Read Cold and Pure and Very Dead Online
Authors: Joanne Dobson
Cold and Pure and Very Dead (10 page)
She rose abruptly from the straight wooden chair and beckoned imperiously to the guard, who moved forward at once.
W
ould you like
a canapé?”
Cookie’s mother had taught Sara how to hold the heavy silver tray, how to arrange the caviar on toast, how to pronounce the word
canapé.
Mrs. Wilson had even had the black dress and little white apron “made up” especially for Sara, and bought her the flat black shoes. Professor Wilson was the Chairman of the English Department at the college, and the Wilsons did a great deal of entertaining. Mrs. Wilson had told Sara that she felt it was her duty as a good wife to support and further her husband’s career. Sara enjoyed working in the Wilson’s bright, well-equipped kitchen, and appreciated the opportunity to listen to the literate conversation at the parties
.
When she didn’t get an immediate response from the guest, Sara repeated her question: “Would you like a canapé?”
“I’d like a great deal more than a
canapé,”
said the tall, slender man with the curly dark hair and the dancing eyes as he smiled down at her. Sara knew this was Professor Andrew Prentiss, because Cookie had pointed him out to her several times in town. Cookie had a mad crush on Professor Prentiss. Once last spring when she and Sara were having a Coke in Jacobs Pharmacy after school, the young professor had come in and ordered an egg-salad sandwich. He had passed Cookie where she sat at the soda fountain without noticing her, even though he had been at her home several times for dinner. She had burst into sobs and Sara had hustled her out of the store. After that the two girls had vowed off older men forever. Now here was Professor Prentiss, with his deep-set gray eyes, heavy brows, and triangular
smile, gazing at Sara as if he would like to eat her up. Sara thought he looked like a handsome young Satan. She felt a breathless catch somewhere in the region of her heart. “And what is your name, pretty girl?” he asked
.
Off in the corner of the room, Cookie sat in a green plush wing chair. She was hiding in the corner because she hated the dress her mother had made her wear, an embroidered blue chiffon with a high neck, gathered skirt, and bow that tied in the back. A “perfect frock for the sweet
jeune fille”
the woman at the shop had called it. A perfect frock for a baby, Cookie thought
.
“Sara,” said Sara, in response to the question from Professor Prentiss, feeling unaccountably as if with the mere utterance of the word she were giving up something far more precious than a simple name
.
Mrs. Wilson stopped in the middle of a conversation with Edwina Price and stared hard at Sara and Andrew Prentiss. Then she excused herself and stepped sharply up to the girl. “Sara,” she said, “keep those canapés circulating.”
H
arriet Person
motioned to me from her position at the head of the long, pale-ash English Department conference table and jerked her head at the chrome-framed chair next to her. I slid it out and sat down. “So,” Harriet said, sotto voce, “I understand you’ve got a hot thing going with our hunky Visiting Writer.” Her eyes were steely slits.
“What?” I practically shrieked it. Ned Hilton looked up curiously from the large, trapezoidal paper clip he was compulsively unbending and rebending. Joe Gagliardi stared across the table, avid for any hint of scandal. Ralph Brooke, oblivious to anyone but himself, fixed Craig Markoff, our new, extremely young Shakespearean, with his intense gaze. Ralph’s gray eyes were magnified behind black-rimmed, thick-lensed glasses, and the effect was uncanny.
“Then there was the time,” Ralph intoned, “when Papa and I were marlin fishing off the Keys—
Papa?
Why, Hemingway, of course. We all called him
Papa.”
Craig nodded and stroked his gold nostril ring nervously. Being in the presence of someone who’d actually fished with Ernest Hemingway most likely had convinced young Craig that he’d been sucked into some eerie academic time warp.
The first English Department meeting of the fall semester was about to get under way. Still stunned by my
encounter with Mildred Deakin Finch the day before, I’d seriously considered not attending. But, even though I was on research leave and wasn’t obligated to go to meetings, I knew that, as an untenured faculty member, I was well advised to show my shining visage at every department gathering. So the morning after my visit to the Columbia County jail and the disquieting talk with Milly Finch, I strolled into the English Department lounge at eleven
A.M.
, attired in khaki shorts and a sleeveless olive T-shirt—and shivered. Although summer still prevailed on the Enfield campus this third week in September, the lounge, with its ice-blue walls, ice-gray carpeting, and ice-green draperies, felt as wintery as always—an appropriate metaphor, I thought, for the chilly relations between department members.
“Shh.” At my outburst, Harriet’s hand sliced the air. I shushed. Ned went back to his murderous-looking length of wire. Shut out of the good dirt, Joe pouted, the gold stud that pierced his lower lip momentarily vanishing in the folds of skin. Ralph droned on and on. Craig glanced wildly around for someone to take pity and rescue him. Harriet leaned over and hissed in my ear. “Come into the hall, Karen, so we can talk without your little secret getting out.”
“What
little secret?” I hissed back at her. “There
is
no little secret!” But I pushed my chair back obediently and followed my senior colleague. The door sighed shut behind us.
Standing there with Harriet in the empty hallway, I noted, irrelevantly, that she seemed somehow different today—younger, maybe. Then it struck me: The trademark streak of white in her otherwise dark hair had vanished.
“Monica says she saw Fenton’s Range Rover in
your driveway the other morning—before six
A.M.
,” Harriet informed me in clipped tones. Monica—our department secretary. “She recognized the New York plates. Said Jake’s car was tucked up to your front door ‘real cozylike.’ ”
A wave of anger threatened to choke me. “What the hell was Monica doing, spying on my house in the middle of the night?” I thrust my hands in my pockets so my colleague couldn’t see that they’d curled into furious balled-up fists.
And what the hell business is it of yours?
“She had some sort of sunrise ritual up Greenfield way—one of her coven things.” Monica is a witch. Literally. And proud of it.
And
she’s nosy as hell. “Karen.” Harriet leaned toward me, her expression unreadable. I shivered again. “Jake Fenton may be hot, but he could mean trouble for you. Even if what you had with him was only a one-night stand, you’d better watch your back.”
“It wasn’t a one-night stand,” I protested—then didn’t like the way that sounded.
Harriet continued as if she hadn’t heard me. “I tell you this for your own good. As junior faculty, you are not best advised to become sexually involved with even a temporary member of the department. Your tenure decision comes up in a year or two. Think of the position such a … a questionable professional history would put you in when your senior colleagues vote on—”
Ordinarily I would have stormed away from such an intrusion into my privacy, but I had a misbegotten notion that if only I could clarify what had actually happened, I could staunch this gossip before it bled me to death. “Harriet, there’s no involvement! Nothing happened!”
This time she heard me. “But he was there? At your house? At six
A.M.
?” She frowned. “And
nothing happened?”
“It’s not what you think. He was just dr—”
Miles Jewell pushed open the door at the top of the stairs. He was followed by Jake Fenton and three other stragglers. From the sudden fire that flashed in Harriet’s eyes when Jake came into view, I realized why she and I were having this conversation. And I knew instantly why the white streak in Harriet’s hair had vanished.
Jake nodded at us. I hadn’t seen or heard from the writer since I’d put him to bed, bombed, on my couch during the wee hours Friday morning. I clamped my mouth shut on the word
drunk
. With an eyebrow-puckering frown at Harriet, who was smirking at Jake, I followed the entourage into the English Department lounge.
T
wenty colleagues
were already gathered around the long table in the center of the room. My eyes scanned the group: Ralph Emerson Brooke, current occupant of the Palaver Chair of Literary Studies; Kenneth Beatty, Shakespeare; Ned Hilton, seventeenth century; Latisha Mohammed, African American; Sally Chenille, coappointment with Comp Lit; Nicole Gottesman, queer theory; Edmund Friendly, the Puritans; Anne McQuade, Shakespeare; Joe Gagliardi, postmodernism; Stanford Franks, postcolonialism; Bob Banks, post-Shakespeare; Deborah Minter, eighteenth century; Michael Dunkerling, animality; the newcomer Craig Markoff, neo-Shakespeare; and on and on. The usual crew.
Jake Fenton pulled out the chair next to Ralph Brooke. He sat, stroked his sexy three-day beard contemplatively,
then leaned over, and whispered something in the older man’s ear. Ralph turned to him, whipped off his clunky glasses, and stared. Jake smiled a snarky smile, whispered again. Ralph choked and went bone pale. Odd. But before I could observe the two further, Miles called the meeting to order. Under the influence of the chairman’s mind-numbing tones, I sank into a deep funk, furious at Jake for putting me in such an awkward position vis-à-vis the college community, furious at the college community for the titillated gossip that was bound to fly around campus like wild fire.
I don’t remember a thing that transpired during that meeting. I know I signed the attendance sheet, voted on measures brought up for voting, dutifully watched my colleagues’ mouths open and shut in eloquent debate, but my mind had vacated the room and was back in the corridor with Harriet Person. All the biting things I should have said goose-stepped into my mind like a platoon of storm troopers. I felt my face grow hot and my jaw set into a truculent jut.
A person can’t even have a goddamned private life around this place without her goddamned colleagues playing Big Brother. Goddamned full professors, nothing but a goddamned bunch of goddamned fucking fascist thugs
.… I wanted nothing more than to jump out of my seat and launch into a diatribe against this intrusion into my personal freedom. Thank God for Robert’s Rules of Order, or I might have scuttled my hard-won career right there and then.
T
wenty minutes
after the department meeting ended, Jake Fenton sauntered into my office. Behind him, Monica lurked in the hallway, four-square
and solid in chinos and a red cotton sweater with a pattern of gray diamonds. She caught my eye and grinned. Before I could muster up a scowl—or stick my tongue out at her, I was in such an evil mood—Jake pushed my office door shut, and stood there with his hand on the knob. I thought, apropos of nothing, that perhaps Jake Fenton always kept his hand on the doorknob. That must make it a hell of a lot easier to get away.
“Is it always like that?” The crooked just-between-us grin illuminated his bronzed face; the gray eyes crinkled.
I didn’t feel like being charmed. My big night with this literary legend, and its aftermath of gossip, had left a bitter taste in my mouth. “Is
what
always like
what?”
“That strange meeting we just endured. The turf battles. The impenetrable sesquipedalian language. Those obscure resentments underlying each debate like massive, ancient icebergs.”
I shrugged. I had no memory of anything other than my own sullen funk. And what was so strange about all that, anyhow? That’s just the way things are in an English Department. Jake had taught elsewhere; he should know that.
Jake relinquished the doorknob, walked across the office, and sank into my green armchair. “I’m really here about what happened the other night, Karen.” His lips tightened. “As you can see, I have a bit of a problem with alcohol. How much of an ass did I make of myself?”
“That depends on what you mean by ‘ass.’ You got drunk; you got involved in a fistfight with strangers; you passed out in the car.” I shrugged again. “I’ve seen worse.”
He cringed. “Did I …? You know …? I mean,
face it, Karen, you’re a very attractive woman. And I … Well, I hope I didn’t …”
“You tried.”
Jake grimaced. “I hope I didn’t … make myself obnoxious to you. I’d really like to spend more time with you, Karen—lots more. That is, if you …”
I gave him an enigmatic smile.
In your dreams, big boy
.
The narcissist in him chose to interpret the smile positively. “I’ll give you a call someday soon, Karen. We’ll set a date.” He rose from the chair and headed for the door. Then, his hand on the knob again, Jake turned back. “I didn’t
say
anything, did I?”
“Say
anything? You
said
a lot.”
An anxious expression crossed his rugged features. “About … anyone in particular?”
“You talked about a number of people. There was some native guide—”
“No.” He shook his head impatiently. “Not
that
kind of talk. Did I say anything about … well … anyone …?” Then he seemed to register what I’d told him, and his face relaxed again. “Never mind, Karen. I don’t know what comes over me sometimes.” He pointed his index finger at me as if it were a gun, then cocked his thumb. “Hey, listen, Karen, I’ll call you.” He flashed me his hot-guy grin, turned the knob, and strode down the hall.
“Don’t bother,” I replied, but he didn’t hear me.
J
ake Fenton?”
George Gilman queried, when he ran into me outside the library. My little colleague’s arms were loaded with books. I was on my way to Earlene’s office to pick her up for a late lunch.
“Don’t
you
start,” I warned. “It’s nothing but unfounded gossip.”
“I hope so, Karen, because I know things.…”
“I don’t care.” I wanted to snap at him, but his wrinkled gnome’s face was so full of concern that I modulated my tone. “It’s all a misunderstanding, George. There’s nothing going on.”
