Extra Credit

by Maggie Barbieri

  Like now. The harrumph that was building in my chest stayed lodged there because I knew that what he said was true.

  “As big a stiff as ever,” he said, and I bristled. Crawford. Couldn’t be anyone else. Everyone in Christine’s family was the opposite of “stiff.” For the life of me, I couldn’t think of an adjective that would adequately describe them. I also wanted to tell Tim that if you looked up “stiff” in the dictionary, a picture of his tense, unsmiling face was right beside it.

  “It’s with the public administrator. As soon as that is settled, it should be ours. Sit tight.” I heard the squeal of the chair’s springs as he turned around to face the door. I hustled toward the bathroom, which I found without trouble, and I locked myself inside.

  I turned toward the toilet and was confronted by a little child who looked suspiciously like a troll. I did the only thing that someone in that situation could do. I screamed.

  The child’s face melted slowly into a mask of tragedy and horror, a shriek trapped at the back of her own throat waiting to be expelled. I held my breath. “Shhhh … shhhh … shhhh!” I said, thinking that I would put my hand over her mouth before she could let the noise out, thought better of it, and put my hands over my own mouth, pantomiming silence.

  It was all for naught. The scream came out in one stunning and mighty roar, at a pitch that I was sure most humans, besides myself, couldn’t hear. I was wrong. Tim emerged from his office, banging on the bathroom door, probably thinking that an intruder was still in the house. I opened the door, the sounds of little—what was her name, anyway?—whatever-her-name-was obliterating any explanation I could give the husband of my husband’s ex-wife. He raced past me and scooped her up, covering her head with kisses while she screamed into his ear about the lady who scared her.

  Seriously? I scared you? I wanted to ask. Try looking into the face of a troll when your bladder’s protesting. That will scare the life out of you; I guarantee it. I did a quick inventory. A mental excursion to my nether regions confirmed that no, I had not wet my pants.

  Tim finally exited with the aforementioned troll, and I took care of business. She was still outside wailing in the hallway when I emerged, and I tried to look concerned, but really, her reaction was way over the top. I gave her a look that said that we were never going to be friends and started for the stairs. I returned to the first floor, where Christine must have missed the trauma of her troll/child, because she was deep in conversation with Crawford, a.k.a. “the stiff.”

  Takes one to know one, Tim.

  He didn’t look too stiff at the moment. Au contraire, he and Christine were laughing and joking, and she didn’t look traumatized at all, considering her house had been broken into and her downstairs powder room was out of service for the time being.

  “Sorry for scaring the … little one,” I said.

  “Oh, that,” Christine said. “I heard her crying. Tim was up there, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She sleepwalks. It’s crazy. We run into her at all hours of the night. It’s like seeing one of those undead kids in The Shining.” She laughed.

  That was an apt description, come to think of it.

  Christine stood. “Thanks so much for coming. I know it’s been weird since the girls’ birthday. I promise not to bother you anymore.”

  “Really?” I asked. It wasn’t until Crawford threw me a look that I realized I had said it out loud.

  She must have thought I was kidding, because she didn’t seem upset at all. “Really. Thanks. You two have been amazing.”

  “That’s us,” I said. “The amazing duo.”

  She showed us out, and I could barely wait until the doors were closed to tell Crawford what I had heard. Well, everything except the part about him being a stiff. He didn’t need to hear that. He kind of already knew it.

  “Did you hear that before or after you scared the living daylights out of the kid?” he asked. “It sounded as if she were being stabbed to death.”

  “Christine didn’t seem too concerned,” I said.

  “She knew Tim was up there. They prefer him anyway,” he said. “Even after all this time, they still don’t consider Christine their mother, and she’s still adapting to raising someone else’s children.”

  I let that sink in. I hadn’t had the luxury of “adapting”; shortly after our marriage, Christine had taken off for London with Tim, leaving me with Meaghan and Erin and everything that came with being their stepmother. “So she doesn’t care that the kid was screaming bloody murder?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “I’m not criticizing her—”

  He cut me off. “Yes, you are.”

  Well, if I was? What did that mean? I decided to change the subject, because if I knew anything, it was when a fight was brewing, just waiting to break out. “It sounds to me like Tim is banking on getting Chick’s money,” I said.

  Crawford took a minute to decide whether or not he wanted to respond. “They probably will. Christine is the sole beneficiary in Chick’s will.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  “She told me,” he said, merging into the right lane on 95. Slowly, he moved over to the left lane. Crawford is a left-laner all the way; years of driving a police car at top speeds had conditioned him to speed even when there was no need.

  “Did Tim know that?”

  “How could he not?” he asked. “They’re married.”

  I didn’t say anything, my mind working out the details of that little admission.

  He put a hand up in my direction. “Stop. Right now. I know what you’re thinking.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “That he was murdered. That Tim had something to do with it. That Christine may have been right all along.”

  Maybe. But not in that order. I think I may have come to the conclusion that Christine may have been right all along first.

  He continued, perturbed. “Chick was crazy. Always was, ever since the day I met him. Who knows where he got the money? Who cares?”

  “Are Christine and Tim having money problems?” I asked, first out of curiosity and then because I wanted to know exactly how much my husband’s ex-wife had been telling him about her personal life.

  His answer made me happy. “How would I know?” He passed a slower-moving car on the right and returned to the left lane. “All I know is that I think it’s weird that there were two break-ins at two separate but related locations, and that nothing was taken.” He looked over at me. “Yes, I think it’s weird,” he admitted, which he hadn’t done prior to this moment.

  At least we agreed on something.

  Twenty-One

  Why it had never occurred to me before I don’t know—maybe because I hadn’t cared?—but I threw the name Jaroslav Stepkowski into the search engine on my school computer and waited to see what I might find out about our dearly departed Chick. Up until now, I hadn’t really cared to investigate Chick’s backstory, but with the situation becoming less clear and the details of his death becoming more suspect—in my mind and Christine’s, anyway—I thought that doing a little background check, the kind that an average citizen like myself could do with a computer and a little spare time, would be in order.

  Tim’s overheard conversation led my mind in several different directions: Ponzi scheme, bankruptcy, maxed-out credit cards. Why else would he want or need the money so badly? Was he playing it fast and loose at work with clients’ money and so needed to hedge his bets, so to speak? Or did he just want to buy a new speedboat or something equally ridiculous, in the throes of a midlife crisis? Pondering all of this and coming up empty, I turned my attention back to my search on Chick.

  Searching yielded little in terms of information. Chick’s wedding announcement from years before had been in the Times. Fancy. I noted that he had gotten married on exactly the same day in exactly the same year that I had married my ex. (We were not in the Times, but we were in the local paper and in my parents’ church�
�s bulletin. That’s as fancy as we got.) Chick’s ex-wife was a blowzy-looking blonde in a really tight strapless wedding gown that managed to make her look both slutty and gone-to-seed. Chick was slimmer than when I had met him and had a full head of black hair that he had styled in a modified mullet.

  How they had ended up in the Times was beyond me until I noticed that his frowzy bride, the aptly named Sassy Du Pris (which I suspected was a stage name; the type of stage I could only venture a guess at), came from a wealthy, albeit louche, family from the South who had made their fortunes in porta-potties. It was all right there in black and white, but not in so many words. Farther down in the article, Chick was identified as having been the director of marketing for Sans-a-Flush. Why Mrs. Stepkowski, née Du Pris, needed to be onstage was something I would have to figure out later, but that gal had “stripper” written all over her, from her tacky weave down to her Lucite-heeled wedding shoes.

  The thing that caught my eye was her hair, a mountain of blond spun sugar, piled high atop her head and slung over her right shoulder in a modified Martha Washington kind of ’do that doesn’t look good on too many people, Sassy included. I flashed back to Chick’s funeral and the woman standing by the archangel gravestone, studying her manicure. Had Sassy Du Pris, long out of the picture, made a brief appearance at Chick’s burial? If so, why hadn’t she made herself known? More importantly, did I really care to find out?

  I decided that rather than ruminate on the boring subject of Chick’s ex-wife visiting the cemetery where he was laid to rest, I would find out more about the bride’s family’s company. Who doesn’t want to learn everything they possibly could about porta-potties? I went to the company Web site, which boasted, “You’ll feel like a king when you sit on our throne!” I wondered if Chick had come up with that witticism. What a wordsmith.

  After the wedding announcement, there was nothing of note in the search engine. Just your basic annual report links and details of the company’s win in an intercompany softball league. Apparently, Chick could throw some heat and had led Sans-a-Flush to the regional championship. Before I could go any further, there was a knock at the door, and Meaghan stuck her head in.

  “Hi. Do you have a minute?” she asked.

  I pushed away from the computer. “Sure. Come on in.” I didn’t know what this was going to be about, but I hoped we could clear the air. She looked a little sheepish and not at all agitated, and I took that as a good sign.

  She sat down, her backpack hanging down between her long legs. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For getting so mad at you,” she said.

  “It’s okay, Meg,” I said. “I hope I didn’t upset you. I just don’t want you to be in a position of having to explain yourself to the university judiciary if something comes up.”

  She hemmed and hawed for a minute before blurting out the truth. “He did give me a test. As a sample.” Her cheeks turned red. “But you have to believe me. I had no idea. I didn’t ask him to do it.”

  I let that sink in. “Okay.” I thought about the next question and how I really didn’t want to hear the answer. “How close was it to the test you took?”

  That’s when she started crying. “It was identical.”

  Oh, boy. The face of cranky Joanne Larkin swam in front of me, the same Joanne Larkin who had chastised me for subscribing to a fake Listserv where fake professors gave the identical fake exams every semester. Was she cutting corners and just not brave enough to admit it? I had certainly been guilty of a few corner-cutting measures myself, like not having homework or papers due on Friday or giving a multiple-choice test when an essay or short answer test would have better. It wasn’t often, but it had happened, and the secret code among professors is that we don’t judge one another when one of our minor cheats comes to light. I realized that I was hashing all of this out in my brain while staring at Meaghan, who was still stricken at the thought of her malfeasance.

  “Listen,” I said. “First things first. Aaron—”

  “Alex.”

  “Right. Alex. You need to stop having him tutor you.”

  She waited. “And?”

  “I wouldn’t be upset if you broke up.”

  “But I love him!” she cried, a bit more melodramatically than the circumstances called for, but I was in no position to judge. I’ve been known to dabble in a little melodrama myself every now and again.

  “Fine,” I said, if only to get her to keep her dramatics to a minimum while she was in my office. “Just stop having him tutor you. Tell him that I’ll do it, or that you’re doing better, or that you don’t think you need his help anymore.”

  She sniffled loudly into a lank tissue that she pulled from her pocket. “Which one?”

  “Which one what?”

  “Which excuse should I use?”

  I enunciated, speaking slowly and clearly. “I. Don’t. Care.” I put my head in my hands. “Any one of them is fine.”

  “Are you going to tell my father?” she asked, standing and slinging her heavy bag over her shoulder.

  I thought about that one. “For now? I don’t think so. But I’m warning you, Meaghan. Stay away from that kid,” I said, not wanting to screw up his name again. I thought back to the night before and how Crawford surely would have asked about the situation with Meaghan had Christine not called with the news of the break-in. Her mother’s bad luck had helped Meaghan luck out. “I know you love him, but he can’t love you if he would put you in this position.”

  “You hate him,” she said.

  We were back to that old accusation. I decided to come clean. “Right now, yes, I do.”

  She looked crestfallen. “He’s really nice.”

  “I’m sure he is,” I said. He’s also closer to thirty than he should be while still in college, I wanted to say but didn’t. “In my opinion, though, he’s been at this school way too long, and if he’s involved in a cheating scandal? Well, let’s just say that however nice he is, he’s going to get in big trouble.”

  She understood. Before she left my office, she squinted at my computer. “Why are you looking at porta-potty companies?” she asked.

  I had forgotten that I had left Sans-a-Flush’s Web site open. I clicked back to the school’s home page as quickly as I could. “Oh, nothing. Sister Mary asked me to look into rental toilets for the next Spring Fling.” The lie was so flimsy that even Meaghan didn’t believe it. I stopped her before she could question me further about the location of the toilets since there were clearly enough commodes in the building to accommodate the Spring Fling attendees. I told her to take off, keep her nose clean, never accept wooden nickels, and make lemons out of lemonade before she left.

  She slunk off, her six-foot frame slumped over and defeated. I felt bad for a minute and then turned my internal rage to that dopey boyfriend of hers. It was Erin’s boyfriend we thought we were supposed to hate, what with his assorted piercings and body art, but the kid turned out to be a gem who not only put up with Crawford’s bitchy little offspring but did well in school and kept her on the straight and narrow. I always thought that Meaghan would have better taste in men than this bore she was besotted with, but I had been wrong on that account.

  I swung my chair around and stared out the windows, looking out toward the sisters’ cemetery. A lot of women, many of whom had taught me and had been my colleagues, were buried in that cemetery, and sometimes, when my head was clouded, I strolled through and looked at the headstones, looking for wisdom and a little clarity. Sometimes, I actually found it. I decided that today was one of those days when a little stroll might be necessary.

  As I straightened up my office, I thought about my conundrum. I was conflicted. Did I tell Joanne and risk her wrath at my accusation, thereby jeopardizing Meaghan’s standing at school? Or did I say nothing? Nobody knew what was up unless you counted me, Meaghan, and Alex, and to be honest, I wasn’t even positive what his role was. Did he buy the paper or had he kept it from ye
ars past? Was it possible he just wanted her to use it for practice? How was I going to approach this?

  I strolled past Dottie, the worst receptionist known to receptioning, without letting her know where I was going. Even a quick conversational interlude with Dottie could take a wrong turn with just one misused word, and we would be heading down a road neither of us wanted to travel. We preferred, instead, to respectfully ignore each other. I get under her skin, for some reason, and she really bugs the crap out of me, so after all these years of my teaching at St. Thomas and working alongside her, we decided that pretending that the other didn’t exist was the best policy. Today I couldn’t tell if she assiduously avoided me, or if she was so engrossed in her latest tome, Love’s Fertile Splendor, that she really didn’t notice me. I tiptoed past her desk and made my way outside, using the back staircase that I had a great view of from my office.

  My conversation with Meaghan weighed heavy on me. Although I’d never go so far as to say that Meaghan and Erin were like my own children, they were as close as you could get. Crawford and I skimmed and skittered around the child conversation a lot; I was no spring chicken—but had not reached middle age—and he had his hands full with raising two teenagers. If I looked deep into my heart, though, a place I rarely went, I had to admit that I did think about it. What did it say about me that I had been much surer of my desire to be a mother when I was married to my first husband, a man I really didn’t love, than I was with the love of my life, Crawford? Maybe a baby would have provided a distraction to Ray, while I wanted Crawford all to myself. I didn’t know the real answer and, as was my custom, I didn’t want to give it much thought. Scratching off layer after layer of emotion wasn’t something I enjoyed. I preferred, as it were, to let nature take its course.

  The first gravesite I visited wasn’t terribly old; Sister Alphonse had died less than a year ago. She once told me that she had prayed for my happiness and that soon after, Crawford had appeared. Granted, he was investigating a murder and I was a person of interest, but I guess Alphonse hadn’t been specific about what kind of man she wanted me to find. Or when. Nevertheless, Alphonse’s power of prayer, obviously finely honed after over eighty years in the convent, made my future husband appear and bring me more happiness than I ever could have imagined. I pulled a sugar packet from my pocket—Alphonse’s sweet tooth was something that I would remember for the rest of my life—and placed it on top of her grave marker, something I did every time I visited. There were ten packets altogether on the cool stone, a few less than there should have been, but with the bird population in the vicinity of the cemetery, that wasn’t surprising. I talked to Alphonse more since she had died than when she had been alive, and while she didn’t talk back, she let her spirit be known in ways that would mystify others but were obvious to me. A fluttering leaf, a sudden gust of wind, a sliver of light that fixated on a particular word on another grave marker—“peace,” “love,” “charity,” words that let me know where she wanted my heart to go.