by Kate Flora
I put his number in my phone and sent him a text: Bring that girl back right now and things can be worked out. Otherwise, we’ll contact the police and accuse you of kidnapping and violating Maryland law. Do you really want that?
I waited to see if he’d respond while Dr. Kingsley made a call to the uncle who’d pressured them to hire this idiot. As she quietly explained the situation, my phone buzzed with an incoming text that read: Who is this?
I showed it to LaDonna, then texted back: Your worst nightmare.
His text: What law?
My text: The one forbidding relationships between teachers and students. We have your emails, BTW.
His text: WTF?
I put my phone down. I wasn’t playing this game because it wasn’t a game. He’d been warned. If he wanted to throw his future away for a seventeen-year-old hottie—his future and possibly hers—that was on him.
“Jesper’s uncle is going to call him,” Dr. Kingsley said. “He did not sound happy. I got the impression he thought we should have found a way to cover it up. But that’s not how we do business, as he should know.” She looked at her watch. “Should we go ahead with the assembly?”
I shrugged. “Why not? Seems like emphasizing the honor code and responsible behavior is more important than ever.”
I showed her the texts on my phone. “Either he comes back, or he doesn’t. We have given him fair warning.”
“Right,” Dr. Kingsley said. “If he’s not back by the time we finish the assembly, we will call the police.”
So I gave my speech, which LaDonna said wasn’t nearly as incoherent as it felt, and I saw a lot of surprise and the dawning of understanding on some of the upturned faces. By the time the speech was done, I was done. Ready to head home and put my feet up while Andre reheated more of Rosie’s great food.
Luckily, when we got back to Dr. Kingsley’s office, security called to report that Jesper DiSantis’s car had just arrived back on campus, and the missing student was with him.
“I think we’ve got this from here, Thea,” she said. “Without too much damage to our program, I hope. Thanks for everything. When we get the final honor code put together, I’d like to run it past you before we send it to our trustees.”
That was fine with me.
Dr. Kingsley turned to LaDonna. “Your report is excellent. Exactly what we needed. I…we all so much appreciate your taking the time to come today and help us out.” She gave LaDonna her card. “So you can send us your bill.”
“Glad I could help,” LaDonna said, tucking the card away. As we headed out to my car, we paused to watch two serious-looking men in security uniforms escorting Jesper DiSantis into the building.
“What was he thinking?” she said.
“He wasn’t thinking, LaDonna,” I said. “He was panicking. Once he realized that you’d be able to trace the leak to him, and get his emails to his female students, he didn’t know what to do, so he just acted on impulse. Very stupid impulse. What was he going to do with no job, a ruined future, and an adoring seventeen-year-old high school drop-out?”
“None of that is fixed by his coming back, either,” she said.
“Well, in my experience, schools are big on avoiding negative publicity, so I expect he’ll quietly resign and his doting uncle will find him a job somewhere else. Hopefully, the girl can continue with the program.”
“I hope it’s someplace where he can’t do much damage,” she said. “I think he was counting on the fact that Luke Bascomb has the computer skills of a well-trained retriever.”
“That’s unkind.”
“That’s reality. Anyone with good computer skills would be somewhere pulling down the big bucks.”
“Like you.”
“Yup. Like me. I’m so cool.”
“That you are. Thanks for doing this.”
“Always happy to help out my big sister Thea.”
I felt a pang at that. LaDonna would make a great little sister. I’d been a real big sister once, and I still missed my little, lost adopted sister, Carrie. Investigating Carrie’s death was how I met Andre, but that silver lining would always be surrounded by a big, dark cloud.
As we headed back to BWI, LaDonna said, “I know I said I’d like to stay here, but actually, I was afraid we would get stuck here overnight. Or you would, and you’re my ride. I have a hot date waiting for me at home.”
“Hot date?”
She grinned. “I got a dog. A Jack Russell terrier. She’s the cutest thing ever, and she has a lot of energy, which means I get regular walks.”
So we headed back to the airport, LaDonna babbling happily about her brilliant and adorable dog. I was glad she was carrying the conversational load. I was toast. I hoped that when I got on the plane, no strange men would plop down in the seat beside me and attempt a useless interrogation. Of course, remembering Malcolm Kinsman brought back all my worries about his missing sister, worries I couldn’t successfully push away.
Luckily, by the time I was on the plane and heading back to Portland, the day’s adventures had left me so worn out, I slept all the way home. I was excited about being the mother of MOC, whoever he or she might be, but the demands of pregnancy on top of a more than full-time job were not my cup of tea.
Fourteen
I paused in my car before driving home to check the emails, texts, and voice mails that had been piling up while I was snoozing on a plane. There was a cryptic text from Suzanne that just said, “Call me.” An email from Bobby saying that the King School board wanted to meet with me tomorrow to discuss what he and Lindsay had found, and develop a media strategy to parallel their legal strategy. Bobby said the meeting was tentatively scheduled for ten-thirty and hoped that would work for me. He thought I should take Lindsay along.
Oh goody. A more than two-hour drive in Massachusetts morning traffic. I sighed and sent him an email saying that would be fine, then called Lindsay to see if she wanted to come along. Wanted? She was thrilled. I said I’d meet her at the office, and also gave her numbers for Emmett and the King School’s main office, in case she had a problem or wanted to drive herself.
Then, though Suzanne’s ominous ‘call me’ messages always involve a complication in the lives of EDGE Consulting, I called her. “What’s going on?” I asked, when she answered.
“Jason disappearing and inappropriate behavior with Lindsay. And Marlene was crying in the bathroom.”
“I thought we vetted these people? Did you talk to them?”
“Marlene admits she fudged her experience and confessed that she has a problem with deadlines. She freezes and can’t do the work.”
“Did you suggest a good therapist?”
“I suggested that she keep trying, that she’s not on a deadline, she has great samples to work from, and you gave her the necessary feedback. I pretty much pitched it as fill in the blank. I even asked if she’d ever played those kids games where you put a word in the blank—a noun, a verb, and adjective, what are they called? Ad Libs? I pretty much treated her like Paul, Jr. when he’s having his four-thirty tantrum. In short, I am trying not to have to go back to the pool of appalling applicants quite yet.”
Ah. The life of a consultant is never dull.
“What about Jason?” I asked, unsure that I wanted to hear the answer.
“Girlfriend trouble. She was having a meltdown. He thought he could sort it quickly, then was afraid to leave her.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Neither do I. More likely something he didn’t dare tell us about. He showed up today like nothing had happened. Let’s see if it happens again. Or if he even shows up tomorrow. Because if we lose him, we risk losing Bobby as well. When Bobby gets stressed and overworked, he begins to listen to Quinn, and we both know what Quinn thinks. We can’t let that happen. I’ll keep a close eye on Jason tomorrow. I hope it doesn’t come down to monitoring his social media.”
That was something we put in the employment contract. A lot of younger people don’
t yet understand that work hours belong to the employer, and do their shopping, chatting, and monitoring their friends’ social media posts while they’re at work, carrying over habits from college. A small amount, during breaks or lunch, wasn’t a problem. Checking in twenty or fifty times a day was.
“We can talk about the Lindsay thing when you’re back in the office. You’re lucky you’re working from home. Things around here are feeling more than a little anxious,” she said.
“Who’s working from home?” I said. “I was at Eastern Shore Academy today and it looks like I’ll be at the King School tomorrow. What am I going to do when this baby comes?”
“Love it. And keep working from home.”
“Right now, working from home means looking at the house across the street, where two people were murdered.”
Suzanne decided to ignore that. My proximity to violence and death makes her nervous. “Not your problem,” she said. “Go sit on the back deck where you can’t see that house.”
I chose not to share my involvement in those murders, such as it was. Suzanne is always counseling me to avoid getting involved. She seems to believe I bring these things on myself. I don’t think that’s fair. I may have a soft spot for vulnerable people, but I didn’t ring Charity’s doorbell. She rang mine.
“King should go smoothly. I understand Bobby and Lindsay found some very useful material on social media. Let’s talk tomorrow,” she said.
“In case you didn’t know, here’s a bit of good news. Lindsay will be finishing her senior year in December, and would love to come and work for us.”
Suzanne was silent for a moment, then she said, “That is beyond wonderful.”
I absolutely agreed.
The drive home was uneventful, if slow, and I was back in time to enjoy the last of the day’s light on the back deck. Summer evening light is so soft and lovely, and the air was full of flowers and the green smells of cut grass and hay. Also, the impassioned noises of insects looking for love. I’d never lived in the country before. Never expected I would. And here I was, loving it.
Andre had something warming in the oven that smelled delicious, and he was sitting with me in the adjacent Adirondack chair. He was drinking beer, a locally brewed IPA he’d recently discovered. Seems like there is a brewery on every corner these days. Regular, micro, or nano. I don’t know who drinks all that beer.
I had iced tea and lemonade and wished there was a bit of vodka involved. I used to like to unwind with a glass of wine or a drink after a long day.
We were watching mama deer and her baby puzzling at the deer fence, looking longingly at my lettuce and chard and other yummy things on the other side of the barrier.
“She makes me feel mean,” I said.
“Mean enough to let her eat your garden?”
“Nope. Just a twinge of meanness.”
We watched the two of them turn away, discouraged, and trot back to the woods. Someone else would have to provide tonight’s salad.
“What’s happening with the…uh…with your investigation next door?”
“He was stunned with a rock, then shot. She was shot.”
“Witnesses? Weapon? Prints? Evidence?”
“You sound like a detective’s wife.”
“Am a detective’s wife. One who is sometimes mistaken for a cop herself.”
“Poor thing.”
“That’s it? The bad guy or gal didn’t leave a note? Footprint? Carelessly discarded cigarette butt?”
“We’ve got some stuff we’re looking at.” He reached over and took my hand. “This is supposed to be our home, our place where the world of crime doesn’t intrude.”
“Except by phone.”
He sighed. “Except by phone.”
“No sign of Charity Kinsman?”
“Not yet. She was there. You saw that. But she seems to have vanished. For now. Of course we’ve got the feds breathing down our necks, doing their self-important thing like we’re the ones who killed their inspector and lost the woman they’re supposed to protect.”
“They tell you why she needs protection?”
“The feds? Be serious, Thea. They don’t share information, they just demand it.”
“Just like on TV?”
“Worse than on TV.”
“So I had a weird thing happen today.”
He sat up straighter and took my hand. Far too many of the weird things that happen to me are of the dangerous variety. “What?” he said. “Something at the school?”
“Something on the plane.”
He waited, veneering a husband’s impatience with a cop’s ability to wait, while I figured out how I wanted to tell the story.
“I was in my seat on the plane. An aisle, you know, since I hate middles and windows and having to climb over people to use the restroom. Which in my current state is all the time.”
He nodded.
“A guy got on and sat in the middle seat. The plane wasn’t that full. He could have had the window. An obnoxious guy. He was looking at my work, and made a disparaging comment about honor codes. He was annoying me, so I put on my headphones to shut him out, and, quite abruptly, he disconnected them and said ‘we need to talk.’”
“Mmm hmm. A jerk,” Andre said, giving off a protective husband vibe. “And?”
“And I tried not to get drawn in. You know that MOC and I are trying to live a stress-free life.”
He laughed.
I was trying to remember the sequence, which weariness and my hormone-soaked brain wasn’t making easy. “Then he didn’t talk. Didn’t introduce himself. He seemed to think I’d know who he was and why he was there. So I challenged him, and he still didn’t introduce himself, and suddenly, looking at him, I realized that he was Charity Kinsman’s brother. Her twin brother, it turned out. He wanted to know where she was and didn’t believe me when I told him I didn’t know. He said he and Charity had talked and she’d told him she thought I could be trusted.”
“Trusted with what?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Her secrets? Only she didn’t share any. Keeping her safe? I never knew she needed to be. He said that she’d told him I was an excellent detective.”
“You would make an excellent detective, you know. Except maybe for your too-tender heart.”
“Like you don’t have a tender heart?” I said.
“Only for you. Go on.”
“I told him she’d made a mistake. I was a consultant, not a detective. I told him everything about my contact with Charity. All two times of it. I even told him about the pot of flowers. He didn’t believe me.”
“How did he know you’d be on that plane?”
“I have no idea, and he wouldn’t explain. He never explained anything. But you know that picture I gave you last night, the one I found in Charity’s room of the guy in uniform? The one of the guy who is named David Peckham, who is Charity’s husband?”
He nodded, and politely didn’t ask how I knew about David Peckham.
“Well, he showed me another photo. This one of himself, his name is Malcolm Kinsman, with David Peckham. But I still don’t know how he found me. Or anything about Peckham. Or why he is missing. Well, except some very vague speculation.”
“What was his vague speculation?” Andre interrupted.
I tried to remember what Kinsman had said. “My vague speculation. He said David is missing and there’s suspicion that he may be a prisoner, held for information. He said there’s concern that the people who are holding him want to use Charity as a lever to persuade him to…uh…talk. But he didn’t tell me who might be holding him or what he or they were doing that got Charity’s husband into this situation, so I have no idea who might be looking for her.”
I sipped my drink and longed for that bit of vodka. “I asked some follow-up questions and got nothing. He said he wasn’t authorized to tell me.”
“I wish I did have some idea where Charity might have gone. If that ratty house is the best the government could do, I co
uldn’t imagine what they’d have for backup, if they even had a backup. Do you know if they’re sending someone to take their dead agent’s place?”
I stopped babbling. I’d been eager to spill out the unpleasant encounter and hold it up for scrutiny by someone who scrutinizes for a living. While I’d been talking, MOC had begun the nightly ritual, and it was hard to talk while taking sharp blows. I knew this exercise was preparation for life on the outside, but I was on the outside. I patted the aggressive little bugger and said, “So get born already, if you’re so bored in there. I promise mama will take you to gymnastics as soon as you’re old enough to walk.”
Andre burst out laughing. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you, pregnant, is one of the funniest things ever.”
“Thanks a lot, Mister. It’s no walk in the park. You swallow a basketball with more limbs than an octopus and then try to use an airplane toilet.”
That made him laugh harder, which made me laugh. I never did get any useful advice about the mysterious Malcolm Kinsman, but we went in to dinner in an excellent mood. Our good mood was not diminished by Rosie’s shells with meat sauce, nor by more of her tiramisu. She must have been cooking for a week to produce this feast, and I was not complaining. Except for a few times when I’d been flattened by bad guys and Suzanne pitched in, I couldn’t recall a time when anyone had arrived on my doorstep with food.
Except for Andre, of course. We’d reached our first cautious détente over a bag of groceries he’d arrived with while I was cleaning out my sister Carrie’s apartment. Unwanted and unwelcomed, he’d proceeded to cook me dinner, and the rest—anger morphing to attraction followed by a series of dramatic ups and downs—was history.
I guess we’re still history in the making and MOC will begin a new chapter.
As dark settled in around us, a question about the guy on the plane floated into my mind like words in a Magic 8 Ball. If he had spoken with his sister, why hadn’t she told him her plans? Because she believed she was safe? Or believed telling him was unsafe? Even if she had had to leave suddenly, she would likely have taken her phone. She could have updated him. There must have been a reason she didn’t. Had he focused on me because of my stupid internet search? His surprise suggested he hadn’t known about the two people found dead at his sister’s house.