by Donn Taylor
I said I would and hung up.
I wanted to call Mara then, but it was time for the ten o’clock news. I turned on the TV just in time to catch the obligatory nuclear explosion and bell-ring before Francie LaBouche came on in her chorus-girl costume and grease paint. Tonight her makeup department must have seen some ads for Caribbean vacations. Francie’s fair complexion had metamorphosed into the color of a corkboard.
“There’s shocking news tonight,” she said with the intonation of one about to tell an off-color joke and expecting everyone to enjoy it. “A woman professor at Overton University, a Christian denominational institution, was found with child pornography on her college computer. Professor Mara Thorn, who joined the faculty last fall as a Wiccan and later claimed conversion to Christianity, was led in handcuffs to the city jail this afternoon.”
The visual presentation shifted to Mara getting out of the police car, her hands cuffed behind her. Her escort, Bruno Pinkle, attempted to grasp her arm to lead her into the station. That was his mistake. She bumped him away with her shoulder and followed that with a sharp elbow that happened to hit his funny bone. He recoiled and grasped his arm while Mara marched proudly into the station without his assistance.
My heart went out to her. She’d been fighting one thing or another all her life, and now, faced with public disgrace, she met it with head held high. But I knew the heartbreak beneath that brave front.
While that pageant was acted out, Francie LaBouche’s voiceover continued—“The discovery of pornography happened as a byproduct of the police’s continuing investigation into the murder of Professor Mitra Fortier.” She drew a deep breath. “As we revealed previously here on station KLYE, Professor Fortier was reportedly having an affair of long standing with a male member of the faculty. Then, last fall, a new woman who joined the faculty gave Professor Fortier a rival for her lover’s affections, and the resulting triangle led to angry confrontations and threats of personal harm. A few days later, Professor Fortier was found dead.”
The visual returned to Francie. “KLYE has now learned that the male faculty member involved was Professor Preston Barclay, and the newcomer was none other than the star of tonight’s show, Professor Mara Thorn, both of whom were involved with the Laila Sloan murder last fall. A police spokesperson confirmed that they are persons of interest in this continuing homicide investigation. Now the investigation widens as Professor Thorn is charged with possession of child pornography so vile that we can’t describe it on the air.”
She paused for another breath. “Authorities at Overton University refused comment except to say that appropriate action would be taken.”
That meant Mara and I faced another meeting with President Cantwell. If we were lucky. If he was out fishing somewhere, Dean-Dean would be happy to fill in.
Trust Francie and her scriptwriters to put the worst possible face on things. Now, thanks to Francie and her TV crew, the Blatant Beast would have a gluttonous feast. If Truth was going to be The Daughter of Time in this case, Time had better move fast.
“In other news,” Francie intoned, “government investigation continues into that rocket failure earlier this week. Authorities have traced the failure to a guidance component provided by Pegasus Electronics. In an unusual move, the corporation’s chairman of the board, Gordon Samstag, announced that an internal investigation is being conducted. He promises to get to the bottom of what happened.”
At that point I hit the “off” switch. I can take just so much TV news, and tonight I’d heard much too much. So now I did what I should have done earlier. I phoned Mara Thorn.
“I suppose you’ve heard the news of my life in crime,” she said, her voice hard and metallic. “So much for our efforts to avoid scandal. The Beast is loose.”
“On TV, they’ve named both of us in that supposed love triangle with Mitra,” I said, “so we can expect another meeting with the president or dean, probably first thing in the morning.”
“We have so much to look forward to,” she said.
“We can either sit and wait for things to happen, or we can use the old Army procedure—‘attack immediately with troops available.’”
“We don’t have any troops, and we don’t have an objective to attack,” she said. But her tone changed. “What did you have in mind?”
“We’ll talk about it if you’ll go jogging with me.” I didn’t know if the phones were bugged, so I used a reference only she would understand. Jogging had been the cover for certain activities we couldn’t discuss openly.
“I could use a good run,” she said, her voice now clear and eager. “Where and when?”
I named a park about four blocks from Mitra Fortier’s house and the time as midnight.
She agreed, and we rang off.
I would have liked to give her some reassurance about her computer, but the possibility of bugged phones precluded it. Some of the local judges are overly compliant with requests for bugs and search warrants. I didn’t know if we’d find anything in Mitra Fortier’s house that would justify our burglary, but it was the only place I could think of to begin.
Shortly before midnight, I changed into my jogging suit, added a dark toboggan cap and scarf against the winter cold, and made sure the pockets still held my latex surgical gloves. My everyday gloves were dark enough, so I wore them. I sneaked out my back door and followed the darkest shadows around to the front, pausing in one of them to make sure no one was watching. Then I climbed into my old Honda and drove to the rendezvous.
Mitra’s house was located about half a mile from mine, the park I’d named four blocks beyond. The deserted park lay in darkness except for the lighted parking area. I arrived early so Mara wouldn’t have to wait there alone, and pretty soon her Buick cruised by, circled the block, and returned to park beside my Honda. Mara herself emerged in her dark blue warm-up, her blonde hair concealed under a dark toboggan cap.
“As it says in the poem,” she said, “‘lead and I follow.’”
“You’ve been reading Tennyson again,” I said, “but I’m not Gareth, and you’re not Lynette.”
She showed a tense smile. “I noticed you aren’t wearing your armor.”
“It was too heavy for jogging. Let’s go.”
She fell in beside me, and we set an easy pace toward Mitra’s house. The screwdriver and chisel I had in my pocket kept banging against my leg, but aside from that it was a good jog. Mara asked no questions when I turned into the garbage-truck alley behind Mitra’s house, which was located in the middle of the block. Fortunately, all of the houses had the usual six-foot wooden privacy fences. That gave us cover for our approach to Mitra’s gate. We opened it and slipped up to the house’s back door.
With my surgical gloves on, I tried the door once. It did not open, so I took out my screwdriver and chisel.
“Let me try it,” Mara whispered. “You keep lookout.”
I gave way and looked toward the gate while she did whatever it was she did.
“Voila,” she whispered and held the door open for me to enter.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“I used my ‘feminine wiles.’ That’s what you called them last fall when you told me to use them on Elmo Koonz.”
“Then this must have been a male doorknob,” I said.
The dark shapes of her hands flew to her hips. “You’re coloring outside the lines again.”
I was never much good at coloring, so I preceded her into the house.
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
“Anything that would suggest why Mitra was murdered, why she thought our jobs were in jeopardy, or how that confounded journal about an affair came into being.”
Mitra’s house had a small living room/dining room, a kitchenette, a hallway, a master bedroom, two smaller bedrooms, and two baths. In the living room, Venetian blinds stood open on the single window that looked toward the street. I closed them before turning on my penlight, which I again had covered with red cellopha
ne. Mara also had brought a red-filtered penlight.
We shined our lights around the living room and found it was simply furnished—a divan, an easy chair, and one of the old CRT televisions with rabbit-ears antennae. I’d bet she never watched anything but news and weather.
Mara rifled the bureau drawers and checked the closets in the master bedroom while I looked over the two baths.
“Nothing odd there,” she reported. “Simple, business-like wardrobe. Nothing fancy in the cosmetics. She seems to have lived a very plain existence.”
“Same with the baths,” I said.
One of the other two bedrooms had been converted into a study, the most likely place for us to find anything helpful. Mara tackled the desk while I examined the contents of three well-stocked bookshelves. Most of the books were scientific texts— physics, advanced mathematics, chemistry, and biology. As a just-the-facts lady, Mitra had plenty of facts to play with.
The other books seemed of more recent vintage. Most of these concerned accounting and business, but there was a pamphlet on aircraft safety certification.
“Nothing of interest here,” Mara said. “Paid receipts, stationery, pens, and pencils. That’s it. Did you find anything?”
“Nothing conclusive,” I said. “The books on accounting confirm what Freda Broyles told us, but the pamphlet on aircraft certification suggests she was looking into Jerry Vaughan’s crash.”
Mara sniffed. “Emory Estes didn’t want to talk about that when you questioned him.”
“Are you suspecting him? I thought you two were friends.”
I could not see her eyes, but I felt them scorching me. “That’s a subject for another occasion. Let’s get on with the search before we get caught.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
In the last bedroom, I had only enough time for an impression of many shelved books before I heard a car stopping in front of the house. Mara and I dashed to the living room and saw, around the closed blinds, red and blue flashing lights. We hurried to the back door, but another police car with flashing lights occupied the alley by the back gate.
We were trapped.
CHAPTER 26
For a few seconds we stood frozen in place, certain we were lost. I cursed myself for getting Mara involved. With all the other strikes against us, we wouldn’t stand a chance in court.
“Come on,” Mara whispered. “They may not check the closets.”
She seized my arm and pulled me down the hallway. Even in those straits, I remembered her abhorrence of being touched. In a strange way, I felt honored.
Heavy steps sounded outside, and someone fumbled with the front door. At the end of the hall I turned toward the master bedroom and its large closet.
Mara seized my arm again. “That’s the first place they’ll look.” She pulled me into the third bedroom and into the tiny closet in its most remote corner. There wasn’t enough room for one person in there, much less two. I backed up against one wall. Mara, as near as I could tell in the pitch black, did the same against the other wall with the door on her right. That left only an inch or two of space between us.
I’m not tall, but my five-feet-ten made me stoop to fit under the shelf. I wondered how long I could hold that position.
The sound of the front door opening came clearly, and we heard two sets of heavy footsteps inside.
“Don’t sneeze,” Mara whispered.
“I hadn’t planned to,” I whispered back. Then I felt her finger laid across my lips in the age-old motion to command silence. I tried to answer with a nod, but that made her finger poke my nose, which proceeded to itch. She withdrew the finger, and I could hear her soft breathing an inch or two in front of my face.
Footsteps moved about in the house, accompanied by voices whose words we couldn’t identify. The steps and voices came closer down the hall, and one said, “Check the closet.” I think my heart would have stopped if my nose had not kept itching and threatening the forbidden sneeze. I needed all the heartbeats I could muster to support the finger I pressed at the base of my nose to prevent the sneeze.
There are times of heightened perception when one is aware of many things at once. My primary attention was given to the pain of my cramped position and my efforts to forestall the sneeze, but I was also aware of Mara’s soft femininity only inches away. She smelled of cleanliness and soap, and I remembered the feel of my consoling hand on her back that night when she’d wept uncontrollably. Now, as then, desire welled up in me as it had not done since Faith’s death. This was a desire far beyond the physical attraction I’d felt with Cynthia Starlington. This desire called for complete merging of body and soul. I knew that Mara had the intellect, the emotional force and, yes, the Imagination for that total companionship.
But she abhorred being touched, and I needed to sneeze.
Through the rear wall of the closet, I could hear the policemen searching the study. My legs and shoulders ached from the stooped position, and my nose felt like it had been overdosed with itching powder, but the pressure of my finger still held back the sneeze.
Footsteps entered the room that hosted our closet. A reflection of light became visible under the closet door, and presently the flashlight’s white beam shone directly under the door. I held my breath and clamped my finger harder on my nose.
Then the light withdrew and full darkness returned. “Nothing here,” a voice muttered from the hallway, and another said something about “nervous old woman …” Footsteps retreated, and presently we heard a door close.
“Not yet,” Mara whispered.
I couldn’t answer because I was too busy preventing the sneeze.
A car engine started out front and receded as the vehicle withdrew. We stood in silence and waited. I don’t know what Mara was thinking, but I was thinking of my cramping muscles and wondering when I could sneeze. I was also increasingly aware of Mara’s closeness and my desire to embrace her.
She exhaled. “It’s all right now, Cupcake. They’ve gone.”
She opened the door and stepped silently out into the room, then moved soundlessly up the hallway. I unfolded myself from my constrained position and tried to stretch the kinks out of my muscles. As soon as I removed the finger’s pressure from my nose, the long-suppressed sneeze asserted itself with an explosion. In the silent house, it sounded like a ten kiloton nuclear blast. Francie LaBouche could have used the sound to enhance the ersatz mushroom cloud that announced her advent on the news program.
Mara stood beside me. “The one in back has gone, too,” she said. “It’s a good thing. That sneeze must have waked half the neighborhood as well as spreading enough germs for a biological warfare attack on China.”
“We’d better get out of here,” I said.
Her chin tilted upward. “Not until we’ve searched this room.”
“There’s nothing here but books,” I said. It was true. The room held nothing except bookcases on three walls.
“But what kind of books?” Mara illuminated one bookcase with her filtered penlight. I cast my light on another bookcase. It was filled with Regency romances by Georgiana Lowe. I already knew Freda Broyles had lied to me when she claimed to be a fan of Georgiana Lowe, and I suspected she’d lied about removing the Regency-style dresses from Mitra’s house. Now these paperbacks suggested that Mitra, not Freda, was the romance reader. Did she also own the dresses Freda took from the house? And if so, what kind of discovery was Freda trying to shield Mitra from?
“Press, I don’t believe this,” Mara whispered. “You said Professor Fortier was a just-the-facts scientific type. But here she has a whole shelf of bodice-ripper romances.” She paused, then asked, “What’s in your bookcase?”
“Paperback romances, but more tasteful ones. Georgiana Lowe.”
“Hers are good—accurate representation of speech and people’s concerns from the Regency period.”
Score more points for Mara’s erudition. She’d read all the classics and period romances to boot.
&nbs
p; We converged on the center bookcase and found that it contained romances whose content lay about halfway between the clean romances of Georgiana Lowe and the raunchy ones Mara had found.
“Well, we’ve searched the house,” Mara said, “and the only thing we’ve found out of line is this roomful of romances. What do you make of it?”
I couldn’t make anything, so I said, “I make of it that we’d better get out of here before the cops decide on an encore.”
“One thing first.” She moved to the living room windows and pulled the Venetian blind a tiny bit aside.
“What do you see?” I asked.
“Someone peeking out a window in the house across the street. I saw the curtains move.”
“That’s Freda Broyles’ house,” I said. “We have a lot more to question her about.”
Mara nodded, and we moved without speaking out the back door and into the alley. The night had grown colder, and our breaths made steam clouds in the frigid air. At the mouth of the alley, we began jogging. In the park we walked for our cooldown and called it sufficient when we stood beside our cars.
“You’re really great, Mara,” I said. “You’re threatened with jail time, yet tonight you’ve been as poised as if you’d been serving afternoon tea.”
“More poised,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what to do at a tea, and at least we’re doing something. What next?”
“We grab the time we have left before someone else preempts. Given tonight’s news, the administration will have us on the carpet before classes tomorrow ... uh ... later this morning. I need to talk to Freda Broyles about why she lied to me, and I need to find out if Weldon Combes actually made a play for Mitra after her boyfriend was killed. And I wonder why he came back to the campus the night we found the body.”
She sniffed. “You can’t get that done before our glorious meeting with the administration, and you may not have freedom to do it afterward. Why don’t I take Freda Broyles? Will she get to work before eight?”