involved in the fires or not, she couldn’t believe any of