Schooled In Lies (13 page)

But no one disagreed with him.

Chapter Nine

THE MEETING ENDED TWENTY minutes later. I was relieved that the police now knew about what had been going on. But I had no faith that they’d make looking into the matter a priority.

“Is that it?” I asked, hurrying to catch up with Harmon and Mercer in the parking lot. Harmon gave me an annoyed look, while Mercer looked like it was past his dinner time and he wasn’t happy about it.

“And please call us if you get any more messages or anything else strange happens,” Mercer added. They got in their unmarked Crown Victoria and took off, leaving me feeling anything but reassured.

Instead of going home, I headed over to the Kingford College library to talk to the custodian on duty. I was hoping it would be the same one who was working the night the stone planter fell, or more likely was pushed, off the roof and almost killed me. After inquiring at the information desk, I was directed to the basement of the library where they kept the archives and books that no longer circulated. The hallway in the basement was narrow and dimly lit and lined with shelves filled with box after box of old books. It smelled a little dank and moldy and I suppressed a sneeze. I could see a light on in an office at the end of the hall. When I got to the doorway of the office, I saw a man who must be the custodian seated behind a gray metal desk playing a game of solitaire on the computer. A large cork message board covered in pushpins and Post-it notes was attached to the wall behind the computer, while the top of the desk was covered in dark rusted rings that must have been left behind by the cracked green Kingford College coffee mug sitting next to the computer’s keyboard. Shelving along the back wall held cleaning supplies. When he saw me standing there watching him, he jumped and then quickly clicked on the mouse making the game disappear.

“Students ain’t s’posed to be down here,” he said testily. He was a heavyset middle-aged man with graying red, slicked back hair. His brown uniform pants looked a little snug around the waist and the sleeves of his tan work shirt were rolled up exposing muscular forearms covered with thick reddish brown hair. The name sewn onto the front pocket of his shirt read: Harlan.

“Sorry to bother you, sir, but I was the one who almost got killed when that planter fell from the roof the other night and I was wondering if you found out how it came loose?”

“I can’t talk to you if you’ve filed a lawsuit against the college. Could lose my job.” He eyed me suspiciously.

“Oh no,” I assured him. “I was just curious. I’m not planning to sue. I promise.”

He continued to stare at me like he didn’t quite believe me then took a swig from his coffee mug and cleared his throat. “What is it you need to know?”

“I just wondered how such a heavy planter could have fallen from the roof? Was it loose?”

“Those planters are pretty old and fallin’ apart. It wouldn’t take much to knock one over, which is why we don’t let people up there. I must have changed the lock on the door to that roof a dozen times, but they always manage to get up there somehow. My guess would be that some students were up there messin’ around and accidentally knocked that planter off the roof. I’m always findin’ condom wrappers and whatnot up there.” He shook his head in disgust and took another loud slurp of his coffee.

“Were you working that night? Did you find anything up there after the planter fell from the roof?” I asked.

“Yeah, I was here all right. They called and interrupted my dinner break to come clean up that mess. Went up to the roof afterwards and all I found was some empty pop cans and these,” he said, opening his desk drawer and pulling out two small white shiny objects and tossing them on his desk. I walked over to take a look.

I could tell he didn’t know what they were, but I recognized them immediately. They were fake fingernails. The cheap press-on kind you can get at any drugstore. They were pearl white in color and oval shaped. Dirt was caked onto the sticky adhesive on the back of each one. Could the person who pushed that planter off the roof have been a woman and a couple of her fake nails had popped off in the process? Or was the custodian right and it had just been some students fooling around. No telling how long the nails had been up there. I told the custodian what they were and he wrinkled his nose in disgust and swept them off his desk into the wastebasket.

“I thought they were guitar picks,” he said still frowning. I thanked him and left.

Five minutes after I got home there was a soft knock at the door. It was Carl. I silently stood aside and he walked in. It felt like I hadn’t seen him in months. I was tired, too tired to fight with him about Vanessa. She wasn’t worth the toll it was taking on our relationship. Carl looked tired, too.

“Kendra, I’m—” he began before I silenced him with a kiss.

We kissed for a long time and clung to each other. It was like we couldn’t kiss deep enough or press close enough together. We kissed and shed clothes all the way to my bedroom. I lay down on the bed and pulled him on top of me. I reached between his legs and stroked his erection and guided him between my legs. One sudden hard thrust and he was deep inside me, causing me to shudder and cry out in pleasure that bordered on pain.

We lay there not moving with him inside me for several long minutes then I flipped him over until I was straddling him and started riding him slowly, exquisitely slow, maddeningly slow. Slow is good. Soon we were both breathing heavily and sweating. I started to moan and he rolled me over onto my back, quickening his pace until I climaxed. Then he came and collapsed on top of me. It was the shrill chirp of the telephone that woke me later. I squinted at the clock as I reached for the cordless. It was close to midnight. I pressed the talk button.

“Hello?”

“Kendra, it’s me, Myra. Sorry it’s so late. Did I wake you up?”

I looked over at Carl to see if the phone had woken him up. He pulled the cover up under his chin and rolled onto his side. I took the phone and went into the living room.

“Good cause you know I don’t usually call no one past eleven o’clock. I’m real polite like that but I figured you’d want to hear what Bone told me.”

“What did he say?” I was sitting on the edge of my rocking chair with the phone gripped tightly in my hand.

“He said there’s a guy named Calvin Lee Vermillion who’s at London with him. Bone said he’s been in the joint for thirty years. He’s ‘bout to get released next week.”

The next day after work, I headed over to Ms. Flack’s house to talk to her about Calvin Lee Vermillion, though I’d yet to figure out just how I was going to bring up the subject. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was in some kind of danger because of this Vermillion guy and wondered if maybe he could somehow be behind all the weird stuff happening to the reunion committee.

Ivy Flack lived in a blue and gray fifties craftsman style bungalow on Hewitt Street. I pulled up in front of her house and noticed her car wasn’t in the driveway but got out and knocked on her door anyway on the off chance her car was parked in the detached garage. No one answered the door but I could hear faint meowing sounds coming from inside the house before a large black and white cat appeared in the big picture window perched on the back of a sofa that sat in front of the window. This must be Tamsin. She looked at me curiously with large yellow eyes that seemed to be telepathically trying to tell me what I’d already figured out, the mistress of the house wasn’t at home. Tamsin and I stared at each other for a few seconds more before I turned to head back to my car. As I stepped off the porch, I heard a crash that startled me and looked over to see that a scrawny stray dog had knocked over Ms. Flack’s aluminum trashcan and was eating something it had found amongst the garbage. When the dog spotted me, it took its prize, which looked like a chicken leg bone, and ran away to hide under the neighbor’s bushes. I could hear it crunching on the bone in the distance as I approached the fallen trashcan.

Knowing that if the trash wasn’t picked up it would end up all over Ms. Flack’s yard and the street, I bent down to clean up the mess. It was mostly empty pop cans, newspapers, detergent boxes, fast food containers, and the rest of the chicken carcass the dog had gotten a hold of. But something amongst the debris caught my eye and made me stop short. I picked it up. It was a package of fake press-on fingernails in pearl white. The exact same kind the custodian had found near the planter that had almost killed me. Only two were missing, which, of course, were the two the custodian had found on the roof. I knew Ms. Flack got manicures on a regular basis, but I did remember her telling me, when I’d run into her on campus last week, about breaking a couple of nails and not being able to get in to see her manicurist right away. In the meantime, she must have resorted to using the fake nails. I stuffed the package of fake nails in my purse. I rooted through the rest of the trash and also found a half empty can of red spray paint. Hadn’t Dennis said that his garage had been spray painted with graffiti?

I stood up too fast and felt dizzy. I sat down on the stoop of my Ms. Flack’s side door and thought about how easy it would have been for her to have spiked Audrey’s pop with alcohol at the meeting. Audrey was the only one who drank diet pop. Plus, it was no wonder she’d refused my offer to take her to the hospital after she fell down the steps. She’d only pretended to fall. She could have set Gerald’s curtains on fire and tampered with Dennis’s vacuum. Had she tried to run Cherisse down as well? I didn’t recognize the car that almost hit Cherisse that night. I looked over at the detached garage. It was a small one car garage and there were windows on each side as well as a side door. I went over to take a peek and was frustrated to find the curtains were closed. I tried the door. It, too, was locked. I went around the side of the garage to look in the other set of windows.

The side of the garage was right next to the chain link fence that separated Ms. Flack’s yard from her neighbor’s. I held my breath and squeezed between the garage and the fence. It was a very tight fit. I inched my way over to the window and looked in. Lucky for me, the curtains were open just enough for me to see a dark colored car inside. It was too dark for me to tell if the car was blue or black. But I could tell it was a much older and larger model than the car Ms. Flack usually drove. It certainly could have been the one that I’d seen that night, though I couldn’t be positive.

Anger and confusion made me feel almost sick. How could she have done this to us? What reason could Ms. Flack have for wanting to hurt and scare us? What did she want us to pay for? Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of time to ponder these questions. I had a more pressing concern, which I quickly discovered when I tried to move. I was stuck. Great! Somehow I had managed to snag the buttons on the back pockets of my denim skirt on the fence behind me. I was stuck fast and I couldn’t turn around, not that there was much room to move anyway. I wiggled around trying without success to pull free of the fence. It was such a tight squeeze that I couldn’t even reach behind me to extricate myself.

The only thing my efforts accomplished was to shake the fence and make the stray dog, that was still hiding under the bushes on the other side, start barking frantically at me. He barked and snarled, baring his teeth. I couldn’t figure out why the hell the damned dog was being so cranky until I noticed its hanging teats and spied two tiny puppies curled up together under the bush. He was a
she
, and she was protecting her pups. When I failed to move, the dog ran around the fence and came charging at me. Being a smaller dog, she was easily able to navigate the tight space and sank her teeth into the hem of my skirt and started pulling. I was worried about what would happen once the dog got tired of a mouthful of skirt and wanted my flesh. I had some cookies in my purse I knew the dog would be interested in. Unfortunately, I’d left my purse sitting by Ms. Flack’s side door. I looked around but there was no one who could help me. And how would I explain what I’d been doing peeking into Ms. Flack’s garage?