The Englishman (41 page)

I haven’t often seen him in a chatty mood, and as the muscles in my stomach relax, I wish I could just snuggle up to him and chat the evening away. It’s grown chilly and the sun is beginning to set.

“My taste doesn’t much run to pomp and circumstance. Mind you, Ardrossan’s foolish, fairy-tale Gothicism is a much less daunting backdrop to processions and trumpets and flags than the neo-classical grandeur of the Morningside Heights campus. That always gave me the creeps, to be honest.”

He gazes at me as if he wanted to comment on that, then he offers me a cheese cracker.

“Two different people, then,” he says when I have told him about the new graffiti. “Corvin, or maybe that Harrison girl, threw fish at your door, and someone else writes graffiti about Natalie Greco and Nick Hornberger.”

“But this is about first-time sex, don’t you agree?” I unfold the piece of paper on which I copied the verse.

“Without a doubt.”

“It isn’t really, of course. It’s from the Bible, like the other one. Revelation, this time. Don’t know whether that is significant. Anyway, so much for your theory that Natalie herself is the graffiti artist. She would hardly produce such a labor of love for a man she has reported for sexual assault, and apparently her mother and her step-brother testify to the fact that she was at home with them all day.”

“It was a good theory.” He shrugs and offers me another cracker.

“Thanks. By the way, I saw Natalie’s stepfather at the opening ceremony of the new institute. His bank is one of the sponsors. He shook Hornberger’s hand! Can you imagine that?”

“Wine?” Giles isn’t interested in Nick Hornberger. He is offering me his glass, and I can see that he is shy about it, which in turn rouses my maternal instincts. Amongst others. If I kissed him now, the tangy aroma of the wine would be on both our lips and tongues.

“Oh, and the other mind-blowingly surreal thing that happened today: I caught Hornberger going through my desk! No idea where he got the key to my office, but he has one. So it probably wasn’t Corvin who broke in before, but Hornberger!”

Now he
is
interested. More, even, than in coming on to me.

“Did he threaten you?”

“Um…obliquely, I’d say. I didn’t know what he was looking for, still don’t, but he didn’t believe that. But one of the alums at the reception, I think she’s a professor at Tulane, told us that he raped someone, a friend of hers, when he was a student here.
Allegedly
raped someone,” I correct myself.

Giles gazes at me, waiting. His eyes are very bright and warm.

“What?
What?”
I nudge him.

“Do you really not know what he was looking for?”

“No! Something to do with the allegations, but—”

“I thought we’d found it. Tessa found it. And it
was
in your office.”

All I can remember when I think back to that day is Giles in his white shirt, and his shirtsleeves, and how he stumbled when—

“The folder. God! I’m thicker than shit in the neck of a bottle!”

Giles laughs. “Yes—
the folder
. The file that went missing when Nick was hired. DeGroot was held responsible, because he was Dean of Studies back in the seventies and had done his utmost to sweep the case under the rug. It explains why Nick was dead against the idea of a Homecoming reception at the English department. But Ruffin and a few others carried it; they may not even know why Homecoming is Nick’s most hated event in the calendar. Too many ghosts!”

“And the allegation? Did he really rape the girl back then?”

Giles shrugs and offers me the glass again; I shake my head.

“No idea,” he says. “His case isn’t in the file. Corvin must have taken it out, maybe taken it home. If you want to know what I think—”

“I do.”

“I think he did it. Then and now.”

“You have reason to think badly of him.”

“Badly, but not the worst. He didn’t hold a knife to Amanda’s throat.” Giles’s jaw clenches and relaxes. “Hornberger gets off on bending people to his will, but brute force isn’t the kind of triumph he wants. I’m sure he calls it seduction, but he messes with their heads. It’s part of his fun that the women afterward hate themselves even more than they hate him. I’m sure he hates women.”

He inhales as if he had a load of boulders on his chest. Who knows what scenes were played in the
affaire
Saunders-Hornberger-Cleveland. If Giles was a friend of mine, I would advise him not to tell his colleagues about Amanda and Hornberger. What purpose could it possibly serve? Dancey has the chair between his teeth now and won’t let go. Giles can take over from him when Horny Horn has had his horns clipped.

“Not
Hornberger!”
I exclaim, jumping with the sudden recollection. “Giles, where’s the file?”

“Why? What is it?”

“You do know he wasn’t called Hornberger then, don’t you?”

He stares at me, very still. Giles becomes very still when he is startled. “What
can
you mean?”

“He took his wife’s name when he married! He was called Eagleson! Is there a Nicholas Eagleson’s case in the file?”

Giles is still staring, thinking fast. “I only checked for Hornberger.”

“Well, come on then!” I draw him up by his hand—surely in an emergency, innocent physical contact is allowed?—and to my surprise he holds on to it.

“I don’t want you involved in this,” he says.

“I
am
involved! He rifled my desk for it!”

“That’s incidental.”

“Giles!” I fairly shout at him, all excited and impatient to have at least one of my Ardrossan mysteries solved.

“It’s no use yelling at me. Do what you like when you’re tenured, but for the next five years you must be as untainted by scandal as a newly hatched spring chicken!”

The implications of this harsh statement hit me as if one of the stone statues had been knocked against the back of my head. But this is a piece of his mind that I will have to chew in private, and not in the middle of the garden, in the middle of campus, still holding hands with him, for Chrissakes!

“Be that as it may,” I say, pulling my hand from his clasp. “I must know about the file! Is it in your office?”

“No,” he says mechanically, but he is in as much of a hurry to get back to the Observatory as I am.

“Hey, sir, you’re going in the wrong direction!” some students shout across at us. We are swimming against the current because everyone is now streaming toward the stadium for the evening game.

I am almost running now to keep up with his long strides.

“Anna, go and powder your nose!” he says curtly when we have reached the first-floor hallway.

“Unfair!”

“Boo-hoo. That’s tenure track for you.” He pushes his hands into his jacket pockets for his keys. “Off you run. Will you be at the—and you needn’t make Bambi eyes at me,
Miss
Lieberman! I’m immune to ’em! Well,” he corrects himself punctiliously, “maybe that’s overstating the case. But I don’t hold with corrupting vulnerable young women, and I won’t let you read that file. Stop that!”

He turns away from me, and I can see his ears have gone red. I only did as he said—opened my eyes at him, fluttered my lashes, pushed out my lower lip, and pouted.

“What if I sit across the room from you, and you just tell me whether it’s there or not?”

This makes him laugh, but he is still barring my way into his office. Just as well that the hallway is empty and nobody can see our ridiculous mating dance. Non-mating dance.

“What if I sit across the room, with my face against the wall and my eyes closed?”

“Anna—”

“If I touch you, you can scream,” I challenge him quietly.

Our knees almost do touch as we sit at his low sofa table perusing the file that records the alleged sexual assault of one Nicholas George Eagleson upon one Mary-Lou Tandy. The scenario, it seems, was humdrum. A dorm party, drugs and alcohol, the assumption of implied assent on the part of the male. What makes this worth breaking into offices for is the eye-witness and ear-witness reports that—if genuine and accurate—seem to leave no doubt that Mary-Lou resisted him and that she had severe bruising on her arms and the inside of her thighs afterward.

“‘They always say no. They have to, because of their reputation. If they let you feel them up, it is okay to go ahead anyway.’”

Giles looks up from the sheet he is reading, the vertical groove between his eyebrows deep and angry. “What?”

“Said one Tommy-Lee Konig, twenty-one, student of geography.”

“It’s incredible that this was kept inside the college.” He surveys the evidence. “It’s as conclusive as it can be, short of a video film. He would almost certainly have been convicted.”

“
Would
be
convicted, you mean,” I correct him. “This would still stand up in court, in this state. It wouldn’t in New York, you see.”

Giles sneers in triumph, and for a moment I can see how much he truly hates Hornberger.

“‘And that’s what I love about the Soooouth…’”

Chapter 23

T
HIS
I
S
N
OT
T
HE
F
IRST
end-of-grading-period party that I have been at, and maybe it is just me, but it seems to me that we have all gone a little crazy.

“No shoptalk!” Erin declares when we arrive. “Whoever mentions the Observatory, or essays, or students—”

“Studnets!” Eugenia interrupts her. “Nine times out of ten when I type the word, it comes out as ‘studnet’! I just call them ‘studnets’ now.”

“
Nomen est omen
,” I say darkly. “Very appropriate, under the circumst—”

“SHOP!” Tim shouts. “SHOT!”

“
What?”

“Down in one, please, Ms. Lieberman.
Doctor
, I should say, a.k.a. Anna-Banana, but don’t call her that, she doesn’t like it!” Tim, already a little ahead of the rest of us, hands me a small glass full of some colorless liquid. Egged on by the others, I shrug and down it without asking what it is. It is straight vodka.

“Fix your hair in bunches with little butterfly clips, and you don’t look old enough to drink that.” Vern, Eugenia’s husband, looks into my eyes just a second too long. I am tired of jokes about how young I look, so I smile and say nothing.

“You are the baby here, aren’t you, Anna?” Erin is our kind hostess, so again I smile and say nothing. But Erin doesn’t allow people to slip from her grasp. “How old are you? Absurdly young, I remember that from your application.”

“Only at heart,” I say wryly.

“Oh, come on—have you crossed the Rubicon yet?” Kirsten Thomason leans back and fluffs up her hair. “That was my worst, so far, thirty.”

“Almost.”

“Almost thirty? What does that mean? This year? Next year?”

“Tomorrow.”

This, predictably, creates something of a hullaballoo. “It’s your birthday tomorrow, and you’ll be thirty? Why didn’t you
say?”
Erin is almost angry with me.

“Because it isn’t important! Really, guys, don’t…don’t make a big thing of it. This is nice, isn’t it? End of grading, yay!”

“SHOP!” Tim shouts. “SHOT! Down in one, please, Thirty-Years-Old-in-Three-Hours-and-Seventeen-Minutes!”

The evening progresses from there.

At midnight they congratulate me and sing for me, and the women hug me, and the men awkwardly shake my hand, all except Giles.

“Did you get any exciting birthday presents?” Eugenia asks. “I would have gotten you something, Anna, if I’d known!”

“I bought myself a seat on a plane. That’s my birthday present to myself!”

“Aaah! Where to?”

“London.”

“Of course, London! Nauseating anglophile,” Tim adds for good measure.

“Yes, I am,” I admit sadly. “I know I am.”

“Maybe one of these days Anna won’t come back from England,” Erin jokes. Almost.

“No, no, I’m here. I’m back,” I assure her, or myself, or my mom. I’ve had far too much vodka.

“Would you have stayed for a man?” she keeps needling me. “It usually hinges on that, doesn’t it?”

This question goes too far, and the others are beginning to be embarrassed by Erin’s insistence.

“I’m guessing that when Anna did her MA at Cambridge, she met more than one bona fide English toff or knob who would have kept her there. In England.” I’m surprised that Giles joins Erin in baiting me. Or maybe I’m just too drunk to decode his signals accurately.