Dana could hear the thrum of vacuum cleaners starting up in the halls. Trash cans rattled as they were emptied room by room, the sound nearing the clinic door.
Suze made a show of groaning. When Dana glanced the vice principal’s way, Suze wiggled toes she’d liberated from pointy high heels.
“It’s getting better, isn’t it? You? The job?”
Dana groaned for real. “I’m as tired as if I’d worked a full-moon shift in the E.R. on New Year’s Eve. I think I seriously underestimated what a school nurse does. I was darn busy, I didn’t even get a chance to pee. And I had at least two kids in here upchucking.”
“Pizza,” Suze said.
“Pizza?”
“Yeah. They served pizza in the lunchroom today, and we always have kids upchucking whenever they serve pizza. It’s some immutable law. You’re lucky it was only two.”
“Cooks can’t figure out what’s going on?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“And what’s with all the neurotic asthma tests?”
Suze cocked her head. “Neurotic asthma tests?”
Dana let her exasperation propel her to a sitting position. “Yeah, the asthma tests I have to do on the kids. Every morning I have to check all twenty-four known asthmatic kids, and every afternoon I have to check them again.”
Her thoughts drifted back over her morning conversation with Patrick Connor. His beloved tests added to an already full day and would put her perpetually behind on her daily mountain of paperwork. “Just doing the checks takes a colossal chunk of time out of my day, and that’s not counting the tallying up I do on Mr. Gorgeous’s Excel spreadsheet.”
“Mr. Gorgeous? Who’s Mr. Gorgeous?”
Dana’s cheeks heated with embarrassment. “Uh, you know. Patrick Connor. The board chairman. The man may be a micromanager and a clean-desk freak, but you have to admit he looks like he’s straight out of a cologne ad.”
Suze bit her lip. “Yeah. He does that, all right. Most of the women around here tend to agree—at least, until they try to date him for more than two dates running.”
“Another commitment-phobe, huh? Figures.” Dana recalled the dates her friends had fixed her up with over the years she’d been single. They’d had terrific nights out—until the guys let her know that her friends had neglected to tell them about her daughter. To discover Patrick was the same way didn’t surprise her.
Suze’s face went blank and she shook her head. “I really shouldn’t comment. But what’s this about asthma tests twice a day?”
“I told you. Twenty-four kids twice a day. If they’ve got asthma on their chart, I’ve got them on my list.”
“I didn’t realize—oh, the lunchroom.” Comprehension eased the furrow between Suze’s eyebrows.
“What does the lunchroom have to do with asthma?”
“We’ve got documented mold in the lunchroom.”
“Huh? That’s why I’m checking twenty-four kids?” Dana tried not to gape.
“Yep. About two years ago the roof on the lunchroom building was replaced. The building’s got a gable roof now, but it used to have an old flat roof, and it leaked so much the lunchroom ladies had to put five-gallon buckets out on rainy days just to catch the drips. Anyway, when the repair people went in to fix the roof, they found mold. They traced it down inside the concrete blocks and under some of the floor tiles.”
“Why is there still mold? Why didn’t they get rid of it?”
Suze gave her an amused smile. “The board members sure wished it had been that simple. They figured all they had to do was get in there with a jug of bleach and a scrub brush. But mold, even when it’s been killed, can still cause trouble if it’s not been properly removed. And it can cost half a million dollars to have professionals do a mold abatement. That’s money the school system doesn’t have.”
“Wait a minute. Are you telling me they left mold—”
“No, well, sort of. They took the do-it-yourself approach. Patrick researched out the yin-yang of how to do it, and one CYA thing he’s apparently still doing is these asthma checks.”
Dana huffed. “Pardon me, but he’s not doing the asthma checks. I am.” Now her irritation at having to do twice-daily checks increased. If the school system wasn’t going to properly abate the mold, then tracking the school system’s most vulnerable population was like holding a hose over a house on fire with no water in the hose.
Suze shrugged. “He’s probably afraid of a lawsuit. The whole thing was all hush-hush. The only reason I know anything about it is that I’m vice principal.”
Dana’s chest tightened. Lawsuits. That was something she knew about only too well. “They haven’t told the parents of the kids?” She hopped off the exam table and started pacing the tight confines of the clinic. “I can’t believe that! The school has a duty to report—” But she cut off her words. Of course she could believe it.
Suze appeared genuinely miserable. “Hey, I’ve said way too much.”
“No, you’ve said just enough. I’m going to talk to him.”
“Who—Patrick?” Suze blanched. “Listen, you should understand—”
She broke off. Dana peered at her. “Understand what?”
“Could you avoid bringing my name up?”
“They wouldn’t fire you for telling me, would they?” Dana gawked at Suze.
“No, no. But Patrick is one stubborn son of a gun, and, well…there’s some history between us.”
“You dated?”
Suze leaned her head against the wall. “No. Not that kind of history. I’d rather not say, okay? I don’t—Patrick’s not a bad guy. He just has…issues.”
Dana glanced at the clock on the wall. Five minutes past the time to pick up Kate. Great. “Well, Patrick Connor is about to have a few more issues—because how he’s proceeding isn’t right.”
CHAPTER THREE
A LL P ATRICK COULD HEAR in the kitchen was the thunk of Melanie’s knife on the cutting board, as she whacked up carrots a little harder than necessary, and the tap-tap of Lissa’s shoes against the tile floor. The girls had their backs to each other, stiff, unbending.
He’d asked for this. Patrick admonished himself. Self-inflicted agony. He had been the one who said the only thing he wanted for his birthday was a dinner at home with his daughters. Right now, he could have been enjoying a gift card from the home-improvement store.
Patrick sighed and opened the door to the cabinet where the plates were.
