A Still, Small Voice Read online

  Copyright

  Published by

  Dreamspinner Press

  382 NE 191st Street #88329

  Miami, FL 33179-3899, USA

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Still, Small Voice

  Copyright © 2011 by D.W. Marchwell

  Cover Art by Anne Cain [email protected]

  Cover Design by Mara McKennen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 382 NE 191st Street #88329, Miami, FL 33179-3899, USA

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  ISBN: 978-1-61372-150-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  September 2011

  eBook edition available

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61372-151-3

  For Stéphan

  “A friend is one who walks in when others walk out.”

  —Walter Winchell

  Prologue

  Conscience is that still, small voice that is

  sometimes too loud for comfort.

  —Bert Murray

  December 2005

  NOAH heard the knock at the door, followed quickly by Aiden’s voice yelling at him to put the bottle of pills down and step away from the collected works of Sylvia Plath. As he opened the door to find his best friend standing there with a paper bag—probably filled with equal parts tequila and Ben and Jerry’s—he actually found himself laughing. After the ordeal that had been his last day as a high school teacher for the Edmonton Public School Board, Noah needed that more than he needed anything else that Aiden could have provided.

  As if this were just another Friday evening, Aiden swept into the room, the heady aroma of Chanel filling Noah’s nostrils with reassurance and comfort.

  “Why didn’t you call me from the station? I would have come to fetch.” Aiden busied himself in the kitchen, emptying the paper bag, putting things away where they needed to be and gathering other things for what Noah hoped would be an all-night visit. He didn’t want to be alone tonight. He wasn’t yet convinced that he would not take a handful pills; of course, the only pills he had in the loft were aspirin, and he wasn’t sure he had enough to do anything other than clear his arteries of plaque buildup.

  “Noh-ums? Are you thinking about the friends you left behind in Cell Block Tango?”

  “Fuck off,” Noah said, but he couldn’t help but smile.

  “Now you know that I’ve never been one to say I told you so, but sweetums, you should have known all along that it would end badly.”

  Noah’s smile melted faster than the ice cream that Aiden had yet to put away. He watched as his best friend pulled out the drawer, picked up two spoons, popped the lids off both containers of Ben and Jerry’s, and passed Noah the Chocolate Fudge Brownie, keeping the Milk & Cookies for himself. “You say that to me all the time,” Noah barked, not believing that Aiden actually said that. He hesitated before taking the container of ice cream. “What if I wanted the Milk & Cookies?” Noah was teasing; they did this routine every time.

  “I’m a selfish bitch, dear heart. You know I don’t think about those things.” Aiden dismissed the issue with a wave of his bangled wrist. “Besides, you’re lactose intolerant.”

  “Since when does Chocolate Fudge not have milk in it?”

  “Since they only had one container of Milk & Cookies and I didn’t feel like schlepping all the way to 123rd Ave. to get another.” Aiden sat in his usual arm chair and jabbed the spoon into the softening dessert. “Now, if you don’t say thank you tout de suite, I’m going to think you’re rude and ungrateful.”

  Noah walked to the sofa and paused in front of the coffee table long enough to put his container down, jab the spoon in the ice cream, and make his way to sit on the armchair. Aiden patted his thigh while Noah leaned over and kissed the heavily powdered forehead. “Thank you tout de suite.”

  “You’re welcome,” Aiden said, offering the thigh a squeeze. “Honestly, you’d think you were the one who’d just had an absolutely abysmal day.”

  Noah plopped himself down on the sofa and leaned forward to grab his container. “Where’s the tequila? Didn’t you bring tequila?”

  “We’ll have the tequila once we’ve satisfied our sweet tooth. We’ll drink until we experience reverse peristalsis and then we’ll sleep, and we shan’t need to worry about the calories.” Aiden tapped his manicured finger against his temple. “Like a steel trap.”

  Noah smiled and shook his head. He didn’t know how he ever would have gotten through this without Aiden. They’d been best friends ever since they’d met in university. They had been in different faculties but had somehow ended up in the same biology course. Noah had been a little hesitant at first, since Aiden had been even more flamboyant back then, but when Aiden announced that he was a fine arts major who was in the introductory biology course to satisfy his science requirement and to meet his future husband the doctor, Noah had found himself laughing more than he could remember. Of course, the fact that Aiden had admitted—within ten seconds and to a complete stranger—that he was gay had had Noah transfixed. He, himself, had been struggling with admitting it not only to himself but also to his parents and friends.

  He had been pretty sure that his parents wouldn’t care, but he was still in that particular staging area of the closet where the doors were far too close and the thought of opening threatened untold drama and misery. Aiden’s generosity from that first meeting on had always surprised Noah. Aiden was kind and considerate, thoughtful and fearless when it came to helping his friends. And Noah had quickly realized, as well, that Aiden didn’t believe in self-pity or regret. It was one of the things that Noah loved most about his best friend. There was nothing that couldn’t be overcome in Aiden’s world. One snappy retort, usually with a smattering of words from another language, and Aiden would forget the offense and move quickly forward. Noah had hoped that he might eventually absorb some of this free-spiritedness, but he never had. Noah had always wanted to be a teacher, so his spirit would need to fly within the confines set out by the conventions of his employer’s expectations.

  There was nothing surprising about that; the newspapers were filled every day with stories about teachers sleeping with their students, teachers found guilty of some sort of moral or ethical offense, and even teachers who’d lost their tenuous grip on reality and quickly found themselves pariahs in the profession they’d once loved. And now Noah would be one of them, through no fault of his own. Or was he to blame? Did loving someone who would never be able to love him back count as his mistake or the other man’s? He didn’t bother asking Aiden, since he already knew that the answer would be that Noah had chosen to ignore his sage advice. Although Noah wasn’t sure Aiden’s pearls of wisdom could be called sage—or advice, for that matter. The guidance Aiden specialized in was more a rambling commentary on how all straight men were to be avoided and all gay men who wore plaid should be exiled.

  They ate mostly in silence, Aiden asking his friend the odd question here and there. Are the men in prison as hot as on Prison Break? Noah patiently explained, for the third time, that he had not, in fact, been in prison, but jail. Aiden dismissed the distinction as nit-p
icking and asked the question again. Noah shrugged his shoulders, answering honestly that he would have no way to know, since he’d been alone in his jail cell. Alone and scared, for the first hour, alone and angry for the second hour, and then just alone and heartbroken for the remaining four.

  As they sat there and finished their ice cream, Noah told Aiden all about the experience of being arrested, jailed, finger-printed, and in general treated like he was actually a pedophile. He was proud of himself for crying only twice, once at the memory of the short, fat detective who’d escorted him from the school and then again when he’d been stripped and searched for the identifying marks that his unnamed accuser had listed as proof of Mr. Noah Lowe’s indiscretions.

  Of course, Noah knew full well he’d done no such thing as seduce and sleep with any student, let alone a female student. But that didn’t really matter in this day and age. What was more important was the police, parents, and school board being ready with the accusation, rather than considering that the student might very well be lying to tarnish the reputation of a teacher who’d had the nerve not to back down from her threats.

  No one needed to tell him who had made the accusation. It had been Skyler Courtwood. And she’d done her homework. In fact, if she’d ever done her math homework as well as she’d done her homework on the most efficient plan to rid herself of Mr. Lowe as her math teacher, she would never have had to repeat the course.

  Noah recounted the story that had seen him handcuffed and led from the school, and since his classroom was at the far west end of the complex, he’d had to walk by far too many fellow staff and far too many students, some of whom actually liked him. He was surprised at how easy it was for him to recite the facts, as if he were merely lecturing his students on trigonometry or algebra.

  Skyler had been very upset when he’d confiscated her cell phone, again. It was the third time that week, and according to the rules of the school, he’d deposited the phone in the central office and placed a phone call to her father. Although Skyler had been able to fool her father in the past, Mr. Courtwood had soon come to realize that his daughter was capable of tremendous deception and had very quickly told his daughter that it would be up to her from now on to prove—beyond any doubt—that her teachers were the liars. “Such is the punishment for you since you’ve been caught in far too many lies,” Mr. Courtwood had explained to his daughter in front of all of her teachers, all of whom she despised except for Mr. Paul Lang. And that fact had been the center of Skyler’s plan to eliminate as many of her teachers as possible.

  Mr. Paul Lang was a relatively inexperienced teacher whose sole aim was to please the administration and become the type of teacher he considered to be an “advocate” for the students. That he chose to believe the students who’d clearly been identified as liars had merely been an unfortunate and trivial point for the majority of the teachers, including Noah, until the afternoon Skyler had convinced one of the grade twelve boys—whom she’d been leading on for weeks—that she was ready to have sex. During the dance scheduled for the afternoon of the last day of classes before Christmas break, Skyler had stolen Mr. Lang’s set of keys and had found a secluded place for her and the unfortunate—and evidently horny—boy to consummate their relationship, albeit one based on deception.

  She’d then relied on Mr. Lang’s gullibility and reported that Noah had assaulted and raped her in the girl’s locker room of the gymnasium. Mr. Lang, wanting nothing more than to prove his worth, had immediately taken her to the office and the principal had taken it upon himself to call the police. Within the hour, Noah had found himself being taken away in handcuffs.

  He had been jailed, made his phone call to the teacher’s association—who’d very quickly put him in touch with a lawyer—and his clothes seized as evidence. Without waiting for his lawyer and ignoring his assertions that he had not done any such thing, the police searched his body for any scratches or bites—since Skyler had said that she’d bitten him while he had his way with her—and a DNA sample was taken so that it could be compared to that collected from Skyler’s sexual assault kit.

  Noah’s voice hitched slightly when he recalled the humiliation of every police officer handling the case assuming that he had actually assaulted and raped one of his students. When it was determined very quickly that there were holes in Skyler’s stories, such as the absence of any bite or scratch marks on Noah’s body, the detective who’d been assigned the case had been shocked at Noah’s ability to laugh. The detective had ignored Noah’s protestations that Skyler had done this to ruin his reputation, plain and simple. Noah was somewhat galled at the incredible naïveté of the detective when he observed that no seventeen-year-old could possibly have the knowledge, let alone the chutzpah, to do anything of the sort.

  After spending approximately twenty hours in the jail cell, wearing a too-big light blue jumper with the letters D.O.C. on the back, Noah had been sleeping when the same detective unlocked the cell door and threw Noah’s clothes at him, telling him that he was being released. Noah demanded an explanation and got one: it had been determined that Skyler had, in fact, been lying. Noah’s immediate thought was to threaten the entire police department with a lawsuit for having been completely taken in by a seventeen-year-old girl. Instead, he calmly asked for his fingerprint card and any mug shot but had been refused.

  Noah reminded himself out loud to ask the lawyer that the union had provided him about this particular point of order and left the station, hailing a cab to go home and reminding himself that he would return some other time—perhaps when he had the moral support of Aiden—to return to the school to pick up his car.

  Aiden sat, stunned into silence. “What the fuck?”

  Noah nodded, knowing that this would be way too much for Aiden to believe.

  “What kind of fucking little bitch is this kid?”

  “The kind that would do this, obviously.”

  “How could this asshole—Paul, I mean—think that you could have done it? He obviously knows you’re gay.”

  “I don’t know,” Noah sighed. “That’s one of the many questions that I don’t have an answer for.”

  “So what happens to you now?”

  Noah raised himself off the sofa and walked over to the answering machine, stabbing the play button, and closed his eyes as he heard—for the third time—a message from the principal and then from Paul Lang. The principal was calling to assure Noah that he had their full support and that there would be no further investigation of his actions. Somewhat predictably, Aiden spat out the same question that Noah had only ninety minutes before: “What actions?” Paul’s message was somewhat less contrite: “Hey, Noah, buddy, I just wanted to call to make sure you understand I had no choice. I had to disclose.” Noah stabbed the button to end the recording, saving the immense pleasure of erasing it for another time, and returned to the sofa.

  “So what happens to the little bitch?”

  Noah shrugged. “Probably nothing,” he admitted, somewhat chagrined. “She’s a minor.”

  “Isn’t there some sort of punishment for misleading the police or making false accusations?”

  “Probably, but do you honestly think they’ll press charges against her?” Noah lifted both hands, counting off the points as he continued. “If they press charges, they’ll have to admit that she had the entire task force fooled and it took them far too long to figure it out. They’ll have to answer for their actions to their superiors—something I’m going to make sure they do anyway—and I’m pretty sure that detective isn’t very good at eating crow. And the most important thing of all is that they know that since she’s a minor, spending all this time and money to punish her would be for nothing because her record would disappear in another ten or eleven months. And then there would be the whole he-said-she-said thing.”

  “So she just gets away with it?”

  Noah shrugged again.

  “Fucking hell, Noh-ums!” Aiden shook his head back and forth while his eyes remai
ned transfixed on his friend’s face. “What are you going to do now?”

  “I will be talking to the lawyer about pressing charges against the police, Skyler’s parents—”

  “I meant about work. Are you going to go back there?”

  “Fuck no.” Noah laughed, a humorless laugh that was more a snort of derision. “I’m supposed to give thirty days of notice, but I told the principal—my exact words—to get his head out of his ass if he thinks I’ll ever trust him again.”

  “Bravo, sweetie!”

  “The only thing that pisses me off about that is the fact that all of my stuff is still in my classroom.”

  “Surely they won’t stop you from going and getting it. I mean, now that they know it was all bullshit.”

  “My keys were confiscated, and I was instructed to stay two hundred meters away from the school and two hundred meters away from Skyler.” Noah got up and went to the kitchen to fill a tumbler with tequila, asking his friend if he wanted any tequila yet. After a nod from Aiden, Noah returned to deposit two tumblers and the tequila on the coffee table. “Of course, I was instructed to do so before it was all revealed to be bullshit from the fucked-up mind of that little sociopath, but….” Noah filled both tumblers, passed one to his best friend, and then held his up. “Here’s to my sudden freedom.”

  “And to little bitches getting what they deserve.”

  Noah drank half of the tumbler, his face pulling in on itself as the alcohol made its way down his parched throat. He let out a gasp finally. “I also told the principal that I would never be coming back to the school to collect my things and that I would make arrangements for them to be couriered to me. Make sure they’re ready by Monday, I told him.”

  Aiden laughed and held up his glass, and they both drank.

  “You should have heard him, Aidee, he was so smug and pompous, even told me he knew all along I wouldn’t do something like that. When I told him I wasn’t coming back? He actually had the nerve to tell me that he would be more than willing to supply me with a reference letter.”