by E M Kaplan
“Did Joshua fake his credentials?”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “Everyone knows that. The man can barely write a sentence to save his life—not that he’s not brilliant enough. I mean, he’s clever in a middling way. He’s simply the single most lazy person on the face of the planet. He’d rather lie, cheat, and steal than sit down and do research or put together a decent article. He got friends—or more fools he’s pulled the wool over—to write letters for him or put his name as a coauthor on their work.”
Josie shook her head in disbelief. “How is this allowed? Bader is a prestigious university. This would be a major disaster if the media found out about it.” She paused for a second, realizing that as a blogger with a decent-to-great following, she was the media.
“There’s no proof, Lydia.” Aimee looked disgruntled, a pint-sized fit of pique personified. She stared at her taller friend, hands on her slim hips, high color slashing across her fair cheeks.
“Where are his published articles? Where are his books that he’s supposedly written? Out of print? Get real. Every time we have a major donor, they parade him out to lecture like he’s a prize-winning horse. He wows them with his song and dance up there at the podium. His jokes and his sparkly eyes, and they throw money at him. He’s a con man, Aimee. And he’s fooled you most of all—especially into forgiving him every damn time he cheats on you.”
Aimee folded her slender arms across her chest. “You’re wrong. Why would he have gone to all this trouble, humbling himself, to bring Ida Mae here if he didn’t love me?”
“Oh my God.” Lydia gave a disgusted laugh. “It’s working. You’re buying it. What can I say to get through to you? I give up. I absolutely give up if you’re not going to think with your brain. I can see we’re never going to see eye-to-eye about this.”
“No, we’re not.”
Lydia tossed up her hand in exasperation.
Josie didn’t think the two women would come to blows, hair-pulling, or Facebook mud-slinging—whatever route their anger might take—but the next time they went out drinking on ladies’ night, after a few apple pie shots, she imagined there’d be some words.
#
As Josie walked toward the Administration building, she pulled out her cell phone. She’d gotten Sarah’s cell phone number from Leah earlier, so she sent Sarah a text to see how she was doing.
Sarah: im at home for a few days
Josie: Good. Stay put and try to relax. Can I come visit you today?
Sarah: Ya. Sounds good. Sending addy. Thx.
Sarah was out of the picture for a while—it was a good idea for her to be away from all the drama. She’d miss a few classes, probably, and some work hours. The Executive Dining Hall had been shut down for evidence collection and cleaning after Dean Handley’s death, so no one who worked there would be called in, including the cook, Linda.
“See you next week!” A kid about the same build as Brandon—but who wasn’t Boy Tarzan—plowed into Josie on the sidewalk. His shouldered duffel was packed for a long weekend, based on its weight, which landed squarely in her midsection. The kid’s head was turned away as he called out to another friend.
“Oof,” she said, both hands braced on the bag.
“Hey, watch it,” he said, without looking at her. He was clearly headed toward the parking lot, where an older man in an idling car gestured at him to hurry up.
“Me? How about you?” She’d almost dropped her cell phone, but had managed to fumble it like a hacky-sack before—miracle of miracles—clawing it out of the air. As he pulled his bag out of her grasp and the hollow it’d left in under her ribs, she lost her grip on the phone and it fell onto the ground.
“Oh, no. Sorry.” He stooped to pick it up, his entire demeanor changed as if he’d made her drop her newborn child. “Is it okay? Did it shatter? I had a cracked screen for, like, four months last year and I couldn’t get a new one until my dad was done being pissed off.” When he finally made eye contact, he added, “Heeeey, do I know you?”
“It’s fine,” she said, pressing the button to wake up her phone which, thankfully, responded.
“Seriously, though, do I know you?” he asked again.
She looked at him, then at his dad, who was leaning out the car window now, still waving the boy over. “I think he’s waiting for you.” Frowning, she noticed a stream of five more cars pulling up behind the first.
“That’s just my dad. He’s pissed about that lady who’s speaking here tomorrow and is taking me home for the weekend. Not that he has anything against me hearing her. He just thinks there’s going to be trouble. I don’t know what he thinks is going to happen—rubber bullets and tear gas or something. I don’t know.” He shrugged.
“Wow.” She watched kids pile into the other cars and zoom off. “Is it really going to be that bad?”
“Dunno, but he’s going to feed me, so I’m going with him.”
Josie nodded. She couldn’t argue with that kind of logic.
“So,” he said, “can I get your digits?”
Chapter 37
“President Olsen, are you aware that students are leaving campus ahead of the Ida Mae Rubens talk tomorrow?” Josie asked Bader University’s head administrator as she sat across from him at the stately desk with the Bader seal. The university’s motto wrapped around it in an arc: Justice Even Unto Its Highest Level. She had no idea what that meant, but it sounded kind of biblical…of an Old Testament nature.
When he clasped his hands in front of him on the desk, a large signet ring caught the light. Glancing around the room, she spied a Harvard diploma on the wall.
He caught her looking and said, “Harvard Law, but Bader undergrad. Class of ’72.”
Fair enough.
“Yes, and if it were my son or daughter, I wouldn’t be averse to the idea myself.” President Olsen was in a navy suit, the coat of which he stood up to remove and hang on a hook by the window. He was tall and stately, broad in the shoulders, and he ambled across his office like a displaced cowboy. The bright sun reflected off his silver hair as he paused to look at the crowded walking paths below. From his office, he had a clear view of the Levin Student Center and, beyond it, all the way down the hill to the Butler Building where the police station was. His realm stretched out before him, so to speak—but how much did he really know about its goings-on?
“Does that mean you’re expecting some kind of incident tomorrow?”
“Expecting? I wouldn’t say that, but we’re prepared for the worst.”
The “worst” meaning what? she wondered. Guns? Bombs? SWAT teams? She had a pretty good imagination for drumming up worst-case scenarios.
Because it was noontime, she’d been hoping the president would be having lunch in his office for their impromptu meeting, but no such luck. Not even a candy dish in sight. She gritted her teeth, exasperated, still not accepting of her fate at this food gulag of a university.
She prepared to launch next into a barrage of questions about Joshua Sanborn’s credentials and alleged publications. As soon as she got some answers, she could leave in search of something to eat. President Olsen had taken a seat in his cushy leather chair that probably would have cost her a month’s worth of blog writing.
“I think you need to take a serious look at your Director of Food Services,” she said instead. “What’s going on in the cafeterias of this campus is a travesty. For the amount of money each student is paying for meals, considering the food offered here…it’s pretty much robbery as far as I’m concerned.”
His snowy white eyebrows shot up on his forehead. He was a tall man with a smooth, tanned face—and a slight southern accent if she wasn’t mistaken. “As a matter of fact, that position is currently unoccupied. We’re taking applications. Dean Handley was spearheading the effort to find a new director.”
“The Dean of Humanities? That’s odd. Why was he involved in a search for a head of Food Services?”
President Olsen cleared his throat. “He voluntee
red. I thought it was an unusual request at the time, but he assured me it was due to his keen interest in the culinary arts.”
Yeah…no. She didn’t believe that tripe for a minute. Not the way Dean Handley had shoveled chow into his mouth like a teenaged boy about to hit a 12-inch growth spurt.
“And the funds for paying the salary of that empty position? As well as the budget for well-balanced daily meals?” She knew with great certainty that money was not being spent on the food at Bader.
“The funds were…misplaced.”
“By Dean Handley,” she said, filling in the blanks.
“That’s currently under investigation.”
“How did he get access to that money?” Josie persisted. She wasn’t about to let him skirt the issue.
“Again, it’s under investigation.”
“But his name was on the account?”
President Olsen drew a stack of photocopies from his drawer and pushed them across the desk toward her. He tapped on one sheet. “My signature.” He tapped on another. “My forged signature.”
Josie crossed her arms. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You’re saying the funds are missing and the dean is dead?”
He looked her right in the eye. “That’s what I’m saying. And I’m counting on you to keep this conversation completely confidential.”
Based on what she knew about the local food industry, Josie figured the average salary for a position like that might be upwards of sixty thousand dollars at a place like this. Maybe closer to eighty. Bader probably had a lot of money flowing through its doors, thanks to donors and a hefty amount of student fees. If that money was missing, there’d be some kind of trail leading right to the person who took it. Possibly the dean himself.
“I’m not interested in blaming people. First of all, I don’t want any more people to get hurt or killed. Whoever killed the dean is still out there. Secondarily, but also in the interest of the well-being of the kids here, I want this food situation addressed. Have you eaten in the cafeterias here?”
“To be honest, I avoid it when at all possible.”
She leaned forward and punctuated each word as she said it by mashing a finger on his desktop, fueled by a hollow stomach and a fierce tiger-mom protectiveness that had reared its ugly head, “I want you to fix this problem. Do you hear what I’m saying?” Her finger went thud, thud, thud on the polished hardwood.
He was at least a foot taller than she was, with almost 40 years on her age. After only the slightest of hesitations, he said, “Yes, ma’am.”
She sat back. “Good. Now tell me where you think the money went. And what this has to do with Joshua Sanborn.”
#
“I’m going to level with you, Ms. Tucker,” the president said. “We have a stalker on campus.”
She looked at him through squinted eyes, trying to figure out if there was an alternate meaning to his words. Why would he state something so obvious…to tell her the very reason that had brought her to Bader?
He held up his hand, his drawl getting a bit thicker. “I know you’ve probably seen those ludicrous letters with the hearts and flowers that Sanborn keeps in his office. That’s not the stalker I’m talking about.” He stood and walked to a locked cabinet, which he opened with keys from his pocket. “Now, don’t get your dander up too much about this. I only just learned about it myself. We opened up Eric Handley’s office yesterday in search of those missing funds and found these. Here are the real stalker letters.”
He passed her a stack of plain white envelopes which she opened one by one. These messages were different from the others. These were all uniform, all typed, all addressed to Joshua Sanborn. Each one demanded twenty thousand dollars or the sender would release information to the media about Professor Sanborn’s phony academic credentials. Short, concise sentences.
Five letters in total. For twenty thousand dollars each.
Josie was no math major, but the money order stubs in Sanborn’s desk added up to twenty thousand—and the missing Food Service director fund might have covered the rest. A tiny light went on in the oven of Josie’s brain.
She suspected that Sanborn had paid off the amount of the first letter out of his own pocket. But when the blackmail letters had continued to arrive, he’d taken them to Eric Handley. To protect the professor—who was his cash cow in terms of donors—the dean had used the Food Service funds to pay the blackmailer.
That might explain where the money went, but who had it now?
Chapter 38
“You ditched us,” Drew said, handing Josie a brown paper sack curled shut at the top and grease-stained on the bottom. She accepted it, cradling its warm, rounded bottom as if it were a baby. “Despite that, I still love you.”
“What is this?” she asked, opening the top of the bag, a steamy puff of burger and French fry goodness rising up and embracing her face. She flipped the bag around to check the front. It was stamped with a familiar and beloved logo—five letter P’s inside a diamond, flanked by wings. Pure bliss. “Holy crap, I love you, too.”
Fine, I’m a hypocrite, blogging about eating healthy, but junk in moderation is heavenly.
They were standing outside the ivy-covered Butler Building where she’d asked Drew and Benjy to meet her. She wanted to consult with Officer Stevie, the technically savvy campus cop. She had a couple more questions about surveillance. Although she wasn’t a rule-follower by nature, she did occasionally have to acknowledge the fact that other people were. If detectives and prosecutors had to build a case against a criminal, she certainly didn’t want to interfere. Her methods might fall outside the line of legality, but her ultimate goal of catching bad guys was the same as theirs.
But first…she dug into the Five Pals bag that held her lunch. After she took her first bite—which probably resembled a scene out of a dinosaur movie involving a raptor and a baby goat—she filled them in on what she needed to find out.
“You sit here and eat,” Benjy told her, guiding her to a bench outside the door. “I’ll go chat with him.”
“How does he do that?” she asked Drew. “How does he just…like people and get them to like him back?”
Drew smiled, handing her a napkin—an unsubtle hint that she would probably need to be hosed down after gorging herself. She slowed down and started pretending to chew a little more thoroughly, but dang, she was hungry.
“He’s a likable guy,” Drew said with a shrug.
What is he talking about? She snorted. He was, too.
“It’s so weird,” she said, only half-joking about her missing social skills.
Benjy came back within a few minutes. “Steve-O’s advice is, if you want to record a conversation surreptitiously, the best way to do it is to pretend to fiddle with your phone. You don’t need a fancy recorder taped to your chest anymore like in the movies. We’re all just carrying around surveillance equipment on us every day. Just use that and you won’t seem suspicious.”
“Perfect,” she said. “It takes me forever to figure anything out on my phone. It won’t be out of the ordinary for me to be messing around on it.”
“Why do you need to know this?” Drew asked. “When they tape a mic to someone in the movies, it’s usually because they’re doing an exchange of hostages or some kind of drug deal. Are we going to buy drugs?”
“Dude. When you do have time to watch all the daytime TV that’s clearly rotting your mind?” Josie stared at him, hands on her hips. This ridiculous side of him kept catching her off guard. Who knew he had this kind of imagination?
Benjy looked amused. “He must be streaming shows on his tablet.”
“What shows are you watching without me?” Josie asked Drew. She pretended to be outraged, but truth be told, she wasn’t watching much TV these days—just her YouTube subscriptions, which ran the gamut from cooking to forensics to yoga.
She and Drew fake-bickered—part sparring, part foreplay—as they walked up the hill to the student parking lot. Benjy watch
ed them with an amused smile, but begged off when they got in Drew’s Jeep, saying he had some phone calls to make. Josie gave him the key to her dorm room—she wasn’t surprised he had other things to do. He was always wheeling and dealing, so to speak. His last entrepreneurial scheme had been to purchase a bunch of mall carts, so now he had to manage a slipshod workforce of people who didn’t really want to work. Mostly college students, come to think of it. In fact, she was surprised his phone hadn’t been ringing more in the last day or so. She made a mental note to ask him about that later. If he was having more career flightiness, she wasn’t afraid to go into big sister mode and meddle.
“Looks like it’s just you and me, headed into the sunset,” Drew said, though it was only about two o’clock. They slid into their respective seats, and he took her hand.
She hadn’t seen much of Needham yet, and it was probably just about as romantic as it sounded.
#
She had underestimated Needham.
Sarah’s parents lived on a lovely tree-lined street where in the next few weeks the leaves would no doubt turn beautiful shades of gold, orange, and red. Although the trees wouldn’t be as vivid as New Hampshire foliage, which was a famous draw for leaf-peepers from miles away, Sarah’s street was just as quaint as any New England neighborhood. Josie loved the smell of autumn in Massachusetts. It made her think of used bookstores and apple cider, rocking chairs and hand-stitched quilts.
“Is this the right house?” Drew asked, peering through the windshield. A rainstorm was rolling in, and the sky had grown dark even though it was only late afternoon.
They’d pulled to a stop in front of a charming two-story house with blue-gray siding and darker blue shutters. A two-car attached garage faced the street, its modern white doors done carriage-style, with built-in windows running across the tops. Josie wanted to say it was Craftsman in flavor, but she was no expert in suburban pseudo-styles. Two Adirondack chairs were angled in a conversational arrangement—easy for sitting and chatting—on the front porch, and Josie could imagine her dog sprawled out next to one as she had a cup of morning tea and worked on a blog post.