The Perfect Coed (Oak Grove Mysteries Book 1) (7 page)

“What else did she say?”

“He didn’t sound upset. He was sort of matter-of-fact about it. Sort of ‘just the facts, ma’am.’”

“Do you have a recording of it?”

“Susan, we’re not the FBI. No, we don’t record calls.” He was wishing she’d get off her detective kick and leave these things to him.

“Damn,” she said. “You could use voice prints to match it.”

“Susan, forget it! You’re not the detective. I am!”

Susan’s next class was a disaster. It was a two-hour graduate seminar in which one student was supposed to lead a discussion of
The Great Gatsby
, but this day it degenerated into an awkward silence, with students casting sidelong glances at the instructor.

“Have you read the book?” she finally demanded.

Eight heads bobbed up and down. Yes, they had read the assignment.

“Then why aren’t you talking to Elizabeth when she asks you questions?”

“Because,” one bold soul ventured, “we’re distracted by what’s happened. By the fact that the girl’s body was in your car and someone tried to run you down last night.”

Susan resisted the urge to ask how he knew about last night. The story of Missy Jackson’s body was in the city and campus newspapers and all over town, but last night…

Instead, she snapped, “I’m distracted too. Class dismissed. By a week from today, I want from each of you a twenty-page paper on the importance of this particular novel in the Fitzgerald canon.”

There was a universal groan, followed by the shuffling of chairs and sound of books being gathered. Alone in the seminar room, Susan put her head in her hands and willed herself not to weep. She couldn’t believe she had taken her anger out on graduate students. And now she’d have to read those damn papers.
Wait until Scott hears she’d lost her cool in a seminar!

Susan went by her office, gathered up papers for some studying that night, and roared off campus on the moped. Jake had offered to drive it, but she insisted, and now she felt her energy returning as she balanced the small machine and guided it toward her country home.

She pulled up to the back of her driveway, unloaded books and papers from the side pockets, fished for her keys, and then headed for the sliding glass door. It never occurred to her to look down, and she nearly tripped on a shoebox in front of the door.

“What the…?” She dumped her stuff on the deck table and reached for the box, all the time hearing Jake say, “Never open an unexpected package. Letter and package bombs have turned up in stranger places than Oak Grove.”

Surely not,
she thought.
Maybe Aunt Jenny has sent me something.
It didn’t occur to her that if the package had come from Aunt Jenny, there’d have been a postmark and a label. She tore off the lid, looked inside, and screamed. Hands to her face, she kept screaming… and staring inside the box. A kitten lay in a bed of white satin. It was gray, fluffy, small, and very dead. A note lay next to the pitiful creature.

Gingerly, she picked up the note and started to unfold it. Then she remembered how careful Jordan had been with that note on the rock that went through Jake’s windshield. Almost too rattled to think, she unlocked her door, crossed the kitchen to prowl under the sink for rubber gloves, and went back to the note. It held the same message as the last one: “Die, Susan Hogan, before you ruin any more lives.”

“Susan, are you all right?” It was Mrs. Whitley, the elderly widow who lived next door to her and whose usual reaction to Susan’s shenanigans was to shake her head and make a noise that sounded like “Tsk, tsk, tsk.” Next door, where she lived, wasn’t really that close, but Mrs. Whitley made it seem like the distance between their houses was feet, not yards.

Susan drew herself together. “I’m fine, thanks, Mrs. Whitley. It was a snake… a plain old garden snake, but it scared me for a minute.”

Mrs. Whitley chuckled. “Many times I’ve been scared by those critters. Well, I’m glad you’re all right.” She turned back down the driveway, and Susan called after her, “Thanks for checking.”

It was comforting to know that Mrs. Whitley was aware of what went on at her house. But Susan realized she was probably also aware of the nights that Jake didn’t go home till morning.

Susan used her foot to shove the box away from the door and with a gloved hand she put the lid back on it. Then she went inside and poured herself a finger of bourbon.
Jake’s going to start wondering why his bourbon disappears so fast,
she thought wryly. Then she realized that her books and papers were still outside, and to get them, she’d have to walk by that damn box again. She took another sip of bourbon, strode deliberately out the door, eyes avoiding the box, retrieved her belongings, and retreated inside. Then she sat on the couch and had a good cry.

* * *

Susan waited in the growing dusk for Jake, who was later than usual. Any other night, she would have been hungry and hoping he’d bring takeout something, anything. Tonight, she had no appetite. The ringing of the phone startled her, and she almost didn’t answer. But then she picked it up and uttered a curt, “Susan Hogan.”

“Susan? It’s Aunt Jenny. How are you, dear? You don’t sound well at all.” She listened to reassurances that Susan was fine and busy and then said, “I’m coming to see you. You need me right now.”

Jenny Hogan was Susan’s seventy-something-year-old aunt. Susan would have told anyone—including Aunt Jenny—that her aunt was the person she most loved in the world. Susan’s parents had divorced when she was three, and then her mother, frightened by the responsibility of a child and the prospect of being alone, took a successful dose of sleeping pills. Susan’s father, on hearing the news, had thrown Susan’s clothes in a suitcase, grabbed her and the suitcase, and taken the whole kit and caboodle to his sister Jenny, the maiden schoolteacher who lived in Wichita Falls. Thereafter, he appeared at Christmas with toy trains that bored Susan and on her birthday with gifts equally inappropriate. Ten years later, he died himself, worn out by drink and gambling and—Aunt Jenny never said the word, but Susan knew—womanizing.

Aunt Jenny, fluttery, distracted, loving beyond measure, had been Susan’s world.

“Aunt Jenny, I’d love to see you. But there’s a lot going on right now. Maybe Christmas?”

“No, Susan, I read the newspaper, and I know you’re as good as accused of murder. I need to be there with you. And, besides, I haven’t met this man—what’s his name? Jake?”

Susan was at a loss. “Uh, yeah, Jake. But Aunt Jenny I really can’t be a good hostess right now.”

“Yes, yes, dear, I understand, and I won’t be any trouble. I’ll be there in time to cook Sunday supper for you.”

“What time is your plane? Jake and I will come get you.”

“Plane? Oh, no, I’ll drive. Far too much trouble to get to the airport, go through all that check-in security. I can be there faster if I drive. Yes, dear, I know how to find Oak Grove. Just go to Fort Worth and turn southwest—what’s the road again? I bet I can even find your house. Susan, stop worrying so much about things. That’s why I have to be there to help you.”

“Aunt Jenny, I love you. But it worries me to have you drive all this way. I’ll be all right. Really. Jake will see to it.” Well, she hoped he would.

“Yes, Susan dear, I love you too. I’ll see you Sunday. And I can’t wait to meet Jake. Buy the makings for chicken and dumplings.”

Susan hung up the phone and held her head in her hands. She loved Aunt Jenny more than she could ever say, but she didn’t need her underfoot right now. And here it was Thursday already, and she’d have to have her house sparkling by Sunday. Wearily, she called Jake.

“I need you,” she said without saying hello or asking where he was and why he hadn’t started cooking her dinner.

He was still at the office. “Susan? Is this an invitation? I didn’t think we parted on the best of terms at the memorial service.” He was laughing at her.

If only you knew,
she thought. “Yeah,” she said, keeping her voice light, “it’s an invitation for Sunday night supper. My Aunt Jenny says she’ll be here in time to cook.”

“Aunt Jenny! I’ve been wondering when I’d be invited to meet her.”

“Jake, what am I going to do with a seventy-plus dither-head sharing my house with me?”

“I guess,” he said, “you’re going to learn a lesson in patience. And the two of us are going to learn a lesson in stolen moments of passion—you won’t let me spend the night, will you?”

“Aunt Jenny would be horrified.”

He sighed. “I was afraid of that. How long’s she staying?”

“She didn’t say. She knows all about Missy Jackson being found in my car, and she’s worried about me.” As she talked, Susan paced as far as the long phone cord would let her, traveling toward the kitchen bar and back again as many as ten times.

“Well, let me go with you to meet her plane.”

“She’s driving,” Susan said flatly.

He was amazed and indignant. “From what you’ve told me, she’s too old to drive here from Wichita Falls. Susan, how could you let her do that?”

“Wait till you meet Aunt Jenny, and then you’ll wonder how I could have stopped her.”

He chuckled. “I’ll be glad to meet the person who can stymie you, Susan. Meantime, I do have a couple of things to report on the murder. Want to forgive and forget over dinner?”

“Yes.” Her answer came so quickly that she heard Jake chuckle again, but she wanted him to come and comfort her and bury the poor kitten. “What time will you be here?”

“Not your place but mine,” he said. “I’ve got beer and wine and hamburger meat, buns, tomatoes and onion, dill pickles—all the makings of your kind of meal.”

Susan rarely went to Jake’s house, and it was a source of argument between them. “It’s not that I mind coming to your house,” he’d told her once, “but I think we ought to share.”

“In Scott’s eyes, it’s bad enough you spend the night at my house, but if I were to spend the night there…” She had thrown her hands up in the air.

“He probably wouldn’t even know,” Jake said, “as far away from campus as I am.”

“Don’t bet on it,” she’d told him.

Tonight, she was about to say, “Jake, I need you here,” when she realized that she wanted to be away from her own house for a while.

“I’ll pick you up, so you don’t have to go home late on the moped.”

She drew her own personal line in the sand. “I’ll ride the moped,” she said with determination. Maybe, she thought, the ride will get rid of whatever I’m feeling. What? Stress? Tension? Fear? That was it—good old-fashioned scared-to-death. “I’ll be there before dark, and I’ll spend the night,” she said.

“I’ll be waiting with open arms.” When he hung up, Jake shook his head in exasperation. Sometimes Susan was so hard to help that it frustrated him and made him wonder about their relationship. Where he came from a man protected a woman, and yet Susan seemed to reject protection—even when she needed it most.

* * *

Jake lived in the country, beyond where Susan lived. Outside, his was the perfunctory ranch-style house with red brick, evenly spaced windows, ordinary landscaping—lots of nandinas—and not much to distinguish it from most suburban houses except that it sat on its own two acres of land. But inside it was totally, well, Jake. For several years, Jake had been gradually fixing it up, beginning with a complete redo of the kitchen. He’d installed a gas cook top, a Jenn-Air indoor grill, a convection oven, a dishwasher, and garbage compactor—Susan laughed at the latter as absolutely useless. He’d used gray tiles on the counters, backsplash, and floor to complement the white walls. The appliances had brushed steel finishes. The result was a clean, streamlined look that spoke of serious dedication to cooking.

Following the standard plan for 1960s houses, his front door opened into a hall with a living room to the right and a dining room beyond that. Straight ahead lay the ubiquitous paneled family room, only Jake had painted the paneling a soft off-white that lightened the room. The bedroom wing was off the hall to the left, but to get to the kitchen you had to go through either the dining room or the family room. A bar-height counter connected family room and kitchen. The front bedroom served as a sort of television room, though Jake read more than he watched the tube, and the room’s walls were lined with bookcases. Several shelves held popular paperbacks, everything from John Grisham and John LeCarré to Louis L’Amour. The middle bedroom was a guest room—maybe Aunt Jenny should stay there, Susan thought—and the larger back bedroom was Jake’s, done in dark green with tan accents. Unlike the other bedrooms, it had its own master bath.

Susan left her house a little after six, after going around locking all the windows and turning on all the lights. She locked the door behind her and even went back once to try it.
I’m turning into a nervous Nellie,
she thought unhappily.
Once my house becomes a threat instead of a safe haven, I’ve had it.
And then it occurred to her that was exactly what this crazy person was trying to accomplish—make her afraid in the places where she felt most safe. Defiantly she strode across her deck, keeping her eyes averted from that damn shoebox. Gunning the moped into action, she whirled past Mrs. Whitley’s house and saw that lady peeking out through discreetly parted curtains.

She headed south on Main, which soon turned into FM 1161, to where Jake lived. Always uneasy now, she looked in the rearview mirror and saw a small, dark car close on her tail. She sped up as much as she could, pushing the moped to forty, a speed that made her feel giddily dangerous. The dark car stayed close behind.

I wish I were smarter about cars. I have no idea if that’s the car that tried to kill me before or not. They look the same, but… If the driver of that car wants to kill me, he’s got a perfect shot on this empty country road. Her heart was pounding, and she had a hard time concentrating on keeping the speeding moped on course. Suddenly, the car behind her veered to the left, gunned its motor, and passed, quickly leaving her behind.

Damn my imagination, Susan said to herself. If I’d been thinking, I’d have known that even a sociopath wouldn’t go to all the elaborate trouble of leaving a dead kitten at my door only to kill me within the hour.