“You work on it while I call the campus cops,” he said, shaking the mop so hard that drops of water rained on the floor. “Every time one of you steals something from the law building, the cops come sniffing at me. I need this job, lady. I’ve got a family just like everybody else, and three kids to put through college.” He glowered at me as if I’d announced an increase in tuition. “Three kids, all wanting to be something more than a janitor”
“I understand,” I said soothingly. “I have a fifteen-year-old daughter who’s demanding a car at the end of the summer. And the cost of four years of college is enough to-”
“Just stay there, okay?” He went into the front room and reached for the telephone.
I had all of ten seconds to lift the computer, grab the construction-paper cat, stuff it into my pocket, and rush into the front room before he hit the final button. “Wait!” I said as I grabbed his wrist. “Please don’t call the police. The computers still attached to everything; there’s no way I could have moved it more than an inch or so without undoing cables and unplugging it. I swear I wasn’t stealing it.”
He did not appear any more impressed by my logic than he had been by my previous attempt at parental camaraderie. “That’s what they all say, lady. What were you doing? Moving it so you could dust? I don’t remember hearing you’d been added to this building’s crew.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that I needed to concoct an explanation before I made my unauthorized entrance into the dean’s private office. Unlike glib characters in mystery novels, my mind went as blank as the top of John Vanderson’s head. “I’m not-no, well-it’s obvious that I’m not on the crew,” I managed to stammer.
“No shit, Sherlock.” He disengaged my hand and began to redial a number that would result in a veritable morass of complications for me.
He was on the sixth digit when I finally thought of something. I pushed down the button to disconnect him lifted my eyebrows, and said, “I think Dean Vanderson will be very displeased if you bother the campus security department. Since I am his wife, I am more than entitled to be in his office. In fact, he asked me to come by and pick up a file for him. He thought it might be under the computer but he was mistaken.”
“His wife?”
“I am Eleanor Vanderson,” I said, articulating carefully and wondering what to do if he’d met her in the past.
We seemed to clear that hurdle, but we encountered the next one with dizzying speed. “You got any identification?”
“My dear man,” I said with the imperiousness of a Kappa Theta Eta alumna interviewing a rushee over tea, “I most certainly do have identification, but I have no inclination to show it to you. On the other hand, I will be happy to call the dean and explain that I was delayed because of your petty suspicions. We are due at a faculty engagement at six o’clock sharp. It’s at Thurber Farber Manor home of the president of the college. I have no quarrel with you, but I can only hope the dean doesn’t file a complaint with your supervisor. I should hate for you to lose your job with those three college-bound offspring.”
He continued to entertain his petty suspicions for a long while, but at last he shrugged and said, “I dunno about this, lady. If you’re really the dean’s wife, you would have said so in the beginning, instead of acting like a thief caught in the act. But I got work to do, and I’d like to catch the end of the ball game when I get home.” He picked up the mop and went to the door “I’m gonna lock this office. Next time you come by on an errand for the dean, plan to show proper identification.”
“I shall impress the dean with your cooperation,” I said, still caught up in my role. I swept past him and sailed out the door of the Guzman Center for Law, and only when I was on the far side of the agri building did I sink down on a bench and allow myself to revel in the absurdity of the scene. I had no qualms about awarding myself an Oscar Best actress in an ab libitum role seemed apt.
I took the folded construction-paper cat out of my pocket, smoothed it, and steeled myself for a sugary message. As expected, the photocopied line read: “Katie the Kappa Kitten Says Thanks!” The handwritten addendum was: “For remembering to pay your dues.”
Pay his dues? John Vanderson was not and never would be a Kappa, and his wife was hardly the kind to need cutesy notes to remind her of anything whatsoever I doubted alumnae paid dues, although they were likely to be dunned by National on a regular basis right up until the opening strains of the funerary procession.
The handwriting was feminine in its swirls. I hadn’t saved the two previous cutouts, but as best I remembered, this newest message was not written by the same hand. If I ruled out Jean and Pippa, I was left with Rebecca, Debbie Anne, and the other sixty or so Kappa Theta Etas who had access to what I envisioned as boxes and boxes of pink construction-paper cats. I examined it carefully, but there was no way to determine if it had been sent that day or six months ago.
The cat was in my hand, if not out of the bag, and it proved my theory that Dean Vanderson was in some way involved. Perhaps not to Officers Terrance and Michaels, or even to Officer Pipkin and Lieutenant Rosen, who were having such a grand time on their joint task force that they were willing to work overtime.
I strolled across the lawn, the cat fluttering between my fingers, and paused on the opposite side of the street. Scaffolding had appeared on the front of the Kappa Theta Eta house, indicative of the imminent arrival of painters. If Ed Whitbred and his beetle-headed assistant had won the contract, they might well be there the next day. I had no idea what I needed to ask them, but I was confident questions would spring to my lips as easily as lies had in the law building. I would pin them down with no more mercy than a lepidopterist, wrench answers from their treacherous mouths, and walk away with some semblance of a hypothesis that would lead me to the whereabouts of Debbie Anne Wray, the murderer of Jean Hail, and maybe the definitive solution to global warming.
Much later the latest paper cat was propped against the coffee pot. A rusty key lay on the kitchen counter; I dearly hoped it fit the door of the Book Depot. No one had answered the telephone at the sorority house, so there was nothing I could do about my key ring for the moment. Caron’s cosmetics case and sleeping bag were gone, as was she. I’d called Luanne and related the highlights of the afternoon, eliciting gurgles, snickers, sharp intakes, and a few brays of laughter We’d agreed that my next assignment needed to be an appointment with John Vanderson. A package that had contained a low-fat, low-sodium microwave meal was discarded in the wastebasket, its contents having been made palatable with the addition of salt and butter
I was soaking in the bathtub, occasionally twisting the hot-water tap with my toes, allowing the heat to nurse away the day’s accumulation of bruises, and reading a mystery novel in which the clever amateur sleuth, a woman of moderate years who had the courage to admit she hated cats, was outwitting bumbly, fumbly, grumbly policemen on every page.
I was reaching for my drink when I heard a scream.
11
I gulped down my drink as I dned myself, scrambled into my clothes, and hurried downstairs and across the lawn to the Kappa Theta Eta house. How could these women-and their neighbors-get any sleep, if they insisted on screaming at every opportunity? As much as I loved my duplex with its view of the campus and convenience to the bookstore, it might be time to move farther away.
I was wondering just how cold the winters were in Fairbanks as I pounded on the front door Winkie jerked it open and gaped at me. “Claire?” she said wonderingly, as if I were dressed in a tutu and clutching a glittery wand. She was the one who warranted a second look, dressed as she was in a naughty scarlet peignoir, with enough makeup on her face to intimidate a seasoned hooker, but very little she or any of the Kappas did these days surprised me.