Extra Credit

by Maggie Barbieri

  Sassy opened the back of the van, a cargo area with no seats; after that, she took Kevin’s brand-new iPhone, the one he loved so much, stomped on it with her high heels, and left it for dead in the parking lot. Apparently, Kevin hadn’t taken my advice and locked his valuables in my glove box. I looked at her. “Where are you taking us? And you do realize that we’ll be rolling around back there?”

  She pushed Kevin into the van in response to my questions, and he fell in with a thud, banging his knee hard. It was at this point that I was grateful he had gotten so chubby; maybe the extra pounds would protect him—and me—as we were tossed to and fro around the metal-encased hold. As Sassy raised a hand to push me as well, I stepped up toward the van, grabbing both sides of the door and hoisting myself in; I didn’t need her help. I was an experienced kidnap victim. Once in the van, I looked around for something to hold, but there was nothing—just a strap hanging from the ceiling that wasn’t long enough for us to grab to keep from rolling around when she took a corner.

  She leaned in and in her squeaky voice admonished us, “If you can’t keep quiet, I will kill you.”

  Kevin trembled beside me, and I put a hand on his knee to calm him. “Don’t worry.”

  Sassy jumped in the front seat and slammed the door, gunning the engine. Kevin looked at me, some color returning to his cheeks. “‘Don’t worry’?” he hissed through clenched teeth. “What would I have to worry about? A crazed stripper just held a gun to my temple, and God knows where she’s taking us. I bet it isn’t church, though.” He put his hands beside him to hold himself steady and dropped his head. “We’re going to die.”

  “We’re not going to die,” I said, a confidence coming over me that had no legitimate source. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t think Sassy was going to hurt us. Well, at least not mortally. Kevin, on the other hand, didn’t look so sure.

  After a harrowing ride through the streets of Yonkers and its environs, Sassy pulled the car over, coming to an abrupt stop that threw me against the opposite wall of the van. I didn’t have a watch and neither did Kevin, but it seemed like we had been driving around for over a half hour. Kevin managed to stay put when she came to a stop, having decided to stand and grab hold of the short strap dangling from the ceiling. After it was clear we were at our destination, I stood, rubbing my butt.

  “That’s going to hurt tomorrow,” I said.

  “If we even have a tomorrow!” Kevin said dramatically. It appeared that he was taking his anger about the situation out on me, a really uncool turn of events to me.

  “God, when did you turn into such a drama queen?” I asked.

  He sputtered, trying to come up with a response, but he had nothing.

  I glared at him. “You had every right to say no when I asked you to come,” I said.

  “Oh, I did?” he asked. He did a passable imitation of my voice and vaguely New York–tinged accent. “‘We’ll be home early. It will only take a few minutes. I just want to talk to her,’” he said. “That’s what I was supposed to say no to? Never in my wildest dreams would this happen,” he said, throwing his arms out wide to indicate the inside of the dingy van.

  “Listen, you’re bored and unhappy with your new life and you came along for the ride. It’s not my fault,” I said as Sassy opened the back of the van. I peered out to see where we were; it looked like classic Westchester woodland, the kind where bodies were laid to rest, never to be found again. I shuddered slightly, hoping Kevin wouldn’t notice. Maybe I had been wrong about Sassy and her intentions.

  “Oh, great,” he said. “Now we’re going to sleep with the fishes.”

  I jumped off the end of the van and looked at Sassy. “Would you please tell him that we’re not going to sleep with the fishes?”

  She shrugged. “You might.”

  Kevin followed me out of the van. We stood at the edge of the parking lot, a light blinking on and off under a very dark sky, a bridge off in the distance; the van lights were still on, and they illuminated the hardened face of a woman who was probably once very pretty and who reminded me of someone else, someone whose identity wasn’t coming to me now. An actress? I studied her to get a sense of whether she really wished us any harm or just wanted to scare us into giving her information that we didn’t have.

  If it weren’t for the circumstances, I would have commented on the gorgeous night and the dark silhouette of the trees around us, but I kept my mouth shut.

  She waved the gun around menacingly, but to me, her heart didn’t seem to be in it. I decided to take control of the situation by offering up what I did know.

  “Sassy, we do not have the money. After Chick died, it went to the public administrator, and it will be months, even years, before we find out who gets it.”

  She looked confused but didn’t say anything.

  “Did you kill Chick, Sassy?” I asked.

  “No!” she said and then began crying, big, horrible sobs that came from the tips of her Lucite-heel-shod toes. “I loved him. I would never hurt him.”

  Kevin had no idea what I was talking about, not knowing about the note we had found in Chick’s apartment. I waited to see if she had more to say.

  “He divorced me. Right before he left. Everyone thought I left him, but it was the other way around. If it was up to me? We’d still be married.” She scratched at her head, and it became apparent that what I thought was a weave was really a wig. She stripped it from her head and threw it into a small stream right off the parking lot. Underneath all that synthetic hair was a lovely round head topped with a short pixie cut that made the really trashy Sassy look about ten years younger and closer to a teen than a middle-aged woman. “God, I loved him.” She looked at me beseechingly. “Is he really dead?”

  “He’s really dead,” I said. I looked at Kevin, shaking uncontrollably beside me. I put my arm around him. “You have to believe us about the money because—”

  “I’m a priest!” Kevin blurted out suddenly, finding his voice.

  Sassy went to her knees like a sack of potatoes that had been dropped from a second-story window. “Oh, God!”

  “Right! Oh, God!” Kevin said.

  Standing there, I was reminded of a dog Max used to have, a giant, showy Afghan with the inexplicable name of Juniper who Max claimed was the toughest dog she knew. How she knew this was anyone’s guess, but to me, Juniper was all bark and no bite. Sure, she sounded some kind of weird alarm every time someone rang the doorbell, and yes, she would jump on top of you the minute you gained entry into the house, but her tail was always between her legs, and at her core, she was extremely docile. The attempted burning down of the house notwithstanding, Sassy seemed the same way to me—a physical oddity with a strange and loud voice, but not someone who would do more than jump on top of you if the situation called for it. I think in the years since she and Chick had separated, Sassy had lost a little of her sass. The gun, to me, was like Juniper’s teeth, big, shiny, and sharp but never to be used for anything that didn’t have to do with food.

  She was overwrought at the thought that she had kidnapped a priest and stayed on her knees. The gun clattered noisily to the ground, and I lunged for it, grabbing it before Sassy had a chance to compose herself. She reacted too late; the gun was already in my hand and out of her reach by the time she realized she had dropped it. “Let us go and this will all be behind us, Sassy.”

  “I need that money,” she whispered from her position on the ground.

  “Why? Why do you need the money so badly?” Then I remembered something that immediately made me feel less sympathetic toward her. “Why do you need money so badly that you would break into my house and poison my dog?” I asked.

  She looked up, and now that the bad wig was gone, I could see her face very clearly. She looked shocked. “I would never harm an animal.”

  “My dog almost died,” I said.

  She stood. “I’ll cop to trying to break into your car the other night and then breaking the window later, but I wou
ld never hurt your dog.” She looked at me, her head cocked. “Your husband is a big guy. Kinda stiff, though.”

  “He’s a cop,” Kevin helpfully added.

  For some reason, I believed Sassy was telling the truth about what she’d done. “Oh, jeez,” Sassy sobbed. “I know. First a cop and then a priest. Do I have luck or what?”

  I didn’t really care if Sassy was unlucky; she was a pain in the ass and might have been the person who had set out to poison my dog. “Who poisoned my dog? Who broke into my house?” I asked her.

  “I have no idea,” she said, going toward the front of the van. “Did Chick ever say anything about me?”

  I thought back to the birthday party, the supposedly joyous event that had set all of this ridiculousness in motion. “He referred to you once as his ‘dear, sweet Sassy,’” I said.

  She mulled that over, and ultimately it seemed to make her happy. “I don’t know. Something screwed him up. I don’t know what it was.”

  “Drugs? Alcohol?” I asked, going for the usual suspects in the “screw up” department.

  She shook her head. “No. That wasn’t it. I think he met someone else,” she said. “Why else would he have left me?”

  Looking at her, and knowing a bit about her background, gave me about a hundred answers to that question even though we had just met. The fact that he had found one woman, perhaps two, was a bit of a stretch, but who was I to judge? Maybe she was right. I didn’t think we’d ever know. I think Chick was just your run-of-the-mill whack job. Frankly, I didn’t care. Spending so much time on the subject seemed like a waste to me.

  “He left me. He left me with nothing. It was supposed to be ours together. We were going to get back together. He told me that when he called me after he disappeared.”

  “What was supposed to be yours together?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Not too smart, are you?”

  Kevin leapt to my defense. “She’s very smart.”

  She ignored him. “The money, stupid. The money was supposed to be ours.”

  Thirty-Five

  That was all we learned about Sassy Du Pris, because right after telling us that she thought she and Chick would share in some ill-gotten gains—gotten from where was still anyone’s guess—she took off in the van, leaving Kevin and me to try to find our way back to Yonkers and the car we had left behind at the Elegant Majestic. Since I was in possession of the gun, I guess she figured it was better to leave than to find out whether or not I had the stones to use it. (I didn’t.) She left us no wiser as to why she needed the money or where she and Chick had gotten it from in the first place.

  He told her they were getting back together, and she believed him. Things hadn’t turned out quite the way Sassy had planned.

  The night was pitch black outside the dimly lit parking lot, and, as is often the case, I had on the wrong shoes for this mission and its unintended end. Kevin and I stood and looked around the deserted park, curiously named Turkey Mountain, according to the sign.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Turkey Mountain, apparently.”

  His voice sounded like he was on the verge of tears. “Where, pray tell, is Turkey Mountain?”

  I tried to make light of it. “Well, if you had your iPhone, we could probably look it up.”

  “You,” he said, his voice quavering, a finger pointed at my chest, “are not as funny as you think you are. You should really think about dropping the sarcasm. It’s not attractive.”

  “That’s not the first time I have heard that,” I admitted. Under the circumstances, I could not disagree with him. I looked around in the darkness to see if there was someone, anyone, in the distance, maybe a moonlight hiker or someone with a really bad sense of direction who had started out that morning and was only now returning to the parking lot, but the whole area was completely desolate, which is just how Sassy had planned it. Across from the preserve, however, was a steep incline, and up that incline, it appeared, was a development. I grabbed Kevin’s hand. “Come on. There are houses across the street.”

  He stood where he was, smack in the middle of the parking lot, looking a lot like he wasn’t going to come. Eventually, when he realized that staying there would end up in a night alone in a nature preserve, he relented and followed me down the dirt road to the street, where nary a car passed by, the hour for driving home from local train stations long past. We crossed the street, one I had never been on, and entered the development, where only a few lights twinkled in the distant windows of the houses that dotted the perimeter.

  We wended our way up a very steep hill, our feet making the only sounds in the tranquil night air. It felt as if it were getting colder by the minute, and the persistent ache in my toes reminded me yet once again—as Crawford always reminds me—that high-heeled boots weren’t appropriate for the task at hand. Seriously, though, who knew that we would be kidnapped, tossed around the back of a cargo van, and then going on a trek in the middle of the night in a town that we had never visited and that seemed to consist only of hills? We were silent while we trudged along, Kevin’s heavy breathing a reminder to me that one, he was out of shape, and two, he wanted to be anywhere but here. I tried to make conversation to pass the time.

  “How are things at the catering hall?”

  “Really, Alison? This is what you want to do? You want to have a conversation about work?”

  “It would be better than listening to you seethe beside me,” I said. “That’s getting kind of old.”

  “I’m not seething,” he said. “Besides, you can’t hear someone seething.”

  “Yes, you are, and yes, you can.” I stumbled over an uneven patch in the road, my toes banging painfully against the front of my boots. “I know what seething sounds like. Crawford seethes a lot.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  We continued on in silence, my attempt at conversation obviously unwelcome. Finally, after a good ten-minute uphill trek, we arrived at a house where the inhabitants seemed to be not only awake but having some kind of gathering at which everyone was having a festive time. I looked at Kevin. “What do you think?”

  “If it gets us off of Turkey Mountain, then I’m all for it.”

  “I don’t think we’re on Turkey Mountain anymore.”

  He sighed. “I was being figurative, Alison. I know we’re not on Turkey Mountain anymore.”

  Someone was a little crabby, but I didn’t let that stop me from marching up to the front door and ringing the bell. As soon as the bell sounded, the house went quiet, except for some scuffling noises and sounds of windows being opened at various levels on the three-story structure.

  I looked at Kevin. “Maybe this wasn’t the best house to pick?” I asked as a hooded figure raced past us and down the street, the footfalls heavy and rubber-soled. Several other figures—some male, some female—also drifted by, some running faster than others, whispers carrying across the still night air. After a few minutes of watching people vacate the house in droves, the front door opened, and we were confronted by a tousle-headed blonde, who stood inside the screen door in the hallway, her hands on her hips. She looked more defiant than an innocuous doorbell ring should have inspired, given that the house had been filled with people just moments before. “Hi,” I said. “Our car broke down,” sort of true, “and we need to use the phone to call someone to pick us up,” all true, “and were wondering if we could come in?”

  “What do you think I am? An idiot?” she asked. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen, with an attitude of a thirty-five-year-old. Behind her, a voice slurred, “Who is it, Brianna?”

  “Cops,” she said and slammed the door in our faces.

  I looked at Kevin, dumbfounded. It was the second time that evening we had been taken for cops. Well, I did have a gun. After I regained my composure, I put my finger on the doorbell and kept it there until Brianna answered again. I pulled the screen open and put my foot on the threshold. “First of all, we’re not cops. Secondly, i
f we were, you would be in big trouble.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Wouldn’t be the first time. Although I’ve never seen you two before.”

  “That’s because we’re not cops. Listen, young lady,” I said, using my professor voice, “we are stranded, and I’d like to use your phone. Please let me know why that is a problem.”

  The sass came out in full force. Her head bobbed back and forth like a chicken’s, and she waved her finger in my face. “It’s a problem because I don’t know you and I’m not supposed to let strangers in my house when my parents aren’t home. Now move your foot and get off my property before I call the cops on you.”

  Leaving my foot where it was—and hoping she wouldn’t go ahead and slam the door anyway—I looked up the street and saw not one other light. Finding a sympathetic ear at this hour, when everyone obviously was asleep, didn’t look promising. I looked at Kevin. He gently pushed me out of the way and spoke to Brianna.

  “Brianna, is it?” he said, standing in front of me. “My name is Father Kevin McManus, and my friend and I here are stranded, having had an unfortunate incident at Turkey Mountain.” He pointed across the main road to the nature preserve.