1. Anticipatory Anxiety

1

I n twenty-four hours, Montgomery Prep would be swarming with students.

In twenty-four hours, my summer break would be over.

While staunchly an anti-morning person, the last day of summer was perhaps a rare occasion where those precious extra moments of sleep weren't worth it. I didn't want to waste a moment of my last day on campus with the waning solitude of summer.

Other than a few support staff, I was the only faculty member who had chosen to stay at Montgomery Prep during the school break.

When I had made the request to Headmaster Winston, in the spring, his wooly grey eyebrows had furrowed, as if he couldn't imagine what I would do for three months all by myself.

What he should have been asking was "What wouldn't I do?"

Like a lazy college student, I slept in most days and took hikes in the vast forest surrounding the picturesque, yet isolated, prestigious preparatory school, nestled in the Maine countryside.

The only thing that had disrupted what would have been a perfect summer was a shadow cast by the as-yet unsolved disappearance of Daniel Graham.

Bitterly I thought the school board and donors would be so proud of the headmaster for how he had been able to completely sweep a missing student under the rug.

I'd tried following up with the police multiple times, only to be told upon my last visit that if I brought it up again, they would start investigating me. The smug look on the officer's face as I'd paled at the threat still made my chest tight with anger.

They wanted everyone to forget he even existed.

But I wasn't everyone else.

I was Violet Price.

Like a dog without a bone, or perhaps a cat without someone to terrorize, I was usually too curious for my own good. It had been difficult to rein in my blunt attitude and lack of filter during my first year at Montgomery. But the challenging effort had been worth it.

Still firmly believing that Daniel was missing, not a runaway, I couldn't accept that he'd abandon everything he had worked so hard for on the precipice of his senior year. With my arguments falling on deaf ears and having no family to speak of, other than some absentee guardian, there was no one looking for him.

There was no one to fight for him.

But I was only one person; there was only so much I could do to look for him on my own. And as both the newest teacher and the youngest by over a decade, at Montgomery Prep, nobody would listen to me. They had been well trained to keep their heads down, pander to the board and donors, and ignore any suspicious activity. And without any help, I'd been spinning my wheels since the police refused to talk to me about the case and wasn't sure what more I could do to try and figure out what had happened to him.

Montgomery was an elite institution, and the families who paid handsomely for their children to attend didn't want to deal with a scandal. Neither did the board or the headmaster. If I wanted to keep my job, still tenuous after the first year, I would have been wise to keep my head down too.

But I knew in my gut I wasn't done. I just wasn't sure what my next move was…yet.

Slipping on some comfortable workout pants, a well-worn tee, and sneakers, I took a moment to relish the soft, stretchy fabric that would soon make way for my simple but boring teaching uniform of slacks and button-ups. Grabbing my coffee mug and a granola bar, I threw a blanket over my shoulder on my way out the door, almost forgetting my tattered and dog-eared copy of The Odyssey .

Built by William Montgomery in the eighteenth century, what was once Montgomery House became Montgomery Prep sometime during the Second World War. The campus was comprised of three main buildings that surrounded a grand courtyard, complete with a fountain.

From stone and mortar, the main school building looked like a mix between a foreboding castle and a sprawling manor home that belonged in the English countryside, rather than the backwoods of New England.

While decades of renovations had provided the addition of modern convenience and structural adaptations that allowed for the conversion to a school, the main building provided dreary classrooms, dungeon-like administration offices in the basement, and a grand dining hall with neat rows of long tables.

A generously sized guesthouse for Montgomery's extended family had been converted into student dorms, and the carriage house was where half the faculty, including myself, resided. All in all, there were close to four hundred students and thirty or so faculty, not including the additional facility staff and student monitors.

Hiking out across the vast lawn that spanned behind Montgomery, I spread my blanket out just at the edge of the forest, where the trees would provide enough shade to keep me from sitting in the heat and humidity that so often lay like a heavy blanket over late August days.

I immersed myself for a few hours in the Homeric epic, having long ago lost track of how many times I'd re-read the classic. But I still managed to find something new, notice a previously missed line, or make note of some new compelling piece every time I revisited it.

The sun's warmth having set in, I closed my eyes, thinking of the day when my mountain of student loans would be paid off and I could save up for a trip to Greece and walk through the streets where ancient history had been born.

I was lucky to have gotten a job at Montgomery, and it had been an accident, really. The history teacher I replaced had suffered a heart attack in front of his class two months into the fall semester last year. The school had scrambled to find a replacement so far into the term.

My master's advisor was a Montgomery alumna, and I was her fourth call, as the first three already had teaching jobs or were busy with their own academic research projects. At the time, I'd been working retail to stay afloat and crashing on an acquaintance's couch while I desperately looked for a decent position where I could apply my degrees. The stress of counting pennies and knowing I was days away from requesting a temporary forbearance on my loans, after a series of unfortunate events that I'd prefer to forget, was heavy and overwhelming.

When my old advisor reached out, I was on the verge of admitting defeat and dragging my sorry ass back home to Michigan to regroup. I didn't have much to go back to. While I loved my mother, our relationship was delicate, and when I first moved away, it had broken her heart. I didn't want to put her through that again because Michigan would only ever be a pit stop for me, on the way to somewhere else…anywhere else, really.

And anywhere else just happened to be Montgomery Prep.