Stork Raving Mad (23 page)

“I can’t imagine why anyone would want to pick it up,” she said, with a shudder. “And—”

She broke off and jammed the end of the hair lock in her mouth.

“Stop that,” I said, slapping her hand slightly. She looked startled and pulled the hair out.

“Yeah, ease off on the hair, Alice,” Kathy said. “Bronwyn doesn’t need a bald understudy.”

“Oh, you’re Bronwyn’s understudy?” I asked.

“That’s right,” she said. “Of course, you wouldn’t know that since Bron hasn’t missed a single damned rehearsal yet. If she broke a leg, she’d talk Ramon into letting her do the play in a wheelchair.”

“You never know,” I said. If Bronwyn turned out to be the killer, Ramon would need Alice. Then again, if Ramon also got arrested . . .

“So your fingerprints are on the statue,” I said aloud. “That’s easily explained. Why would the chief jump to the conclusion that you killed her?”

“Because everyone knew how much I hated her,” the girl said, burying her face in her hands. “I got the part of Ophelia in the studio production of
Hamlet
last fall, and she took it away from me.”

“Took it away from you? I didn’t realize she had any influence over casting department shows.”

“She doesn’t,” Kathy said. “But you can’t appear in a show if you’re on academic probation.”

“And she flunked me,” Alice said. “The witch. Claimed I didn’t turn in a paper on time, and it’s a lie. She lost it—maybe deliberately. But of course, I can’t prove that.”

“How sure are you that you turned in the paper?” I asked.

“Positive,” she said. “I even turned it in a week early. As soon as the cast list went up on Friday and I knew I’d be doing Ophelia, I wanted to clear out everything else so I could just concentrate on the play.”

“Very commendable,” I said. I suspected the not unearned reputation drama students had for disorganization stemmed at least partly from the long hours they put in on shows. That and their belief that organization was boring and uncreative.

“So I spent the whole weekend in the library working on my paper for Dr. Wright.” Her hands were still now, clasped in
front of her, and she held her head high. She was acting, I realized. Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean she was lying, only that she’d probably told this story many times.

“Monday morning, as soon as I finished typing it, I went down to Dunsany Hall to put it in her box,” she went on. “And I ran into her there. It was before six, but she was already there, drinking tea and staring at something on the bulletin board. She said, ‘You’re up uncharacteristically early’—I guess she noticed I didn’t always get there by nine, when the class started.”

“Nine’s early for drama department people,” I said. I’d come to hate the semesters when Michael’s schedule called for him to teach a morning class.

“I told her I wasn’t up early, I’d stayed up late finishing my paper, and she smirked and said, ‘You pulled an all-nighter for nothing, then—it’s not due till next week.’ So I told her I knew that, but that I was about to be very busy with rehearsals for
Hamlet
, and I wanted to get it done before that happened. You’d think she’d be glad someone was being responsible.”

“She wasn’t?”

“No,” the girl said. She had gone back to hand-wringing. “She just stood there holding my paper with her thumb and forefinger, like she thought it might have cooties or something. And she didn’t say anything—not ‘Thank you’ or ‘Good morning’ or even ‘Go away and leave me alone.’ It was kind of awkward. So I offered her a chocolate macaroon—I’d stopped by Geraldine’s on the way to get some for my breakfast—and she acted as if I’d tried to hand her a chocolate-covered worm. She snapped, ‘No!’ and reared back like she was going to lecture
me. I wasn’t sure what I’d done wrong, so I just said ‘Sorry!’ and ran away as fast as I could. I still don’t know what I did to upset her. You’d think I’d tried to poison her or something.”

“Actually, you did try to poison her,” Kathy said. “Though she should have known it was quite unintentional. She was diabetic.”

Luckily Kathy was so focused on comforting Alice that she didn’t see my jaw drop when she revealed her knowledge of Dr. Wright’s medical history.

“Diabetic?” Alice said. “Oh no, I had no idea.”

“Yes,” Kathy said. “And much as I adore Geraldine’s cookies, they’re definitely not something a diabetic should be eating.”

“Did a lot of people know this?” I asked Kathy.

“Hardly anyone,” she said. “I only know because I caught her shooting up in her office one time. I knocked before I went in, but apparently she didn’t hear me so I went on in to leave some papers in her in-basket, and she was sitting there with her skirt hiked up, injecting herself in the thigh.”

There would be a needle mark on the body, I realized. Had Dad spotted it? Was that why he’d told Horace to be on the lookout for insulin? And would there be some way of telling the fatal needle mark from any Dr. Wright had recently made herself?

“What did she do when you interrupted her?” I asked.

“Chewed me out something wicked for trespassing,” Kathy said. “And I did knock. Then she showed me the insulin bottle—as if I’d really think she was doing smack or something—and told me that her medical history was her
own business and if this got out in the department, she’d know who was responsible.”

“So you never told anyone?” I asked.

“Not till now,” Kathy said. “And I was living in fear that someone else would find out and leak it and she’d blame me. But I guess she’s beyond caring about her privacy now, and beyond retaliating against me for spilling the beans.”

I nodded. I ached to tell poor Alice that she could relax, that her fingerprints on Tawaret weren’t going to be as incriminating as she thought—but the chief wouldn’t like it if I spilled the real story of Dr. Wright’s death.

And the chief would probably want to know that one of his suspects was aware of Dr. Wright’s diabetes.

“Wow,” Alice said. “I didn’t realize. No wonder she snapped at me.”

“But she didn’t have to be so rude,” I said. “She could have just said ‘No, thank you.’ ”

“Yeah, but what if she loves cookies and can’t eat them, and there I was, waving them under her nose,” Alice said. “When you come down to it, I was torturing her.”

“That may be,” I said. “But you can’t just go around losing people’s papers when they annoy you.”

“Except she did, all the time,” Kathy said. “That’s one of the reasons she hated me so much. She was doing this to students all the time—to drama students, that is. That’s why we started this thing where people who were afraid she’d do it to them would give their papers to her in front of me. So they’d have a witness.”

“Stupid me,” Alice said. “I should have done that. I thought turning it in a week early would be safe.”

“You need to tell the chief about all of this,” I said.

“All right,” Alice said. “If you’ll go with me.”

“We’ll all go together,” I said. “Right, Kathy?”

Kathy turned pale. Then she nodded and began burrowing in her cavernous black tote bag.

“Before we do,” she said. “Here.”

She handed me a thick file folder.

I opened it. The first page was a typed table of contents for the documents in the file. It was her evidence against Dr. Wright.

“We should take this to the chief, too,” I said.

“That was my idea,” she said. “I brought two copies. One for Dr. Wright, so I could try to talk some sense into her, and one for Abe, that I was going to give him if I failed, so he wouldn’t be totally blindsided. The chief doesn’t need both. Give that copy to Abe. He and Art and Michael might be able to use it.”

“Don’t they already know about it?” I asked.

She hesitated.

“Not really,” she said. “I told Abe I had some information about her treatment of students that might be useful. I don’t suppose he had any idea how much information.”

I glanced down at the file, which was over an inch thick.

“We should make sure it’s okay with the chief,” I said, tucking the folder under my arm. “Let’s go.”

We marched downstairs, making a strange procession. Alice went first, holding her head high, looking like a defeated queen
marching to her execution. Kathy just looked anxious, scurrying along with the tote bag containing her file clutched to her chest. I brought up the rear, keeping an eye out to make sure neither of them suddenly changed her mind.

As we reached the bottom of the stairs, I felt a familiar slight twinge of pain in my abdomen. But it didn’t repeat during the whole long way down the hall to Michael’s office, so apparently it was just another Braxton-Hicks contraction. I couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or disappointed.

As we turned into the hallway to the library, the doorbell rang. I looked over my shoulder and saw Rose Noire scurrying to answer it.

“Is this the residence of Professor Waterston?” boomed a resonant voice. The Face had arrived. I breathed a sigh of relief that Rose Noire would be dealing with him. I’d once had to make conversation with him for ten minutes at a faculty party, and it had seemed the longest ten years of my life. I hurried after Kathy and Alice.

The chief and Sammy were standing at the end of the hallway.

“More witnesses for you,” I called, as our procession approached.

I found myself remembering a long-ago fall when mice moved into the basement of our family house. The chief’s face wore the same look of truly mixed feelings that Mother’s had each time our cat caught a mouse and proudly deposited it at her feet.

We all filed into Michael’s office and, being old hands, took
seats on whichever boxes and stools we thought would be preferable to the awful chairs. The chief, who followed us in, frowned slightly. I suspected he was about to ask to speak to his witnesses alone.

“Kathy and I convinced Alice that she should come and talk to you,” I said. I made the mistake of patting Alice’s hand in a comforting manner, and she seized mine with a death grip.

“Don’t be afraid, Alice,” Kathy said. Having seen what had happened to me, she patted Alice on the shoulder and managing to avoid being grabbed herself.

With much encouragement from Kathy and me, Alice sobbed out her story of Dr. Wright’s persecution and her fears that having touched the statue would make her the chief’s prime suspect. It took rather longer than necessary, but probably less time than it would have taken him to extract it from Alice by himself.

“Thank you,” the chief said, finally. “Let this be a lesson to you not to withhold information in the future.”

“You’re not going to arrest me?” Alice asked, sniffling slightly.

“Not unless some other more compelling evidence of your guilt comes up,” the chief said. He stood up to usher her to the door.

“Wash your face in cold water,” Kathy called after Alice. “And go lie down for a while. They might need you for rehearsal.”

“Fat chance,” Alice said as she closed the door behind her.

The chief sat down again. He glanced at me and then fixed his gaze back on Kathy.

“So, Ms. Borgstrom. Do you also want to confess having handled the statue?”

“No,” Kathy said. “I wanted to give you this.”

She handed him the file folder. The chief opened it, leafed through the first few pages, than glanced up as if asking for an explanation.

“I’ve been keeping a dossier of things Dr. Wright has done to various drama students,” Kathy said. “Actions that might be illegal and certainly were unethical. Losing their papers, grading them more harshly, refusing them extensions and other accommodations that she routinely granted to other students.”

“For what purpose?” the chief asked.

“Who knows?” Kathy said. “The woman had a pathological hatred of the theater.”

“I meant why were you keeping this file?” the chief said.

“In the hope that we could use it against her,” Kathy said. “Even a tenured professor shouldn’t be allowed to get away with some of this stuff.”

“So you were hoping to get her disciplined?” the chief asked.

“I was hoping Abe could use her misconduct in his campaign to liberate drama from the English department,” Kathy said. “It needs to be an independent department. So I started documenting everything. I figured one or two incidents she could easily explain away, but not a pattern documented over several years’ time. And when I heard about what she was pulling now, trying to ruin Ramon’s career, I thought maybe it was time to confront her.”

“So you brought this file out here to give it to Dr. Sass?” the chief asked.

“Actually, I planned to confront Dr. Wright with it,” she said. “And maybe put her on the defensive before the meeting with Abe, Art, and Michael. It sounded as if they were going to bring up the idea of secession.”

“She gave me the copy she brought for Abe,” I said, holding it up. “Is it okay if I give it to him?”

“Let me see it first,” the chief said, holding out his hand.

Kathy and I watched as he flipped page by page through both files. At some point I realized I was holding my breath, so I stopped and took a few deep, calming breaths. The chief took out his notebook, glanced at it from time to time, and made a few new notations. No doubt he was seeing which of the people in Kathy’s evidence were already on his suspect list and which he’d have to hunt down. And, of course, making sure my copy didn’t contain anything extra.

Eventually, though, he handed one of the files back to me.

“Oh, one more thing,” I said. “It may not be relevant, but Kathy, you should tell the chief what you told Alice and me. About Dr. Wright’s health.”

“Her health?” Kathy repeated. “Oh, you mean that she was a diabetic?”

The chief froze, just for a split second, and stared intently at Kathy. But she was looking at me, waiting for an answer, and missed it.

“Yes,” I said. “Any medical detail could be relevant. Dad was telling me the other day about a crime that wasn’t solved until
they figured out that the victim was a hemophiliac. Without knowing that, their time of death calculations were all off. So the chief—and Dad—might need to know about Dr. Wright’s diabetes.”

Kathy shrugged, and repeated her tale of interrupting Dr. Wright in the act of injecting herself with insulin. The chief continued to scribble for several minutes after she finished.