Final Exam (6 page)

“She’s the spitting image of Sister Mary.”

Crawford shuddered involuntarily. Mary scares him, too.

“I think Wayne Brookwell is Mary’s nephew.” I thought about that for a second while acknowledging the rumbling in my stomach. If it wasn’t one bodily complaint, it was another. The Chinese food from two hours before was a distant memory and nature was calling again.

Crawford motioned that I should continue. “And . . .”

“And I don’t know what that means. Could indicate why he got the job on campus. Could give me a clue as to why Mary didn’t say a word during my interrogation and subsequent imprisonment by Etheridge and Merrimack. Could mean a lot of things.” I looked out the window and spied a Thai restaurant; I knew where we’d be having dinner. I thought back to my encounter with Sister Mary outside the bathroom at Hop Sing. “Could be why she asked me about Wayne at the restaurant.”

“Or it could mean nothing.”

“Right,” I agreed. “But you got to admit it’s weird, right?”

“It’s weird,” he agreed, adjusting himself in his seat so that he could restart the car. “I called Fred while you were inside and he said they need another hour before you can come back. What do you want to do?”

I pointed to the Thai restaurant.

“But we just ate,” he complained.

“That was two hours ago. And I didn’t get to finish my . . .” I looked at him. “What was that anyway? It really wasn’t lunch and it really wasn’t dinner.” I put my hands together, pleading. “Please, Crawford. Please?”

Five minutes later, we were seated in the Thai restaurant in the main village of Scarsdale, picking at some spring rolls.

“Did you see anything in the house to indicate that Wayne might be living there?” he asked, looking around the restaurant. I don’t know what he hoped to see, but he was taking it all in, from the paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling, to the waitresses dressed in traditional Thai garb, to the guy cutting up sushi behind a long bar. Although it called itself “Thai,” it seemed that the restaurant was going more with pan-Asian.

“I saw a St. Thomas sweatshirt hanging on the banister,” I said with gravity.

“So what?” he asked. “If their kid worked there, I’m sure they have a ton of St. Thomas clothing.”

“They don’t strike me as St. Thomas clothing kind of people. He was wearing the old khaki-oxford-shirt-loafer combo and she was dressed to the nines, too. And it’s a Saturday afternoon and they were hanging out at the house. I don’t imagine Geraldine would be caught dead in a St. Thomas sweatshirt at the local Stop & Shop if she’s not wearing it at home on a weekend.”

Crawford stared at me for longer than I thought necessary. I snapped my fingers in front of his face. Finally, he spoke. “Wow. That was amazing.” He put the rest of his spring roll in his mouth. “You’ve got this all figured out. I don’t know whether to be amazed or frightened.”

“Amazed. Go with amazed.” I took the last spring roll from the plate and dunked it in a ramekin filled with sauce. “So, chances are, Wayne has been somewhere in the vicinity recently.”

“You really think so.” It was more of a statement than a question.

“I do.” I handed the empty plate to our server, a gorgeous Asian woman with an elaborate bun and eye makeup. “So, Chad, I think we need to start looking for a house. The Brookwells have invited us for cocktails, too.”

Crawford held up his hands in protest. “I’m out.”

“You are not ‘out,’ ” I said. “If you want me out of that dorm, you’re very much ‘in.’ ”

Crawford crossed his arms on the table and rested his head on them. “There’s so much wrong with this plan that I can’t even begin. And if Geraldine Brookwell is Sister Mary’s sister, this is going to unravel so quickly your head will spin.”

He had a point. But him having a point had never stopped me before. And it sure wasn’t going to stop me now.

“That kid’s obviously in a heap of trouble so I hope, for everyone’s sake, he’s safely ensconced in Scarsdale. His parents seem like very nice people. I would hate to have to tell them their kid’s a drug mule or a dealer or something of that ilk.” I thought about them for a moment. “I really hope that he doesn’t put them in any danger.”

Crawford looked sad all of a sudden. I was sure it was the parental connection, being as he was the father of twin teenage girls. “Me, too.” He leaned back in his chair, his long legs grazing mine under the table. “We need to find out if there’s a missing persons on him in Scarsdale. Let me poke around.” He closed his eyes, thinking, trying to work out that part of it. He opened them a few minutes later. “When’s your next flight?” he asked, a twinkle in his eye.

“I’m on the New York to Paris flight at midnight,” I said. “And I won’t be back for two weeks.”

“And I have a graphic design convention in Cleveland next week,” he said. He waved to our server. “Check, please.”

Seven

I was able to get back into my room around nine o’clock, where I fell into the bed that Crawford had made up again with fresh sheets after we had returned from the restaurant. I lay there, my arms behind my head, and thought about how the day, and even the whole week, hadn’t turned out as planned. If it had been normal, I would be home, alone, petting my dog and watching a reality show on Bravo. I would have been less surprised if I had ended up on a space shuttle mission than where I was now. Never in my wildest dreams did sleeping on a thirty-year-old mattress on campus come into play.

But here I was. Crawford had bid me a chaste adieu in the dorm hallway, heading back to his apartment in Manhattan, because even though visitation was still in effect, I didn’t want to look like a hussy my first week on the job. He was working the next day, and I wouldn’t see him for a couple of days, which, in itself, was depressing enough. Now this. Living in a dorm room—there was no place on earth where this would be considered a “suite”—every surface covered with fingerprint dust, with hissing pipes overhead. I decided to make the best of it, and fell into a deep sleep, thinking that I would clean up the fingerprint powder in the morning.

I hadn’t set my alarm; there was no reason. The only thing I had to do the next day was unpack and go back to Dobbs Ferry to get Trixie. It was going to be a tight squeeze with the two of us living here but we would manage. I got up around nine and used the communal bathroom on the second floor again, making a mental note to call maintenance before I left so that they could give me a new toilet. Because you know what? The cops had taken my toilet “as evidence.” Yes. Just when I thought my life couldn’t get any weirder or more embarrassing, the appliance upon which I had sat my ample behind was now in some evidence room at the Fiftieth Precinct.

I dressed and headed off to Dobbs Ferry, hoping that at the very least, Max was in a semigood mood and not in her usual fugue state.

I entered the house and was greeted by an overly enthusiastic Trixie, who pushed past me to go out into the backyard where she ran free for a few minutes before rooting for field mice in the giant pile of leaves that I had never bagged the autumn before. When she tired of that, she came back in and paid me the respect I deserved by jumping on me and slathering me with wet, dog-scented kisses. I pushed her down and called for Max, who didn’t respond. A quick survey of the area told me that she wasn’t home.

She really hadn’t left the house for any significant length of time in the past two weeks, so I was surprised that she was gone. I scribbled a note with the phone number in my room on campus and put it next to a can of paint sitting on the counter.

I looked at Trixie. “Where did this come from?” I asked her. It is not unusual for me to ask her questions and even more common for my questions to be met with adoring silence. I looked at the top of the can and saw a little dab of paint on the label: Million Dollar Red. I had no idea where this had come from or what it was for, but I left it there, thinking that Max might have purchased it to redo a room in her own apartment once she revoked Fred’s squatter’s rights and she returned there. She had been talking about making a fresh start and I couldn’t think of a fresher start than painting a room red.

I pulled together everything I needed: Trixie’s food, bowls, leash, and chew toys. We got into the car and headed back to St. Thomas, never seeing Max.

The director of security, Jay Pinto, was waiting for me when I returned from my trip. He held the door to the dorm for me as I carted in a box with Trixie’s supplies, her leash dangling off my wrist. We made our way down to my room, where I set the box on the ground and commanded Trixie to “sit.” She responded by taking off down the hallway, skidding up and down on the marble floors, investigating her new environment.

I folded my arms over my chest, expecting the worst. “I guess you heard what happened.”

Jay, shorter than me with a thick shock of black hair and a neatly trimmed mustache, looked up at me and nodded. A faithful practitioner of kickboxing—a fact I had learned during one of Etheridge’s goofy awards ceremonies—he was in excellent shape for a man in his early fifties. “You know I’m retired from the Job?” he asked, using the term cops normally used to refer to their time on the NYPD. Obviously, it was important for him to establish that I knew that before we got down to the business at hand, namely my exploding toilet. “I really wished your boyfriend would have called me first. We could have kept the whole thing a lot quieter.”

I hadn’t known he had been a cop but it didn’t surprise me. It also didn’t surprise me that he knew about Crawford. “So you talked to Detective Lattanzi?”

“The other one. Marcus,” he said. A couple of students, tanned from their spring break adventures, came through the side door near my room and scampered down the hallway, encountering Trixie on the way. She was thrilled to make new friends. Jay leaned in so that we wouldn’t be overheard. “We’re going to try to keep this quiet anyway. If we can.”

I wasn’t surprised to learn that, either. “I won’t tell anyone.”

“Really quiet,” he said meaningfully. He raised an eyebrow. “Understand?”

I nodded slowly even though I didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about.

“Sit tight. Do your job. Keep your nose clean.”

“That’s my plan,” I said. The presumption that I wouldn’t do those three things irked me slightly. I wondered how many people had seen two police cars and two unmarked vehicles peel into campus yesterday, and I decided that whoever did was given the evil death glare—the same one I was getting at that moment—from Jay. I guess he was under the same strict orders as everyone else on the campus with the same mantra: “We’re one big, happy family! Nothing bad ever happens here! It’s heaven on earth!”

Except it wasn’t. We now had exploding, drug-filled toilets to add to our roster of “bad things that happen at St. Thomas.” As if murder hadn’t been enough.

“So, we’ll never speak of this again?” Jay asked pointedly.

“I can’t guarantee that,” I said, honest to a fault. Because I was going to find out where those drugs had come from, where Wayne Brookwell was, and how the drugs and Wayne were related. That meant I’d have to talk to someone, sometime, about this situation.

He glared at me some more. But coming from a five-foot-five grandfather, even if he was a champion kickboxer in his age bracket, it just wasn’t that intimidating.

“Oh, okay,” I relented. “We will never speak of this again,” I repeated with tremendous gravitas. I crossed my fingers behind my back and said an Act of Contrition for the lie I just told.

He gave me one final glance before saying, “Good.”

He started to walk away, whistling a Miles Davis tune. “Oh, and one more thing.” He stopped a few feet from my room. “You’ll need to move your car.”

“That’s my regular parking spot,” I reminded him.

“That’s your regular parking spot if you don’t live on campus. The resident parking lot is up the hill past the auditorium.” He seemed to derive great pleasure in passing this information on to me.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

He put his hands up. “Not my rules. The school’s. You’ll have to move your car into the resident lot before the students start coming back.”

I started to protest to his back as he continued down the hallway.

“Have a good day, Dr. Bergeron,” he called back.

“You, too!” I said but I didn’t mean it. I hoped he had a very bad day. Like the one I had had the day before. I called Trixie and she came running, sliding to a stop in front of me. I watched Jay turn the corner and go out the main entrance of the dorm. Was it me or was this place an insane asylum? “Want to see your new room?” I asked her.

Her enthusiastic tail-wagging suggested that she might. I opened the door and her tail became flaccid, eventually tucking between her legs. “It’s not scary, Trix,” I said, putting my fingers between her chain-link collar and the thick rug of fur around her neck. I dragged her into the room. “See? It’s just like home,” I said, but even the dog could tell I was full of it. She went into the shoebox-sized living room and, with a heavy sigh, fell into a heap on the floor, dust rising up around her from the Oriental carpet. She looked up at me, her doleful eyes watching my every move. I went to the bathroom door and pulled down the police tape.

“Wayne?”

I peeked my head around the doorjamb and saw a young woman, long curly, black hair hanging to her shoulders, her eyes behind a pair of glasses with black, Buddy Holly–esque frames. She was in jeans and a Princeton sweatshirt, her feet in a pair of pink flip-flops. She was going for the art-student vibe but even that couldn’t hide how cute she was under the helmet of hair and the outdated glasses.

“Sorry. Wayne’s not here,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m Alison Bergeron. I’m the temporary RD.”

She took my hand. “Hi. I’m Amanda Reese. I’m the RA on the third floor. Where’s Wayne?”

Where’s Wayne? That was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “Not sure. I think he took a short leave of absence,” I said, trying not to arouse any suspicion, which made me ask myself why I felt compelled to cover for this guy.

I recognized Amanda from around campus but knew that I had never had her as a student. The look on her face, however, led me to believe that she knew exactly who I was: the same Alison Bergeron who owned the car in which a student’s body had been found the previous year; the same Alison Bergeron whose ex-husband, the head of the biology department, had been found dead, missing his hands and feet, in her kitchen; the same Alison Bergeron who got herself involved in too many fracases to mention. I don’t know if it was my presence or the fact that Wayne wasn’t where he was supposed to be, but she seemed nervous.

“He didn’t mention anything to me about a leave of absence,” she said, her eyes narrowing behind her thick lenses, her flip-flopped foot tapping on the marble.

“It was sudden,” I said. Trixie came out from the living room and introduced herself to Amanda. “This is Trixie.” I looked at the dog. “Trixie, this is Amanda.”

Trixie held up her paw and allowed Amanda to hold it.

“I didn’t think they allowed animals in the dorms,” she said, dropping the paw.

“Special dispensation from the pope,” I said. She didn’t get the joke. “Special circumstances, really. I live alone and I wouldn’t have anybody to take care of my dog while I lived here.” And no, I wasn’t lying: living with Max these days was like living alone, and she certainly wasn’t going to take care of Trixie while I was away. “Now, is there something I can help you with?” I steeled myself for some kind of spring break confession about irresponsible sex or a wet T-shirt contest but there was none forthcoming.

“Are we still having our house meeting tomorrow night?”

“House meeting?”

“Yes. When all of the RAs get together and discuss the upcoming events and any issues that exist in the dorm.” She looked at me as if I were a moron. “House meeting,” she repeated.

“Sure. We can have a house meeting,” I said. I wondered if she’d like to hear about my “issues,” namely, that I didn’t have a toilet. “Where and when?”

“Seven o’clock in the TV room,” she said, leaning in to get a better look at my accommodations. “All of Wayne’s stuff is gone,” she whispered to herself.

“Sure is.” I looked around. I hoped it was. If I discovered anything like what I had found yesterday, I wasn’t going to be happy. “So I’ll get to meet the other RAs tomorrow?”

She nodded. “There are six of us. Me, and five guys.” She stepped out of the room and back into the hallway. “There’s only one floor of women here. You knew that, right?”

“I knew that,” I confirmed. “Hey, were you close with Wayne?”

She flushed a pink that was close to the color of her flip-flops. “No. Why would you ask that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. He lived here, you live here . . . just thought I’d ask. I thought maybe you knew where he went.”

“Why would I know where he went?”

“Just thought I’d ask,” I repeated. When she didn’t move from her place in the hallway, I asked her, “So, tomorrow at seven? TV room?”

She nodded and took off down the hallway, her flip-flops slapping a guilty staccato on the marble floor. She knew more than she was giving up. Or she was madly in love with slack-jawed Wayne. Or both.

The next thought hit me like a ton of bricks.

Could he have been her dealer?