Extra Credit

by Maggie Barbieri

  The knock at my office door nearly made me burst into tears, the identity of the knocker most likely someone who wanted to spend some time setting up the outline for a paper that was due the following week. I don’t know when I had gotten so conscientious, but there you have it. Whereas in the old days, I might have been known to fall silent, pretending that I wasn’t behind the frosted glass of the decades-old mahogany door, these days, I was the model professor, always available, always willing to help. It crossed my mind that I could fold myself in half and hide under my desk until whoever it was went away, but guilt got the better of me. My best friend was already suspicious of my moral fiber; if word got around school that Professor Bergeron hid under her desk so that she didn’t have to deal with students, my shaky reputation would take another hit, crumbling once and for all. I shoved the rest of the papers in my bag and called out to the person on the other side of the door to come in, hoping that usual social cues like me donning my coat and jangling my keys would hasten his or her departure.

  It was Mary Lou Bannerman. With a large cup of something hot, if the steam coming out of the little hole on the plastic lid was any indication. I smiled. In spite of my exhaustion, seeing her was just the lift I needed. She brandished a manila envelope as well as a wide grin.

  “What’s that?” I asked, referring to the cup.

  “It’s the beginning of my manuscript!” she said, obviously excited and proud.

  It wouldn’t be in good taste to ask after the cup again, so I expressed my delight over her pages instead.

  “Will you read it?” she asked.

  “Now?” I asked, my enthusiasm waning.

  “No, silly,” she said, putting it on my desk. “Whenever you get a chance. I had a burst of creativity last night and just started writing.” She pointed at me. “You were right. When you’re ready to write, you’re ready to write. It just flowed out of me.”

  Finally, someone appreciated my wisdom. I stared pointedly at the cup she was holding, protected by a wide cardboard ring that would keep the hot in and off her hand.

  “Oh, and this is for you,” she said, handing it to me. “Chai tea. From the cafeteria, not some fancy coffee shop, I’m afraid.”

  I looked at my watch. After all my years teaching here, I had no idea that the cafeteria was open at five on a Friday. “Really? They’re open?”

  She looked momentarily flustered. “I have an in there,” she said. “I’ve made quite a few friends among the staff, and once they heard it was for you,” she said, throwing her arms wide, “well, the world was my oyster, so to speak.”

  Nice to know I had friends in high places, or at least ones where you could get a burger after closing time. I opened the cup and inhaled deeply. “Thank you, Mary Lou. I was starting to fade.”

  “Do you have five minutes?” she asked, sitting down in her usual spot across from my desk.

  How could I say no? I sat back down behind my desk and sipped the tea. Chai wasn’t my favorite, but it definitely hit the spot at the end of a long day, not to mention week. I fingered the envelope on my desk. “I’ll read this first chance I get, Mary Lou. Was it difficult writing about the topic?” I asked, referencing her husband’s murder.

  “I’m not there yet,” she said. “I’m talking about how we met.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “At work,” she said, a slight flush coming to her cheeks. “He had his own company, and I was an assistant to the director of marketing.”

  I took another sip of my tea.

  “I know I’m married again and very happy, but can I confess something?” she asked, her blue eyes shining. Tears? Or a glimmer of what was past? “He was my soul mate. I will never love anyone the same way again.”

  I stared at her, not sure why she was sharing these feelings with me. Had I blurred the line between student and professor so much that I was now in the business of listening to confessions of the lovelorn? Probably. I could do nothing now but sit and listen, my head feeling heavy, the lack of sleep catching up with me and making me inert. I took a bigger sip of tea, which seemed to perk me up in the short term but wasn’t doing a lot to counter my feelings of exhaustion overall.

  She dropped the manila envelope on my desk. “The synopsis and some pages. I would love your opinion. It’s all in there.”

  I stood, not really wanting to have this conversation in the confines of my office. Outside, darkness was settling over the campus, and the last student stragglers, the ones who hadn’t immediately left the building after their last class ended, were scurrying back to their dorms to prepare for whatever that particular Friday held in store. I put the remaining papers in my messenger bag and asked Mary Lou if she’d like to continue our conversation on the way to my car; all of a sudden, a heat was creeping up my neck, and I felt like I needed to get out of my office and into the chilly night air.

  She followed me out of the office area and into the stairwell. As soon as I hit the outside and the cold air, I got light-headed and grabbed on to the new banister that now ran along the back steps. Mary Lou chattered away, oblivious to the fact that I was dead on my feet. I took another sip of tea, now a comfortable temperature. With each passing step, I felt slower and slower, my legs feeling leaden as I navigated the stone stairs. We reached the top and headed toward the parking lot.

  “Do you feel that way about your husband?” she asked. The way she said it indicated to me, even in what was becoming a weakened state, that she had already asked me at least once before but I hadn’t answered.

  I stared back at her, not sure how to respond. Of course I felt that way about Crawford, but did I really need to get that personal with her? Suddenly I realized that even if I wanted to answer, I couldn’t. My tongue was thick and unmoving in my mouth, and I attempted to lick my lips.

  “Are you sick?” she asked, a look of such great concern on her face that it made me nervous.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I felt my knees give out and I hit the macadam, pitching forward and breaking my fall with my hands. The combination of the cold ground and the rough surface was doubly bruising, and I felt the pain course through my hands and up my arms, an insult to the nerve center in my brain. The papers that I had been packing to take home escaped from my bag and skittered off the side of the parking lot, my eyes following them, not really understanding what I was seeing.

  “Professor Bergeron?” she asked, her tone frantic.

  A student hurrying by stopped when he saw me falter and go to the ground. It was Meaghan’s boyfriend, and even though I was having a hard time telling which end was up from my perch, I could see in his eyes that he was thinking about continuing to move rather than help me, but something got the better of him. His conscience, maybe? I didn’t know, but he scurried over and helped me up.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Thank you, Alex,” I said, finally nailing his name, even in my altered state. He was a big guy, so getting me off the ground wasn’t too much of a chore, even with his heavy backpack over one of his shoulders.

  He looked worriedly at Mary Lou. “She doesn’t look good. Is she alright?”

  Mary Lou looked behind her. “I’ll take care of it. Thank you for coming to our assistance,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “Should I call her stepdaughter?”

  “Her stepdaughter?” Mary Lou asked, as if Meaghan’s existence weren’t something she had considered. Now she looked worried.

  “Yes, her stepdaughter. She’s my girlfriend,” he said, giving me a glance that told me that he knew I wasn’t pleased with the relationship.

  “No,” she said. “Thanks again. I’ll take it from here.”

  I really wasn’t able to form a coherent sentence, so I stood idly by, my hands scraped and bloodied, while this exchange played out between Mary Lou and Alex. After a few more questions from him and reassurances from her, he wandered off uneasily.

  Behind me, I heard the sound of a car c
oming up the one-lane road that wrapped around campus and served as the exit on this side. It came to rest on the far side of the road, just below the cemetery and what I hoped was the ever-watchful spirit of my old friend, the late Sister Alphonse. Still unsteady on my feet, I attempted to grab the papers that were on the ground, but the action proved too hard. I looked at Mary Lou and, with every ounce of energy that I had left, attempted to tell her something.

  “I don’t feel well,” I managed to get out after only getting one errant piece of paper back into my bag, my limbs heavy and shaky, my mind muddled.

  The car was still idling by the curb, and I saw Mary Lou give it a nervous sideways glance.

  “Who is that?” I asked, hearing an edge of hysteria in my voice. Between the way I felt physically and the way she had suddenly stopped talking, choosing instead to cast her gaze about shiftily, I had a feeling that things were about to change for the worse.

  The driver’s door of the car opened, but it was too dark for me to see anything except that the figure who got out was large and male.

  Mary Lou put a hand on her hips and looked displeased. As the figure got closer, she got more agitated. Finally, when he had made his way to us, she looked at him and in a voice dripping with disappointment and despair asked him one question that left me even more baffled.

  “Briggs, what did you do?”

  Forty-One

  He was still in his work clothes, a chef’s jacket and black-and-white-checkered pants, black professional cooking clogs on his feet. This, more than anything, more than the fact that we were leaving campus for parts unknown, more than the fact that he had thrown me in the back of the car as if I weighed no more than a large sack of potatoes, and more than the fact that he kept calling Mary Lou “Mom,” confused me. I looked at the scenery whizzing by, unable to tell what road we were on or where we were going. I remember seeing the river to the right of me at one point, leading me to believe that we were headed into the city, or maybe toward New Jersey.

  Crawford was right: I sure did get kidnapped a lot. What was it now, five? Six? Eight? Who could remember?

  My brain was fried, and I couldn’t tell if the words I were thinking were actually coming out of my mouth. The last thing I thought—“and I wanted to fix you up with my stepdaughter!”—must have left my lips because Briggs looked in the rearview mirror and gave me a little smile, responding with “I am a catch.” Sure he was, if I wanted Meaghan with a guy who looked like Ryan Gosling but acted like Ted Bundy.

  I wasn’t sure how long we drove, the sound of Mary Lou’s impassioned pleas to him to not hurt me filtering into my head as we wended our way north, as it turns out. Although I thought the river was on my right, it was actually some other body of water, smaller but wider. I groaned when I saw that we were back at a place I hoped never to see again, the inexplicably named Turkey Mountain, the place where Sassy had taken Kevin and me. How had I ended up back here, who Briggs actually was, and why this was all happening were thoughts that were swirling around my addled brain.

  He stopped the car just a few spaces away from where Sassy had stopped the car when we were here together. He turned and looked at me, and I saw that although he was handsome, he had mean eyes, the kind his smile never reached; the kind that looked like there was nothing behind them. “Ready to take a walk?” he asked.

  I really wasn’t. I was ready to curl up on the backseat of the car and take a nice long nap. Despite Mary Lou’s protestations, though, he was insistent on getting me out of the car and into the wild, going so far as to grab my arm and drag me out onto the pavement, where gravel embedded itself into any exposed body parts. I was thankful that I had put on tights that morning but not that I had worn high heels.

  Another day, another kidnapping, and another pair of inappropriate shoes. I stumbled along the gravel path that led to an entrance to the preserve and went to my knees as I failed to navigate the dip in the earth. Briggs pulled me up by the back of my coat and threw me forward. It took all my will and coordination not to fall again.

  I couldn’t run and I couldn’t hide, as they say. I knew, because it was jutting out from the pocket of his chef’s coat and into my back, that Briggs had a gun, and he seemed just itching to shoot it. Anyway, where exactly would I go? Behind that big tree over there? Or the one right next to it? Too many choices and not enough brain cells.

  I would have liked to see the look on Mary Lou’s face, just to get a sense of what she might be thinking, but taking my eyes off of my own feet for too long would result in another fall. If my screaming joints were any indication, another fall would push me into a whole different level of pain, one that I couldn’t withstand without crying, something that I wouldn’t do in front of this strange man.

  We got to a little bridge and I decided that I had had enough. I turned to Mary Lou. I summoned up whatever brainpower I had left. “So are you in on this?” I asked. “Did you buy that tea in the cafeteria so that he could drug me and the two of you could get me up here to what? Kill me? Bury my body so that no one would find me until the spring thaw?”

  She surprised me by starting to cry. Good Lord. I was the one in high heels being frog-marched through a nature preserve, probably to my death, and here she was bursting into tears. Great. “I’m so sorry, Professor Bergeron.”

  Briggs gave me a little push. “Back off, Briggs,” I said. “If you’re going to kill me, I’d like to get some information first.” I was surprisingly calm and collected and actually a bit more clear-headed than I had been in the car. I wondered what he put in my tea and if, in smaller doses, it would just take the edge off a bit.

  “If you had just told my aunt where the money was,” he said, exasperated, “we would have left you alone. Now, I have to do this,” he said, throwing his arms wide in reference to the great outdoors.

  His aunt. Even with some kind of drug in my system, it was all starting to come together. Sassy. “Yes, it’s very inconvenient that you have to drive me to the middle of nowhere—”

  “It’s actually Yorktown,” Mary Lou added helpfully.

  “Okay … Yorktown … to kill me, but why? The public administrator has the money and will probably have it until the people in the Stepkowski family tire of asking about it or hire a lawyer to get it back. My money’s on the lawyer part because I think every single one of them is champing at the bit to get it.”

  Briggs shrugged. “You were as good as anyone. You found his body. You’re married to his sister’s ex. You live in that shitty little house, so you’d probably want a piece of the pie even to get rid of that crappy siding. Seriously,” he said, “you need to step it up with the landscaping. Although it did provide good cover.”

  How did I end up on a home improvement show all of a sudden? “If you’re going to kill me, please don’t insult me first,” I said. “That’s what’s called adding insult to injury.” Suddenly, or at least suddenly given the current condition of my brain, I realized what that comment about the landscaping meant. “You poisoned my dog,” I said, gasping.

  “I didn’t poison it,” he said.

  “Her.”

  “Fine. Her. I just made her sleep for a while.”

  “You nearly killed her,” I said. I thought about how I could get my hands around his ample neck and squeeze the life out of him. “Did you make Chick take all of those drugs, too?” I asked, making a logical leap, at least in my own head.

  His confusion was masked a bit by his anger over my stalling. “That guy offed himself. Plain and simple.”

  “Why would he do that?” I asked, because I still didn’t know.

  “Guilty conscience?” he suggested. “Okay, enough. I hated that guy and I don’t want to talk about him anymore. Where’s the money?”

  “For the last time,” I said, trying to sound as convincing as possible, “I do not know.”

  He pulled the gun from his pocket. “I still don’t believe you.”

  I looked at Mary Lou. “You’re not writing a novel,
are you?”

  She continued crying loudly. “Well, now that I’ve taken your class, I would really like to!”

  Finally, a good evaluation. Too bad I’d be dead before I’d see it. I tried to take an analytical approach. “Listen, Briggs. I don’t have the money. I won’t get the money. If I had to take a guess, I’d say Christine will eventually get the money and, knowing her, will probably split it between her brothers and the girls.” And the trolls, maybe. “I will never see a dime of that cash, nor do I want to.”

  “I still don’t believe you,” he said, taking the safety off the gun. “I think you know more than you’re letting on.”

  “Why would that be?” I asked.

  “Because Meaghan told me about the money he gave her. For her birthday,” he said. “I think there’s more where that came from.”

  “Meaghan told you about the money she got for her birthday?” I asked. When this was over, I was putting her in time-out.

  “She was going to buy new skis. And an iPad.” He laughed. “What that kid won’t tell you for a free chocolate chip cookie.”

  So that’s what it took to get her to talk. I’d have to tell Crawford.

  I backed up a little and got my heel stuck in the space between the two wooden slats on the bridge. I wiggled my heel back and forth to get it loose, but it was stuck in there good. “If you don’t believe me, then you’re not very smart,” I said, bending down to pull my shoe out of the slat. It was released with a resounding thwack, and as I held the shoe in my hand, I realized that what I had was a weapon. A beautiful, suede-covered weapon, but a weapon nonetheless. I handled the shoe, feeling the heft of it—my feet are big—and looking at the heel, a slender piece of wood covered with fabric that came to a tiny point at the end. I lifted my foot as if I were going put my shoe back on but grabbed Mary Lou around the throat, holding the point of the shoe against her carotid artery, now doing the salsa against my palm. Doing so required focus that I didn’t have and strength that seemed to have left me but that I was able to summon in one last-ditch effort to save myself. When all was said and done, I was going to need a very long nap.