Extra Credit (34 page)

Several limousines lined the curb in front of the Gothic building, and their doors opened almost simultaneously, Rayfields spewing forth and onto the sidewalk. Max’s brothers, their wives, their children, and assorted aunts and uncles started to assemble at the steps to the church, and I scanned the crowd for my best friend. She was the last one out of the first limo, Fred standing by her side as she emerged from the deep backseat of the long black car. The day was unseasonably mild, and her black cashmere swing coat was open, revealing a fitted black dress that, in turn, revealed a very curious detail about Max’s usually very slim, very taut shape.

If my eyes weren’t deceiving me, I would say that my friend was just a little bit pregnant. That, or last night’s burritos hadn’t properly digested.

I didn’t stand on ceremony, nor did I wait to see if she was mad at me. I rushed up to the car and, pushing myself between her and Fred, grabbed her in a hug. At first resistant, she finally relented and softened, falling into me and letting out a sob that she seemed to have been holding in for an eternity. Then she punched me in the shoulder.

“I’m really mad at you,” she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“I know.”

“I wasn’t even expecting to see you. Heard you got kidnapped again. Twice.”

I shrugged. “Just another day in the life of a boring college professor.”

“We have to talk. Not today, but soon.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” I said and pointed to her belly. “Seems like I’ve missed a lot.”

“More than you know,” she said. “I figured my not drinking was a dead giveaway but sometimes you’re really dense, you know?”

Yes, I knew.

“Dad always liked you best, you know.” She was only half-kidding; she’d let my comment about the belly slide, indicating to me that she wasn’t ready to talk about it. Or that she didn’t want to ruin something so happy with the events to take place.

“That’s only because I was the good girl.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You think?”

“I know.” I laid my hand lightly on her belly. “The tattoo, the blue hair, the nose piercing … shall I go on?”

“You need to stop,” she said, but she was talking about something else. “Before someone … before you get hurt.”

“Too late for that.” I said before realizing I didn’t know what she was talking about. “I need to stop what?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Everything. The sleuthing. The mystery solving. The getting into everyone else’s business. You don’t have time for anything else,” she said. “You don’t have time for me.”

So there it was. She was feeling neglected. Who could blame her? I had spent so much time on other pursuits the past several weeks that I had left her in the dust, and if I knew anything, it was that a neglected Max was an unhappy Max. Just as she was once the only person I had in my life, it seemed like now I was the only one she needed. Or the one she needed the most; I couldn’t tell which it was.

There was nothing more to say, at least not at that moment. Her father had to be buried; there was time to repair what had been broken between us. “I’m going to go inside and grab a pew,” I said, starting off toward the front doors.

She grabbed me by the shoulder. “No, you’re not. You’re sitting with my family,” she said. She took my hand, and together we waited curbside for Marty’s coffin to be removed from the hearse. I gave her hand a hard squeeze, which she returned, and then we all fell in line behind the beautiful mahogany box, Max grabbing hold of her stoic mother with her free hand. Her blond hair done up in an elaborate chignon, Gigi resembled an older Grace Kelly, her very expensive handbag dangling from her thin wrist. In the distance, hurrying past what was once the parochial school that Max had attended and was now a parish hall, was Crawford, his coat flapping behind him as he made his way to the church. He went behind us and snuck in a side door, leaving me to process behind the casket with the only family I had ever had since losing my parents.

Before we got inside the church itself, the casket taking up most of the space right inside the door, she leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Nice dress.”

That’s how I knew we would be good again. We always were.

Forty-Four

Mary Lou Bannerman, if that was even her legal name, wasn’t going to win any writing awards, but her story was compelling and illuminating nonetheless. It helped clear up a few things for me, loose ends that kept me awake at night as I listened to Crawford snoring contentedly beside me, his duties as stud wearing him out.

Mary Lou was on probation; Briggs, not so much. The mastermind of the extortion/kidnapping plot was most likely going to go to jail for a long time, and I certainly wasn’t doing anything to stop anyone from putting him away.

I was back at school and keeping a low profile, brown bagging my lunch so I didn’t have to look into the sad eyes of Marcus, the person who had gone to bat for the hiring of Briggs, spending long stretches in my office by myself, and only leaving to teach my classes. It was a lonely existence but one that I needed to maintain if I were to keep my job. I had definitely worn out my welcome at St. Thomas, bringing dishonor to a school for which, deep down, I had great affection.

It was late in the day and I was tired, but I was also champing at the bit to read Mary Lou’s pages. I had made a copy, having turned over the original manuscript of what was really only a synopsis and a few pages, an outline really, to the authorities, curious to see just what had driven Mrs. Bannerman to try to get as close to me as possible and what she had to do with this whole charade turned nightmare.

I wasn’t surprised when my parents adopted Sassafras; after all, she had nowhere else to go. She was a sweet kid with a wild side, but her heart was in the right place and even though more than a decade separated us in age, we became close.

She always called me Sissy, not because I was now her sister, but because that’s what I was: a big sissy. “No guts, no glory,” she used to say before bringing me into her latest scheme, something that usually involved lying to my parents.

I resisted the urge to correct grammar and punctuation as I read the story of how Sassy came to be part of Mary Lou’s genteel family and what really happened to her husband. It had all the earmarks of a southern tragedy.

She arrived in New York when she was twenty, looking to live with me and Bob, but he wouldn’t take her in. I tried to help her find a job because even though my family was well-off, Sassy had been cut off. Her lack of direction, dropping out of school, and inability to stay out of trouble had caused my father to stop giving her money and she had nowhere else to turn. I helped as much as I could but it wasn’t enough. She turned to exotic dancing to make ends meet. The money was great and she was very talented, from what she told us. I didn’t think dancing was a career but she was bringing in more money in a week than I had ever seen.

And then she met Chick.

Seemed like we were getting to the good part.

What kind of man supports a woman in a career like that? Someone like Chick, obviously. They were married on a beautiful Saturday, in a beautiful church, and had a reception at a beautiful restaurant. They seemed to be madly in love even if their lifestyle choices weren’t what my family and I chose for ourselves. The rest of his family seemed nice, his sister especially, but he was a ruffian, despite his job standing at Sans-a-Flush. He put our company on the map, but he also was partially responsible for its descent into bankruptcy, using money from various accounts to support his and Sassy’s lifestyle. Bob, by then the CEO of my father’s company, decided that the best course of action was to fire Chick.

The day Bob died, a gorgeous day in 2001, he wasn’t supposed to go to work that day, but my father wanted Chick gone. Chick was stealing, my father said. Chick was bad news. Bob went to work to fire Chick. I kissed him good-bye and wished him luck. Bob liked Chick but got to thinking that he might be up to no good just as my father suspected. On that day, Bob traveled to his office to meet Chick. When he got there, he found Chick emptying his office and taking things he shouldn’t, files of work, ideas for new marketing directions, and in the midst of all of that, some of the company’s financial records. And checks. Signed by Bob. The ones he had been using to keep him and Sassy in the lifestyle they wanted.

Bob and Chick fought. Not physically, of course, but loudly and violently in their way, Bob trying desperately to talk Chick out of doing what he planned. After Chick left, Bob had a massive coronary right there at the offices, right where he had given Chick his start, right where he had built an empire, and died.

Chick Stepkowski murdered my husband.

Why Chick had taken his life was still a mystery. Guilt over the fact that his intrusion at the Sans-a-Flush offices had in some way contributed to Bob’s death? I didn’t know and I didn’t care. As involved as I had been in all of this, I was not invested in Chick, in Mary Lou, or in the Du Pris family at large. I just wanted all of them to go away and leave me alone with my boring existence, my recalcitrant students, my hectic teaching load, and my Crawford.

I do love Michael, just not in the way I loved Bob. I married him because I don’t know how to be alone. And that makes me very, very sad.

I looked out the window and stared at my favorite sight, the St. Thomas cemetery, the one that was the final resting place of the nuns who had passed on, including my favorite, Sister Alphonse. If I had been a nonbeliever before, I was rapidly coming around to the idea that maybe Alphonse was now my guardian angel. So much had happened, and yet I was still safe. For me to think that she had had some hand in my well-being was crazy, but for me to think that she didn’t have a hand in it was also crazy. How could I have avoided so many dangerous scrapes without some divine intervention?

As I mulled this over, I spotted a figure that I had come to recognize coming down the stairs in front of the cemetery. How she had gotten past security at the front gate—everyone now had her picture—wasn’t all that mystifying; the security team, and I use that term loosely, was not known for its crack enforcement. As an extra precaution, Crawford’s brother, Jimmy, my go-to for all legal matters, had requested a restraining order, but she had probably plied the gate guard with an applesauce loaf or a few cupcakes; they could be bought that easily. Mary Lou Bannerman was not supposed to come to my place of work at any given time, something that was in effect until her probation ended, sometime in the next decade.

I was frozen in my chair. St. Thomas, for Mary Lou, was completely off-limits. I had a few choices, all of which swam through my head. Calling security was an option, but really, what could any one of the guards—most of them overweight, legally blind, old, or some combination of those traits—do if she had come to hurt me, armed with God knows what? Call Crawford? I wasn’t sure where he was or what he was doing, so I decided that texting him was the best way to get his attention. I knew that I had a few seconds before she arrived in my office, so I tapped out a quick SOS to my husband, somewhere in the Bronx, doing something that was probably as unsavory as protecting me from Mary Lou Bannerman, someone I wasn’t sure was even dangerous. These days, though, I wasn’t taking any chances.

When she arrived, I was standing behind my desk with a thick first edition of
Anna Karenina
brandished over my head, prepared to throw it if necessary. She stood outside my open office door, knowing that what she was doing was not kosher under the terms of my order of protection. My arms were getting tired;
Anna Karenina
was heavier than I thought.

“You can put the book down,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“How did you get on campus?” I asked.

“I walked.” She smiled. “No one looks twice at a middle-aged mother when she enters a college campus.”

“But everyone has your photo.”

She shrugged. “Lot of good it did.” She rested her hand on the doorknob. “Can I come in?”

“Absolutely not.” I said, my arms coming down a little farther from the weight of the book. “What do you want?”

“Put the book down, Alison,” she said, smiling at Sister Evelyn, shuffling past to her corner office. To Sister Anna Catherine, who was also passing by, what was going on both inside and outside my office was completely normal. The convent must have let their subscription to the local paper lapse, keeping Sister Anna Catherine and all of her compadres in the dark about my latest exploits and what the appearance of former student Mary Lou Bannerman might mean.

“I just wanted to say I was sorry for what happened,” Mary Lou said, taking a step closer to the office.

“Stay there. Not another step.”

“I really am,” she said. “Can I give you a hug?”

“Again, absolutely not,” I said, wondering what it was about this woman that allowed her to not take a very direct hint. “Get the hell off campus, Mary Lou. I’ve already let Crawford know that you’re here, and if he gets here before you leave, you’re going to spend the night in jail for sure.”

The crying started again. After my night in the woods with her, I had been hoping I would never hear the keening cries of Mary Lou Bannerman, her sadness apparently the only thing that mattered. “I’m so sorry.”

“You should be,” I said, finally putting down the book. “You have a nut job of a son, and I could have been killed. Your sister was no picnic, either. I just want you and your family to go back to Crazy Town, where you all belong.” I sat down, suddenly feeling the exhaustion that had plagued me for the past few weeks returning. “All I wanted to do was throw a nice birthday party for my stepdaughters. Nothing fancy,” I muttered. “Just a little cake and champagne and presents. I wish I had never thought of it.”

“Why are you so angry at me?” she asked. By her tone and the plaintive look on her face, it appeared that she really didn’t know.

I didn’t feel like explaining to her that getting drugged, kidnapped, and threatened usually made people angry at one another, even if the person asking the question wasn’t the one who actually did the drugging, kidnapping, or threatening. I fixed her with a look that I hoped communicated what I felt without having to say a word.