Authors: Maggie Barbieri
Tags: #Police Procedural, #New York (State), #Mystery & Detective, #Blogs, #Crawford; Bobby (Fictitious Character), #Women College Teachers, #Fiction, #Couples, #Bergeron; Alison (Fictitious Character), #Mystery Fiction, #Women Sleuths, #Large Type Books, #General
“We met. At St. Thomas.”
“We did?”
I’m really good at breaking the mood. I rolled off him and pulled the duvet cover up over my chest. I was glad the room was dark because I didn’t want to see the look on his face after I confessed what I knew. “Remember that story you told me about the stolen cab?”
He was silent as he put all of the pieces together. Slowly, it dawned on him. “You were the RA.”
“Yep.”
He rolled over on his side, propping himself up on his elbow. “And when were you going to tell me this?”
“I just figured it out. When you mentioned it at dinner. It all came back to me.”
“You lied to me,” he said, but I could detect, even in the dark, the smile on his lips. He could hardly believe that I had kept it from him for the last several weeks but found the humor in the situation, as well.
“I had decided a long time ago that I was going to take that piece of information to my grave,” I said. I had also decided that if I was going to keep Lydia Wilmott’s secret, I had to let another one out. Otherwise, I decided, I might explode. I didn’t tell him that, however. Max’s secret seemed like the most innocuous one to reveal under the circumstances. “Do you remember anything about that RA?”
“I remember that she looked like she was going to throw up,” he said. “I remember that she was tall. And I remember that she kept staring at my undershirt.” He traced a heart on my shoulder. “And I remember that the nun looked like Billy Martin.”
I took his hand in the dark. “Max was in the closet right next to where we were talking.”
He started laughing. “You must have thought you were going to die.”
“That about sums it up.”
He chuckled again. “Why the hell are you friends with her again?”
“Because I love her,” I said. “Remember? When you love someone, you don’t want to see her suffer. Know what I mean?”
He knew exactly what I meant. He didn’t subject me to the Crawford cross fire, and I didn’t subject him to any more of my dithering. I had stopped my excessive overthinking on the subject and he had let go of the fact that his family needed to have any say in the subject of his happiness.
Quick Study
Extracurricular Activities
Murder 101
www.minotaurbooks.com
ISBN 978-0-312-59328-5
First Edition: December 2010
eISBN 978-1-4299-2631-7
First St. Martin’s Press eBook Edition: November 2010