River Road (20 page)

I
sat for another minute, watching the milk congeal on the top of my coffee, fighting against doing what McAffrey suggested. The last time I'd felt like this was when my father died. He'd been diagnosed with bladder cancer three years before. I'd watched him go from a big, hearty man to a shrunken shape under the wrinkled hospice sheets. He was in excruciating pain for the last few months, refusing to take morphine so he'd be lucid up to the last. When he died I knew that I would miss him every day of my life, but I was also relieved that it was over. And ashamed at my relief. I felt that same mix of shame and relief now.

By tomorrow the news that Ross was the new suspect in Leia's death would have spread through the community. By the time winter break was over everyone would have forgotten the few days I'd been a suspect. My colleagues would act sheepish around me. My students would titter over what a lech Professor Ballantine had turned out to be and then they would move on to some new scandal. Whoever had killed Oolong would feel bad about it—

My stomach wrenched at the memory of her poor frozen body.

—and what would I do? I thought about how McAffrey had described me in the year after Emmy's death.
Sleepwalking
. He said I'd eventually woken up, but had I? I remembered the day that I paused
in the middle of a lecture and looked out at my class—at twenty fresh (some bored, some polite) faces and thought,
This could have been Emmy in thirteen years. She would have deserved more. They deserve more.
And so I started paying attention. Once I did it was easy to get swept up in their lives, their dramas, their needs. Cressida was right about that—they were a demanding generation. But whereas my colleagues complained about that I welcomed it. Because it was another way of not thinking about Emmy. Just like two or three glasses of wine at dinner and a nightcap of brandy or bourbon had been a way of not thinking about Emmy. Cressida was right about that too. I wasn't a falling-down drunk like Hannah Mulder. I kept my drinking to myself—one reason I kept so much to myself—and managed to teach my classes, but how long would I be able to keep that up without a job to keep me busy and give me a reason to hold it together? Already I was feeling the pull of that bottle of Glenlivet to deaden the pain of Oolong's death.

If I went home now, back to my life, I'd be going back to that, but where else did I have to go?

I got up and opened the door. As I stepped into the hallway I saw someone walking into the other interview room. A woman in a rumpled trench coat, loose grayish blond hair falling over her face. There was something familiar about her but I couldn't place her. Then she disappeared into the interview room. I turned and walked into the waiting room, where I found Dottie sitting in one of the plastic chairs knitting a purple scarf. Her eyes were still red and swollen but she looked like she had regained her composure. When she saw me she tucked her knitting into her quilted handbag. “Are you ready to go?”

Without waiting for a reply she got up and walked ahead of me to the car, humming “Silent Night” under her breath. There was one other car in the parking lot, a bright red Mini Cooper, its engine running, dome light on. Kelsey Manning stared at me defiantly, then bent her head to her phone.

“I wonder what she's writing now,” I said.

“Probably—” Dottie began, then she pressed her lips together and said, “I'm sure I have no idea.”

Dottie remained taciturn for the ride back. I spent the time thinking of all the things she had done for me over the years—making sure I had a good schedule, reminding me when I'd forgotten some bit of bureaucratic paperwork, baking me little treats and making sure I didn't forget to eat lunch when I was working in my office. She'd watched out for me while I had been sleepwalking. And what had I done to thank her? I'd taken advantage of her friendship to make my life easier. I'd taken her for granted. Even tonight I'd asked her to drive me to the police station without thinking of how devastated she'd be to learn that Ross was a suspect. And then I'd accused her of spreading rumors.

When we got to the bottom of my driveway she stopped the car. “I don't think I can make it up your driveway. You really ought to get someone to plow it. Troy Van Donk Senior will do it for you.”

“Dottie,” I said, ignoring her plowing advice. “I'm sorry I said you were a gossip. I didn't mean it.”

“No, you were right. But that's all going to stop.” She drew a line across her lips with thumb and forefinger. “I'm going to keep my mouth shut from now on.”

She kept her hands gripped on the steering wheel and her eyes trained ahead, as if she was still driving, as if she'd already dropped me off and was on her way home, as if she'd already left me behind. I couldn't think of anything else to say. I got out of the car and walked up the icy, unplowed driveway to my empty house and to the bottle that was waiting in my cupboard to empty me of the pain.

*  *  *

The wind woke me up the next morning. It sounded like an angry woman shouting at my house and rattling the windowpanes. I turned over in bed, feeling for Oolong's warm body, but then remembered that Oolong was lying cold and dead downstairs in a laundry basket. It felt
like part of my body had been scraped out. Not my heart, which is how I felt when Emmy died, but another smaller yet nonetheless vital organ like a kidney or a liver. Unable to go back to sleep I padded downstairs, the house feeling emptier without Oolong twining around my ankles. The first thing I did was to move the laundry basket with Oolong's body into the unheated woodroom, where it was cold but no animals would get to her. The ground was too frozen to bury her.

When I turned to leave the woodroom I felt a pang at leaving her alone in the cold, unheated space. I found one of her toys—a ragged catnip mouse—and brought it back to lay by her body. As I knelt down I remembered the things I'd found on Leia's shrine—the daffodils, the barrette, the bottle. It was like one of those rhymes on
Sesame Street
that Emmy used to sing along to.
One of these things is not like the others.
I could picture Hannah leaving the daffodils and the barrette but not the bottle. Even an old falling-down drunk like Hannah Mulder wouldn't deface a shrine for a young girl with a bourbon bottle. And she'd shaken her head when I held up the bottle. But then who had left it? And who had killed Oolong?

I readjusted the afghan over Oolong's body, then checked that the back door was locked. I looked out the window at the backyard, checking for footprints, but the wind had blown the snow into eddies and drifts that looked like a river at low tide. Any footprints left there yesterday would already have been erased.

Trying to shake off the feeling of being watched, I went back into the kitchen, made myself a cup of coffee, and opened my laptop. If someone was trying to send me a message they might try through “Overheard at Acheron.” But I found that the site had been closed, with a message from President Martin requesting students to refrain from speculating about the terrible tragedy of Leia Dawson's death. Then I googled
Leia Dawson.
The first link I got was to an article on
Gawker
titled “Why Acheron President Martin Doesn't Want Her Students Talking about Leia Dawson” by Kelsey Manning. It included a picture
of President Martin entering the police station in a wrinkled trench coat and what looked like Ugg slippers. I realized that's who I'd seen entering the other interview room. But why had Abbie Martin been at the police station so late at night? I read the article with a growing sense of unease.

Last night the President of SUNY Acheron made a midnight visit to the police station where the police were questioning Professor Ross Ballantine. The next morning President Martin closed down a student forum discussing Leia Dawson's death. What does she have to hide? Is she afraid that it will get out that Professor Ballantine was having an affair with his student right under her nose? Or had she learned that he had had an affair with Nancy Lewis?

The rest of the article made unfounded allegations against Ross and me. We were having a ménage à trois. The faculty party had been a drunken orgy. I had caught Leia and Ross together and run Leia down in Ross's car. It was a vitriolic rant full of speculation and rumor. I was surprised that even
Gawker
would run it. Unfortunately it had a few crumbs of truth in it—the picture of Abbie Martin entering the police station and the fact that Ross was being questioned there. And that I had had an affair with Ross six years ago. How had Kelsey gotten
that
information? Was it commonly known around campus?

Kelsey went on to accuse the college of sheltering a sexual predator who traded favors (grades, internships, recommendations) for sex.
I can see now why I got a C in Professor Ballantine's British Lit class,
Kelsey concluded,
I didn't put out.

Ross would be mortified. I thought of him sitting in a circle of rapt students who were listening to his stories. He thrived on that admiration. To have that taken away—

But if he had exploited that admiration—if he had had an affair with Leia,
if he'd run her over
—didn't he deserve this?

Or did I just think that because I was relieved that I wasn't a suspect anymore?

I didn't know what to feel—and I wouldn't until I found out the truth from the one person who could give it to me. Besides, I didn't know how long I could sit in this house, wind shrieking like a banshee, Oolong's body in the woodroom, and that bottle of Glenlivet calling seductively from the cupboard.

I got dressed in warm clothes and walked down to River Road. The wind had blown the candles over on Leia's shrine. Glass shards littered the snow. The woods that had seemed so peaceful yesterday were full of thrashing branches. Like the trees in Dante's third circle of hell that moaned if you broke their branches. I didn't have the patience to stand and listen to them while I waited for the Loop bus, so I wrapped my scarf around my head, pulled up my hood, and started walking toward campus. The wind was so loud that I couldn't hear cars coming until they were passing right by me. Twice they came so close I lurched off the side of the road into the snow to avoid being hit. The second time I heard someone shout “Hey, Prof!” from an open window. In the past I would have thought it was a friendly greeting but now it sounded like an angry jeer. Were they deliberately trying to scare me? Was that what had happened to Leia? Had someone deliberately driven her off the road in a fit of rage?

I tried to imagine Ross doing it. If Leia had threatened to expose their affair he'd have been angry. He would have lost his position at the college. I knew how much teaching meant to him—but would it have been enough to make him kill Leia?

I thought of him racing down those roads in the Catskills the summer we were together. There was a recklessness in him, a self-destructive streak, but I couldn't remember any moment when he'd lashed out at me. Try as I might, I couldn't picture him deliberately running Leia off the road.

But then I remembered what Ross had said about playing a role in
his classes. Maybe I didn't know him any better than I'd known Leia Dawson.

When I came to Ross's house at the edge of the campus I was relieved to see how quiet it was. I'd half expected a ring of news trucks around it and angry protesting students. Instead the house looked staid and calm,
solid
, like Ross himself. The paint on the shutters was fresh, the path neatly shoveled, the hedges trimmed for winter. Ross took good care of his home. He had once told me that he chose a house close to campus because he wanted to be able to invite students and faculty over for sherry hours and holiday parties. He always held his last class of the semester at his house. He always hosted the department holiday party and he held a barbecue in his backyard after graduation.

Those days were over, I thought, walking up the path. Even if he was found innocent of Leia's death the accusation of the affair would taint his relationship with his students. Even if he denied having the affair, even if he
hadn't
been sleeping with Leia, even if he had nothing to do with her death, he wouldn't be able to stay here.

The
New York Times
, wrapped in a blue plastic bag, lay in front of his door. I could imagine him not wanting to read the paper first thing this morning, but it was already ten thirty and I knew he always read the paper with his morning coffee. “I barely know how to start the day without doing the
Times
crossword,” he'd once told me. “And I can't abide reading the paper online.”

He didn't like to read anything online, didn't even own a Kindle. Maybe he hadn't read the
Gawker
article. Maybe he'd slept in after getting back late from the police station. I didn't see the Volvo in the driveway, but he could have parked it in the barn now that the Peugeot wasn't in there.

I picked up the paper and rang the bell. I could hear it ringing in the house, a melodious tune played on antique brass chimes that Ross had restored when he bought the house. They sounded tinny this morning under the shriek and moan of the wind, as if they were echoing in an
empty house. I lifted the heavy brass door knocker shaped like a man's head—
Marley's ghost
, Ross would joke to newcomers,
here to remind me of my sins.

The joke didn't seem so funny this morning. I waited, listening for the sound of footsteps inside. I wouldn't blame Ross for not wanting to answer his door. I might be an irate student or parent. After a few minutes I tried calling his name, but he didn't appear. Maybe he didn't want to talk to me either.

I walked around to the kitchen door. The top half of the door was glass. I could see a wedge of granite countertop and the kitchen sink, both spotlessly clean and bare. He'd had a housecleaner in since the party. The crystal bowl that usually held his car keys and spare change was on the counter beside the sink. I pressed my face to the glass, trying to make out if a cuff link was there, but I couldn't tell through the thick, faceted crystal what were coins and what might have been a cuff link. I knocked again and called and listened to the echo of my voice die in the wind—and to another sound. A low hum. It sounded mechanical. The refrigerator maybe, or some kind of pump or generator. Knowing Ross he'd have an automated system for sucking moisture out of the basement—and it did seem to be coming from
beneath
me. I could feel the vibration in the soles of my feet.