Final Exam (24 page)

She took a few deep breaths and finally put her hand on the door handle. “Wish me luck.”

“Godspeed.”

“What? Godspell? What does that have to do with this?” she asked.

“Good luck, Max.”

“Thanks. I’m gonna need it.” She opened the car door. “Does Margaret Raymore flirt?”

“If she has to,” I said.

Max got out of the car and, after looking both ways, crossed the busy street that separated the strip mall from the T&G building. I dug into my pocketbook for my cell phone, which had begun to chirp halfway to Newark, indicating that I had a voice mail message. I had turned the phone to vibrate so that I wouldn’t have to be disturbed while driving.

I pulled out the directions that I had downloaded from the Internet that morning—although I had Lola I still liked to have something printed—and looked at what I had written across the top: Martha Raymore. Then I remembered my conversation with Adriana and our discussion about my fake name. The second time Adriana and I had spoken. I had played along and gone with Martha Rayburn. Max was supposed to be Martha Rayburn not Margaret Raymore. My stomach did a little flip when I realized I had given Max the wrong name.

I leaned down and looked out the passenger side window of the car, watching as Martha/Margaret made her way to the front door of T&G.

I said a silent prayer that Max was still able to think on her feet. Obviously, thinking on my feet wasn’t my strong suit, nor was memorizing an alias that I myself had created.

Max was gone for far longer than I ever would have imagined, and when we hit the one-hour mark, I nearly lost consciousness from the stress. My thumbnails were bitten down to the quick, and in an amazing display of hindsight being twenty-twenty, I came to the realization that this was a very bad idea. What did I hope to find out? That yes, Nicholas Tsagarakis was a ladies’ man? Who cares? That he had flooded the company in cash and, as a reward, wanted his son to marry Costas’s daughter? That maybe—and this was clearly a long shot—one of the guys who attacked Amanda was associated with the company? I didn’t know what I was hoping to find out and wasn’t sure why I even cared. If Amanda didn’t have the guts to tell her stepfather that she didn’t love Brandon, that was none of my business. She was a big girl and I had known her a week. Didn’t concern me.

But it did, in a way. I had married a guy once who didn’t love me and things had turned out very badly. I didn’t want to see anyone go down that road, and if I could stop Amanda, I guess I could move beyond my failed marriage and realize none of it had been my fault. Or could I?

This had started as a way for me to find Wayne and get my life back. Well, we had found Wayne, he was behind bars, and hopefully, at some point, I would be free of the Siena dorm.

I looked in the rearview mirror and spoke to myself. “Time to move on, Alison.”

About five minutes later, I finally saw Max exit the building and run across the street, this time barely looking to see if a car was coming down either side of the boulevard. As she approached the car, I could see the flush in her cheeks.

She got in and immediately starting beating me with her purse. “My name was
Martha Rayburn
not
Margaret Raymore
!” she yelled, the blows to my head coming fast and furious. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

I covered my head with my hands. “I know! I know! I remembered after you got out of the car.”

She eased up with the beating after a few more blows to my midsection. “I had to blame it on some girl named Adriana who I don’t even know!”

I rubbed my head. “Wait. Who blamed it on Adriana?”

“They figured out that she had written the wrong name down . . . or the right name,” she said, giving me a dark look, “and said that she’s pretty scatterbrained so I had to agree with them.”

Poor Adriana. So now my lying was going to involve getting an innocent receptionist in trouble. Great. I took a deep breath. “Did you get anything? Did you learn anything new?” I looked over at T&G. “Why were you in there so long?”

“They’ve got a whole marketing spiel that I had to sit through.” She dropped the timbre of her voice and intoned, “Welcome to T&G. The best in limousine service and more.” She closed her eyes as if wanting to forget the whole thing. “There’s PowerPoint slides, a slide show, music, Nicholas and Costas, the kid . . .”

“Wait. Which kid?”

“Nicholas’s son. The hot one. Brian or Bryce or . . .”

“Brandon.”

“That’s it.”

“Really? He’s part of the presentation?”

“He
was
the presentation,” Max said. “He did the whole thing while Daddy sat at the conference table across from me, making bedroom eyes at me the whole time.” She grimaced. “Then Daddy gave me the double-handed handshake at the end. I swear if I had given him an inch, he would have given me a hug with the ass grab.”

I put my hands on the steering wheel, lost in thought. “Anything else?”

“That’s it.” She dug into her purse and pulled out a lipstick, which she reapplied perfectly without looking in the mirror. “Oh, there was one more thing.”

I waited but she seemed to have lost her train of thought. “Yes?”

“The kid had a cut on his head. He had those Band-Aids that you put over stitches. I don’t know what they’re called.”

“Steri-strips?” Teaching in a college with a large nursing program had its advantages. One of them was being able to name every Band-Aid appropriately.

“I guess. He said he was in a minor fender bender.”

“Did you believe him?”

She shrugged. “Do I care? No,” she said emphatically. “Can we get the hell out of here before I get diarrhea from the stress? I’m getting too old for this.”

I started the car and began to pull out of the parking lot. I stopped at the exit, looking for an opportunity to merge into the flow of traffic, but since we had arrived, the number of cars had picked up and I didn’t see a safe way to get in. I sat and stared at T&G. “Is Nicholas handsome?” I asked, more out of curiosity than anything else. I was fascinated by serial wedders and anyone who had more than three marriages certainly fit the bill.

“Sure, if you like muscley, swarthy, Don Juan types with a roving eye.”

That didn’t tell me anything but I didn’t push it because my attention was diverted by the front door of the limo company opening and Brandon exiting with his father. “That him?” I asked. Brandon was chatting amiably with his father, whom Max had described to a T. She had left out the best part of the description, though, and that was what appeared to be the extremely dapper pin-striped suit he was wearing. I could see the high gloss of his Italian leather shoes from where I sat, too. “You didn’t mention the metrosexual quality,” I said, pointing across the street. I drove into the intersection and managed to find an opening in which to insert the car. I took one last glance across the street, and found myself staring back at Brandon, who did a quick double take as I drove by.

“Shit,” I muttered.

“What?”

“I think we were made,” I said, looking in the rearview mirror.

“Made what?”

Brandon was staring after the car as I inched forward toward a light that seemed to change from red to green and back again in the space of ten seconds. After about a minute, plenty of time for him to memorize my plate number, I drove through the intersection and into the night, hoping that the sight of my car—with its New York license plate—didn’t arouse his suspicion and that in the dark, he couldn’t tell that it was me driving the car.

These sorts of capers always left me extremely paranoid.

Max snorted, knowing exactly what I was thinking. “There is no way he could tell that that was you.”

“A narrow, two-lane road separated us from the building. There is definitely a way he could see us.”

Max considered this but changed the subject, as she is wont to do when she doesn’t want to deal with reality. “We should eat,” she said. “I’m starving.” She looked out the window. “There! There’s a diner.”

I made a quick right turn into a diner not a mile from T&G. It occurred to me that we should go farther out of town if we were going to eat, but my growling stomach said otherwise. Hunger always trumped caution in situations like this. I unfortunately had to park right in front as all of the other spots were taken; I had wanted to put the car in the back so that it wouldn’t be visible from the street.

We entered the diner and got a booth in the back. Max opened the menu even though she probably could have recited the entire culinary repertoire to me by heart; Max is a diner aficionado, having eaten at the one by school every Friday (fish night in the dining hall) and Sunday morning (they didn’t serve her favorite breakfast food—hamburgers) the entire time we were at St. Thomas.

“Why do you even have to look at the menu?” I asked, taking a sip of warm water from the short glass in front of me, still hot from the dishwasher.

“I have to see if something speaks to me,” she said dramatically. “And right now, the meat-loaf dinner is telling me that I need to eat it right now.”

Our waitress approached the table and asked for our order. Max did order the meat loaf and a glass of cabernet; I was interested to hear her reaction to the diner’s house wine. I ordered a cheeseburger and a chocolate shake. Max gave me a look after the waitress walked away.

“A chocolate shake?”

“Yes,” I said. “And your point is?”

She looked away. “Nothing. No point.”

This wasn’t about a cheeseburger and the tension between us had ratcheted up a notch now that we weren’t trying to convince ourselves that our sleuthing was a great idea and would yield crystal clear results. Or a rapprochement. I leaned across the table. “Listen. I eat every meal in the commuter cafeteria. I’ve eaten more salads and Salisbury steak dinners than I care to count in the past week and a half. If I want to have a friggin’ chocolate shake and a cheeseburger, that is my right.” I pulled a napkin out of the holder on the table and wiped my brow, which had become quite sweaty during our drive. “So where are you living right now?” I asked, my tone still testy. I wasn’t going to bring up the red bedroom but I wanted to find out if she had permanently vacated my home.

“I told you already. I’m back home.”

“What are you going to do? Are you going to get married for real or just live together?”

“We are married,” she said in the same voice she would use to speak to a kindergarten student.

“No you’re not.”

“We’re just not married in the church,” she said. “But we’re married.”

I didn’t know how a woman so smart—she runs a cable television station, for criminy’s sake—could be so stupid. “Did Fred tell you that?” It sounded like something he would say just to appease her.

She put her hand over her heart. “We’re married here, in our hearts, and that’s all that matters.”

“No it doesn’t. You can’t be married in your hearts. There’s no such thing as being married in your hearts. You have to be married by the state of New York or by the Catholic Church. Or wherever else you worship. You need to be married by someone who can actually marry you,” I explained. I must have raised my voice, because the elderly couple at the next table shot daggers my way. “Sorry,” I said to them, baring my teeth in an unsuccessful attempt at a smile. “You haven’t even been together long enough to have a common-law marriage,” I added dismissively. And that’s when I knew I had gone too far. Her face became a mask of hurt and betrayal.

“Why can’t you just be happy for us?” she asked, welling up. “Why can’t you be happy that I’m happy?”

I was saved from having to come up with an immediate response by the delivery of my shake and Max’s cabernet. I took a big draw from the straw in my shake, the cold seeping up my nasal passages and giving me a tremendous pain between my eyes. Serves you right, I thought. First, I had made a nun cry and now I had made my best friend cry. It had been a wonderful week. “I am happy for you, Max. I couldn’t be happier,” I said, which was the truth even if my tone or my body language didn’t convey it properly. I was exhausted, and hungry, tired of living on campus, and afraid to go home to a red bedroom. But really and truly, I was happy if Max and Fred had decided to put their relationship back together. If it made them happy, it made me happy.

Right?

We ate our dinners in silence, her not responding when I asked if the house cabernet tasted like old shoe or was actually palatable. I was too hungry to lose my appetite for what turned out to be a giant, juicy, and extremely greasy burger, and I inhaled the whole thing in record time.

My back was to the door and the height of the booth obscured Max’s line of sight. So, when Brandon slid onto the Naugahyde bench next to me, the two of us were caught completely by surprise.

I tried to pretend that running into one of my students’ boyfriends in a town far, far away from where I taught and lived was the most natural thing in the world. I swallowed the hunk of greasy burger that got stuck in my throat and greeted him warmly.

“Hi, Brandon!” I said, with way too much cheer.

He kept his eyes on Max. “Good to see you again, Ms. Rayburn? Or is it Ms. Raymore?”

Max studied her meat loaf for a few seconds, shoving a huge piece into her mouth and pointing at her bulging cheeks with her fork.

“She doesn’t want to talk with her mouth full,” I explained.

Brandon folded his hands on the table. In profile, I could see the strong resemblance between him and his father. “Shall we cut the crap, ladies?”

I pushed my plate to the side and turned to face him. “Fine. Her name is Max Rayfield, she’s my best friend, and I just want to know what’s going on at your company, why two thugs beat up Amanda, and what, if anything, anyone there has to do with that. Especially you.” I took in his shocked expression. “Your turn. Go.”

Brandon blanched a bit at the mention of the beating that Amanda had withstood.

“Oh, and why you have those stitches,” Max chimed in.

I looked over at her. “Thanks, Max. I forgot about that.”

Brandon looked down at his hands. “For starters, there is nothing going on at T&G besides car service, nobody at our company had anything to do with what happened to Amanda, and I don’t know who those guys were. I’m offended that you would even suggest that I knew something about that,” he said evenly, but I could hear the anger simmering beneath the surface of his tone. And I hadn’t suggested that he himself had anything to do with it—at least not outright. I took note of the fact that he had taken my suggestion so personally. “Secondly, I hit my head on a doorjamb at the office. Seven stitches. Nothing to write home about. You can ask my father, the doctor at Newark General who stitched me up, or look at the door, which still has blood on it.” He paused. “Or you can ask my sister, Adriana, who was there when it happened.”