Extra Credit (32 page)

“Briggs, what did you do?”

Forty-One

He was still in his work clothes, a chef’s jacket and black-and-white-checkered pants, black professional cooking clogs on his feet. This, more than anything, more than the fact that we were leaving campus for parts unknown, more than the fact that he had thrown me in the back of the car as if I weighed no more than a large sack of potatoes, and more than the fact that he kept calling Mary Lou “Mom,” confused me. I looked at the scenery whizzing by, unable to tell what road we were on or where we were going. I remember seeing the river to the right of me at one point, leading me to believe that we were headed into the city, or maybe toward New Jersey.

Crawford was right: I sure did get kidnapped a lot. What was it now, five? Six? Eight? Who could remember?

My brain was fried, and I couldn’t tell if the words I were thinking were actually coming out of my mouth. The last thing I thought—“and I wanted to fix you up with my stepdaughter!”—must have left my lips because Briggs looked in the rearview mirror and gave me a little smile, responding with “I
am
a catch.” Sure he was, if I wanted Meaghan with a guy who looked like Ryan Gosling but acted like Ted Bundy.

I wasn’t sure how long we drove, the sound of Mary Lou’s impassioned pleas to him to not hurt me filtering into my head as we wended our way north, as it turns out. Although I thought the river was on my right, it was actually some other body of water, smaller but wider. I groaned when I saw that we were back at a place I hoped never to see again, the inexplicably named Turkey Mountain, the place where Sassy had taken Kevin and me. How had I ended up back here, who Briggs actually was, and why this was all happening were thoughts that were swirling around my addled brain.

He stopped the car just a few spaces away from where Sassy had stopped the car when we were here together. He turned and looked at me, and I saw that although he was handsome, he had mean eyes, the kind his smile never reached; the kind that looked like there was nothing behind them. “Ready to take a walk?” he asked.

I really wasn’t. I was ready to curl up on the backseat of the car and take a nice long nap. Despite Mary Lou’s protestations, though, he was insistent on getting me out of the car and into the wild, going so far as to grab my arm and drag me out onto the pavement, where gravel embedded itself into any exposed body parts. I was thankful that I had put on tights that morning but not that I had worn high heels.

Another day, another kidnapping, and another pair of inappropriate shoes. I stumbled along the gravel path that led to an entrance to the preserve and went to my knees as I failed to navigate the dip in the earth. Briggs pulled me up by the back of my coat and threw me forward. It took all my will and coordination not to fall again.

I couldn’t run and I couldn’t hide, as they say. I knew, because it was jutting out from the pocket of his chef’s coat and into my back, that Briggs had a gun, and he seemed just itching to shoot it. Anyway, where exactly would I go? Behind that big tree over there? Or the one right next to it? Too many choices and not enough brain cells.

I would have liked to see the look on Mary Lou’s face, just to get a sense of what she might be thinking, but taking my eyes off of my own feet for too long would result in another fall. If my screaming joints were any indication, another fall would push me into a whole different level of pain, one that I couldn’t withstand without crying, something that I wouldn’t do in front of this strange man.

We got to a little bridge and I decided that I had had enough. I turned to Mary Lou. I summoned up whatever brainpower I had left. “So are you in on this?” I asked. “Did you buy that tea in the cafeteria so that he could drug me and the two of you could get me up here to what? Kill me? Bury my body so that no one would find me until the spring thaw?”

She surprised me by starting to cry. Good Lord. I was the one in high heels being frog-marched through a nature preserve, probably to my death, and here she was bursting into tears. Great. “I’m so sorry, Professor Bergeron.”

Briggs gave me a little push. “Back off, Briggs,” I said. “If you’re going to kill me, I’d like to get some information first.” I was surprisingly calm and collected and actually a bit more clear-headed than I had been in the car. I wondered what he put in my tea and if, in smaller doses, it would just take the edge off a bit.

“If you had just told my aunt where the money was,” he said, exasperated, “we would have left you alone. Now, I have to do this,” he said, throwing his arms wide in reference to the great outdoors.

His aunt. Even with some kind of drug in my system, it was all starting to come together. Sassy. “Yes, it’s very inconvenient that you have to drive me to the middle of nowhere—”

“It’s actually Yorktown,” Mary Lou added helpfully.

“Okay … Yorktown … to kill me, but why? The public administrator has the money and will probably have it until the people in the Stepkowski family tire of asking about it or hire a lawyer to get it back. My money’s on the lawyer part because I think every single one of them is champing at the bit to get it.”

Briggs shrugged. “You were as good as anyone. You found his body. You’re married to his sister’s ex. You live in that shitty little house, so you’d probably want a piece of the pie even to get rid of that crappy siding. Seriously,” he said, “you need to step it up with the landscaping. Although it did provide good cover.”

How did I end up on a home improvement show all of a sudden? “If you’re going to kill me, please don’t insult me first,” I said. “That’s what’s called adding insult to injury.” Suddenly, or at least suddenly given the current condition of my brain, I realized what that comment about the landscaping meant. “You poisoned my dog,” I said, gasping.

“I didn’t poison it,” he said.

“Her.”

“Fine. Her. I just made her sleep for a while.”

“You nearly killed her,” I said. I thought about how I could get my hands around his ample neck and squeeze the life out of him. “Did you make Chick take all of those drugs, too?” I asked, making a logical leap, at least in my own head.

His confusion was masked a bit by his anger over my stalling. “That guy offed himself. Plain and simple.”

“Why would he do that?” I asked, because I still didn’t know.

“Guilty conscience?” he suggested. “Okay, enough. I hated that guy and I don’t want to talk about him anymore. Where’s the money?”

“For the last time,” I said, trying to sound as convincing as possible, “I do not know.”

He pulled the gun from his pocket. “I still don’t believe you.”

I looked at Mary Lou. “You’re not writing a novel, are you?”

She continued crying loudly. “Well, now that I’ve taken your class, I would really like to!”

Finally, a good evaluation. Too bad I’d be dead before I’d see it. I tried to take an analytical approach. “Listen, Briggs. I don’t have the money. I won’t get the money. If I had to take a guess, I’d say Christine will eventually get the money and, knowing her, will probably split it between her brothers and the girls.” And the trolls, maybe. “I will never see a dime of that cash, nor do I want to.”

“I still don’t believe you,” he said, taking the safety off the gun. “I think you know more than you’re letting on.”

“Why would that be?” I asked.

“Because Meaghan told me about the money he gave her. For her birthday,” he said. “I think there’s more where that came from.”

“Meaghan told you about the money she got for her birthday?” I asked. When this was over, I was putting her in time-out.

“She was going to buy new skis. And an iPad.” He laughed. “What that kid won’t tell you for a free chocolate chip cookie.”

So that’s what it took to get her to talk. I’d have to tell Crawford.

I backed up a little and got my heel stuck in the space between the two wooden slats on the bridge. I wiggled my heel back and forth to get it loose, but it was stuck in there good. “If you don’t believe me, then you’re not very smart,” I said, bending down to pull my shoe out of the slat. It was released with a resounding
thwack,
and as I held the shoe in my hand, I realized that what I had was a weapon. A beautiful, suede-covered weapon, but a weapon nonetheless. I handled the shoe, feeling the heft of it—my feet are big—and looking at the heel, a slender piece of wood covered with fabric that came to a tiny point at the end. I lifted my foot as if I were going put my shoe back on but grabbed Mary Lou around the throat, holding the point of the shoe against her carotid artery, now doing the salsa against my palm. Doing so required focus that I didn’t have and strength that seemed to have left me but that I was able to summon in one last-ditch effort to save myself. When all was said and done, I was going to need a very long nap.

“So I have an idea who you are, but I’m not entirely sure,” I said to Briggs, wondering if he had given me some kind of truth serum. Suddenly, I just wanted to tell the truth. “I don’t know who this woman is exactly either,” I said, digging the heel into Mary Lou’s throat, “or what connection you have to her or to me or the Stepkowskis, but if you don’t throw that gun as far as you can, and you look pretty strong, so I’m guessing you can throw it pretty far, I will plunge the heel of this shoe into her throat.” This last part was almost a growl, and mostly true. “I don’t have the money. For the last time.”

A voice, female and small, came from inside the preserve. “But I do.”

Forty-Two

“Hello, Sissy.” A small figure, but one that I recognized, came out of the woods, a miner’s hat strapped to her head, the light blinding me momentarily. “Alison, you can put the shoe down,” Christine said, standing at the other end of the slat bridge. “They’re not going to hurt you.” Next to her were three giant duffel bags, one stacked on top of the other, almost as tall as she was. “I hope big bills are acceptable,” she said. “It was easier to carry that way.”

I took my arm from around Mary Lou’s neck but kept the shoe handy. I knew it wasn’t any protection against a gun, but seeing Christine had made me let down my guard. I hoped it wasn’t to my own detriment. Mary Lou staggered off, coughing and choking, still crying; the hold I had around her throat had been pretty tight, judging from the way she was rubbing at her neck.

Briggs asked Christine if she had come alone.

“Just like you asked,” she said. She pointed toward the parking lot. “Do you see any other cars there?”

I hadn’t even seen hers, so I wouldn’t know if there were more than just the car we had arrived in.

“No, really, Alison,” Christine said. “You can put your shoe back on.”

“What the hell is going on?” I asked, donning my beautiful pump, the one that I was thankful I hadn’t had to plunge into Mary Lou’s neck. I would have ruined a perfectly good shoe and ended my day on a particularly sour note, and neither of those things appealed to me.

“Why did you bring her?” Christine asked. “I thought we had a deal.”

“Insurance policy,” Briggs said. “Just in case you had changed your mind.”

Christine took a closer step, leaving the bags behind her. They looked like they weighed more than she did, and I wondered how she got them this deep into the woods. Even though we could still see the parking lot, it was a pretty long way to drag what looked like really heavy duffels. “Do you want to tell them or should I?” In her sneakers, puffy down coat, and miner’s hat, she looked like a kid playing war in the woods rather than the mother of two and stepmother of four.

I looked at Mary Lou and then Briggs, who had returned the gun to his pocket. “Please. Someone. Anyone,” I said. “The suspense is killing me.”

No one spoke for a minute, and then Christine explained. “Alison, this is Sissy, Sassy’s sister.”

“Say that three times fast,” I said.

“Briggs is my son,” Sissy/Mary Lou said.

“Of course he is,” I said. It didn’t really matter. “Can I go?” I asked, knowing that I could return to Brianna MacGyver’s house, break up another party, and use the phone. “I honestly don’t care who anyone is or what they have to do with this. I’m just really, really tired.” Suddenly, exhaustion took complete hold of me and I sat down on the bridge. “What did you put in my tea, anyway?” I asked. “I’m exhausted but in a good way.”

“Ativan,” Briggs said. “It’s an antianxiety drug.”

“Ah, that explains it,” I said, curling up in a ball on the slats. “I should be more anxious given that you were going to kill me, but I couldn’t care less.” I got comfortable on the bridge. They could continue their conversation as long as they wanted; I was taking a nap.

“You’ll have to come and get the money,” Christine said, knowing now that I didn’t care what the story was or what anyone had to do with anything. “I can’t lug these bags again. They’re too heavy.”

“It’s all of it?” Briggs asked. “The whole two hundred and fifty thousand?”

“All here,” she said.

“Where did you get it?” he asked. “I thought it was with the government or something.”

“I married well,” Christine said, and I could hear the smile in her voice.

“You married a guy who could come up with that kind of money quickly?” Briggs asked.

“I did,” Christine said. “Fortunately, he’s a really nice guy, too.” I could hear her moving on the bridge, her feet coming to rest beside my face. “He gave me the money to give you so that you would leave us alone,” she said.

I wasn’t so sure about that. Old Tim didn’t have a job anymore.

“Once the public administrator released it, we would have our money back,” she said.

Made a certain amount of sense, but Briggs wasn’t buying it.

“Chick stole that money. From my father. There’s no way the public administrator will ever give it back,” he said.

Christine had an answer for that, too. “Whatever happens, we’re even. And I can rest easy, knowing that the money that you think my brother stole is now back with you. Where it belongs.” She took another step forward. “Go get the money. I kept up my end of the bargain, and now you have what you want.”

Mary Lou was still weeping somewhere in the vicinity.