Extra Credit

by Maggie Barbieri

  “Inheriting my crazy family is one thing, but getting the family of my ex-wife, an even crazier bunch, is not something you should have to deal with.”

  I couldn’t disagree, but for the sake of marital harmony, I protested ever so slightly. “No. It’s fine. She’s the mother of your children.”

  “Still…”

  I pulled him tighter. “None of us could have anticipated this turn of events, Crawford. We’ll deal with it, and then we’ll go back to the way things were.”

  “How were they?”

  “Boring. Lacking dead bodies.”

  “I hope you’re right,” he said, just before drifting off to sleep.

  In the morning, after I showered and dressed, I went outside to pick up the papers that we had delivered, looking through them as I brewed a big pot of coffee. Both of us had to work today, in spite of the previous day’s events, and neither of us had slept very well. As was often the case after I had a migraine, my head felt hollow and my stomach a little queasy; I mentally took stock of what my day might bring in terms of stress and determined it should shape up to be pretty calm. I would beg off office hours after my last class, a two o’clock Senior Seminar, and book it back home to spend some time on the couch with Trixie and a book that I had started over the summer and never finished. If any day called for playing the couch potato, today was it.

  Crawford looked worse than I felt, but he was up, showered, and dressed at the normal time, taking his gun out of the kitchen cabinet where he stowed it and affixing it to his belt before heading to the precinct. “How fast for coffee?” he asked.

  “About three minutes,” I said. “You okay to go to work?”

  “Don’t have a choice,” he said, turning his phone on and looking at the screen. “Message,” he said, dialing into his voice mail. He looked at me while he listened, an expression crossing his face that told me he didn’t really understand what was being said. He hit a button and played the message again.

  I took an insulated coffee cup from the drain board beside the sink and made him some coffee to go. He snapped his phone shut.

  “Remember when you said that we would deal with this and then go back to the way things were?” he asked.

  I nodded, the smell of the coffee all of sudden becoming unpleasant.

  “You were wrong.” He put his phone back in his pocket. “Mount Vernon PD found two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in Chick’s mattress.”

  Six

  Jaroslav “Chick” Stepkowski was buried from the chapel at St. Thomas. Raised Catholic but not really a churchgoer, Chick was without a place to call his own spiritually. That’s when having a best friend who is a former priest comes in handy; one call to my dear friend Kevin McManus and not only did we have a church, we had a priest to officiate, as well as a few altar servers who made sure the church was prepared for the funeral. Other celebrants might have had a problem with suicide, but Kevin and the guy he pressed into service did not. Nor did Kevin or his friend care that Chick hadn’t been inside a church since his confirmation thirty years previous. Father Bracca, who was a friend of Kevin’s from the seminary and now sat on the board of a private Catholic high school in Manhattan, had taken the time to drive north to the Bronx to give Chick the send-off the tortured man deserved and provide the family some solace during a difficult time.

  The president of the college, Mark Etheridge, an old nemesis of mine who was now something just shy of a friend, had given us permission to have Chick’s funeral on a weekend when students wouldn’t be in the building. In recognition of my service to the school, he also sprang for a vast array of gorgeous flower arrangements and the use of the organist from his own church, who blew the doors off with her rendition of “Precious Lord, Take Me Home.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the place, except maybe for Crawford, who looked like he was having an out-of-body experience, an expression he had been wearing since we had discovered Chick.

  It had been a tough week, to say the least. I had gone to school, but Meaghan and Erin had taken the week off to spend with their distraught mother, surrounded by Stepkowskis, who in the light of day didn’t seem as raucous or unruly as they had at my house. Another brother, Gabriel, flew in from Savannah, his home for the past twenty years, with his wife and two grown sons, all of them staying close to Christine so that they could mourn together.

  We stood in the rotunda outside of the chapel watching as the funeral director brought the casket down and put it into the hearse. His assistant, a guy who had ex-cop written all over him, instructed us to follow in our cars to the cemetery, ten miles or so north of school. I turned to look for Crawford and spied him off to the side with another cop-looking guy, deep in conversation. I caught his eye and gave him the high sign that we needed to leave. As he separated from the man and the conversation, I overheard him say, “Keep me posted.”

  I wouldn’t expect anyone to understand why I had a friend in the Westchester medical examiner’s office, but I did. His name was John “Mac” McVeigh, and he was an old-school gentleman, someone who felt very comfortable at funerals and who always knew the right thing to say. I saw him in the throng of people walking down the rotunda stairs and ran to catch up with him, leaving Crawford to follow behind me. We were between the second and first floors when I grabbed his arm.

  “Mac!” I linked my arm in his.

  “Good to see you, Alison,” he said, quickly amending, “but not under these circumstances, of course.”

  We got to the first floor of the building, and I lowered my voice so that the other mourners couldn’t hear us. “What are you doing here?”

  “Mr. Stepkowski was one of mine,” he said, and by that, I knew that he had performed the autopsy. “When I read the obituary in the paper and saw that he was the uncle to Meaghan and Erin Crawford, I did a little digging until I found out the connection.” He laid a hand over mine. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Thank you, Mac.”

  “We took exceptionally good care of him,” he said, but he didn’t need to. Mac took exceptionally good care of everyone who came through the morgue; I was sure of that.

  Christine drifted by, and I watched as Crawford put his arm around her slim shoulders. She was shattered, and I didn’t know if she would be able to put the pieces back together, knowing that prior to his death, she carried a heavy burden where her brother was concerned.

  “Suicide?” I asked, still not convinced.

  Mac nodded sadly, his blue eyes kind.

  “Well, thank you for coming, Mac.” I leaned in and gave him a kiss. “We need to have that lunch we keep talking about.”

  “You know where to find me,” he said and walked off, his head bowed.

  I found Crawford outside of the building on the front driveway, helping Christine into the limousine. Tim was idling in his minivan behind the limo that would take Christine and the girls to the cemetery. Crawford and I walked to his car and fell into line behind the hearse.

  “Was that Mac?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Who were you talking to?”

  “Lead detective on the case. Name’s Minor.”

  “He have anything to say?”

  “Nothing that I haven’t heard already,” he said, his eyes on the road leading off the campus.

  It took a few seconds for it to dawn on me. “Why is there a lead detective? Why is there a case?”

  Crawford angled the car onto a narrow side street, getting out of the funeral queue. He knew where he was going, obviously, and didn’t need or want to be in a line of slow-moving cars. “It’s about the money.”

  “Seriously?” I asked.

  “It’s always about the money,” he said, something I didn’t understand. “The fact that there is so much of it and that it was hidden? That’s a problem.”

  I guessed that made sense, but what if Chick was just a strange guy who liked to carry his money around with him? He wouldn’t be the first person to have done that. My uncle Guillaume, according to my late mo
ther, had once hid four thousand dollars in American quarters in a barn way out in eastern Quebec. Yes, Uncle Guillaume now resided in an assisted-living facility for people who couldn’t take care of themselves from day to day, but maybe he was onto something. Maybe the American quarter would become extinct, going the way of the Susan B. Anthony dollar and other arcane bits of currency that we all remembered but none of us had. Maybe, once he died, I would inherit a huge fortune, all in quarters.

  “I can see your wheels turning over there,” Crawford said.

  I was staring out the window. “Who, me? No, no wheels turning here,” I said, but I was lying. I wondered if those four thousand American quarters had been found and if so, if there was more where that came from. My mother wasn’t around, so I couldn’t ask her, and Uncle Guillaume thought that it was 1967 and that he was still harboring one of my cousins from the States who was avoiding the draft. Mr. McLaughlin, Uncle Guillaume’s next-door neighbor, didn’t appreciate being called a draft dodger every day, but to my uncle, Mr. McLaughlin looked no different than my cousin Tommy from Traverse City, Michigan, and that was presenting real problems for my cousin Jeannette, Uncle Guillaume’s daughter.

  We pulled into the cemetery and lined our cars up one in back of another, all of the doors opening almost simultaneously as we emerged to stand by the gravesite. We gathered in a semicircle around the casket and the open grave into which it would be placed, which was covered with a white blanket. Tim had his arm around Christine; thankfully, none of their children were with them today, and Tim could attend to his wife without having to enlist the help of my ever-gracious husband, whom I needed at the moment. The remaining Stepkowski brothers, cut from the same stocky genetic mold, stood shoulder to shoulder while the priest recited some prayers, commending Chick to the gates of heaven. Behind them, at a safe but watchful distance, was the cop I had seen at the funeral, along with some of his compadres, who had appeared out of nowhere to witness the burial.

  It was strange; I had to admit, even with the precedent of Uncle Guillaume and his hoarding of quarters. First the ten grand and now a quarter mil in a mattress in a fleabag apartment in a bad part of Mount Vernon. What had Chick been up to for ten years? The years before that? Christine’s recollections were sketchy, and I couldn’t tell if that was on purpose or not. Selective memory? She was definitely the odd man out in that clan and had created a lovely life for herself, first with Crawford and then with the somber and silent Tim. Did she avoid thinking about the upbringing she had endured in the midst of a brood of ruffians? Or did she really not know?

  I had no leg to stand on. I had endured a long marriage with my eyes closed, figuratively, thinking that my husband’s lack of interest in me was due to our busy schedules and our pursuit of academic standing at St. Thomas. What I knew deep in my heart, but refused to acknowledge for the longest time, was that I had married a scoundrel, a cheating one at that. If Christine was indeed deluding herself into thinking that Chick had gone underground for a ten-year spa retreat only to reappear for precisely no good reason whatsoever, who was I to judge or deny her that little fantasy?

  The prayers concluded, and we started to go our separate ways. Christine caught up to us. “Would you join us for lunch?” she asked, her eyes beseeching us. We were about to decline when she played her trump card. “I know the girls would love it if you came.”

  I looked at Crawford; this wasn’t my decision to make. I could almost see his mind working; he wanted out of here and fast, and he was trying to figure out a way to say no. Apparently, Christine figured out what he was thinking, too, having been married to him long enough to know what the look on his face meant at any given time. She waved the suggestion off. “Forget it. Another time. I’ll get the girls back to school,” she said, and although I wanted to detect a hint of passive-aggressiveness so I could do something to make her less than perfect in my mind, there was nothing there, just a sensitivity to the fact that we would want to get out of there as quickly as we could.

  I held my breath, hoping that Crawford wouldn’t capitulate, and he didn’t disappoint. “Thanks for understanding, Christine. It’s been a long week,” he said.

  She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek, then turned to me and hugged me tightly. “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  Crawford and I walked back to the car, and I wondered if this would be the last time we would have to endure the company of the Stepkowskis. I thought of asking Crawford but then thought better of it. I looked out the window as we drove through the rolling hills of the cemetery, spotting a lone woman sitting on a hill beside a soaring stone statue of an archangel, her face obscured by a large black hat, her long blond hair cascading down her back, hair that you would see on a Barbie doll or a woman who was in a certain kind of “show biz,” for lack of a better term. She was tall and voluptuous, her curves not hidden by her black pants and gray shirt. She was leaning nonchalantly at the foot of the angel, Michael the archangel, if I had to guess, studying alternately her manicure and something in the distance. I turned my head to see what she was looking at, but it wasn’t necessary.

  The only thing in the distance was Chick Stepkowski’s casket, all alone, waiting to be put in the ground.

  Seven

  I drove with Meaghan back to school on the Monday after the funeral, as she’d stayed with us on Sunday night. She was a bit more circumspect in her reaction to Chick’s death than her sister, whose only question to us as we put her cranky little ass back into her minivan was “Now do we get to keep the money?”

  Crawford had slammed the door shut, but not before asking her which charity she’d like to donate it to, just to mess with her head. She had driven off in a purple rage, muttering undoubtedly about all the things she could do with five grand, starting with declaring her independence from the parental units in her life.

  Crawford went back to work, investigating the untimely deaths of people he didn’t know, which was just the way he liked it. I returned to my slate of teaching, including the creative writing class, determining who had talent and who didn’t; I wasn’t expecting anything in the way of surprises, and that’s just the way I liked it.

  I grabbed my messenger bag and made my way up to the fourth floor of my building, where I was met by Sister Mary and the woman she had brought by my office over a week earlier and about whom I had promptly forgotten. They were waiting by the door of the classroom, expectant looks on both their faces.

  Mary was all piss and vinegar, just like always; the smell of her Jean Naté was particularly pungent today. “Alison, thank you for joining us,” she said, insinuating that I was late. I wasn’t. “This is Ms. Bannerman—”

  The woman interjected, “Please. Call me Mary Lou.”

  Mary didn’t seem to mind her interruption; God forbid I should jump in with any germane information, though. Her head might explode. “Mary Lou is the new student I told you about who would like to audit your creative writing class.”

  “Audit?” I asked. That was the first I heard of that. It meant Mary Lou was using the creative writing course at St. Thomas as her own writing workshop. If she wanted to workshop her stuff with a bunch of kids, there was no one stopping her, but I wondered why a nattily turned-out woman who was closer to my age than that of the other students would choose our little university rather than a Gotham Writers’ Workshop class or even an online critique group.

  She anticipated my question or saw the puzzled look on my face, because she had an answer for all of that. “My kids are in college, so I have a lot of free time on my hands, and my mother was a ‘Tommy.’” She smiled at some memory that she didn’t share. “I have a lot of fond memories of St. Thomas. The annual Visit with Santa in Memorial Hall, the Easter egg hunt on East Lawn … I love it here.”

  This woman really knew her St. Thomas fun facts.

  “And I’m writing a novel,” she proclaimed with so much joy it made my heart hurt.

  “Great!” I returned in kind, noting that Ma
ry was looking at me like if I made one false move—or didn’t respond in the way she thought was appropriate given the situation—she would devour me whole. “I’m thrilled that you’re in my class,” I said, channeling my inner Lee Strasberg. I motioned toward the classroom. “Please. Join us.”

  Mary seemed satisfied by this incredible acting display and stomped off in her old-lady nun shoes, giving one backward glance that was both intimidating and hilarious at the same time. I stifled a giggle as I followed Mary Lou Bannerman, the next great American novelist, into the classroom. She took a seat right in the front row, just as I knew she would, and turned around to smile at the rest of the students, who wouldn’t have noticed if Chewbacca had entered, let alone a middle-aged dilettante who was the daughter of an alumna.

  “Good morning, class,” I said. “This is Mrs. Bannerman—”

  “Mary Lou,” she interjected.

  “Mary Lou,” I said, “and she will be joining us for the semester. Let’s all give a warm welcome to Mary Lou.”

  There was a mixture of “good morning, Mrs. Mary Lou,” and a bunch of other interesting non sequiturs, but that was as good as it was going to get. I got down to business.

  Mary Lou was an apt pupil, just as I knew she would be; the older students usually are. I talked about our plan to generate a short story by the end of the following week, highlighting some of my favorites to give them guidance as they thought about their own. I asked a few students what they thought they would write about and got some interesting answers.

  Mary Lou raised her hand. “So we will be doing novels at some point, right?” she asked.

  “Well, we’ll start with short stories,” I said, “but if you find you have something there that can be turned into a longer work, feel free to keep going with your plot and characters.”

  She jotted some notes down in a Vera Bradley notebook; her pen was a very expensive and very large Montblanc. She looked up at me expectantly.

  “Would you like to share what you’ll be writing about?” I asked.