Extra Credit (15 page)

“Well, that’s an awfully irresponsible Listserv if you ask me.”

I took umbrage at her disdain for the imaginary Listserv and the hardworking professors who subscribed to it, even though they didn’t really exist. “So you don’t? Reuse tests?”

“No, I don’t reuse tests,” she said, and I could imagine her readjusting her unflattering glasses on her face. “These kids will take any advantage that they can, Alison. You have to be vigilant,” she said. “Are we still talking about Meaghan and her remarkable recovery from her failing grade?”

I remained quiet.

“Because, frankly, I have been thinking about that myself.”

“You have?” I asked. I didn’t like where this was going.

“You see, I have had a little experience with these incredible turnarounds, and I’ve found that they are usually the result of less-than-stellar study habits.”

“What are they the result of?” I asked, steeling myself for the answer.

“You know what I’m talking about, Alison,” she said. “Now. Why don’t we end this talk of tests being reused and just be grateful for your stepdaughter’s good fortune?” She hung up.

So maybe I had been wrong about Mr. Super Senior. Maybe he was a good tutor, and she had studied hard. I had been wrong about Meaghan, obviously. So here was another situation I had to make right. I texted Meaghan and waited, eating my sandwich while I did, but she never texted me back. I still wasn’t convinced that Mr. Super Senior was completely blameless in this whole thing; after all, he had been among the throngs that I had seen when I was hiding on the convent stairs, and his academic record didn’t support his contention that he was a “great tutor.” As a boyfriend? Who knew? This wasn’t something I was going to forget even though my limited snooping to date had led to a dead end.

The day passed quickly, much to my delight, and I headed home to spend time with Trixie, who was back to her old tricks after her near-death experience. When I walked in the back door, she had a pair of suede flats in her mouth, chewing away noisily and happily. When she saw me, she dropped the one shoe that was in her mouth and pushed it away with her paw as if she hadn’t been engaged in footwear foul play.

I put my messenger bag on the counter and bent down to assess the damage. Besides some extreme wetness from her saliva, she hadn’t done too much harm. I looked into her doleful face. “I thought we were done with this?” I asked, expecting an answer.

She put her head down on her paws and closed her eyes, pretending that she was asleep. I guessed that she was exhausted after an afternoon of shoe play. I picked up the shoes and put them in the sink, wondering what the effect of more water would be on suede.

I was contemplating that when Crawford walked in with a bag from my favorite sandwich place in the Bronx, the one that doesn’t pretend that its sandwiches are healthy, and that prides itself on marinating its roasted red peppers longer than should be considered safe. I clapped my hands together.

“Rota’s for dinner?” I asked, holding my breath.

“Yep,” he said, putting the sack onto the counter next to my bag. He gave me a kiss; if the way he smelled was any indication, it had been a very bad day indeed. I backed away, wrinkling my nose.

“Don’t ask,” he said.

“I didn’t plan to.”

“Let me take a shower and then we’ll eat, okay?” he asked, already on his way upstairs. “Don’t touch the bag!” he called back over his shoulder.

I told him I wouldn’t, but it was the first thing I did. The sandwiches were wrapped in white paper, so I couldn’t see what was inside, but the greasy spots that made the paper translucent were a very promising sign. Something in there had lots of oil and vinegar on it, and that made me very happy.

I was halfway through the
Times
crossword puzzle when he came back down, his hair still wet from the shower, sporting a T-shirt and jeans. He ripped open the bag, which I’d cleverly reclosed after my snooping. “Chicken cutlet with mozzarella and roasted red peppers or eggplant parm?” he asked, sliding the sandwiches out of the remains of the bag.

“Half of each,” I said, grabbing plates from the cabinet. “Beer or wine?”

“Beer,” he said, pulling out a container of pasta salad as well.

We made plates, took them to the kitchen table, and dug in. He asked me how my day was.

“It was fine,” I said, leaving out the details of my meeting with Meaghan’s boyfriend and my conversation with the ever-cranky Joanne Larkin. Unfortunately, the way I averted my eyes, looking anywhere but at him, gave him an indication that I was skirting around the truth. If anyone can figure out when the details are missing, it’s him. I took a healthy bite of my sandwich and let out a sound that indicated that he had done well in choosing.

“Are you leaving anything out?” he asked. “Do I need to frisk you?”

“What would frisking do to get me to talk?” I asked, pushing my chair back, ready to make a quick getaway even while the idea of being frisked by Crawford gave me a thrill. “Great sandwiches, by the way.”

He dropped his onto his plate. “Spill it,” he said. “I know you. You only talk about food when you’re hungry and when you’re avoiding talking about something else.”

“There’s nothing to spill,” I protested. “Normal, ordinary, lovely day at school.”

“Now I know you’re lying. You always have something to complain about. Something to tell.”

He had a point.

“What gives?” he asked.

I didn’t have to answer because the phone rang; I looked at the caller ID and held back a groan. “Christine,” I said, trying to look as impassive as possible.

He dropped his sandwich onto his plate, deciding what to do. “Don’t answer it,” he said.

The phone kept ringing and ringing, and it was starting to annoy us. Finally, after the tenth ring, the call went to the answering machine, the volume turned so loud that we could hear everything she was saying, even though the machine was in the living room. Crawford looked down at his sandwiches, his enthusiasm for them lost.

Christine’s voice had its usual nervous timbre; I hadn’t heard her sound any other way in the past several weeks. She hemmed and hawed, not wanting to bother us, before blurting out the detail that brought our dinner to its unfortunate and untimely end.

“Um, Bobby? Someone has broken into my house.”

We waited a beat, looking at each other.

“But it’s weird. Nothing’s missing.”

Twenty

So rather than spend the evening with my dog, the shoe vandal, and my husband, I was on my way to Connecticut with him to offer support to the shaken Christine.

His ex and her extended family were really starting to get on my last nerve.

They were also getting under my skin and cramping my style and every other hackneyed expression one could use to express annoyance. Rather than burden Crawford with my dissertation on separating from her and her brood and all of their troubles, I stewed in edgy silence all the way up 95.

We had ascertained over the phone that everyone was fine and that the house was free of intruders before I allowed myself to arrive in this frustrated state, but the fact that I wasn’t talking was a dead giveaway to my husband that I had had enough. We didn’t need to talk; our telepathy was finely honed and in good working order. As we pulled off at her exit, he told me that he understood completely what I was feeling.

“You do?” I asked. “How so? My ex-husband is dead, conveniently, so you don’t have to deal with him and his peccadilloes. Your ex, however…”

“I know,” he said, sounding as exasperated as I was.

We let it go for a few minutes as he wound his way through the streets of downtown Greenwich, looking for the street that Christine and Tim lived on. “Do you think that her break-in is related to our break-in?” I asked.

“I guess anything’s possible.”

“It seems odd. First us, then them.” I knew he had already thought of it, but I thought it bore repeating. “And nothing missing from either house.”

“Bingo.”

We pulled into a lovely tree-lined street in the very affluent suburb. Christine’s house was an old, restored Colonial, the kind of house that I would love to live in but could never afford, even with our combined salaries. Old Tim must be raking it in, because with a bad economy, not many people I knew were making the kind of scratch, as Max would say, that would allow them to live comfortably, old-money fashion.

The police had come and gone, by the looks of things; the house was locked up tight, a few lights blazing in the windows on both the first and second floors. We knocked on the front door, Crawford using the heavy brass knocker. Christine opened it, her eyes puffy and red.

“Come in,” she said. “It’s so nice of you to come.”

Well, you asked us to,
I wanted to say, but instead I leaned in and gave her a kiss. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said, stepping aside to let us into the beautiful large foyer.
I want one of these,
I wanted to cry. When you walked in the front door of my house, you were in the house. No anteroom, no place to hang your coat, just a quick step through the front door and you were in. I took a minute to look around, noting a large formal living room on the right and an even larger, more beautifully decorated family room on the left, obviously the place where the family spent most of their time. Behind the stairs that emptied into the foyer was the kitchen, a room that was sure to be leaps and bounds over my little cooking area, what with its four-burner stove and smaller-than-normal refrigerator. Despite the fact that they hadn’t moved in that long ago, there was not a box in sight. Everything had been unpacked and put away. Heck, I still had unpacked boxes in my basement, and I had lived in my house a long time.

We followed her into the kitchen, and it didn’t disappoint. Everything was either white or stainless steel and immaculate. I didn’t know how this was possible with four little kids, but she seemed to have figured out how to do it. Tim was sitting at the kitchen table, a big slab of wood that was suspended on thick wrought iron, nursing a beer. He looked up wearily, unaccustomed as he was to the world of crime.
You’ll get used to it,
I wanted to say, even though I didn’t think that was what he wanted to hear.

“Hi,” he said. “Anyone want a sandwich?”

I always wanted a sandwich, but I decided that asking for one now would be in bad taste. Crawford and I demurred, but all I could think of was my sandwich back home. In my house. With my dog. I wondered if it would still be there when we returned.

Tim was clearly agitated. “You up to speed on what happened?”

We sat down at the table with him while Christine got drinks, water for Crawford, a glass of wine for me. (What? It was late. I was in Connecticut. I deserved a glass of wine if I wasn’t getting a sandwich.) “No, we don’t know what happened beyond what Christine told us over the phone,” Crawford said.

“There’s really not much more to tell,” Christine said, handing me a glass of cabernet with some serious legs. This wasn’t something she’d be drinking if she was still married to a cop, I’ll tell you that much. “Someone broke in while we were at Liam’s soccer game and seemed to be looking for something, but left when they couldn’t find it.”

“How did you know someone had gotten in?” Crawford asked. “Did they trip the alarm?”

Christine looked over at Tim, sheepish. She opened her mouth to talk, but Tim cut her off.

“She doesn’t set the alarm,” he said, his voice tense. “Doesn’t see the need. Thinks we live in a safe community. I try to tell her that this is where they come to break into people’s houses.”

I didn’t know who “they” were, but I assumed he meant “the bad guys.” I didn’t want to let my mind wander to whom else “they” might be.

“Now do you believe me?” he asked, giving her a hard look. Wow, when Tim meant business, he really meant business. Maybe I should have taken the sandwich; the process of assembling it might have had a soothing effect on him. I had never seen him this worked up, or even this alive. “They got in through the front door. Which, I bet, wasn’t even locked.”

I kicked Crawford under the table. Up until this point, Tim had been a bland, boring guy, one that we couldn’t get a read on. Give him a good break-in and suddenly he developed a personality. Crawford kicked me back—judging from the look on his face, not to tell me that he understood why I was kicking him, but to tell me to stop.

Christine looked on the verge of tears, so I offered up helpfully that we had been broken into as well. Crawford broke his “no kicking” rule and kicked my shin.

“You were?” she asked, grabbing a napkin from a ceramic holder in the middle of the impressive kitchen table.

“Yes,” I said, “and they didn’t take anything from us either. Not that we have anything to take.”

Tim exploded. “This is your brother’s fault! We didn’t have problems like this before he came back into your life.”

That opened the floodgates. Christine started crying, Crawford looked at me as if we had just stepped into a lion’s den, and suddenly, my cabernet tasted like cough syrup. Nothing like a good meltdown to ruin a perfectly good post-break-in mood and a delightful red wine. I could see Crawford’s mind working, trying to decide whether he should come to his ex-wife’s defense, risking a tongue-lashing from her current husband and a withholding of sexual favors from his current wife. He decided, after much thought, smoke from the process practically coming out of his ears, to keep his mouth shut.

Christine was having one of those crying jags accompanied by hiccupping and loss of breath. She tried to state her case to Tim, but she was too far gone. He responded by stomping off, after politely saying “excuse me,” like a good WASP would, making haste for the front stairs and the second floor of the house.

Something hit me. It was quiet, and nobody was trying to burn the house down. “Where are the kids, Christine?” I asked.

“The little ones are already asleep, and the two older ones are sleeping at friends’ houses. It was prearranged, so that worked out well. We dropped them off after the game,” she hiccupped between sobs. She looked at Crawford. “Do you really think this has something to do with Chick?”