Final Exam (2 page)

Two

I followed close on Etheridge’s heels to his office in the Administration Building. When I got there, Sister Mary was there as was Dean Merrimack, for whom I had decided “douche nozzle” was way too kind a moniker. Etheridge waved generously toward the only open seat across from his desk. Sister Mary kept her eyes on her hands while Merrimack stared at me with his rat eyes as if I were a piece of cheese. I sat, placing myself as close as I could to the edge of the chair without falling off. This wasn’t about tenure and that was painfully obvious.

“I guess you’re wondering why I asked you here on a Friday evening,” Etheridge said, his eyes glinting behind his Teddy Roosevelt–style horn rims. Out the window behind his head, I could see the bones of a new dorm taking shape.

I stared back at him until it became obvious that I was going to remain silent.

He harrumphed a bit and rearranged himself in his chair. “Well, as you may or may not know, Wayne Brookwell, the resident director at Siena dorm, has unceremoniously left his position.”

I continued staring back at him, not sure why I was hearing about Wayne Brookwell not once, but twice, in the same evening. I could barely pick the guy out of a lineup but everyone seemed very concerned about his whereabouts. And I suspected that I should probably be more concerned about his disappearance, too.

“And that, Dr. Bergeron, is where you come in,” Dean Merrimack said, close to orgasm in his chair.

“Oh, my sleuthing days are over,” I said, as much to convince myself as to convince them.

Etheridge gave me a withering look. “We’re not interested in your sleuthing skills, Alison.”

I slid a little closer to the edge of my chair, close to tipping it over. “Then why am I here?”

Etheridge looked down at the desk calendar that took up most of his desk and counted the number of weeks left in the semester. “We have five weeks left in the semester, Alison, and we need someone to take Resident Director Brookwell’s place until school ends.”

I looked over at Sister Mary, who continued to stare at her hands. Her complexion flushed pink all the way up to the hairline of her sensible, gray permanent. Panic was starting to take hold and I felt a little short of breath. “No, I can’t . . . ,” I said, my voice wavering.

“Yes you can. You must.” Etheridge pushed back from his desk. “So, that’s settled. Shall we go back to the party?”

“No, we should not go back to the party!” I exclaimed, jumping up from my chair, surprising everyone. The force of my ejection sent the chair flying backward and everyone in the room regarded it with horror. “I have a life. I have a dog. My best friend is going through a horrible separation from her husband and living with me. I have a boyfriend,” I said, realizing too late how inane that sounded. “I cannot . . . ,” I said, grabbing the edge of Etheridge’s desk, “move into the Siena dorm.”

Etheridge gave me a steely look. “You can. And you will.” He came out from behind his desk and stood before his floor-to-ceiling bookcases. I had once made Kevin a bet that the bookcases only housed decorative spines, and not real books. I suddenly had an urge to race over and pull one of the books down just to check, but I suspected that action wouldn’t be a big hit. “You can begin to move your things in this weekend.”

“No, I can’t,” I said.

Etheridge moved closer to me and the air got uncomfortably warm in the dark-paneled room. I towered over him by a good four inches. “Dr. Bergeron, your tenure—or lack thereof—here has been marred by your ‘sleuthing’ as you call it,” he said, finger-quoting, “and the people who love this university are not pleased.” We were now just a few inches apart, close-talking to one another. “And by the university, I mean the board. And our donors. One dead body was one thing, but the untimely death of your former husband?” I heard Mary mutter a prayer under her breath for my murdered ex. “That was just too much, even though it had nothing to do with you. You spend too much time in pursuits other than those required of an academic. So being on campus full-time should allow you to focus entirely on St. Thomas, your courses, and your students.”

“I love this university!” I protested. Just because a dead student had once been found in the trunk of my car and my ex-husband had been dismembered in my kitchen didn’t mean that I didn’t love St. Thomas. After all, I had graduated from here years before. They could question my judgment, but they couldn’t question my loyalty to the school. “And is anyone concerned about what happened to Wayne?” I asked, sounding way more familiar with him than I was.

“We’re looking into his disappearance,” Merrimack replied.

“I hope so,” I said. Still, he didn’t sound terribly concerned, which gave me pause. “Did you call the police?”

Etheridge and Merrimack exchanged a look that could only be described as “fraught,” but with what, I had no idea.

Etheridge started for the door, not answering my question. “As for your
boyfriend
?” he said, with a sneer. “Detective Crawford, I presume?” His hand was on the knob and Merrimack was right behind him. “He’ll just have to wait.”

I ran over all of the options in my head and concluded that I didn’t have any. I decided to go with the path of least resistance with one minor caveat. “Fine. But the dog’s coming with me.” I straightened my spine and attempted to sound unyielding. I really didn’t have anything to bargain with but I hoped Etheridge had a heart.

Merrimack decided to exert his influence at that moment. “We don’t allow animals on campus.”

If that were the case, I thought, you’d be out of a job, Rat Boy. I wisely kept my mouth shut and appealed to Etheridge. “Listen, she’s a wonderful animal and very docile. I can’t leave her at the house.”

Etheridge considered this and decided to confine his cruelty merely to making me move in. “The dog can come.”

I heard Mary let out a sigh of relief, for what I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t pegged her as a dog lover, but you never know. I also knew that she wasn’t mute, though she had done nothing to disprove that during this meeting.

Etheridge opened the door and gestured that I should leave. He smiled as I walked past him and into his secretary’s area, vacant at this time of day. “I think this will work out very nicely. Consider it extra credit.” He chuckled. “Dean Merrimack will give you the Code of Conduct folder and all of the other necessary information you’ll need to execute your tasks. We’ll expect you to be ensconced in your suite by Monday morning, latest.”

“Code of Conduct?” I asked.

Merrimack rubbed his rat hands together. “Yes. For instance, coeducational visitation ends at eleven P.M.”

My heart sank. That was going to put a serious crimp in my relationship with Crawford.

“And we’re, of course, a dry campus.”

I already knew that, obviously, and I didn’t want to hear anything else. I did know that I was going to go home and mainline Ketel One like an addict on their way to rehab. I looked impassively at Merrimack and held out my hands. “Keys, please?”

He dropped an ancient-looking set of keys into my palm. “The black key is the front door and the other key is to your suite. The one with the red dot on it is the school master key. It is imperative that you do not lose that one especially.”

Got it, chief. Don’t lose the master key. It was a wonder they paid me a salary, so handicapped did they consider me. I knew that “suite” was probably a very misleading term to describe my new accommodations, so I didn’t get my hopes up. I had seen one of the resident director’s quarters once, twenty years earlier when I was a student. I was sure things hadn’t changed dramatically since that time.

I walked out into the hallway outside of Etheridge’s office cursing a blue streak in my head. I stopped by my office and picked up my bag, papers spilling out and reminding me that my spring break was supposed to have been spent grading. But now I was moving, and with the lack of grading I had done, I was up the creek.

Before I left my office, I clicked on the school intranet and looked up Wayne Brookwell. There was a picture and a bio. He was exactly who I thought he was—skinny, with a square jaw and eyes just a little too closely set. His mouth hung open slightly in the picture, giving me the impression that he was an habitual mouth breather. Just missed at being handsome, as I had reported to Kevin. He was the guy I would have dated in college, while Max, my best friend, would have dated his dumber, yet much better looking, roommate. I read his bio: “Wayne Brookwell graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in art history,” I read. That degree made him perfectly suited to a life as a resident director because, God knows, without a master’s degree, he wasn’t getting a job anywhere outside of the souvenir shop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. No offense to art history majors. The bio was brief, but to the point. It said that Wayne was twenty-six but didn’t make any mention of his moonlighting career as a limousine driver. I stared at his picture. “We’ve never met, Mr. Brookwell, but you’ve ruined my life. I hope you’re happy.”

He stared back at me, in all of his slack-jawed awesomeness.

“Where did you go, Wayne?” I asked, staring at the picture for a few more minutes. When Wayne didn’t answer, I printed out his picture and folded it up so that it would fit in the front of my briefcase. I turned off the computer and headed home to give the news to my new roommate, Max, that I was moving out for several weeks.

And to let my dog, Trixie, know that we had a new home.

And to let Crawford know that his level of sexual frustration—at a fever pitch since I had inherited Max as a roommate—was about to increase tenfold.

Three

I was in a foul mood when I got home and even the sight of my gorgeous boyfriend—I had recently come to terms with using that word to describe him vis à vis our decidedly middle-aged romance—sitting in his sedate Volkswagen Passat station wagon at the curb did nothing to lift my spirits. I left my car in the driveway and stomped down to where he was parked; he was in a coma in the front seat, and when I jerked open the driver’s side door, he sat up with a start, his hand going instinctively to the gun on his hip.

I held up my hands. “Don’t shoot!” I hollered. “It’s me.” This night was off to a really bad start. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, but ending up with a slug in the chest would really ruin things for good.

He put his hand over his heart. “Don’t do that!” he said, relaxing only slightly when he realized who it was. He swung a long leg out of the car and took in my sour demeanor. He pulled on his tie and smoothed it down, something that he did when he was at a loss for words. I’ve seen him pull on so many ties that I’m surprised he had any left that weren’t twice as long as they should be. “What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me?” I asked. “What’s wrong with me? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me,” but I wasn’t able to get out a coherent explanation.

When I didn’t respond, just continued to gesticulate wildly, he looked at me quizzically. “So, what’s wrong?”

I burst into tears. “I have to move into a dorm on campus!”

He leaned against the car and folded his arms across his chest, taking in my shaking shoulders and tear-streaked face. I had cried most of the way home. “Is that bad?” he asked, genuinely interested.

“Yes! It’s bad!” I wiped my nose on the sleeve of my sweater before he had a chance to pull out the fresh, pressed handkerchief I knew he kept in his blazer pocket.

“Start at the beginning.”

I hiccupped and coughed my way through the story and was in full-blown hysteria by the time I finished. He looked at me calmly. “So you’ll be out by the end of the semester?”

I rooted around in my messenger bag for a tissue and came up with a previously used one. I smoothed it out and blew my nose. “Looks that way.”

“And that’s only about five weeks from now?”

I nodded.

He chewed on that for a minute and then held his arms open. I fell into them and took a whiff of his clean laundry scent, hoping that would help me pull myself together. “We’ll manage. It’s not that long,” he said.

“I don’t understand why Etheridge hates me so much,” I sniffled.

“I don’t, either,” Crawford agreed unconvincingly. He knew exactly why Etheridge hated me but was too much of a gentleman to list the reasons. He led me up the walk to the front door. We sat down on the stoop and he wrapped an arm around my shoulders. My life for the last year had been unpredictable, to say the least. I had gotten divorced, been involved in three murder investigations, seen my best friend’s marriage fall apart, and embarked on a relationship with this wonderful man, whose single status hadn’t been quite so clear-cut when we met. And just when things started to right themselves, I ended up with a roommate (Max) and a new living situation (the dorm).

Can’t a girl catch a break?

We sat for a few more minutes, watching cars travel back and forth on my usually quiet street. Spring was coming early and I could see some buds on the trees that stood sentry between two-story suburban homes and tidy, swept sidewalks. I could hear Trixie scratching at the front door from inside the house; she sensed that I was home and wanted to see me. I’m her reason for being, and sometimes, she’s mine. Crawford hooked a thumb toward the house. “What’s going on in there?”

“Oh, that’s a whole other story,” I said. Max had been living with me for a couple of weeks, having broken up with her husband, to whom she had been betrothed less than six months. As luck would have it, her husband was Crawford’s longtime partner, another detective named Fred Wyatt.

He knew what was going on—from Fred’s perspective probably and from my updates—but I guess he was hoping that his visiting wouldn’t be an issue. Max was still extremely angry—at Fred and at men in general. “How’s she doing?”

I shrugged. “How would you be doing?” I asked, my mind still on my predicament. “Do you still want to come in?”

He thought about it for a moment. “I guess so, unless it’s going to upset her.”

I put one hand on the doorknob and the other on his face to get his attention. “Here’s what we’re going to do. If she’s playing the Linda Ronstadt version of ‘You’re No Good,’ and singing along, she’s angry. If she’s got Crystal Gayle’s ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,’ she’s sad.”

“She has green eyes.”

“Yes, I know, Captain Literal,” I continued. “But if it’s Alanis Morrisette,” I said, putting my key into the back door, “run.”

“Run?” His eyes showed a little flash of fear. He knew Max well and knew that she was overly dramatic and more than a little hostile right now. She was tiny but could be deadly.

“Run,” I repeated. “Very fast.”

I opened the door and peered inside. “Max? Hi! It’s me,” I called in, “and Crawford. Crawford’s here,” I repeated. “I’ve got Crawford with me.” The sound of the television in the background told me nothing; I had come home on more than one occasion to find her gone and every appliance running. I turned and looked at him. “All clear.”

Trixie gave us her usual adoring welcome, jumping up on Crawford for a love fest. He let her lick his face a few times before pushing her down.

Max—one hundred pounds soaking wet with the appetite of a fleet of sailors—was ensconced on my living room sofa, eating a giant bowl of what appeared to be linguine carbonara, the remote in her other hand, her feet on my coffee table. She was wearing the same yoga pants and sports bra that she had been wearing for the last two days and her hair had seen better days, both in terms of cleanliness and highlights. She looked up and took in the two of us, standing tentatively in the hallway adjacent to the living room, then looked back to the TV. “Hey.”

My first thought was to tell her that if she got that carbonara on my sofa she was toast, but I refrained. “How was your day?”

“My day?” she asked, shoveling another forkful of carbonara into her mouth. “Same as it ever was,” she said, quoting a Talking Heads song. She had reverted to quoting songs from our youth to describe her situation and I was finding it exceedingly tedious.

Crawford looked at me questioningly. He doesn’t exactly have his finger on the pulse of pop culture. I told him it didn’t matter if he didn’t understand what she meant. “We’re going to go into the kitchen and have a glass of wine. Do you want one?” I asked.

She picked a bottle of beer out from between the sofa cushions and held it aloft, her eyes never leaving the television.

“I take that as ‘no, thank you’?” I said, raising an eyebrow. Crawford took my elbow and steered me toward the kitchen, Trixie in tow. As bad as I felt about Max’s situation, I was starting to lose patience. She had been with me since she had found out that her new husband had had an affair with the Bronx medical examiner. And the ME’s sister. But it had been ten years ago, which to me was well outside the statute of limitations on infidelity. Max’s issue was that he was now working closely with the ME—she had just been transferred from some office in the bowels of hell or something like that—and he had never told Max about the affair or his new working relationship with the ME.

To which I say, “So what?” But I kept that to myself.

I understood her initial consternation; nobody likes their spouse’s former lovers working in close proximity to them. But that’s life. And it’s messy. And if anyone knows from messy, it’s me. My husband had been a champion philanderer, yet I had still felt sadness when he had been murdered. Messy, indeed.

Methinks someone—namely, Max, the former consummate party girl who had married Fred mere months after meeting him—was looking for a “get out of marriage free” card. One had been presented to her and she had played it.

Crawford sat at the kitchen table and I got a couple of wineglasses out of the cupboard. “Red or white?” I asked.

He settled on a new merlot that I had opened the night before. I poured him a healthy glass and finished the bottle off in my glass. I leaned against the counter. “Can you help me move?”

He rolled his eyes toward the living room. “When are you going to tell her?” he whispered.

I shrugged. “No idea.” I repeated my initial question, “Can you help me move?”

“Of course.”

“And can you help me find Wayne Brookwell?”

He chuckled.

“I’m not kidding.”

“You’re going to try to find him?” he asked, incredulous.

“Uh, yes,” I said, equally incredulous that he didn’t think that that was the first item on my to-do list. “Did I mention that St. Thomas is a dry campus with limited coeducational visitation?”

“No drinking, no sex?”

I put my index finger on my nose. “Bingo.”

He looked up at the ceiling; that got him thinking. Specifically, the faster we found Wayne, the faster we could get back to our lives. I watched him work through the details of the situation. Finally, he looked at me. “You’re going to look for him whether or not I help you, so let me know what you need.” I could tell he was resigned—but not totally opposed—to my snooping around.

I put my wineglass down and walked over to him, sitting on his lap. I gave him a long kiss. “Thanks, Crawford. I knew I could count on you.” I kissed him again. “How are you going to occupy yourself while I’m in hell?”

He looked up at the ceiling again and thought about his answer. “I guess I’ll have to go back to fantasizing about Fred until we get back together.”

I got off his lap. “Come on. Let’s go make out in the garage before I start packing.”