The Jinx (22 page)

“R
achel?”

I looked up in relief, glad to hear Hilary's familiar voice.

Grant was curled into a fetal position, moaning, so his face wasn't visible, but she assessed the situation quickly. “Crocker?” she asked.

I nodded.

“You kicked him in the balls?”

I nodded again.

“Excellent. I've always wanted to do that to a guy.”

“I know. Me, too. And I have to admit there was something sort of gratifying about it.”

“I bet. I'm sorry I missed it.”

“If he ever recovers, I might need some help restraining him until reinforcements arrive.”

“Shall I call the police again?” asked Hilary.

“No, I'll go,” I volunteered. “But keep an eye on Crocker. I don't want him to get away.”

“Sure thing. Worst case, I'll just give him another little kick.” Judging from her enthusiastic tone, she seemed almost hopeful that such measures would be required.

 

Alas, Grant remained in his fetal position until security arrived. O'Connell showed up soon after with a fleet of additional police officers. He made fast work of reading Grant his rights before instructing his team to take him into custody. Perhaps the most surprising turn of events, however, was that when Hilary invited O'Connell to join us for dinner, he agreed to come. “I'm going to need to spend some time at the station,” he said, “but I'll swing by as soon as I'm done.”

Hilary and I were at Jane's a little before eight, still buoyant from our crime-fighting coup. Sean and Matthew had retreated again to the basement to work on Baby Hallard's cradle, but the rest of us sat around the kitchen island, watching Jane cook. She'd rebuffed everyone's offer of help except Emma's, which was fine with me. I filled my friends in on my encounter with Beasley, leaving out the more embarrassing parts, and told them the story Gabrielle had told us. Hilary took over from there, recounting our adventures in Widener with great relish.

“And then,” she concluded, “Rachel kicked Grant Crocker in the balls.”

Jane gasped. “You didn't.”

I blushed. “I did.”

“Hard?” asked Emma.

“Really hard.”

“He was practically unconscious when I got there,” Hilary added.

“Was it cathartic?” Luisa asked.

I paused in order to give her question the consideration it deserved. “Absolutely,” I said.

And that made everybody laugh.

 

I'd checked my Blackberry for messages on the way to Jane's, realizing as I did so that I was deluding myself if I was holding out any hope for a word from Peter. But it still hadn't helped to have my lowered expectations confirmed by the absence of any voice mail or e-mail from him. Think about Jonathan, I told myself. I'd learned long ago that the best cure for any failed relationship was to embark on a new one. Although the cure was becoming less effective as I grew older. Experience was teaching me all too well that the new relationship would eventually become an old one, with all of its assorted baggage and heartache. Give it one more chance, I lectured myself. And if Jonathan proved himself unworthy, then I could give it all up. I felt a fleeting moment of the euphoria I'd experienced earlier that day when I had resolved to do just that. See, I reminded myself, I did have options. If Jonathan ended up being a dud, I could pursue the idiosyncratic spinster path and have red wine and microwave popcorn for dinner whenever I wanted.

It was probably a good thing that I'd had this little mental conversation with myself before Jonathan arrived, because it prepared me for what was to come.

* * * * *

Meeting my old roommates was, for a potential love interest, an important test. Their reads on the various men in my life had had an unerring accuracy, and I'd learned the hard way to take their opinions seriously, sooner rather than later. I was glad that we were going to be running Jonathan through their gauntlet before anything serious had even taken place between us. I had little confidence left in my own judgment, and it would be a relief to put the matter into their capable hands. On some level, I was worried that my interest in Jonathan had more to do with wanting a Plan B than with Jonathan himself. And while my ego enjoyed ticking off items that could be construed as evidence of his interest in me, I kept coming back to the strange way he paused, right before each time he tried to kiss me. As if his heart wasn't quite in it and he needed to gear himself up.

He started off strong. After all, he was absolutely gorgeous. He apologized profusely for his late arrival, even though we all knew that he had a good reason to be late, and he'd brought an excellent bottle of California red. Luisa, who was the only one of us who had an eye for such things, was impressed by his choice, which was a positive sign.

But it was all downhill from there. Perhaps he felt intimidated, but everyone was on his or her best behavior, even Hilary, and welcomed him warmly. Still, it was only in the presence of my friends that I started to notice what his looks and attentiveness had blinded me to before. There was only one way to say it, really. And Hilary, being Hilary, said it, although she waited until she was safely out of Jonathan's hearing, which showed remarkable restraint for her.

“I've got some bad news for you, Rach,” she said. The two of us had gone out onto the porch to keep Luisa company while she had a cigarette between dinner and dessert.

“What's that?”

“Hilary,” said Luisa in a warning tone. “Be nice. Rachel's having a really bad day.”

“Damn but he's dull. Come on, Luisa. You have to admit it.”

“I was going to say bland,” Luisa confessed. “And I was going to work up to it a lot more gently.”

“Immature, too,” Hilary continued. “That entire faux-threatening you in the Coop was sort of puerile. But he thought it was really funny. He kept talking about it.”

“I was thinking insecure,” said Luisa.

“Boorish,” added Hilary.

I had to admit, Jonathan had been less than impressive at dinner. He'd talked at great length, and although I knew Hilary resented anybody else monopolizing the conversation, you knew you were in trouble when you found yourself wishing that she'd been doing the monopolizing. All of the embarrassing parts that I'd left out in my narrative to my friends had been included in Beasley's own narrative. And there'd been an incredibly awkward moment when Jonathan had made a reference to a poem by T. S. Eliot. Only, the poem wasn't by T. S. Eliot, it was by W. H. Auden. I'd done a double major in English and economics, and I recognized the gaffe. Jane had majored in applied mathematics, but she'd taken the same Twentieth Century Poetry course that I had, although it had been an elective for her. Still, she saw the error as well, and the teacher in her was unable to let it go uncorrected. So she corrected him, in a kind but firm way. And instead of admitting his mistake, Jonathan had insisted he was right. Fortunately, Emma had jumped in and changed the subject, but the damage had been done.

“Dull, immature and boorish,” I said sadly.

“But look on the bright side, Rach. He is really great-looking,” said Hilary. “You can always just use him for sex. Speaking of which, look who's here.” She gestured toward the kitchen window. O'Connell had arrived. “Just in time for dessert. Let's go back inside.”

 

O'Connell couldn't tell us everything, of course, but he did seem to be confident that Grant Crocker was the serial killer. Apparently, Grant had been ready to talk, and he'd confessed to the prostitute killings. O'Connell related the facts he could share, and he seemed more relaxed than I'd seen him before. Clearly, having solved a major case had taken a significant weight off his shoulders. He also seemed appreciative of Hilary's various charms, and she was giving him every possible opportunity to appreciate them. “You must feel great,” she said, a chocolate-covered strawberry poised strategically next to her full red lips. “You've caught the killer and solved the attacks on Sara Grenthaler in one fell swoop.” Then she took a bite of the strawberry and ran her tongue over her upper lip. Next to me Emma stifled a snort with a cough.

“Actually,” said O'Connell, “I'm not so sure we've solved the Grenthaler attacks.”

“Really?” Jonathan asked in surprise. He'd been relatively quiet since O'Connell had arrived, which was one small blessing.

“Really?” I echoed.

“He confessed to the murders, but he protested his innocence pretty vehemently when we asked him about Sara,” O'Connell explained. “The guy seems to be genuinely in love.”

“But what about the shrine he has set up in his apartment?” I asked. “He's obviously obsessed with Sara.” It had been so nice to remove worrying about somebody trying to kill Sara from my list of things to worry about. Now that I was back to having no love life, I was loath to return a negative item to a list that was already too long.

O'Connell shook his head. “Oh, he's obsessed with her. In fact, I think that having these feelings for her, and her not returning them, has been part of what's been setting him off of late. It probably contributed to the escalation of his attacks over the last month.”

“It's like a Madonna/whore complex, right?” posited Hilary. “When he's rejected by the Madonna—Sara, in this case—he takes it out on a whore. Literally.”

“I'm afraid so,” said O'Connell. “It's a cliché, I know, but in this case it seems accurate.”

“Did you ask him about the stalking letters?” I asked.

“He said he didn't know anything about them. And given everything else he was confessing to, I don't know why he would have held back. He was very forthright about his feelings for Sara.”

“I can't imagine anyone wanting to own up to having written those letters,” I said. “Wow, are they bad.”

O'Connell laughed, and the conversation segued into the letters. O'Connell's opinion as to their literary merit was no higher than my own, and he entertained us with a few particularly absurd quotes from them. Soon, we were all making suggestions as to what Sara's secret admirer could write next, fueled in no small part by the wine we'd all been drinking.

“I'm thinking limericks,” said Sean. “Nothing says I love you like a good limerick.”

Only Jonathan didn't seem to be enjoying the tack the conversation had taken. In fact, he was not only silent, his face seemed redder than it had earlier. As if he were embarrassed, I realized. Or angry. He excused himself abruptly, asking Jane where he could find a bathroom. The rest of the party barely noticed he'd left the table.

But I had an epiphany. And it put the final nail in the coffin of Plan B.

 

I added it up in my head. Beasley had seemed unusually attentive to Sara, even if he was her section leader. And he was the only one who seemed to find the letters anything but nauseating. In fact, he'd described one as “sweet.” He'd also been very quick to dismiss the letters as dangerous in any way, and he'd been fairly cavalier about preserving them as evidence, unconcerned with people touching the letters and soiling them with their own fingerprints. And if he was obsessed with Sara, it would explain my feeling that he was only going through the motions in his advances toward me.

Maybe Jonathan Beasley wasn't a serial killer. But could he be a writer of truly awful love letters? And, even more importantly, had he been stalking his student? Was he behind the attacks on Sara?

T
hankfully, Sean insisted that all of the menfolk accompany him to the basement to inspect the progress that he and Matthew had made on the cradle. I couldn't understand the fascination that anything involving dangerous tools like saws and hammers held over people with a Y chromosome, but it was a convenient way to get Beasley out of the room. As soon as they were safely downstairs, I told my friends about my suspicions.

“You know, Rach, just because you're upset that Jonathan isn't Mr. Right doesn't mean that he's a crazed stalker,” said Hilary. “I'm not the guy's biggest fan, but you may be jumping to conclusions—again—for the wrong reasons.”

“I think what she's saying makes sense,” said Emma. “I was watching him, too, and he was really getting upset when we were joking about the letters.” Emma was quiet by nature, and she tended to be unusually observant, probably because she didn't spend as much time as the rest of us trying to figure out how to get a word in.

“There is something weird about him,” Luisa said. “I thought he was going to blow a gasket when Jane corrected him before.”

“What does that mean, anyhow, blowing a gasket?” asked Hilary.

“Most people would have just laughed it off, but he seemed to take it really personally,” said Emma.

“But he's Sara's professor,” Jane pointed out. “To write those letters would be really crossing a line.”

“The letters do reference a ‘forbidden love,'” I reminded her.

“Ick,” said Hilary, reaching for a nearly empty bottle to top off her wineglass.

“Well, maybe he wrote them,” Jane said. “But would he really attack her?”

“You clearly have not been watching enough Lifetime Television for Women,” I answered. “Stalkers always end up trying to kill the women they love.”

“How much Lifetime Television for Women is enough Lifetime Television for Women?” countered Luisa.

“Okay,” said Jane. “Maybe Beasley is behind the letters. But how can we prove it?”

“I have an idea,” I told them. “But I'm going to need help.”

 

There was some debate about whether we should simply confide in O'Connell, but while I'd redeemed myself somewhat with the capture of Grant Crocker, I wasn't willing to formally make another accusation against Jonathan without tangible proof. We came up with an alternative plan and none too soon. The guys trooped up from the basement just as we were finalizing the details.

“You all look like you're plotting something,” said Matthew, taking in the five of us seated around the kitchen island with our empty wineglasses. My friends talking over the remains of a drinking session was a sight he'd seen on far too many occasions not to be suspicious of what we might be hatching.

“Oh, you know, the usual. Just figuring out how to overthrow the patriarchy,” said Hilary brightly.

“I thought you'd already done that.”

“We're moving on to the second phase,” Emma said, taking hold of Matthew's hand and looking up at him. “Beware, white males.”

“We stand warned,” he answered good-naturedly.

I stretched and let forth with an enormous yawn. “I'm sorry to be the first to break up the party, but I'm exhausted.”

Fortunately, Jonathan offered to drop me back at the hotel. It took a while to say good-night to everyone, but we had one more dinner planned for the following night, so these weren't final goodbyes. Ten minutes later, Jonathan was unlocking the door of his car and helping me into the passenger seat. As he walked around the front of the car, I transferred my cell phone from my purse and into my left hand. I dialed Jane's cell-phone number, heard her pick up and lowered my hand under the seat, so the phone wouldn't be visible to Jonathan when he got in the car.

Under normal circumstances, this would have been an awkward ride home in a banal way. I'd realized that he wasn't for me. And I'd also realized that while Jonathan may have been going through the motions of pursuing me, he didn't really have his heart in it. Even before I'd decided Jonathan was Sara's stalker, something in the dynamic between us had shifted, and I had a feeling that he sensed it, too. The banality would be due to the loss of the initial enthusiasm of which we wouldn't speak but that would tinge the drive with a stale and slightly sour quality. Tingling was a thing of the past, and while I would mourn its potential efficacy in calorie-burning, I couldn't say I would mourn its source.

But the good news was that I had more important things to do than make awkward small talk to fill up the ten minutes it would take us to get to the hotel.

“That was a nice dinner,” said Jonathan. “Your friends are really neat.”

There were many adjectives I would use to describe my friends, but “neat” wasn't high on the list. Still, I let it pass, saying instead, “So, Jonathan, do you want to tell me about writing the letters to Sara?”

The car swerved into the opposite lane, and then nearly hit a parked car when he overcorrected back to our side of the road. “What? What are you talking about?” The note of surprise in his voice sounded strained, and it erased any last doubt I may have had.

“I'm talking about you being the one who wrote the letters to Sara. It's pretty obvious that it must have been you.”

Headlights from behind us flashed in the rearview mirror, and Jonathan busied himself with adjusting its angle. “I don't know what you're talking about,” he repeated through clenched teeth. A nerve twitched along the line of his chiseled jaw. “Haven't you made enough ridiculous accusations for one day?”

“Look, I understand why it's hard for you to admit. Writing love letters to a student is probably against some code of behavior the business school makes you agree to or something.” Harvard would likely find how badly written the letters were to be even more objectionable than Jonathan crossing the boundaries of professional behavior.

“Rachel, I really don't know where this is coming from. Why are you doing this?” The nerve had gone from twitching to jumping.

I carefully laid out the reasons behind my conjecture, as if I were structuring an answer to a particularly tricky exam question, being as gentle as I could when I pointed out that both Jonathan and the letters shared a frequent habit of misquoting poetry or misattributing the poetry to the wrong poet. “When you add it up, it all points to you.”

There was silence as I waited for him to respond. “You can't prove it,” he said, a new and hostile tone to his voice that I smugly took as evidence of a usually hidden violent streak.

“You're admitting that you wrote the letters?”

“Yes. Not that it's any of your business.” He made a sharp turn onto a deserted side street.

“Where are you going?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice level. Our plan allowed for the possibility that Jonathan might deviate from the route back to the hotel, but the speed with which he was maneuvering on the slick roads was unnerving.

“I'm driving you back to the Charles.”

“This isn't the way. There's no reason to go down—” I looked in vain for a street sign so I could broadcast where we were. One flashed by, but I couldn't make out the words. Glasses, I thought. I definitely needed glasses.

“If you tell anyone about this, I'll lose my job. You know that, don't you?” He made another sharp turn onto another equally deserted side street.

“Well, I don't know how you're going to be able to do your job from jail. And are you sure this is the way to the hotel?”

“Now what are you talking about?” he exploded, jamming his foot down on the accelerator as he swung the car into another turn. The wheels skidded in the snow, and there was a hair-raising moment when we were hurtling toward a tree. I was bracing myself for the impact when I felt the wheels gain traction under us.

“Don't you think you should slow down?”

“Why would I go to jail?”

“Don't be dense, Jonathan.” The reckless way he was driving was making me testy. “For attacking Sara Grenthaler, of course. And slow down already. The roads are too slippery for you to be driving like this.”

“I've got snow tires.”

“Snow tires or not, you're still going to jail.”

“I love her, dammit! I love her! I love her,” he repeated.

And then he slammed the car to a stop.