Milford Elementary Read online

  MILFORD ELEMENTARY

  BOOK ONE IN THE GWENDOLYN STRONG SMALL TOWN COZY MYSTERY SERIES

  J A HODA

  Copyright © 2022 by J A Hoda

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All names are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental.

  Created with Vellum

  CONTENTS

  Milford Elementary:

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  MILFORD ELEMENTARY:

  Book One in the Gwendolyn Strong Small Town Cozy Mystery Series

  By J.A. Hoda

  CHAPTER ONE

  I am crying on what is normally the happiest day of the year for me.

  I’m not talking about Christmas, with the mayhem of four generations unwrapping presents simultaneously, or repeatedly sneaking tiny slices of my stepmother’s rum-laden fruit cake.

  And I’m not talking about my birthday. Some would argue that my birthday should be my happiest day, but only three other people know the truth. After my sixth birthday, I was content to play the game and blow out the candles and make a wish that never came true.

  No, today I am bawling because it’s the first day of school and I’m not teaching for the first time in over thirty-five years. My body wracks in convulsions as the dam holding back my emotions breaks apart, and I am swept away in the flood.

  My husband, Ken, put on the coffee this humid, late summer morning. He filled his thermos and then drove a couple of towns over to the big box home improvement store to get materials he needs for his latest customer. He is Milford’s most trusted remodeler and does renovations like nobody’s business. The city folks line up months in advance and pay big-city money for his craftsmanship on their fixer-uppers. He offered to stick around this morning, knowing how difficult today would be for me. We’ve been married for thirty-three years, so he knows my moods by now. I declined, but how I wish he found an excuse to tarry. Would I have kept up a brave face had he stayed, or would I have melted into his sinewy yet gentle arms, sobbing into his flannel work shirt?

  Everything was as it should be this summer, like it had been for the last three and a half decades, until last Monday night—or was it early Tuesday morning? It’s been a blur.

  The school board was under siege by angry parents with the union attorneys giving the town folks all the ammunition. In the end, after a bitterly contested vote, the board decided to close Milford Elementary and eliminate seven teaching positions, custodians, and the school nursing office. It was not lost on the agitated crowd that the principal, who was not in the union, was spared and would become more overhead at the regional school district’s administration building outside of town.

  I was the senior of two kindergarten teachers in the district. I came to Milford as a student intern my last year at college and taught this magical grade, never having the desire to teach any other grade or subject. Where else do you get nap time after lunch? I would smile at those academics who thought I should strive to teach more erudite classes like chemistry at the academic high school or culinary at the vocational-technical school. I taught kindergarten for thirty-five years and treated it like a calling. Sometimes it could be monotonous, like on beautiful summery days in June added to make up for snow days, but mostly, I couldn’t believe they paid me a living wage with benefits and the entire summer off for doing what I loved to do. I was excited about going to school every day.

  Everyone expected I would exert my hard-earned seniority to keep my job, but I spoke in a clear, unwavering voice. I said Christine Flaherty was a fine kindergarten teacher, and at twenty-four, she had the energy and qualifications to carry on the legacy started by Emelina Bidwell seventy-five years earlier. I had brought Christine along the way Emelina taught me, and it was time for fresh blood to take over. I said that out loud, and in the crowd, I spotted my now newly minted centenarian mentor Emelina beaming.

  So, I stunned everybody, including myself, by offering to take the golden parachute package and be laid off in place of my protégé.

  Christine’s job was safe. I promised to fill in when she needed me, given that she was pregnant with her second. Afterwards, Christine and her husband, Ron, a former student, each hugged me unabashedly, while over their shoulders, I received the stink eye from our union rep. Union rules stipulated last hired, first fired. I was bucking the union. I shrugged. Whaddya gonna do in a small town?

  The closing of the school was a shock, although it shouldn’t have been. Declining enrollments while trying to maintain an aging facility were not new to the folks here. Church congregations and their elders had faced the same problems, and several beautiful houses of worship sat shuttered.

  The school board failed to consider the nostalgia of a small-town school where generations of taxpayers had attended. I paid little attention to the too little, too late calls to demand a referendum. I had a garden to weed, tomatoes to can, and an upstairs bedroom to repaint. So, I kept myself busy as the week flew by.

  Parents know what it’s like to put their kid on the school bus for their first school day. For some of the children, already veterans of one or two day-care facilities, the separation is no big deal, but for others it is traumatic for both the child and the parents. They had been inseparable since the child’s birth. The kids can pick up on the parents’ separation anxiety too and feed off it.

  On the first day of school, I would welcome the kids and the parents to kindergarten. Many of the recent years’ parents had been my students, and without exception, they told their children that when they were in my class; they loved it.

  For many children, the first day of school can be awful. It was my job to make it awesome. Whether I sat on a chair in a circle or on the floor that first day, I made sure they did not feel abandoned, and they knew this was a safe place for them to make friends. No one should be terrified by their first day in school. The importance of making the children feel welcome on their first day was never lost on me. I wasn’t there this morning for them, and I could feel the ache in my gut like I had eaten bad shellfish.

  I am Mrs. Strong to most of the people in town, Gwen to my friends and colleagues, and Gwendolyn to my husband on those rare occasions when he is cross with me. Today, I am a ship in a tempest, without a rudder, breaking apart on the rocky coast.

  What am I going to do?

  I am Mom to my son, Wesley and my daughter, Erin. He’s single and is an accountant for the electric company. She is a stay-at-home mom with three precious children and a good marriage to Darren, a financial wealth manager. They live about forty-minutes away. She home-schools the older two and has an interesting part-time job she can do anywhere with an internet connection.

  She’s calling me now. It’s uncanny how she always knows wh
en to check in on me.

  I go first. “Hi, honey. How are the kids?”

  “We’re stuck inside this morning but managing. How are you?”

  “I didn’t expect today to hit me so hard.” How much do I tell her? “I wasn’t planning on retiring for another nine years. It all happened so suddenly.” I take the middle road. “Truth be told, I am not processing it all very well.”

  “I can’t begin to imagine how you feel. Thirty-five years is a long time of doing something, and now you’re not.”

  “It was my choice, Erin, and I did the right thing. Time to pass on the torch and move on.”

  “Any ideas, Mom?”

  “Not a clue. I have time before I need to work again. The school gave me a lump sum payout, and that doesn’t even include all my unused sick time.”

  “You were never sick.”

  “I accumulated the most days of any current employee. Only Emelina had more.”

  “Cha-ching! That should tide you over for a while.”

  “I know that I could plop down on the couch eating Cheetos and bingeing Netflix, but that would get awfully boring. I can’t sit around all day and wait for your dad to get home, and I don’t want to just do something for the sake of keeping busy. I still can contribute.”

  “Like volunteer stuff?” my daughter asks.

  “I don’t know. Nothing is really grabbing me.”

  “What’s your favorite movie, Mom?”

  “You know it’s Groundhog Day. Why?”

  “Bill Murray’s character didn’t figure it out right away either. You already have an open heart. It will come to you faster than you think.”

  I raised a smart daughter. “My pupils are in good hands with Christine Flaherty. I will call her after dinner and ask how her first day went. Right now, I have to go for a walk and clear my head.” A brisk stroll around town always makes me feel better.

  Erin tells me, “Do yourself a favor and don’t let your feet walk you by the school. It won’t do you any good.”

  “Yes, Mrs. LeGrande,” I reply. I raised a good mother, too. “Maybe I’ll buy something special at the grocery store and have it on the table when your father comes home.”

  “Dad will like that, but I’m sure he will take you out to eat if you change your mind.”

  “Love ‘em and hug ‘em, honey.” I always end my calls with Erin that way.

  “Will do, Mom.”

  I decided to walk about Milford. It has a busy few blocks of downtown where the state highways intersect before taking the truck traffic and tourists to the interstate on the outskirts of town. I avoid those streets and navigate along alleys and residential roads.

  I feel like I am playing hooky. School is in session, and I am not there. Last year, Erin and I spent a long weekend and Thanksgiving in New Haven, but I can’t recall any other time when my fanny wasn’t firmly planted in Room #1 of the 106-year-old school building. Instead of feeling better, I feel like a goldfish flopping on the ground outside of the fishbowl. I breathed easier on the climbing parts of the Appalachian Trail than today on the warm sidewalks of my hometown. The growing tightness in my chest and the stars in my eyes warn me this walk is not a good idea, but I keep going anyways.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Gwen, honey, are you okay?”

  The face of Emelina Bidwell forms in front of me. I am inside an air-conditioned room. It is quiet and cool. Natural light streams from the windows. Behind her is the concerned face of a man I vaguely recall. He has long gray hair tied in a ponytail and a beard of the same color. Emelina, at 100 years old, is still spry and very mobile. Evidently, she is also very flexible. She is wearing yoga clothes, and I am laying prone on a yoga mat in a yoga studio.

  Ken had redone this house so that the non-bearing wall separating the living room and dining room was removed. He installed hardwood flooring and restored the supporting walls to their original plaster lathe. I brought a few hand tools here to Ken last summer while he worked on this rehab.

  I now remember the ponytailed man as the owner, Abe Schatz. He contracted Ken to turn the downstairs front rooms into the studio and update the kitchen in the back. Ken told me that Abe was a commodities trader from the city who had burned out on the hustle. Divorced and estranged from his adult children, he changed his life and now offers five-dollar drop-in classes for meditation and yoga in the mornings and evenings.

  As I sit up, I notice a dozen other people milling about. Their faces show concern as well.

  “I’m okay,” I say too soon, then close my eyes to the swirling stars.

  “You gave us quite the scare,” Emelina says. “We were in tree pose when you knocked on the door. You looked as white as a ghost, dear.”

  “I’m not handling the first day of school very well, I suppose.” I open my eyes again, and the room stops spinning this time.

  “Here’s a cup of chamomile tea with lemon,” Abe tells me. “Drink.”

  I notice that my sneakers had been removed when I sit cross-legged. I take the tea and sip slowly, blowing on it.

  The yogis nod at me as they make their way to the door. Class is over, and I am the reason.

  “It’s normal to feel this way, dear,” Emelina says. “I knew for a few years before I decided to retire what I wanted to do. Then you came along, and I knew it was time. I was waiting for the right student-teacher to take my place.” She places a hand on my knee. “You surprised everybody at the school board meeting the other night, including yourself, I take it.”

  “I didn’t have a Plan B, and it all hit me today. I didn’t realize how emotional today was going to be.”

  “How’s the tea?” Abe asks.

  “Very calming,” I reply.

  “Would you like a raspberry scone? They’re gluten-free.”

  Out of politeness, I am about to decline when Emelina says, “Yes, and I will have one too.”

  We sit cross-legged on mats drinking tea and eating scones. Emelina fills Abe in on my sudden decision to resign.

  He says, “It was different for me. I had to stop doing what I was doing, or it would have killed me—or I would have killed myself. You chose to leave prematurely what you loved doing. That’s a big difference.”

  “This is what you chose to do?” I ask.

  “It chose me,” he replies. “I needed to slow down my mind and listen to my body. I go back to the city every six months for a check-in with my doctor, and he’s amazed at my numbers. I’m off all medications and am only taking a baby aspirin and a multi-vitamin. A better diet and the tea help.”

  “I’m in great shape. That’s why I don’t understand what happened to me,” I tell them.

  Abe smiles. “I’m no doctor, and I don’t play one on TV, but I think you had an anxiety attack. I saw them all the time with clients when the stock market went into the toilet.”

  I chew and sip as I take in this sage advice.

  “Does not being with the kids today bother you, or is it a fear of your future?” Emelina asks.

  “Definitely not being with the kids for their first day of school. I’ve had no thoughts about what I want to do when I grow up. What did you do?”

  “Everything. I said yes to everything. If I started thinking of myself as old and retired, do you think I would be in Abe’s class today to catch you when you fell?”

  “She makes me feel old,” Abe says, winking at his oldest student.

  “In the word retired is the word tired,” Emelina says. “There are some days when I feel tired, and that’s okay. Most days, I jump out of bed with a fresh twenty-four hours to play with.” What did Erin say about Groundhog Day?

  Abe adds, “I meditate, do yoga, skip breakfast, catch up on correspondence, have a light lunch, take a nap, work on a project, and make a nice dinner before the evening meditation and yoga class to finish the day. This routine grounds me and keeps me focused on what’s important.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s not horns honking, ambulance an
d police sirens all day, or cutthroat commodity trading, that’s for sure.” He smiles. “What’s important is different for everybody. You will find out in due time.”

  Emelina tells me, “You said it yourself. The kids are in good hands with Christine. There is an entire world waiting for you out there to explore. What are you waiting for?”

  I fell literally into the hands of my mentor in this spiritual space. I don’t think Abe thinks of himself as a guru, but he is.

  I stand on sturdy legs now and carry the teacup to a table next to a trash can, where I brush the crumbs from my shirt. “You both are what the doctor ordered. It is always good to see you, Emelina. Next time I drop in, Abe, it won’t be so dramatic.” I hug her and give Abe a fist-bump.

  “Take care, honey,” she says.

  “Say hello to Ken for me,” Abe adds.

  The country market has what I am looking for. Bill the butcher is cutting the steaks special for me. Local farmer’s corn, string beans, peaches are already in my basket. I will buy the vanilla ice cream last. Ken loves to grill, and I’ll do the veggies. Sliced peaches in melting ice cream in the screened-in porch is dessert. I will pull some mint from the garden for tea tonight.