“Why does she think you have this money?” the officer asked. Her name was Prynne, as in Hester. Curiouser and curiouser.
Crawford gave her a look. “I can only guess that she thinks we know of its whereabouts, given our connection to the deceased.”
It was like a lightbulb went off over her head. “Ahhh,” she said, jotting down a few notes in her leather-bound notebook.
Crawford pulled me to the side. “Are you sure it was Sassy?” he whispered.
“Big blonde in stripper heels? It wasn’t Snow White as far as I could tell.”
“She ran away in stripper heels?” he asked, not really able to get a mental picture of what that looked like.
I nodded. “I know. Hard to fathom.” It was cold, so I started for the house. “By the way, I’m getting in my time machine and going back to a time when I could change the course of history and make this day never happen.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he called after me.
The dog was hiding under the coffee table in the living room, a space that was way too small for her voluptuous frame. The lights and sounds of a police invasion had left her shaking, her tail between her legs. I lured her out with a piece of cheese that I found in an otherwise empty drawer in the refrigerator. As I sat on the couch, petting her silken fur, I wondered how Sassafras would feel once she found out that she had absconded with a pair of large trousers, a 46 long blazer, and a tie that had probably seen better days. Was breaking and entering worth the reward on this one? Probably not.
I hoped that none of us were around when she figured out that she was on the hook for this felony and had gotten no closer to finding the money she so desperately wanted.
Thirty
I was exhausted, but relieved to go back to work. The same couldn’t be said for Crawford, who was still dealing with the aftereffects of having taken one too many Advil PMs, thinking that his large size necessitated a near overdose. He had no answer as to why he had taken one, never mind three, of the pills; I reminded him that in all the time I had known him, he had never had insomnia, let alone had trouble falling asleep, especially after a day spent at work and then in a dead man’s apartment.
“Don’t lecture me,” he said, crankily.
If he thought that was a lecture, he definitely still had drugs in his system.
I didn’t feel as bad as I thought I would, even though I was bone tired. The sun was out and the campus was alive, as it always is in the middle of a semester, particularly before winter has hit and everyone gets really ornery. I went into my office and tossed my bag onto my desk, nearly spilling the large cup of coffee that I had purchased in the cafeteria. I righted the coffee cup, pulled a few folders out of my bag, turned on my computer, and got to work, figuring out what needed to be done immediately and what could wait until the end of the day.
I still hadn’t heard from Max. I dialed her number first; it went straight to voice mail. Same for Fred. I wondered what was up. Was she so distraught that she couldn’t talk, or was there something going on that had completely missed my radar? Or, as I knew deep in my heart, was she angry because I had never seen Marty in the hospital? I texted Crawford to ask Fred what was up, if indeed Fred even showed up for work that day. The guy had a work ethic like no other, but losing his father-in-law might have encouraged him to break his streak of ten years in homicide with the fewest absences of anyone in the squad.
So now that we had two Sassy Du Pris sightings, albeit brief ones, there was an all-points bulletin out for her arrest. Finally, someone was taking this woman’s reappearance seriously; I knew Christine would be happy about that. The police were tracking down the old couple from the restaurant to see if they could ID this mystical creature, a violent stripper with a checkered past beyond her marriage to Chick. Crawford had called Minor to let him know that he should consider a recanvass of the building to see if anyone had seen the big, buxom, and blond ex of the man who had died in 5D. To me, she was like a unicorn—fabled, storied, and hard to find. That is, of course, if unicorns wore high heels and could run like the wind in them. I had only seen Max’s Hooters PIs run in high heels, and trust me, they had nothing on Sassy.
My fatigue led me to make a decision that I thought, after the fact, might come back to bite me in the ass, but I went for it anyway. Going to see Joanne Larkin would probably end up being a bad idea, but I was tired of pussyfooting around the likelihood that she was reusing tests; we needed to get to the bottom of this, if only to clear Meaghan’s conscience on the whole subject. I had only seen my stepdaughter briefly in the hallways, but every time she saw me, she avoided me like the plague, even though it was clear that I believed her. She was ashamed of something, and I could only hope it was the fact that she was involved with the oldest college student at the school, if not in the world, and nothing else.
Joanne was drinking a mug of hot tea when I entered, the limp string from her tea bag hanging off the side of her mug, which had a witty saying about cats and dogs, in which cats came out superior, stamped on the side. She had on a bright orange sweater with a head-sized pumpkin fastened to each shoulder. Really, Joanne? Holiday sweaters and cat mugs? Maybe I should go easy on her; this was clearly a woman who had few joys in her life.
“May I sit?” I asked.
She looked reluctant to give me a chair but finally relented.
“Listen,” I started, using one of the oldest, most tension-inducing openings in the history of conversation as a starter. When someone tells me to “listen,” my first reaction is to bristle, not pay attention. I saw that my opener had the same effect on Joanne. “You and I both know that my stepdaughter is a good student, a little lazy maybe, but not a cheater as you intimated during our last phone call.”
“Really? And how would we know that?” Joanne asked, making a show of swirling her tea bag around in her cat mug.
“Come on, Joanne,” I said. “You know as well as I do that Meaghan is a good student who wouldn’t stoop so low as to cheat on your exam.”
I waited for her reaction; she had none.
I went for broke, leaning in so I could whisper. I didn’t want anyone to overhear the next thing I had to say. “I know you reused that test, Joanne. It’s not a problem. I just don’t want Meaghan to be penalized in any way for doing something she had no idea she was doing if, for some reason, this whole thing comes to light.”
Her face turned hard. “Prove it. Prove that I reused that test.”
How to do this without getting Meaghan in more hot water with her teacher was proving difficult. I didn’t think I’d get the cooperation of Mr. Super Senior either, so my hands were tied. “You’re right. I can’t.” I stood. “I’m just protecting my stepdaughter.”
“There shouldn’t be a problem, Alison, as long as you stop talking,” she said.
“Really, Joanne? That’s how you want to play this?”
“Really, Alison. Leave it alone. No one is implicating your stepdaughter in anything, and as long as she keeps her nose clean, this whole thing will go away.” She took a sip of her tea, and I was somewhat happy to see—judging from her grimance—that she had burned her sharp tongue.
“Maybe she could take another exam?”
That suggestion didn’t seem to please Joanne. She had no other exam to offer, and that was a problem. “No.”
“What about if we tossed the grade and she made it up some other way?”
She stared at me.
“Joanne, if you didn’t reuse the exam, then it was stolen from you, before the test.” I stared back at her. “Don’t you see that we have a major problem here?”
“Alison, you’re the only one with a problem.” That pretty much summed it up. “Now, if you will excuse me? I have work to do,” she said pointedly, as if I didn’t work at all.
I bit my lip. “Work” like xeroxing tests from years gone by so you don’t have to break a sweat? I wanted to ask but didn’t. Before I got out into the hall, she called to me to come back in. “Alison? I
f something compels you to reveal any of this information to anyone else, then consider Meaghan’s record permanently sullied.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“Meaning that I will turn her in.”
Shit. That didn’t go the way I wanted it to.
I left her office, passing by the chapel and President Etheridge’s office before taking the back staircase to the Humanities floor. Waiting for me in front of the closed door was Mary Lou Bannerman.
Never was I so glad to see a student. Particularly a middle-aged one who always seemed to travel with gourmet goodies.
“Good morning,” she said as I got closer, the small paper bag in her hand leading me to believe this was a social call. The baked by susan logo on the side boasted of something from a small bakery north of me that had gotten rave reviews in both local and regional papers. She proffered the bag. “Fresh scone?”
Fresh scone? Was I human? And did this woman know me or what? I grabbed the bag from her hand, unlocked my office door, and shepherded Mary Lou in, trailing behind her, thoughts of eating the scone in two bites swirling around in my addled, exhausted brain. Hopefully the coffee on my desk was still hot. “Did you have one?” I asked.
She patted her nonexistent midsection. “Trying to lay off the treats for a while. At least until Thanksgiving is over.”
I wish I could exhibit such restraint, but I can’t. I ripped open the bag and found a lovely chocolate chip scone, sugary goodness dusting the top, waiting for me. I took a big bite. “This is good,” I said, chasing it with a slurp of coffee. Yes, still hot, if the numb spot on my tongue was any indication; restraint is not my strong suit, particularly when it comes to food and drink. “Thank you.” At that moment, I might have fallen in love with her just a little bit. Today, she was wearing a gorgeous cashmere sweater over a crisp white oxford and skinny jeans, a pair of leopard-print Tory Burch flats on her feet. The woman was the epitome of class and style, even if her latest short story needed a little work. I tried not to think about the moth hole I had discovered in the sweater I had donned that morning; it was under my right arm and wouldn’t be visible to anyone I encountered during the day. Probably.
“What did you think of my latest short story?” she asked.
Dang. I thought we were going to avoid that until I had finished my scone at least. I took a bite out of the middle of the pastry and chewed for a while. “Okay, well, it’s…”
“Not good,” she finished.
“No!” I said. “Not not good, but not your best work either.”
“What do I need to do, do you think?” she asked, looking far more worried than I thought she should.
I attempted to reassure her. “It’s fine. Just a little … ponderous?” I suggested. “More dramatic than it needs to be?”
She exhaled, relieved. “Oh, I thought you were going to tell me to start over.”
“Never,” I said. “In my experience, it’s the rare story that needs to be scrapped completely.” That wasn’t entirely true, but it was in this case.
She put a hand over her heart. “That is so good to hear.”
I put the scone down. “Why does this mean so much to you, Mary Lou?” I asked. She seemed to have an unnatural devotion to the class and to becoming a better writer; I wanted to know what was at the heart of that.
She pursed her lips together. “Well, let me see. I guess I’ve been doing things for everyone else for so long that I wanted to have something to call my own?” She appeared to be trying that reason on for size, but it didn’t seem to satisfy her as a complete explanation.
I think I understood it even though I had never felt that way.
“And maybe because I’ve never really been good at anything, so I wanted to see if I could get better at something that I loved doing? To have something that set me apart from the other wives and moms that I know? I’ve been doing those things for so long, being a wife and a mother, that I’m not sure I know how to do anything else. I guess I’m not really sure who I am and need to find out.” She let out a little laugh, but it was tinged with sadness. “Does that sound too … ponderous?”
My heart almost broke. To me, she seemed together, strong, and confident, but inside, it would seem, she was insecure and unsure of herself, a feeling not uncommon to women who spent their lives raising children and helping a man succeed, I supposed. It was foreign to me, having been on my own for a lot of my adult life in spite of two marriages, but I could see how a woman could feel that way if she had never left the house long enough to do anything besides shuttle a kid to an activity or do the grocery shopping, things that Mary Lou seemed to have been doing for a long, long time.
“Finish your scone,” she said.
I realized I had been staring at her, trying to figure out how to boost the spirits of this incredibly kind woman by telling her something good about her story. “You write great characters,” I said finally.
“I come from a family of great characters, so that makes it easy,” she said.
“You?”
“Yes, me.” She got up. “Someday, I’ll write a story about my family and you’ll see what I mean.” She went to the door. “This class means a lot to me. Thank you for being so kind.”
Once again, my mind went back to my initial consternation at her auditing the class. I’m nothing if not a practiced self-flagellator, returning often to thoughts of my spiritual and emotional shortcomings. “It’s wonderful having you in class. Thank you for joining us.” As she exited, I called after her. “And thank you for the scone!”
Talking to Mary Lou and eating the scone had been the perfect antidote to my meeting with Joanne Larkin, whose inability to admit that she had screwed the pooch, so to speak, on her midterm was baffling, to say the least. I was getting nowhere with her, and short of having Meaghan drop the class, a thought that had crossed my mind more than once, I guessed I would just have to wait and see what, if anything at all, was going to happen.
I supposed I could ask Crawford, too, but having tried so hard to keep him out of this situation, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to drag him in now. That’s what I told myself, anyway. In all honesty, I still thought that either this would go away or I would figure out how to handle it if the poop hit the fan. Although the truth would set us all free, only some of us were interested in it, and Joanne Larkin certainly wasn’t what I would call an interested party.
When the phone rang, I prayed that it was Max and my prayer was answered. She sounded tired, frail, and sadder than I’d ever heard her sound, except for the one time she couldn’t score Duran Duran tickets for their first farewell concert. “How are you doing?”
“I’m okay.” She was lying. She was far from okay.
“What can I do?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. I’ll let you know when we have everything set up.” Then she was gone.
I stared at the receiver in my hand and hoping I could blame Max’s reaction to my call on the emotional vagaries of grief and not on something more broken in our relationship. The last few times we had spoken, things had been tense; even I, with everything else going on in my life, could see that.
Who knew why any of us acted the way we did when we lost someone we loved? The day my mother died, I got in her car and drove to Cold Spring, a river town about thirty miles north of where I lived, and sat on Main Street in front of her favorite French restaurant. I cried until a woman passing by knocked on the window and asked if I needed help, her kindness making me even sadder in the face of my loss. No, I didn’t need her help, I remember telling her; I needed my mother. No one else. Just my mother. The woman tried to console me, but it did no good. My despair was immeasurable, and finally, after questioning me about who she could call, someone who would come and get me, she got Marty Rayfield’s number out of me, and he was there in a flash. Instead of driving me to our empty house, he had taken me back to his home in a village not far from mine and put me up in Max’s old room, taking care of every single d
etail related to my mother’s funeral while I rested there, getting myself together enough to escort my mother’s casket down the center aisle of the church where she had worshipped with a devotion that was unfathomable to me.
I turned and looked out the window toward the cemetery, the sun casting a burnished glow on the polished marble headstones and grave markers. The giant angel, the one that had implored me to follow the truth a few days earlier, was somewhere in the midst of all the other markers, rising majestically off in the distance. Closer in, I took notice of a figure leaning against another massive headstone, the hair blond, the clothes black, the cigarette dangling menacingly from red, red lips.
Well, by Jove, I thought, if it isn’t the lovely and talented Sassy Du Pris.
I didn’t know if she could see me, but I suspected she could—why else would she be there?—so I tried to pretend that I hadn’t seen her and that I wasn’t dialing Crawford’s cell number as she slouched against the headstone that I recognized as Sister Alphonse’s.
“Hey!” he said, far too enthusiastic for the occasion.
“Hey,” I whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” he asked.
I didn’t know. I cleared my throat. “Listen to me carefully. Sassy Du Pris is in the St. Thomas cemetery leaning against Sister Alphonse’s gravestone.”
“I’m on it,” he said, adding before he hung up, “Stay wherever you are and do not attempt to catch her.”
I was all set to listen to him and not do anything stupid. After all, this woman might have murdered Chick. She had tried to burn his house down. She had been in jail for breaking and entering. She might have broken into my house and poisoned my dog. She had certainly vandalized Crawford’s car and stolen his giant man clothes. She was not a woman to be trifled with, that was for sure.
Until she did the one thing that pushed me over the edge and had me tearing out of my office as if I were being chased by a nest of hornets: She put her cigarette out on Alphonse’s gravestone.
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