Third Degree (13 page)

I did today. I practically had bathed in it. “Why, yes, Mark, I do.”

“My grandmother’s favorite scent,” he said proudly. “She was a real lady.”

That did nothing to buoy my spirits; Etheridge was a good ten to fifteen years older than me so that put his grandmother … well, never mind. Suffice it to say, I was not interested in smelling like Grand-mère Etheridge, despite his protestations of her status as a real lady. And here’s the thing: Etheridge isn’t very nice to me usually. So his dropping by and complimenting me on my choice of Chanel No. 5—the scent worn by grandmothers all around the world—was suspect. In the nicest way possible, I asked him to cut to the chase.

“Hey, Mark, what brings you here?”

His fakey-fake smile faded and I was confronted with the true face of Mark: sullen, nonsmiling, and decidedly unsunny. I could only imagine the energy it had taken him to keep up the façade of dedicated and faculty-loving president that he had put forth for the thirty seconds preceding my question about his visit.

“Have you spoken to Father McManus?” he asked.

“No. And as a matter of fact—”

“Yes, he’s gone.”

Thank you, Captain Obvious. Now, the question was, why? Followed by, and where did he go? “Hmmm …” I said, stalling. “Where did he go?”

“He’s taking a sabbatical. He wasn’t sure if he would have time to tell you, so he asked me to communicate his leaving to you. I wanted to get to you as soon as possible. I knew you’d be worried.”

“And how did you know that I knew he was gone? And more important, how did you know that I didn’t already know why?” Yes, there was an easier way to ask those questions, but I’ve found that when trying to get the answers you want, confuse ’em with words. Works every time.

Except for this one. I hadn’t taken into account that my theory was only effective when dealing with lying coeds. Someone of Mark’s superior intellect could find another way to not answer the question and his was to get up and start for the door. “You can talk to Father McManus when he’s ready to communicate with you and you can ask him about what he’ll be doing from this point on.” He stopped midway in his trek and tossed a verbal grenade in my direction. “On his sabbatical, I mean.” Yes, whatever that meant. Priests don’t get sabbaticals. The church elders treat them like Amish children except that the poor men of the cloth don’t get their version of a rumspringa.

I got up quickly and tried to follow Mark, but my skirt got caught on the corner of my open desk drawer and by the time I extricated myself, he was gone. “But why did he leave?” I called after him, hoping for some indication of where Kevin had gone and why. I raced into the common area that the offices opened up onto and tried to catch a glimpse of him. To no one in particular, I muttered, “Who the hell does he think he is? The freaking Green Lantern?” I had never seen a disappearing act like that one.

“Alison! Your mouth. Young lady.” Sister Alphonse—aka the Fonz—couldn’t see very well but apparently she could hear and she knew exactly who I was just by the sound of my voice. She peered at one of the office doors, and convinced she was where she needed to be, rapped loudly with her bony, arthritic knuckles, drawing herself up to her full six feet two inches. “Louise? Are you in there? I’m ready for my blood pressure check.”

“Sister, that’s Coach Burton’s office.” I took her arm and guided her to Sister Louise’s office. And I knew she didn’t want to see Bill Burton, the head of the phys ed department. He wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a blood pressure cuff and a microwave. I deposited her in front of Louise’s office door.

“Three Hail Mary’s, dear, for that flagrant foul,” she called after me. The Fonz is blind but she’s got a good sense of humor. And she played a mean center for the St. Thomas girls’ basketball squad back in 1942, the last time the St. Thomas Blue Jays had a winning season.

I went back into my office and hurled myself into my desk chair, rapidly checking my e-mail to see if I had any messages from Kevin. Not a one. Then I checked my local paper online, where a huge headline filled the page: “ ‘I’m Innocent!’ DPW Chief Claims.” A picture of a rather pathetic-looking George Miller, propped up by his weirdo wife, Ginny, accompanied the story.

You might be innocent, George, I thought, but something tells me that wife of yours isn’t by a long shot.

I was eating a Lean Cuisine, rather indelicately, when Crawford called that night.

“So I guess you’ve seen the paper?” he asked.

“You mean George Miller protesting his innocence?” I tried to lick some sauce off my fork before it dribbled onto my T-shirt. Too late. “What did we expect him to do? I don’t know how he’s going to get out of this one. He’s got me and Greg as witnesses. We saw him punch Wilmott in the head. I’m sure he didn’t mean to kill him, but he did. Plain and simple.”

Crawford was silent for a moment. “So you’re back on that? You know you’re going to have to testify, right?”

I changed the subject. “I got pushed into the river last night.”

Nothing I could tell him would surprise him but this definitely piqued his interest. “By whom?”

“By Ginny Miller.” I explained the whole story, starting with the note instructing me to “get up again” and ending with my impromptu swim.

“You know you were trespassing?”

I guess I was. But that didn’t matter. “Doesn’t it make you wonder what she was doing on the boat?”

“Sure. But you were trespassing. You were on someone else’s property. You can’t do that.”

“Neither can she,” I said. “Don’t forget that.”

“I’m more concerned about you. I couldn’t care less about Ginny Miller. If you get jammed up with Hardin and Madden again, though, it’s not going to be good.” He paused. “And I won’t be able to help you because they’re not that fond of me, either. Guilt by association.”

“I. Know.” I forked a little more lemongrass chicken, some of which was burning hot and some of which was ice-cold, into my mouth. Damn that cheap microwave. “And I know the definition of ‘trespassing.’ ”

An audible sigh let me know that we were heading into an area where the wrong word would start a fight. Crawford and I don’t generally argue but the proposal had become the elephant in the room, and I suspected that any movement in that direction, conversationally, would bring one on. I didn’t have to wait long to find out if he was going to bring it up. “So are you ever going to give me an answer?”

I played dumb, something I do quite well after years of practice. “About what?”

“Don’t play dumb, Alison.”

“Did I mention that I got pushed in the river yesterday?” His silence on the other end of the phone was troubling. I kept chattering so that I wouldn’t have to listen to dead air. “I really don’t want to have this conversation on the phone … I’ve had a lot going on and we really haven’t had time—”

“We’ve had all the time in the world. You don’t want to have this conversation, ever. That tells me a lot.”

I sputtered a little bit, trying to figure out a way to disagree with him, but when I thought about it, he was right. I didn’t want to talk about it. “There’s a lot to discuss, Crawford. For one, where would we live?”

“I don’t care.”

“I think you do. Do you really want to move to the suburbs after you’ve lived in the city all of your life?”

“We could move by St. Thomas. It’s half suburb, half city. We’d both be happy.”

Wow, he’d really thought this through. That was a mighty fine solution but I was loath to agree. “Well, maybe you would, but my life is here. I have friends …”

“Who?”

“Well, Jane, for one. And …” I couldn’t come up with another one who lived in the area. “Greg?”

Again, the pregnant pause.

“Really, do we have to talk about this right now?” I asked, bending over at the waist to restore my equilibrium. I had felt fine all day; all of the sudden, the taste of the Lean Cuisine clogged my throat and I stood up and flung the half-full container into the sink. “I don’t feel very well.”

“You never feel well when we start talking about this,” he said softly. His next sentence hit me like a punch to the solar plexus. “Maybe we should take a break.”

“From talking about this?” I asked hopefully.

“No. From everything,” he said. His voice was barely a whisper. “I’m not Ray, Alison.”

“I know you’re not!” I said, feeling the tears spring to my eyes. “I just need time. There hasn’t been enough time.”

“There’s been plenty of time,” he said. I heard the usual commotion of the Fiftieth Precinct detective squad in the background. “I have to go.”

And then he was gone. And I was alone in my kitchen with my beautiful dog and a half-empty container of lemongrass chicken.

Curious.

I dialed his cell phone again, expecting to be confronted with his full voice-mail box, and was surprised when he answered. So surprised, in fact, that I began to choke on the muffin I had bought in the cafeteria, a piece of which I had just shoved in my mouth.

“Alison?”

I started coughing, spewing muffin crumbs all over my desk and my computer monitor. I finally managed to swallow the crumbs, washing them down with the remainder of my cup of coffee. “Kevin?”

“Alison?”

“Where the hell are you?” I asked, rather indelicately, given that I was speaking to a man of the cloth.

“I’d rather not say.”

“And why did you leave?”

“Again, I’d rather not tell you.”

“Okay,” I said, seeing that I wasn’t going to get anywhere. “Are you all right?”

He sighed. “I guess.”

“Does your family know where you are?”

“They know I’m fine and that’s all they need to know right now. You spoke to Jack, right?”

“Briefly.” I didn’t understand all this cloak-and-dagger stuff but he obviously didn’t want to talk about it so I wasn’t going there. I had already picked the scab off the wedding conversation wound with Crawford and I wasn’t going to take any chances that I had blundered into something distasteful again. “Just tell me that you’ll be back?”

“I don’t know if I will. I can’t say any more.” He sounded bereft. “Listen, I have to go. I’ll call you soon. I promise.” And then he was gone. The men in my life were hanging up on me with regularity. Time to find some new guy friends.

I continued my presemester work with the candidates for Freshman Comp, along with reviewing some papers for the senior seminar course that I’d be teaching this and the following semester. Students had been asked to choose an author to study in depth and I was relieved to see F. Scott Fitzgerald and Kurt Vonnegut among the choices of the ten students who were taking the course this semester. I wasn’t so happy to see a few contemporary authors whose books were blockbuster sellers but whom I considered a little cut-rate, and I made a mental note to talk to the students on the list whose authors didn’t pass muster. I’m all for the “Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a baby” thing but St. Thomas isn’t, so it looked like Dan Brown would be off the list. I looked out my window and toward the cemetery that rested on the hill beyond the access road behind the building and contemplated the various goings-on in my life.

I was being harassed to change something in my life by a nameless, faceless letter writer who thought I either suffered from erectile dysfunction or some other peccadillo that was getting in the way of my emotional health.

A woman named Ginny Miller had become a major thorn in my side.

One of my best friends had gone missing and was being extremely coy about where he was and why.

And oh, yeah, the topper? My boyfriend, the one who adored me and wanted to spend the rest of his life with me, thought we should spend some time apart.

I considered all of this as I stared out the window at the various tombstones that dotted the hillside behind my office. And I felt sick to my stomach most of the time. When I added all of it up, I became pretty depressed.

I walked into the main office area and approached Dottie’s desk. She was engrossed in the
Daily News
’s Jumble and was trying to unlock the word that was comprised of the letters
v-i-e-s-o-l
.

“Olives,” I said. Because if it’s one thing I know, it’s how to spell “olives.”

She looked up at me, not aware that I had been standing there figuring out her Jumble. “Thanks,” she said, and folded the paper up, sticking it into a half-open drawer. She eyed me suspiciously. “Can I help you?”

I picked up our conversation from a few days prior as if there had been no interruption. “So if Charlie asked you to marry him, you are absolutely, positively sure that you would say yes? How can you be so sure?”

Dottie has been wronged by more than one man and her attennae went up. “Why? What do you know?”

“I don’t know anything,” I assured her. “I just want to know how you can be so sure that you want to spend the rest of your life with him. Doesn’t he annoy you or get on your nerves? And haven’t you lived alone for a long time?”

“Honey,” she said, waving a hand dismissively, “I’ve lived alone so long that anything that man could do to annoy me or get on my nerves would be a welcome change of pace.”

I chewed on that for a minute. “Yeah, but what if you do get married and then you decide that you made a mistake? That it wasn’t the right decision?”

“Aren’t you divorced?”

“Well, I was before he ended up dead. I’m not entirely sure what that makes me.”

There was no question in her mind. “That makes you divorced.”

I nodded. “I guess you’re right.” She didn’t respond. “So what are you saying?”

“If you made a mistake, you divorce his ass. But if you love him, nothing he does will annoy you enough to make you think you made a mistake.”

I went back into my office no closer to a decision. But I did know that things had taken a very weird turn if I was using Dottie as my barometer for good decision making.

I left my office around five with the intention of driving straight to the restaurant where I was to meet Jane, an ice-cold martini in my immediate future. I arrived at Chez Madeleine with twenty minutes to spare and took a seat at the small, granite-topped bar. Two tables in the restaurant were filled with early birds, but the bar was empty, much to my relief. I didn’t feel like making small talk with anyone, let alone the bartender, a young guy who really took his role as liquor-serving therapist seriously.

“You look like a lady who could use a drink,” he said with a sad smile, placing a napkin in front of me. “Let me guess. Chardonnay? Something oaky with a hint of blackberries?”

“Ketel One martini, three olives. Up.”

He gave me a winning smile. “That was my second guess.” Before turning to mix my drink, he looked up at the television placed over the bar, tuned to our local Westchester news station. They were doing a story on Carter Wilmott. “Hey, did you hear about that poor guy who dropped dead in Beans, Beans?”

“No,” I said, playing dumb for the second time in as many days. “I’ve been out of town. What happened?” I always love to hear other people’s take on a story in which I’ve been involved. It’s a weird combination of rubbernecking and gossipmongering, but interesting nonetheless.

He leaned in conspiratorially. “Got into a fight with the head of the DPW and was killed.”

“Really?”

“Really.” He pulled a martini glass off a rack above him and filled it with ice. “Apparently, the DPW guy really knocked the stuffing out of poor Wilmott. Killed him.”

“Wow,” I said. “How awful. Were there any witnesses?”

“Well, apparently, there was the guy who owns Beans, Beans. You know. The big hippie guy?” he asked, shaking the cocktail shaker within an inch of its stainless steel life. “And some college professor who lives in town but nobody seems to know anything about except that her ex-husband was murdered last year.”

I shrugged. “Can’t imagine who that might be.”

He looked up at the ceiling, trying to remember something. “Bertelsman? Bergerson?” He put the cocktail shaker down and leaned his hands on the counter. “Oh, it will come to me.” My mouth was watering, waiting for my drink. Open the damn shaker! I wanted to scream at him. “Anyway, nobody’s seen her since it happened.”

“Sounds like she doesn’t want to be seen.”

He finally poured my drink into the martini glass and placed it in front of me. Despite being extremely chatty, he clearly knew what he was doing in the drink department. The first sip went down very easily and helped take the edge off just slightly. The bartender watched me with interest, holding out his hand after I had put the drink back on the napkin. “My name is Jamie.”

I took his hand. “Maxine.” If ever there was a time to channel Max, now was it.

“Hi, Maxine,” he said warmly, resting his elbows on the bar. “So, having a bad day, Maxine?”

“The worst.”

“Does it have something to do with the black eye?” he asked. “Or is it man trouble?”

“You could say that.” As a matter of fact, you could. I saw a guy get dead, my priest has gone missing, and my boyfriend thinks I’m a commitmentphobe. If that wasn’t man trouble, I didn’t know what was.

“Well, Maxine, I might be able to help in that department.”

I took in the bartender’s young, handsome face, glossy black hair, and long eyelashes and decided that there might not be anything wrong with being single again. But then when I noticed just how much he resembled a younger and more filled-out Crawford and realized that he probably was just above the legal age, I hovered between devastated and horrified. I realized that I couldn’t carry on this charade of being a hip chinchilla or whatever they called women my age who dated younger men. I looked nervously toward the door of the restaurant, hoping against hope that Jane would be early and would rescue me from this most uncomfortable situation.

“Well?” he asked, giving me a dazzling smile.

“Well, I don’t need as much help as you might think,” I said, laughing nervously. “As a matter of fact,” I said, spotting Jane ambling toward the front door, “I’m not sure my girlfriend would approve.”

He looked at me quizzically.

“Would you have my drink brought to my table?” I asked, getting up from my bar stool. I wrapped Jane in a big hug and took her hand. “You’re early!” I said.

Jane was shocked by my public display of affection and gently extricated herself from my grasp. “I am. I got out of work a little early tonight.”

“I’ll explain everything when we sit down,” I whispered in her ear as we followed the hostess to our table, tucked into the front corner of the restaurant and thankfully out of view of the bartender. We sat down and she ordered the oaky chardonnay with the hint of blackberries after my martini had been delivered to the table.

She studied her menu quickly and snapped it shut. “Try the scallops if you like seafood.” She unfolded her napkin and put it on her lap. “So what’s going on?”

“Well, I’m your significant other if the bartender asks, and Crawford and I have broken up.” I had to spit the whole thing out; if I had spent more time thinking about how to phrase it, I might have broken down and become the mess that I had been the entire night before.

She didn’t know where to start. “You? Me? Crawford?” She shook her head, her hair coming loose from the elastic band holding her blond hair in a low ponytail. “Start over.”

I started with the Ring Pop, because that was the most logical place to start, and ended with Crawford hanging up on me. “Then, the bartender started hitting on me,” I said, holding up a hand when I saw the incredulous look on her face. “I know. Hard to believe, but true. So I told him you were my partner just to save face.”

“His or yours?”

I shrugged. “No clue. His, I guess.”

Jane swallowed the rest of her chardonnay in one gulp and motioned for another one. “Well, that’s quite a story. And that’s not even taking into consideration your run-in with Carter and that guy from the DPW.”

I touched my black eye instinctively.

“Tough couple of days.”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“So what do you want to do about Crawford?”

“Marry him, I guess.”

She smiled. “Doesn’t sound too convincing.”

I put my head on the table, careful to avoid the bread basket. “I’m just not sure.”

Jane put her hand over mine. “Listen, I had the great, good-looking husband, the nice house in Larchmont, the two great kids, and the dog and the picket fence, and it just wasn’t right.”

“Yeah, but you’re gay.”