What Strange Creatures (7 page)

“Yeah. We didn’t have a chance.”

Kyle drew a long breath into his nostrils. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Margery”—I involuntarily lowered my voice to a whisper—“Lipinski.”

“Uh-huh. I got that.”

Kyle raised both eyebrows, waiting for more. But I had nothing.

“Are you working for Donald Wallace or something?” he asked.

“What?”

“I really don’t appreciate you coming here. I have a real job here. I know you all were harassing Kim, and maybe she deserved it for being a pain in the ass. But I don’t have anything to do with their little project. I wouldn’t dream of messing with Donald Wallace. The less I have to think about him, the better. I’m not even
voting
in this damn election. Have you been stalking Missy, too?”

“I’m not working for Donald Wallace,” I managed to say.

“Whatever you’re doing, you’re not being honest with me. And I’d like you to leave.”

I’d like you to leave.
I’d never heard these words before. They froze me. They seemed words for a different sort of woman from myself. A raving maniac of a woman, perhaps. What would Marge do?

Another customer walked in—a bone-thin man in a loose necktie, gray dress pants sagging off his nonexistent behind, and thick, round glasses. He gazed around the store with buggy little neck movements, then stared at Kyle expectantly.

“With you in a moment, Mr. Bowles,” Kyle said to him.

“I’m taking care of her dog, you see?” I said softly, feebly. I realized then that I should’ve
started
with Wayne. “I’ve got Wayne at my house, and I’m just wondering when she’s going to pick him up.”

Kyle wasn’t listening. It was too late. I’d already botched this in a big way.

“If you’re not here about a carpet, ma’am, I think you need to leave.”

“Okay,” I mumbled, feeling strangely shamed—perhaps due to the presence of a genuine carpet consumer.

Turning toward the door, I felt all their eyes on me: Kyle’s, the desk girl’s, Mr. Bowles’s. I wasn’t exactly sure what had just happened, but I didn’t know how else to deal with the situation except to end it.

I pushed through the glass doors and hit the
UNLOCK
button on my car keys. After I’d put on my seat belt and started the car, I stole a glance into the store. Even through the glare of the glass, I could still see Kyle’s little death-ray eyes shooting hostility at me.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Kyle Spicer. He’d seemed a relatively reasonable guy—if a bit greasy—until I’d mentioned Donald Wallace. When he started to doubt I was telling the truth, his face had changed. In the moment I’d interpreted it as anger. Now that I thought about it, though, it seemed like it could have been fear.

M
ost of Thompson University’s young academic stars made me want to puke, but Zach Wagner, admittedly, did not. The extent of his success was potentially sickening, but he was so friendly and down to earth that directing snide jealousy at him would just feel gratuitous.

Before he started teaching at Thompson, he’d won a few journalism awards. More recently—about two years ago—he published a well-received book. It was nonfiction, partly about his own brief experience in a juvenile-detention center as a teenager, partly about the juvenile-justice system in general. It was nominated for the National Book Award and even inched onto the
New York Times
bestseller list for a few weeks. Rumor had it he’d gotten a pretty big advance on his next book, but I was pretty far down the department food chain, so I wasn’t ever sure of the accuracy of information once it reached me.

I’d heard parts of Zach’s first book before it was even published—a few years ago, at a small department reading. The part he read—basically the story of how he got into the system in the first place—was pretty amazing. His mother’s house was about to be foreclosed upon. As a fifteen-year-old, Zach had gotten the brilliant idea that if he staged an “accidental” fire, his mother could collect the insurance money. My favorite passage described the night he got the idea. He and his mother were watching the news—watching the Branch Davidian compound in Waco burn down while she polished her bowling ball and he ate pineapple chunks out of a can. Something clicked in his head when his mother said, “I’ll bet they’ll never really know what happened in that place.” A week later he came home from school and found his old cat dead on the kitchen floor—probably of heart failure. Knowing a tiny bit about how insurance worked, and knowing that a dead cat in the rubble would make a fire seem a lot more believable—and probably grief-stricken over his childhood pet—he decided it was now or never, found some matches, lit a couple, tossed them on his upstairs bed, and then went outside to watch the house burn down. A neighbor called the fire department when she smelled the smoke. Two upstairs rooms were badly damaged, but the fire never reached the kitchen or the dead cat.

As odd as it might sound, he had the whole room laughing at this passage. The book was funny and humble and humbling and sad. Zach spent six months in juvenile detention and the next couple of years afterward mending his relationship with his mother.

I was still married when his book came out, so I didn’t really notice then that Zach was attractive. But he is. Not
hot,
mind you. Cute. Softer than what I normally go for, but definitely appealing. He has pink cheeks, fine sandy hair slightly overgrown, and sandy eyebrows to match. And I appreciate his gently framed glasses in the grad-school sea of de rigueur hipper-than-thou horn-rims. Usually he wears these chunky, cozy sweaters that make you want to double-palm a chai and tell him all of your most sensitive secrets.

Zach’s relative lack of academic trimmings made him more appealing to me as my dissertation dragged. But he caught my eye roughly around the same time he was nominated for the National Book Award. Of course I was too intimidated to talk to him after that.

Besides, it was also around that time that a stylish brunette started showing up for him at the end of his office hours. She resembled Kate Middleton. I promptly stopped eyeing him, as I certainly can’t compete with a Kate Middleton.

Now I tried to puff myself up with fake confidence as I opened the heavy door of Phillips Hall. Zach was nice. At least I’d heard he was nice. Jeff had liked him a lot. Surely, then, he’d want to help—even if he was the pride of the English department and I was its shame.

As I entered the building, I could hear the Cloud-Nines practicing their signature tune on the first floor. I quickened my pace, hurrying for the stairs. Collegiate a cappella makes my brain cells ache.

I headed up to the English department’s office on the second floor. The Phillips Hall smell entered my nose, filling me with a familiar dread. The building always smelled smoky-sweet—as if someone were burning a bouquet of lilies. I never could figure out where the scent came from. No one else ever seemed to notice it. Maybe it was the smell of my own incompetence.

I’d looked up Zach’s current office hours online so I’d be sure to catch him. When I opened the door to the department lounge, he was standing there in front of the mailboxes. I watched him flip through a stack of papers, sigh, then look through them again. Today’s sweater was navy blue with a chartreuse Charlie Brown zigzag across the front.

The floorboard under me creaked as I shifted my weight.

“Theresa,” Zach said, looking up and pointing at me with uncertain recognition.

“Yeah,” I said, surprised. “Yes. Hi.”

“Are you looking for Dr. Clemson? Because he’s not—”

“No. Uh. Not today. I came to talk to you, actually.”

“Me?”

“Yes. About a friend. Kim Graber.”

Zach pressed his glasses into the bridge of his nose. “Oh. Kim. Really?”

“She’s kind of left me in an awkward situation. She seems to have disappeared, and—”

“Disappeared?” Zach looked startled.

Why didn’t you start with the puggle?
I berated myself.

“Well, see, she left me with her—”

“Listen. Why don’t you come in?” Zach interrupted me and opened the door to his office—one of four choicest offices right off the lounge. Then he offered me a chair. “Do you want a glass of water or anything?”

“I’m okay.”

“How about a cookie?” Zach extended a paper plate to me, piled with flat, crispy-looking cookies. “I forgot the baking soda, apparently, but they still taste pretty good.”

I wouldn’t have been tempted to take one, but since he mentioned he’d made them, I felt obliged. Zach lifted a wide-mouthed metal water bottle off his desk and unscrewed the top. When he gulped from it, water splashed out the sides and down the front of his sweater.

“Shit,” he said. “I can’t get used to these things. I switched from plastic because of BPA.”

I tried to look sympathetic, since I couldn’t think of a good response. I don’t worry about BPA and such. I’m in my mid-thirties, so I figure I’m already doomed, as far as those things go.

“How do you know Kim?” Zach asked me. “You say she’s
missing
? Have the police been notified? Is this serious?”

“Well . . . I’m not sure yet. But she’s a friend of a friend. And she left her dog with me when she went away. This may sound like a small thing, but I’d like to be relieved of dog-sitting duty.”

“Huh. That’s
not
a small thing, actually. And I wouldn’t have guessed she’d have a dog.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. A dog requires a certain amount of . . . what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe she seems more like a cat person. Maybe that’s all.” Zach’s face began to redden over his fleshy white cheeks—endearingly, like a Campbell’s-soup kid. “A friend of a friend, you said?”

“The friend was my brother, actually.” Zach’s bashfulness made me want to be sincere. “Her boyfriend.”

“Jeff is your brother?”

“Jeff Battle,” I said.

“I know. I just . . . never knew
your
last name. Everyone around here just calls you . . .” Zach hesitated. “Theresa.”

He’d nearly said
St. Theresa,
the poor fool. I’d of course heard it before. Nicknaming was a gentle form of disowning in the department. The other dissertation lifer—the
Robinson Crusoe
guy—they called Gilligan.

“Yeah, my last name’s Battle. And Jeff’s my brother.”

“Jeff was in my night class last year.”

“I know. I encouraged him to take it.”

“I liked Jeff a lot. His pieces for my class were very entertaining.”

“His pieces?”

“His responses to my prompts.”

“Oh.” I shrugged. “My brother never lets me read anything he writes.”

“Does he write much? Now that the class is over?”

“I don’t know. He usually has a few creative projects going at once. I’m never clear what they are at any one time.”

I wasn’t sure how true this was anymore. But I wished it still was.

“Well. It wasn’t till Kim came to me a few weeks ago that I realized she was dating Jeff. Not that it was any of my business. But she mentioned she’d met her boyfriend in my class. I think that may be a first for me. First match made in my class.”

“You never know.”

“You never do.” Zach pressed the bridge of his glasses again.

I thought I saw him looking at the cookie in my hand, so I took a bite.

“Don’t finish it if you don’t like it. I made them for one of my classes. I usually do something like this when I’ve given them a lot of work. So they won’t hate me. This week I gave them three nights to read
Sister Carrie.
Did you ever do stuff like that when you were teaching?”

Was he kidding? My students were lucky if I remembered their names and brushed my teeth.

“No,” I answered.

“Good for you. It’s probably unprofessional. Bringing food into the classroom. You know, I had a professor when I was an undergrad. A real dick. He rarely gave anything but C-pluses and made people cry during their presentations, and everyone hated him. But at the end of the semester, you know what he did?”

“What?”

“He had us all to his
house
on the last day of class. For a
pizza party.
I mean, we all had to go because he was a stickler about attendance. We all had to go to his creepy house and have beer and pizza with his creepy wife because he had decided he wanted to see what it felt like to be one of those ‘likable’ teachers. I would’ve had way more respect for him if he’d simply embraced being the dick that he was. Sometimes I think I need to remember that.”

“Cookies with no baking soda are a good compromise,” I offered. “Between embracing your dickishness and being a pizza-party professor.”

Zach frowned at the paper plate. “Nobody ate them.”

“So, uh . . .” I looked at the cookie in my hands, then took another bite. “Kim came to you. . . .”

“Yes. For help on a personal project. Did she tell you about it?”

I paused to finish chomping on the cookie. “Sort of.”

Zach scratched his head. “Okay. What did she tell you?”

I knew I needed to do this delicately. I didn’t want Zach suddenly blowing a gasket, like Kyle.

“That it had something to do with the election,” I said. “I mean, something to do with Donald Wallace.”

“Yes. She was putting together a video about some of his cases. Cases he prosecuted in which she thought there might’ve been wrongful convictions. Some kind of YouTube thing—like a homemade campaign ad.”

REALLY, now,
I thought. That wasn’t what I was anticipating at all. That sounded rather ambitious and academic for Kim. I’d expected something more in the category of catching Wallace at a strip club.

“Are there really so many wrongful convictions?” I asked, doing my best to hide my surprise. “On Wallace’s record?”

“I don’t think so. But
she
thought so. She had this idea in her head that there were.”

“And this idea came from where, exactly?”

Zach took another drink from his BPA-free water bottle, this time very carefully. A tiny, deliberate sip.

“Did she tell you anything about the Jenny Spicer case?” he asked.