Burying Ariel (29 page)

When I got back to the Political Science office, Rosalie was at her desk. She was wearing a white silk blouse, a single strand of pearls, and delicate pearl and diamond drop earrings. She looked lovely, and I told her so.

“One of the tips in my bridal book is that a bride should try out her jewellery for the wedding beforehand. It says a bride doesn’t want to be walking down the aisle when she discovers that she should have had her grandmother’s pearls restrung.”

“No,” I said, “I guess she doesn’t.”

Rosalie picked up the flatness in my voice. “Am I talking too much about my own life these days?”

“Of course not,” I said. “I love hearing the details. You know that. I’m just a little preoccupied. You haven’t seen Solange, have you?”

“She was waiting outside the office when I got to work this morning.”

“Is she around now?”

“No. She wanted some information, and when I gave it to her, she left.”

“What was the information?”

Rosalie fingered her grandmother’s pearls pensively. “You know that I try to keep my dealings with every faculty member confidential.…”

“This is important,” I said quickly.

“I guess there’s no reason not to divulge this,” Rosalie said. “Solange wanted to know if we had a current phone number for Maryse Bergman.”

The name was familiar but I couldn’t make a connection. “Is she a student?” I asked.

“She
was
a student,” Rosalie said. “She was the one who accused Dr. Coyle of rape.”

“Right,” I said. “How soon we forget.”

“I’ll bet Dr. Coyle hasn’t forgotten,” Rosalie said tartly.

“I’m sure he hasn’t,” I said. “So, did you have a current number?”

“The last listing we had was in care of the Political Science department where Ms. Bergman went to do her M.A.”

“You mean some university actually
accepted
her into their graduate program? Kevin showed me her transcript when all his problems with her started. She barely made it through her undergraduate degree. Who took her?”

Rosalie named the university.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Their program is first-rate. They’ve rejected students of ours who had a lot more potential than Maryse Bergman.”

“Maybe she didn’t have that much potential after all.” Rosalie’s blackberry eyes sparkled with secret pleasure. “Solange wasn’t able to reach Ms. Bergman through the Political Science department there. She must have flunked out. Anyway, Solange came back and asked if we had anything more current.”

“And we don’t.”

“We don’t, but I knew Dr. Coyle would. He makes a point of keeping track of all the people involved in his defence. He calls them his ‘players.’ I guess he was able to give Solange what she needed because I haven’t seen either of them since. Funny. Dr. Coyle didn’t even drop by to tell me where he could be reached. That’s not like him at all.”

“Rosalie, do you have Tom Bradley’s number? He’s …”

“Head of the Political Science department that accepted Maryse Bergman?” she said. “Of course, I have it. He was one of Dr. Jesse’s closest friends.”

“I’d forgotten that, too,” I said.

“I haven’t forgotten anything about Dr. Jesse,” Rosalie said wistfully. “When he was head of this department, we had standards.” As if to stop herself from elaborating, she snapped her lips shut and reached for her Rolodex. The conversation was over. I walked to the filing cabinet, found Maryse Bergman’s file, and pulled it.

When Rosalie handed me the paper on which she’d written Tom’s number, I noticed her manicure. “I like that shade of nail polish,” I said. “What’s it called?”

“Bridal Pink,” she said, but for the first time an allusion to her wedding didn’t bring a blush and a smile.

I went back to my office and opened Maryse Bergman’s file. What I saw confirmed the need to call Tom Bradley. Not only were Maryse’s grades mediocre, the file was fat with letters of protest she had written about grades. Maryse had never been my student, but her litany of aggrieved entitlement was a familiar one. “I spent three weeks working on this paper and I know for a fact that X wrote hers the night before, and I don’t think it’s fair that she got a better grade …” I closed the file and picked up the phone.

I’d met Tom Bradley several times when Ben had been alive, and we had liked one another enough to keep up the acquaintance through e-mail. I was glad we were on good terms because the question I had to ask Tom was a humdinger.

His pleasure when he heard my voice filled me with guilt, but there was no turning back. “I need to ask you about Maryse Bergman,” I said.

When he spoke again, there was a distinct chill. “What about her?”

“Is she still in your M.A. program?”

“She didn’t last.”

“That can’t have been a surprise. I’ve just been looking at her file. What made you accept her?”

The silence between us grew painful.

“You did it as a favour to Ben, didn’t you?” I said.

“To Ben and to your department,” he said finally. “Joanne, you remember the atmosphere then. It was a war zone, and the press was panting over every lurid rumour. Finally, when it seemed as if the worst was over, Maryse Bergman came along with her charges against Kevin Coyle. They would have been proven false. I want you to know that. If there had been even the slightest chance that Maryse Bergman was telling the truth, Ben wouldn’t have called me.”

“And asked you to accept Maryse into your graduate program to get her out of the way,” I said.

“It was a decision I didn’t lose a moment’s sleep over,” Tom said. “By accepting an unqualified student who, logic suggested, wouldn’t make it through her first year of studies, I was able to spare an innocent man more public humiliation and give your department a chance to reflect and regroup. Most importantly, I was able to take some of the heat off Ben. He’d already had one heart attack. I could see the price he was paying for trying to be fair and decent to a small group of people who were neither. I didn’t want to lose him. As it turned out, we lost him anyway, but I take comfort in the fact that I did my best for him.”

“You should,” I said. “Ben Jesse was one of the finest men I’ve ever known. Unfortunately, that’s not a factor here. I still need to get in touch with Maryse Bergman. Do you have a number where she can be reached?”

“So Ben’s obituary is going to be rewritten after all,” Tom said coldly. “Like Neville Chamberlain, he’ll be remembered as a man with a fatal need to appease.”

“If I’m lucky, Ben’s name won’t even come up,” I said. “All I need to find out from Maryse Bergman is if she acted alone or if she had a little help from her friends.”

“Joanne, does all this have something to do with that instructor who was killed out there last week? There hasn’t been much about it in our media, but I assumed it was a case of random violence. It never occurred to me till this minute that there might be a link with that mess two years ago.”

“There may not be,” I said, “but if there is, Maryse Bergman may be able to shed light on the connection. Will you give me her number?”

“Sure,” he said. “But if you were of a mind to, you could hop in your car and be talking to her face to face in less than an hour. When her studies didn’t work out here, Maryse moved back to Saskatchewan. She works on the front desk at the Big Sky Motel in Moose Jaw.”

I thanked Tom, rang off, then dialled the number he had given me. My call was picked up on the first ring. I was obviously dealing with a five-star establishment.

“Big Sky Inn,” a male voice said, “Kelly speaking. How may I help you?”

“I’d like to speak to Maryse Bergman, please. She’s an employee.”

“Maryse is no longer with us.”

“As of when?”

“As of this morning. She walked off in the middle of her shift without a word of explanation to anybody.”

“Do you have a home number for her?”

“It’s against company policy to give out the phone numbers of employees.”

“But she’s no longer an employee.”

He laughed. “You’ve got me there, ma’am. Hold on.”

He gave me the number, but when I dialled, all I got was Maryse’s voice mail telling me that she’d been forced to relocate and her friends would hear from her soon.

Too restless to work, I headed for the café in the Lab Building where Ann Vogel and her group hung out. It was empty, and the metal accordion screens had been pulled across the serving area. It seemed everyone but I had left for the weekend. I’d started back to my office when I heard someone call my name. I turned and saw Kristy Stevenson, the archivist who had sung at the vigil for Ariel.

“Have you got a few minutes?” she asked. She was wearing a lavender-blue silk blouse; the colour matched her eyes, but her oval face was pale and miserable. “I hate this Friends of Red Riding Hood stuff,” she said. “I keep thinking of the lines from that song by Beowulf’s Daughters that you used in your talk.”

“Darkness is our womb and destination, Light, a heartbeat glory, gone too soon,” I said.

“Well, no one at this march has any interest in turning back darkness. Ann Vogel and her gang are getting ready in the library quadrangle, and it makes me sick.” Kristy bit her lip in frustration. “Joanne, I’ve loved libraries since I was a little kid. That’s why I chose to be an archivist, making certain that all the pieces of the puzzle were there for anyone who was seeking answers.”

“People like Ann Vogel don’t need archives,” I said. “They don’t even need libraries. They already have the answers.”

Kristy’s eyes flashed with anger. “You bet they do. Simplistic ones. Women who don’t share their views are bad; books that don’t reflect their philosophy are bad; art that doesn’t mirror their reality is bad; literature that doesn’t tell their story is bad. Why would they need a library?”

We had reached the glass doors that opened onto the quad. Outside, perhaps a dozen women were working on placards: attaching wooden pickets to poster-board, filling the blank faces of the signs with words or with painted sunflowers or ferocious cartoon wolves. The finished placards were propped against a low wall to dry, and their messages were designed to foment:
NEVER FORGET; WOLVES BELONG IN CAGES; ARIEL WARREN – THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST; REAL MEN DON’T KILL; REVENGE THE RED RIDING HOODS; MURDERERS DESERVE WHAT THEY GET
.

“There seems to be a certain lack of focus,” Kristy said dryly.

“No lack of firepower, though,” I said. “I’m going to go out and ask them to tone down the rhetoric.”

Ann Vogel was on her knees stapling rectangles of poster-board back to back. Despite her falling-out with Solange, Ann appeared to be sticking to the combat look: head-to-toe black, and hennaed hair shirred to a buzz cut. When she recognized me, she stood and waved her staple gun in mock menace. “You’re not wanted here,” she said.

“That makes us even, because I don’t want to be here,” I said. “So I’ll just ask one quick question. What if you’re wrong about Charlie, too?”

Ann narrowed her eyes. “What else was I wrong about?”

“Kevin Coyle,” I said. “I talked to Tom Bradley, he’s the head of …”

“I know who Tom Bradley is,” Ann snapped.

“Good. So you’ll know that, while the idea of a trustworthy man may be an oxymoron to you, it’s not to a lot of other people. When Tom says that Ben Jesse believed the charges Maryse Bergman made against Kevin were false, I believe him. Other people will, too.”

Ann tilted her chin defiantly. “Kevin Coyle deserved what he got,” she said. “He’s unfair to women. He marks us too hard. He’s dismissive of the answers we give in class.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Ann. Kevin’s unfair to everybody,” I said. “He marks everybody hard, and he’s dismissive of everybody. That doesn’t make it right, but that’s the truth. He’s an anachronism. When I was an undergraduate, the universities were full of profs like that.”

“We don’t have to take that kind of crap from men any more.”

“I know,” I said, “and amen to that. But I still don’t get it. Why did you target Kevin? He’s rude, he’s abrupt, he’s probably misanthropic. But he’s not a misogynist. Why did you get Maryse Bergman to lie about him? Why did
you
go after him?”

“You never get the point, do you?” She looked around to check if anyone was in hearing range, then she lowered her voice. “We needed an example. If we showed how bad he was, everybody would see that we needed women in the department.”

“There were women in the department,” I said.

“Women like you,” she said. “Women who were no better than men. Look at what happened yesterday. You’re given the honour of going to a funeral for a Red Riding Hood.”

“For Ariel Warren,” I corrected her quietly.

“Whatever. But when Ariel’s killer crashes the party with his father, you just leave with the men. Now you tell me, what does that make you?”

“A loyal friend?” I said.

“A traitor,” she said. “Not just to Ariel but to all women, and no matter what Maryse is saying now, what we did then was for all women. Our department needed gender parity.”

“And that was worth risking a man’s career?”

“It was worth everything,” she said.

“ ‘The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the wrong deed for the right reason,’ ” I said.

She looked at me sharply. “What?”

“Solange has defected from your group, hasn’t she?”

“She had issues,” Ann said coldly. “And I have signs to make, so if you’ll excuse me …”

“I’ll excuse you,” I said. “But I won’t forgive you.”

She stepped close to me and placed the staple gun so that the business end was flat against my cheek. “Go fuck yourself,” she said. Then she turned on her heel, strode over to a stack of placards, and began stapling them to pickets.

Very scary. As I walked back into the library, I thought with gratitude of the solid complement of police officers who would be accompanying Ann on the march and who were charged with the duty of keeping her and the other Friends of Red Riding Hood from discovering just how scary they could be.

CHAPTER
13

Taylor and Bruce and Benny were waiting for me on the front step when I got home. Taylor had a new skipping rope, and she was making a lazy crack-the-whip movement with it through the grass so the cats could chase its iridescent rainbow handle. All three were blissed out, and I thought, not for the first time, that being a cat must be one of the alltime great gigs.