Third Degree. Greg Iles

of Diane in a glittering sequin unitard as she twirled two batons at a national college competition. Diane made a cranking motion with her hand, meaning that Laurel should roll down her window, though almost no cars had window cranks anymore, at least not in the parking lot of Athens Country Day.

      Laurel wiped her tears on the shoulder of her blouse, smearing mascara on the white silk, then pressed the window button. The glass sank into the door with a low whir.

      “What’s the matter, honey?” Diane asked. “Are you all right?”

      Do I look all right? Laurel silently responded. But what else was someone supposed to ask when they found you crying in a parking lot? Some teachers would have derived savage ecstasy from finding her in this state, but Diane wasn’t one of them. She really meant well.

      “I think I’m getting a migraine,” Laurel said. “I’m getting that aura, you know?”

      “Christ on a crutch,” Diane said with empathy. “Seems like a long time since you had one.”

      “Over a year.” Since before Danny and I got together, Laurel realized.

      “Do you think you can handle your conferences? If it was just classes, I’d sit with your kids, but I wouldn’t know what to tell special-ed parents.”

      “I’ll be all right,” Laurel asserted, leaning down to lift her purse and computer off the floor. “Sometimes I just get the aura but not the headache. They call that a silent migraine. I’m hoping this is one of those.”

      Diane shook her head. “Oh, honey, I don’t know. You don’t have one of those shots with you? The stuff that heads it off?”

      “Imitrex? It’s been so long since I had a migraine that I stopped carrying the kit.”

      Diane gave her a look of maternal reproach.

      “I know,” Laurel said, getting out of her car. “Stupid.”

      “You should run to Warren’s office,” Diane suggested. “Get that shot, you know? What’s the use of having a doctor for a husband if you don’t take advantage now and then? I could cover for you till you get back. My homeroom knows I’ll skin them alive if they misbehave.”

      Laurel almost laughed. Diane had a glare that could paralyze a mischievous boy from a hundred paces. After locking the Acura, Laurel started toward the Special Students building. “I’ll be all right, Di, seriously. I saw some spots, that’s all.”

      “You were sobbing in pain, girl.”

      “No … I was just overwhelmed. I really believed I might be over them. That’s why I was crying. Facing reality.”

      “Reality’s a bitch, all right,” Diane said under her breath. Then she giggled like a 1950s wife who’d accidentally said shit.

      She squeezed Laurel’s wrist as she left the door of the Special Students building. Her touch was oddly comforting. Laurel felt an irrational urge to pour out her heart to the older woman, but she didn’t say a word. Diane couldn’t possibly help with her predicament, even were she so inclined. And Diane was unlikely to feel sympathy for the deranged slut who was cheating on her husband—Diane’s personal physician—and was stupid enough to get pregnant while doing it. Laurel nodded once more that she was okay, then walked down the short hall to her classroom, easily found by the raucous chatter of special-needs kids in the grip of their morning energy.

      After an aide escorted her students to the playground, Laurel sat at the round table she used for parental meetings. Sitting across a desk made parents feel they were being lectured to; the round table made them feel like partners in educating their children. Laurel had eleven special-needs children in her program, almost too many, given that she had only limited help from an aide. But Athens Point was a small town, and parents had few options. She hated to turn anyone away. Her kids’ problems ran the gamut from ADD and oppositional/defiant disorder to mental retardation and autism. Handling such a broad spectrum was hard work, but Laurel relished the challenge.

      To insure that parental meetings went as smoothly as possible, she kept meticulously organized records during the year, and none was more detailed or better organized than the file on Michael McDavitt. The way to get through this, she thought, is to focus on my second meeting. That way I can keep Starlette at arms’ length—psychologically speaking—until I’m actually facing her across this table.

      It was a nice idea, only Laurel couldn’t manage it.

      Even when she closed her eyes, she saw the former Tennessee beauty queen sweeping into her classroom wearing her latest catalog purchases, her bleached hair perfectly coiffed, her nails flawlessly painted, her waist pathologically thin, her fancy cowboy boots (which must surely be passé by now) shimmering. Laurel’s negative feelings toward Starlette McDavitt had not begun during the affair. That happened during their first meeting, when it became clear that Mrs. McDavitt saw her autistic son as a burden dumped on her by an unjust God. Starlette had run on for half an hour about how some parents claimed that autism was caused by mercury in government-mandated vaccinations, but deep down she knew it was a divine punishment. Something so deeply destructive simply had to be God’s will, she believed. And it wasn’t necessarily anything you’d done. It could be retribution for some sin committed far back down the ancestral line, rape or incest or something you didn’t even know about. In less than an hour, it had become clear that Michael McDavitt’s primary caregiver was his father, Daniel, who was fifteen years his wife’s senior.

      Danny McDavitt was a soft-spoken man a year shy of fifty. He looked younger, but his eyes held a quiet wisdom that bespoke considerable experience. It wasn’t long before Laurel learned that McDavitt was a war hero, an Athens Point native who had left town at eighteen and returned as a prodigal, thirty years down the road. All he’d told her during the first weeks of Michael’s assessment was that he’d flown helicopters in a couple of wars, that he was now retired due to wounds received, and that he was giving “fixed-wing” flying lessons out at the county airport. Laurel soon decided that either flying or combat experience must be good training for men dealing with special kids, because in nine years of teaching, she had never seen a father work harder to connect with a developmentally challenged son than did Danny McDavitt.

      The problem was his wife.

      The only mystery about Starlette McDavitt was why Danny had married her. This single act betrayed a serious lapse of judgment, which seemed uncharacteristic in him. Of course Laurel had noticed that even brilliant men could be out-and-out fools when it came to picking women. They were like little boys at a Baskin-Robbins. I’ll have some of THAT. Hmm, that tastes good, I want some more. Pretty soon, they bought the whole bucket of ice cream, to keep a steady supply. But once they had access to that bucket all day every day, they didn’t like the taste so much. That ice cream didn’t even look the same as it had behind the frosted glass with the big silver scoop stuck in it.

      Starlette looked tasty enough, and her looks matched her name. She was a former Miss Knoxville or something, not quite a Miss Tennessee, but something higher up than a Soybean Queen. Yet her TV spokesmodel beauty was offset by bitter eyes that told you she’d already learned the lesson that pageant victories only take girls a short way down the road of life. The real irony was that in Starlette’s view, Laurel had won the marital lottery. She’d married a doctor—count your blessings and keep your mouth shut, honey (and your legs open, if you know what’s good for you). Starlette had never verbalized any of this per se, but it had seeped out between her little digs at other doctors’ wives (none present to defend themselves) and in her limited observations on her own lot in life.

      Danny had married Starlette seven years ago, a year before he’d planned to retire from the air force. First marriage for both of them. He’d waited a long time to make that mistake, he told her, but the waiting hadn’t made him any wiser. After nineteen years in the service, he’d flown to Nashville to buy a house in anticipation of working as a songwriter in his retirement, something he’d always done during downtime in the air force. To protect his savings, he’d lined up a job with a local flying service. The owner was a big