Extra Credit (16 page)

I kicked Crawford again. “Don’t speak” was the message I was sending. This woman was already on the verge of a nervous breakdown; the thought of her dead brother having something to do with this might send her over the edge. To find out that he might have been involved in something untoward would break her in two.

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice cracking a bit, a telltale sign for me that he was lying. I wondered if she had picked up on that little character flaw when they had been married.

Nature called, and while it couldn’t have been a worse time to exit, what with Crawford now playing the lying game, I had to go. “A restroom?” I asked.

Christine pointed toward the front stairs. “Go upstairs. The powder room is a bit of a mess. If I find out who stuffed a Power Ranger down the toilet, there will be hell to pay,” she said, something I found hilarious even if she didn’t. I stifled a chuckle as I exited the kitchen.

I headed upstairs, thrilled that I would have a chance to survey the second floor of this incredible home. The wide-planked floor was a shimmering, dull gold under my feet, and I was grateful that I had changed into my rubber-soled clogs so they didn’t make much of a sound as I traversed the hardwoods in search of the bathroom. I stayed on my tiptoes, keeping the squeak as rubber hit wood to a minimum. The bathroom was adjacent to what seemed to be a bedroom, but a quick look through the crack in the door revealed that it was an office. Tim was sitting in a high-backed leather chair, facing away from the door and looking out to the backyard, pitch black save for a spotlight shining on the pool. The office was all dark wood and gleaming brass, a giant laptop sitting open on the desk.

“I think the money is ours,” he said, and not that quietly.

I couldn’t help myself. I stopped a few inches past the barely open door.

“Crawford and his new wife are here.” He paused, listening to what the person on the other end was saying. “She’s a bit of a busybody, from what I gather. Gets involved in other people’s business far too often. But Christine seems to have taken a real shine to her.” He paused while listening. “I guess. She seems fine. Just always poking around.”

Like now. The harrumph that was building in my chest stayed lodged there because I knew that what he said was true.

“As big a stiff as ever,” he said, and I bristled. Crawford. Couldn’t be anyone else. Everyone in Christine’s family was the opposite of “stiff.” For the life of me, I couldn’t think of an adjective that would adequately describe them. I also wanted to tell Tim that if you looked up “stiff” in the dictionary, a picture of his tense, unsmiling face was right beside it.

“It’s with the public administrator. As soon as that is settled, it should be ours. Sit tight.” I heard the squeal of the chair’s springs as he turned around to face the door. I hustled toward the bathroom, which I found without trouble, and I locked myself inside.

I turned toward the toilet and was confronted by a little child who looked suspiciously like a troll. I did the only thing that someone in that situation could do. I screamed.

The child’s face melted slowly into a mask of tragedy and horror, a shriek trapped at the back of her own throat waiting to be expelled. I held my breath. “Shhhh … shhhh … shhhh!” I said, thinking that I would put my hand over her mouth before she could let the noise out, thought better of it, and put my hands over my own mouth, pantomiming silence.

It was all for naught. The scream came out in one stunning and mighty roar, at a pitch that I was sure most humans, besides myself, couldn’t hear. I was wrong. Tim emerged from his office, banging on the bathroom door, probably thinking that an intruder was still in the house. I opened the door, the sounds of little—what was her name, anyway?—whatever-her-name-was obliterating any explanation I could give the husband of my husband’s ex-wife. He raced past me and scooped her up, covering her head with kisses while she screamed into his ear about the lady who scared her.

Seriously? I scared you?
I wanted to ask. Try looking into the face of a troll when your bladder’s protesting. That will scare the life out of you; I guarantee it. I did a quick inventory. A mental excursion to my nether regions confirmed that no, I had not wet my pants.

Tim finally exited with the aforementioned troll, and I took care of business. She was still outside wailing in the hallway when I emerged, and I tried to look concerned, but really, her reaction was way over the top. I gave her a look that said that we were never going to be friends and started for the stairs. I returned to the first floor, where Christine must have missed the trauma of her troll/child, because she was deep in conversation with Crawford, a.k.a. “the stiff.”

Takes one to know one, Tim.

He didn’t look too stiff at the moment. Au contraire, he and Christine were laughing and joking, and she didn’t look traumatized at all, considering her house had been broken into and her downstairs powder room was out of service for the time being.

“Sorry for scaring the … little one,” I said.

“Oh, that,” Christine said. “I heard her crying. Tim was up there, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“She sleepwalks. It’s crazy. We run into her at all hours of the night. It’s like seeing one of those undead kids in
The Shining
.” She laughed.

That was an apt description, come to think of it.

Christine stood. “Thanks so much for coming. I know it’s been weird since the girls’ birthday. I promise not to bother you anymore.”

“Really?” I asked. It wasn’t until Crawford threw me a look that I realized I had said it out loud.

She must have thought I was kidding, because she didn’t seem upset at all. “Really. Thanks. You two have been amazing.”

“That’s us,” I said. “The amazing duo.”

She showed us out, and I could barely wait until the doors were closed to tell Crawford what I had heard. Well, everything except the part about him being a stiff. He didn’t need to hear that. He kind of already knew it.

“Did you hear that before or after you scared the living daylights out of the kid?” he asked. “It sounded as if she were being stabbed to death.”

“Christine didn’t seem too concerned,” I said.

“She knew Tim was up there. They prefer him anyway,” he said. “Even after all this time, they still don’t consider Christine their mother, and she’s still adapting to raising someone else’s children.”

I let that sink in. I hadn’t had the luxury of “adapting”; shortly after our marriage, Christine had taken off for London with Tim, leaving me with Meaghan and Erin and everything that came with being their stepmother. “So she doesn’t care that the kid was screaming bloody murder?”

He didn’t respond.

“I’m not criticizing her—”

He cut me off. “Yes, you are.”

Well, if I was? What did that mean? I decided to change the subject, because if I knew anything, it was when a fight was brewing, just waiting to break out. “It sounds to me like Tim is banking on getting Chick’s money,” I said.

Crawford took a minute to decide whether or not he wanted to respond. “They probably will. Christine is the sole beneficiary in Chick’s will.”

“How did you find that out?”

“She told me,” he said, merging into the right lane on 95. Slowly, he moved over to the left lane. Crawford is a left-laner all the way; years of driving a police car at top speeds had conditioned him to speed even when there was no need.

“Did Tim know that?”

“How could he not?” he asked. “They’re married.”

I didn’t say anything, my mind working out the details of that little admission.

He put a hand up in my direction. “Stop. Right now. I know what you’re thinking.”

“And what’s that?”

“That he was murdered. That Tim had something to do with it. That Christine may have been right all along.”

Maybe. But not in that order. I think I may have come to the conclusion that Christine may have been right all along first.

He continued, perturbed. “Chick was crazy. Always was, ever since the day I met him. Who knows where he got the money? Who cares?”

“Are Christine and Tim having money problems?” I asked, first out of curiosity and then because I wanted to know exactly how much my husband’s ex-wife had been telling him about her personal life.

His answer made me happy. “How would I know?” He passed a slower-moving car on the right and returned to the left lane. “All I know is that I think it’s weird that there were two break-ins at two separate but related locations, and that nothing was taken.” He looked over at me. “Yes, I think it’s weird,” he admitted, which he hadn’t done prior to this moment.

At least we agreed on something.

Twenty-One

Why it had never occurred to me before I don’t know—maybe because I hadn’t cared?—but I threw the name Jaroslav Stepkowski into the search engine on my school computer and waited to see what I might find out about our dearly departed Chick. Up until now, I hadn’t really cared to investigate Chick’s backstory, but with the situation becoming less clear and the details of his death becoming more suspect—in my mind and Christine’s, anyway—I thought that doing a little background check, the kind that an average citizen like myself could do with a computer and a little spare time, would be in order.

Tim’s overheard conversation led my mind in several different directions: Ponzi scheme, bankruptcy, maxed-out credit cards. Why else would he want or need the money so badly? Was he playing it fast and loose at work with clients’ money and so needed to hedge his bets, so to speak? Or did he just want to buy a new speedboat or something equally ridiculous, in the throes of a midlife crisis? Pondering all of this and coming up empty, I turned my attention back to my search on Chick.

Searching yielded little in terms of information. Chick’s wedding announcement from years before had been in the
Times
. Fancy. I noted that he had gotten married on exactly the same day in exactly the same year that I had married my ex. (We were not in the
Times,
but we were in the local paper and in my parents’ church’s bulletin. That’s as fancy as we got.) Chick’s ex-wife was a blowzy-looking blonde in a really tight strapless wedding gown that managed to make her look both slutty and gone-to-seed. Chick was slimmer than when I had met him and had a full head of black hair that he had styled in a modified mullet.

How they had ended up in the
Times
was beyond me until I noticed that his frowzy bride, the aptly named Sassy Du Pris (which I suspected was a stage name; the type of stage I could only venture a guess at), came from a wealthy, albeit louche, family from the South who had made their fortunes in porta-potties. It was all right there in black and white, but not in so many words. Farther down in the article, Chick was identified as having been the director of marketing for Sans-a-Flush. Why Mrs. Stepkowski, née Du Pris, needed to be onstage was something I would have to figure out later, but that gal had “stripper” written all over her, from her tacky weave down to her Lucite-heeled wedding shoes.

The thing that caught my eye was her hair, a mountain of blond spun sugar, piled high atop her head and slung over her right shoulder in a modified Martha Washington kind of ’do that doesn’t look good on too many people, Sassy included. I flashed back to Chick’s funeral and the woman standing by the archangel gravestone, studying her manicure. Had Sassy Du Pris, long out of the picture, made a brief appearance at Chick’s burial? If so, why hadn’t she made herself known? More importantly, did I really care to find out?

I decided that rather than ruminate on the boring subject of Chick’s ex-wife visiting the cemetery where he was laid to rest, I would find out more about the bride’s family’s company. Who doesn’t want to learn everything they possibly could about porta-potties? I went to the company Web site, which boasted, “You’ll feel like a king when you sit on our throne!” I wondered if Chick had come up with that witticism. What a wordsmith.

After the wedding announcement, there was nothing of note in the search engine. Just your basic annual report links and details of the company’s win in an intercompany softball league. Apparently, Chick could throw some heat and had led Sans-a-Flush to the regional championship. Before I could go any further, there was a knock at the door, and Meaghan stuck her head in.

“Hi. Do you have a minute?” she asked.

I pushed away from the computer. “Sure. Come on in.” I didn’t know what this was going to be about, but I hoped we could clear the air. She looked a little sheepish and not at all agitated, and I took that as a good sign.

She sat down, her backpack hanging down between her long legs. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For getting so mad at you,” she said.

“It’s okay, Meg,” I said. “I hope I didn’t upset you. I just don’t want you to be in a position of having to explain yourself to the university judiciary if something comes up.”

She hemmed and hawed for a minute before blurting out the truth. “He did give me a test. As a sample.” Her cheeks turned red. “But you have to believe me. I had no idea. I didn’t ask him to do it.”

I let that sink in. “Okay.” I thought about the next question and how I really didn’t want to hear the answer. “How close was it to the test you took?”

That’s when she started crying. “It was identical.”

Oh, boy. The face of cranky Joanne Larkin swam in front of me, the same Joanne Larkin who had chastised me for subscribing to a fake Listserv where fake professors gave the identical fake exams every semester. Was she cutting corners and just not brave enough to admit it? I had certainly been guilty of a few corner-cutting measures myself, like not having homework or papers due on Friday or giving a multiple-choice test when an essay or short answer test would have better. It wasn’t often, but it had happened, and the secret code among professors is that we don’t judge one another when one of our minor cheats comes to light. I realized that I was hashing all of this out in my brain while staring at Meaghan, who was still stricken at the thought of her malfeasance.