Amazon
MerryJones
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Oceanview
ISBN-10: 1608091910
Type: Fiction
Pages: 293
Copyright: 2017
ISBN-13: 9781608091911
Price: $9.99 (eBook)
Second grade teacher Elle Harrison hears that a former student has been released from prison where he'd served time for killing his father. Soon the principal, another teacher and others who'd been connected to the student are killed. Is Elle next?
First day of school is almost here. Elle Harrison prepares her second grade classroom and works late, only to find the principal grotesquely murdered in her office.
When school opens, a teacher is killed in the same brutal fashion.
Elle's former student, Ty Evans, has recently been released from juvey, where he'd served time for killing his abusive father. Ty visits her and hangs around her classroom and home.
More murders occur, all connected to Ty. But has Ty committed them? Or is someone trying to frame him so he'll go back to jail? Why would anyone do that? The answers provided in this page-turner challenge what we assume about friendship, family, childhood and innocence
Excerpt
I was the first one there.
The parking lot was empty, except for Stan's pickup truck. Stan was the custodian, tall, hair thinning, face pock-marked from long ago acne. He moved silently, popped out of closets and appeared in corners, prowled the halls armed with a mop or a broom. In fourteen years, I couldn't remember a single time when he'd looked me in the eye.
Wait--fourteen years? I'd been there that long? Faces of kids I'd taught swirled through my head. The oldest of them would now be, what? Twenty-one? Oh man. Soon I'd be one of those old school marms teaching the kids of my former students, a permanent fixture of the school like the faded picture of George Washington mounted outside the principal's office. Hell, in a few months I'd be forty. A middle-aged childless widow who taught second grade over and over again, year after year, repeating the cycle like a hamster on its wheel.
Which reminded me: I had to pick up new hamsters. Tragically, last year's hadn't made it through the summer.
I told myself to stop dawdling. I had a classroom to organize, cubbies to decorate. On Monday, just three days from now, twenty-three glowing faces would show up for the first day of school and I had to be ready. I climbed out of the car, pulled a box of supplies from the trunk, started for the building. And stopped.
My heart did triple time, as if responding to danger. But there was no danger. What alarmed me, what sent my heart racing was the school itself. But why? Did it look different? Had the windows been replaced, or the doors? Nothing looked new, but something seemed altered. Off balance. The place didn't look like an elementary school. It looked like a giant factory. A prison.
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