Warming Trend (24 page)

“Ani lost everything,” Lisa said vehemently. Ani tried to quell her with a gesture, but she rushed on. “She didn’t take the notes to begin with. Someone else did, and they got away with it. The only person who has ever suffered is Ani. Monica made sure of that.”

Tan was shaking her head. “I don’t see it. I’m not saying it’s not possible. But I don’t see where you get that.”

“I know her type. She exploited what existed.” Lisa turned to Ani. “Why didn’t you call Eve after you went back to GlacierPort?”

“They took my phone.”

Eve and Tan both nodded in corroboration.

“So Ani had been basically under house arrest, with no phone, all day, and neither of you knew.”

Tan nodded. “I didn’t, and I told Ani that was completely wrong.”

“It conveniently made her dependent on Monica for all her news, plus the nimrods who were taping hate messages to her door. And I’m going to bet that Monica is the only one Eve got to talk to besides Ani.” Lisa cocked her head in Eve’s direction. “Did you talk to her? Did she tell you Ani couldn’t call you?”

Eve had stilled. After a hard swallow, she said, “No, quite the opposite. She seemed very surprised that I hadn’t heard from Ani. I’ve never…wondered about that. Ani didn’t have a phone, and Monica knew it, but she thought Ani would have called me. I didn’t find out they’d taken her phone until I got there.”

Lisa steepled her fingers, a gesture that Ani found intensely irritating. “And how did that make you feel?”

“I didn’t know what to feel. Monica told me Ani had taken the notes and it looked pretty bleak, but she kept saying that she thought I should hear it all from Ani. But Ani never called. I thought—I guess I thought she was too ashamed to call me. Or other people were more important.”

“But I couldn’t call.”

Lisa waved a silencing hand, and gave Eve one of those laser looks Ani had learned to be wary of. “When you talked to Ani and Ani said she’d done it for her accomplished, gorgeous rock star professor’s sake, what did you think?”

“You’ve been watching too much Court TV,” Ani muttered even as her head was spinning.

“What does it matter?” Eve leaned forward, arms wrapped around her midsection. “Fine. I thought maybe Ani did have feelings for Monica that she’d never told me about.”

“Let’s get real. You thought maybe Ani didn’t love you.”

Ani gaped. How could Eve had possibly thought that? To her amazement, Eve nodded as tears welled up in her eyes. Ani wanted to pull her close—she couldn’t stand to see Eve cry. She’d been the cause of all the clouds in those sky-blue eyes. Without thinking, she said, “Oh, honey, I wasn’t in love with her. I was trying to save her career, though. I thought it was the right thing to do. How could you think I didn’t love you?”

Eve wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I thought you loved her, and you couldn’t love us both. There was no other explanation for you stealing the notes. That was so unlike you that I thought…”

Lisa was nodding. “It was something so wrong that you thought she had been motivated by the biggest force there is—love. Only love would make Ani steal something from a dying man.”

A tear trickled down Eve’s cheek, and Ani wanted in the worst way to wipe it away with her thumb. “She said so herself, when I saw her. That she’d done it for Monica’s sake. Jeopardized everything for another woman.”

“But that’s not what I did.” Ani swallowed down her own tears. “I moved something that had been stolen. I did it for the professor, the scientist, someone who might help save the planet, literally. Not the woman. I still got the notebook destroyed.”

Tan burst out with, “I still don’t get it. If the secret is that the notes turned up in Monica’s office and Ani inadvertently got them destroyed, then why wouldn’t Monica just say so—to Eve at least. To some folks, here and there. Someone tried to destroy her career, after all. That’s the kind of thing you get into the gossip mill, so the person who tried knows that you know, and they failed.”

“Finally,” Lisa said triumphantly. “Finally, someone is asking the right questions.” She gave Tan a beaming smile.

Feeling detached, Ani watched Tan’s blush start from her neck and work up. She might have commented but she was too flummoxed by learning Eve’s state of mind to say more than, “What?”

Lisa spoke as if Ani were four. “Monica told you one thing. She told Eve something else. She told you that your only choice was to leave or they’d make you pay back a whole lot of money for your scholarship. The two of you never compared notes, and you were so isolated and scared you stopped listening to people who wanted to help, including your girlfriend. I’m saying that Monica didn’t want you to be helped. She wanted you gone.”

Ani felt inside something that was a perfect match to the small, short whimper that escaped Eve. “But why would she do all that?”

Lisa spread her hands. “Because she was hiding something bigger.”

Ani joined Tan and Eve in leaning forward expectantly.

Lisa rolled her eyes. “People, you’ve had three years to figure this out. Took me thirty minutes. Oh, for heaven’s sake.
She
took the notes.”

Then, as if she hadn’t been clear enough, she added for good measure, “Duh!”

“Prove me wrong,” Lisa said for at least the fortieth time.

Eve looked up from flipping quick salmon hash in her favorite copper skillet. “To be honest, something about Monica has always made me uneasy, so I’m not arguing with you.”

Eve’s unease with Monica was news to Ani. “You never said.”

“It wasn’t important. You admired her very much, but you were with me.”

“I just—” Ani turned to Lisa again. “I just can’t believe she’d do that.”

Tan, who hadn’t stopped looking at Lisa the way Tonk looked at Ani’s shoes, said, “I don’t want to believe it either. But I think the whole cruise thing was a lie, Eve. I think she didn’t want you and Ani to have this conversation, let alone a conversation three years ago.”

“She called again today and wanted me to go out to dinner.” Eve seasoned the hash, then spiraled it out onto a plate. Ani hated the distraction of their talking—she wanted to watch Eve move in her kitchen again. It was a delight to watch her pour art and science into her food like an alchemist, and watch those graceful, precise hands working magic. But talk they must, because the part of her not fascinated with Eve’s hands had a headache to beat the band.

Tan accepted the steaming dish gratefully. “Thanks, really. I was famished. When Lisa called I was about to grab some late lunch, so I skipped it and made up a doctor’s appointment to leave early.”

Eve gave Lisa a puzzled look that she transferred to Ani. Ani met her gaze, but didn’t know what to make of it. Inside, a little voice was saying, with increasing intensity, Monica took three years from you both. She broke something you can’t mend. Every time she looked at Eve, she flushed at the memory of that hug, when their skin had tried to do the talking for them.

“I don’t know why she invested in the restaurant, to be honest. I was catering a party and mentioned that this location was available, just in passing.”

“Guilt?” Tan swallowed a mouthful of hash and gave a satisfied sigh. “Or maybe she wanted to be sure she’d hear if Ani came back.”

Eve, her eyes narrowed, asked, “How do we know her account of the so-called accident is right?”

“Now you’re talking.” Lisa, who’d been leaning elegantly against the counter, made a show of filling a glass with water, placing it on a tray, then delivering it to Tan with a flourish. “How do we know?”

“Inquest,” Tan said, after she thanked Lisa for the water. “He died of blood loss from cuts and blunt force trauma to the lower body sustained in the ice slide. The rate of blood loss was rapid. The coroner speculated he’d only been conscious for perhaps five minutes, and died in less than fifteen.”

Ani was shaking her head, but she was not sure if it was in denial or just a reflection of her rising anger and dismay. “Maybe she just took advantage of the situation. Except she was trapped in the ice too. It was clear that she had been.”

“But she got free, and could have taken the notebook then. Kenbrink was dying, or already dead.” Tan looked thoughtful. “Maybe events just got out of hand. Once she got back, she didn’t know what to do.”

“So she framed me. Didn’t tell me not to leave GlacierPort yet. Didn’t tell me to bring my pack when I came back. Told me not to do anything with the notebook, but dang, she really wished it would go away somehow.”

“Will no one rid me of this ignorant priest?” Lisa glanced around the abruptly silent kitchen. “Henry the Second? Thomas Becket? Am I the only person here with any kind of liberal arts education?”

“I saw that movie,” Tan said. “The soldiers took it to mean the king wanted Becket dead, so they killed him.”

Lisa beamed. “And?”

“The king denied that was what he wanted.”

“Hell.” Something in Ani snapped. “What’s the point? We can’t prove any of this. You know we can’t. I destroyed the notebook, and it might have had her fingerprints on it—more than just the cover, if she looked through it at all.”

Lisa looked at Ani. “There’s one thing that still puzzles me.”

A ceaseless barrage of disbelief, feelings of betrayal and aching scars of isolation were all pounding behind Ani’s eyes. She wanted to yell something, but if she did she knew she would run out of voice long before her words made any sense. Trying to sound calm, she asked, “What would that be, Mr. Monk?”

“How did Monica get the notebook into her office?”

Ani blinked at Lisa. “I assumed she didn’t get as thoroughly searched, being above suspicion.”

“The dean’s a guy who doesn’t like lesbians, and he knows Monica was alone with Kenbrink for a while. Why wouldn’t he search all of her gear, and her?”

Tan chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “I was a witness, and the search was thorough. Every bit of her gear. A female security guard patted her down, and she was first, to set an example of cooperation. People who were searched moved on to one of the study rooms to wait. She couldn’t have stashed it with someone else, then retrieved it before they were searched.” Tan finished up the hash and took the plate to the sink to rinse. “You’re right, Lisa, I don’t know how she got it into her office by the next morning.”

Eve looked up from drying her frying pan. “I remember that Ani was toward the back of the arriving pack, with the last sled. But she broke away from the main group. I wasn’t paying attention to anything but her. I picked up her pack and took her home. If anyone tried to stop us, I missed it.”

“There was a lot of confusion,” Tan admitted. “Several people got to the parking lot, but there was an assistant there to tell them to go back. I think you two must have been in the upper lot by then.”

Eve nodded. “I always parked there.”

“Do you know when Monica figured out Ani wasn’t there to be searched?”

Tan nodded. “It was late—around ten. Ani wasn’t in her dorm room, and I gave Monica Eve’s phone number from the emergency contact file. She said she called and got no answer.”

The pan clattered out of Eve’s hand with an angry crack. “She didn’t call until the morning. Six o’clock in the morning, when Ani and I were still half asleep.”

Ani watched Eve reclaim the pan with an apologetic caress. She was heartened that Eve remembered the details so vividly. “So maybe she didn’t single me out in advance. I was the front runner in the circumstantial evidence is all.” At first, Ani thought the idea was comforting. It eased part of her consternation to think that if Monica had needed to set someone up, she hadn’t chosen her deliberately. On the other hand, it really felt rotten to have gone through what she did simply because she was convenient.

Lisa went back into her detective mode. She picked up a Dragonfly coffee mug and carried it to the far end of the kitchen. “Let’s say this is the accident site.” She walked back to her previous perch and regarded the mug from that distance. “How does that mug get over here?”

“Someone carries it. Call me Person Unknown.” Tan, with a grin at Lisa, retrieved the mug, moving it to the counter opposite all of them. “Theory one: Monica carried it to GlacierPort.”

“Except that we agree that it’s impossible she got it inside. Don’t we?”

Tan nodded. “I don’t see how she could have. Security was treating it like a drug raid at a fraternity. It was serious business.”

“So we don’t even know how it got to GlacierPort, let alone past security and into Monica’s office.” Lisa picked the mug up and moved it all the way back to the end of the kitchen. “Let’s start with it all the way back at the accident site. Where did it go from there?” She left the mug and joined Tan.

Ani watched them both staring at the mug as if it would suddenly tell them secrets. Her stomach was in knots and she could feel a sick tremor in her shoulders from holding in the incoherence of her feelings. She might have screamed, but Tan and Lisa suddenly looked at each other, back at the mug, then at each other again. They nodded.

“Right, then.” Tan picked up another mug and set it on the counter opposite.

“Yep,” Lisa said. “That’s it.”

Ani couldn’t help but look at Eve, who was giving her a look that seemed to mirror her own. It was Eve who asked, in a steady voice, “What’s it?”

Lisa and Tan shared a mutual sigh of longsuffering. Lisa picked up the second mug and held it out to Ani. “Ani, I found the missing mug. Here, get rid of it for me.”

Ani looked across the kitchen to the first mug. “But the missing mug is over there.”

“Duh,” Lisa and Tan said, in unison.

“Oh my lord,” Eve said. “She couldn’t pull that off. We’re really reaching here.”

“She was desperate. Somehow the notebook got separated from Kenbrink. Maybe she did that—took it from him—maybe she didn’t.” Tan folded her arms over her chest. “But they’re in her possession and then she realizes she can’t possibly keep their loss a secret. So why doesn’t she put them back?”

“Ice fog. It was freezing and she was lucky to get back to camp. Her own kit was buried,” Ani said, feeling just this side of faint. “Too far down to care about the minor stuff in it, like the radio and GPS. Her own notes were on her handheld, which was in her pocket.”