River Road

by Carol Goodman

  “Yes, that must have been stressful,” I said. “I’ve always been impressed by how much you do—your classes, the prison program, writing a book—”

  “Exactly!” she said, looking grateful that I’d hit on the right answer, as if I were a student in one of her classes. “How do they expect you to teach a full load of classes and have time to produce a book every couple of years? It’s easier for fiction writers—you can just make something up—but I’m a memoirist. I told my whole life story in my first book. How am I supposed to repeat that?”

  I could have suggested she try writing about other people, but I didn’t think she’d come here for constructive criticism or writing advice. She’d come because she knew I had Leia’s story—the one she’d plagiarized—but surely that wasn’t reason enough to kill me, unless—

  Icy sweat broke out under my arms and on my brow, fear finally penetrating the Vicodin cloud. Leia had gone to see Cressida before coming to me. She would have seen an advance copy of her book. What had she thought when she saw that her teacher had stolen her writing? What had she done?

  “You must have been under a lot of stress,” I repeated, still trying to keep her calm even though anger was bubbling up along with the fear. I thought of Leia opening Cressida’s galley and seeing her own words there. That was why she had left me the story. That was what she had wanted to talk to me about. “It would be natural to let something you’d read slip into your own writing.” Word for word? “Anyone could have made that mistake.”

  “That’s what I tried explaining to Leia. We have to read so much of our students’ work that our heads fill up with their words. I swear my grammar has gotten worse over the years reading their tripe.”

  “But Leia’s work wasn’t tripe.” Not a good idea to interrupt, Joe’s voice said in my head, not if you want to live through this.

  “No, it wasn’t.” She waved the gun at me. “You know what’s funny?”

  “No,” I said. “What?”

  “I gave her the job at the prison. I suggested she write about it. I made her rewrite that piece until she got it right.” She pointed the gun at her own book. Her hand was wobbling—I could make a grab for it—but then she swung the gun back at me. “But was she grateful for my help? Was she grateful for the recommendations I wrote to graduate schools for her or the extra time I spent going over her writing samples? These students—they think we’re all dying to read their first novels, like we have nothing better to do with our time. I must have read two hundred pages of Leia’s work over the last two years. Is it any wonder that some of it leaked its way into mine? But instead of being grateful she had the nerve to try and blackmail me.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “She said that if I gave her ten thousand dollars she wouldn’t tell anyone that I plagiarized her work. As if I had ten thousand dollars just lying around my house. As if it was nothing to me.”

  “Did you have it?” I asked, curiosity getting the better of me. “I mean, you’d gotten the advance for the book—”

  “A paltry advance. My publisher said my past sales numbers didn’t justify a bigger one. Of course, I could have gotten it out of my trust fund but my bitch of a stepmother administers that and she’d have asked annoying questions. Besides, that’s not the point. It was the principle of the thing.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help myself.

  Cressida slapped me across the face with the butt of the gun. I fell to the floor, my ears ringing. Worse than the pain—the two Vicodin I’d taken with the scotch mercifully blunted that—was the shock of it. The casual ripping away of the veneer of civilized discourse. We weren’t two English professors debating the ethics of literary appropriation. We were a killer and her hostage.

  “Do you think it’s funny to be blackmailed by your student?” She was bent over me, shouting, shoving the gun in my face.

  I shook my head. Something seemed to be loose in it.

  “Besides, she was lying that she wouldn’t tell anyone. She had already shown you the story.”

  “She left it in my box,” I said, sitting up and leaning my aching head against the desk leg. “Because she wanted my advice. She hadn’t decided to blackmail you yet. She must have decided when Troy told her that Scully would need the money back if they dumped the heroin.”

  Cressida sat down on the edge of my desk and tilted her head at me. One of her braids was sticking straight up, I noticed, giving her the air of a demented Pippi Longstocking. But her face was calm—not at all like a woman who had just pistol-whipped her colleague—and curious. I had a story to tell her as well.

  I explained how Shawna had died from tainted heroin and that Troy had hidden the rest of the stash in the boathouse. “She told Troy that she could get the money. Had you told her that you’d give it to her?”

  “I said I could have it in a few days. She insisted I give her proof, so I went back to my house for my financial records. I was trying to figure out what I should show her. I didn’t want her to get the idea I had so much money she could blackmail me for the rest of my life—don’t look at me like that. People think that just because I have a trust fund I have nothing to worry about. But my portfolio took a beating back in two thousand eight and my father made some foolish investments in his later years. I have enough for now, but it has to last me my whole life. This miserable state school salary certainly won’t.”

  “I’ve always thought it admirable that you work at all,” I said, the truth slipping out.

  This time she was the one to laugh.

  “Ha! The diamond heir slaving away at a state school. The truth is, it’s a condition of my trust that I work a salaried job. It wasn’t good enough for Daddy that I write books. He didn’t consider that real work.”

  I winced. “Neither does my mother,” I said. “So you were trying to figure out what bank statement to show her when . . .” Her author photo came back to me. “You were at your desk and you saw Troy and Leia park in the turnaround.”

  “Yes. In Ross’s car. At first I thought it was Ross come to see you—yes, that’s how I knew about the affair. I used to see him park in the turnaround when he came to visit you. But then I saw it was Troy and Leia. I watched them walk up the hill—practically past my house—and then to the boathouse. I thought they’d just come to make out, smoke some weed, celebrate their victory over Professor Janowicz who had money to burn. But then I saw Leia running back, Troy following her, shouting at her to come back.”

  Come back! His voice had echoed through the woods and into my dream.

  “I went down to see what was going on. I thought”—she laughed at herself—“I actually thought that Leia was in danger from Troy and that if I saved her she would reconsider blackmailing me. But then I saw Troy back off and walk away. Leia was walking to River Road. I saw the car—Ross’s Peugeot—parked in the turnaround, the keys in the ignition. Careless kids. I just thought I’d follow her, offer her a lift, tell her that I’d return the car and not tell Ross she’d taken it. I wanted to catch up with her before someone else came along. I may have taken the curve a little fast . . . and she turned and looked right at me, as if she knew it was me, as if she knew I’d come following her to beg her to let me off the hook. I swear, she looked so . . . smug.”

  I pictured Leia turning her long, swanlike neck to look behind her, seeing the Peugeot—

  “She thought it was Troy.”

  “I couldn’t help it. She made me so . . . angry. I hit the gas. I think I just wanted to scare her, to wipe that smug expression off her face, but then the car lurched forward and skidded in the snow. The car hit her.”

  The car. Not her.

  “I wasn’t going to drive away—I got out to help her but she was already dead. I had my phone out, I had already started calling nine-one-one.”

  “But then you saw my car.”

  “Yes! It was such a strange coincidence. It felt almost . . . fated. I figured you must have passed out. I checked to see if you were in the car but
when I saw you weren’t I thought you’d gone home. Then I saw you in the woods unconscious. I thought . . .” She looked down at me and then at the desk. I knew she was looking at the pills.

  “You thought I had killed myself.”

  “Yes. To tell you the truth, Nan, I’ve always wondered why you didn’t do it years ago instead of slowly drinking yourself to death. I don’t know how you can live knowing that you caused your own child’s death. I don’t know how you could bear it.”

  “How have you found living with Leia’s death?” I asked, unable to stop myself.

  “That’s different!” she snapped. “Leia’s not my daughter and she drove me to it.”

  “Like she drove you to set me up for it?”

  “I thought you were dead—or would be by morning. So what did it matter if everyone thought you’d run over Leia first? It made sense.”

  “So you dragged Leia into the ditch under my wheel. Weren’t you concerned that the police wouldn’t find her blood on my car?”

  “I smeared some of her blood on your tire. I figured that would be good enough for the idiots in our local constabulary—and if it wasn’t they’d find Ross’s car. I even had Ross’s cuff link. It came out of Leia’s jacket pocket when I dragged her. Leia must have picked it up when she took the keys out of the dish in Ross’s kitchen. I figured if the police didn’t believe you killed Leia, I could implicate Ross.”

  “Is that why you tried to kill Ross?” I asked, taking a chance.

  “He called and asked me to come over. I thought he’d seen me bringing the car back to his house that night, but it turned out he only wanted to talk about reversing your tenure decision. He needed me to change my vote.”

  “Your vote? But I thought—”

  “That I’d voted in your favor?” She smiled coldly. “A washed-up novelist who hasn’t published anything—not even an article—in years? Please. I was offended Ross would even ask.”

  “So you decided to kill him?”

  “I slipped Ambien into his coffee.” She seemed to be bragging now. “I figured I could pin everything on him and the police would stop looking. I hadn’t expected you to show up or that Officer Joe would be so diligent. Speaking of whom, we ought to get going. He’s probably realized by now that the anonymous tip that got him down to Poughkeepsie was a fake.”

  I felt an absurd surge of relief that Joe hadn’t made up the “following a lead” excuse—cut short by realizing what she’d just said.

  “Go where?”

  “Well, Nan, that’s up to you.” She picked up one of the pill bottles in her gloved hand and rattled it at me. “It looks like you were planning an exit of your own. You can continue with that—I even have a few extra Ambiens to add to the mix—or you could opt for a more scenic dive into the river. No one will be very surprised after what happened in the chapel. All you’ve been through—someone killed your cat, for God’s sake!”

  I stared at her. “You killed Oolong, didn’t you?”

  She sighed. “The damned cat got out when I came here while you were sleeping at my house. I was only planning to have a look around but when it got out . . . well, I figured you only needed a little more to push you over the edge. That cat should have been put down years ago. She was only skin and bones.”

  I stared at her, anger now taking the place of fear. “I won’t be so easy to get rid of. How are you going to force me to take those pills? If you use the gun your suicide story is ruined.”

  “True, but this is a very special gun with a very special provenance. I got it from one of my former students in the prison initiative. It’s been used in a liquor store robbery and a drive-by shooting in the Poughkeepsie projects. Your boyfriend will deduce that one of Scully’s colleagues came looking for the rest of that stash. Sadly for you, drug dealers are none too delicate in their interrogation techniques. He would start with shooting you in the kneecap”—Cressida aimed the gun at my knee—“and proceed up through other nonvital body parts before he dealt the final death blow. I’m afraid that not even the Vicodin you’ve been taking will dull that much pain.”

  She smiled at me. I would have accused her of bluffing but she so clearly wasn’t. She was so clearly out of her mind. I didn’t want to get shot in the kneecap—neither did I want to die from pills or drowning. I didn’t want to die. The revelation was enlightening, even if it did come a little late in the plot. So which option should I choose?

  The one that gives you more time, Joe’s voice said in my head.

  “I choose the river,” I said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Cressida wouldn’t let me take a coat. “Suicides don’t bundle up and remember their mittens.” I suspected it was to discourage me from running. “But remember,” she said, in case I was thinking of it, “our putative drug czar would shoot you in your legs first and then make you crawl the rest of the way to the river.”

  She was enjoying this role of drug czar. It occurred to me, as we began my forced march to the river, that she was as prone to playing roles as Leia had been—the wounded daughter, the ballerina, the professor, the prisoner’s advocate, the concerned friend—all deftly concealing the plagiarist, murderer, and now underworld thug. When I glanced back at her, her face was stony and impassive in the moonlight. Trying to appeal to her sympathy wasn’t going to save my life—and I did want to save it. That revelation hadn’t been fleeting. We crested the hill and the ice-covered river appeared below us. I was stunned by how beautiful it was. An hour earlier I’d been ready to leave this world but now I couldn’t imagine closing my eyes on it forever. Even the bite of cold against my skin and ache in my ribs felt good. Was it knowing I was going to die that made life seem so precious all at once? Or the combination of Glenlivet and Vicodin? I didn’t care. There had to be some way to change Cressida’s mind—if not by appealing to her sympathy then to her pragmatism. I searched my drug-addled brain for a good reason for her to spare me. If nothing else, at least if I kept talking someone might hear us.

  “You know, it’s bound to come out eventually,” I said, turning my head so she could hear me, and hoping my words might carry over the frozen hills. “Leia must have shown her ‘Pins’ story to someone else. Your plagiarism will be revealed and then someone—Joe, for instance—will start asking questions about your role in Leia’s death and mine.”

  “Leia never showed the piece to anyone else. She told me after she submitted it to me that she didn’t want anyone else to read it. She felt that she’d appropriated the stories of those women in the prison. I told her she was giving them voice and she said that was an arrogant assumption—what a righteous little prig! To call me arrogant!”

  “But she showed it to me. She might have shown it to someone else—Ross, for instance.”

  “No, I checked on that when I went by for my little chat with him. He said Leia was going on about something to do with plagiarism that night but he thought she had possibly stolen someone else’s work. Before she could tell him what was really on her mind, though, you burst into the kitchen and interrupted her. Thanks for that, Nan. Your hysteria over not getting tenure has been very useful.”

  “She might have told Troy.”

  “Troy’s dead,” she snapped. “And good riddance. He was a posturing idiot, with all his Hemingwayesque macho prose and overinflated Greek allusions.” She went on harshly critiquing Troy’s writing and then the literary failings of the rest of her students. I let her. Her voice echoed off the icy hills. It gave me time to think, to find some flaw in her plan. There must be some mistake she’d made that would expose her, but even if I came up with one she would dismiss it. She was the one who was arrogant. She believed that she’d plotted this scenario out perfectly, that all she had to do was dispose of me and she would be free to bask in the success of The Sentences, no doubt enjoying the irony that she had evaded her own prison sentence.

  We had reached the train tracks, which had been shoveled out by Amtrak crews. I listened for an approaching
train, thinking I might be able to attract the attention of a passenger—a thought that made me laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Cressida asked.

  “I was thinking of that Agatha Christie novel in which an old woman sees a murder from a train window.”

  “4.50 from Paddington. Thanks for reminding me.” She looked down at her watch, which had an illuminated dial. “The nine fifty-six will be through in ten minutes. Let’s get across the tracks and into the boathouse. You have a suicide note to write.”

  She gave me a nudge with the gun and I stumbled over the tracks. The narrow path to the boathouse was covered with ice. The river itself had reached an uneasy stasis. It was frozen as far as I could see but this close I could hear the creak and moan of the ice moving, nudged by the current flowing beneath the surface. Even if the temperature stayed this low it would be weeks before the ice was solid enough to venture across safely. If I tried to run across it Cressida would only have to shoot me down and give me a nudge into the water. I would join Troy and Scully and our bodies would stay trapped beneath the ice until the spring thaw.

  “Come on,” Cressida said, “plenty of time to admire the river later. Time to make your amends. Just think of the boring AA meetings I’m saving you from.”

  The cold pressure of the gun against my neck propelled me into the boathouse. It was darker in here, with only the glow from the open berths to light the high-ceilinged structure. I could use this darkness, I thought, with Cressida close behind me, if I rammed back into her and knocked the gun loose I could get away and hide in the dark—

  But my plans were cut short by a flare of light. Cressida had taken a flashlight out of her coat pocket. She was aiming it at the far wall.

  “Over there,” she said. “Under Leia’s masterpiece.”

  I walked toward Leia’s self-portrait, which was lit up by the flashlight beam. The wavering light—she must be cold if her hand is shaking—made it look like there was life in those eyes, as if Leia was following my progress across the slick boathouse floor. They had the same startled look they’d had in the kitchen when I interrupted her talk with Ross. Why didn’t you listen to me? they seemed to say now. If you hadn’t been so caught up in your own problems, if you had just stopped and listened, neither of us would be here right now.