Third Degree (9 page)

“He seems like a nice guy.”

“He’s the best,” she repeated.

“So if he asked you to marry him, would you?”

“Of course!” she said. “I’ve been alone a long time. I’d love to be married again.” Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t really trust me or this line of questioning. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no reason,” I said. “You just seem very happy.”

Glad that one of us was able to make a decision on our love life, I let myself into my office, leaving the door open behind me so that students could come in freely, or more important, so I could see when the rest of my colleagues on the office floor arrived.

“Well, if it isn’t Chesty Morgan!”

Kevin stood in my doorway, his hands cupping his pectorals. I didn’t know what he was talking about until he pointed at my chest. The Scotch tape had predictably gotten loose and both my bra and a pretty healthy portion of my breasts were hanging out of the front of my dress. No wonder the mail guy had been stricken mute at my arrival. I hastily gathered my dress back into an appropriate show of neck and cleavage and held it there with my hand. “Well, if it isn’t Father Inappropriate. Welcome back from your vacation, Your Excellency.” I offered him the chair in front of my desk with a wave of my hand. “And who’s Chesty Morgan?”

“Just one of the most famous exotic dancers, by way of Poland, in the seventies and eighties,” he said, sitting down. “Are you doing that to draw attention away from your black eye?” Kevin has known me long enough to know that I am a klutz of the highest order. He didn’t seem surprised by the Technicolor band around my eye.

“And you would know about this Chesty woman how?”

“I have four brothers, remember? She had a seventy-three-inch chest. That’s not something you forget hearing about.” He smiled. “Especially if you have taken a vow of celibacy.”

I held up a hand. “Okay! Enough!” I leaned back in my chair. “How was your vacation?” Kevin usually takes the month of August to travel, and this year he had gone to Paris for two weeks.

“First, the eye.” He leaned back in his chair. “Explain.”

“You first,” I said. “Tell me about the vacation.”

“It was great.” He reached into the pocket of his black trousers and pulled out a small package wrapped in tissue paper. “Here. This is for you.”

I opened it up and found a small medal with the image of the Blessed Mother printed on it. It was blue surrounded in gold and very pretty. “Why, thanks, Kevin,” I said, truly touched. I knew what these kinds of medals meant to him, and to be given one that he transported back from France was truly special.

“It’s from the Church of the Miraculous Medal. It’s the actual place where our order of nuns here was founded. How great is that?” he asked, beaming. From strippers to churches, that was my Kevin. After accepting my heartfelt and profuse thanks, he changed the subject. “Oh, hey, I saw that there was a weird death in your village this weekend. Something about a guy around my age dropping dead in a coffee shop?”

“Oh, Kevin, do we have a lot of catching up to do,” I said.

“Make sure you put in the part where you ended up looking like Jake La Motta.”

“I will.” I went through the whole story, starting with the blog, going into great detail about the black eye and the death of Carter Wilmott, and ending with my conversation with Ginny Miller on the street.

“Sounds like this guy had a lot of enemies and any number of them could have wanted him dead. And it’s pretty easy to get information on terrorist tactics off the Web, too, so just about any of them could have figured out how to make an explosive.” Kevin knew a lot about many more things than I gave him credit for. “What was his motivation in writing the blog?”

I pondered that. “Good question. No idea, actually. I know he was a rabid liberal to the point of socialist, despite being one of the richest men in Westchester. But beyond his taking issue with most of the politicians and public officials in town, I don’t know why he did what he did.” But I can find out, I thought. My previous day’s shame at poking around Lydia Wilmott’s home and life was gone and I was now back to my old nosy self.

Kevin got up. “Gotta run. I’ve got a ten o’clock with Etheridge.”

Mark Etheridge was the college president and a bit of a horse’s rear end, but he was our boss and we were suitably fearful of him. “What’s that about?” I asked. Getting summoned to the president’s office was never a good thing.

Kevin was dismissive, however. “Oh, nothing. I’m not sure but I think it’s about the installment of the student Eucharistic ministers. You know how he loves to keep his hands in all things liturgical.”

A student poked her head in the doorway and was immediately taken aback at the sight of Kevin in his Roman collar and Birkenstock sandals. I assumed this was my first appointment of the day and I shooed Kevin out of the office after giving him the address of the blog, which he requested before taking flight from the room. The student—a young woman who looked like she was twelve but who I knew to be almost nineteen—took a seat and I began what would be the first of ten interviews.

I watched Kevin’s back as he trotted back out into the main office area and through the door to the flight of stairs that would lead up to Etheridge’s office. Unlike Kevin, I wasn’t so dismissive about his being summoned to see the president. My experience had led me to believe that if Etheridge wanted to see you, it couldn’t be good.

I fingered the Miraculous Medal on my desk and said a quick Hail Mary.

I packed up and went out the back door, careful to avoid the cracks in the risers of the steps on my way up to the parking lot where I had left my car. My mind on things other than school—namely, how
does
a seemingly healthy man drop dead if not from a blow to the head?—I missed one step and took a header toward the next step, catching myself with my hand but not before banging my shin and wrist. Oh, for God’s sake, I thought, will it never end? My messenger bag went flying and, with it, all of the papers that had been inside. Fortunately, it wasn’t windy, and everything stayed pretty much where it was supposed to. The unfortunate part? The wrap part of my dress, which was doing a poor job of holding everything in to begin with, was now ripped from the force of my fall and holding nothing in. I quickly gathered the front of the dress together, got up, and began to shove everything back in my bag, not even knowing if I was hurt, but knowing that I was fully humiliated.

A few freshmen had gathered on the hill next to the steps and were staring at me, a college professor with a black eye, and probably a skinned knee, her boobs hanging out in the ugliest bra they had probably ever seen. “I’m fine!” I called over and they stared at me in gape-jawed wonder, probably reconsidering what it was that they saw in this school and its curriculum in the first place. Not one of them made a move to help me, so I quickly jogged up the rest of the steps, noting a sharp pain in my wrist but able to move freely otherwise.

I cursed and muttered all the way to the car. I’m not known for my grace, but this was just ridiculous. I had been trying so hard to avoid falling down and had fallen harder than I would have anticipated. Still holding my dress together, I sped out of the parking lot, slowing down for one of the many speed bumps around campus that always hampered my time getting out of there. I looked to the left and to the spot where I usually said a silent prayer to the stone angel sitting on the wall in front of the library that had been there since before I had been a student at St. Thomas. Instead, all I saw was an empty pedestal, no angel in sight.

The angel was gone, apparently ripped right off its antique perch. This was going to be quite a class if they were already vandalizing the campus.

I continued home, ready to wash my wounds, and wipe this day right out of my mind.

Things picked up considerably upon my arrival home. The sight of Crawford, drinking a beer and sitting on my front stoop, did more to cheer me than anything could have at that moment. Trixie sat beside him, overjoyed at seeing me; her tail wagged back and forth, slapping Crawford in the face. I stopped at the end of the driveway and called out to him. “What are you doing here?”

“I took some lost time,” he said. “Come on. I’ll take you to dinner.”

I pulled the car up the length of the driveway and parked in front of my detached garage, gathered my bag and a sweater I had left on the front seat, and hobbled over to Crawford, who had come around to the back of the house. He took in my appearance and whistled.

“That’s a good look for you,” he said, taking in the ripped dress and the fully exposed décolletage.

“I’m not in the mood, Crawford.”

“Must have been a tough day at school,” he said, taking my bag and sweater from me. “What happened to you?”

“I fell,” I said, as if that weren’t apparent. “Those stairs behind my office have been there since the eighteen hundreds and nobody would think to fix them. Wait until some kid with a lawyer father falls down. Then they’ll get fixed.” I extended my left arm for Crawford’s examination. “Does my wrist look swollen to you?”

“A little,” he said. He took it in his hand and examined it carefully. “Probably sprained but doesn’t look broken.” He had me run through a series of agility exercises that included flexing my fingers, bending my wrist, and then putting my arm around my neck, which he admitted was just so he could get a better look at my boobs through the ripped dress. He kissed the tip of my nose. “The wrist goes nicely with the black eye.”

“Not. Funny.” I went through the back door, noticing that the screen had been replaced. I softened immediately. “Thanks, Crawford,” I said.

“Not a problem,” he said. He put my bag on the table and leaned against the counter. “Now, do you feel like going out or staying in? If we go out, we’ll have to go to a place that doesn’t have a ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service’ rule.”

“Out. Definitely out,” I said.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked.

“I’m fine. It was just the weekend, Crawford. I was just wigged out.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Let me get changed.” I started for the hall stairs. “If I find an Ace bandage, would you wrap this thing for me?” I asked, holding out my wrist. I went upstairs and took stock of the situation while sitting on the toilet lid. The dress was a goner, the wrap part having been torn from the waistline and getting ripped in the process, but my shin was surprisingly unharmed. My elbow was a little scraped but nothing I couldn’t live with. I rummaged around in the drawers of the vanity and came up with an Ace bandage because the wrist was clearly the most troublesome of all of the injuries.

I handed it to Crawford when I reentered the kitchen; I had put on a pair of jeans and a linen shirt and looked slightly more presentable. He had me sit at the table, wrapping my wrist tight and affixing the metal clip. “How’s that?” he asked.

“Better,” I said. My wrist was now immobile but felt better as a result. I hadn’t had time to ice it so I figured this was the next best thing.

We decided to go to a restaurant right on the river that was within walking distance of my house. Crawford asked the hostess for a table in the corner so that we were far away from the cluster of diners who were seated at the tables that ringed the restaurant and had the best view of the river. We saw each other so infrequently during the week that the river view wasn’t a lure but privacy was. After we sat down and each had a drink in front of us—me, my usual Ketel One martini with three olives, and him, a bottle of domestic beer—I told him about the missing angel.

“I loved that angel!” I said, stuffing an olive in my mouth. “You know it. It’s the one with the broken wing tip. That angel’s been through a lot but it’s always there and that makes me feel better when I drive onto campus.”

“Sounds like a troubled class already,” he said. He pulled a piece of bread from the basket and slathered it with butter. “Did I ever tell you about my first call as a rookie at the Fiftieth?”

“I don’t think so.”

He smiled at the memory. “I’m on the job maybe two hours when we get a call from the Avenue Cab Company …”

“Ahhh, I remember it well,” I said. The Avenue Cab Company—555-5551—was a favorite of St. Thomas students when I was there. It ferried us back and forth to Broadway where all the bars were. I spent many a night in the back of one of their cabs, smelling like beer and cigarettes. And best of all? No matter how drunk you were, you could always remember their number. Usually.

“… that they dropped a fare off at St. Thomas but that the cabbie had asked permission from the resident assistant on duty to use the bathroom and had gone inside. When he came back out, the cab was gone. Apparently, someone—and we never found out who that was—had stolen the cab and taken it for a joy ride. We found it down by the river, running, with all of the doors locked.” He took a big bite of bread. “Come to think of it, you were there then, right?”

“I guess I would have been. You’re on the job almost twenty, right?”

He nodded.

“Then I was there.” I took a sip of my martini.

“Do you remember hearing about that?”

I nodded. “It was all the talk for about a week or two.”

He dug into the bread basket and pulled out another roll. “It wasn’t you, right?” he said, his face serious.

I almost spat out my martini. “No! Why would you even ask that?”

He smiled. “I was just kidding. You? You were probably studying for a test that was two weeks away, or polishing the nuns’ silver.” He leaned in close. “I know you weren’t a bad girl.”

But I am now, I thought, but didn’t say it. “You’re right about that.” I speared another olive. “Straight as an arrow.”

He finished his bread. “It’s a good thing we never found out who did it. I don’t think that kid realized that they were in for a heap of trouble if they had been caught. Stealing a car is serious business.”

The waitress dropped our salads in front of us. “Well, I hope it didn’t give you a jaundiced eye toward all students at St. Thomas,” I said.

He pushed his salad around on his plate. “Nah. It seemed like the whole lot of you were just a bunch of immature, naïve girls. That’s why the cab getting stolen seemed so out of character for the type of girls we usually met from there.”

“You didn’t go trolling for girls on campus, now did you?”

“I was married. Remember?”

“Oh, right,” I said. I was trying to forget that, actually.

“And speaking of marriage …” he started.

“Yes?”

“Are we going to talk about it?”

“I’m having a tough week, Crawford,” I said, looking over his head at the river view beyond. Max is the only person who knows why August is the worst month for me; although I had alluded to it once with Crawford, I never did tell him just what a complete funk I go into at the thought of approaching both my mother’s birthday and the anniversary of her death. Fortunately, he’d been working a lot and hadn’t gotten the full force of my melancholy this month. I know—I love him and should share everything with him. I just feel like I’m a lot to handle and have a lot of baggage so I need to keep things to myself, especially when his job requires him to confront death on a daily basis.

If asked by one noted television psychologist, “How’s that working out for you?”, I would have to admit: not very well.

“You’re always having a tough week when we start to talk about this.” He exhaled, frustrated, but he let it go, just as he had the few other times it had come up. “You’re either too busy, or too tired, or changing the subject.” He laughed but it was a laugh devoid of humor. “I’m starting to get a complex.” It was clear that he was getting tired of trying to get a true, honest answer out of me, but he had been with me long enough that he knew that if he pushed too much, my reaction was unpredictable at best. His assumption, if I had to guess, was that my first marriage had left me with some deep wounds, and he would be right. But there was much more to the story and I really didn’t feel like getting into it now or ever.

The waitress came back to the table. “How’s everything here?” she asked.

“Wonderful,” I said. Not exactly saved by the bell, but close enough. Saved by—I squinted to read her name tag—Tameka. Thank you, dear Tameka. “Excellent, as a matter of fact. Where’s your restroom?” I asked, knowing that it was right by the front door. I figured the longer I kept her engaged in conversation, the more likely it would be that Crawford would start his salad and get distracted. Tameka gave me directions to the bathroom and I headed off, assuring Crawford I wouldn’t be long.

I was entering just as Lydia Wilmott was exiting. I was taken aback, not expecting to see her until the funeral, which I would eventually attend, but which had been put on hold until the coroner released the body, according to the local paper. She gave me the once-over, her eyes lingering on my wrapped wrist.

“Alison. Hello,” she said.

“Hi, Lydia. How are you?” I asked, giving her an awkward hug. We weren’t really friends, but we had shared an intimate experience, albeit indirectly, so I felt like a verbal greeting wasn’t enough. By her stiff response to my hug, I guessed I was wrong.

“I’m doing the best I can,” she said. “We have so many house guests that I decided that we should go out to dinner. Do something normal.” She fiddled with the diamond heart necklace around her throat. The size of the heart, coupled with the size of the diamonds in it, made me think it cost about the same as what I made in a year.

“That sounds like a good idea,” I said.

Her eyes went back to my wrist. “What happened?” she asked.

“This? Oh, I fell at school,” I said, rolling my eyes at my own stupidity. “The stairs behind my office are about a thousand years old, well, not really, but it seems that way, but they’re old, and they’re cracked, well, some of them are, and I was walking, running actually, and I fell, and ripped my dress—”