Extra Credit (23 page)

“Maybe she could take another exam?”

That suggestion didn’t seem to please Joanne. She had no other exam to offer, and that was a problem. “No.”

“What about if we tossed the grade and she made it up some other way?”

She stared at me.

“Joanne, if you didn’t reuse the exam, then it was stolen from you, before the test.” I stared back at her. “Don’t you see that we have a major problem here?”

“Alison, you’re the only one with a problem.” That pretty much summed it up. “Now, if you will excuse me? I have work to do,” she said pointedly, as if I didn’t work at all.

I bit my lip.
“Work” like xeroxing tests from years gone by so you don’t have to break a sweat?
I wanted to ask but didn’t. Before I got out into the hall, she called to me to come back in. “Alison? If something compels you to reveal any of this information to anyone else, then consider Meaghan’s record permanently sullied.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“Meaning that I will turn her in.”

Shit. That didn’t go the way I wanted it to.

I left her office, passing by the chapel and President Etheridge’s office before taking the back staircase to the Humanities floor. Waiting for me in front of the closed door was Mary Lou Bannerman.

Never was I so glad to see a student. Particularly a middle-aged one who always seemed to travel with gourmet goodies.

“Good morning,” she said as I got closer, the small paper bag in her hand leading me to believe this was a social call. The baked by susan logo on the side boasted of something from a small bakery north of me that had gotten rave reviews in both local and regional papers. She proffered the bag. “Fresh scone?”

Fresh scone? Was I human? And did this woman know me or what? I grabbed the bag from her hand, unlocked my office door, and shepherded Mary Lou in, trailing behind her, thoughts of eating the scone in two bites swirling around in my addled, exhausted brain. Hopefully the coffee on my desk was still hot. “Did you have one?” I asked.

She patted her nonexistent midsection. “Trying to lay off the treats for a while. At least until Thanksgiving is over.”

I wish I could exhibit such restraint, but I can’t. I ripped open the bag and found a lovely chocolate chip scone, sugary goodness dusting the top, waiting for me. I took a big bite. “This is good,” I said, chasing it with a slurp of coffee. Yes, still hot, if the numb spot on my tongue was any indication; restraint is not my strong suit, particularly when it comes to food and drink. “Thank you.” At that moment, I might have fallen in love with her just a little bit. Today, she was wearing a gorgeous cashmere sweater over a crisp white oxford and skinny jeans, a pair of leopard-print Tory Burch flats on her feet. The woman was the epitome of class and style, even if her latest short story needed a little work. I tried not to think about the moth hole I had discovered in the sweater I had donned that morning; it was under my right arm and wouldn’t be visible to anyone I encountered during the day. Probably.

“What did you think of my latest short story?” she asked.

Dang. I thought we were going to avoid that until I had finished my scone at least. I took a bite out of the middle of the pastry and chewed for a while. “Okay, well, it’s…”

“Not good,” she finished.

“No!” I said. “Not not good, but not your best work either.”

“What do I need to do, do you think?” she asked, looking far more worried than I thought she should.

I attempted to reassure her. “It’s fine. Just a little … ponderous?” I suggested. “More dramatic than it needs to be?”

She exhaled, relieved. “Oh, I thought you were going to tell me to start over.”

“Never,” I said. “In my experience, it’s the rare story that needs to be scrapped completely.” That wasn’t entirely true, but it was in this case.

She put a hand over her heart. “That is so good to hear.”

I put the scone down. “Why does this mean so much to you, Mary Lou?” I asked. She seemed to have an unnatural devotion to the class and to becoming a better writer; I wanted to know what was at the heart of that.

She pursed her lips together. “Well, let me see. I guess I’ve been doing things for everyone else for so long that I wanted to have something to call my own?” She appeared to be trying that reason on for size, but it didn’t seem to satisfy her as a complete explanation.

I think I understood it even though I had never felt that way.

“And maybe because I’ve never really been good at anything, so I wanted to see if I could get better at something that I loved doing? To have something that set me apart from the other wives and moms that I know? I’ve been doing those things for so long, being a wife and a mother, that I’m not sure I know how to do anything else. I guess I’m not really sure who I am and need to find out.” She let out a little laugh, but it was tinged with sadness. “Does that sound too … ponderous?”

My heart almost broke. To me, she seemed together, strong, and confident, but inside, it would seem, she was insecure and unsure of herself, a feeling not uncommon to women who spent their lives raising children and helping a man succeed, I supposed. It was foreign to me, having been on my own for a lot of my adult life in spite of two marriages, but I could see how a woman could feel that way if she had never left the house long enough to do anything besides shuttle a kid to an activity or do the grocery shopping, things that Mary Lou seemed to have been doing for a long, long time.

“Finish your scone,” she said.

I realized I had been staring at her, trying to figure out how to boost the spirits of this incredibly kind woman by telling her something good about her story. “You write great characters,” I said finally.

“I come from a family of great characters, so that makes it easy,” she said.

“You?”

“Yes, me.” She got up. “Someday, I’ll write a story about my family and you’ll see what I mean.” She went to the door. “This class means a lot to me. Thank you for being so kind.”

Once again, my mind went back to my initial consternation at her auditing the class. I’m nothing if not a practiced self-flagellator, returning often to thoughts of my spiritual and emotional shortcomings. “It’s wonderful having you in class. Thank you for joining us.” As she exited, I called after her. “And thank you for the scone!”

Talking to Mary Lou and eating the scone had been the perfect antidote to my meeting with Joanne Larkin, whose inability to admit that she had screwed the pooch, so to speak, on her midterm was baffling, to say the least. I was getting nowhere with her, and short of having Meaghan drop the class, a thought that had crossed my mind more than once, I guessed I would just have to wait and see what, if anything at all, was going to happen.

I supposed I could ask Crawford, too, but having tried so hard to keep him out of this situation, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to drag him in now. That’s what I told myself, anyway. In all honesty, I still thought that either this would go away or I would figure out how to handle it if the poop hit the fan. Although the truth would set us all free, only some of us were interested in it, and Joanne Larkin certainly wasn’t what I would call an interested party.

When the phone rang, I prayed that it was Max and my prayer was answered. She sounded tired, frail, and sadder than I’d ever heard her sound, except for the one time she couldn’t score Duran Duran tickets for their first farewell concert. “How are you doing?”

“I’m okay.” She was lying. She was far from okay.

“What can I do?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. I’ll let you know when we have everything set up.” Then she was gone.

I stared at the receiver in my hand and hoping I could blame Max’s reaction to my call on the emotional vagaries of grief and not on something more broken in our relationship. The last few times we had spoken, things had been tense; even I, with everything else going on in my life, could see that.

Who knew why any of us acted the way we did when we lost someone we loved? The day my mother died, I got in her car and drove to Cold Spring, a river town about thirty miles north of where I lived, and sat on Main Street in front of her favorite French restaurant. I cried until a woman passing by knocked on the window and asked if I needed help, her kindness making me even sadder in the face of my loss. No, I didn’t need her help, I remember telling her; I needed my mother. No one else. Just my mother. The woman tried to console me, but it did no good. My despair was immeasurable, and finally, after questioning me about who she could call, someone who would come and get me, she got Marty Rayfield’s number out of me, and he was there in a flash. Instead of driving me to our empty house, he had taken me back to his home in a village not far from mine and put me up in Max’s old room, taking care of every single detail related to my mother’s funeral while I rested there, getting myself together enough to escort my mother’s casket down the center aisle of the church where she had worshipped with a devotion that was unfathomable to me.

I turned and looked out the window toward the cemetery, the sun casting a burnished glow on the polished marble headstones and grave markers. The giant angel, the one that had implored me to follow the truth a few days earlier, was somewhere in the midst of all the other markers, rising majestically off in the distance. Closer in, I took notice of a figure leaning against another massive headstone, the hair blond, the clothes black, the cigarette dangling menacingly from red, red lips.

Well, by Jove,
I thought,
if it isn’t the lovely and talented Sassy Du Pris.

I didn’t know if she could see me, but I suspected she could—why else would she be there?—so I tried to pretend that I hadn’t seen her and that I wasn’t dialing Crawford’s cell number as she slouched against the headstone that I recognized as Sister Alphonse’s.

“Hey!” he said, far too enthusiastic for the occasion.

“Hey,” I whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” he asked.

I didn’t know. I cleared my throat. “Listen to me carefully. Sassy Du Pris is in the St. Thomas cemetery leaning against Sister Alphonse’s gravestone.”

“I’m on it,” he said, adding before he hung up, “Stay wherever you are and do not attempt to catch her.”

I was all set to listen to him and not do anything stupid. After all, this woman might have murdered Chick. She had tried to burn his house down. She had been in jail for breaking and entering. She might have broken into my house and poisoned my dog. She had certainly vandalized Crawford’s car and stolen his giant man clothes. She was not a woman to be trifled with, that was for sure.

Until she did the one thing that pushed me over the edge and had me tearing out of my office as if I were being chased by a nest of hornets: She put her cigarette out on Alphonse’s gravestone.

That was the one thing she wasn’t going to get away with. If I caught her, and that was unlikely with her ability to sprint in stilettos, I was going to wring her neck.

Thirty-One

I ran cross-country one year at my all-girls Catholic high school. I even have the sweatshirt to prove it. Every once in a while, if only to prove Crawford wrong when he insinuates that I’m not athletic or, worse, that I’m out of shape, I put it on to show him that once upon a time, Alison Bergeron was someone. She ran cross-country.

Technically, that’s not entirely true. When the coach got a look at me, wowed by the length of my legs and my seemingly unbridled enthusiasm for running, she was overjoyed. That is, until she found out that I was incredibly uncoordinated, verged on asthmatic, and had the stamina of a postmenopausal woman with osteoporosis. In other words, I stunk. However, long arms guaranteed that I could at least be considered for shot put, and since no other girl was willing to give it a try, I took one for the team, hoisting a metal ball behind my neck five days a week and sometimes on Saturday, attempting to put my high school on the map for the “field” part of track and field. My mother, French Canadian, gorgeous, and stylish, was horrified and blamed the genetic mutation—as she saw my freakishly long arms—on my father, who found his own freakishly long arms well suited to his job as a UPS man.

Too bad I didn’t have a shot put handy. I would have thrown it farther than I had ever managed while in high school and nailed Sassy in the head. I was irate that she had desecrated my dear Alphonse’s gravestone, and she would pay. If it turned out that she was also the one who poisoned my dog, well, she was dead meat. No pun intended.

By the time I arrived at the cemetery, of course she was gone. I stood at Alphonse’s grave, my hands on the stone, panting. I hadn’t run that fast in … well, forever, and at my age—decidedly not middle-aged—it was not a good idea to go from eating scones and drinking coffee into a full sprint. Someone could get hurt. Or something could rupture. I now knew where my gall bladder resided, and it was right under the last rib on the right of my rib cage. In other words, no good could come of physical activity at my age.

Crawford arrived less than ten minutes after I had called him, no Fred in tow. With him was his colleague of many years Carmen Montoya, she of the tight pants and even tighter backside. She sidled over to the gravestone and sized up the situation.

“You need an
ambulancia
,
chica
?” she asked.

“No, I don’t need an
ambulancia
,” I said, struggling mightily to catch my breath. “Some oxygen might be nice, though.”

“Didn’t I tell you to stay in your office?” Crawford asked, squinting in the morning sun.

I lifted my head just long enough to give him a withering look.

“My boyfriend here filled me in on who this Sassy person is on our way over.” Carmen lifted her heel to check how much dirt she had accumulated on her black leather boots. “Sounds like a charmer.”

“She is,” I said. “She may have poisoned our dog, and she threatened his ex, Christine.”

Carmen’s face lit up at Christine’s name. “So Christine is well? Haven’t seen that girl in a dog’s age. Always fond of her.”

I narrowed my eyes at her.