I sniff and stand. “I, um, tripped.”
He glares at me, his body standing, chest whipping from facing Minnie and Elaine then back to me. “I think I have all the information I need, Minnie,” he says in an official-sounding voice. “We don’t have any leads yet on who took Amy, but your information will really help us.”
My mind splits in two: one part screams “liar” while the other just watches, observing.
Observing Mark lie.
Chapter Twenty
As Mark says goodbye to us all with a rushed set of glances and more fake promises to Minnie about how he’ll do his best to find Amy, I feel like I’ve been gut-kicked by a horse.
Mark
Knows
Who
Did
This
I race after him, leaving Elaine sputtering my name. I throw open the front door and scream, “STOP!”
Mark continues his march to his car. Maybe he doesn’t hear me. I don’t care. I run so fast I feel like I’m flying. He starts the police car engine and is backing up when I thump my hands on the hood of his car, hard.
He looks up in confusion and on alert. His expression changes to irritated relief when he sees me. He rolls down the window.
“What?” he says impatiently. “I have to get back to the station.”
I’m breathing hard. My hands are curled along the edge of his lowered window. My chest feels like it will explode.
“You. That call. Who was that?” I gasp.
His eyes change instantly, the golden brown becoming something ominous. “Police business. Nothing you need to know about.”
“You’re acting weird,” I blurt out. A newscaster within a few yards from us tilts her head like she’s listening. I see her motion to her cameraman. Great. The last thing I need is for this to be caught on camera. I have enough problems already.
“Weird? Jesus fucking Christ, Carrie, I’m the lead investigator in a kidnapping case! What the hell is wrong with you?”
“THAT MISSING PERSON IS MY BEST FRIEND!” I bellow. All hope that Mark is the same good, sweet guy I loved years ago is gone. Gone, gone, gone. Gone like my dad. Gone like my dreams.
Gone like Amy.
Now the newscasters openly begin pulling cords and equipment toward us. “Officer Paulson!” one of them calls out. I hear one of them murmur my last name.
Damn.
“This is not the place for you to freak out on me, Carrie,” Mark says through gritted teeth. He peels my fingers off his window, one by one. He keeps his head down and won’t even look at me. “She’s your best friend. You’re hysterical. You’re becoming unhinged and—”
“Who’s Allie?” I ask through my own gritted teeth.
He flinches, then gives me his eyes. “You were eavesdropping,” he growls. “Did you hear everything?”
I jut my chin up in the air, defiant. “I heard enough.”
He shakes his head and lets out a long sigh, but says nothing.
“And what’s ‘a brew home’?” I add.
His eyes widen, then narrow, and the look of murderous rage on his face makes me take a step back. The force of that look could stop my heart. Mark floors the accelerator of the police cruiser, spraying gravel up on my shins as the newscasters shout his name and a thousand other words I don’t care about.
By the time the dust settles I jog back to the house where Elaine stands at the door. She ushers me in, hands me a fresh cup of coffee, and goes back to Minnie. As I try to reach up and catch the thousands of thoughts and feelings that fly around my head like I’m in the middle of a blender, my eyes roam to a big calendar on the front of the fridge.
It’s Friday.
Euchre night. Except it’s not nighttime. It’s eight a.m. and I’m due at work in an hour. The dean let me stay home yesterday, with a lovely, heartfelt expression of sympathy, but rules are rules. Human Resources said it was an exception.
Life goes on, even when it’s turned upside down.
Time to get ready for work.
* * *
There’s a handwritten note on my desk. I recognize the dean’s handwriting:
Carrie,
I’m so sorry. I’ll be at a conference all day at the medical school campus. Please update the student advising files. It is routine work and should help to keep your mind occupied. May your friend be safe and well, and come out of this better than before.
Ig
“Better than before”? “Ig”?
A shiver makes its way through the full length of my spine. There is something very, very wrong with that man. I can’t put my finger on it. This is day five on the job and I’ve barely interacted with him. He gives me the creeps. His eyes are like the ones in old paintings.
Always following me.
I know he knows I think he had something to do with my dad’s arrest. Politeness stops him from saying a word. When dad was arrested Brian told my dad and me that Professor Landau was the one who masterminded everything. Dad had no idea the chemicals he was asked to order were for a big meth operation.
And then Brian went silent. He never testified in Dad’s favor. The lawyers never called him. I remember Dad trying over and over to get Brian to tell him what was going on. I remember asking Elaine and Brian and getting nothing but shrugs and nervous looks.
There’s nothing nervous about Professor—now Dean—Landau.
He’s so smooth he might as well be an oil factory. Thank God he’s gone all day on the other side of town. That’s one less source of stress for me. Hopefully, Claudia’s not around, either. She and Eric are going dancing tonight, right?
Tonight.
The last day and a half have been a blur. A true blur. I had no dreams last night. My mind wouldn’t shut off, and I expected nightmares. Instead, all I got was racing thoughts and horrible imaginings of Amy.
My mind made up so many awful things.
At least, I hope they’re made up.
She could be beaten. Tortured. Raped. Killed. All of those and more. I keep imagining the moment between regular life and the change. How an instant can make everything you know become different—forever.
Amy was walking off that elevator toward her car like no big deal. She was probably thinking about what to eat for dinner. Whether her pantyhose had a snag. How she could cover her student loan payment and take a fun weekend trip to the mountains.
And then—BAM! She’s kidnapped. Abducted. All the normal thoughts of life gone.
Gone.
I stare stupidly at my desk and reach for my coffee mug. Dean Landau gave it to me on my second day. It’s huge and ceramic, with a rubber top to keep the coffee hot.
It says YATES UNIVERSITY in block letters on it. Of course it does.
I walk over to the coffee station and sure enough, someone left a smoldering pot of coffee with an inch of liquid in it. I can’t call it “coffee” because while it once was coffee, now it looks like dirty radiator fluid. I shake my head. The other administrative assistants always—always—rinse the coffee pots out and start a fresh pot.
The last person to have coffee must have been a professor.
Or a dean.
I start a new pot and wish they did have those little Keurig machines. That would make the stale smell of burnt coffee a thing of the past. I loop over to the department mailboxes and grab the dean’s mail, delivering it to his desk. There’s nothing but flyers and ads for me. By the time I come back, the coffee is hot and done. I fill my mug and pour a lot of cream in it. I remember I’m the one in charge of keeping the real cream in the little fridge at the coffee station.
Dean Landau says the powdered creamer reminds him of ground up bones. I’m authorized to spend three bucks a week on real cream. “We’re worth it,” he joked when he told me all this.
I walk back to my desk and sit down, turning on my computer. The familiar little jingle grounds me. The past few days wash over me. Mark. The no-kill shelter. Amy’s disappearance. Minnie’s breakdown.
; Funny how I thought I was coming home to solve one mystery. Now I find myself embroiled in a completely different one.
Someone clears their throat pointedly and I look up, surprised. It’s Effie. Her hair is a strange shade of greyish-bluish-white and she’s wearing coral lipstick that perfectly matches a set of beads around her neck. I look down.
And bright bows on the toes of her shoes.
“Good morning!” I say a little too brightly.
She scowls. “Aren’t you chipper for someone whose best friend was stolen two days ago? Cut the crap, kiddo. You don’t need to be fake with me.”
If I’d been holding my coffee in my hands I’d have spilled it all over myself.
“What?” I gasp.
She gives me a hard look. “I know you’ve been babysitting Minnie and taking turns with Elaine. I heard you and Officer Paulson had a screaming match on Minnie’s lawn.”
“Gossip is faster than Internet around here,” I mutter, dropping my eyes.
“More reliable, too,” she shoots back. Her face softens. “You have a lot on your plate.”
I laugh bitterly. “That’s one way to put it.”
She shifts a large folder from one arm to the other, cradling it in her thin elbows. “Maybe you don’t need to add more today.”
I arch one eyebrow and take a sip of my coffee. My tongue instantly tingles with a nasty burn. Ah, well. At least I’m feeling something.
“Go ahead. Throw more work at me. I’d rather keep busy than sit around wondering whether Amy’s being—” I choke on my own words. I can’t think like this. I can’t.
“Oh, honey,” Effie says, her eyes going sad. She reaches down and pats my shoulder. “They’ll find her.”
Dead or alive? I want to ask. I keep my mouth shut.
“You might as well have this now. You’re a grown up,” she says with a wry half-smile I would resent on anyone else.
“I’m twenty-two,” I say. Why did I say that?
She snorts. “I have replacement hips older than you, kid.”
That makes us both laugh. It feels good to laugh. Then I feel guilty.
Effie shakes her head, clearly disgusted by something. “People call us old administrative assistants a bunch of dinosaurs. We’re supposed to know how to use that email thing and edit web pages and do all the fancy technical stuff, but when push comes to shove, you know what really works? Good old-fashioned paper.”
She slides a thick manila folder across my desk. It’s brown, with two circle coffee stains on it. “Facilities” is written on the tab.
I give her a questioning look.
“Adele Mariega. She was the department secretary for chemistry for more than thirty-five years. She took retirement right as your dad was arrested.”
My eyebrows go up like someone shot them from a gun.
Effie gives me a hard look. “Interesting, isn’t it? Adele was a nasty bitch, but she was devoted to old Iggy.”
“Iggy?” I open the folder to find email printouts. The top ones are dated from about four years ago.
Effie sniffs. It’s clear from that single sniff that she doesn’t like the dean. “Ignatio. Dean Landau. She called him Iggy for all the years she worked for him.” Her voice drops to a raspy whisper. “I think Adele thought he was in love with her.”
“Was he?”
She purses her mouth. It looks like a cat’s butthole. “If he was, you wouldn’t know it. That man was obsessed with his dead wife, Nora.”
I file that piece of information away for the future. I begin to rifle through the folder, my eyes searching without any pattern. “His wife?”
“Claudia’s mother. She died when you were kids.”
A faint memory jangles inside me. Cards we had to write for Claudia after her mom died. Fifth grade? Seventh? I don’t remember.
Suddenly, I stop listening. There’s an email, about ten pieces of paper down, between Joseph Myerson and Ignatio Landau.
My heart speeds to double time.
“Effie,” I say, my breath caught in my throat, “where did you say you got this?” My eyes greedily scan the words. I’ve pored over every piece of evidence in my father’s trial. It feels like I’ve done nothing but work and read pieces of evidence for these years.
I have never, ever seen this particular email.
It’s an order request from then-chemistry chairman Landau for a chemical I know is used to make meth. And the request asks my father to buy it. This says exactly what Dad insisted during his trial. This is the evidence he claimed was buried. Erased.
Eradicated.
People called my dad crazy for saying Landau doctored the evidence. Oh, my God.
Here it is.
“I told you,” Effie said, a bit irritable suddenly. “Adele is one of the department secretaries who saves everything. Like me. We don’t trust these stupid computers. They crash and die and go bad all the time. So we print all our emails. Every day. Print them and file them in case the fancy-schmancy computers go down and everyone acts all in a tizzy.”
I can’t speak. My eyes rush over the stack of emails. My fingers rifle through them.
Effie looks around the room nervously. “I don’t think Iggy knows about these. Adele stored so much in the old storage room. We all squirrel our files away since the university started that stupid ‘paperless’ initiative. When the police came, they never went back into the old stuff from the 1970s.”
I stare dumbly at her.
She gives me a triumphant look. “We’re the ones who really keep this place going. The faculty and administrators think they do, but we’re the ones who know where the bodies are buried.”
Bodies.
“Er, wrong choice of words,” she says. “Go take those home. Put them in your backpack now. Don’t let anyone know you have them until it’s time to take them to the authorities.”
“Effie—”
She presses her finger to her lips. “You didn’t talk to me. Those don’t exist.”
And with that, she leaves. I grab the folder, my heart racing, and shove the papers in my backpack, zipping it up like it’s a vault at Gringot’s. Might as well be, right now.
“What don’t exist?” says a familiar male voice. As Effie passes Eric, who is entering my office, she gives him a tart look. Oooo, she’s not a fan. I’ll have to ask her about that later.
“Faculty who understand how to use a photocopier,” I say, smoothly changing the subject. I hear Effie’s stifled laugh from afar and give myself a mental attagirl.
“Ha ha. We have to learn it while we’re teaching assistants and then it all gets crowded out once we finish our Ph.D.s,” Eric answers. “Besides, who has time for that? It’s what clerical staff are for.”
I bristle at that. Dad once told me to look at two things in a guy: how he tips the wait staff, and how he treats his mother. If you don’t like how he acts with them, watch out, because that’s how he’s going to treat you one day.
I don’t say anything. He narrows his eyes and asks again, “What was Effie here for?” His eyes scan my desk.
A creepy-crawly sensation slithers up my back and over my shoulders like a giant boa constrictor settling into place, ready to claim a victim. Eric moves closer to me.
“Just answering some questions for me.” That was technically true.
“About what?”
“Work.” Also technically true.
“I heard the dean’s name mentioned.”
“Were you eavesdropping?” I over-exaggerate my reaction, pretending to be more offended than I am. Every sensor inside me is screaming with alarm and fear. Eric is dangerous. Eric is a threat. This entire conversation makes no sense and yet it triggers my need to escape.
“You don’t want to mess with the Landau family. Trust me on this.” His words come out of nowhere.
“What?”
“We all know why you’re really here, Carrie.” He looks toward the door where Effie left. “Quit trying to dig into matters that are none
of your business.” His eyes narrow and then the skin around them changes. He lowers his voice. “I know how much you loved your father. You’re traumatized, still. It’s understandable. Any young, vulnerable woman would be. It’s made you a bit unhinged.”
Unhinged. That’s the second time someone’s called me unhinged in two hours.
Both men can bite me.
“Thanks for your concern,” I say, grabbing a random folder. His hand covers mine. I try to jerk it away.
Eric’s stronger than he looks. His fingers curl like a hawk’s talons, piercing its prey. I open my mouth to cry out, but my throat is dry. I can’t move. Can’t breathe.
Can’t scream.
Chapter Twenty-One
I rip my arm away from him and feel the skin tear under his nails, my body twisting and stepping forward to walk out the door—
And I slam into a brick wall called Mark.
“You’re threatening her?” Mark says in a voice so full of outrage I think he’s going to bite Eric’s head off, right there, like a huge game lion taking out a small animal. Just—gulp.
“I—no—it’s not what you think,” Eric stammers.
Oh, there are those words again. My life feels like one big repeat.
“I know what the fuck I just heard, asshole. You threatened her.” Mark’s eyes drift down my body. Long, red scratches dot my wrist and I look down. There’s blood.
“She’s bleeding? You made her bleed?” Mark grabs Eric by the lapels and pulls him up so hard Eric’s feet dangle. He gags, his dress shirt cutting against his throat. Mark looks like he’s about to kill him, eyes bulging, neck tight and red with anger, his hands in fists and forearms rippling with power. Add in the cop uniform and it looks like Eric’s having a bad day already.
And it’s not even 9:30 a.m.
“Did he threaten you, Carrie?” Mark asks in a voice so menacing it sounds like it’s filled with needles. I hear Eric gagging and thrashing, then he’s on the ground, his fist tight at his hip, and it’s pounding into Mark’s kidney.
Soon they’re a tangle of thrusting limbs and grunts and angry shouts of “fuck” and “goddamn” and I just stand there, amazed.
Dangerous To Love Page 175
