An Educated Death (25 page)

The more we talked, the more glum and taciturn he became. I managed to establish that each student had a sign-out card, that there was a sign-out box where cards were kept, that it sat on a desk in their living room and that all the students knew what to do when they wanted to sign out, and that unless a student had been unreliable, sign-out worked on an honor system. Beyond that, he had little to offer. I asked if Laney had been considered unreliable. He said yes, and no, and sometimes. I asked what they did about sign-out for unreliable students. He said they paid more attention. I asked how they went about that. He scratched his head and finally said he guessed they kept the card out of the box and the student had to come to them to get it.

We seemed to be getting warmer, so I asked him if they'd kept Laney's card out of the box. He couldn't remember. I asked if Laney had come to them on Friday to sign out to go to Merri's house. He said he couldn't remember. I asked if he'd been around on Friday afternoon. He said he couldn't remember. His ability to obfuscate and not remember would have qualified him for a Congressional run, but for my purposes, it was useless. After fifteen minutes of struggling to draw out his grudgingly measured words, I lost my temper. "Does it bother you at all that Laney Taggert is dead?"

His head shot up and he stared at me in surprise. "Of course it does. Kathy and I were very fond of Laney."

"Then why won't you talk to me about her? Why are you both making this so hard?"

He hunched his big shoulders together defensively. "Kathy warned me you'd be like this," he said. "She said she couldn't understand why Dorrie had hired such an insensitive person for such a sensitive job. Now I see what she meant."

"Did Dave Holdorf explain to you what I'm supposed to be doing here?"

"Yes," he said, his lower lip thrust out like a sullen child, "to review our procedures for keeping track of students."

"I'm also supposed to put together a picture of her last day. And to get a sense of Laney as a person, to see whether anything suggests her death might not have been an accident—"

"Of course it was an accident," he interrupted. "She went out there with her head in the clouds, probably imagining some romantic role or other—Laney was like that, she tended to live inside her own head—got herself out on the ice, and she just fell through. That's all. There's no great mystery about it."

"Maybe there is and maybe there isn't, Mr. Donahue. You knew Laney pretty well. Why do you think she was out on the ice when she was supposed to be going home for the weekend with Merri Naigler? And why wasn't she in bed if she told Chas Drucker that she was too sick to go to dinner?"

"Beats me," he said. "Probably she was working on some scheme. You know how Laney was. Always playing both ends against the middle—"

"No, Mr. Donahue, I
don't
know how Laney was. That's what I'd like you to tell me. You've just told me two very contradictory things about her." He gave me a puzzled look. "First you said she was very dreamy and probably just wandered onto the pond. Then you said she was probably working on some scheme. Which was she, Mr. Donahue? Dreamy and distracted, or scheming and worldly?"

Donahue made no effort to answer my question. He just sat in infuriating silence, watching his interlaced fingers. Waiting, I suppose, for me to give up and send him on his way. Check him off my list. Yep. Saw that one. Nice guy, that Bill Donahue, if you like sullen lumps of clay. But he'd misjudged his audience. I always want to grab people who refuse to answer a direct question, particularly a reasonable one, and shake them.

"It was dark and cold, Mr. Donahue. She was way out in the woods and she wasn't wearing boots, and you have no ideas about what she might have been doing there?" He shook his head. "You said she was probably working on some scheme. Can you suggest a scheme that would have led her into the woods on a dark winter night when she was supposed to go home with a girlfriend because she was planning to have an abortion the next day?"

He sat up straighter in his chair. "Who told you that?"

"Who told me what?"

"That she was pregnant."

"Don't you watch TV, Mr. Donahue? When there's an unexplained death, they usually do an autopsy. Did you know she was pregnant?"

"Maybe she told Kathy." He looked anxiously at his watch and then at the window. Maybe wondering if he should jump out?

"Did anyone ever find her overnight bag?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"When was the last time you saw Laney?"

"Sometime on Friday," he said. "We try to see all the students at least twice a day and make some sort of significant contact at least one of those times. You know, just to check in, see how things are going."

"When on Friday? And do you remember what you talked about?"

He shifted restlessly in the chair. "I don't remember. Sometime in the morning I think. I asked her what she was doing for the weekend. She said she was going to Merri's. I think I said 'Don't forget to sign out' or something like that, and she said she always did."

"So her card was in the box?"

He made a helpless gesture. "I told you. I don't remember."

"Did you ever find her sign-out card for Friday?"

"I don't know. Did you ask Kathy?"

"She said to ask you."

He looked at his watch again. "Well, I'm sorry, Ms. Kozak, but we each have more important things to do than to chase after pieces of paper."

"You don't consider sign-out cards important? What if there was an emergency?"

"I didn't mean that." Donahue no longer looked benign. His face and posture reminded me of an angry dog about to snarl and strike.

I held out my arm for him to bite. "Then what did you mean?"

"Kathy's been having health problems. We've been distracted...." He trailed off without explaining.

"Based on your impressions of Laney, do you have any reason to think her death might have been a suicide?"

"None at all. That's a crazy idea. Who told you that?"

"No one. I'm just trying to rule it out as a possibility. You know that in a suggestible community like this a suicide presents a very real risk of copycat behavior."

"Of course I know that. But no one thinks Laney killed herself. If they don't think it was an accident, they think she was—" He stopped abruptly.

"They think she was what?"

"Nothing," he said. "I'm sorry. I've got to go. I can't talk about this. It's too upsetting."

He headed for the door, but I beat him to it. If this had been a gun fight, he would have been the loser. "What is it, Mr. Donahue? What are you and your wife hiding from me?"

"Nothing. We aren't trying to hide anything. I don't know where you got that idea." He looked frantically around, trying to find another exit, then shouldered me aside and escaped, confirming, as if I'd been in doubt, that something was terribly wrong.

I closed my eyes and for a few self-indulgent seconds I wished that Andre Lemieux would come galloping up in his fat, funny-looking government-issue Chevy and take me away from all this. Carry me off to that California hillside where we would raise solemn-faced brown-eyed boys and tanned and willful girls and live happily ever after.

Carol Frank was a blessed relief after the men who'd come before her. My initial impression of a dumpy, middle-aged woman vanished as soon as she'd crossed from the door to the chair and I could see her face. She wore shapeless clothes and had curly, shoulder-length gray hair that still looked girlish and she had the face of a girl. Not just any girl, either, but a girl you wanted to be your best friend. She glowed with a comfortable warmth and happiness and an overall aura of goodness. No wonder the students were willing to confide in her. If I hadn't had a job to do, I would have tucked my feet under me and confided in her myself.

She considered my questions carefully, answered them fully and was genuinely sorry there wasn't more she could do to help. She was also genuinely sorry there wasn't something she could have done to help Laney. "She was a very complicated girl, Ms. Kozak. A real challenge to understand. A real challenge to help. Sometimes she was astonishingly mature and clearheaded, other times she seemed years younger than sixteen and terribly vulnerable, lost, and needy."

"How does a student get referred to you?"

She smiled. "There are lots of different ways. Sometimes an advisor will notice a student needs a little help, sometimes a dorm parent. A lot of times they refer themselves."

"How do they do that?"

"It was Dorrie's idea. She said maybe it would be a little expensive but it was an experiment she wanted to try. She has one of us available a few hours a week and the students can just sign themselves up."

"On a sign-up sheet? Isn't that awfully public?"

"It would be, if they used their own names, but they just have codes. One day last week I saw Zorro, Killer Angel, the Weasel, and Black Bart's girl. Laney was Moby Dick."

"Why did she come to you?"

"She was struggling with her relationships. Particularly with her roommate. They didn't get along very well and Laney needed help deciding whether to try and salvage the relationship or give up and move into a single room by herself. I think she was a little afraid of being alone and of having failed at such a basic relationship. She was also struggling in her relationship with Josh. It was, as I'm sure you've heard, very intense. So intense that it frightened her. She was an emotional girl. People have probably told you about her imitations? Well, that was an outlet for her emotions. Not always a very successful one, since she seemed to be especially good at offending people, but necessary. Laney liked to be in charge. Like her mother, she was very controlling. She couldn't control Josh and it scared her."

Carol Frank pulled some sensible glasses out of a pocket and put them on. "I think I should tell you that I asked Peter Van Deusen whether it was all right to tell you these things. I wasn't sure how confidentiality applied once a person is... was... dead. He said I should tell you whatever you wanted to know."

I was so grateful to her for making this easy that I could have hugged her. "Was Laney afraid of Josh?"

"She was more afraid of herself."

"How do you mean? Afraid she might be considering suicide?"

"Oh, no, not like that. She was afraid of her impulses. Of how powerful her desires were, of wanting her own way too much. We were working on understanding the difference between wanting something but recognizing you couldn't or shouldn't have it and wanting something and having to make it yours or you'll die. In short, we were working on impulse control."

"Do you know whether there were any other men in Laney's life besides Josh? Men she was intimate with?"

She hesitated briefly and then gave me an apologetic smile. "Keeping people's secrets gets to be such a habit that I find it hard to share them. I know I'm supposed to be open with you, but I can't completely shake the notion that I ought to protect her privacy."

"I understand how you feel. When my sister was killed and the police interviewed me, I felt exactly the same way. It seemed wrong to reveal personal and intimate things about her to total strangers. But if there was foul play involved in Laney's death, it isn't her privacy you're protecting, it's the killer."

She stared at me wide-eyed, her hands gripping the arms of the chair with white-knuckle intensity. "Foul play? Killer? I thought you were doing a procedures audit. I thought you were just checking to be sure that we were taking care of our students... checking on our counseling function... to see if we were available... I mean accessible... giving them the necessary attention. And... and maybe, knowing the effect a suicide can have in a community like this, making sure she wasn't suicidal. Which she wasn't."

It was then I realized I'd completely abandoned the idea that Laney's death might have been an accident. I was almost as certain that it hadn't been suicide. Too many people were acting too strangely and too many people had told me she wasn't the suicidal type. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to shock you. There's no evidence that it was anything other than an accident, but since she was pregnant—"

"Pregnant! Yes, she was, poor child. Is that why you were asking about other men? Oh, of course it was. Because Josh wasn't the father, was he? The question does come up then, doesn't it? I suppose you do need to know, then, don't you? I don't remember their names, though I have them in my notes. We'd mostly been talking about Josh. We'd only begun to talk about others...."

"Others? There was more than one?"

She ran a hand distractedly through her hair. "I... this is... I mean I'm not ready to... I wasn't expecting... This makes things a little more complicated...." Her sweet face was terribly distressed. "I was comfortable talking to you about Laney, and even about Josh, since their relationship is pretty much public knowledge... but this stuff about other men... that brings other people into it. Other people whose privacy matters, too, you know. I'm just not sure how I ought to handle it. This is such a tight-knit... there are academic reputations... unless it really matters?" She stopped and looked at me, wanting some direction.

"What if Laney Taggert was murdered?" I asked.

"I think I'd better talk to Peter Van Deusen again before I say anything more."

How could this nice, smart woman be so dumb? She'd talked to Peter but never discussed Laney's pregnancy or the potential father? I stared at her in astonishment, feeling like Wile E. Coyote. Every time I got close to that damned Roadrunner, I fell off a cliff or someone slammed a door in my face. People knew stuff, and for a myriad of reasons, refused to reveal it.

Talk about a lack of impulse control. I wanted to jump over the desk and shake her until she told me what I wanted to know.

"Ms. Frank... Carol... you have names in your notes?" Reluctantly, she nodded. "Don't you realize how important your information may be? This isn't something to play games about."

"I am not playing games," she said quietly. "I just need time to consider the implications of what I may be saying."