Final Exam (15 page)

Things suddenly took a dramatic turn when the presumed boyfriend, who I concluded was the fiancé, Brandon, broke the embrace and grabbed Amanda by the arm. I surprised myself by taking a few steps toward them and screaming, “Unhand her!”, which in my agitated state was the best I could come up with. The two of them looked at me but Brandon dropped his hand from her upper arm long enough for her to scurry away, up the hill, and past me, without ever looking at me or back at him. I called to her but she kept going, obviously not wanting to chat about this. I locked eyes with the boyfriend until he finally got in his car and drove off, leaving a cloud of exhaust in his wake.

This drama was far from over and was curious in nature; was Amanda ending her engagement to Brandon? I decided that I would delve into this later and headed off to my class, down the hall, around a corner, and in a dark section of the classroom building, where I saw a group of students clustered in the doorway.

“Sit down!” I called, skidding to a stop in front of the door, taking in their disappointed faces. I made it to my desk, where I put down my messenger bag and wiped my hand across my sweaty brow. “Essays, please,” I said, and watched as they filed forward to drop their papers on my desk.

I gave my lecture but my mind was on Amanda Reese.

Twenty

Crawford got away for dinner that night and that was the only thing that saved the day from being a total waste.

I had pissed off Max, made my boss cry, worn the wrong shoes (again!), and seen Amanda Reese in the grips of some kind of relationship drama. I had had enough for one day and was looking forward to seeing Detective Hot Pants, as Max refers to him, even if there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to show him just how hot I thought he was.

I was sitting on the edge of the desk in the lobby of Siena when I saw his car pull up. It was time for Bart Johannsen to kiss his lacrosse stick good-bye and come down to do his weekly duty at the desk. That lacrosse stick had seen more action in the past week than I had seen in the last month. I looked at my watch. Bart was now five minutes late.

Before Crawford made it to the door, Mary Catherine Donnery came bouncing up and pushed the buzzer. Crawford was right behind her and she turned, giving him a dazzling smile. I pushed the buzzer and watched as he held the door for her.

“Good evening,” I said, and nodded to Mary Catherine, who bypassed the desk and started up the staircase without signing in. Crawford watched her as she made it to the landing and then looked at me. “Halt!” I called out.

She turned and gave me a look. She leaned over the staircase and Crawford turned bright red as we both got an eyeful of healthy young boob, a crested mountain of pink flesh, cascading out the front of her tank top. “Is there a problem?”

I held up the log-in pad. Besides the exposed boob? Yes. “You need to sign in.”

“I do?” she asked. Crawford headed back toward the door so that he had no view of her at all. “Are you sure?” she asked sweetly.

“I’m sure.”

“Really sure?”

“Mary Catherine, what’s the issue? You know the rules,” I said, and waved the pad in the air to remind her.

“Yes, but
Coco
. . . ,” she started, and smiled again.

Oh, that. She wasn’t going to blackmail me with the Coco Varick cover story now that Sister Mary knew. “That’s over, Mary Catherine, and we’re back to house rules,” I said.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Yes! I’m sure!” I said, my irritation getting the best of me. “Get down here and sign the flipping book!”

She flounced back down the stairs and peeked around the corner to smile at Crawford. “Okay. You don’t have to get mad.” She bent over to sign the pad while Crawford looked at the ceiling, assiduously avoiding seeing anything that he didn’t want to. “There.” She started back up the stairs and disappeared from our sight.

Crawford let out a sigh of relief. “And I thought it was bad when Erin wore her pajama pants to school every day.”

“Yes, underwear on the outside is definitely far worse,” I said, and got up from the desk. I gave him a kiss. “We have to wait a few minutes until Bart comes down to sit desk.”

“What’s she doing here every night anyway?” Crawford asked.

“My guess? Hot monkey sex with Michael Columbo.”

Crawford put his hands over his ears. “Stop!”

I put my arms around his waist, slipping a hand into the back of his waistband, careful to avoid the firearm that remained on his hip even though his tour was over. “Remember hot monkey sex?” I whispered.

He shook his head. “Nope.” He relaxed a little bit and let me kiss him. “Besides, I thought you had a hematoma?”

“It’s not so bad,” I said. “So, do you remember hot monkey sex?”

“No,” he said weakly.

But something told me he did. I kissed his cheek, letting my lips linger on his earlobe. The sound of a lacrosse ball bouncing off the wall one floor above made the two of us separate abruptly, and Crawford headed down the hall toward my room and away from the impressionable young eyes of Mr. Johannsen, who I was sure had seen and participated in much more elaborate public displays of affection than what we had just done. I saw Crawford stopped in front of the bulletin board outside the janitor’s closet, studying it with an intensity it didn’t warrant.

Bart threw himself into the chair behind the desk and flew back a few feet on the wheeled chair, his lacrosse stick stopping his backward progression. “I’m here,” he proclaimed, twirling the stick in the air.

“You know what to do, right?” I asked.

“I think so,” he said, pulling up close to the desk. It looked like it was the first time he had ever seen some of the objects on the surface. He held up a stapler and examined it curiously.

“Are you sure?” I asked, suddenly afraid to leave him. I wondered if he was a special ed student.

“I’m just messing with you!” he said, laughing uproariously. He slapped his hand on the desk. “This is my second year, Dr. Bergeron. I taught those idiots up there,” he said, using his lacrosse stick to point at the ceiling, “how to do this job.”

“That makes me feel so much better,” I said with just a trace of irony that I was sure was lost on him.

He finger-gunned me to indicate that he was on the job.

Crawford sauntered back down toward the lobby, looking more relaxed than before, and took a gander at Bart, who was happily twirling his stick and singing along to a song being piped into his ears through his tiny earphones. He bounced the lacrosse ball with his free hand in time to his song. We bid good night to him and went into the parking lot.

“Does St. Thomas have a special ed program?” Crawford asked, completely serious.

I laughed. “Uh, no.”

“Because that kid . . .”

“I know. I know,” I said, and took his hand. “Get used to it. That’s the kind of boy one or both of your daughters is going to bring home after they start college.”

He moaned. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said.

Once we were in the car, Crawford dug a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Here’s the info on that plate number: Costas Grigoriadis, 17 Pine Terrace, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.”

I thought for a moment. “Never heard of him.” I looked at Crawford, my face telling him exactly what I was thinking.

“We are not driving to New Jersey,” he said emphatically.

I put my hands together. “Please, please, please, Crawford. We can get McDonald’s and eat it in the car on the way. It will be like a road trip!” I said, trying to make my enthusiasm contagious.

He gripped the steering wheel, staring out at the encroaching dusk. It was mealtime on campus and students were starting to head to the cafeteria. He flexed his fingers and looked at me. “Why do you want to go there?”

He was cracking and I could tell. “I want to see
where
he lives and maybe figure out
who
he is.”

“And then what?”

I was honest. “I’m not sure.” I leaned in close and gave him a kiss. “How about it? A little road trip? We could be there and back in an hour and a half and still have time for dinner.” I squeezed his thigh. “That’s if you don’t want to have McDonald’s in the car.”

“An hour and a half? That’s a generous estimate,” he said. He turned toward me, his hands still gripping the wheel. “Listen. There’s no Coco, no Chad, no house hunting. Got it?” He thought of something else. “And no using the bathroom. That’s what got us into this mess.”

“Got it,” I said solemnly.

“I could get in big trouble for this.”

“For what?” I asked. “We haven’t done anything wrong and we’re not going to do anything wrong.” I put on my seat belt. “And not for nothing, there’s no problem with impersonating an Air France flight attendant or a graphic designer.”

He banged his head on the steering wheel a few times. “There is if you’re a police officer for the City of New York. Have I taught you nothing?” He sat up suddenly. “Oh, and how are we going to find Seventeen Pine Terrace, by the way?”

I pulled off my seat belt. “Wait here.” I jumped out of the car and ran a few feet to my car, ignoring the stack of tickets on the windshield. I reached into the glove compartment, retrieved my rarely-used GPS system and held it above my head victoriously. His face fell. He knew now that there was no way we weren’t going to New Jersey.

He rolled down his window. “Where did you get that?” he asked.

“Max,” I said. “Where do I get any purchases over a hundred bucks?” I asked, handing it to him. “I call her Lola. Make sure you follow her directions. She gets very cranky when you change direction.”

Crawford made short work of setting Lola up on the dash and plugged in the directions to Costas’s house. Lola told us that the ride was exactly thirty-seven miles and fifty minutes long. No give or take. That’s what it was.

I looked out the window as we left campus, watching students walking around and enjoying the mild weather. We passed the library, where Amanda was walking down the steps, dressed in her usual uniform: jeans, flip-flops, and Princeton sweatshirt. Her hair hung down her back, a tangle of dark waves. I needed to get Max over here to give that girl a makeover. She would be a knockout with a trim and some decent clothes. She looked up just as we were driving by and raised her hand in a halfhearted wave.

Crawford slowed down to a crawl over the speed bumps. “Okay, grandma, speed it up,” I said. “We don’t have all night.”

“I’d like to have some shocks left when I get off campus,” he said, saluting the guard in the booth just as we exited onto the avenue.

Lola gave us our directions. “Go straight to Broadway.”

“She’s as bossy as you are,” Crawford said, ignoring her directions.

“Recalculating,” Lola said, and set about coming up with a different route for us to take.

Crawford ignored her and continued on his route. “So tell me about your evening with Wayne and Mr. New Jersey, who we can now call Costas or Mr. Grigoriadis.”

“Wayne is a big, giant, scum-sucking piece of plankton, and I don’t care how much trouble he’s in or not but you don’t go hitting a lady over the head,” I said.

Crawford was silent for a moment. “But how do you
really
feel?”

“That’s how I really feel.” I gave him a quick summary of my break-in at the convent.

“You broke into the convent.” It was more a statement of fact than a question.

“I had to, Crawford,” I said. “I just knew he was there and I wanted to prove it, once and for all.”

“The uniforms went to the convent, searched the place, and came up with nothing,” he reported. “Wayne’s gone from there.”

“They did?” I asked, feeling a little queasy all of a sudden. “Sister Mary’s not going to be happy about that.”

“Which part? The convent search or the missing nephew?” he asked.

“Both.”

“The kid—her nephew—assaulted you, Alison. Of course I was going to send someone over to check it out.”

“I guess I should have expected that,” I said. I told him about my talk with Costas and how weird it was. I finished up with the Sister Mary debacle.

“And you made a nun cry?” This time he was genuinely surprised. “You made Sister Mary cry?”

“I know,” I said as we merged onto the Saw Mill River Parkway. “That wasn’t my best work.”

He sighed. “I’ll say.” He looked into the rearview mirror and adjusted it slightly. “So Wayne was definitely living in the convent—which we already knew; we don’t know why Mr. Grigoriadis keeps turning up; and Sister Mary isn’t an automaton. Good work. We now know less than nothing.” He smiled slightly to show me that he wasn’t criticizing my sleuthing even though it sounded strangely like he was.

“Well, when you put it like that . . .” I looked out the window and then back at Lola’s screen. “Follow her directions,” I said.

“I know another way,” he said.

“But she said to take the George Washington.”

“Trust me,” he said, and patted my thigh.

I watched as the various towns in southern Westchester passed by my window. We slowed down at the light that would take me to my house in Dobbs Ferry. I decided that now would not be a good time to mention that Max was embarking on an online dating adventure and wisely kept my mouth shut.

“What?” he said, seemingly reading my mind.

“Nothing,” I said.

He pulled away slowly from the red light. “Liar.”

I didn’t dispute that and kept my mouth shut until we got onto the Tappan Zee Bridge. “Are you sure this is right?” I was a little nervous about going against Lola’s advice.

“I go this way when I go down to the shore,” he reminded me. “I know that it’s easier at this time of night to go across the Tap than the GW.”

I trusted him. Crawford has only given me one reason not to trust him—it involved an estranged wife that he had kept secret from me at the beginning of our relationship—but since that time he had reestablished himself as one of the good guys. I relaxed in my seat, enjoying the number of times Lola had to recalculate.

Once we had a general sense of where we were headed, I filled him in on what I had witnessed at school that day between Amanda and Brandon.

“
Unhand
her?” he asked. “You trying out for Shakespeare in the Park?”

“It was all that came out of my mouth,” I said. “I was nervous that something was going to happen and I needed to get him to leave her alone.”

“
Unhand
her?” he repeated.

“Yes,” I said, annoyed. “So what do you think is going on?”

“No idea,” he admitted. “Did it look violent? Abusive?”

I had to admit that it didn’t. “But he clearly wasn’t happy with her.”

“If you should see Mr. Princeton Boyfriend put his hands on her again, get one of those senile guards to come down and get him off campus.”

We were at the Grigoriadis house faster than the fifty minutes that Lola had predicted due solely to Crawford’s sense of direction. He pulled onto Pine Terrace, an upscale street populated by large contemporary homes. He pulled up to one, an architectural marvel of planes and angles with floor-to-ceiling windows, and put the car in park.

“Swanky,” I said.

“Mr. Grigoriadis does do well for himself,” he said, leaning over me to get a good look at the house. It wasn’t set too far in from the street, but had an impressive front yard with some extremely expensive landscaping. “So, what now?”

The house was dark—and with the plethora of windows that allowed you to look into the house, it was easy to tell that there was no one home—and there were no cars in the driveway. Lucky. I looked at the front door and noted that the mailbox was full of mail, either from today or the last few days; I didn’t know how much mail the Grigoriadises usually got, but if this was one day’s mail, they got a lot more than I did on a daily basis. “Wait here,” I said, and opened the car door.