Extra Credit (35 page)

“He stole our money. Bob’s money. It wasn’t fair,” she said. “We’d been looking for him for years. When we found out he was back, through Sassy, we just had to find a way to get the money back.”

“Did you kill him?” I asked, thinking of Christine’s fervent conviction that he had been murdered.

“No,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “We would never do that. Do you understand why we wanted the money so badly? It was ours,” she said. “That company was our future. Our family. When Chick took that money, it left us with nothing. My father was crushed. Everything we had was flushed away.”

That was a good way to put it.

“And what about Sassy, Mary Lou? Why did she kill herself?”

Her face crumbled. “I don’t think I’ll ever know. To be with Chick, maybe?”

“Fine. It was yours. But you dragged so many people into this mess than were necessary.” In the distance, I heard sirens. “The jig is up, Mary Lou. They’re coming for you. Again.”

A voice came from behind her, the accent definitely Polish, the tone definitely harsh. “Don’t move a muscle, lady.”

I peered out around Mary Lou and saw Sister Anna Catherine—Sister Perpetua beside her—holding a giant dagger aloft. I recognized it as the one the Theatre Department used in last semester’s production of
Hamlet
. She was little but powerfully built, and hoisting the dagger didn’t seem to give her as much trouble as holding a large volume of Russian literature aloft had given me. Perpetua looked like she would really enjoy smashing someone over the head with the giant rolling pin in her right hand, the one that she was slapping menacingly into the palm of her left.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Perpetua used a softer tone. “We’re going to have to ask you to leave, dear. Professor Bergeron really shouldn’t be in your presence.”

It was really the other way around—Mary Lou needed to stay away from me—but who was I to quibble with weapon-wielding nuns? It was nice to know they had my back. Here all along I thought it was a dead nun protecting me. Seemed I had a whole army of Jesus’s brides on my side.

The sirens got closer, but Mary Lou’s visage never changed; she was as unconcerned as one could be by the impending arrival of law enforcement. “Will you accept my apology?” she asked finally.

“No!” I said. “No, I will not accept your apology. I will not ever be friends with you again. I don’t want your lousy sandwiches or your scones.” The last part was a total lie. I would always want her sandwiches and her scones, but as our relationship had moved to a different plane, having any just didn’t seem like it was a realistic expectation anymore. Her face fell. “Just leave me alone. Go away.”

Sister Anna Catherine brought the dagger down with a loud clang, scaring all of us. “I’m going to ask you one more time. Leave.”

Mary Lou’s face crumbled. “I’m going,” she said. “I never meant to bring you into this. I just wanted to find out what you knew about where the money might have been.”

“Why, Mary Lou?” I asked. “Why did you want the money so badly?”

“Because we’re bankrupt. We have nothing.”

“Sell one of the Chanel bags,” I said. “That’ll net you a mortgage payment.” I set the book down. “This is not my problem.” I stepped back toward the window, keeping Anna Catherine in my sights. She was strong, but how good was her aim?

“That money would have saved all of us,” she said. “Me. Sassy. Briggs. It was ours, and he took it.”

“Why me?” I asked.

“You were close enough to the family to know something even if you didn’t know a lot. I wanted to get close to you to find out what you knew.”

I had invested time and emotion into Mary Lou, buying the line of crap she was selling, and now felt betrayed—and angry. “You used me. You almost got me killed.” I took a deep breath. “Oh, and by the way? Your story stinks.”

I don’t know what part of that made her cry the loudest, but she let out a huge, gasping sob, a sound that made it seem like I had stabbed her through the heart. Figuratively, I guess I had and for that, I felt kind of bad. I had to remind myself of what had transpired so that I didn’t completely forgive her or God forbid, apologize for my rudeness.

I looked outside and saw Crawford, a guy not known for his speed, hurtling down the back steps, Fred on his heels. “There’s my husband. You’d better go.”

It was too late, though. Mary Lou dithered just a few seconds too long and was soon being given a stern talking-to by Fred as well as a recitation of her Miranda rights. Crawford, on the other hand, was mesmerized by a little nun brandishing a dagger. He had his gun trained on Mary Lou while Fred cuffed her, but his eyes uncharacteristically strayed toward Sister Anna Catherine.

“Please put the knife down, Sister,” he said.

“It’s a dagger, Detective,” she said, still holding on tight with both hands.

Sister Perpetua let out a little giggle. “Hello, Detective Crawford.”

“Hello, Sister,” he said to Perpetua while retraining his eyes on Mary Lou, someone who I think was less of a threat than Anna Catherine. “Sister, please put down the dagger.”

She let it clatter dramatically to the floor. “‘O happy dagger!’” she exclaimed.

Perpetua offered a little tsk-tsk. “That’s from
Romeo and Juliet,
Sister.”

“I know,” Sister Anna Catherine said testily. “It was the most fitting response, however, to Detective Crawford’s request.”

Fred, too, was transfixed by two tiny nuns holding what they considered deadly weapons. He pulled Mary Lou up by the cuffed hands finally and started to march her out of the office area. Thankfully, it was late in the day, so the number of rubbernecking professors was smaller than usual, and Mary Lou was perp-walked out of the St. Thomas Humanities Department with only a few openmouthed stares to follow her. Sisters Anna Catherine and Perpetua drifted off to their offices; I called out a hearty “Thank you!” to them before they each closed their doors.

Crawford came into my office. “Are you alright?”

“Fine,” I said. “Just exasperated. Will this ever be over?”

“Well, now that she’s blown the order of protection, she may do some time.” He turned and looked out into the office area. “I thought that little Russian nun was going to cut her.”

“She’s Polish.” I jammed a bunch of papers into my messenger bag. “And she teaches in the Nursing Department, so she could probably cut her and not leave any evidence.”

He considered that intently, then returned to one of his favorite topics. “You hungry?” he asked.

“You hungry?” I echoed. “That’s what you have to say after all of this?”

He smiled sheepishly.

“You’re finished working?” I asked.

“I was until I got your SOS text. Fred will process Mata Hari over there,” he said, pointing out the window, where I spied Fred pushing Mary Lou’s head down as he stuffed her into the back of a squad car, “so we are free to go. What are you in the mood for?”

I thought that over for a minute. “A hot shower followed by a vacation to a remote island, one where none of your extended ex-family resides or visits.”

“I don’t think I can arrange that right this minute.”

I rested my head on a stack of papers and collected my thoughts. I could feel his eyes on me. “You’re still hungry, right?”

“Starving.”

“Meet you at the Chinese place?”

“Sounds like a plan,” he said.

Beyond my office, I spied Joanne Larkin by the Xerox machine and realized, with everything that had gone on, that we hadn’t really resolved our conflict. I didn’t want Meaghan to have a grade tainted by the suspicion of cheating, nor did I want to be blackmailed by Joanne into keeping my silence. After Crawford left, I went on the Web site for the publisher that distributed the textbook Joanne used, created a fake password and ID, and downloaded what the publisher considered a reasonable multiple choice test to be given midway through a term. I don’t know why it hadn’t dawned on me sooner or why I had been so passive, but it hadn’t and I had.

Now the jig was up and Joanne was going to do things my way.

I approached her, noticing a bottle of Wite-Out resting on one side of the Xerox machine; pages of what looked like a previously mimeographed test were flowing through the giant copier. While she waited, she mulled over a pull in the sleeve of her sweater, this one festooned with an image of Garfield.

“Hi, Joanne,” I said.

“Alison,” she said, a sneer developing on her lips.

I leaned in close. The events of the last several weeks had worn me out, and I felt like I had nothing to lose. “So here’s how we’re going to play it,” I said, handing her the test. “You’re going to let Meaghan take this test and give her a grade that befits her performance. You’re going to tear up the previous test. We will never speak of it again. And you will never threaten me or my stepdaughter again or there will be hell to pay,” I said.

“What if I don’t?” she asked.

I opened the top of the copier and pulled out the page she was copying, a test that had seen better days and that had been created, obviously, before the Internet had been invented. The type was blue and from an old-fashioned typewriter, not a fancy font from one of the several hundred Macs that were on campus and that most of us used to create our tests and reports. I folded the page in quarters and slipped it into my skirt pocket. “Then I have this, and it will find its way to the dean of your department.”

“There are no rules against reusing tests,” she protested.

“There are when they find their way into the hands of former students who sell them to current students,” I said. Her eyes were growing wide. “That’s right, Joanne. Your tests are being sold. I wanted to keep this from you, seeing if we could reach some kind of agreement on Meaghan’s situation, but you wouldn’t have it. So now you know.” I had kept it from her because she had been so unreasonable and not knowing what she might do to my stepdaughter, had stupidly kept my mouth shut. That time was gone now and she knew it.

She took the tests out of the copier and threw them into the recycling bin by Dottie’s desk. “I had no idea.”

“Well, now you do,” I said, waiting for an apology that never came.

“Please excuse me. I have some work to do,” she said, scurrying off.

*   *   *

Meaghan got a C
−
on the retaken midterm and a C
+
for the term, and never had I felt so proud of any grade she had received. Alex broke up with her after the term was over, saying that her stepmother seemed crazy and it would never work between them. Meaghan took a vow of celibacy and devoted herself to her academics and basketball, becoming the high scorer for the season for the St. Thomas Blue Jays.

“See what you can do when your put your mind to something?” I had asked, bearing her withering glance with ease, now that I had some experience with the care and feeding of teenaged daughters. She knew she owed me, and that was something that I would keep in the back of my mind until it was absolutely necessary. The time would come when she would have to pay the piper, so to speak, and hopefully, that would keep her on her toes, just where I wanted her.

Forty-Five

Martina Alison Rayfield-Wyatt was born on a cloudless spring day, the color of her eyes matching the sky above. I was there for the birth, something, in hindsight, I should have taken a pass on. When I’ve seen births take place in movies, the mother is screaming or moaning or threatening everyone around her. Martina’s birth was soundless, with just a wild-eyed Max looking at everyone encouraging her to “push!” with such deadly intensity that it was beyond frightening. It didn’t help that I kept asking Max at inopportune moments how much it hurt, just to get a handle on whether it was as bad as it looked. It hurt pretty bad, judging from the hold she had on my fingers. Then there was the blood … and the other stuff. I hit the ground when a giant mass resembling a platypus burst forth to great fanfare in the delivery room, the word “placenta” being bandied about. That was all I needed to hear. Here I thought that once you had the baby, it was all over. You put on your silk bed jacket, ordered room service, and accepted visitors. Your husband handed out cigars in the waiting room. Before long you got up, put on your makeup, and went home. I didn’t realize that what came next made some of the dead bodies I’ve seen look positively sterile. When I came to, it was all over—for real this time—and Max was holding what looked like a football with eyes and ears. A beautiful, perfect football that had grabbed hold of her finger and wasn’t letting go.

Fred was uncharacteristically chatty. “That’s my girl!” he said, bending over to get a look at a baby who had his perfectly round head and Max’s bow lips. It was hard to tell how much she had gotten, genetically, from her Samoan African American father and Irish American mother, but time would tell. I said a silent prayer that she wouldn’t grow up to be a six-and-a-half-footer with a bad attitude, just like her dad.

Crawford was in the waiting room when I came out. I gave him two thumbs up. “It’s a girl,” I said, “and she looks just like you. What’s up with that?”

“Very funny,” he said, giving me his fake smile. “How’s Max?”

“Cranky.”

“So how is that different from any other day?”

“I’m going to give her a pass,” I said. “She just passed a watermelon through her hoo-hah. We’re going to cut her some slack.” I sat down on one of the vinyl couches in the waiting room. “You didn’t tell me it looked like a scene from
Apocalypse Now
when you had a baby.”

“Yes, I may have left that out.” He pulled me close, kissing my head. “You hungry?”

“Is the pope Catholic?”

“Last time I checked.” I was starving. Seeing a live birth had taken a lot out of me. “Tim’s Fancy Sandwich Shoppe?” I asked.

“That’s not what it’s called,” he said.

“Yes, but it’s what I like to call it,” I said. Tim’s midlife crisis had turned out surprisingly well. His sandwich shop—the Earl of Sandwich—had opened in Greenwich and had become a bit of a hot spot with the locals, so much so that he was thinking of opening another location in another part of town. Yes, he had quit his job and not told his wife, but his newfound fame and success as the Earl had put him back in her good graces, and things seemed to be better again. Seemed that old Tim had done quite well in the hedge fund business so even if the shop hadn’t done well, they were set for life. He had a silent partner as back up, too; the guy had been on the phone with him the night I had overheard his conversation about the money. I was really in the wrong business. I had a soft spot for his eggplant rollatini wedge, and the minute Crawford mentioned sandwiches, my mouth began to water. “I should really call Kevin before we go,” I said.