“Good Lord God,” Charlie muttered. No such problems at the end of the hall.
Mr. I-Can’t-Remember-Your-Name was even more attractive than she remembered. The standard button-down-with-khakis uniform of a middle-school teacher couldn’t hide the fact that he had muscles in places that men in their forties had generally replaced with beer and fried meat. His scraggly beard was more of a five o’clock shadow. The gray at his temples gave him a wizened air of mystery. He had one of those dimples in his chin that you could use to open a bottle.
This was not the type of man Charlie dated. This was the exact type of man that she studiously avoided. He felt too coiled, too strong, too unknowable. It was like playing with a loaded gun.
“This is me.” He pointed to the bulletin board outside his room. Small handprints were traced onto white butcher paper. Purple cut-out letters read MR. HUCKLEBERRY.
“Huckleberry?” Charlie asked.
“It’s Huckabee, actually.” He held out his hand. “Huck.”
Charlie shook his hand, too late realizing that he was asking for his iPhone. “Sorry.” She handed him the phone.
He gave her a crooked smile that had probably sent many a young girl into puberty. “Yours is in here.”
Charlie followed him into the classroom. The walls were adorned with maps, which made sense because he was apparently a history teacher. At least if you believed the sign that said MR. HUCKLEBERRY LOVES WORLD HISTORY.
She said, “I may be a little sketchy on last night, but I thought you said you were a Marine?”
“Not anymore, but it sounds sexier than middle-school teacher.” He gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Joined up when I was seventeen, took my retirement six years ago.” He leaned against his desk. “I was looking for a way to keep serving, so I got my master’s on a GI bill and here we are.”
“I bet you get a lot of tear-stained cards on Valentine’s Day.” Charlie would’ve failed history every single day of her life if her teacher had looked like Mr. Huckleberry.
He asked, “Do you have kids?”
“Not that I know of.” Charlie didn’t return the question. She assumed that someone with kids wouldn’t use a photo of his dog as his screen saver. “You married?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t suit me.”
“It suited me.” She explained, “We’ve been officially separated for nine months.”
“Did you cheat on him?”
“You’d think so, but no.” Charlie ran her finger along the books on the shelf by his desk. Homer. Euripides. Voltaire. Bront?. “You don’t strike me as the Wuthering Heights type.”
He grinned. “Not much talking in the truck.”
Charlie started to return the grin, but regret pulled down the corners of her mouth. In some ways, this easy, flirty banter felt like more of a transgression than the physical act of sex. She bantered with her husband. She asked inane questions of her husband.
And last night, for the first time in her married life, she had cheated on her husband.
Huck seemed to sense her mood shift. “It’s obviously none of my business, but he’s nuts for letting you go.”
“I’m a lot of work.” Charlie studied one of the maps. There were blue pins in most of Europe and some of the Middle East. “You go to all of these places?”
He nodded, but didn’t elaborate.
“Marines,” she said. “Were you a Navy SEAL?”
“Marines can be SEALs but not all SEALs are Marines.”
Charlie was about to tell him that he hadn’t answered the question, but Huck spoke first.
“Your phone started ringing at o’dark thirty.”
Her heart flipped in her chest. “You didn’t answer?”
“Nah, it’s much more fun trying to figure you out from your caller ID.” He pushed himself up on the desk. “B2 called around five this morning. I’m assuming that’s your hook-up at the vitamin shop.”
Charlie’s heart flipped again. “That’s Riboflavin, my spin-class instructor.”
He narrowed his eyes, but he didn’t push her. “The next call came at approximately five fifteen, someone who showed up as Daddy, who I deduce by the lack of the word ‘sugar’ in front of the name is your father.”
She nodded, even as her mother’s voice silently stressed that it was whom. “Any other clues?”
He pretended to stroke a long beard. “Beginning around five thirty, you got a series of calls from the county jail. At least six, spaced out about five minutes apart.”
“You got me, Nancy Drew.” Charlie held up her hands in surrender. “I’m a drug trafficker. Some of my mules got picked up over the weekend.”
He laughed. “I’m halfway believing you.”
“I’m a defense lawyer,” she admitted. “Usually people are more receptive to drug trafficker.”
Huck stopped laughing. His eyes narrowed again, but the playfulness had evaporated. “What’s your name?”
“Charlie Quinn.”
She could’ve sworn he flinched.
She asked, “Is there a problem?”
His jaw was clenched so hard the bone jutted out. “That’s not the name on your credit card.”
Charlie paused, because there was a lot wrong with that statement. “That’s my married name. Why were you looking at my credit card?”
“I wasn’t looking. I glanced at it when you put it down on the bar.” He stood up from the desk. “I should get ready for school.”
“Was it something I said?” She was trying to make a joke out of it, because of course it was something she’d said. “Look everybody hates lawyers until they need one.”
“I grew up in Pikeville.”
“You’re saying that like it’s an explanation.”
He opened and closed the desk drawers. “Homeroom’s about to start. I need to do my first-period prep.”
Charlie crossed her arms. This wasn’t the first time she’d had this conversation with long-time Pikeville residents. “There’s two reasons for you to be acting like you’re acting.”
He ignored her, opening and closing another drawer.
She counted out the possibilities on her fingers. “Either you hate my father, which is okay, because a lot of people hate him, or—” She held up her finger for the more likely excuse, the one that had put a target on Charlie’s back twenty-eight years ago when she’d returned to school, the one that still got her nasty looks in town from the people who supported the extended, inbred Culpepper clan. “You think I’m a spoiled little bitch who helped frame Zachariah Culpepper and his innocent baby brother so my dad could get his hands on some pissant life insurance policy and their shitty little trailer. Which he never did, by the way. He could’ve sued them for the twenty grand they owed in legal bills, but he didn’t. Not to mention I could pick those fuckers out of a line-up with my eyes closed.”
He was shaking his head before she even finished. “None of those things.”
“Really?” She had pegged him for a Culpepper truther when he’d told her that he’d grown up in Pikeville.