“Back off, Bree,” he barked. “Your child is covered in Bryan’s blood, and she’s going to tell me why.” He took another ominous step, crowding Bree and Alice against the wall. “Now.”
I recognized the mulish expression on my cousin’s face. Irresistible force had met immovable object, and nothing good could come from that. I decided I ought to wade in to prevent further bloodshed.
Carefully, I placed a gentle hand on Cal’s arm. His muscles vibrated like a tuning fork beneath my fingers.
“Cal,” I whispered.
“Not now, Tally,” he growled.
“Cal,” I said more forcefully. “You’re not going to get anywhere like this. Why don’t you walk with me a minute?”
He shook my hand off, but he backed away from Bree and Alice.
I followed as he stalked down the hall a few yards, then stopped and dropped onto one of the low benches that lined the walls. He scrubbed his face with his square, long-fingered hands.
“Christ a-mighty,” he sighed. “What am I going to tell Marla?”
I sat next to him, perching gingerly on the edge of the bench. “I’m so sorry, Cal.”
He looked down the hall, gaze resting briefly on Alice and Bree before focusing on the doorway to the English department office. Parents, students, and faculty had cleared away, leaving a harried knot of uniformed law enforcement: Dickerson University police, Dalliance police, and a couple of representatives of the Lantana County Sheriff’s Department. A muscle in Cal’s jaw bunched and released, as though he were chewing over a tough thought.
“Dammit,” he muttered. “I can’t even work the case. Can’t do shit.”
Cal and I hadn’t spoken much over the last twenty years, but I felt like I knew him pretty well. Cal’s grandma and mine were neighbors, and Cal and I had grown up within biking distance of each other. As kids, we’d matched wits with one another over games of Risk and Monopoly, played on the same peewee softball team, and dunked each other at the community swimming pool.
In high school, the fact that Cal had more money and was way more cool than me suddenly started to matter. He still came to my rescue on occasion—like when my mama got plastered and threatened to drive to Tulsa and shoot my daddy with Grandma Peachy’s shotgun—but we didn’t go to the same parties or hang out with the same kids anymore. Then, as adults, he’d gone into the military and I’d gotten married, so we didn’t really cross paths much until the trouble of the autumn before. Still, those lazy summer evenings of lightning bugs and flashlight tag bound us together as surely as blood.
Cal acted. He fought, he seized, he saved, he fixed, he did—having to sit on the sidelines while his family absorbed such a blow would kill him.
“Marla’s gonna need you by her side,” I said. “That’s the best place in the world for you to be.”
Once again, I laid my hand on his forearm. This time, he didn’t push me away. Instead, he covered my hand with his own.
“Detective McCormack?”
Cal and I jumped apart as though we’d been burned.
Emily Clowper stood before us, Finn at her side. Tentatively she extended a hand. “I’m Dr. Clowper. I was on Bryan’s committee. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Cal bolted to his feet. He gave Emily’s hand a hard stare, but made no move to take it. His mama would have had a fit and dropped dead on the spot if she’d witnessed her son behaving so rudely.
“I know who you are,” Cal said, something dark and dangerous in his voice. “And I don’t imagine you’re sorry at all.”
What little color was left in Emily’s face drained away, and she let her proffered hand fall to her side.
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
“What happens to your hearing now that Bryan’s gone, huh?”
Blood rushed to Emily’s waxen cheeks, staining them a hectic crimson.
“Detective McCormack, university counsel has advised me not to discuss Bryan’s allegations or the upcoming hearing with anyone.”
“Sounds mighty convenient,” Cal snapped.
Emily shook her head. “Hardly,” she said. She looked like she was about to argue further with Cal, but Finn placed a restraining hand on her arm. He leaned in to whisper something in her ear. Whatever he said, it clicked with her. She heaved an impatient sigh, but then visibly collected herself.
“Once again, Detective McCormack, I’m sorry for your loss.” Without waiting for an answer, she walked away, turning the corner at the end of the hall and disappearing.
Cal watched her go, jaw hard and eyes harder, before turning on his heel and storming off in the opposite direction.
Once he was out of earshot, I faced Finn. “What the heck was that all about?”
He fidgeted with his camera strap, and I wasn’t sure he’d answer me. But then he shrugged. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Basically, Emily failed Bryan on some exam, and he claimed that she did it in retaliation because he refused her, uh, romantic advances.”
Sexual. Finn meant “sexual advances.” I tried to imagine the abrupt, prickly woman I’d met today making a pass at a younger man. It seemed far-fetched. But given the looks she’d exchanged with Finn, she clearly wasn’t a nun.
“That sounds pretty serious,” I said weakly.
“Apparently so,” Finn said. “Bryan had retained a lawyer and was threatening to sue the school, so there was a lot of pressure on the administration to act. The university had an administrative hearing scheduled for the week after next, after the semester ended. If the university determined Bryan was telling the truth, Emily probably would have lost her job. Finding another academic position after something like that would have been downright impossible. And there aren’t that many other jobs out there for people with Ph.D.’s in English.”
“Wow.” I searched Finn’s face, but his expression remained flat, impassive. “And now that Bryan’s dead?”
He shrugged again. “I’m not sure. Certainly no lawsuit. And from what Emily said, which wasn’t much, Bryan didn’t have any evidence. It was just her word against his. And he was lying.”
“According to Emily.”
He met my eyes, and I saw the conviction in his gaze. “Yes, according to Emily,” he conceded. “But she was telling the truth.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. Emily’s not perfect, but she’s a straight arrow. She’d never abuse her power over a student. And if she did, she wouldn’t be able to cover it up. There isn’t a deceptive bone in her body.”
“Hmmm.” In my experience, everyone kept secrets. Everyone lied, if the stakes were high enough.
Emily Clowper certainly had enough at stake to lie. But did she have enough at stake to kill?
chapter 3
By Monday morning, news of the murder at Dickerson University had spread like a west Texas brush fire, igniting latent town-gown animosity into a full-fledged inferno of speculation and name-calling. And rightly or wrongly, Dr. Emily Clowper was strapped to a stake right in the middle of it all.
Down-home, no-nonsense, small-town pride is as integral to life in Dalliance, Texas, as the gas-rich shale that runs beneath the arid north Texas soil. Big-box stores and suburban strip malls were cropping up out on FM 410, but the heart of the town still beat in the tiny courthouse square. Folks from outside Texas sometimes comment that the courthouse square reminds them of a medieval castle, guarded by a moat of one-way streets and knights in white pickup trucks. The town barely tolerated the highfalutin university on the best of days, and with trouble brewing on campus, the pickups were closing ranks.
Rants about an East Coast intellectual preying on a hometown boy and ivory-towered eggheads obstructing justice to protect their own filled the Op-Ed page of the Dalliance News-Letter (never mind that Emily Clowper was from Minnesota or that Dickerson had acted with lightning speed to place her on administrative leave pending the resolution of the police investigation). Meanwhile, the Dickerson Daily lamented the lack of objectivity of the
Dalliance PD and fretted about a rush to judgment that might ruin the career of a promising young scholar (never mind that Cal McCormack had been barred from anything to do with the investigation or that the authorities officially denied that Emily was a suspect).
Alice had no trouble choosing sides.
“It’s not fair, Aunt Tally,” she said as she lugged a two-gallon tub of our new Flamin’ Hot Chile-Pineapple ice cream out of the walk-in freezer. “Dr. Clowper didn’t do anything wrong, but she’s being punished anyway.”
We were getting ready to open the Remember the A-la-mode—stocking the freezer, balancing the till, heating the sundae sauces—before Alice headed off to class. “Most people wouldn’t consider a paid vacation ‘punishment,’” I responded as I dropped a metal pot of fudge into the water bath and turned on the heat. I might have had my doubts about Emily’s innocence, but I knew better than to argue the point with Alice.
She heaved the bucket of ice cream into the empty spot in the display freezer with a tiny grunt. Alice didn’t weigh more than a buck ten soaking wet, but she worked like a dray horse. “It’s not a vacation. It’s a banishment. They won’t even let her finish her classes this semester, and she can’t teach the May-term class she was scheduled for.”
“May term?” I asked. “Is that like summer school?”
“Sort of. It’s a little short term in between the regular semester and summer school. Just three weeks, but each class meets for three hours a day, five days a week.”
“That sounds horrible,” I muttered.
Alice laughed. “It’s not fun, either for students or teachers. But Dr. Clowper was going to teach the short term so she could travel the rest of the summer.”
“Must be nice,” Bree said. “Now she can leave even sooner.”
“No, now she probably can’t go at all. She needed the income from the May-term class to fund a research trip to the East Coast later this summer. Massachusetts and Washington.”
Bree, who had been counting out the change drawer under her breath, paused in the middle of a stack of fives. “Massachusetts? She writes about books. Don’t they have books here?”
Alice let the door to the display freezer drop with a thud. “Geez, Mom,” she snapped. “She’s working on a book about the political subtext of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and she needs access to the collection of her letters and diaries in Amherst and to information about her father’s term in Congress. Without the summer teaching money, she’ll have to get a grant to fund the trip. And grant money is really, really tough to get.”
“Sor-ry,” Bree drawled.
Alice rolled her eyes, but she seemed mollified. “It’s a big deal,” she said. “Dr. Clowper’s up for tenure next year, and she needs this book to be done and published if she wants to keep her job. It’s all about tenure, you know.”
A flicker of wistfulness clouded Bree’s expression. We both wanted Alice to have a good education and all the opportunities that came with it. But the bottom line was that Alice was entering a world Bree and I knew little about. Our little girl was vanishing right before our eyes, being transformed into a sophisticated stranger.
“How do you know so much about the nitty-gritty of Emily Clowper’s job situation? As in her precise situation at this moment?” I asked, sliding a canister of salted caramel sauce in next to the fudge.
Alice’s shoulders jerked, and she turned toward the sink. She cranked on the faucet to wash her hands, and for a second, the hollow roar of water on metal made talking impossible.
I waited until she snatched up a towel and knocked the tap closed with her elbow. “Alice?”
Bree had slid the cash drawer closed and was watching her daughter with narrowed eyes.
Alice sighed. “Okay. I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d be all crazy about it, but I talked with Dr. Clowper last night.”
“You what?” Bree barked.
“It’s no big deal. I went over so we could talk about my paper—”
Bree cut her off. “ ‘Went over’? You mean to her house?”
“Yeah. It’s really no big deal. She’s had us over before, all the students who are doing independent studies with her, so we can workshop our projects. We order pizza and sit around her living room. It’s just more comfortable than meeting in her office and quieter than a coffee shop or whatever.”
“Were these other kids at her house last night?”
Alice looked at her feet for a moment, before raising her chin and facing her mother squarely. “No. I went by myself. Dr. Clowper had sent us a mass e-mail saying she wasn’t allowed to come to campus until everything gets resolved, and I was worried about her.” She tucked her sleek strawberry hair behind her ear. “I tried to get some of the other kids to come with me to show our solidarity.”
“But they were all too smart to say ‘yes,’ huh?” Bree shook her head. “Well, you’re not gonna do that again.”
Alice’s jaw slid to the side, like she was chewing on gristle. “Actually, I am. Dr. Clowper isn’t allowed on campus, and they even put a hold on her account so she can’t access the library or the school computer network from home. So she gave me the key to her office, and I promised her I would stop by a couple of times a week so I can bring her things she needs for her work.”
Bree gasped in outrage, but Alice pressed on. “I want to show her that we don’t all think she’s some sort of criminal.” She set her small fists on her hips. “Because she’s not.”
Bree matched her daughter’s belligerent stance, so I sidled up to her, ready to intervene if things got too nasty. After all, I had to unlock the store in a few minutes, and their domestic dispute wouldn’t be good for business.
“She’s not a criminal,” Bree mocked. “And do you have anything other than her word for that?”
“Yes,” Alice said. “I have my own good judgment.”
That took a little of the starch out of Bree’s spine. “I still don’t like it,” she insisted. “Even if she weren’t a suspect—”
“She’s not a suspect.”
Bree raised her hand. “Even if she weren’t a suspect,” she repeated, “I think it’s weird for you to go to a teacher’s house, especially by yourself. If there was any way for you to drop your classes this late in the semester, I wouldn’t even let you on that campus. I sure as heck don’t want you spending one-on-one time with a possible murderer.”
Alice opened her mouth, then snapped it closed. She shook her head as she stripped her apron off. “I have to go to class,” she muttered, holding up a hand to fend off any potential argument, “with hundreds of other students in broad daylight. We can talk about this later.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Bree insisted.
“Whatever.”
Nothing got under Bree’s skin more than that one dismissive little word. She tensed up again, ready to have it out with her troublesome child.
“Let it go, Bree,” I hissed.
Bree shot me an irritated glance, but Alice was already on her way out the back door, a backpack that probably weighed as much as she did slung over one shoulder.
“Can you believe that?” Bree huffed as the door banged shut.
Bree snorted. “Going to that woman’s house without so much as a by your leave? I thought I raised that child better than that.”
I smothered a laugh. “She’s more like you every day.” Bree shot me a disbelieving look. It killed me that neither mother nor daughter could see how much alike they were. “She’s fiercely loyal, listens to her gut, stubborn as a mule . . . shall I go on?”
I walked to the front door, flipped the OPEN sign, and threw the dead bolt. Late-April weather in north Texas is unpredictable, but the local news promised sun and highs in the eighties for the day. With any luck, the A-la-mode would be jumping by lunch.
“Listen,” I said. “Whether you like it or not, Alice is going to stand by her teacher. And you can’t watch her every minute of every day.”
“Wanna bet?”
I let the laughter escape this time. “For what it’s worth, Finn thinks pretty highly of this lady, and he’s a good judge of character.”
Bree arched an eyebrow, and I knew she was itching to press me about Finn and Emily, but she showed uncharacteristic restraint.
“Why don’t you compromise?” I suggested. “Tell Alice that she can meet with Dr. Clowper, but they have to meet here. On neutral territory.”
Bree snapped a clean apron over her head.
“Not a bad plan. Though I’m not sure either one of us is ‘neutral’ toward that woman.”
chapter 4
Much to Bree’s surprise, Alice and Emily both agreed to meet at the A-la-mode. Much to my surprise, Emily brought Finn Harper with her.
I watched through my plate glass storefront as Finn waited patiently on the sidewalk, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his rumpled khakis, while Emily locked a pink bicycle to a parking meter. Her short flippy purple skirt and ballet-necked white T-shirt showed off a lithe figure that her long linen dress had concealed when I first met her. With a canvas tote bag slung across her body and a pair of Earth sandals on her feet, she looked like she could be a college student herself.
Finn held the door for both Alice and Emily, and they filed to the back of the store.
“Anyone want ice cream?” I asked as they settled down around one of my wrought-iron café tables. Bree crossed behind them to the door to lock up for the day, and Kyle Mason, my only nonfamily employee, slouched by the restroom door, watching Alice’s every move with a blend of longing and animosity peculiar to moody teenagers. Poor Kyle teetered right on the brink of adulthood, but Alice, his crush, had already entered the grown-up world of college. He chafed at being left behind.
“No, thanks,” Alice said, as she rooted around in her backpack.
“You know I can’t resist your ice cream, Tally,” Finn said with a wink. “Bring me something tasty.”
I looked at Emily. She stared back, her brow furrowed in confusion. “Diabetic. Just water.”
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