Sticks and Stones Page 11

  “Right now they probably don’t know you’re missing, but we could head over there anyway.”

  He turned toward my diminutive host. “Thanks again, Father. It was good to run into you.”

  I shook hands with Father Masson, who told me to give my best to Dr. Tarrant before ushering us out. Seems he was a subscriber to HYSTERICAL and a friend of Grace’s. I swear someday I’ll learn never to second-guess people. He waved from the doorway as we made our way across the impromptu ice rink in front of the Administration Building.

  “Christian Platonics?” I asked Steve as soon as we were out of earshot of Father Masson.

  “I had a hankering to have a course in a real old college. Probably came from reading too many Oxbridge novels. St. Joe’s was the only one available, and C.P. was the only course I could justify. It wasn’t bad, all in all.”

  “So, you’re Catholic?” I couldn’t believe it. Here in the middle of a crisis I was probing the background of my boyfriend. If he was still my boyfriend.

  “Only in my tastes,” Steve laughed and hugged me around the shoulders.

  I hugged him back.

  “Randy, I’ve got to apologize for this last week. I was wrong to shut you out like that. I know you didn’t deliberately scupper anything, and if you say there was nothing of note in the journal, then I believe you.”

  We had stopped just outside the stage doors to the Horowitz Theatre. I reached up a mittened hand to touch his cheek.

  “I’m sorry, too. I’ve missed you.”

  “So, no more than one slice of pizza and I’ll see you home, okay?”

  “You don’t have to stay and work?”

  “I’m thinking of going deep undercover tonight.” He laughed.

  Thank goodness it was dark. The blush had me almost warm by the time we got into the SUB lobby.

  28

  THE PLACE WAS BUZZING. I’VE NOT FOUND MUCH reason to go into SUB since my early days on campus, especially since they tarted it up. Once it had looked like a ­students’ union, with the focus on the bookstore, a good inexpensive cafeteria, a common area complete with fire pit, and a large seating area that was by day eating space and by weekend a cabaret. RATT, the Room at the Top, was the rowdier of the three campus bars. Now, although RATT still maintained its reputation, the whole place looked as antiseptic as a shopping mall, with nailed-down seating arrangements surrounded by fast-food kiosks.

  Two camps had congregated. One had formed around Denise, spouting indignation and a little bit of excitement to be caught up in a real live adventure. Police officers were pulling them off two at a time to take statements at one of the food court tables.

  The other group just looked wet and cold and bewildered. Grace seemed to be in charge of them, hustling around the perimeter, organizing them to remove wet outerwear and line up for the telephones.

  I wasn’t sure where I might be needed and was selfishly ­trying to make sure I wouldn’t be indispensable anywhere. Denise caught sight of Steve and me, and waved us toward her melee.

  “Randy! Are you all right? I wasn’t sure where you were standing when the chaos began.” She broke off to address Steve. “Are you in charge of the officers this evening? Because if you are, I have to express my disappointment in their ­ability to maintain what had been an orderly demonstration.”

  “Sorry, no.” Steve broke in before she could really get rolling. “I was here on my own time, although I have a feeling this investigation will probably lead back to mine.”

  Denise’s eyebrow shot up in a question, but she refrained from quizzing him.

  “Grace has ordered pizzas,” she said. “Lord knows what her credit card is going to look like after tonight, but we can’t just let these kids go home covered in icicles. Some of them are calling friends to bring dry clothes. Others who live on ­campus will just hurry home after the officers have finished their questions.”

  “Did you see anything from where you were standing?” Steve asked Denise.

  “I’ve been wondering.” She pursed out her bottom lip, thoughtfully. “I was toward the back on the top steps of the Admin Building. We had one arc light focused on the stairs for the speakers, so maybe my eyes weren’t working on full night vision. All I really know is that just as Heather got into the chorus of the spiritual, she got drowned out by shouting. It was so sudden, and from so many directions, I’m not sure exactly what they were shouting.”

  “The ones behind me were chanting ‘Chill out, bitches,’ but I’m pretty sure that’s not all that was being said,” I offered.

  Steve looked tired and more than a little bit frustrated. He put out his hand to Denise, who shook it.

  “On behalf of sane men everywhere, I apologize for the disruption of your ceremony. The only statement I can make officially is that we have apprehended one perpetrator, and we hope to run all the hooligans to ground soon.”

  Denise looked impressed, and nudged me when Steve left for a moment to talk to the officers in charge. “I have to say, Randy, there goes a good man.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “We should have him stuffed and mounted.”

  “Denise!”

  “Just kidding. I take it you’re not going to stick around for pizza?”

  “Uh, I figured, as long as I’m not really needed …”

  “Go on, Craig, you are so transparent. If it makes you feel any better, think of yourself as a mole for the sisterhood.”

  “Yeah, right, that makes me feel a whole lot better.”

  Steve returned before I could say anything more damaging and we left through the west doors toward the car park and Steve’s car.

  “Do you really think you'll get anything out of the guy you caught?”

  “Well, I’m banking on him being a frightened freshman unaware of his rights, but it would have been a lot easier if we’d caught two of them. Then we could play one off against the other.”

  Steve opened the car door for me, a gesture I hadn’t seen in a while. I guess too many guys are afraid of being rebuffed for the manners that their mamas instilled.

  “What I hope to find out is if there’s a ring of assholes out there, or if there’s just a whole lot of nasty people working individually.”

  “You mean the letter-writers and the door scribbler and these hooligans tonight might all be the same guys?”

  “Could be. We managed to get only three guys to admit to the letter-writing, and though all of them said there were more than three people in the room, none of them would name any other names.”

  “Could one of them have actually murdered Gwen?”

  “Jeez, Randy, I hope not.” Steve pulled up in front of my place and stopped the car. He held on to the steering wheel and stared through the windscreen at the frigid night. “Not trying to downplay what happened tonight as less than it is, but I have a personal hierarchy of malfeasance. This was pranksterism, and one could argue the same for the letters, although they were really ugly and ill conceived. The doors are one step further down the ladder, but murder is at the very bottom, and I hate to think that kids who are supposed to be worried about their mid-terms are capable of it.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said, “but that’s something you have to get beyond.”

  “What?” He turned to face me.

  “That someone in a university is somehow beyond basic ugliness. I was shocked when I attended my first faculty meeting, because I always figured that folks who had spent their lives studying greatness wouldn’t themselves be petty. But to be human is to be petty, I think. It just hurts more to see it in the ivory tower than to see it in the boardroom or the staff canteen.”

  “ ‘We are all of us lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’,” Steve intoned.

  “Are you quoting the original Oscar Wilde or Tennessee Williams?” I laughed.

  “Tell me the Tennessee Williams.”

  “It comes from Summer and Smoke where Alma the goody-goody is in love with the ne’er-do
-well doctor’s son. She says ‘Who said, ‘We are all of us lying in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars’, and John says, ‘I think it was Oscar Wilde,’ and she gets huffy and says ‘Well, it doesn’t matter who said it, it’s still a lovely sentiment!’ ”

  Steve laughed. “How about, we are all of us freezing in December, but some of us are sitting in our cars?”

  “Now that’s an original. C’mon, I’ll make you some cocoa.”

  “Are you trying to bribe an officer of the law, ma’am?”

  “Would it work?”

  “There’s just one way to find out.”

  29

  THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER AN AMAZINGLY restrained shower, I found Steve sorting through the wilted vegetables in my crisper when I swanned into the kitchen.

  “If this is a search, you’d better have a warrant.”

  He smiled. “I thought I’d surprise you with a Browning original. Slumgullion omelet coming right up.”

  “And he cooks too. Just wait till my mother phones next.”

  The coffee was already dripped through, so I reached across the action on the cutting board for a mug that hung off a hook under the cupboard and helped myself. I could get used to this.

  Steve looked up at me and smiled, making me wonder if I’d said the words out loud.

  “You don’t have to rush off?”

  “It’s my day off. Mayhem will have to wait. Actually, that’s some of the best advice I ever learned, and they don’t mention it in the academy. It was my first sergeant who took me aside and said, ‘Shit just keeps on happening, whether you’re there or not, and you have to rest sometime.’ ”

  “Quite the philosopher.”

  “Wasn’t he just? One of the few cops I ever met who had a fifty-year marriage and a happy retirement, so I figure he was worth listening to.”

  “But what happened to the thing you read in mystery ­novels, where you have to work like the devil so the trail isn’t forty-eight hours cold?”

  “Oh, there’s overtime for that sort of thing, and it happens more than I like, but you get resigned to wearing a beeper, and you gather your rosebuds where you may. That’s your actual poetry, just for you.”

  “Charmed, I’m sure.”

  Steve dumped a mass of chopped tomato, green pepper, onion and potato into the egg mixture bubbling on the stove and stooped to kiss me on the nose.

  “I think I’m in heaven.”

  “Set the table, and you’ll find out for sure.”

  In a few minutes I was digging into a wonderful breakfast, vowing in the back of my mind to get back to Muffets the next morning. It was astonishingly good to sit across from someone in the early morning and share a meal. I wondered if long-married couples realized their blessings, or buried themselves in newspapers and missed the glow.

  “Well, I’m off today, too. In fact, I’m done till a week Monday, when I sit exams.”

  “Really? What are you doing with your week?”

  “Well, I was planning to reread Love Medicine, and I should do a deep-clean on this place, especially since even my rotting vegetables are no longer safe from prying eyes. Then there is Christmas shopping to think about, and card-writing …”

  Steve looked up and gave me a questioning glance as I stopped speaking mid-sentence.

  “You know, it feels strange to think about ordinary things when so much has been happening that’s out of my normal existence.”

  “Meaning the murder investigation or the pranksters?”

  “Both, I guess. And this too, this—what should we call it?—relationship.” My laugh sounded surprisingly brittle. “Isn’t that a stupid word?”

  “It’ll have to do, though. After all, ‘affair’ has taken on such tawdry overtones, and seems to indicate a presumed ending. You’re the word person. You should come up with a new word.”

  “Words are hard, though, when you’re uncertain.”

  “Are you uncertain?”

  “I guess I’m worried about opening up emotionally and …”

  “Allowing your vulnerability to show?”

  “More like scaring you away. Wasn’t it Rita Rudner that once said she always got rid of unwanted men by saying, ‘I love you’? I know I’m generalizing wildly here, but stereo­typically, your gender is not known for clinging to ­commitment.”

  “Ah, I get you.”

  “Most of the women I know go by the tenet that it’s best to hold back and wait until the guy expresses himself first. It’s today’s version of the junior high school dance ritual; girls on one side of the gym, guys huddled at the other side. All the girls trying desperately not to show how much they want someone to cross the gym and ask them to dance.”

  “And it would make you feel better if I told you that I showed up at the vigil last night hoping to find you because I’ve been realizing this last week that thoughts of you keep creeping into my mind?”

  My face was getting tingly with heat. “It would.”

  Steve smiled, and stuck his hands in his pockets. He shuffled across the three feet separating us in my miniscule kitchen, until he stood barely an inch away.

  “Well, a sunny kitchen wasn’t exactly the atmosphere I had in mind for saying this, but, Randy Craig, would you like to dance?”

  30

  IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON AND ANOTHER COBBLED together meal before Steve left. I filled the sudden emptiness with laundry and other mindless chores, trying to regain a bit of equilibrium. Everything in my world was changing, some of it for the better, but all of it a bit too fast for my liking. Mind you, continental drift is a bit too sudden for me at times, too, so I was trying not to get too stressed out.

  When the place looked presentable again, I sank onto the sofa with a cup of coffee, and reached for a pad of paper and pencil. A list would help. I would probably take a pad of paper to a deserted island instead of the works of Shakespeare. My days would feel so much more structured: “Tuesday: make coconut soup, work on raft, get off island.”

  Steve’s question of what I’d be doing with my week had made me panic a little. So much had been happening that I hadn’t really thought ahead to this glorious week off. I liked this week better than the Christmas break, since during that time I was usually marking essays. It was more fun to loll about when everyone else was panicking over exams.

  I did have to reread Louise Erdrich’s book, but I’d taught it before, and my notes were pretty thorough, so I didn’t foresee too much prep work for the lectures. Having had to clean my office last week had been a blessing in disguise; it was ready for next term already.

  If I went out Christmas shopping tomorrow, I could wrap and send my parents their present in time for the twenty-fifth. They were the hardest to shop for, since I usually like to buy everyone books, but my mother screams over the price of postage, so my choices for her were predicated on their poundage. She wouldn’t be needing another silk scarf. Maybe I’d find her some nice moccasins. I’d seen some hokey golf club covers for my father, with all the Sesame Street Muppet heads on them. I doubted if he’d use them, but they would make him laugh.

  I would hit a bookstore for Fiona, Denise and Leo, and maybe get some Body Shop soaps for Grace. I felt a bit out of my element buying books for a full professor.

  Steve would definitely be interesting to shop for. I wrote his name down and then had to shake myself out of a reverie to get back to my to-do list. One of the important chores would be to work on my Christmas letter this evening, and get it mailed off by the end of the week. Some of the people on my list only heard from me once a year. I wasn’t sure how much of this autumn I wanted to commit to paper. I usually flipped through my wall calendar to remember what I’d done for the past twelve months. I hadn’t kept a journal since undergraduate days. It seemed slightly hypocritical to demand regular journal-keeping from my freshmen when I myself was so lax about recording things for posterity, but hey, I was the boss.

  Damn journals anyway. Thank goodness Steve had been big enough
to forgive me my stupidity about Gwen’s journal. He was right; there probably hadn’t been anything of interest to the police in there, and I’d already told him about the ­therapist business.

  Someone had thought it important, though—important enough to ransack my office. Unless they really had been after the exams and had just taken it for some unknown reason. Like a macabre souvenir.

  The thought of some hooligan reading Gwen’s diary made me shudder. She’d been through enough without her innermost thoughts being ravaged as well. I shook myself, literally as well as mentally. Talk about pathetic fallacy; here I was despairing over the violation of words, as if what had actually been done to Gwen was in some way less than the worst ­possible. I guess my mind still couldn’t absorb what had happened as real. Maybe it was my sheltered background or the daily life on a university campus, but I didn’t really have any identifying feelings for connecting to Gwen’s annihilation. Words were my succor; they might well be my prison too.

  Nothing like self-flagellation to work up an appetite. I made myself a pita stuffed with things Steve had overlooked or discarded as less than edible and went back to my list.

  I folded the page lengthways, to begin again. There were a few things I had been wanting to ask Steve, but somehow ­didn’t get around to in his presence. Even thinking that started the heat of a blush up my neck.

  Was it the exam or the journal? I wrote at the top of the list, and then chewed a bit on the end of the pencil, stopping only when the tired eraser hit the roof of my mouth by accident. Yuck.

  Did you find Jane the therapist?

  What did she tell you? I figured I’d give it a try, although I had some preconceptions about therapist disclosures that made me think I wouldn’t get much out of Steve, if indeed he’d got anything out of the therapist.

  Are you going to tell Jane that the journal’s missing?

  I stared at the silk-screen print on the wall across from me. A friend of mine had done it when he was taking a Fine Arts degree, and titled it Autumn Beach. Sometimes I could almost see it, but tonight it was just some streaks of pleasant color with a few rock-shaped circles to one side.