Josie Tucker Mysteries Box Set 2

by E M Kaplan

  Eric. That was Dean Handley. No surprise there. “What’s the CSA?”

  “Christian? Chinese? Actually, I don’t know what that one stands for.” Jane held up a hand. “Yes, I admit, there are some things even I don’t know on this campus. Shocking, I know.”

  Josie chuckled. But she wasn’t surprised—she knew from working in kitchens, including her mother’s, that people who worked behind the scenes, like waitstaff and valets, often knew more about the inner workings of a business than the owners and managers. As an administrative assistant, Jane wasn’t any different from restaurant support staff. And Josie intended to milk her for insider knowledge as much as possible.

  “So what’s the scoop on Ida Mae? Is Bader expecting a big turnout for the talk?”

  “Are you kidding me? Not only do we have cops coming in to direct on-campus traffic, but they’re actually bringing their riot gear.” Josie almost laughed, but Jane added, “No joke. I’m utterly serious. Some kids are already being pulled out of classes by their over-protective parents until the whole thing blows over. President Olsen had to issue press passes. It’s a nightmare for kids who actually want to learn something but a boon for the university in terms of media and notoriety. How it will affect yearly donations is another question entirely, though. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how that stacks up at the end of the yearly drive.”

  “Because Bader has always been liberal?”

  Jane held her hand up again in that don’t even go there gesture Josie associated with soccer moms and 20-somethings at coffee shops. “Liberal—not exactly. Leftist. Pinko commie. We’ve been called things way more left than just polite liberals. People here used to make Abbie Hoffman look moderate. And we’re pretty proud of this heritage.”

  “So, what must you all be thinking about Ida Mae? Are you going to boycott her talk?”

  “Hell, no. Lydia Blaine from Women’s Studies is organizing a sit-in. There’s no way I’m missing out on this. I think we’re printing up t-shirts and buttons. Making signs. The whole nine yards. I haven’t had this much fun since the Tiananmen Square tank protests when I was an undergrad.”

  Chapter 16

  Dizzy from hunger and crankier than usual, Josie wandered down the hill to the main student center—the Levin building—where she’d heard there was a larger cafeteria. She pushed through the glass doors and found herself in a bright, sunny atrium with large, potted plants—none of the same kind that had been left outside Professor Sanborn’s office door. These plants had narrow, spear-like leaves, not at all similar to Jane’s rubber tree.

  Overhead glass panels let in natural light, giving the place a humid, Mediterranean climate. Which wasn’t terrible for a campus that would soon be blanketed in a cold New England snow. Maybe the Greek atmosphere set her expectations too high. Maybe she’d been hoping for a scoop of snowy, protein-packed hummus, a bracing triangle or two of pita with which to scoop it, and a side of tabbouleh so fresh, she could feel the mint growing.

  Yeah, that was probably setting the bar too high.

  This time, as she approached the food line, she didn’t bother to pick up a tray, deciding to browse before she committed to buying. She would not be burned—nor would she cause a massive scene and disrupt the flow of desperate students lining up for sustenance. No—this time, she would control herself and behave in a civil, mannerly fashion. Even if the food was inedible, preservative-laden, or—

  “Seriously? Are you kidding me?” Her outburst drew shocked looks, but she couldn’t help it. “Do you expect us to eat this crap? These are not soldiers eating MREs in Afghanistan. These are not starving refugees from Syria out on the Aegean Sea. These are matriculated students who paid a crap-ton of money to be here. How do you get away with this nonsense? Twelve kinds of noodles in a greasy butter snail trail?”

  All the way down the unmanned, self-service food line, she saw only beige. Bland, bland, bland, and more bland. Bowtie pasta noodles. Couscous with no herbs or visible seasonings. Mashed potatoes. Chicken breasts that looked pale and rubbery. A vat of apple sauce. Yellow cake with white frosting. Sugar cookies.

  Yellow. White. Beige. Ecru. Not a color or green in sight.

  “Are we feeding toddlers here?” Josie continued to rant unchecked thanks to her outrage and the shocked expressions of everyone around her. “How can we expect the next generation of thinkers, doers, educators…cancer-free, decent human beings to flourish on a diet like this? No wonder you’re all walking around like zombies. You’re being anesthetized by your lack of nutrition.”

  But when she heard the muttered words in a newly minted baritone, “Dude, is that your mom?” she snapped her mouth shut and pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and index finger.

  Addressing the group of a dozen or so backpack-laden students, she said, “No, I am not his mom. I’m hungry. And this…poor excuse for food…is not cutting it. This is pathetic, and I’ll not stand for it any longer. This university is world-renown for its authors, academics, statesmen and women. You cannot expect to maintain such a level of prestige and excellence when you’re feeding your students and staff chemical-riddled pig slop.”

  She didn’t know which one of the kids spoke up as he said, “Lady, you’re not hungry. You’re hangry.”

  #

  Hangry meant being angry from hunger, so yes, Josie was the poster child for hanger mismanagement.

  If Bader had been a larger university, she might have had the dining option of a food cart. One of Benjy’s recent entrepreneurial forays had been into the world of mall carts—those mobile sales stations that sold anything from time-shares in South Padre Island, Texas, to polarized sunglasses. Though she and Susan had heartlessly mocked Benjy one night over beers, maybe he’d have some ideas about bringing mobile food options to a small campus like Bader. And since he was bringing her car to her tomorrow, she could grovel and ask him in person.

  After she blew her rage volcano in the cafeteria, one of the boys in line patted her on the shoulder, saying, “But you’re a grown up, so you have your own car, right? You can just leave and get whatever food you want.” The response jacked up her blood pressure even more because that was the absolute point to her eruption. These kids—who were making her feel uncomfortably maternal—were veritable prisoners on campus. They could not leave in search of better things to eat.

  Pat, pat, pat went his hand.

  She knew she should be focusing on other issues, namely Professor Sanborn’s stalker, but how could she concentrate under conditions like these? She was a food critic and blogger. This outrage was not to be borne.

  So she glared at the kid until he backed away, his comforting gesture unacknowledged. His hand slipped from her shoulder as he returned to the relative safety of his herd.

  “I’m going to fix this,” she promised him—she promised them all—with an angry glare. While she was trapped here along with the rest of them, she was not one of them. She had the extreme advantage of not caring who she offended with her demands to make things right. And by God, she would.

  As she whirled around to make a grand, diva-like exit from the travesty of a cafeteria, she slammed right into fresh-faced Leah, who was just walking in with Sarah, the dining hall server. Because Leah was so much taller than Josie, she face-planted into the cotton-tee-clad trampoline that was her front—the classic and unfortunate short person meets tall person hug.

  “Hey, boss lady,” Leah said in greeting, peeling Josie off her frontside. Awkward. “You never came back to Sanborn’s class. You missed an amazing lecture on the apocalypse, the End of Days, the great unveiling. Speaking of which, did you get a fresh lead?”

  Only if her empty stomach counted. Because it certainly was leading her down a path to being mentally unbalanced.

  “Maybe,” Josie said, hedging. She didn’t want to mention the additional letters yet until she had them in hand and had seen how vicious they were. “How about you? Did you see anyone in class who was acting suspicious?”
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  Sarah hiked up her backpack on her shoulder. “Look, kids,” she said, interrupting, but not in a rude way, “I’m about to be late for the big shindig. I gotta split.” It was only then Josie noticed she was wearing her server uniform—white shirt, black pants, the universal outfit for orchestra members, waitstaff, and people who wanted to be invisible. And with a wave, Sarah cut through the cafeteria and went out the door on the opposite side.

  Leah ripped a sheet of paper from a notebook and handed it to Josie. “Here’s a list of five female students who weren’t taking notes in Professor Sanborn’s class this morning. The top two with stars next to their names weren’t breaking eye contact—barely even blinking. And that one with exclamation points,” she said, pointing, “although she was sitting in the back row behind you, she was wearing dark sunglasses. Hungover or stalker—I don’t know.”

  “Wow.” Josie was impressed and mildly alarmed. “This is amazing. Thank you.” She slid the list into the front of her own notebook where she’d put the class rosters from Jane, intending to cross-check them against each other. She figured she’d get back to Professor Sanborn and see if he knew the students by name—or even better, if he had any hand-written assignments from them.

  Leah beamed, her smile turned up beyond its usual intensity to roughly as bright as a laser. “No problem. Hey, are you grabbing lunch? I don’t really have time, but I was going to get a few things from the store in the student center. Wanna come with?” She bobbed her head, tilted to the side as both enticement and a directional pointer.

  Josie sighed. What the heck. “Sure. I was just looking for something to eat, but I didn’t see anything here.”

  “Yeah. Kind of a pathetic selection, huh? If my Grandma Betty could see it, heads would roll. I mean, she wasn’t a gourmet cook, but it was still the best food ever, if you know what I mean. Like, hot dishes with tater tots and tons of cheese. But totally made with love.”

  They strolled across the courtyard past the student postal boxes until they reached what was barely more than a janitorial closet with a Dutch door, the top half of which was open. Inside, a bored-looking student sat, leaning on an elbow and doodling in a notebook.

  Leah dug around in her bag for her student ID and handed it over to the girl, who stretched out her hand without looking up. “Bread. Peanut butter. Marshmallow fluff,” Leah said.

  The girl laid the items on the sill of the half-door and swiped Leah’s ID card through a machine. “You want a knife?”

  “Yeah.”

  Which was how Josie’s first official and most satisfying meal on Bader campus turned out to be a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich on white bread that stuck to the roof of her mouth, as they sat in the grass on a sloped hillside overlooking the rest of campus. And, while it was still a doughy, beige meal, she was sure nothing had tasted better in days.

  Chapter 17

  Leah mumbled something, and Josie had to pause while they each used their pinky fingers to scrape the marshmallow and mashed Wonder Bread goo off their soft palettes before Leah could repeat herself.

  “I said that’s the gym over there. It’s the Krejci Athletic Center and Auditorium, the kickass one with all the glass…in the middle of all the other buildings with all the glass. It’s awesome. We even have a juice bar, a sauna, and an indoor pool. You’re coming to self-defense class tonight, right?” And without waiting for Josie to agree, Leah continued, giving her the aerial tour from their overlook vantage point. “Over there is downtown Northam. You can see the Shop ’N Time—that’s the red sign you can just see the corner of—right over there. It’s like, a forty minute walk, so not really worth it. The first time I did it, I went a little crazy buying Oreos and milk. But I learned my lesson because carrying it all back was a pain in the tush. I mean, I could have gotten a cab or called home, but that’s a lot of trouble for some chocolate-flavored snack biscuits with creamy centers…which sound like heaven right now. In retrospect, I should have blown off the milk and just stole some from the cafeteria.”

  Still…Fresh food. Cooking ingredients. Spices. All within view. Fate taunted Josie. She’d never craved parsley more. She was suffering from garnish lust, for heaven’s sake.

  “Called home?” Josie asked with a feverish spark of excitement. Was she about to get a furlough from this culinary desert island? “Do you have access to a car?”

  “Well, no. I guess I should—I don’t even have a driver’s license—but I grew up in Northam. Went to Northam High. I’m what the other kids might call a townie. I get dropped off and picked up by my parents, but it’s a five-minute drive to my house. You’d think I could get Oreos there, but I still have three teenaged brothers at home. When they see food, they fall on it like a plague of locusts.” Even so, maybe that’s why she was always smiling—home-cooked meals in walking distance.

  She couldn’t fault Leah for not having a license, even out in the suburbs like this one. Josie hadn’t had a valid driver’s license until recently, although that was more a matter of laziness and the Green Giant failing emissions tests repeatedly. With Leah’s family living as close to campus as they did, she wondered if any rumors of Professor Sanborn’s previous conduct with the young student and his current stalker problems had leaked off campus.

  “Brandon’s a townie, too,” Leah said. “I’ve known him since second grade. Well, technically, kindergarten like I said the other night, but he went to Montessori for a year and then came back for second. I remember it like it was yesterday.”

  “Crushing that long on him?” Josie said without thinking. Darn her faulty brain-to-mouth filter.

  “Uh, noooooo,” Leah said with a little too much force. After a couple subsequent seconds of silence, she added, “Pretty obvious, huh? But it’s not a big deal. I mean, I’ve been working around my stupid feelings for about twelve years. This is not anything new, if you know what I mean.”

  Josie scratched a blob of dried marshmallow off her fingernail. “Ever stalked him?”

  A siren sounded in the distance, probably echoing the bells going off in Leah’s mind. More silence, then she slugged Josie across the chest with the bag of leftover bread. “Shut. Up,” she said. “I am totally not the stalker type. Do you know how much subtlety that requires? I mean, look at me. Do I seem like a sneaky kind of person to you? I can’t even enter a room without tripping or burping or making some kind of noise. It’s kind of my thing.” She made a mock gangster sign—or what Josie thought might be an attempt at one. “It’s what I’m known for.”

  Josie smiled—it was hard not to around Leah. “I was just kidding.” And she had been. Kind of.

  When Josie stopped chuckling, the sirens grew louder. From their vantage point on the hill, they both saw an ambulance, lights flashing, pull up in front of the faculty dining hall.

  “Oh, crap,” Leah said, with a loud and somewhat inappropriate guffaw. “I hope Sarah didn’t kill anyone.”

  #

  Josie did a double-take at her companion over that cheerful murder remark.

  Within minutes, the EMTs wheeled a person out of the dining hall on a stretcher. They couldn’t see who the patient was from afar, but from the emergency techs’ hustle, it must have been a serious situation. Josie was halfway down the hill toward the commotion before Leah, with her long legs, caught up.

  As the ambulance raced away with its lights flashing and sirens blaring, they met Sarah rushing out of the dining hall to meet them.

  “What happened? Who did they take in the ambulance?” Leah burst out before Josie got a chance.

  “It was Dean Handley.” Sarah was breathless and wide-eyed. Her fair hair was coming out of her braid in wisps around her face, and her freckles stood out more than usual against her paler than usual skin.

  “Heart attack?” Josie guessed. The dean was the right demographic for that, though his eating habits put him at risk for choking.

  “Maybe. I mean, I don’t know. He was pale and fainting, but then he started puking like
he was President Bush aiming for the Prime Minister of Japan.”

  Could a heart attack make a person vomit? Josie had no idea, but suspected that it was possible.

  “Huh?” Leah’s forehead creased as she frowned.

  “Barfing copious amounts at an important political and social event,” Sarah told her. “Pay attention in history class. I knew you were sleeping.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You’ll never get my jokes otherwise. If we don’t study history, we are bound to repeat ourselves. And we didn’t make good mistakes the first time.”

  “History nerd.”

  “Shut up. I’m trying to tell you—you gotta come in here before everyone leaves. You have to see what happened. This is just so bizarre. The police are taking statements for the incident report. They’re going to start questioning the staff, too. Oh my lord, I’m getting nervous.” Her freckled face scrunched up with anxiety.

  Sarah dragged them into the dining hall where they kept to the wall, making their way around the room. Two campus police officers stood by a round table set for ten people—what a server might call a ten-top—though most of the places were empty, as if the diners were deliberately set apart for extra personal space.

  In a hushed voice, she told them the names of the table’s occupants—for Josie’s benefit—starting at twelve o’clock position, as if the table had a clock face. Though the diners weren’t seated anymore, they stood around the table, roughly in their original positions, it seemed.

  “Professor Blaine, from Women’s Studies.” Josie had heard about her, both from Jane, the Humanities Department admin, and from Brandon, who liked to tromp back and forth across the line of political correctness when it came to being sexist. In person, the Women’s Studies professor looked like a politician’s wife, ironically, and as conservative as they come. Pale pink cardigan sweater, and pearls. Honestly, did normal women actually wear pearls?