Doom with a View (15 page)

I could tell that the professor didn’t really want to get involved any deeper, and I couldn’t blame him. Being connected to a student who disappeared could cause anyone to get nervous, but my radar didn’t want me to let Houghton go. There was something I knew I needed to dig for, but I didn’t know what. “Can you tell us anything more about her?” I asked.

Houghton shrugged. “What more
can
I tell you?” he said, turning the question back on me. “Bianca was a great kid. She was enthusiastic, paid attention, never skipped class, studied hard, and got good grades. At least in my class she did. She was eager to get on my good side for obvious reasons, but she never did anything inappropriate or out of line.”

I shook my head. That last sentence didn’t make any sense to me. “I’m sorry, she was eager to get on your good side? Why exactly?”

Houghton waved his hand at the walls of his office and I suddenly realized they were covered with framed newspaper articles. “I’m the administrative editor of the
State News
,” he explained. “I appoint all the student reporters and writers to MSU’s paper.”

“And Bianca wanted to join the paper,” I said as the memory of asking Terry if Bianca was trying to get an internship at a newspaper for the summer rang some bells.

“She did,” he said. “But she was only a freshman. Because there’s such an interest in the paper, it’s more traditional to appoint second-semester juniors or seniors to those positions. I told her to work on a story or two and come back to me in the fall. I might be willing to make an exception if she came back with something really good.”

And like that, a few of the puzzle pieces that had been swirling around in my head clicked into place. “She was working on something,” I said softly.

“What’s that, Abs?” Candice asked.

I shook my head, snapping my eyes back into focus and momentarily ignoring Candice’s question. “Professor Houghton,” I began urgently, “did Bianca by any chance tell you about a story idea she had, or something she might have been working on?”

Houghton looked slightly chagrined. “Maybe,” he said.

I cocked my head. “Maybe?”

Houghton nodded and cleared his throat. “As I said, Bianca was anxious to get onto the school newspaper’s staff, and I knew that her father was a state legislator. We haven’t really had any interesting political stories lately, so I told her to use her connections and bring me back something working that angle. I also let her know that it would have to be a big enough story to warrant an exception to the rule of assigning someone so young to the staff. I recommended that she nose around her father’s office, and see what she could come up with.”

I could feel a sense of adrenaline rush through me as my radar dinged big-time. Candice, however, didn’t seem at all pleased with the professor’s response. “So let me get this straight,” she snapped. “You told an eighteen-year-old girl to basically rat on her father or one of his colleagues?”

Houghton’s face immediately flushed. “Of course not,” he said defensively. “I would never suggest such a thing. But she did have the perfect cover for some undercover reporting, which is done in journalism all the time.”

Candice’s frown turned into a full glare. “This is why no one trusts the press anymore,” she muttered, then looked at me as if to ask if I was ready to go.

But I wasn’t quite done with Houghton yet. “Professor,” I said, making sure to remove any sense of condemnation from my voice. “Did Bianca suggest to you that she might already have a story idea?”

Again, Houghton looked uncomfortable. “She never told me directly, but yes, I believe she had something in mind.”

“How do you know exactly?” I asked.

“When we had this discussion, she asked me if there was perhaps a line that she ethically shouldn’t cross, and when I pressed her on that, she said she’d heard rumors regarding a powerful politician that could end a career.”

“And what did you tell her?” Candice pressed.

Houghton swallowed. “I told her that the public had the right to know about the ethics and morals of the people they’d elected to government, and if she could uncover anything of substance, then it was her obligation as a journalist to bring it to the public’s attention.”

I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to collect myself. I really hated this asshole. Finally I looked back at him and said, “You’re sure Bianca never let on who she wanted to expose?”

“No,” said Houghton, and I could tell he was growing impatient with our line of questioning.

“And you didn’t think that her disappearance was in any way connected to the story she was going to work on?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Houghton. “We had that conversation only a week before her final exam and her disappearance. With all of her other classes and finals, she couldn’t have had time to work on the story, so I assumed it was unrelated.”

But my radar wanted to suggest otherwise. I knew there was something here, but I also knew it was only a small thread in this bigger puzzle. I turned to Candice and motioned with my head that I was ready to leave.

“Thank you for your time, Professor Houghton,” she said. “We’ll let you get back to your work.”

We left the professor’s office and hurried down the hallway, Candice pestering me for details along the way. “What’s your radar saying?” she wanted to know.

I waited until we were outside so that I could face her and talk about it without being overheard in the crowded hallways or stairwell. “Bianca was absolutely working on that story,” I said.

“And you think that whoever abducted her was the target of the investigation?”

I opened my mouth to say yes, but I felt my left side immediately grow heavy, which totally confused me. “No,” I said, and was surprised to hear it come out of my mouth.

“No?” Candice repeated, looking as confused as I felt.

I nodded. “Yeah, my radar says that’s off,” and as I said that, immediately my right side felt light again and I was even more confused. “Hold on,” I said, and closed my eyes to concentrate. There was a mixture of thoughts running through my intuitive filter. I knew that the story Bianca was working on had something to do with her disappearance, but I couldn’t figure out how. Finally I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe her disappearance is connected to the story,” I said, and when Candice shot me a rueful look, I added, “Sorry, toots, that’s the best I can do.”

“How do the others fit into this, then?” she pressed.

That stumped me. “Smoke screen?” I offered, saying it like a question.

Candice seemed to consider that for a minute. “Okay,” she conceded. “Or maybe this isn’t about Bianca at all. Maybe it’s about some grudge the wacko who abducted her has against state political leaders, and killing their children is his way of getting his point across.”

I sighed, suddenly very weary. “Yeah, well, it’s all I’ve got.”

Candice nodded. “Okay, then, we’ll follow your lead and see where it takes us. If you get a chance, go back to her journals and keep digging. Maybe she wrote about her story idea in one of them.”

“Will do.”

“I’ll scour her e-mails for any reference to an article or news story she might have mentioned to her dad. Maybe he even talked to her about it and that’s where she came up with the idea in the first place.”

“Oh, and make sure you ask her friends if she was working on some juicy story—they might have heard something too.”

“I’m on it,” Candice promised.

Game plan in hand, we headed home.

That night as I was cozying up next to Dutch and just beginning to drift off to sleep, my radar gave me a really big buzz. I sat up in bed and felt my heart begin to beat faster as my anxiety grew. “Abs?” Dutch asked, setting down the David Morrell novel he’d been reading.

“Something’s wrong,” I said, working to pull some details out of the ether.

“What exactly?”

I stared at him with wide eyes. “I don’t know,” I whispered as my sense of dread increased.

“Can you tell me who it might be about?”

I blinked at him and felt out that question. “It’s about a female,” I said. “No . . . wait,” I added. “It’s about two women. One older, one younger.”

“Is anyone hurt?”

I closed my eyes and my heart sank. “Yes,” I whispered. “One of them is close to death, but I can’t tell who it is!”

Dutch’s hand rubbed my shoulder. “It’s okay, honey,” he soothed, and I realized I was breathing heavily. “We’ll figure it out.”

My eyes opened and I stared urgently at him. “It’s bad.”

Dutch nodded gravely. “Do you think these women were attacked?”

I closed my eyes again, then slowly shook my head. “No . . . there’s no attacker.”

“Were they in a car accident?”

I frowned. I could feel the fact that one of the women was in grave condition, but how she’d gotten that way I couldn’t tell. And the other woman’s energy felt so . . . so . . .
familiar
that it was eerie. And then, as if a lightbulb above my head were suddenly turned on, I knew who the second woman was. “Ohmigod, Candice!” I gasped, opening my eyes and reaching over Dutch for the phone on the nightstand.

“She’s hurt?” Dutch asked, helping me by handing me the phone.

I didn’t answer him because my hands were shaking as I tried to dial her number as fast as I could. I pressed the wrong buttons and hung up, swearing in the process. Just as I was about to click the phone on and try again, it rang in my hands. I jumped, as it was so unexpected, and noticed immediately that the caller ID read
Fusco, Candice
. “What’s happened?” I demanded when I answered, knowing she was calling with bad news.

It took a moment for her to answer me. She was crying so hard on the other end of the line that I couldn’t make out anything she said. “Where are you?” I pressed. She blubbered something that I couldn’t make out, so I tried again, calmer this time. “Honey, I’m on my way, but I can’t understand you. Just take a deep breath and tell me where you are and we’ll be there in two minutes.”

“Hos . . . hos . . . hospital!” she wailed.

“Beaumont?” I asked, hoping it was the local hospital right down the street.

“Yes,” she said as her sobs continued.

“We’re on our way!” I clicked off the phone before jumping out of bed and grabbing a pair of jeans.

“What’s wrong?” Dutch asked me again as he too got out of bed and reached for his pants.

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking all over. “Candice is at the hospital and I’ve never heard her so upset.”

“Is her grandmother okay?”

I froze and gawked at him. All the clues suddenly clicked into place as the right side of my body confirmed that something was very, very wrong with Madame DuBois. “I don’t think so, Dutch,” I said. “I think something’s happened to her.”

“Come on,” he said, shoving his bare feet into loafers. “I’ll drive.”

We arrived at Beaumont Hospital four minutes later. Candice was sitting in the emergency room with her knees drawn into her chest and looking so forlorn that she broke my heart. I rushed to her side and hugged her fiercely. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “Candice, I’m so, so sorry.”

“She had a stroke,” she explained, her voice hoarse and nasal. “I tried calling her tonight, and when she didn’t answer, I went over to check on her. I found her on the floor in her kitchen.”

Dutch sat down on the other side of Candice and rubbed her back. “What can we do for you?” he asked gently.

Tears streamed down Candice’s face. Madame DuBois was the only family Candice had left. Her parents had both died of different cancers within two years of each other, and her sister had died in a violent car crash when Candice was little. I couldn’t imagine what she must be going through right now. “Just stay with me,” she begged. “They’ve got her in ICU, but no one thinks she’ll pull out of this.”

I hugged her fiercely again and felt my own tears slide down my cheeks. “As long as you need us, we’ll be here, honey.”

We waited with Candice until three in the morning. Around one a.m. she was called into her grandmother’s room by a kind nurse who suggested that Candice might want to spend some final moments with her grandmother. Dutch and I hovered outside the room, pacing back and forth until we heard the sound of the heart monitor bleep slower and slower; then it finally bleeped its last. Candice’s gut-wrenching sobs quickly followed.

As tears poured down my own cheeks, Dutch hugged me tightly and said, “Get in there and be with her. We’ll take her home with us tonight. She shouldn’t be alone. I’ll call off work tomorrow and help her with the arrangements.”

I nodded into his chest, unable to speak, then hurried quickly into the room to offer what small comfort I could to my very dear friend.

Chapter Seven

Madame DuBois’ funeral was held in the rain. Dutch and I both hovered with umbrellas over Candice, her forlorn figure hunched under the weight of her grief. She looked pale and exhausted as the cemetery employee worked the lift that slowly lowered the frosty pink casket of her beloved grandmother into the grave. I knew that Candice had to be thinking about the funerals of her other family members eased into the earth the same slow, sad way.

I squeezed her hand again and again, trying in vain to let her know that she wasn’t alone, that she still had family even if we weren’t blood related. As I glanced at the onlookers gathered around the gaping hole in the ground, I felt comforted by the fact that there were so many in attendance. All of Madame DuBois’ elderly friends from the senior center had come out. Her neighbors and the woman who did her hair each week were also there.

Many of Candice’s clients and friends had also come out, along with Dutch’s best friend, Milo. Dave and his “old lady” had come as well, and it touched my heart that they’d even postponed their move a few days so that they could attend the funeral and support a friend. Even my sister, Cat, had flown in for the day, and the area around Madame DuBois’ grave was covered with dozens of bouquets of pink roses that my wealthy sister had so generously and thoughtfully purchased. Cat stood on the other side of me and I nudged her with my shoulder.