Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

Caryn looked up from her copy of Shakespeare and studied her class. “I got tired of the city. I wanted to try something different.”

“Yeah, right,” Troy Habegger said. “Did you get in trouble or something? Do you have some big dark secret you need to hide?”

“Like she’d tell us!” Ralph Fryburg chimed in. “She’s probably in trouble with the law and has to hide out. Who’d look here?”

Caryn crossed her arms and glared. The class went quiet. They’d learned quickly that Caryn wasn’t a teacher one took lightly. She put a lot into her lessons, and she expected a lot of her students. She didn’t buy into the “I’m only going to be a farmer” routine.

“Every mind can be expanded through reading,” was her constant reminder.

“Look. You always tell us to use our minds. We can’t help being curious,” Kenny Nesco said. “None of our teachers had ever started in the city and ended up here. It makes us wonder.”

Caryn sighed. He had a point. “I’m forty-three,” she said. “Every year, teaching in the city got harder. The kids got harder to reach. More of them died.”

“Died?” Betsy asked.

“Car accidents. Drug overdoses. Gang violence,” Caryn explained. “Anyway, I got tired of it. It just seemed like I was putting too much into it and getting too little back, so I quit and came here.”

They stared.

“Why not just try a different job?” Ralph asked. “Teaching must be a lousy job anyway. Why not go for the money? Go into business or be a bartender?”

Caryn shook her head. “I was sick of it all, having to worry if I’d get mugged, if my car would still have tires when I left a restaurant, the whole thing...”

“You wimped out,” Ralph said.

“I gave it all I had,” she snapped, “but those kids’ needs were so big, they were beginning to consume me. And I wasn’t saving them anyway. We were all going down.”

Betsy squirmed, frowning. “So you came here expecting it to be like Mayberry.” She sounded half-mocking, half-sympathetic.

“It’s not what I expected, okay?” Caryn conceded. It had come as a rude shock that country kids weren’t the innocents she’d thought they’d be. They had mouths and attitudes that went with the nineties, just as every teenager in America must have, she decided. “But nothing is. Remember that. Reality and expectations rarely agree. When you leave here and go to the city, you’ll see what I mean.”

That sobered them. Maybe their dreams would be as deluded as hers.

“Have I answered all your questions?” Caryn asked. “Are you satisfied now? Because, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to our lesson.”

No one protested. She didn’t think they would.

In the middle of March, Silas Greeley’s rusted pickup truck made its way down the long gravel drive that led to the farmhouse and parked near the kitchen door. It was the first time he’d come since he’d handed Caryn the keys to the house and given her a short tour of the property. She was thankful that the yard was small, only a green square of grass, surrounded by wheat and soybean fields. Silas farmed these, but he’d sold her the house.

“Buying all the property I can,” he’d explained. “Renting even more, but I don’t need the houses. Glad somebody can use one.”

She’d gotten the house for a bargain because the family who’d owned this property had gone under. Farming wasn’t the simple family concern it had once been. Silas had wanted the rich fields, and she’d wanted the house, so they’d made a deal. It had worked well for both of them.

As he climbed the wooden steps to the back stoop, she went to greet him.

“Howdy.” He took off the seed cap he habitually wore and fussed with it, turning it in his large hands. “Just thought I’d come and check on you. See how you were making out.”

“Fine.” She motioned him inside. “Care for some coffee? I just made some fresh.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” He sat at the wooden kitchen table and looked about him uncomfortably. “Haven’t done much since you moved in.”

“I’ve been too busy,” she explained, bringing him a steaming mug with a creamer and sugar bowl on a tray, “but I plan to dig in once school’s out. I’ve got lots of ideas.”

He looked out the window silently. “You’re new here, and folks are kind of cliquish, so I don’t s’pose you’ve heard.”

“Heard what?”

He hesitated, sipping his coffee to give himself time. “Old lady Yardley, one field over, died sometime this week. When she didn’t show up for Ladies’ Sewing Circle at the church, the minister came to call on her. Found her at the bottom of the stairs. Been dead for a while.”

“You mean she fell down the steps and died?”

“Looks that way,” he said. “Don’t make much sense, though. Moved her bed to the parlor a long time ago. Her arthritis made it too hard to go up and down steps.”

“Maybe an animal got in upstairs and she went up to see.”

“Maybe.” He squinted into his mug for the answer, but shrugged in frustration. “Thing is, people are bound to talk. She left all her property to me, land, that is. Personal stuff went to her kids.”

“She left her land to you?”