“It sure was fun having Susan here yesterday afternoon,” Jan told Cody as they moved furniture into the living room they’d painted the day before. It looked a lot better too; today they would deal with the bedroom. “I think she’s going to make a pretty good renter.”

“I think so too,” Cody agreed. “Let’s face it, while Southern tends to draw kids who are pretty responsible, they’re still kids, and usually this is the first time they’ve lived away from home. It’s bound to cause problems.”

“We’ve been pretty lucky about that. Of course, you being a police officer has to help.”

“I’m sure it does. By the way, we shouldn’t kill ourselves today, and I need to get a nap this afternoon. I’m going to be on graveyard here in town today.”

“If you have to,” she sighed. “I’ll manage. I want to do some studying ahead anyway.”

Cody didn’t have to ask why Jan wasn’t very enthused about him having to work the graveyard shift for the Hawthorne Police Department. In truth, he wasn’t exactly thrilled about it either, but being a new officer and part time at that, he almost always drew the least desirable shifts when he worked. He knew that Jan didn’t like being left alone and out of his protection overnight, and because she didn’t like it, he was uncomfortable with it. It wasn’t because it was unsafe, because this was about as safe a place as could be in Hawthorne.

While Jan was not as good a shot as Cody was – few people were – when she was firing competition on a range she usually got within ten or fifteen percent of his scores, which was better than most police officers. On top of that, he knew that she’d have her Sig Sauer P229 nine-millimeter within reach every minute he was gone – even in the shower. Even now, she usually stayed up reading, watching TV, or studying while Cody was gone on night shifts since she hardly ever slept soundly without him beside her. It wasn’t the fear that something would happen to her; it was her dreams that she feared.

Jan’s fears – especially her fears at night – seemed unreasonable to Cody, although he understood why she had them and didn’t blame her in the slightest. At least here he felt he could leave her alone at night, which also, understandably, he couldn’t do in Spearfish Lake.

It wasn’t something they talked about around others; in fact only his parents – who were also her de facto parents the last few years – knew much about it and even they didn’t know everything.

Although they had gone to great effort to try and relieve the fears she held, and had some success at it, some were still there. It was a fact of life for both of them, and they’d learned to live with them.

Cody and Jan had a very complex relationship, more so than anyone understood. Again, even his – their – parents didn’t totally understand them.

It all went back to the night Cody had rescued her. He hadn’t known Jan well then – she was just another high school classmate, and a rather unobtrusive one at that, certainly nothing like a girlfriend. Jan’s real father and brother had been flying high on their own homebrew meth. They had beaten her badly and were taking turns raping her. Jan had been sure she was going to die that night, it just hadn’t happened yet, though it couldn’t be far off.

Then Cody appeared at the door carrying a nine-millimeter that spoke with what Jan thought was the voice of God. To her Cody was an avenging angel sent to rescue her and extract retribution, and deep down inside she still felt that way. It was clear to Jan that not only had Cody saved her life, but that her life was now his to do with as he pleased.

Although Cody had tried to inject some reason into her thinking, she still felt that way. She saw Cody not only as her rescuer, but her protector and master. She would, then and now, do anything Cody asked her to do without question. She had total faith in him and his judgment.

That truth had only slowly become clear to him. Cody was not the kind of guy who would take advantage of her feelings, and he had tried to get Jan over that delusion, but with only partial success. He, his parents, and a psychologist had worked with Jan, trying to get her to make her own decisions and not let him do her thinking for her. As a result, she could be her own person if she had to be, but had admitted to him that she made independent decisions on the basis of deciding what he would have wanted her to do or would approve of her doing.

The situation was a little different for Cody. While he didn’t feel any regret about killing her whole living family and would gladly do it again if he could – she’d been messed up that badly – he felt more than a little sorry that such a thing had to happen to her. There was still a little residual desire to make things up for her by being her protector, to make sure something like that didn’t happen to her again.

From the night of the shooting until Cody had to start working night shifts as a policeman, they had only spent one night apart, and that was her first night in the hospital when she’d been sedated. He’d stayed at her side, even while she slept, sometimes holding her hand, until she’d been released.

The Archer family had agreed to take Jan in since they knew she was now an orphan and they were as outraged by the incident as anyone else. The very first night, as Jan was sleeping in Cody’s brother’s room she had a nightmare that her father and brother were after her again. It woke her up, and she couldn’t get back to sleep, so she’d asked Cody if she could spend the night with him, just so she would know that he was close by to protect her. She still couldn’t get to sleep, so Cody, in one of his more brilliant moments, got his mother’s .357 magnum, loaded it, and set it on the bedside stand. He told Jan that if her father and brother came for her in her dreams again, he’d be ready to kill them for her again.

Amazingly enough, it worked. They’d slept side by side in his bed as innocently as you please every night, a loaded pistol on the bedside stand. It was months before the two teenage kids progressed to having sex – Jan had been ready to do that as thanks to her protector after she had healed enough from her beating, but it had been Cody who had been unwilling since he didn’t want Jan confusing him with her father and brother. When they finally did it, nine months after the shooting, it sealed the relationship between them even more firmly.

Beyond the range of her fears, Jan was bright, articulate, and competent, not to mention the fact that she was a good-looking woman – and the latter had come about under Cody’s mother Candice’s tutelage, which was why Jan tended to resemble his mother a little.

Jan had been a registered nurse since the end of classes the previous spring. The Clark Foundation in Spearfish Lake had offered her the opportunity to work toward being a nurse practitioner, but it carried with it the stipulation that she’d have to work in Spearfish Lake for five years. Jan turned them down as the thought of enduring the extra bad dreams that would come to her in Spearfish Lake was intolerable. Still, it was a worthy objective and she was working toward that goal without the help of the foundation. It would take some time, especially with Cody looking at law school, but it was a target to work toward.

Even in high school Cody had vacillated between the ideas of being a police officer and a lawyer. Working as a police officer was a solid part-time job, and combined with Jan working at the nursing home it brought the couple a reasonable income. However, Jan’s insecurities made leaving her alone at night intolerable on a long-term basis. Still, he knew he was going to have to do it for a while since it was income they wouldn’t have otherwise, and Jan accepted it as well.

“At least we’ve got a few days before school starts,” Cody sighed, trying to change the subject. “The new kids are going to be here early, so maybe they’ll settle in before things get serious.”

“That’ll help,” Jan agreed. “If they’re like most new kids, they don’t understand just how hard it’s going to be to get up to speed.”

“At least we had a running start,” Cody smiled. “I think both of us figured it was going to be something like the semester we spent at Riverside, maybe a little harder, but not much. But then we spent that summer in Pontiac, when you were studying to be an EMT and I was at the Academy. They threw a lot of stuff at us in a short time, and that prepared us for this place. We would have been way behind the eight-ball if it hadn’t been for that.”

“You’re right,” she said, popping the lid from a can of paint. “I think most kids coming here expect to have a bunch of easy classes like the ones we had at Riverside. Boy, are they in for a surprise.”

“The logic on that in most schools is to separate out the workers from the slackers before they get to the serious classes,” Cody agreed. “And they might be right on that. Kids going to any college are supposed to know that they’re going to be up to their necks in serious stuff right from the get-go. They have to learn how to scramble to keep up or they don’t last.”

“At least we don’t have much problem keeping the apartments full,” Jan replied. “But we always seem to have some vacancies when the second term starts.”

“I can tell you that Susan is going to have her hands full with what she’s doing,” Cody snickered. “I mean, she’s been through here and she knows the drill, but I think she needs to concentrate on getting the message across before the kids even set foot on campus, and it’s too late for that this year.”

“I have to wonder how the new kids with us are going to work out,” she replied. “I know we’ve met Jack, Vixen, Alan, and Summer two or three times, and they seem like nice kids and serious students. I think they’ll be ready. At least, I hope they will, since we’ve given them enough of a warning. The Halifax girl, well, I don’t know her.”

“I don’t know her either,” Cody replied. “I know we haven’t met her, though we know her father, and he seems to think she’s pretty sharp. I can’t put a name with a face from when we were in school though.”

“It’s been over three years since we were in school at Spearfish Lake, after all. It’s not surprising that we don’t remember her.”

“I expect we’ll find out. Last year we spent an awful lot of time helping kids over the kind of humps this place throws at them. Maybe with Susan living here it won’t be quite so bad.”

*   *   *

It was as long a drive as ever between Hawthorne and Spearfish Lake for Susan. There were two ways to make the trip – east of Lake Michigan, or west of it. Going east was longer by far, but mostly with light traffic and nice views. Going west was shorter, but involved fighting traffic through Chicago, Milwaukee, and Camden. She needed the time and the ability to think without the distractions of heavy traffic, so going the long way was the obvious choice.

In spite of a relatively early start, the sun had set and it was nearing full darkness when Susan pulled off the state road in Spearfish Lake and up the half-mile of gravel to the familiar scene of her parent’s house. It was getting to be her folk’s bedtime, but she’d called ahead on her cell phone to let them know she was on her way; she’d already told them about her new job and about renting the apartment from Cody and Jan.

Her parents, Mike and Kirsten, were waiting on the deck enjoying the last of the sunset when she pulled in. “Did everything go all right on your drive home?” her father asked.

“Just fine,” Susan replied. “But that drive isn’t any shorter than it ever was.”

“Well, at least you’re home for a bit,” her mother said. “While you’re going to be a ways away, at least you’ll be in the States for a while. Maybe we can actually have everyone here for Christmas for the first time in I don’t know when.”

“It’ll seem strange to me, too,” Susan replied. “Christmas isn’t a holiday in China. Well, last year I got together with a few Western ex-pats I knew in a bar for a few drinks, but it wasn’t anything special.”

“How long are you going to be home this time?”

“Not long. In fact, as little as I can get away with. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I’ve got to do in the next few days and the list got longer and longer all the time. I have to dig into it since there isn’t much time before classes start and I have lots to do. I’m just going to grab what I think I need and get some running around done as quickly as I can, then get started back. Probably not tomorrow, but the day after for sure.”

“It sounds like a big job.”

“A huge job, and that’s partly because there aren’t many limits set on it yet,” Susan explained. “In fact, one of the things I’m going to have to do first is to define those limits. It looks to me like at least part of the job is going to be slopping into some areas that might be in the Dean of Students’ responsibility, so that’s probably going to be an issue.”

“Somebody plans on protecting their territory, and maybe gaining a little?” her father grinned.

“Dr. Thompson thinks so,” Susan replied. “It doesn’t help that the Dean of Students is Charles deRidder.”

“You’re fooling,” her father shook his head. “Is that where he wound up?”

“It surprised me, too,” Susan admitted. “I know I never knew him very well, and I don’t know what happened when I was in China, but my understanding is that his departure from here wasn’t exactly a happy one.”

“No, it wasn’t,” her father replied. He was the editor of the Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, and knew a lot of what went on around the schools and the school board – in some things, perhaps better than the board members themselves. “He wasn’t exactly fired, but the board wouldn’t renew his contract.”

“I hate to say this, but it looks like I may have to go nose to nose with him from time to time, so I wouldn’t mind knowing more about him.”

“To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think deRidder was a bad superintendent,” Mike said, leaning back in his chair. “He was a whole hell of a lot better than that joker before him, who’s still in jail as far as I know. But that much said, deRidder was something of a meteorologist as an administrator, in that he always tried to know which direction the wind was blowing. That’s not all bad, but it’s not necessarily all good, either.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, after Harold Hekkinan retired as principal, deRidder got the bright idea that he needed a principal loyal to him, rather than to the community. He brought in a guy, Bryson Payne, who was a real asshole. Just about the first thing Payne did was boot Cody Archer out of school over him shooting those two jerks the previous winter. I always thought deRidder was behind it, and he let Payne do the dirty work. Payne’s point – or deRidder’s point, or whatever, was that Cody was a threat to the other students. Even though they’re administrators, they didn’t take any time to learn squat about what really happened, or care very much about it, either.”

“Anti-gun nuts, I take it?”

“Very much so,” Mike sighed. “Which wasn’t Payne’s only problem, but we don’t need to get into that. The point is that the action was unwarranted and lacked due process, let alone ignoring the fact that it was a civil issue, not a school one. To make a long story short, Cody’s family sued for damages, which is why Cody and Jan finished high school as home schoolers.”

“I knew that much but didn’t know the reason behind it.”

“That’s only where it begins. The point that got deRidder into trouble was that he figured he’d better back up Payne, who was an employee, rather than listen to reason and what the law and the school policy actually said. Needless to say, that didn’t set well with Cody’s dad, John. That, added to a couple other stunts Payne pulled right at the beginning of school that year, got Ryan Clark out at Clark Plywood and Randy Clark at Clark Construction pissed off with Payne, deRidder, and the school board in general. You know Ryan and Randy, of course.”

“Right, the main people at the Donna Clark Foundation.”

“I don’t know who thought it up, but John wound up running for school board unopposed the following spring. Then, the year after that, Ryan, Randy, and John put up a whole slate of candidates for school board, and then someone put up more money than I’ve ever seen spent in a school election to get them elected. Clark Foundation money, naturally, although it was hard to see the fingerprints. DeRidder had had a rubber-stamp board up until the Clark’s coup d’état, but after the dust settled John was the school board president and deRidder couldn’t even get his contract renewal on the agenda.”

“Ouch,” Susan smiled. “And I can understand why John was out for blood. He got it, too.”

“Right, and even Cody got a piece of it. He was patrolling one night, just as a substitute officer, when he caught Payne driving drunk, and of course he wasn’t going to let him go with a warning. I don’t know what all happened, but that was one stick of wood on the fire that gave Payne the idea that his prospects would be better elsewhere. He was gone almost without warning and not too many people were sorry to see it. I haven’t heard a word about him since. Hopefully he’s sleeping under a bridge somewhere.”

“I have to ask if the Record-Herald was part of driving deRidder out of here,” Susan asked, wondering just how this little group of facts was going to affect what she would have to do down at Southern. The fact that deRidder had essentially gotten kicked out of Spearfish Lake wouldn’t help a bit when he realized who she was, where she was from, and most importantly, who her parents were. Maybe, if she was lucky, he might be a while finding out.

“We tried to stay out of it as much as we could,” her mother grinned – she was the publisher of the Record-Herald – “but we didn’t turn up our noses at the ad revenue. They spent a bundle, and a lot of it was with us.”

Susan sat back and let the story sink in a little. It wasn’t clear what this meant about how deRidder would go about things, but if he connected her with the Record-Herald he might have every reason to grind an axe. It did make one thing perfectly clear – she would have to assist Dr. Thompson in every way possible to stay independent of the Dean of Students’ office if she wanted to accomplish even a little of what he wanted her to do. “Well,” she said finally. “There is that Chinese curse about living in interesting times. Maybe teaching ESL in Asia wasn’t that bad a deal after all.”

“Could be,” her father said. “Really, I don’t have a lot of advice to give you on how to handle him. I honestly didn’t think he was all that bad an administrator, but he made an abysmally bad decision on hiring a principal, and then backing him up when he knew he was in the wrong. Like I said, his flag is going to tend to fly with whatever direction the wind is blowing. It was just that he guessed wrong on where it was blowing on the deal with Cody, and he wound up getting his fingers burned.”

“I guess I’ll find out what’s going to happen,” Susan sighed.

“I don’t know what to tell you either,” Susan’s mother added. “Other than to say that there are times to stand and fight, and there are times to cut and run. Having an idea of which way the wind is blowing can help you make the decision about which is which. Don’t forget that you wound up winning a major battle in your life by knowing when to cut and run and drop out of Spearfish Lake High School. That wound up for the best all the way around for you.”

“I don’t know if it’ll work all that well this time,” Susan shook her head. “I don’t have the solid gold alternative to run to this time.”

“Maybe you do,” her mother replied. “Susan, for years all we’ve heard out of you is how badly you want to work and live overseas. You still have that option open to you, even if it’s only teaching ESL. In fact, I’m surprised that you’re actually taking a job in the States, especially when it sounds like it might prove to be a long-term or career job.”

“That’s true,” Susan nodded. “The money is important, of course, but I happen to believe in the program and the policy at Southern, and I want to do what I can to see it continue to be a success. I don’t want to see it ruined by some outside administrator who doesn’t understand the special things we have there.” She stopped, thought for a moment, then went on. “I guess I have to say I believe in Dr. Thompson. He is the kind of visionary you only see occasionally in this life. He’s managed to accomplish something incredible down there, and I feel I have to do what I can to support him.”

“I think you’ll do just fine,” her father smiled. “I always suspected there was some kind of an idealist in you, Susan. I’m glad to see it coming out.”

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