by E M Kaplan
Because it was already dark, emergency blue safety lights dotted the walkways of the campus every so often. But still, it didn’t dull the flashing lights of the campus police car, which she spotted long before she reached her building.
Probably isn’t anything to do with me…
She jogged up the steps of her dorm and swiped her student ID against the door sensor to unlock it. When she took a slight right in the stairwell to go up to her floor, she heard a police radio blip. The crackling static came from downstairs in the basement where Professor Sanborn’s apartment was. One foot still on the stair, she pivoted and headed downward.
Couldn’t have anything to do with Professor Sanborn…
Except…when she rounded the corner and found Tyshawn and Tiffany with their backs against the wall outside of the professor’s apartment door, a police officer pinning them there with a glare. He’d knocked on the professor’s door, apparently, because it opened just then. Professor Sanborn, looking a little worse for the wear—disheveled clothes, blond hair poking up at odd angles—stuck his head out.
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” the officer said. He was a middle-aged guy, probably in his mid-forties—not a lot of wrinkles or wear and tear to his face. Just some crinkles in the corners of his eyes as though he might have a sense of humor down deep inside somewhere. Hopefully. “We detained these two students outside your office trying to break in.”
Well, crap.
As Josie neared them, the officer glanced at her, seemed to rate her a non-threat, and turned back to Professor Sanborn. In most situations, she would have been peeved to have been dismissed so rapidly, but for once she was glad—she could still scoot out of there without getting involved.
“Sir,” he continued, “since we detained these two before they did any damage, we’re giving you the option of speaking with them and deciding for yourself what you’d like done.”
Tyshawn looked thirty seconds away from losing his cookies, no doubt thinking his scholarship was in jeopardy. That was enough to make anyone queasy—thousands of dollars circling the drain because of one misguided idea. Tiffany, on the other hand, merely looked pissed off—but Josie was beginning to think that was how the girl dealt with any situation, any emotion she couldn’t or didn’t want to handle.
“What in the world is happening on this planet today?” Professor Sanborn said, shaking his head. “I just can’t deal with this. First Eric, and now this? You two are honor students. What were you doing? You going to jeopardize your schooling and your futures…for what? Test scores? Money? I don’t have any of that.” He shook his head, exhaustion making his gestures exaggerated and cartoonish.
Josie had warned the kids that she’d disavow any knowledge of them. She’d explicitly told them that they shouldn’t do anything that would jeopardize their studies or their standing at the university. And now, her best course of action was to keep on walking—just avert her eyes and keep her feet moving to the stairwell at the other end of the hall.
Nothing to see here. No reason why I might be interested in these two kids, officer. I only know them in passing, from living in the same building. Hardly even had a conversation with them. Certainly had not eaten dumplings out of a carton with them while sitting in my room…
To their credit, neither Tyshawn nor Tiffany looked her direction. Not even a sideways flick of the eye from either kid, which swelled Josie’s cold, self-serving heart with pride.
“Do you two have anything you’d like to tell the professor to try to clear this mess up?” the officer asked them. For all of his stern tone, Josie knew he could have taken a much harsher approach with them. However, they weren’t drunk, they weren’t combative—they weren’t armed with dripping cans of spray paint—and they were cooperating. They presented themselves as “good kids,” but it wasn’t clear if they were truly well-behaved or merely pretending to be so, maybe due to previous run-ins with the po-po.
Tyshawn and Tiffany remained silent, eyes averted, trained on the floor. They really weren’t going to rat her out?
The officer pressed again, “If you don’t speak up, I’m going to have to take you down to the station. Call your parents or possibly press trespassing charges. We have you on video entering the building. I don’t know how you did it.”
“It was unlocked,” Tiffany said in little more than a sullen mumble.
“Is that so? And do you want to tell me why it was so important to get into the professor’s office that you couldn’t wait for office hours tomorrow morning?”
More silence. Professor Sanborn also appeared to shuffle his feet like a horse sensing the presence of a possible snake in the barn.
“Well?” the officer asked again, making certain they knew it was their last chance.
One of them was going to crack at any moment, Josie knew. It was always the weakest link in the chain, the most emotionally vulnerable crook who turned the others in after a grand heist. True, the three of them all had a lot at stake. Tens of thousands of dollars in scholarship money and their futures, while Professor Sanborn had his whole career and livelihood on the line. Yet the snitch who spoke first was the most likely to be treated with leniency. Surely, one of them would crack in the name of self-preservation?
Or maybe one of them would be willing to take the blame for the whole caper? The proverbial martyr who would fall on the grenade to protect the others? Ha. Fat chance of that happening in real life. That happened only in the movies, right?
“I know exactly what this is about and I want to apologize on their behalf,” Josie said. This time, she was not the least bit sorry for her big mouth. For once, she’d face the consequences later without an ounce of regret.
Tyshawn looked shocked, and Tiffany sent her a glare, which Josie took to be an expression of gratitude in an emotionally twisted way. “Is that right?” the officer said, crossing his arms over his bullet-proofed chest.
Josie started to fake-laugh, but wasn’t even able to convince herself to complete her lame chuckle, so she plowed ahead. “As it so happens, I might have mentioned to these two honor students that I dropped some letters while I was in Professor Sanborn’s office yesterday. No offense to the professor, but it’s easy to misplace things in his office. And I really need these letters so that I can complete my project quickly.”
The officer sighed, waiting for her to continue, but Josie figured she’d better stop while she was ahead. She could nearly see her over-emphasis of certain words flashing like a marquee over her head. Not in a cartoon thought cloud. More like a flashing neon sign that said, “Liar, liar. Pants on fire.”
“What I’m trying to say is, Officer…” She peered at his name badge and then gaped in an unprofessional fashion. “Krupkey? Really?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes. Just like West Side Story. Before you ask, yes, I get that a lot. No, please don’t sing the song. My father was a cop, too, and whereas he was a musical fan, I’m not so much.”
Josie was losing ground with the cop—and fast. Luckily, he’d prevented her from belting out the song because first of all, she had a horrible singing voice. And second, she didn’t exactly know the words, which would have been a disastrous start and an even worse finish. Instead, she dug in her pocket for her wallet—a last resort. Feeling very much like the new drifter in town who has a run-in with the local sheriff, she handed him her P.I. identification card, issued by the state of Massachusetts.
He accepted it with relatively good grace, turning the flimsy paper over in his large hand.
“Is that even real?” Tyshawn said.
Good question, Josie thought, though for once in her life, she managed to keep it to herself.
#
“Scooby gang, assemble,” Josie said, closing her dorm room door so she and her undergraduate minions could speak in private.
Officer Krupkey—Josie still wanted to snort over his name—had run her driver’s license and P.I. information. Apparently satisfied, he’d released them all to go about the
ir business, but not first without some intense residual scrutiny. On the whole, he was a pretty decent guy for a campus cop. How cushy was his job? University security on a campus that had no active Greek system. No frats meant no hazing, no massive house parties…
By some miracle, all the kids had been available for a quick get-together. Sarah and Leah were finished working. Brandon had been studying in the common room with three female students. And Josie had freed Tiffany and Tyshawn from the long arm of the law with very little effort and a lot of luck.
“What’s that a reference to?” Leah asked.
“Superhero movie, I guess,” Tyshawn said. “But I don’t know about the Scooby part. I never really liked that cartoon. Kinda dumb, if you ask me. I mean, the hipster pothead guy talks to the dog?” He shook his head. “So weird.”
“Please tell me you know about a certain TV vampire slayer.” Josie was seriously concerned for their well-roundedness—no, their veritable humanity. She didn’t even bother mentioning that Shaggy wasn’t a hipster but an authentic hippie. That trivia would probably fly right over their heads.
“Are you talking about those chick flicks with the vampire and the werewolf and the love triangle?” Brandon asked, once again centering his butt on her bed pillow, almost as if he were marking his territory. Annnnd she’d just run out of clean sides on to which to flip it. Maybe she could turn the pillowcase inside out.
“No, and for the love of God, after this is all over, you are coming to my apartment for a Buffy marathon. Mandatory. I will accept no unexcused absences.” She found herself pinching the bridge of her nose just the way her father used to. Then she flinched when she realized she’d just invited them into her real life. She could pretend that the last couple of days, living in the dorms was all make believe—an uncomfortable dream brought on by indigestion—until this very moment.
“Your place? Sweet,” Brandon said. “I’ll bring snacks.”
Josie made a whatever gesture—a shrug mixed with a sour pickle face—she’d picked up from them and then launched into her lecture. “You two.” She pointed at Tyshawn and Tiffany. “You owe me. I just saved your bacon. Of all of you guys sitting here, I would have thought you’d have the most common sense.”
“Uh, hellloooo. What about me?” Leah said with mock dismay. Or maybe real chagrin. Whichever the case, Josie didn’t stop in her rant to acknowledge her.
“The point is, things have gotten very serious. As Leah already told you all, Dean Handley fell into a coma today at the hospital after eating at the faculty center.”
“Uh, yes. Do you want me to report or debrief or whatever?” Leah looked hesitant for once, and Josie wasn’t sure if it were nerves caused by today’s events or something else. Had she unwittingly invited a suspect into their informal gang?
“Hells yeah,” Brandon said. “Do we have a killer among us?”
“Shut up,” more than one of them said—it was a blend of voices, indistinguishable as individuals. Now that was what I call a team.
“The thing is,” Leah said, sitting forward on the bed so they all had a good view of her face, “I was working the desk at the athletic center when these two campus EMTs came in. And they said they were at the hospital transporting a girl who broke her wrist at lacrosse when the dean flatlined in the ER once before they stabilized him. You know, he coded. And one of the ER nurses had a pan of…well… you know, the stuff that Dean Handley had been puking up. And she said, ‘Wow, it looks like oleander plants. I know because my cat did the same thing.’ Ate a bunch of oleander plants, which are apparently super poisonous, and croaked.”
“Oleander plants took out a bunch of hikers in California. They used sticks from it to roast their hotdogs. They all died,” Tiffany added, looking at her cuticles.
“This is horrible,” Sarah said, her freckles standing out in her pale face. “But he couldn’t have eaten it here on campus. All of our salad comes straight out of a bag.”
Which was cringeworthy. Plastics and chemicals were not a good delivery method for leafy greens.
“I don’t even know what oleander looks like,” Tyshawn said. “I’d probably eat it without realizing a damn thing. Where do you even get it?”
“There’s some in the atrium of the food court,” Tiffany said, handing him her cell phone on which she’d called up a photo. “In those big pots by the doors. There’s some at my house.” She shrugged with a big, bored duh expression behind her smoky eye makeup. “I’m from Pasadena. Everything grows there.”
“And you already knew this before today?” Brandon said.
“If you think that’s going to help you get back into my pants, you’ve got another thing coming,” she said, not bothering to look at him.
Silence blanketed the room.
Then Sarah said again, “But it couldn’t have been in the salad. Everyone ate the same salad. And I was the one who put the lettuce on the plates.”
Chapter 22
“Am I a person of interest?” Sarah asked them with rising concern, the pitch of her voice shooting up into dog-whistle range. She wasn’t a hand-wringer as many people were, Josie noticed, but rather an unapologetic, hysterical shrieker. Josie swallowed hard to pop her ears because she had temporarily gone mute.
“Are you kidding me? You’re the least sneaky person I know,” Leah said, patting her roommate’s knee. “After me, of course.”
“Plus, you don’t have any motive to hurt Dean Handley,” Tyshawn said. “And perpetrating a crime is all about motive, means, and opportunity where motive is the reason, means is the ability, and opportunity is the chance or the right set of circumstances.”
“Where’d you learn that, you brainiac? You watch a lot of Law & Chaos?” Tiffany said, her usual bored expression not slipping in the slightest.
“He learned it on the Internet,” Brandon said, and added, “Sorry, bro. You left your laptop on with your browser open. At least I didn’t go onto your Facebook account and announce you’re pregnant with quadruplets or something. Because next time, I totally will. You have been warned.”
“Thank God for small favors.”
“This brings up an important issue,” Josie said before the two pairs of roommates could snipe at each other further. “And that is—the kitchen at the faculty dining hall wasn’t secure at all. The back door opens up to a patio that you can access from three different directions, including the other food area, which has some oleander plants.”
Josie recognized the potted plants in retrospect. Her Aunt Ruth had a large stand of them growing on the sunny side of her Tucson house. The leafy behemoths bloomed white and deep pink from spring through fall in southern Arizona, providing precious shade during the hottest months.
But how anyone could chow down on the thick, fibrous leaves without realizing it? A person would need to drown it in salad dressing, be incredibly distracted by the lunchtime conversation, and have atrocious eating habits on par with a wood chipper…as Dean Handley had.
“Okay,” Tyshawn said, retrieving a notebook from his backpack. He took the pen that had been perched behind his ear and began writing—a kid after Josie’s own heart.
Because, when in doubt, make a list.
He scribbled for a second and then turned his notepad around so they could all see. He’d drawn three rows and some vertical column lines:
MOTIVE
MEANS
OPPORTUNITY
“Now, let’s take Sarah for a minute,” he said, and wrote the girl’s name in the first empty column.
She squeaked in alarm, and Leah patted her knee again. “Don’t worry. You didn’t do it.”
But Josie wondered if she truly could rule either of the girls out—either separately or working together.
She glanced around the room. Tiffany had plant knowledge and a cold ruthlessness. Tyshawn had a strategist’s mind. And Brandon…might go to great lengths to impress a girl. Do I have the ability to rule any of them out?
“Sarah claims not to have kno
wn what oleander looks like, but what if she actually did? That’s easy enough to fake. She works in the kitchen where the food that almost killed Dean Handley was made. And, in fact, admits to preparing it herself.” Tyshawn put a checkmark in each of the boxes on his chart for those categories. “As for motive, clearly, she was in love with the dean.”
All three females present erupted in groans.
“Dude, that’s gross,” Brandon said.
Points for Boy Tarzan.
“Okay, okay. You know I was only postulating. I wasn’t serious,” Tyshawn said, backtracking. “So Sarah doesn’t have a motive. Good news,” he told her. “You’re free to go about your business…Who’s our next suspect?”
“Professor Sanborn,” Tiffany said. “Because the dean was going to fire him for not keeping his man-hose in his pants.”
#
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Sarah said, jumping to the defense of the professor—more quickly than she’d acted in defense of herself. “You can’t just say something like that without proof. What evidence do you have?”
They all looked at Tiffany, who remained silent, still examining her nails. Finally, she lifted her gunked-up, black-rimmed eyes and said, “I’m bound by a confidentially agreement not to speak about it.”
Leah gave a gasp that sounded like a choke. “You…and him? That’s disgusting.”
Even Brandon looked a little alarmed, his chiseled jaw dropping open wide enough to squash a Twinkie into his mouth. If Josie had had one on hand…well, she probably would have eaten it instead, she was that desperate.
Tiffany looked around, not understanding the shocked expressions she encountered. Then she balked. “Not me, you idiots.” With a massive eye roll, she said, “If I tell you what I know, you have to promise that it does not leave this room. I mean, this is more important than getting expelled for breaking into Professor Sanborn’s office tonight.”
“Trying to break in,” Josie corrected.
