Josie Tucker Mysteries Box Set 2

by E M Kaplan

  “You know Professor Sanborn. Look how upset he is, poor guy.” Sarah’s schoolgirl crush was making itself known, loud and clear, under duress. Josie had suspected the girl of having a fixation with him since she’d served them the goopy lasagna lunch the previous day, fluttering her blonde lashes at him.

  In truth, Joshua Sanborn looked sweaty and nauseated at the moment, his face pink and flushed under his bright eyes which he kept averted, focused anywhere but on the place next to him. Josie couldn’t blame him. A quick glance told her that Dean Handley had indeed gotten sick at the table—very sick. Maybe Professor Sanborn was one of those people who couldn’t hold onto his cookies when he saw other people paving that slippery path.

  “Ugh,” Leah said in a whisper that wasn’t really a whisper, as several heads turned their direction. “Are you going to have to clean that up?”

  Sarah ignored her roommate and continued with her introduction of the people around the table to Josie. “Next to the place where Dean Handley was sitting is Victoria Rothsfeld. She’s the donor who requested they bring in that hideous anti-feminist speaker this week.”

  Josie stared at the woman with great curiosity. What did an anti-feminist look like these days? “What do you know about her?” she asked Sarah, who frowned in concentration.

  “I knew you’d ask me that, so I paid attention as much as I could.” She pulled up the sleeve of her white dress shirt to reveal some notes written in ink on her forearm. “Okay. She doesn’t eat bread. Possibly gluten-free. Picked at her salad. Had the dressing on the side, of course, but didn’t touch it. Drank two glasses of white wine and was going to number three when Dean Handley passed out. At first, I thought he was drinking her wine, but then I realized it was something else.”

  Josie and Leah stared at her with blank expressions.

  “Then she ordered the steamed vegetables and salmon with the cream sauce. Is that gluten-free? Would that be a clue?” She looked at them looking at her. “What?”

  “Dude, you’re telling us what she ate. Did you happen to hear anything of what they were talking about? Maybe…” Leah lowered her voice to a raspy whisper, “the stalker?”

  “Oh, that. No. I was going back and forth to the kitchen most of them time. That demanding woman kept asking for things. Not all donors are like that, but she was really getting on my nerves, to be totally honest.”

  Josie snorted and had to cover it with a sniff when Sarah looked crestfallen.

  “Nice work,” Josie told her. After all, Sarah wasn’t an idiot, but merely a kid in a grown up body, playing at being an adult—just like the rest of them. Josie included.

  “Who’s that woman next to Victoria Rothsfeld?”

  Leah chuckled, having recognized the woman. “That’s Professor Sanborn’s soon-to-be ex-wife, Aimee Kohler-Rowski. She’s a professor, too—like, some kind of English literature, something prissy like Jane Austen—over at Tufts or somewhere snootier. I’m not exactly sure, but somewhere with a good reputation, like she was ready to jettison his butt at the slightest provocation.”

  “Kolawowski?”

  “No, Kohler-hyphen-Rowski.”

  Very interesting. Two last names and neither one was Sanborn—that seemed like some kind of statement to Josie. “His ex-wife, huh? Why is she here?”

  “I think she knows that Ida Mae person.”

  What in the world? Josie couldn't imagine a more stressful lunch. Heart attack or not—no wonder the dean had collapsed. The icing on the cake would have been Ida Mae herself.

  The thought occurred to Josie that maybe this whole stalker thing was a ruse to cover up the Ida Mae ruckus. But that didn’t make any sense either—there was no obvious connection. At least, not one that she’d found yet.

  Chapter 18

  From across the dining hall, Jane the admin had spied Josie and beckoned her over.

  “Hang tight, kids,” Josie told the girls. “I’ll be back.” As she approached the table of faculty members, Jane waved her closer with some urgency, flapping her thin fingers like a featherless wing.

  Off to the side, Professor Sanborn, looking pasty and anxious, was conversing with campus police while Victoria Rothsfeld, the donor, spoke into a cell phone from her seat at a nearby table. “Reggie, I know I said you’d have time to get lunch, but you have to bring the car for me now. One of the professors upchucked at lunch, and the smell is horrific. I mean, poor man. And poor me. I can’t even eat dairy, and it smells like a vat of Ranch dressing left out in the Destin sun.” She held her cloth napkin up to her face and turned away from the table.

  “Were you here? Did you see what happened?” Jane pulled her in closer, brimming with gossip. Her gray eyes were wide and shocked behind her dark-rimmed glasses. A vein pulsed in her tanned forehead.

  “I saw the ambulance pull away. I heard the dean got very sick,” Josie said.

  “Hi. I’m Aimee Kohler-Rowski,” the woman on the other side of Jane interrupted, sticking out her hand for a brief and firm shake. Josie always found it weird to shake other women’s hands, especially when they were as thin and fragile-feeling as Sanborn’s ex’s hand.

  “Lydia Blaine,” the third woman said, introducing herself as well. She was much taller than the other two, but the three of them stood together like a Greek chorus. Their heads bowed together for a minute as they whispered among themselves right in front of her. The Greek drama image dissipated and the word coven came to Josie’s mind.

  She thought she heard one of them say, “What are we going to do?”

  “This is Josie Tucker,” Jane said. She’s the one I told you about.”

  Significant looks and lifted eyebrows passed among the three women. Aimee Kohler-Rowski nodded in understanding. Professor Sanborn’s soon-to-be ex was petite—as short as Josie’s 5’ 2”—with white-blonde hair that may have actually been partly white. Her lean, owlish look matched Jane’s, as if they were buddies from not only spinning class, but book club, too—athletic, yet nerdy. Maybe they were running partners or something, though Jane’s outdoor tan contrasted sharply with Aimee Kohler-Rowski’s extreme paleness. Ivory tower? If she’d been a bit taller, she would have resembled one.

  “What are you going to do about what?” Josie asked. Yes, she was butting into their private conversation, but it was her job, after all.

  “Ida Mae’s talk on Friday,” Jane said, though it sounded a bit hasty, like a cover-up. “Eric was supposed to go over the final details and make sure her speaking fee was delivered on time. But I’m sure it’ll all work out.”

  “If it’s just the stomach flu or something bad he ate, he should be back by then, don’t you think? “Is he really that bad? What happened?”

  “We don’t know. We were just sitting here, finishing up coffee, arguing about whether watermelon should be served at the reception when Ida Mae is here on Friday—because I mean, she’s African-American and I think that’s really insensitive, even though it’s on Ida Mae’s list of things she likes—when the dean suddenly got sick. It was fast. I mean, violent and without warning. Wasn’t it, Aimee?”

  “I don’t know about there being no warning signs. I mean, he’d gone kind of quiet while Josh was speaking. We were still assuring Ms. Rothsfeld that the speaking engagement was going to go smoothly. All the security is in place for protesters. All the media outlets have been alerted.” Aimee spoke rapidly and with almost a clinical delivery, but then she added, “Right after that, he went blaaaaagh.” She shivered. “I’m so squeamish. It’s a good thing we never had kids.” Her gaze flicked across the tables toward Professor Sanborn.

  Her look hinted at the opposite intent of her words, Josie noted. Regret was present in the crease between the woman’s brows, without a doubt.

  “At first I thought it was something we ate,” Jane added. “But I feel fine. You feel all right, Aimee? Lydia?”

  “Honestly, I feel queasy,” Aimee Kohler-Rowski said, “but it’s only because I’m not good around vomit. Sorry. I never could
dissect things either. English major here. I can’t handle strong odors or weird textures.” Her narrow shoulders shivered.

  Probably not an adventurous eater, Josie guessed. But, hey, not everyone could have bragging rights in that area.

  “Sorry to bring this up at a time like this, but did you all eat the same thing?” Josie asked. She didn’t know if there was a food connection, but the fact that the dean had gotten so vomitus was beginning to point in that direction. If other people were going to start erupting, it would be nice to be prepared. She looked around for the nearest wastebasket, but didn’t see one.

  “Yes,” Jane said, ticking off the items on her fingers. “Salad, salmon—which we all ate except Joshua because he can’t stand fish. Wine. Some of us ate bread. Cookies and coffee. I ordered the meals myself when I was setting up the luncheon last week. But I feel completely fine. I think we’re all fine, right?”

  No ubiquitous, gooey pasta on the menu for them, Josie noted. Yes, she felt bitter. Fresh veggies, also. Then again, no one had gotten sick from the cafeteria pasta that she knew of—yet.

  While Josie chatted with the women, Sarah and some of the other servers who had been milling around had gotten back to work. Some of them cleared the table, rolling up and removing the soiled linens. One of the servers returned with an adult—some kind of manager of the dining facility—and they sprinkled some kind of odor-absorbing powder over the large splatter on the carpet. Truth be told, the smell of sickness was not good. Neither was the smell of the cleaning powder.

  The other diners—maybe a half-dozen or so other tables—quickly cleared out of the room, either upset by the commotion or the aftermath. The sour smell was powerful. The thought of continuing to dine while the dean had been removed to the emergency room wasn’t compelling. Seriously, it would take an icy heart to keep chewing your salmon when someone had just violently ralphed all over his table—so badly that he’d needed an ambulance.

  Professor Sanborn finished talking with the campus police, shouldered his heavy bag, and neared them to speak with Jane. But to Josie’s surprise, it was Aimee Kohler-Rowski he addressed, his frazzled, nervous energy in full force. “I’m going to go to the hospital to see how Eric is doing. Maybe they’re just going to pump him full of fluids and let him go home after a while. But you never know—I’ll go wait with him.”

  “Sure. Let us know how it goes,” his ex said in a fairly cold and dismissive manner. Aimee Kohler-Rowski had crossed her bony arms over her chest, which she now loosed enough to give him an awkward hand wave before he left. Josie couldn’t decide if their quirky mannerisms were a good match or if the pair was more like oil and water with opposing social tics.

  Josie watched Jane’s face as the estranged couple spoke—Jane’s intense stare never left the professor’s face, but Josie couldn’t decipher her expression. Anger? Concern? Disgust? Maybe a complicated combination of all of those. Her feelings weren’t evident.

  Josie wanted to quiz Jane more about Ida Mae Rubens, as well as get her hands on those missing stalker letters, but it seemed neither the time nor place to ask about either—especially with the wealthy donor still present. So instead, she asked Jane, “Will you be back in the office later today?”

  “Yes, I will. With this mess, we might need an acting dean, especially if Eric can’t come back to work for a few days. I know my phone is going to be ringing off the hook.” Her tone and pinched expression suggested she wasn’t relishing the fact.

  Aimee Kohler-Rowski put an arm around her and said in a bracing tone, “It’ll be okay, Janey. You’ll see.”

  Lydia Blaine flanked her other side, forming a tight-knit group. Josie changed her earlier assessment—they weren’t a coven, but a phalanx.

  #

  Witnessing a violently vomiting dean was upsetting in itself, never mind weighing in the big dollar signs at stake with Victoria Rothsfeld, the donor, who threw her cell phone in her purse and left without a glance backward as soon as her driver appeared in the doorway.

  Not long after the professor departed, Leah also left for class. Since Sarah had also gotten back to work, Josie decided to stay and check on her to make sure she was holding up all right. The fair, freckle-faced girl was quieter than her roommate, and quiet people could stand to vent a little more often than…never.

  Her own stomach was evidence of that.

  “Hi?” Josie stepped through the kitchen doors into utter chaos. Haphazard piles of dirty dishes and linens lined almost every work surface. No dishwasher in sight, neither the person nor the machine. In fact, the entire kitchen was deserted. Not good. At this point in the service—even Josie knew—they should have been clean and prepping for dinner, even with all of the chaos out in the dining room. Then again, everything she’d seen about food on campus had made her wish even harder for a mini-fridge and hot plate in her room. This mess was just par for the course, it seemed.

  A couple more steps and she froze.

  Was that a…knife in a pool of blood?

  The eight-inch chef’s knife balanced on the lip of the sink, its blade painted with enough viscous red stuff to make the edges of Josie’s vision get fuzzy. It looked so much like a crime scene that she thought she felt her shoulder tingle—but that was ridiculous. Scar tissue didn’t suddenly wake up and do a tap dance. Her old cut wasn’t a phantom limb, for crying out loud. Mentally, she told it to shut up. Then she realized she was talking to it like it was an imaginary friend.

  Knife accidents were common in kitchens. A lot of cooks were proud to show off their scars to her as if they were battle wounds. Staff liked to compare working a dinner shift to being under fire, down in the trenches of a skirmish. A couple of Iraq vets she knew said it was worse, but she doubted it. Gallows humor was universal, however.

  She took a couple of deep breaths—in through the nose, out through the mouth—and followed the sound of voices down a narrow hallway, being careful not to knock anything over as she passed the precarious stacks of plates. The dim passageway opened up to a bright doorway, and Josie was surprised to find herself standing in a pleasant, red-bricked patio shaded with leafy trees and dappled with filtered sunlight. Brick walkways spidered outward between the surrounding buildings in three different directions.

  “What if he had an anaphylactic reaction to something we gave him?” Sarah said. No longer concerned about dirtying her work clothes apparently, she’d sunk down on the dusty brick walkway, her head resting in her hand.

  “But we didn’t.” A heavyset, kind of doughy woman replied while smoking a cigarette, a kitchen towel wrapped tightly around her hand. When she saw Josie, she leaned over and stubbed out her butt in the nearest flower pot—but not before taking one final drag. “Yadda, yadda. Non-smoking campus, I know, but I’ve had a tough day. Cut my damn hand right in the web between my finger and thumb. Right in the webbing. Wasn’t even chopping anything. I just picked the damn thing off the floor.”

  Josie got a little woozy remembering the state of the kitchen and the watery muck on the floor. The bacteria on the knife blade alone…She was never eating on this frickin’ campus again.

  “Don’t mind me,” Josie said, averting her eyes from the towel with a burgeoning red spot. Its scarlet brilliance was startling. Blood never used to make her this queasy—no, that was a lie. She’d always been this bad, even when it wasn't her own platelets pouring out. “You might want to…uh…elevate that. I just came to see if Sarah was all right.”

  “Yeah. I guess,” the freckled girl said. “It sucks, but I mean, no one died from lunch. It wasn’t our fault. Right, Linda?”

  Linda? Josie tried to distract herself from passing out, taking those idiotic deep breaths her YouTube yogi was always talking about. Didn’t linda mean pretty in Spanish? And this woman didn’t look remotely Spanish.

  She nodded. “That’s right, honey. It wasn’t us. They’ll run some tests at the ER and find out what happened. Probably a virus. Those things can come on you fast and furious like a freig
ht train. Like that one time last year I had to lie down on the kitchen floor. God, I was sick that day.”

  That was a story Josie did not want to hear. If Dean Handley turned out to be the victim of food poisoning from this kitchen—and that looked like a distinct possibility, based on what Josie had just walked through—the university could be opening itself up for lawsuits. Never mind the hundreds of people who were at risk from having eaten here, herself included.

  “We do the best we can with what we have. And that’s not much. Missing or late deliveries. Nothing from the bakery. What are we gonna do? Sometimes it just stinks.”

  “Were you missing a delivery today?” Josie asked.

  “Well, no,” Linda said. “What we are missing is Bob the dishwasher and two other servers. No phone calls, no texts, no nothing. Just no-shows.”

  “Are you the manager here?”

  “Hell no,” Linda said with a disgusted snort. “I barely work here.” At Sarah’s giggle, Linda said, “I’ve been working here for nine years and it’s the same every week. I mean, no one gets taken away in an ambulance. That sure isn’t the norm. But I’m just the first one in and the first one out. I have the key to the place. I submit the inventory and purchase orders.”

  “Basically, she runs the place,” Sarah said.

  Linda scratched her chin with a stubby finger. “Yeah, I kind of do. But I’m not a chef or anything. I can read a recipe—anyone can do that. I’m just an old school waitress who sometimes cooks stuff.”

  “So who actually is in charge?”

  “Well…no one, really,” Linda said.

  And that, right there, was the point.

  Chapter 19

  Josie walked back to the Humanities building later that day to see if she could get the key to Professor Sanborn’s office. She really wanted to find those missing stalker letters before she became completely derailed by the horrible cafeteria food. If it wasn’t too late already.