Death by Dissertation (25 page)

“So what’s up with Miss Ernestine these days?” Rob asked as he poured water into the coffeemaker.

Feeling lightheaded, I walked over to the sink near Rob. What the hell, maybe Ernie was right. He turned to look at me, and I leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.

Startled, he drew away and stared at me. “What got into you?” He grinned. “I don’t care what it is—I like it.” He returned my kiss.

I hugged him, and his arms felt strong and warm around me. We stood that way for a long time, then I pulled back. Our noses touched. My glasses almost slid down onto his nose.

“Can we start over?” I asked softly.

“Please,” he said earnestly. “I promise you this much, at least—I won’t turn away from you again. I wouldn’t hurt you for anything in the world.”

“I’m not a shy, naive sixteen-year-old anymore,” I said. “Neither one of us is the same person we were ten years ago. Duh!” I laughed. “I’m finally beginning to understand what that means. Why don’t we get to know each other again, and see where that leads us? Okay?”

“Okay,” Rob said, and he kissed me again.

I pulled away from him after a brief interlude, hard as it was to do, and he tensed slightly.

“What is it?” he asked, his arms dropping. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s something we have to get out in the open.” I leaned against the sink, watching him. “Yesterday, when I came downstairs with the dictionaries, I saw you take a piece of paper out of the pile, fold it, and put it away in your shirt. What was it? Why did you hide it?”

“Geez,” Rob said, paling slightly.

I waited, afraid of what I might hear.

“I was going to tell you, at some point,” he said, looking me straight in the face, no longer flinching. “I just didn’t want to get into it while Maggie was here. You two are close, but I don’t know her as well as you do, and there are things I don’t feel comfortable discussing around her.”

I nodded. That much I could understand.

“I hid that piece of paper because I had looked at it long enough to realize that it was something about me. And I thought it would be better if I deciphered it on my own.”

“What did it say?” I asked.

The look of pain in his eyes haunted me. At first I thought I had caused it, by forcing the questions on him, but when he spoke, I understood the true source.

“Charlie was in love with me, or so he wrote in his journal.” Rob’s eyes teared up. “There I was, the last two months, like an idiot, and I never realized that his feelings for me were that strong.”

“What would you have done if you had known?” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry.

Rob’s eyes bored into mine. “I would have given him that trite old speech about loving him as a friend but there could never be anything more between us.” I caught some faint hint in his voice.

Or maybe it was just the jealousy (yes, jealousy!) making me overly sensitive. “Was there ever anything more than friendship between you?”

He turned pink. “Geez, Andy, you’re not making this easy.” He sighed. “But we should start as we mean to go on, I suppose. Yes, there once was something more between us. Charlie and I had a brief—a very brief—fling a few years ago in college. I figured out quickly that it wouldn’t work, partly because I had someone else on my mind”—he looked hard at me—“and partly because Charlie was too promiscuous for my taste. Somehow, we stayed friends.”

“And at some point, or maybe all those years ago,” I said softly, “he fell in love with you. Poor guy. He just couldn’t get it right.”

Rob shook his head. “I wish I could have him back for a little while, just to tell him that I did love him, in my way.”

I put my arms around him, and he rested his head on my shoulder. “Geez,” he muttered, hugging me.

“You don’t have anything to feel guilty about,” I said before I kissed him again.

“I guess you’re right.” He hesitated. “Do you want to see the sheet of paper I took?”

With my stomach clenched, I shook my head. “No, I trust you.”
And, please, God, don’t let him betray that trust this time!

Rob smiled his thanks and his joy. A few minutes later, breathless but happy, I left him fixing his breakfast. I floated out the door and to my car, unable to concentrate on my errand. My thoughts kept straying to Rob, and I smiled at myself in the rearview mirror. I was lucky not to have an accident, because my attention certainly wasn’t on driving.

By ten-thirty I was on the fourth floor of the library, heading straight for Dan’s carrel, where he usually spent most mornings. Now that I was getting closer to the actual confrontation, I was able to focus on something besides Rob, and my stomach churned. At this rate, I’d have an ulcer before I was thirty!

Dan was practically a stranger, and here I was, about to ask him some intensely personal questions.

His carrel was empty, but the light was on, so I figured he must be around. As I waited nervously, I scanned the shelves out of habit. Dan was supposed to defend his dissertation soon, though with Whitelock’s death, I wasn’t sure what would happen to the professor’s doctoral students. Dan had to defend; he wouldn’t be considered for the post-doc at Harvard unless he completed the degree. Both Selena Bradbury and Margaret Wilford had also lost their major professor, but, as far as I knew, neither of them had jobs or fellowships lined up for the spring semester. Someone else would have to take Whitelock’s place in order for them to get their degrees. Ruth McClain was the obvious choice.

My eyes roved over Dan’s shelves, seeing that he had the standard works on Anglo-Saxon England checked out to his carrel. One title gave my head a funny feeling as I stared at the spine of the book. The lettering leaped out at me: Anglo- Saxon England. Sir Frank Stenton’s book, the classic, authoritative work on the period.

Dazed, I sank down into Dan’s chair, as that puzzling, elusive fragment of memory suddenly took full shape in my mind.

I had seen the Stenton book on a table just before I spotted Charlie Harper’s body that morning in the grad lounge. I remembered mentally reminding myself to get it from whoever had it checked out at the time. But the sight of Charlie’s body—or, more likely, the bump on my head from hitting the wall—made me temporarily forget about the book.

And now, here it was, in Dan’s carrel. Did this mean that he had been the person in the grad lounge when I discovered Charlie’s body? What was he doing there? Had he simply found the body, just before me, and panicked over being seen with the corpse? Or was there a more sinister explanation? Was he the killer?

That would certainly explain why he shoved me and removed the book from the room. Then I remembered Dan’s phone call after I had returned home from campus that morning. He had called to find out whether I had seen him or somehow figured out that he had been in the room.

“Hey, Andy!” Dan’s voice roused me from my reverie. The Southern greeting still sounded discordant in Dan’s nasal Boston twang.

There he stood, dressed in blue jeans and crisp Oxford-cloth, button-down shirt—long sleeves, no less—grinning down at me.

“Morning, Dan,” I said quietly as I stood up.

“What’s up?” he asked as he perched on the edge of the carrel desk. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company this morning?” He picked up on my mental turmoil and watched me expectantly. As he waited, he rubbed the tip of his right index finger across his leg, as if his finger itched.

“We need to talk about something.”

“Sure.” Dan frowned. “Here?”

“No. Why don’t we go to a study room down at end of the stacks?”

Dan followed me, and we found one of the empty rooms and went in and closed the door.

“So, Andy, what’s up?” he said again, eyeing me nervously.

For the first time, I noticed dark shadows beneath his eyes and faint lines of strain around his mouth. I was going to take a chance. I didn’t have much to lose, so I decided to go for it.

“What were you doing in the grad lounge the morning I found Charlie Harper’s body?”

The question obviously hit home. I had hoped all along that I was wrong about him, but, by his reaction, I knew I was right. The look of shock on his face disappeared almost in the same instant it appeared, but I had seen it.

He laughed uneasily. “What on earth are you talking about?”

I didn’t reply. I stared at him, not smiling, willing him to forgo the attempt at denial. He stared back almost defiantly. Then his resolve apparently wavered. His shoulders slumped, and he put his head between his hands. The fingers clinched in the thick blond hair until the knuckles went white. When he raised his head to look at me again, he looked frightened.

“How did you know?” Dan asked shakily. “And how long have you known?”

I answered the second query first. “Since just a few minutes ago, for sure. Though, I figured part of it out last night. Rob and I discovered that you and Charlie had gone to prep school together.” He gave me a startled glance, and I continued. “Rob and I are wondering why neither you nor Charlie had ever told anybody.” For the time being, I decided to leave Maggie’s name out of it. “It just seemed odd, and the more I thought about it, the more it puzzled me. Then this morning I saw Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England on your shelf.”

Dan’s eyes blinked in reaction, and I continued. “I saw the Stenton book on a table in the grad lounge, just before I found Charlie lying on the couch. While I was staring at his body, someone pushed me and I bumped my head on the wall. But I had forgotten about the book, probably because of the combination of the bump on my head and the shock of finding Charlie’s body.” I paused. “Then, when I saw the book in your carrel this morning, it all came back to me. Now I know why you called me at home that same morning. At the time, I thought it was a little strange, but I never stopped to think how you could have found out so quickly that I’d been the one to discover Charlie. You were trying to find out if I had seen you.”

He started to protest, but I held up my hand to forestall him. “I realize that’s not much evidence to go on,” I said, “but the coincidence was a little too noticeable. So I gambled.”

I almost expected him to get up and storm out of the room. After all, there was no way I could compel him to keep talking to me. I would have to tell Herrera, if I couldn’t talk Dan into talking to the police himself. The lieutenant could look up the library’s records of check-outs on the Stenton book.

“And so you decided that it was I who pushed you.” Dan made this statement in a voice devoid of inflection.

“Yes,” I replied.

He groaned, a miserable sound, then turned to look at me pleadingly. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was so terrified of being discovered with the body that I simply reacted before I thought. I didn’t realize who you were until I pushed you.” Dan’s hands moved restlessly on the table between us.

I felt pity, listening to his misery-laden voice, and said, “You didn’t hurt me.”

“Thank God,” he replied. He gave me a look of calm resolution, as though he had made up his mind to talk to me. Perhaps he had been so worried about being found out, that this was more of a release than anything else.

The timing was right to ask another question. “Why didn’t you and Charlie tell us that you had been in school together?”

Dan sat up straight in his chair and gazed at some indeterminate point. When he spoke, he didn’t answer my question directly. “I knew Charlie for a year, in prep school,” he said. “I was a senior, and he was a freshman. I was having trouble in second-year Latin and was assigned a tutor. That tutor was Charlie. He was such a whiz at languages that, even as a freshman, he was tutoring seniors.” He paused to take a deep breath, then stated baldly, “He seduced me during our first session.”

Well, you could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather! It was so unexpected, I didn’t know how to react.

Once he got started, Dan decided to tell everything. “We had a relationship for the rest of the school year, until I graduated.” He shook his head. “I’ve tried to forget that year, but it never worked. I was infatuated with him. He made me feel like I was the only person in the world who mattered. Even though, God knows the kind of trouble we could have gotten into if anyone had found out. I had already turned eighteen, but he was only fifteen. I had to be crazy.” He looked at me again, and the pain in his eyes made me want to shrink away from him.

“I was a textbook case, the classic situation,” he continued. “My father ran off when I was two, and my mother worked so hard to keep us fed and clothed that she was too tired to give me much attention.” Dan laughed derisively. “I was the scholarship kid who’d do anything to fit in—an easy mark for someone as smooth as Charlie. Even at fifteen, he was years older than I was. I didn’t find out until the next year, when I was in college in New Jersey and Charlie wasn’t answering my letters, that he had been sleeping with another student he was tutoring. I was sure naive!”

Feeling sick at my stomach, I was uncertain what to say. Having to witness the exposure of such painful secrets unnerved me.

“The last time I saw Charlie—before we both wound up in graduate school here—was my graduation day.” Dan’s tone was noncommittal. “I went through hell, getting over the way he treated me. After a long time, I began dating— girls this time.” He laughed again. “One of them was just as much a barracuda as Charlie ever was. I broke up with her when I moved to Houston. I was getting along well until one day, at the beginning of school two years ago, I walked into the grad lounge, and there he was, in a roomful of new students. At first, the beard threw me off, but then I recognized him.”

“That must have been quite a shock,” I offered inadequately.

“Yes, it was. I approached him after everyone left. It took him a minute to place me. I knew then, all over again, just how little I had meant to him.” He said it with only a faint trace of bitterness. “Charlie didn’t seem at all fazed when he realized who I was. He acted like we were old classmates who had gradually lost touch rather than former lovers.”

He turned to look at me, and I met his gaze, trying not to turn red. His intensity embarrassed me.