River Road

by Carol Goodman

  I wasn’t that woman, I told myself as I fed Oolong and picked up the bottle of bourbon. That kind of woman would have a drink right now after the ordeal of that interrogation in the police station, but I never drank in the daytime and never before class. I put the bottle away in the kitchen cupboard next to the sink, where I kept my vitamins and Tylenol, and went upstairs to shower. I hadn’t hit Leia Dawson; someone else had and the police would find her—or him—just as they’d found Hannah Mulder, one of Emmy’s pink barrettes lodged in the grille of her Chevy Corsica, three empty fifths of Four Roses bourbon rattling around in her backseat.

  I leaned my head against the shower tiles and closed my eyes until the hot water ran out. Then I toweled dry, rubbing my skin until it was pink, and got dressed.

  The bedroom was neater than the living room but even more forlorn-looking. Only half the bed was mussed from the last time I’d slept in it. A half-empty coffee cup sat on the night table next to a splayed mystery novel I’d abandoned when finals started. Dead stinkbugs, their dust-brown bodies like tiny heraldic shields of a lost battle, littered the windowsill. I started dressing in tights, skirt, and blouse until I remembered I wasn’t going in to work.

  Work. I fished my cell phone out of my discarded cardigan pocket and saw I had three more calls from Dottie and one from Ross. Anat might be right about staying home but it would look weird if I didn’t call in.

  Dottie answered on the third ring, her voice a fluty warble like a mourning dove’s call. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling all morning. There’s been a horr-rr-ible, horr-rr-ible tragedy—”

  “I know about Leia,” I cut off her rising keen. “The police were here.”

  “The police? Why did they come to you?”

  “I-I can’t really talk about it—”

  “Did you see something? I told the police officer who came here that you left before me. Do you know who did this?” Before I could answer she gasped. “Oh, Nan! I wasn’t even thinking about how terrible this is for you. Are you all right? Are you okay to drive?”

  “Actually,” I began, planning to ask her if she could bring me the rest of my students’ papers on her way home, “if you could—”

  “Oh, of course! I should have thought of it before. I’ll come get you right now. I have to go out anyway to pick up candles for the vigil tonight. I’ll be there in a jiffy.”

  Before I could object she’d rung off. I thought I should call her back and explain, but then I looked at the message from Ross on my phone. I had to tell him the police considered me a suspect before he heard it from someone else. And I had to do that in person. I’d go in, talk to Ross, pick up my students’ papers, and come right back here.

  * * *

  I waited at the bottom of my driveway because I didn’t think Dottie’s ancient VW would handle the snow as ruthlessly as Anat’s Subaru. When she pulled up I started to get into the passenger side, but she put the car in park, hopped out, and came around to wrap me in her arms. I resisted for a moment, then melted into her soft motherly hug. Not that my own mother’s angular and guarded embraces ever felt like that. I’m not one for shows of emotion, darling, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you.

  But then why did I feel so loved wrapped in Dottie’s arms—a woman I’d known for only seven years and with whom I had barely anything in common besides a love of Jane Austen and good tea?

  When I shifted my weight back she let go of me, holding me at arm’s length to look at me. Her cheeks and eyes were as pink as her flowered cardigan.

  “Oh, Nan! I still can’t believe it. It’s all my fault!”

  “Your fault? What are you talking about?”

  “I told Leia she shouldn’t walk home—I’m always telling the students that it’s too dangerous to walk on River Road—but then I got distracted straightening up. Ross had disappeared somewhere and I didn’t want to leave the house a mess—you know men, he’d have left it all for the morning—and when I went to look for her I couldn’t find her anywhere. One of the boys said she’d left, but now . . . well, Ross said the police told him she was run over after the snow started and I got home before the snow began so she must have still been at the party when I left.” She took a deep, mucousy breath that dissolved into a sob and fished out a crumpled tissue from the cuff of her cardigan.

  “I didn’t see her when I left either,” I told Dottie, squeezing her arm. “Maybe she was outside. A bunch of students were out by the old barn on the edge of Ross’s property watching the sun set and smoking cigarettes.” I pictured them, black slouching silhouettes against the red glow of the sunset. Troy had been one of them, laughing, apparently over his “girlfriend trouble.” Had Leia been the girl in the red leather jacket he’d been laughing with?

  “I told them not to do that,” Dottie said, bustling to the driver’s side and getting in. “I told them they shouldn’t litter Professor Ballantine’s lawn with cigarettes . . .”

  I missed whatever she said next as she ducked inside the car and I opened my door. She was talking about the arrangements being made to counsel students when I got in, the emails that had been sent to faculty, students, and parents, the plans for a candlelight vigil tonight and a memorial service after Christmas in the chapel. I was glad she was as wrapped up in the details as she was. I hated to think of her blaming herself for Leia’s death. I knew how corrosive guilt was, how it ate into everything like road salt through the floor of an old car. Kind, generous Dottie—she’d baked four dozen cookies when she got the call from Ross this morning so that the students who came to the counseling center would have something sweet—didn’t deserve to feel guilty because Leia hadn’t taken a lift home with her. I was almost certain now that it had been Leia talking to Troy out by the old barn.

  By the time we got to the road she was on to an idea for a memorial quilt for Leia. Dottie was an expert quilter. She made baby quilts for all the new babies in the department and kept photographs of them on a bulletin board over her desk. She kept a picture of Emmy up there too—Emmy in braids with the pink barrettes she loved.

  “Leia was working on a quilt with the women at the prison. We could ask them to contribute. They all loved Leia, all the faculty too, even the women in the cafeteria—”

  A gasp cut off the list of all the people who loved Leia. Dottie braked so sharply I was thrown against the dash. I braced myself—half expecting that we’d hit something. Dottie was pulling to the side of the road. “Look,” she said pointing across the road, “that must be where it happened. Someone’s already started a memorial.”

  I looked toward the stone wall. Where there had only been the daffodils and candle before there were now a few tall candles, their weak flames flickering in the watery sunlight. How did people know so soon? I wondered. Was grief a flame drawing moths to it?

  “Oh! I wish I had something to put on it!” Dottie said. “Wait, I know . . .” Dottie reached into the backseat of her car and plucked something out of a large quilted tote bag. Then she jumped out of the car and crossed the road without looking in either direction. I watched her cross, my heart thumping, and then got out and followed her across the road. I’d look at those daffodils again later to see if I could tell where they’d been bought. I found Dottie reading a note that had been left under one of the candles.

  “Love you forever, Ladybug,” she read aloud.

  Dottie held up the bit of red cloth with ladybugs printed on it that she’d taken from her quilting bag. “She said that’s what her mother called her when she was little— Oh, that poor woman! She’ll never be the same—” Dottie stopped and looked guiltily at me. I shook my head, unable to talk, which Dottie took as acknowledgment of the grief I shared with Leia’s mother, but it wasn’t that. Lying beside the candle among the daffodils was a pink barrette—the mate to the one they’d found in Hannah Mulder’s radiator grille.

  * * *

  It was just an awful coincidence, I told myself as we drove north on River Road, like the daffodils. Those p
ink barrettes were literally a dime a dozen. Well, not literally, I would have corrected my students. They were a dollar a dozen at the dollar store in Kingston. I’d bought three packs of them for Emmy, discarding the other colors because she’d only wear the pink ones. “She’ll grow out of that,” a mother at Emmy’s day care had said. But she never had. Never would.

  I tried to remember if I’d ever seen Leia wearing pink barrettes. Her style had been edgier, especially since she’d started working at the prison, but she might have worn them ironically, the way the punk girls wore torn Hello Kitty T-shirts. I tried to picture her at the party yesterday, standing outside Ross’s barn, red leather jacket, long white scarf tied around her thin neck, laughing at something Troy Van Donk had said . . .

  “Did you see Troy Van Donk at the party yesterday?” I asked Dottie.

  We’d reached the campus, which had the hushed feeling it got between terms. Classes were over—most of the finals too—many students had already gone home, and those who were still on campus were probably sleeping in. They hadn’t woken up yet to the notice on their college email about Leia.

  “Troy Van Donk? I’m not sure. . . . I wouldn’t think he’d come to the department party, though. He’s failing two of his classes, you know, and he’s already on academic probation. Cressida told me he was in danger of being suspended. It’s a shame. I hate to see a local boy like Troy lose his opportunity at the college. I went to high school with Troy Senior, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t.” One of the perks of being friends with Dottie was getting to hear all the local gossip, but I wasn’t sure I was up to it this morning. “I’m worried about how he’ll react because I think he might have been close to Leia. They always sat together in class.”

  “Leia and Troy?” Dottie said, wrinkling her brow. “I can’t see the two of them together—but then, Leia was kind to everyone. Do you know she brought me fabric scraps from a store near her home in Buffalo?” Dottie’s voice wobbled at the memory. “Oh, why is it that it’s always the best that get taken?”

  “Bad people die too,” I said without much conviction.

  “I hope this doesn’t make me a bad person,” Dottie said, her voice suddenly fierce, “but I hope the person who hit Leia dies. Prison’s too good for anyone who’d hit a child and leave her in the road to die.”

  “If you’re a bad person,” I said, rubbing the pink barrette in my pocket, “then I am too.” I had thought the same thing about Hannah Mulder a thousand times.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dottie had a handicapped sticker because of her bad hip so we were able to park behind the Jewett Faculty Tower. It was an ugly brick monstrosity built in the fifties, but it had beautiful western-facing views of the river and the Catskill Mountains. From Dottie’s desk, positioned in the middle of the English Department office, she could see the whole river valley from the window on her left and the hallway with faculty offices to her right. I’d once joked with her and Ross that she was like the Lady of Shalott sitting in her tower and watching over all of us. At the next faculty party Ross had presented her with a plaque that read “Lady Dorothea of Shall Not.”

  “Because she tells all the students—and faculty—what we shall and shall not do.”

  Today all the doors to the offices in the hallway were closed. When we passed Cressida’s office, though, I heard voices. It wasn’t like her to close her door. “The last thing you need is a student accusing you of sexual harassment,” she told me when I started working at Acheron. “Even if they’re weeping about their dead dog, keep your door open.”

  So why had she closed it now? Maybe it was someone upset about Leia.

  In the main office Ross’s door was also closed but that wasn’t unusual. I knocked at it, and then Dottie said, “Oh, he’s not in. He’s driving to the train station to pick up Leia’s parents. Poor man. He looked like death when he came back from identifying Leia at the morgue. He adored her . . .” Dottie dabbed her eyes and shook her head, making her gray curls bounce. “He made the call to Leia’s parents himself.”

  “That must have been hard,” I said, “but I do have to talk to him. Could you tell him I’m in my office and that it’s very important?”

  “Is it about what you were talking to the police about?”

  I nodded, hating that I couldn’t tell Dottie everything. What a relief it would be to pour out the whole story to her! But then I thought about all the stories Dottie had told me over the years about people in town and teachers who had been at the college before me. She knew everyone. I couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t “share” my situation with someone else. Even if Dottie thought I was innocent—she would, wouldn’t she?—the story could be all over campus by the end of the day.

  “It’s just really important I talk to Ross as soon as possible.”

  “I’ll let him know,” Dottie said.

  I went to my mailbox, pulled out a stack of late papers, and was heading out the door when I heard angry voices coming down the hall from Cressida’s office.

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Dottie said. “I’m going to buzz her to see if she’s all right—”

  Before Dottie could use the intercom, Cressida’s door burst open and Troy Van Donk stormed out and headed down the hall straight toward us. He looked terrible. Curly black hair writhing around his head like Medusa’s snakes, face unshaven, blue eyes bloodshot and swollen. He brushed past me, bumping into my shoulder, without any sign that he even recognized me and pounded on Ross’s door.

  “He’s not in—” Dottie began, but Troy silenced her by lifting his middle finger and backing out of the room. Dottie’s hand flew to her chest as if she’d been struck. I was as shocked as I had been by anything else today. No one gave Dottie the finger!

  “Are you okay?” I asked, afraid that the outrageous rudeness might actually give Dottie a heart attack.

  She nodded, speechless, and sank into her desk chair.

  Cressida came down the hall, braids swinging, two red splotches on her pale face, and looked at Dottie. “Call campus security now and tell them that boy should be escorted off campus and not allowed back on.”

  “Did he threaten you, Cressida?” Dottie asked.

  “He had the nerve to say it was my fault that Leia was dead because I upset her at the party.”

  “Why did he think that?” I asked in as neutral a tone as I could. Cressida was my friend but I knew she sometimes intimidated students. Nearly six feet tall, her white-blond hair twisted into a bewildering array of braids threaded with beads, she resembled a Viking shield maiden.

  “Leia was upset about something at the party, but it had nothing to do with me.” She blinked at me and her face softened. “She came out of the kitchen upset after you went in there to talk to Ross. Did you tell her about the tenure decision?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “That would be unprofessional.”

  “Yes it would . . . sorry.” She shook her head and her braids rattled like wooden battle spears. “It’s been a rough morning. Actually, I wanted to talk to you, Nan.”

  “Can it wait?” I asked, holding up my armful of papers. “I want to get my grades in as soon as possible.” Although I usually enjoyed talking to Cressida she could be a little . . . judgmental and I didn’t feel up to her brand of tough-love advice this morning.

  “It’s about Leia,” she said simply, a trump card I couldn’t dispute.

  “Oh,” I said, feeling the blood rise to my face. Did she know that the police had brought me in for questioning? I couldn’t imagine how, but Cressida often found out things before anyone else. It pays to stay in the loop, she was always telling me. “Of course.”

  I followed her down the hall and into her office, giving Dottie a backward glance and mouthing Ross’s name to remind her I needed to speak with him. If Cressida already knew it was only a matter of time before Ross heard. I sat down in the hard, straight-backed chair, which I suspected Cressida had picked out to discourage students from linge
ring, preparing to explain to her why the police had it all wrong. But instead of demanding an explanation, Cressida perched on the edge of her desk, leaned forward, and put her hand on my shoulder. “Poor Nan,” she said, “this must be terrible for you. It must make you relive what happened to Emmy.”

  Sympathy from Cressida undid me in a way that it hadn’t from Dottie. A sob escaped from my mouth. Cressida leaned back and plucked a Kleenex from a box on her desk and handed it to me. She waited a moment for me to control myself, lifting her eyes up—a trick that she’d once told me kept her from crying. “Men will judge you if you cry,” she’d told me. “They’ll think you’re a hysterical female and you won’t get tenure.” Is that why I hadn’t gotten tenure, I wondered, because Ross thought I was hysterical and weak? When I’d blown my nose Cressida clasped her hands and looked down at me.

  “I think I understand you better now,” she said. “Losing Leia—well, she was like a daughter to me.”

  I looked up, not sure what surprised me more, that Cressida felt that way about Leia, or that she thought losing a student, even a beloved one, was the same as losing your own child. But then I realized how judgmental that was. I hated when parents—like my stepsisters—acted like single women without children were somehow less worthy than those who had wedded and procreated. Cressida had endured her own hardships. Although she’d grown up in a wealthy Long Island family (her grandfather was a Polish immigrant who had founded a successful diamond business and appeared on local TV as Dave the Duke of Diamonds), her mother had suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disorder and subjected Cressida to alcoholic rages, and harried her into a grueling career in ballet. I knew all this because Cressida had written a memoir about her struggles with anorexia and bulimia and her time in the ballet world called Raising the Barre. She taught classes on body image and gender roles that were especially popular with the female students. I’d often seen Leia talking to her, and I remembered now that she’d been coming out of Cressida’s office before she’d come to my door yesterday. Maybe Leia had some body image issue (she had lost weight recently) she felt more comfortable talking to Cressida about. I felt an absurd pang of jealousy at the thought that Leia might have been closer to Cressida than to me.