Scoop to Kill (17 page)

There was a note tucked inside the front cover of the book:

Sherbet jumped up beside me and started nibbling at the end of the pink ribbon.

“I don’t think so, little man. I am not taking you back to the vet tonight.” I tugged the ribbon away and tucked it between the folds of the paper before pulling the cat onto my lap.

“What do you think, Sherbet? In honor of my new status as ‘college student,’ do you think I should tackle this nasty-looking book?”

Sherbet squeaked and butted his head on the corner of the hard cover.

“Do you want to do my homework for me, little man?” He squeaked again. “I didn’t think so.”

I was petting the cat’s silky head and idly flipping through the first pages of the book, trying to decide whether etiquette required me to actually read the thing, when a word caught my eye.

It was near the bottom of the third page, just one little word at the beginning of a paragraph, but it rocked my world.

Ostergard
.

 

It creeped me out a little that, as we convened around the back table of the A-la-mode, Kyle took the chair Emily had usually occupied. But it was the seat closest to the wall outlet, and he had his laptop fired up.

I’ve heard it said that people tend to look like their dogs, and it seemed the same could be said about laptop computers. Where Emily used a sleek white machine, all slim curved lines, Kyle’s laptop had a dark case, its clunky frame covered over with stickers for bands and skateboard manufacturers.

“Tally, you don’t have Wi-Fi here, do you?” Finn asked.

“Huh?”

Alice laughed, and Kyle snorted. “No,” he said. “But McKlesky and Howard does.”

“The law firm?”

“Yep.”

“Isn’t their network password protected?” Finn sounded incredulous.

“Nope.”

“Incredible.”

“I know, right?”

Kyle and Finn bumped fists. Apparently their mutual disdain for McKlesky and Howard’s idiocy provided some sort of cement for their boy-bonding.

“Ostergard?” Kyle asked.

“That’s right. Walder—with a ‘d’ instead of a ‘t’—Ostergard.”

“Huh.”

“Let me see,” Alice said, pulling the laptop around in front of her. Kyle held up his hands, seemingly surrendering his machine to her.

She read silently for a second, clicking keys on the computer.

“This must be him,” she said. “Walder Ostergard, ASC. Cinematographer. His Wikipedia entry says he’s from Denmark but lived in the U.S. for the last thirty years of his life. Died last summer. Worked extensively with Christer Rasmussen before immigrating.”

“That’s the guy,” I said. I scanned through the paragraph in Landry’s book, the one that mentioned Ostergard. “Landry thanks him for helping arrange the interviews he did with Rasmussen.”

“That’s why the book is such a big deal,” Alice said. “From what Reggie said, Rasmussen was notoriously reclusive—like J. D. Salinger reclusive. The fact that Landry got to interview him extensively before he died, it’s huge.”

“But what’s fake?” Bree asked. “Wasn’t that what Bryan’s calendar said? That Ostergard was fake? But he’s a real person. Dead, but real.”

“I don’t know,” Alice said. “Maybe there’s something in his blog.”

“Blog?” Bree asked.

Kyle rolled his eyes. Working with old ladies like us about drove him nuts.

“Blog,” he said. “Web log, like an online diary.”

“Don’t take that tone with me, Kyle Mason,” Bree snapped. “What kind of idiot keeps a diary out on the Internet where everyone can read it?”

“Oh, just everyone,” Kyle drawled.

“I don’t suppose he blogs in English?” Finn said.

“Actually he does,” Alice replied. She read silently a moment. “Broken, profane English, but English.”

Something jogged loose in my brain.

“That’s got to be it,” I said. “Reggie mentioned that Landry was pissed at Bryan last fall, and he made some comment about Bryan spending too much time reading blogs. Reggie thought Bryan wasn’t doing his work, but maybe Landry was upset over something Bryan found on a blog.”

I felt a growing certainty that this was it, the key to everything. In my experience, when people cheated on their spouses they displayed a fundamental lack of character, a failing that spilled into other aspects of their lives. If Jonas Landry could cheat so boldly, what else might he do? Lie? Kill?

Still, my innate dislike for Jonas Landry wouldn’t get us far in a court of law. If Jonas killed Bryan, we’d have to unravel the whole story, start to finish.

Alice moaned. “But what?” she said, echoing my own thoughts. “What did Bryan find? Geez, if it’s something on Ostergard’s blog, we’re doomed. The guy may not have spoken English very well, but he sure liked to write. It looks like he averaged a good twenty posts a month, and the index goes back for years.”

“I’ve got it,” Finn said. “I’m taking my mom to the hospital for some tests tomorrow. It’ll take all day. So just give me the URL for the blog and the book, and I’ll see what I can figure out.”

I
was an average student in high school, earning mostly As and Bs, but through hard work rather than native brilliance. I probably could have gotten into college, but I had no way to pay tuition. Mama and I had to pinch pennies till they squealed just to get by, my daddy had a whole other family to support up in Tulsa, and I sure wasn’t in a position to win scholarships. Heck, even if I’d been able to find the cash, I couldn’t have gone far: my mama needed constant supervision when she was drinking. Which was always.

Bottom line, college simply wasn’t an option.

As a result, most of what I knew about universities I’d learned from watching television. I expected the offices of the faculty to be grand affairs with wood paneling, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and tall, leaded-glass windows. Lecture halls should be filled with oak desks, a stately podium at the front of the room, golden sunlight streaming through ivy-draped windows, and the scent of leather-bound books heavy on the air. The outside of Dickerson, and even the big public atrium in Sinclair Hall, fit my Hollywood image of a private university. But once you peeled back that top layer and got down to the real working part of the school, the image shattered.

When I crossed the threshold into the main lecture hall in Sinclair Hall, the fusty scent of lunch meat and damp socks hit me hard.

Buzzing fluorescent tubes cast unforgiving light on the chipped laminate desks bolted into a tiered floor covered in stained commercial carpet. The chairs, too, were bolted in place, their hard plastic contours splattered with Magic Marker graffiti. The walls of the room were covered with a chaos of posters for study-abroad programs, sorority fund-raisers, and summer subletting opportunities.

At the front of the room, Reggie stood beside a lectern resting on an office desk. Behind him, a vast whiteboard bore the ghostly marks of lectures past. He glanced up and gave me a quick smile before returning to studying the black binder in his hands.

I spotted Alice sitting in the front right corner of the classroom, narrow shoulders squared beneath a baby blue cardigan, a half-dozen sharpened pencils and two highlighters lined up next to an open notebook on the table in front of her.

I made my way toward the middle of the classroom, wanting to be close enough to Alice to keep an eye on her but not so close as to make her self-conscious. I found a seat about five rows from the front and only a few in from the aisle. As I settled in, I could tell that even my ample behind would be no match for a full three hours in that hard plastic seat.

“Hey, Mama.”

I craned my neck around to see the boy who had spoken, a thick-necked young man with Greek letters emblazoned across his chest, knee-length khaki shorts, and leather flip-flops. The sort of flip-flops that cost more than my best dress shoes. He wore a puka shell necklace, a backward ball cap, and sprawled in his chair, slumped down so far his butt about fell off the edge of his seat.

I hadn’t gone to college, but I knew his type. I’d wrangled boys like that when I worked at Erma’s Fry by Night Diner in high school, the rich kids from Dickerson who had more money than manners. I’d watched those boys grow into men with florid faces, sports cars, and inappropriate girlfriends. And I’d watched those men grow fat and sad with middle age, turning into pitiful caricatures of themselves. Basically, I’d watched the life cycle of this boy’s type, and I would bet he wouldn’t be smiling such a smug grin if he knew what was in store for him.

A half-dozen smirking boys formed a gangly knot around the boy who’d spoken. This particular breed of jerk tended to travel in packs.

“I haven’t seen you around campus,” he said, undeterred by my most thin-lipped glare of annoyance. “You new? Cuz maybe I could, uh, show you around.” He bobbled his eyebrows suggestively, and his posse sniggered.

The ringleader high-fived the kid next to him and laughed, but the sound had an ugly edge to it. Whether he ever pantsed a kid in gym class or not, this guy was a bully.

As a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, I’d learned that the best way to beat a bully is to ignore him. I swiveled back around, prepared to do just that, but my rebuff only prompted a round of catcalls from the peanut gallery.

I swung back around. “Sugar, I’m old enough to be your mama, so don’t think your cute will work on me.”

“Me-ow,” he said, swiping a playful claw through the air. “A real live cougar!” His backup bullies laughed way louder than his comment deserved.

I opened my mouth to put him in his place, but before I could utter a word, someone behind me came to my defense.

“Put it back in your pants, Bubba. She doesn’t have time for your bull crap.”

I turned around to thank my champion and found Ashley Henderson, the perky desk clerk from the Lady Shapers, a high-end all-girl fitness club in town. I’d done a little undercover work—emphasis on the “little” instead of the “work”—there the year before, and Ashley had inadvertently given me some very useful information. Given how transparent middle-aged women were to vivacious young girls like her, I couldn’t imagine she would remember me, but she surprised me.

“Hey, Miz Jones,” she said.

“Hey, Ashley. Thanks for that.”

She waved her hand dismissively. “Bubba’s a jack-ass. You get used to him.”

Her words were friendly enough, to me if not to Bubba, but her shuttered expression and flat tone of voice did not invite girl talk. “Well, thanks anyway,” I said.

She nodded and turned to her notebook. I flipped open my own, and mindlessly jotted the date on the top of the page, and then I studied Ashley out of the corner of my eye.

When I’d seen her six months earlier, she’d been as sweet and bubbly as strawberry soda, her highlighted blond hair caught in a high ponytail and her tight athletic clothes showing off the compact curves of her muscular body.

She’d changed.

Like many Texans, she’d lost her sun-kissed glow during the winter months, but her skin had gone beyond pale to the flat, sallow color of cooked custard. She still wore her hair in a ponytail, but it listed to the side and strands escaped to create a nimbus around her head. The precious matching spandex-enriched cotton outfits she wore to the gym were gone; in their place, she sported a pair of real sweatpants, their original color faded to an indeterminate muddy hue, and an oversized pink sweatshirt with purple Greek letters appliquéd across the chest.

I wasn’t judging the girl. Heck, I wasn’t dressed much better, and she’d probably been out painting the town the night before. It just surprised me to see her looking so, well, ordinary.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Reggie announced from the front of the classroom. “It’s time for us to begin.”

And with that, I began my very first and probably last college class.

 

After an hour and a half of Reggie droning on about the significance of classical liberal political philosophy in the early American novel, I understood why college kids drank coffee all dang day. When he finally announced that we’d take a ten-minute break, I grabbed Alice’s hand and pulled her bodily out of the classroom and down to the basement where the vending machines hummed contentedly.

“Are you having fun?” Alice asked, as I dug quarters out of my purse for the soda machine.

I searched her face for any hint of sarcasm, found none, and sighed. “Darlin’, your aunt Tally probably isn’t cut out for college. Now, your mama might get a kick out of this, but I’d really rather be home watching ShopNet.”

Alice rolled her eyes. “How can you watch that crap? You don’t even buy anything. It’s weird.”

I shrugged as I studied the pictures of different flavors of soda. I couldn’t remember which brands of root beer had caffeine and which ones didn’t. Unwilling to risk a decaffeinated beverage, I opted for the diet cola.

“I just like looking at the stuff.” The can fell into the receptacle at the bottom with a satisfying clunk. “I don’t know why. And it’s relaxing.”

She shivered dramatically. “Hardly.”

I’d always had problems with insomnia, with my brain running on overdrive whenever I closed my eyes. Years before, I’d discovered that home shopping channels provided the perfect antidote: just enough sense to keep my mind from flying in a million different directions, but not enough meaning to actually keep me engaged and awake. After enough nights falling asleep to the patter of ShopNet announcers, I’d started to find them soothing even when I was awake. Alice and Bree both thought I should be committed for watching that drivel, but in the grand scheme of vices, bad TV was pretty far down on the list.

I cracked open the can and took a long pull, then had to stifle a little belch. “You want one?” I asked Alice.