Warming Trend

by Karin Kallmaker

  Eve slowly turned her head to give Ani a long look. “You didn’t tell me the whole truth.”

  Ani, with a flash of anger over her clear distress, answered back, “I was going to, but you didn’t let me. You ran away.”

  Lisa held up a hand. “Truce—you two work that out on your own time. I think it’s time Eve and Tan heard the truth, Ani, don’t you? Because I think it’s going to be very interesting comparing notes.”

  Chapter 9

  Ani felt as if her heart had lodged somewhere in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t want to relive it all again, not after spending the entire journey telling Lisa. But really, she had no choice. It was such a cliché, but the only way out was through, and if she chickened out again, she deserved her fate. She’d already been stupidly wrong about Monica and Eve, and she ought to be happy she was wrong, but she couldn’t be until she’d told Eve the truth, finally.

  Lisa was obviously relishing her role as the next star of Law & Order with Eve and Tan as her witnesses. “Monica never gave either of you any reason to think there might be another story?” To Eve she added, “You, the woman Ani was in love with, you who were suffering in this horrible vacuum of silence and didn’t know what to think?”

  Eve shook her head. “No, I asked for details and you’re right, I didn’t get anything that wasn’t common knowledge. Like Tan said, it was always ‘Ani took them, now they’re destroyed’ and that was the end of the story.”

  Ani spoke through a throat that felt as if it was full of sand. “They were planted in her office. I took them and left them where I thought they’d be found, but they got destroyed instead.” She didn’t dare look at Eve.

  “Are you serious?” Tan reached across the table to grab one of Ani’s hands. “Why didn’t you tell anyone that?”

  “You know what they would have said. I was the only one who didn’t get searched right away. I got caught, so I ditched them in a panic. Or Professor Tyndell took them and put them there. She was covering for me, I was covering for her. People were saying I’d done it because I wanted to sleep with her, or I already was. Queers, you know, no morality,” she added bitterly. “Nobody was rational, especially me. And the dean, who I really think doesn’t like our kind, by the way, was very scary.”

  “You’re right about that. His diversity speeches are lip service.” Tan leaned back against the cushion again.

  There was a long silence and Ani realized she was holding her breath. She felt naked and under a spotlight, that a single harsh word from Eve would peel her to the bone.

  Eve moved fitfully in her seat, and finally said, “I’m very confused. I don’t know why I’m only now hearing this.”

  Ani said again, aware of Eve’s bitter tone and matching it with her own, “You didn’t give me a chance.”

  “Monica told me she blamed herself.” Eve was staring at a spot on the table somewhere between her glass and Tan’s. “You said that you did it for her.”

  “I did.” Ani coughed to hide a quaver in her voice. “Her work was and is important. She’s part of saving us from ourselves. Those notes being found in her office would have damaged her influence, possibly irreparably. I’d already been half framed. I thought if I arranged for someone else to find them maybe I could get us both out of it. If it didn’t work, it would still be blamed on me. I didn’t know they’d land in water.”

  Tan made an aha sort of sound. “Did Monica know about your plan?”

  “No. I mean, I asked her why putting them somewhere else to be found would hurt. She said not to touch them, then went to find the dean. I thought I knew better, and took them. And got them destroyed. I was devastated, I mean—it was research.”

  Eve sipped from her iced tea, the ice clinking against the glass as she set it down again. “I’m sorry, my brain isn’t tracking. They were planted in Monica’s office? Why wouldn’t she at least tell me that?”

  Lisa examined her nails. “Your guess is as good as mine. I find it so very fortuitous that she went to get the dean and yet didn’t tell him she’d found the notebook. Wouldn’t you have said that, very first thing? I think Ani did exactly what Monica wanted. Once Monica thought Ani had taken the bait and burned up the notes, she let everyone think Ani was guilty of the original theft.”

  Ani realized she’d never thought about what Monica might have told Eve. “She was protecting herself. Can you blame her? I’d already drawn all the blame onto me by being an idiot and getting the notes destroyed. Why should she tell anyone otherwise?”

  The other three women all looked at her with varying degrees of disbelief. Tan finally said, “There’s the issue of her being your advisor, and you being in her care and her obligation to give you basic guidance, which she didn’t do. But I know why she wouldn’t tell me, even privately. I’m an administrator, so I don’t technically work for the dean of the school, but I’ve signed contracts that require me to report academic frauds, like plagiarism, and falsified vitaes to the dean. She tells me, I have to report or risk losing my job if it comes out that I knew. But I haven’t a clue why she wouldn’t have told Eve. Eve was the one person who could have used some comfort. Eve probably doesn’t know they were threatening to make Ani pay back her scholarship. I thought Ani was a kid who’d made a mistake, and would have happily advised her of her rights—been her ombudsman, so to speak. That’s one of the other roles I play.”

  Ani ducked her head from the I-tried-to-tell-you-but-you-wouldn’t-listen look that Tan gave her.

  “I didn’t know.” Eve turned her glass on the table, apparently studying the droplets on its exterior.

  Ani was momentarily lost in the study of Eve’s hands, the strong, agile fingers. Like there always had been, a few tiny burns dotted the backs of Eve’s hands. One of their nightly rituals had been Ani noting and kissing the boo-boos. She abruptly missed it fiercely, though it was such a little thing.

  “Even so,” Eve said, “I’m not sure there’s much point to this. What does it matter now?”

  “Ani lost everything,” Lisa said vehemently. Ani tried to quell her with a gesture, but she rushed on. “She didn’t take the notes to begin with. Someone else did, and they got away with it. The only person who has ever suffered is Ani. Monica made sure of that.”

  Tan was shaking her head. “I don’t see it. I’m not saying it’s not possible. But I don’t see where you get that.”

  “I know her type. She exploited what existed.” Lisa turned to Ani. “Why didn’t you call Eve after you went back to GlacierPort?”

  “They took my phone.”

  Eve and Tan both nodded in corroboration.

  “So Ani had been basically under house arrest, with no phone, all day, and neither of you knew.”

  Tan nodded. “I didn’t, and I told Ani that was completely wrong.”

  “It conveniently made her dependent on Monica for all her news, plus the nimrods who were taping hate messages to her door. And I’m going to bet that Monica is the only one Eve got to talk to besides Ani.” Lisa cocked her head in Eve’s direction. “Did you talk to her? Did she tell you Ani couldn’t call you?”

  Eve had stilled. After a hard swallow, she said, “No, quite the opposite. She seemed very surprised that I hadn’t heard from Ani. I’ve never…wondered about that. Ani didn’t have a phone, and Monica knew it, but she thought Ani would have called me. I didn’t find out they’d taken her phone until I got there.”

  Lisa steepled her fingers, a gesture that Ani found intensely irritating. “And how did that make you feel?”

  “I didn’t know what to feel. Monica told me Ani had taken the notes and it looked pretty bleak, but she kept saying that she thought I should hear it all from Ani. But Ani never called. I thought—I guess I thought she was too ashamed to call me. Or other people were more important.”

  “But I couldn’t call.”

  Lisa waved a silencing hand, and gave Eve one of those laser looks Ani had learned to be wary of. “When you talked to Ani and Ani said she’d
done it for her accomplished, gorgeous rock star professor’s sake, what did you think?”

  “You’ve been watching too much Court TV,” Ani muttered even as her head was spinning.

  “What does it matter?” Eve leaned forward, arms wrapped around her midsection. “Fine. I thought maybe Ani did have feelings for Monica that she’d never told me about.”

  “Let’s get real. You thought maybe Ani didn’t love you.”

  Ani gaped. How could Eve had possibly thought that? To her amazement, Eve nodded as tears welled up in her eyes. Ani wanted to pull her close—she couldn’t stand to see Eve cry. She’d been the cause of all the clouds in those sky-blue eyes. Without thinking, she said, “Oh, honey, I wasn’t in love with her. I was trying to save her career, though. I thought it was the right thing to do. How could you think I didn’t love you?”

  Eve wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I thought you loved her, and you couldn’t love us both. There was no other explanation for you stealing the notes. That was so unlike you that I thought…”

  Lisa was nodding. “It was something so wrong that you thought she had been motivated by the biggest force there is—love. Only love would make Ani steal something from a dying man.”

  A tear trickled down Eve’s cheek, and Ani wanted in the worst way to wipe it away with her thumb. “She said so herself, when I saw her. That she’d done it for Monica’s sake. Jeopardized everything for another woman.”

  “But that’s not what I did.” Ani swallowed down her own tears. “I moved something that had been stolen. I did it for the professor, the scientist, someone who might help save the planet, literally. Not the woman. I still got the notebook destroyed.”

  Tan burst out with, “I still don’t get it. If the secret is that the notes turned up in Monica’s office and Ani inadvertently got them destroyed, then why wouldn’t Monica just say so—to Eve at least. To some folks, here and there. Someone tried to destroy her career, after all. That’s the kind of thing you get into the gossip mill, so the person who tried knows that you know, and they failed.”

  “Finally,” Lisa said triumphantly. “Finally, someone is asking the right questions.” She gave Tan a beaming smile.

  Feeling detached, Ani watched Tan’s blush start from her neck and work up. She might have commented but she was too flummoxed by learning Eve’s state of mind to say more than, “What?”

  Lisa spoke as if Ani were four. “Monica told you one thing. She told Eve something else. She told you that your only choice was to leave or they’d make you pay back a whole lot of money for your scholarship. The two of you never compared notes, and you were so isolated and scared you stopped listening to people who wanted to help, including your girlfriend. I’m saying that Monica didn’t want you to be helped. She wanted you gone.”

  Ani felt inside something that was a perfect match to the small, short whimper that escaped Eve. “But why would she do all that?”

  Lisa spread her hands. “Because she was hiding something bigger.”

  Ani joined Tan and Eve in leaning forward expectantly.

  Lisa rolled her eyes. “People, you’ve had three years to figure this out. Took me thirty minutes. Oh, for heaven’s sake. She took the notes.”

  Then, as if she hadn’t been clear enough, she added for good measure, “Duh!”

  “Prove me wrong,” Lisa said for at least the fortieth time.

  Eve looked up from flipping quick salmon hash in her favorite copper skillet. “To be honest, something about Monica has always made me uneasy, so I’m not arguing with you.”

  Eve’s unease with Monica was news to Ani. “You never said.”

  “It wasn’t important. You admired her very much, but you were with me.”

  “I just—” Ani turned to Lisa again. “I just can’t believe she’d do that.”

  Tan, who hadn’t stopped looking at Lisa the way Tonk looked at Ani’s shoes, said, “I don’t want to believe it either. But I think the whole cruise thing was a lie, Eve. I think she didn’t want you and Ani to have this conversation, let alone a conversation three years ago.”

  “She called again today and wanted me to go out to dinner.” Eve seasoned the hash, then spiraled it out onto a plate. Ani hated the distraction of their talking—she wanted to watch Eve move in her kitchen again. It was a delight to watch her pour art and science into her food like an alchemist, and watch those graceful, precise hands working magic. But talk they must, because the part of her not fascinated with Eve’s hands had a headache to beat the band.

  Tan accepted the steaming dish gratefully. “Thanks, really. I was famished. When Lisa called I was about to grab some late lunch, so I skipped it and made up a doctor’s appointment to leave early.”

  Eve gave Lisa a puzzled look that she transferred to Ani. Ani met her gaze, but didn’t know what to make of it. Inside, a little voice was saying, with increasing intensity, Monica took three years from you both. She broke something you can’t mend. Every time she looked at Eve, she flushed at the memory of that hug, when their skin had tried to do the talking for them.

  “I don’t know why she invested in the restaurant, to be honest. I was catering a party and mentioned that this location was available, just in passing.”

  “Guilt?” Tan swallowed a mouthful of hash and gave a satisfied sigh. “Or maybe she wanted to be sure she’d hear if Ani came back.”

  Eve, her eyes narrowed, asked, “How do we know her account of the so-called accident is right?”

  “Now you’re talking.” Lisa, who’d been leaning elegantly against the counter, made a show of filling a glass with water, placing it on a tray, then delivering it to Tan with a flourish. “How do we know?”

  “Inquest,” Tan said, after she thanked Lisa for the water. “He died of blood loss from cuts and blunt force trauma to the lower body sustained in the ice slide. The rate of blood loss was rapid. The coroner speculated he’d only been conscious for perhaps five minutes, and died in less than fifteen.”

  Ani was shaking her head, but she was not sure if it was in denial or just a reflection of her rising anger and dismay. “Maybe she just took advantage of the situation. Except she was trapped in the ice too. It was clear that she had been.”

  “But she got free, and could have taken the notebook then. Kenbrink was dying, or already dead.” Tan looked thoughtful. “Maybe events just got out of hand. Once she got back, she didn’t know what to do.”

  “So she framed me. Didn’t tell me not to leave GlacierPort yet. Didn’t tell me to bring my pack when I came back. Told me not to do anything with the notebook, but dang, she really wished it would go away somehow.”

  “Will no one rid me of this ignorant priest?” Lisa glanced around the abruptly silent kitchen. “Henry the Second? Thomas Becket? Am I the only person here with any kind of liberal arts education?”

  “I saw that movie,” Tan said. “The soldiers took it to mean the king wanted Becket dead, so they killed him.”

  Lisa beamed. “And?”

  “The king denied that was what he wanted.”

  “Hell.” Something in Ani snapped. “What’s the point? We can’t prove any of this. You know we can’t. I destroyed the notebook, and it might have had her fingerprints on it—more than just the cover, if she looked through it at all.”

  Lisa looked at Ani. “There’s one thing that still puzzles me.”

  A ceaseless barrage of disbelief, feelings of betrayal and aching scars of isolation were all pounding behind Ani’s eyes. She wanted to yell something, but if she did she knew she would run out of voice long before her words made any sense. Trying to sound calm, she asked, “What would that be, Mr. Monk?”

  “How did Monica get the notebook into her office?”

  Ani blinked at Lisa. “I assumed she didn’t get as thoroughly searched, being above suspicion.”

  “The dean’s a guy who doesn’t like lesbians, and he knows Monica was alone with Kenbrink for a while. Why wouldn’t he search all of her gear, and her?”
>
  Tan chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “I was a witness, and the search was thorough. Every bit of her gear. A female security guard patted her down, and she was first, to set an example of cooperation. People who were searched moved on to one of the study rooms to wait. She couldn’t have stashed it with someone else, then retrieved it before they were searched.” Tan finished up the hash and took the plate to the sink to rinse. “You’re right, Lisa, I don’t know how she got it into her office by the next morning.”

  Eve looked up from drying her frying pan. “I remember that Ani was toward the back of the arriving pack, with the last sled. But she broke away from the main group. I wasn’t paying attention to anything but her. I picked up her pack and took her home. If anyone tried to stop us, I missed it.”

  “There was a lot of confusion,” Tan admitted. “Several people got to the parking lot, but there was an assistant there to tell them to go back. I think you two must have been in the upper lot by then.”

  Eve nodded. “I always parked there.”

  “Do you know when Monica figured out Ani wasn’t there to be searched?”

  Tan nodded. “It was late—around ten. Ani wasn’t in her dorm room, and I gave Monica Eve’s phone number from the emergency contact file. She said she called and got no answer.”

  The pan clattered out of Eve’s hand with an angry crack. “She didn’t call until the morning. Six o’clock in the morning, when Ani and I were still half asleep.”

  Ani watched Eve reclaim the pan with an apologetic caress. She was heartened that Eve remembered the details so vividly. “So maybe she didn’t single me out in advance. I was the front runner in the circumstantial evidence is all.” At first, Ani thought the idea was comforting. It eased part of her consternation to think that if Monica had needed to set someone up, she hadn’t chosen her deliberately. On the other hand, it really felt rotten to have gone through what she did simply because she was convenient.