Size 12 Is Not Fat (12 page)

I fill Magda and Pete in on the whole thing during our lunch break. I tell them what’s going on, including the part about Cooper—

But not that I’m madly in love with him or anything. Which of course makes the story much shorter and far less interesting.

Pete’s only response is to scoop up a forkful of chili and eye it dubiously.

“Are there carrots in this? You know I hate carrots.”

“Pete, didn’t you hear me? I said I think—”

“I heard you,” Pete interrupts.

“Oh. Well, don’t you think—”

“No.”

“But you didn’t even—”

“Heather,” Pete says, carefully placing the offending carrot on the side of his plate. “I think you been watching way too much
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
”

“I love you, honey” is what Magda has to say about it. “But let’s face it. Everyone knows you’re a little bit”—she twirls a finger around one side of her head—“cuckoo. You know what I mean?”

I cannot believe a woman who would spend
five hours
having the Statue of Liberty air-brushed on her fingernails is calling
me
cuckoo.

“C’mon.” I glare at them. “Two girls with no history of an interest in elevator surfing dying from it in two weeks?”

“It happens.” Pete shrugs. “You want your pickle?”

“You guys, I’m serious. I really do think someone is pushing these girls down the shafts. I mean, there’s a pattern. Both of these girls were late bloomers. They never had boyfriends before. Then, suddenly, a week before they died, they both got boyfriends—”

“Maybe,” Magda suggests, “they did it because after saving themselves for the right man for all those years, they found out sex wasn’t so great after all.”

All conversation ceases after that, because Pete’s choking on his Snapple.

The rest of the day is a blur. Because the two deaths occur so close together in the semester, we’re bombarded by the press, mostly the
Post
and the
News
, but a
Times
reporter calls as well.

Then there’s the memo Rachel insists on sending to all the residents, letting them know that a counselor will be on hand twenty-four hours a day this weekend to help them all
through their grief. This means I have to make seven hundred photocopies, then talk the student worker into stuffing the memos into three hundred mailboxes, two for each double room, and three for the triples.

At first Tina, the desk worker, outright refuses. Justine, it seems, had always simply made one copy per floor, then hung them next to each set of elevators.

But Rachel wants each resident to receive his or her
own
copy. I have to tell Tina that I don’t care how Justine had done things, that this is how
I
want things done. To which Tina actually replies, dramatically, “Nobody cares about what happened to Justine! She was the best boss in the world, and they fired her for
no good reason
! I saw her crying the day she found out! I
know
! New York College is so
unfair
!”

I want to point out that Justine was probably crying tears of relief that she’d only been fired and not prosecuted for what she’d done.

But I’m not supposed to mention the fact that Justine had been fired for theft in front of the students—kind of for the same reason we’re not supposed to call the place we work a dorm. Because it doesn’t foster a real feeling of security.

Instead, I promise to pay Tina time and a half to get the memos distributed. This cheers her right up.

By the time I get home—with milk—it’s nearly six. There’s no sign of Cooper—he’s probably on a stakeout, or whatever it is private eyes do all day. Which is fine, because I have plenty to keep myself occupied. I’ve smuggled home a building roster, and I’m going through it, circling every resident named Mark or Todd. Later, I’m going to call each one, using the building phone book, and ask them if they knew Elizabeth or Roberta.

I’m not really sure what I’m going to say if any of them say yes. I guess I can’t come right out and be all “So…did you
shove her down the elevator shaft?” But I figure I will deal with that when the time comes.

I am just settling down in front of the roster with a glass of wine and some biscotti I found in the cupboard when the doorbell rings.

And I remember, with an almost physical jolt, that I volunteered to babysit for Patty’s kid tonight.

Patty takes one look at me after I open the door and knows. She goes, “What happened?”

“Nothing,” I assure her, taking Indy from her arms. “Well, I mean, something, but nothing happened to me. Another girl died today. That’s all.”

“Another one?” Frank, Patty’s husband, looks delighted. There’s something about violent death that makes some people very excited. Frank is evidently one of them. “How’d she do it? OD?”

“She fell off the top of one of the elevators,” I say, as Patty elbows Frank, hard enough to make him go
unngh
. “Or at least, that’s as close as we can figure out. And it’s okay. Really. I’m all right.”

“You be nice to her,” Patty says to her husband. “She’s had a bad day.”

Patty has a tendency to get fussy when she’s going out. She isn’t comfortable in evening clothes—maybe because she still hasn’t lost all of the baby weight yet. For a while, Patty and I tried going power walking through SoHo in the evenings, as part of our efforts to do our government-suggested sixty minutes of exercise per day.

But Patty couldn’t seem to pass by a shop window without stopping, then asking, “Do you think those shoes would look good on me?” then going inside and buying them.

And I couldn’t pass a bakery without going in and buying a baguette.

So we had to stop walking, because Patty’s closets are full enough as it is, and who needs that much bread?

Besides, Patty has nowhere to wear all her new stuff. She’s basically a homebody at heart, which, for a rock star’s wife, is not a good thing.

And Frank Robillard is a rock star with a capital S. He makes Jordan look like Yanni. Patty met him when they were both doing Letterman—he was singing, she was one of those showgirls who stands around holding the cold cuts party platter—and it was love at first sight. You know, the kind you read about, but that never happens to you. That kind.

“Cut it out, Frank,” Patty says to her one true love. “We’re going to be late.”

But Frank is prowling around the office, looking at Cooper’s stuff.

“He shot anybody yet?” he asks, meaning Cooper.

“If he had, he wouldn’t tell me,” I say.

Since I’ve moved in with Cooper, my stock has gone way up with Frank. He never liked Jordan, but Cooper is his hero. He’d even gone out and bought a leather jacket just like Cooper’s—used, so it’s already broken in. Frank doesn’t understand that being a private investigator in real life isn’t like how it is on TV. I mean, Cooper doesn’t even own a gun. All you need to do Cooper’s job is a camera and an ability to blend with your environment.

Cooper’s surprisingly good, it turns out, at blending.

“So, you two going out yet?” Frank asks, out of the blue. “You and Cooper?”

“Frank!” Patty screams.

“No, Frank,” I say, for what has to be the three hundredth time this month alone.

“Frank,” Patty says. “Cooper and Heather are roommates. You can’t go out with your roommate. You know how that
is. I mean, all the romance is gone once you’ve seen someone in their bathrobe. Right, Heather?”

I blink at her. I have never thought of this. What if Patty is right? Cooper is never going to think of me as date-worthy—even if I win a Nobel Prize in medicine. Because he’s seen me too many times in sweat pants! With no makeup!

Patty and Frank say their good-byes, then Indy and I stand and wave to them as they go down my front steps and climb back into their waiting limo. The drug dealers on my street watch from a respectful distance. They all worship Frank’s band. I am convinced that the reason Cooper’s house is never graffitied or robbed is because everyone in the neighborhood knows that we’re friends with the voice of the people, Frank Robillard, and so the place is off-limits.

Or maybe it’s because of the alarm and the bars on all the ground and first floor windows. Who knows?

Indy and I spend a pleasant evening watching
Forensic Files
and
The New Detectives
on the TV in my bedroom, where I’m able to keep an eye on both my best friend’s child and the back of Fischer Hall. Looking up at the tall brick building, with so many of its lights ablaze, I can’t help remembering what Magda had said—her joke about Elizabeth and Roberta ending it all over discovering that sex isn’t all it was cracked up to be. Bobby had been a virgin…at least according to her roommate. And it seemed likely that Elizabeth Kellogg had been one as well.

Is that it? Is that the link between the two girls? Is someone killing the virgins of Fischer Hall?

Or have I seen one too many episodes of
CSI
?

When Patty and Frank arrive to pick up their progeny just after midnight, I hand him over at the front door. He’d passed out during
Crossing Jordan
.

“How was he?” Patty asks.

“Perfect, as always,” I say.

“For you, maybe,” she says with a snort as she shifts the sleeping baby in her arms. Frank is waiting in the limo below. “You’re so good with him. You should have one of your own someday.”

“Twist the knife, why don’t you,” I say.

“I’m sorry,” Patty says. “I love having you sit for us, but you do realize you’ve never once said you couldn’t because you were busy? Heather, you’ve got to get back out there. Not just with your music, either. You’ve got to try to meet someone.”

“I meet plenty of people,” I say defensively.

“I mean someone who isn’t a freshman at New York College.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Well, it’s easy for you to criticize. You’ve got the perfect husband. You don’t know what it’s like in real life. You think Jordan was an anomaly? Patty, he’s the
norm
.”

“That isn’t true,” Patty says. “You’ll find someone. You just can’t be afraid to take a risk.”

What is she talking about? I do nothing but take risks. I’m trying to keep a psychopath from killing again. Isn’t that enough? I have to have a ring on my finger, too?

Some people are never satisfied.

No matter how much I try to shake it, the thought stays with me all weekend. The Virgins of Fischer Hall.

I know it sounds insane. But I just kept thinking about it.

Maybe Patty’s right, and the kids in the dorm—residence hall, I mean—are taking up the space in my heart where love for my own kids would be if, you know, I had any. Because I can’t stop worrying about them.

Not that there can be that many more virgins left in the building—which I happen to be in a position to know. Ever since I swapped the Hershey’s Kisses in the candy jar on my
desk for individually wrapped Trojans, I’ve had kids stumbling down to my office at nine in the morning in their PJs—and if you don’t think nine in the morning is early by college standards, you’ve never been in college—unapologetically plucking them from the jar.

No embarrassment. No apologies. In fact, when I run out of Trojans, and the jar remains empty for a day or so until I get more from Health Services, let me tell you, I hear about it. The kids start in on me right away: “Hey! Where are the condoms? Are you out of condoms? What am I supposed to do
now
?”

Anyway, the upshot of it is, I pretty much know who is getting some in my building.

And let me tell you, it’s a
lot
of people. There aren’t a whole lot of virgins left in Fischer Hall.

But somehow, some guy had managed to find and kill two of them.

I couldn’t let any more girls die. But how was I going to stop it from happening again when I didn’t have any idea who the guy was? I didn’t get anywhere with the roster thing. There were three Marks and no Todds at all in the building, although there was one Tad. One of the three Marks in the building was black (he was a resident on Jessica’s floor—I called her to ask) and another Korean (I called his RA as well), which ruled them both out, since Lakeisha had been sure the guy was white. Tad was so obviously gay that I just stammered an apology and said I’d gotten the wrong number when he picked up the phone.

The third Mark had gone home for the weekend, according to his roommate, but would be back on Monday. But according to his RA, he was only five foot seven, hardly what you’d call tall.

I guess you could call the investigation—such as it was—stymied.

And with Cooper in absentia all weekend, it wasn’t like I could ask for his professional advice on the matter. I’m not sure if he was hiding from me, or busy working, or busy—well, doing something else. Since I moved in, Cooper hadn’t had a single overnight guest—which for him, at least if Jordan is to be believed, might be a record dry spell. But given how frequently he was gone from the townhouse for days at a time, I could only assume he was crashing at the home of his current flame—whoever she might be.

Which was typical of him. You know, not to rub it in my face that he’s getting some, while I’m most definitely not.

Still, I had a hard time appreciating his courteousness as the weekend wore on, and I was still no closer to figuring out who was killing the Virgins of Fischer Hall. If, um, anyone was.

Which might be why, when Monday morning finally rolls around, I’m the first one in the office, latte and bagel already ingested, deeply engrossed in Roberta Pace’s student file.

The file’s contents are remarkably similar to Elizabeth’s, although the two girls came from different sides of the country—Roberta was from Seattle. But they’d both had interfering mothers. Roberta’s mother had called Rachel to complain that Roberta needed a new roommate.

Which startles me. How could anyone not like Lakeisha?

But according to the “incident report”—one of which is filled out whenever a staff member has an interaction with a resident—when Rachel spoke to Roberta, it turned out to be Mrs. Pace, not her daughter, who had the problem with Lakeisha. “It’s not that I don’t like black people,” Mrs. Pace had told Rachel, according to the report. “I just don’t want my daughter to have to
live
with one.”

This is the kind of stuff, I’ve discovered, that people in higher ed have to deal with every day. The good thing is, usually it’s not the kids with the problem, but their parents. As
soon as the parents go back home, everything ends up being okay.

The bad thing is—well, that people like Mrs. Pace exist at all.

I force myself to read on. According to the report, Rachel called Roberta down to the office and asked her if she wanted a room change, the way her mother said she did. Roberta said no, that she liked Lakeisha. Rachel reports that then she let Roberta go and called the mother back, gave her our standard speech in such cases—“Much of a college education takes part outside the classroom, where our students experience new cultures and ways of life. Here at New York College, we do everything we can to encourage cultural diversity awareness. Don’t you want your son/daughter to be able to get along with every sort of individual when he/she enters the workforce?”

Then Rachel told Mrs. Pace that her kid wasn’t getting a room change and hung up.

And that was it. That was the only thing in Roberta’s file. The only sign at all that she’d had any sort of trouble adjusting to college life.

Except, of course, that now Roberta is dead.

I hear the ding of an elevator, and then Rachel’s heels clacking on the marble floor outside our office. A second later, she appears in the doorway, a steaming mug of coffee that she’s brought down from her apartment in one hand, and the morning’s
Times
in the other. She looks startled to see me at my desk so early. Even though I live four minutes away from it, I’m almost always five minutes late to work.

“Oh my goodness,” Rachel says, looking pleased to see me. “Aren’t you here early! Did you have a nice weekend?”

“Yeah,” I say, closing Roberta’s file, and kind of sliding it under some other stuff on my desk.

Not that I don’t have every right to be reading it. It’s just that I feel kind of reluctant to tell Rachel what I suspect—about the girls being pushed, and all. I mean, technically, I probably should have said something about the key, or the condom, at least, or that both girls had recently met a guy…

But I can’t help wondering—what if Cooper is right? What if Elizabeth and Roberta really did fall, but I make this big stink about how I think they’d been murdered? Would Rachel mark down in my employment file that I suffer from paranoid delusions? Could something like that keep me from passing my six months’ probation? Could they fire me for it, the way they had Justine—even though I’d fully kept my hands off the ceramic heaters?

I’m not about to risk it. I decide to keep my suspicions to myself.

“Mostly,” I say, in reply to Rachel’s question about my weekend. Because, aside from calling about the Marks and Todds, I’d done nothing but walk Lucy, watch TV, and fiddle around with my guitar. Hardly anything worth reporting. “You?”

“Terrible,” Rachel says, shaking her head. Although for someone who’s had such a bad weekend, she looks really great. She has on a new suit, really well-cut. The black brings out the ivory in her skin, and makes her hair seem an even deeper chestnut. “Roberta’s parents came in,” Rachel goes on, “to pick up their daughter’s things. It was just a nightmare. They plan on suing, of course. Though on what grounds, I can’t imagine. Those poor people. I felt so sorry for them.”

“Yeah,” I say. “That had to suck.”

The phone on Rachel’s desk starts ringing. “Oh, hello, Stan,” she says, when she answers it. “Oh, thank you so much, but I’m fine, really. Yes, it’s been just awful—”

Wow. Stan. So Rachel’s on a first-name basis with Dr. Jessup now. Well, I guess if a couple of kids in your dorm—oops,
I mean, residence hall—die, you get to know the head of your department pretty well.

I start going through the briefing forms the weekend desk attendants have left me. I can generally get payroll, the budget, any memos that need to be typed, and the desk coverage schedules done by eleven in the morning. Then I have the rest of the day free for cruising the Net, gossiping with Magda or Patty, or trying to figure out who might be killing girls in my place of work, which is how I’ve already decided I’m going to spend this particular Monday.

I just haven’t quite figured out how.

I’m just finishing up the payroll when this pair of Nike-encased feet appear in my line of vision. I lift my head, expecting to see a basketball player—hopefully with a semilegible note I can add to my collection.

Instead, I see Cooper.

“Hey,” he says.

Is it my fault my heart flips over in my chest? I mean, I haven’t seen him in a while. Like almost seventy-two hours. Plus, you know, I’m totally man-starved. That has to be why I can’t take my eyes off the front of the jeans he’s wearing, white in all the places where the denim’s been stressed, like at his knees and other, more interesting places.

He also has on a blue shirt beneath his rumpled leather jacket—the exact same blue as his crinkly eyes.

“Wh—” is the only sound I can get to come out of my mouth, on account of the jeans…and the my-being-a-total-loser-who-is-completely-in-love-with-him part.

I watch as he takes a newspaper out from beneath his arm, unfolds it, and places it in front of me.

“Wh—” I say again. At least, that’s how it sounds to my ears.

“I wanted to make sure you knew about this,” Cooper says.
“You know, before
Us Weekly
starts calling, and catches you by surprise.”

I look down at the paper. It’s the
New York Post
. On the front page is a large, blown-up photo of my ex-fiancé and Tania Trace dining at some outdoor café in SoHo. Underneath their images are the words, in eighteen-point type at least:

THEY’RE ENGAGED!