Final Exam (17 page)

Twenty-Three

I had been living on campus less than a week and had been interrogated by a mad, Greek stepfather; had made my boss cry; had spotted Wayne several times and indeed been kidnapped by the erstwhile resident director; and had been knocked unconscious. All in all, a very exciting stay.

Not that I’m complaining; as I said before, I was enjoying rolling out of bed and into my office to start my day. And I was enjoying seeing Crawford as often as I was, although not on any overnights, which was not enjoyable. He had left a message on my cell phone asking if I was available for a quick dinner that night when he took his meal, but I had more pressing matters on my schedule, namely, getting Max and Kevin together to discuss the situation regarding her illegal marriage. I couldn’t avoid it any longer. Crawford was disappointed but didn’t want any part of that discussion so he bowed out gracefully, promising to call me later that night when he got off work for good. I gave him a quick update on my time in the park with Amanda and Wayne; he wasn’t surprised to hear that Wayne was still lurking around, but he promised to pass the information on to the detectives on the case.

I sat on my bed and texted Max, knowing that this was the surest way to get a response:
“want to have dinner 2nite?”
I had finally figured out how to punctuate properly and was happy to find the question mark pretty quickly. I had barely sent it when I received her exuberant reply:
“SURE! Your place or mine?”

“Mine
,
”
I wrote back. I didn’t want to remind her that “her place” was really “my place” anyway and hoped that she understood that she was supposed to come to campus. I dialed Kevin and petted Trixie absentmindedly while I waited for him to pick up.

“Father McManus.”

“Hi, Kev, it’s me.”

He didn’t respond immediately. He had been avoiding me since his revelation, and I got the sense that if he never saw me again, that would be fine. Finally, he gave me a tentative, “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said and cut to the chase. “Listen. We have to resolve this Max thing and I think the sooner, the better. She’s coming for dinner tonight.” He started to hem and haw, but I cut him off. “Tonight, Kevin. We’re going to do it tonight.”

He sputtered a little bit. “Well, all right.”

“The faster we rip this Band-Aid off, the easier it will be.”

“If you say so.” He sniffled a little bit, and although it sounded like he was crying, I didn’t want to imagine that. “Come here?”

“You know, I’m not sure what’s better. It might be better to be in public so that she won’t make a complete scene.”

“I’ll leave that up to you. Whatever you think is best.”

I hung up and looked at Trixie. “What do you think, Trix? Kevin’s apartment or the Steakhouse?” Her eyes lit up at the thought of steak, not that she would be having any, but my decision was made. The Steakhouse it was. I wasn’t sure if this was the best plan in the world—taking her out to dinner—but I couldn’t even begin to imagine the histrionics that would take place if we stayed up in Kevin’s apartment. My head still hurt from where Wayne had clobbered me and I just didn’t have as much mental stamina for a Max meltdown.

Selfish? Maybe.

More like self-preservation, I convinced myself.

Friday is an unusually busy day for me. Whereas most of my colleagues teach one or two classes and hit the road, I teach a record four. One is a class that only meets once a week, but it spans two class periods, making my day more hectic than a Friday has any right being. I finished up around four, after having organized a bunch of papers and assignments on my desk into neat little piles. They should have been put into my messenger bag and taken back to my dorm room, but I wanted a weekend without correcting, and if I needed them, I could always venture down the hill and pick them up.

I headed back up to the dorm, the sun warm on my face, the beautiful campus belying the feeling I had of doom and gloom. I passed a couple of students, joyful at the coming weekend. I could hear music coming from the campus bar—once a place to get beer, now dry since the drinking age had turned twenty-one—probably from a local band hired to play happy hour. I was surprised to see Max leaning against her car in the parking lot when I rounded the corner.

Her long legs were sticking out from a tailored black pencil skirt, her feet in improbably high black pumps with vivid red soles. By now, I knew that they were Louboutin and very pricey. She had a whole selection of them in my bedroom. She straightened up and I took in her soft suede coat, another item that I would never be able to afford on my teacher’s salary. She looked better than when I had left earlier in the week and was back to her usual sprightly, well-groomed, gorgeous self. She smiled wide when I saw her and the transformation from depressed single to the old Max was complete.

“How come you never have your cell on when I call you?”

I was confused. “It’s on.” I pulled it out of my bag and looked at the screen. “Well, it was on. It’s dead.”

She approached me and gave me a hug. “How are you?”

“Good,” I said warily. I hadn’t expected her to arrive so early and I wasn’t prepared. “You?”

“Great!” she said. “Guess who I talked to today?”

I looked at her, fearing the answer.

“Fred!” she said, and smiled even wider. “I think we’re making progress.”

“Oh, good!” I said, trying not to grimace. “So no more
Match.com
?”

She waved her hand dismissively. “No,” she said, as if she had finally realized that there was no worse idea than her foray into online dating. “I met one guy and he was wearing his high-school ring and smelled like formaldehyde.” She took her thumb and index finger and made an
L
on her forehead. “Loser.”

“Be nice, Max,” I said as we approached the dorm. Poor guy probably didn’t know what he had gotten himself into with her and was probably hiding under his bed somewhere. After he dismembered the bodies in his bedroom and soaked them in formaldehyde.

Max cocked her head and listened to the music coming up from the bar. “Is that coming from Dunleavey?” she asked, referencing the campus bar.

“Yep,” I said, continuing to walk.

“Remember when I made out with Jimmy Commiskey down there? And we accidentally knocked over that angel statue in front of the building?”

“No,” I said, my step quickening. I knew where this was leading, and going down to Dunleavey to listen to a Genesis cover band wasn’t on my to-do list. Telling Max that she wasn’t really married was.

“Oh, sure you do,” she said, her high heels clacking a staccato rhythm on the pavement. “You were working the door that night. And we had to find Krazy Glue so I could glue the angel’s head back on?”

“I don’t remember,” I said as we reached the door.

She smacked me with her purse. “Hey! Focus! Jimmy Commiskey! Cute guy, looked like a young Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp from
21 Jump Street,
not Johnny Depp from
Sweeney Todd
. And the angel? You helped me glue its head back on?” she said.

I got inside the vestibule and fumbled around for the second key. “Maybe,” I said.

She lost her train of thought, a result of my apathy toward the more dramatic details of the story. “Let’s go down to Dunleavey before dinner!” she exclaimed, as if the idea had just occurred to her.

I shook my head. “No. We can’t.”

“Why not?” she asked. She looked at her watch. “It’s four-thirty. We’re not eating dinner yet, are we?”

“That reminds me,” I said, unlocking the inner door. “What are you doing here so early?” We entered the marble foyer, still cool even though the temperature was steadily rising as spring progressed. We started down the hallway toward my room.

“I decided to cut out early. My boss still thinks I’m not up to a full day so I’m going to milk that for all it’s worth,” she said.

“I thought you were the boss?”

She chuckled. “Oh, that’s right. I
am
.” She put her briefcase down on the floor while I fiddled with the lock. “I mean the head of the station. The big cheese—Randolph,” she said, referring to the mogul who had bought the station a few years back. He loved Max and would do anything to keep her happy. I suspected that his love for her knew no bounds but she managed to take it all in stride, chalking it up to him being an oversexed Australian. “Can we please, please, please go to Dunleavey for a soda?”

I greeted Trixie, whom I had locked in the bathroom after I had walked her at lunchtime. Pinto had called me and let me know that Trixie barked during the day and that there had been some complaints, hence her imprisonment in the bathroom. She ran out into the hallway to circle me, letting me know that she needed to go out. Now. When I thought about Max’s proposition, I came to the conclusion that there was no reason why we couldn’t go down to the bar for a soft drink; I wasn’t going to convince Max to eat dinner at five in the afternoon and Kevin wasn’t meeting us for another hour so I thought it was as good a way to kill time as any. “Fine. But I have to walk Trixie first. Can you stay out of trouble if I leave you here alone?” I asked from the hallway. I leaned in and grabbed the leash off the hook right inside the door.

She looked around the room apparently assessing whether or not she could stay trouble free; she opened the French doors between the parlor and the bedroom. I had started keeping them closed because that room was so musty that I was convinced black mold was growing in there and killing me slowly.

“I guess so.” She poked her head into the bathroom. “I think I had sex in this room.”

I rolled my eyes. “Of course you did. Listen, just sit here and don’t touch anything?”

She perched on the edge of the bed. “Oh, like your fabulous discount shoe collection? Or your drugstore lipstick? Or your fancy underwear from Target? I think I’ll manage to keep my hands to myself.”

“Nice,” I said. Max had been in such a sorry state for the past few weeks that I had almost forgotten about snarky Max. Even though she was insulting me and my frugal side—underwear from Target? Hell, yeah—I was happy that she was back.

Trixie and I wandered out to the parking lot and decided to head up to the cemetery for our nightly walk. I let Trixie off the leash and rested my backside on a tombstone, stretching my legs out as she romped through the small cemetery, stopping to leave her mark on the graves of nuns long gone. I looked up at the waning sun and warmed my face, still hearing the strains of the band playing at Dunleavey. Trixie came back a few minutes later and let me know that she was done; I went searching for whatever it was that she had left behind, hoping the whole time that she hadn’t sandblasted the front of some old nun’s eternal home with the remnants of her fiber-rich lunch. I cleaned up and the two of us headed back to the dorm.

Max was standing out in the hallway when I returned. “I couldn’t take the smell in there,” she said, pointing to my room.

“What smell?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but if that’s you, you need to see a doctor. Immediately.” She made a face. “You’ve got some serious internal problems. Do you have irritable bowel syndrome?”

“No,” I said, getting mildly concerned about the smell emanating from the parlor.

“Crohn’s disease?”

“No!”

“Ulcerative colitis?”

“I have no bowel issues, Max,” I assured her. I wondered how she had become so acquainted with diseases of the bowel but decided that was a conversation for another time. I lifted my arm and sniffed at my blouse. “I don’t smell bad.”

“Well, your room does, sister, so you’d better have a CT scan or an MRI or have them turn you inside out and figure it out because it smells really bad in there.”

I was a cross between indignant and fearful, wondering what could possibly smell in my room. From the hallway, Max pointed to the small parlor. “It’s mostly in there.”

I entered the room tentatively. Frankly, the whole building was so old that it freaked me out, and I didn’t even want to think about what could possibly be in the closet in the parlor to cause the smell that, yes, I was starting to discern. Trixie charged past me and headed toward the small linen closet in the parlor and began to bark wildly, scratching at the door.

This wasn’t going to be good.

I turned and looked at Max, whose eyes were wide over the hand covering her nose and mouth. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the window in the parlor, open to let the musty smell out, was missing its screen so that it was open to the parking lot; the car right outside the window was so close I could touch it.

I walked over to the closet and opened the door.

The only thing I saw was the word “Princeton,” black letters emblazoned on an orange sweatshirt, coming toward me.

Twenty-Four

Max began screaming and ran down the hallway, Trixie nipping at her heels.

Me? I was lying on the floor of the parlor, a hopefully not dead Amanda Reese on top of me.

I lay for a few seconds, not sure what to do and terrified beyond belief. The smell of vomit filled the room, Amanda’s open mouth inches from mine and expelling the same odor. Her glasses were still on but broken, both lenses shattered in a spider’s web of disrepair.

Adrenaline finally forced me to move and I wiggled out from under her, lowering her gingerly to the floor. I watched as a puff of dust flew up around her. I heard a noise like a dog whimpering and realized that it was me; I tried to get a hold of myself as I knelt beside Amanda, who I wasn’t sure was still alive.

I was pleading with her, with God, with someone, that she wasn’t dead. “Please, please, please, please, please,” I repeated as I looked at her face, sideways on the rug.

I finally rolled her over gently and pulled her eyelid open; her eye rolled back. I laid my head on her chest and thought that I could hear a heartbeat but then realized it might just be the thudding in my ear from the blood flowing to my head. “Max!” I called but she didn’t answer. I had no idea where she had gone or why she wasn’t helping me but I needed her. “Max!” I screamed, my voice sounding unfamiliar to me, choked with hysteria and the sobs that were escaping. “Anyone!” I finally screamed, hoping that someone, anyone, was in the building, despite the band playing at Dunleavey, and the dinner service commencing across the campus at the dining hall. Even though it was only a week after spring break, a lot of students still went home for weekends, so I was guessing that the dorm was sparsely populated.

“Max! Anyone!” I called, hoping to get the attention of the person sitting desk. But as the seconds ticked by, it was clear that Max wasn’t coming back and there was no one at the desk, something that was going to be brought up at the next dorm meeting if I had anything to do about it. I scrambled over Amanda to the phone on the dusty coffee table and dialed 911. After I explained Amanda’s situation to them, I hung up and dialed Crawford.

When he answered, I burst into tears. “Crawford, get over here right away!”

I could tell that he was running to his car as I explained what was going on: Amanda was unconscious, her sweatshirt was covered with vomit, and her breathing was shallow. I put a hand on her chest and felt it rise and lower under my palm. I sat back on my heels, keeping my hand there.

I didn’t see any blood on her but I didn’t want to disturb her too much; falling out of the closet and on top of me was trauma enough for both of us. Her hands were tied behind her back and I undid the knots, rubbing her wrists to bring the blood back to them. I worked on the ropes around her ankles next. I wondered why her mouth wasn’t taped shut and decided that she must have been unconscious when she had been stuffed in the closet and not a threat to scream. Someone wanted to scare her, not kill her, I surmised. I was glad that they hadn’t covered her mouth; with the amount of vomit that was soaking the front of her sweatshirt, it was obvious that she would have choked to death if her mouth had been taped shut. I sat next to her with my hand on her forehead, waiting for the sound of sirens in the distance, which didn’t take too long to start. Amanda moved her head from side to side, and threw up again onto the decades-old carpet, an action I took as a good sign; it meant she was alive and hopefully coming back to life. I lifted the back of her head so that she wouldn’t choke.

She started to come to, her eyes opening slightly. She struggled to sit up but I held her down. “Stay down, Amanda.”

I heard the sound of the sirens getting closer as they made their way down the hill toward the dorm and I started to breathe normally again. In moments, a team of paramedics broke through the side door with a stretcher and entered my small set of rooms. I got up and quickly moved to the side as they went to work on her.

One of the paramedics, a short stocky woman, asked me a series of questions, only a few of which I could answer. I didn’t know how long Amanda had been in the closet, I didn’t know how long she had been unconscious. I had no idea whether or not she had an ingested any substances. But I did know that she was twenty or twenty-one, and that she lived in New Jersey. I even had her home address. That much I knew.

When the paramedic was done with me, she went back to her partner and spent some time on Amanda, asking her a few questions. But Amanda was still not fully conscious and was clearly disoriented. I wrapped my arms around myself as I watched what was going on, standing close to the open window trying to get some air. I kept my arms close to my body so that I wouldn’t be tempted to touch anything; the room was now a crime scene and I had been involved in enough crimes of late that I was starting to know exactly how to behave. I looked out the window and scanned the parking lot for a sign of Crawford, and I didn’t have to wait too long before his puke-brown Crown Victoria skidded to a stop on the far side of the parking lot by the cemetery.

The paramedics loaded Amanda onto a stretcher, an IV having been started in her arm, an oxygen mask on her face. Her eyes were now open wide and she looked scared to death. I held her hand and assured her that someone would call her parents and that I would meet her at the hospital as soon as I talked to the police, a group of whom had congregated in the hallway waiting for the stretcher to pass.

Crawford entered through the side door with Fred in tow. I ran to him and threw my arms around him. He held me at arm’s length. “You okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I said, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. “I have to get to the hospital to be with her. Will you take me over there?”

Nobody had been murdered, so the case wouldn’t be his. He spoke briefly with one of the patrol officers who had shown up and gave him a few instructions. “Where did they take her?” he asked the cop.

“Mercy,” the cop said, and went into the room, his hands already gloved for the investigation.

I looked at Fred, standing by the janitor’s closet, and remembered Max. A quick survey of the area revealed that she was nowhere to be found.

“Max!” I hollered, startling the cops who were clustered in and around the parlor. She didn’t respond. “Max!” I called again. I had no idea where she had gone but figured she couldn’t be far. I started down the marble hallway, the sound of my voice reverberating off the tiled ceiling. “Max!”

I heard the sound of her heels hitting the marble risers as she slowly made her way down the staircase in the lobby. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and peeked around, looking to see who was there. “Is the coast clear?” she asked.

I marched toward her, my blood boiling. “You are completely useless, you know that?” I could hear Crawford call my name but the sound of my own pulse in my ears nearly drowned every sound out.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, rooting through her pocketbook, not really paying attention to me.

“It means that you are completely useless!” I grabbed her pocketbook and threw it to the ground to get her attention. “I had a body fall on top of me. The body of one of my students. Who you didn’t know whether or not was still alive.”

“I got scared,” she protested, and bent down to pick up the contents of her purse. Her indignant attitude toward what I considered a very serious situation made me irate.

“Well, what about me?” I asked, kicking a tube of lipstick out of her reach; it ricocheted off the wall by the unmanned desk and skidded to a stop by the TV room, where just a few days ago she had tried to sort out her feelings about her husband. Who wasn’t really her husband. They hadn’t been together long enough to even qualify as common-law spouses. I jabbed her in the chest with my index finger. “What about Amanda? What if we needed help?”

She was finally starting to realize the depth of my ire and her green eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? You’re sorry? How about thinking about someone other than yourself every now and again?”

Crawford arrived at my side and took my elbow. “Let’s go,” he whispered.

I shook it off. “No, I have some things I want to say.”

“You’re very upset,” he said, grabbing my elbow a little more tightly this time. “Let’s go,” he repeated forcefully.

I continued crying, more upset by Amanda’s condition than Max’s reaction to the situation. I spied Fred out of the corner of my eye and he wisely chose to keep his mouth shut and not use the opportunity to profess his love for Max or to make some sarcastic comment to me.

Max’s expression turned sad. “That wasn’t a very nice thing to say.”

“You need to understand something,” I said. “Sometimes you need to do the complete opposite of what your brain is telling you to do.” I pointed at my own head and took a deep breath so that I could continue my rant. “That means that if your brain tells you to run, you stay put. That tells you that if you want to break up with your husband for some ridiculous reason, you stay put. That means that you do what’s logical, not what I would consider completely illogical.”

I heard Fred harrumph and give me an “amen, sister.”

Max gripped her pocketbook a little closer to her chest; her lip quivered. I noticed that a group of students were now congregating in the lobby, watching this scene play out. If I hadn’t been so upset, I would have taken this conversation to the TV room, but I was on a roll.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” I asked. I don’t know what possessed me at this particular moment to unleash nearly twenty years of anger toward this woman whom I considered the closest thing to a sister but it all came out in an ugly torrent; it wasn’t unlike the one time my family’s septic system had overflowed and befouled the backyard, not to mention the entire neighborhood. I was befouling the closest female relationship I had and I didn’t know if someone with rubber boots and a wet/dry vacuum would be able to bail me out this time. “Sometimes, if you think that you can’t handle something, you have to find a way. Because people might be depending on you.” I stared at her, my anger increasing with every second I looked at her puzzled visage. “Did that ever occur to you?”

Behind me, I heard footsteps on the stairs and Kevin appeared at the bottom of the staircase. “Alison? What’s going on?”

I turned and let out a long and shaky sigh. “Kevin . . .”

“Did you tell her?” he asked. If I had been thinking more clearly and not been so upset, I probably would have heard the relief in his voice. He was off the hook; someone else had done the dirty work.

I almost started in on him but Max looked at me, less sad now and more puzzled. “Tell me what?” She looked at Kevin, who turned crimson.

I threw up my hands. “Oh, you’re not married. We might as well just go for broke tonight.” I started walking down the hallway. “You’re selfish, but you’re not married. Kevin screwed up the paperwork. The archdiocese found out. You’re not married. You never were. There. It’s all out now.”