Extra Credit (22 page)

Come to think of it, Max was a chip off the old block.

Crawford was asleep, deep breaths coming from between his parted lips. The guy was a study in extremes; wide awake one minute, sound asleep the next. I envied his ability to turn off the dialogue that was surely in his head, the same one that was in mine. What had happened, what did Sassy have to do with it, and what could we do to figure it out? Those were the questions that were circulating in the card carousel of my mind.

Crawford stopped breathing for a second, as he often did when he was in a really deep sleep, and I nudged him to make him turn on his side so that he wouldn’t suffocate. He changed position grudgingly, as if I were being completely unreasonable. After another half hour of listening to him snore, stop breathing, and then choke back to life, I made a mental note to call a sleep clinic to get him straight so that I didn’t have small heart attacks every night, thinking that he wouldn’t wake up. I finally got out of bed and padded down to the kitchen, Trixie on my heels, not content to let me rustle around in the refrigerator by myself.

I don’t know what I was expecting to find, but a peek into the refrigerator confirmed what I should have already known: There was nothing in there. Crawford’s schedule is hectic, and I could exist solely on vodka and pretzels, so grocery shopping is the one chore that often gets tossed to the side in favor of takeout food or dining out. Looking into the barren refrigerator made me sad. I vowed then and there to start watching Food Network all the time and figuring out this thing that they called “cooking.”

Trixie was placid one minute and on alert the next, her ears up and the hair on the back of her neck standing at attention. A low growl started deep in her gut and traveled up to her mouth, coming out as a warning bark that startled even me. The only light in the kitchen came from the open refrigerator, and my hand on the appliance handle felt like it had turned to stone. To turn around or not to turn around; that was the stupid question. My hand dropped from the handle, and slowly I turned toward the kitchen window over the sink. It looked out into the backyard, the one where Christine’s stepchildren, nieces, and nephews had attempted to start a bonfire what seemed like a hundred years ago. I don’t know what I expected to see in the window, but I was surprised when I saw nothing at all, just the blackness of the vacant backyard and a light in the distance coming from someone’s porch light on another block.

I looked down at Trixie. “Just a raccoon, my friend. Nothing to worry about.”

My dog was smarter than I was. I learned that the hard way when I heard the sound of something sharp hitting glass, a violent and sudden noise, breaking the silence of what should have been a dull evening in a sleepy suburban town. For the second time that evening, I heard the wail of Crawford’s car alarm, a sound that I hoped never to hear again. It sounded like a banshee screaming, and I’m not even entirely sure what a banshee is.

I opened the back door without thinking and took off across the backyard, my feet bare, the dog nipping at my heels. I reached the driveway, where Crawford’s car alarm was singing a sad, sad song, one that kept time with the flashing lights illuminating the tacky weave that belonged to none other than the elusive Sassy Du Pris.

Girl could move. She was tearing down my driveway, in her hand Crawford’s bag of extra clothes—the one that possibly contained the framed picture of me, though I wasn’t holding my breath—as she took a hard left and started down the street, running on impossibly high heels.

“Sassy!” I screamed. “Sassafras!” I fumbled around in Crawford’s car, trying to figure out how to turn off the alarm before the whole neighborhood woke up and realized that I really was the giant pain in the ass that about 40 percent of the neighbors already thought I was.

Although Crawford falls asleep with no trouble, waking up is another story. He appeared in the back door, clad in a pair of boxer shorts and dress shoes, a gun in his hand. “What’s going on?” he asked as he made his way across the backyard, the gun dangling in his limp hand.

“It’s Sassy,” I said, pointing down the street.

He was still half asleep. “Should I chase her?”

“Of course you should,” I said, pushing him in the direction of her departure. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I took an Advil PM. Maybe three. Things are kind of cloudy.” He slumped against the car. “She broke my windshield.”

I sighed. He couldn’t chase her now even if he wanted to. Judging from the haste with which she had beat it down our driveway, only a racehorse on speed would have been able to catch her.

It was cold. I pulled my arms into my T-shirt. “She’s fast.”

He looked at me, his senses dulled by the sleep aid.

“Maybe we should call 911?” I suggested. He lumbered back into the house, and I followed him. I found him staring at the phone, wondering what he had come in to do. “I’ll call 911,” I said, “and make some coffee. You go put on some pants and a shirt.” He started off down the hallway. “Leave the gun!” I called after him. He walked back and placed it on the counter.

The 911 operator—who either hadn’t heard of me or was professional enough not to have a reaction when I said my name and gave my address—promised to send someone right over. I said a silent prayer that it was none of the cops who had already been here. Then I wondered if my homeowner’s insurance would go up. My propensity for using public servants so freely might put me into a new category.

Crawford came back looking like the old Crawford—the one who could string a few words together well enough to form a sentence and/or dial 911—dressed in jeans and an NYPD T-shirt, I suppose to let the village PD know who was boss. On the law enforcement food chain, NYPDers consider themselves higher than all others, and since peeing in public, even to mark one’s territory, is considered a “public nuisance” misdemeanor, they opt instead to flash their badges, wear their police-issue clothing, or brandish their big guns in the presence of other cops.

“You look better,” I said.

“Cold shower,” he said.

“That was a little drastic, don’t you think?”

“Not if you felt like your head was filled with cotton candy.”

It was only a few minutes later that our driveway was filled with local police, who regarded Crawford’s car as if it were a hunk of kryptonite. I helpfully offered that the car had been broken into by a woman named Sassafras Du Pris and she was on the loose.

One of the responding officers, a woman who looked young enough to be my daughter, asked me how I knew the woman’s name.

“Long story.” I looked at Crawford. “Can you explain?”

He could. With his usual economy of words, he described Sassy and her relationship to our family and explained why, possibly, she would want to break into our car and steal a bag of giant man clothes that would fit only a small percentage of the population. “She’s looking for money,” he finished. “Money we don’t have.”

“Why does she think you have this money?” the officer asked. Her name was Prynne, as in Hester. Curiouser and curiouser.

Crawford gave her a look. “I can only guess that she thinks we know of its whereabouts, given our connection to the deceased.”

It was like a lightbulb went off over her head. “Ahhh,” she said, jotting down a few notes in her leather-bound notebook.

Crawford pulled me to the side. “Are you sure it was Sassy?” he whispered.

“Big blonde in stripper heels? It wasn’t Snow White as far as I could tell.”

“She ran away in stripper heels?” he asked, not really able to get a mental picture of what that looked like.

I nodded. “I know. Hard to fathom.” It was cold, so I started for the house. “By the way, I’m getting in my time machine and going back to a time when I could change the course of history and make this day never happen.”

“Sounds like a plan,” he called after me.

The dog was hiding under the coffee table in the living room, a space that was way too small for her voluptuous frame. The lights and sounds of a police invasion had left her shaking, her tail between her legs. I lured her out with a piece of cheese that I found in an otherwise empty drawer in the refrigerator. As I sat on the couch, petting her silken fur, I wondered how Sassafras would feel once she found out that she had absconded with a pair of large trousers, a 46 long blazer, and a tie that had probably seen better days. Was breaking and entering worth the reward on this one? Probably not.

I hoped that none of us were around when she figured out that she was on the hook for this felony and had gotten no closer to finding the money she so desperately wanted.

Thirty

I was exhausted, but relieved to go back to work. The same couldn’t be said for Crawford, who was still dealing with the aftereffects of having taken one too many Advil PMs, thinking that his large size necessitated a near overdose. He had no answer as to why he had taken one, never mind three, of the pills; I reminded him that in all the time I had known him, he had never had insomnia, let alone had trouble falling asleep, especially after a day spent at work and then in a dead man’s apartment.

“Don’t lecture me,” he said, crankily.

If he thought that was a lecture, he definitely still had drugs in his system.

I didn’t feel as bad as I thought I would, even though I was bone tired. The sun was out and the campus was alive, as it always is in the middle of a semester, particularly before winter has hit and everyone gets really ornery. I went into my office and tossed my bag onto my desk, nearly spilling the large cup of coffee that I had purchased in the cafeteria. I righted the coffee cup, pulled a few folders out of my bag, turned on my computer, and got to work, figuring out what needed to be done immediately and what could wait until the end of the day.

I still hadn’t heard from Max. I dialed her number first; it went straight to voice mail. Same for Fred. I wondered what was up. Was she so distraught that she couldn’t talk, or was there something going on that had completely missed my radar? Or, as I knew deep in my heart, was she angry because I had never seen Marty in the hospital? I texted Crawford to ask Fred what was up, if indeed Fred even showed up for work that day. The guy had a work ethic like no other, but losing his father-in-law might have encouraged him to break his streak of ten years in homicide with the fewest absences of anyone in the squad.

So now that we had two Sassy Du Pris sightings, albeit brief ones, there was an all-points bulletin out for her arrest. Finally, someone was taking this woman’s reappearance seriously; I knew Christine would be happy about that. The police were tracking down the old couple from the restaurant to see if they could ID this mystical creature, a violent stripper with a checkered past beyond her marriage to Chick. Crawford had called Minor to let him know that he should consider a recanvass of the building to see if anyone had seen the big, buxom, and blond ex of the man who had died in 5D. To me, she was like a unicorn—fabled, storied, and hard to find. That is, of course, if unicorns wore high heels and could run like the wind in them. I had only seen Max’s Hooters PIs run in high heels, and trust me, they had nothing on Sassy.

My fatigue led me to make a decision that I thought, after the fact, might come back to bite me in the ass, but I went for it anyway. Going to see Joanne Larkin would probably end up being a bad idea, but I was tired of pussyfooting around the likelihood that she was reusing tests; we needed to get to the bottom of this, if only to clear Meaghan’s conscience on the whole subject. I had only seen my stepdaughter briefly in the hallways, but every time she saw me, she avoided me like the plague, even though it was clear that I believed her. She was ashamed of something, and I could only hope it was the fact that she was involved with the oldest college student at the school, if not in the world, and nothing else.

Joanne was drinking a mug of hot tea when I entered, the limp string from her tea bag hanging off the side of her mug, which had a witty saying about cats and dogs, in which cats came out superior, stamped on the side. She had on a bright orange sweater with a head-sized pumpkin fastened to each shoulder. Really, Joanne? Holiday sweaters and cat mugs? Maybe I should go easy on her; this was clearly a woman who had few joys in her life.

“May I sit?” I asked.

She looked reluctant to give me a chair but finally relented.

“Listen,” I started, using one of the oldest, most tension-inducing openings in the history of conversation as a starter. When someone tells me to “listen,” my first reaction is to bristle, not pay attention. I saw that my opener had the same effect on Joanne. “You and I both know that my stepdaughter is a good student, a little lazy maybe, but not a cheater as you intimated during our last phone call.”

“Really? And how would we know that?” Joanne asked, making a show of swirling her tea bag around in her cat mug.

“Come on, Joanne,” I said. “You know as well as I do that Meaghan is a good student who wouldn’t stoop so low as to cheat on your exam.”

I waited for her reaction; she had none.

I went for broke, leaning in so I could whisper. I didn’t want anyone to overhear the next thing I had to say. “I know you reused that test, Joanne. It’s not a problem. I just don’t want Meaghan to be penalized in any way for doing something she had no idea she was doing if, for some reason, this whole thing comes to light.”

Her face turned hard. “Prove it. Prove that I reused that test.”

How to do this without getting Meaghan in more hot water with her teacher was proving difficult. I didn’t think I’d get the cooperation of Mr. Super Senior either, so my hands were tied. “You’re right. I can’t.” I stood. “I’m just protecting my stepdaughter.”

“There shouldn’t be a problem, Alison, as long as you stop talking,” she said.

“Really, Joanne? That’s how you want to play this?”

“Really, Alison. Leave it alone. No one is implicating your stepdaughter in anything, and as long as she keeps her nose clean, this whole thing will go away.” She took a sip of her tea, and I was somewhat happy to see—judging from her grimance—that she had burned her sharp tongue.