Present Danger

by Susan Andersen

  With a secret smile, she thought about the additional boost her self-assurance had received when he’d kissed her that night in her apartment. Granted, it was in an entirely different area, but she fiercely hugged to her breast that isolated proof of her desirability as a woman.

  “Anybody heard anything new on the caller?”

  Aunie swallowed the french fry she’d been nibbling and leaned forward to look at the speaker seated further down the table. “What caller?”

  Mary, a new friend who was seated on her right, turned her head to look at her, her round blue eyes even bigger than usual. “Haven’t you heard about the guy who’s been calling the female students here?”

  That prompted a niggling sense of familiarity, but Aunie couldn’t pinpoint its origin so she shook her head.

  Mary gave her a nudge. “Can I have a couple of your fries?” she requested and Aunie pulled the cardboard container along the table until it sat between them. “Thanks.” Mary helped herself.

  Holding several fries suspended between container and mouth, she said, “It’s really creepy, Aunie. Some guy keeps calling a bunch of the women students here. No one knows how he gets their numbers, but nearly a dozen women have filed complaints.” She leaned forward on her forearms and looked down the table. “Joe. Pass the ketchup, will ya?” She poked the fries into her mouth and half closed her eyes in appreciation of their salty flavor.

  “Obscene calls?” Aunie inquired.

  “Not really,” Mary replied with her mouth full, then self-consciously covered her lips with her fingers. “Sorry,” she mumbled around them and swallowed. Her face turned pink with embarrassment. “Jeez, not only am I eating your food, I’m acting like a pig while I’m doing it.”

  Aunie smiled. “Help yourself,” she invited. “I can’t finish them all anyway.” She butted Mary’s shoulder with her own. “And relax, Mary. Emily Post isn’t around, so who the heck cares if you have a couple fries in your mouth while you’re talkin’? I won’t tell if you don’t tell. I’m more interested in what you were sayin’.”

  With her natural friendliness, curly blonde hair, and pretty voluptuousness, Mary was outgoing and well-liked. She had a natural confidence that came of knowing herself to be popular. Sometimes, however, she couldn’t help comparing herself to Aunie’s daintiness and obvious breeding, and the mental comparison tended to make her feel oversized and clownish. She found herself trying not to appear as slovenly in her manners and speech in Aunie’s company, something she never particularly worried about with anyone else. Now, however, she grinned in appreciation of the way Aunie had rescued her from her own sense of awkwardness, filled with a warm glow of affection for her new friend. The more she got to know Aunie Franklin, the better she liked her.

  She had noticed her, of course, when Aunie had first entered their trig class a week after the semester had begun. Hell, who hadn’t? There was just something about her that had fascinated them all.

  She was drop-dead gorgeous for one thing, and for all her diminutive size, she had the type of bearing that attracted a lot of attention. The guys in their lunch group had practically salivated over her, but she’d seemed rich, reserved, and sort of stand-offish, so everyone had pretty much given her a wide berth.

  They’d sure talked about her, though. She appeared to be older than most of the students here and worlds more sophisticated. Her jeans were plain old Levi’s and Lees like everyone else’s, but she topped them with fabrics even the uninitiated could tell were ritzy. It was glaringly obvious she was from a very different background than the rest of them.

  Speculation had run rampant about her reasons for attending a dinky little community college when she looked more the exclusive, ivy-league type. Neither Mary nor her lunch partners had entertained any real hope of ever having their curiosity satisfied, however, as Aunie had always sat alone in the cafeteria during lunch, her nose in her textbooks, and rarely had Mary seen her speak to anyone.

  But she sure knew her stuff in the two classes they shared and it was obvious to everyone that she was smart. Therefore, when Mary ran into trouble understanding a particular assignment, she had picked Aunie to query about it. To her surprise, she had found her to be very friendly in a low-key sort of way.

  She’d half expected to be politely rebuffed, but instead Aunie had immediately sat down with her and explained the mathematical process needed to solve the problems. When Mary’d still had a difficult time grasping the concept, Aunie had demonstrated the process in a number of different ways until she’d finally hit on one that Mary understood. Her patience had been phenomenal. She hadn’t volunteered any private information during that time and she’d still sat off by herself at lunch, but she’d smiled at Mary when they’d caught each other’s eye and had stopped to talk if she were spoken to first. It seemed a ludicrous notion, but Mary began to wonder if her aloofness might not actually be shyness.

  Then the Monday after Thanksgiving, Aunie had approached her and asked if she’d be interested in being her study partner. Mary had agreed enthusiastically and offered to introduce her to the group with whom she ate lunch. Prepared to have Aunie reject the suggestion, Mary had been surprised when instead she’d accepted with every appearance of pleasure.

  In view of everything they’d said behind her back, the lunch group had been a little stiff in her presence at first. Her quiet warmth and graciousness had ultimately worked on them the way it had on Mary, however, and by degrees everyone had begun to relax around her. There was still a lot Mary didn’t know about Aunie, but she felt that they were nonetheless slowly becoming friends.

  “So, where was I?” she asked.

  “Oozing potatoes between your teeth,” Joe retorted and passed the ketchup.

  “What a charmer you are,” Aunie rebuked him in her mannerly way but took the sting out of her gentle reprimand with a smile. She prompted Mary, “I asked if the calls were obscene and you said not exactly.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Mary curled her lip at a flushed Joe before she turned her attention to Aunie. “The caller doesn’t make sexual suggestions or talk dirty, from what I’ve heard, but what he does is almost worse. He seems to know all sorts of personal stuff about the women he calls.” She shivered. “Can you imagine anything creepier than having some total stranger know everything about you? Take Alice Zablinski, for instance. She just got engaged the other night, and practically before her boyfriend finished putting the ring on her finger, this creep was on the phone describing the weight and shape of the stone.”

  “It was the next day that he called,” one of the girls sitting further down the table contradicted her.

  “Close enough.” Mary shrugged. “Aunie knew what I meant.” She leaned into the petite brunette at her side and murmured, “God, what a fussy attention to detail. My version has more flair, don’t you think?”

  Aunie’s dimples flashed in amusement. “Entirely more dramatic,” she agreed.

  Other students sitting at the table began to contribute stories they had heard about the man they’d nicknamed the Campus Caller. The whole affair sounded strange and disturbing, but Aunie was affected the way she might have been by one of those gory slasher movies that teenagers seemed to love. She was repulsed by the anonymous caller’s actions, but basically felt removed from them. Perhaps it was because she didn’t know any of the principals involved or perhaps it was simply because she had concerns of her own that seemed more pressing.

  Either way, she didn’t feel it had all that much to do with her.

  The next several weeks in Aunie’s life were a healing period. Determined to go forward rather than stagnate in fear, she put Wesley and the injustice the legal system had dealt her out of her mind, concentrating on the present. Her friendships with both Lola and Mary deepened, and her confidence grew daily.

  It used to be she mentally cringed at comments on her looks. She had always feared that, should they suddenly disappear, it would be discovered there was nothing of substance behind them and she�
��d be exposed as a fraud. Attractively cased, she’d been afraid people would say, but basically a nonperson. One didn’t have to be overly endowed in the intelligence department to realize that an accident of genes did not constitute a personal accomplishment.

  Recently, however, she’d discovered she possessed something much more consequential than good bones and flawless skin: She had a brain. It was a realization that made her feel truly substantial for perhaps the very first time in her life.

  It still amazed her that she should be drawn to math and computers, of all things. She hadn’t even seen a computer back in high school, except for a basic keyboarding class, and she’d barely scraped by in math. On the other hand, she had never taxed herself in an attempt to comprehend either. She’d taken her family’s assessment of her intelligence at face value and automatically assumed she was lacking in the necessary mental fortitude required for the precise sciences.

  She’d had no choice but to take a required math class when she’d signed up for college following her divorce from Wesley, and she’d enrolled in a computer course in an attempt to drag her skills kicking and screaming into the nineties. Determined to gain a well-rounded education, she had struggled to understand them at least well enough to get a passing grade. To her amazement, by the end of the year she’d begun to believe she had an actual aptitude for mathematics and computers. To test herself, she’d loaded her schedule with an abundance of both when she’d picked her courses at the community college in Seattle. Each day that passed with an increase in her comprehension skills added to her growing self-esteem. Now she was tentatively beginning to believe she might actually possess what it took to go the distance toward a goal she never would have dreamed, a few short months ago, she was smart enough to tackle. Software engineering.

  Mary’s friendship was an additional ego booster. Aunie was treated by her new friend as if she were a card-packing member of Mensa.

  One day, studying in Aunie’s apartment, Mary suddenly threw her pencil on the table and flopped back in her chair in disgust. “I don’t understand this stuff at all,” she snarled, plowing her fingers through her curly hair. “God, I’ll be lucky if I pull a C out of this course. Why can’t I be smart like you?” She scowled across the table. “Forget your dainty bone structure and that skin; I’d give a bundle to have half your brains.”

  “Oh, Mary, honestly?” Aunie’s dimples punched deep into her cheeks as she smiled radiantly at her friend. “I think that’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

  Mary propped her chin in her palm and chewed on her pinkie finger. “Oh, yeah, right,” she said skeptically. “Like you don’t know you’re the brain of the CC calculus circuit.”

  “It’s news to me,” Aunie replied with perfect honesty. “Until this past year, I never suspected I had any sort of brain at all.”

  “You kiddin’ me? I figured you for one of those whiz-kid genius types. Brains and beauty—what a gagger. I couldn’t figure out what you were doing at this rinky-dink community college.”

  “I’m here because my high school grades weren’t good enough to get me in anywhere else.” Aunie laughed. “Gawd, but you’re good for my ego.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Mary replied glumly, picking up her pencil. “Anytime it needs a stroke, just give me a jingle. But in the meantime, I really need you to help me understand this shit.”

  “C’mon, c’mon,” Mary muttered, leaning on the buzzer. “I didn’t slog through the rain for four stinking blocks for this.” There was still no answer. “Damn!”

  She hesitated, then pressed the button beneath the label that read Manager.

  Static crackled. “May I help you?”

  Mary leaned into the speaker. “Yes, please. My name is Mary Holloman … I’m a friend of Aunie’s. Apparently she’s not home and I was wondering if I could leave a message for her.”

  “She has told me of you,” the exotically accented voice replied in a calm, lilting cadence. “Please to come in. You will find her on the second floor learnin’ from the mons how to paint.” The intercom crackled again, then fell silent. An instant later the door buzzed and Mary pushed it open. As she climbed the stairs she thought to herself—for about the hundredth time—what an enigma Aunie Franklin was.

  Apparently, she’d discussed her with the woman with the accent; yet she’d never said a word to Mary in return about the exotic-sounding woman. Aunie had told her a little about her upbringing, enough to explain, anyway, why she was unceasingly flattered at Mary’s unshakable opinion of her as a brain. Mary had an intuitive feeling, however, that there was more to Aunie’s story than she had yet heard.

  She truly hoped that someday they’d be close enough for Aunie to trust her with the entire story of her life. She was endlessly interested in her and thought they had the potential for a deep and lasting friendship.

  “Dammit, Aunie, don’t slop!” Mary heard a masculine voice say irritably just before she reached the top of the stairs.

  “You bumped the ladder!”

  “I was nowhere near the damn ladder.”

  “Oh, sure. If that isn’t just like a man to weasel out of taking responsibility.” There was a rumble of choked laughter that was hastily turned into a deep-timbre cough. Then Aunie’s voice again, saying with sweet insincerity, “It was all my fault, Mistah Rydah, Ah’m sure. I am evah so sorry.”

  “You’ll be sorry, if you don’t stop with that mister bullshit. I’ve wised up to you, Magnolia—I know damn well you just do it to piss me off.”

  “Why, James, I’m appalled you should think such a thing.”

  “Like hell. You’re probably tickled pink that it works.”

  Mary stood a few steps away from the top of the stairs and eavesdropped with unabashed fascination. She and Aunie shared a kindred sense of humor and over the past few weeks they’d laughed together quite a bit. For the most part, however, she was accustomed to her friend’s habit of being gracious but somewhat distant to most of the people she came into contact with. She’d never before heard her quite like this, all feisty and argumentative. It was yet one more facet revealed in a multifaceted personality. Mary grinned and bounded up the remaining stairs.

  She caught sight of Aunie standing on a ladder between two men who looked like they’d be right at home in a street brawl, and she paused, eyeing her friend’s companions warily. The black man was gigantic and looked like he ate babies for breakfast. It probably had something to do with that bald, scarred head and massive physique. The other one, the blonde with the ponytail, while lankier and nowhere as tall as his dark-skinned buddy, was still solidly built; and his eyes, drilling holes at the moment into Aunie’s back, were not civilized. His expression suggested he was the type who’d dare to do just about anything. Mary was a little surprised that Aunie had the nerve to give him any lip—hell, to sass either of them, for that matter.

  Then she shrugged. First impressions weren’t always the best criteria to judge a person’s worth by… look how wrong she’d been about Aunie. Obviously, if Aunie was comfortable enough to jerk a few chains with impunity, then she must be fairly friendly with the two men. Mary grinned once again in a humorous sort of wonder. They weren’t exactly the type of company she’d have expected her well-bred little friend to be keeping.

  Mary set herself in motion once again. “I expected you to be crackin’ the books, Franklin,” she called as she strolled down the hallway. No one had noticed her arrival as they’d painted the wall, and in unison their heads swung around at the sound of her voice.

  “Mary!” Aunie’s voice was warm and welcoming. She set her paint pad carefully in the tray attached to her ladder and wiped her paint-splattered hands on the black smock she wore.

  “It’s a damn good thing you’re home,” Mary informed her as she walked up to the three of them. “I came to study with you for tomorrow’s final and I had to park four blocks away. Four blocks! It’s pouring out there and I wasn’t a happy camper when you didn’t answer
your buzzer. Luckily, there was a lady with a pretty accent in the manager’s apartment, and she told me what you were doing and let me in. My name is Mary,” she said in a friendly aside to the two men. “Who are you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Aunie said, climbing off the ladder. “I should have introduced you. This is my friend Mary Holloman,” she said to the men. “Mary, this is James Ryder and Otis Jackson. It was Otis’s wife Lola to whom you spoke.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Mary said and immediately turned back to Aunie. “What are you doing painting walls during finals week? I thought I’d find you hip-deep in textbooks.”

  “I needed a break from studying,” Aunie replied. “So Otis and James offered me the opportunity to learn how to paint.” She gestured at the wall behind them and smiled happily. “Isn’t it great? I’ve never done this before.”

  Puzzled by Aunie’s attitude, which seemed to suggest that a very special favor had been bestowed on her, Mary turned to study the two men. “Big of you to make her such a generous offer,” she said skeptically. Both of them just grinned, and their smiles gave Mary her first glimmer of the personalities behind the tough, street-aware exteriors. She couldn’t help smiling back before she returned her attention to Aunie. “Speaking of breaks, when’s your last final?”

  “Friday morning.”

  “My last one is on Thursday afternoon. Let’s go out Friday night and celebrate, whataya say?”

  “Just you and me?”

  “Yeah. Slap on some red lipstick and curl your hair. I know a good bar where the music’s hot and the men are good-lookin’.”