“I got a call,” Farman said as he took off his giant cop belt hung with all manner of weapons and handcuffs. He hung it on the coatrack beside the door. “I told him to walk to school.”

Sharon Farman rolled her eyes, turned on her heel, and headed back to the kitchen where one of the daughters was yelling, “Mom, it’s burning!”

Anne turned to look at Frank Farman.

“I’m Anne Navarre. Your son’s teacher,” she said, annoyed. She had met him several times and he had yet to recognize her. She was of no importance to him whatsoever. She imagined no woman was.

“You came here to tell us Dennis wasn’t in school?” he asked. “You couldn’t pick up a telephone?”

“Actually, I came to see how Dennis is doing after what happened yesterday—”

“He’s fine.”

“I thought he might be upset—”

“He’s not.”

“Has Dennis talked to you about what happened?”

“The kids were playing and they found a dead body. What else is there to talk about? He’s a kid, for Christ’s sake.”

“Before this happened he told one of the other kids there were bodies buried in the woods,” Anne said. “I wondered if he might have seen something before—”

“Look, Miss Navarre, I’m the sheriff’s deputy, you’re the teacher. I do my job. Why don’t you stick to yours?”

Anne pressed her lips together to keep the words she wanted to say from spilling out.

“I’ll deal with Dennis,” he said, turning to the hall table to go through his mail.

She took a step toward the door then turned back. “If Dennis has an unexplained absence tomorrow, he’ll be on probation. If he has three unexcused absences, he’ll be expelled for a week.”

“Oh, he’ll be there,” he guaranteed.

Farman looked at an envelope promising he may already have won a million dollars.

Anger flushed through Anne. “Mr. Farman, could I please have your undivided attention for two minutes?”

He set his mail aside and looked at her with an impatient sigh.

“Does it not bother you at all that your son claimed to know there were bodies buried in the park before anyone actually found a body there?”

“Miss Navarre,” he said. “Dennis is a boy. Boys make up stories. I’m not concerned that Dennis saw bodies in the park before because there were no bodies. Believe me, if Dennis had seen a dead body before yesterday, he would have told me because that would be a very big deal to him.

“If you believe everything kids say, you’re either crazy or unbelievably gullible,” he said.

Anne wanted to kick him in the shin. In the span of a few sentences he had managed to make her feel both stupid and furious. She wanted a brilliant, scathing comeback line, but nothing came.