by E M Kaplan
Benjy turned to Josie and mouthed the word “unfortuitously” with a question in his expression. Is that a real word? She had no idea, but she was disinclined to trust the professor based on his writings she’d sampled online.
They listened to him speak for a few more minutes about unforeseen circumstances, and just as he was on the verge of winning over the crowd once more with a few glib comments and clever witticisms, heavy footsteps came from backstage.
“Did Ida Mae come back for part two?” Benjy asked in a whisper.
Though the entire audience had begun to murmur at the racket, Professor Sanborn himself was unaware of the distraction until a person appeared from behind the curtain.
Correction—make that two people, Josie thought.
First came Jane with a furious look on her lean, tanned face. Her curls were askew as she tried to free her arm from the clutches of a second person, who was Aimee Kohler-Rowski, looking mortified. “Jane, let’s stop and talk about this.”
“I am done talking, Aimee,” Jane said, yanking her arm away. “You know what the promise was. He had tasks to complete before you’d go back. Stick to the plan, for God’s sake.” She stalked toward the podium where Sanborn appeared to be frozen in his tracks. “You,” she shouted, a single thin brown finger jabbing in the air at him. In a reversal of roles, she reached behind her and grabbed her friend’s arm and dragged her fully on-stage until the three of them were in full view of a couple hundred witnesses. “You failed to keep your word. You lose.”
#
“Lose what?” Benjy asked, craning his neck to see better. Not for the first time in her life, Josie wished she were taller.
Good question.
“You set me up to fail,” Sanborn said, his temper rising. The veins in the sides of his neck stood out as he shouted at the women. His wispy hair was half sticking up, half plastered down with a growing sheen of sweat under the hot stage lights. “You knew this ridiculous charade would fail, but you made me do it anyway. Aimee, please,” he said, turning to his wife, his voice growing softer. “I did this all for you—to win you back, to say I’m sorry. Did you also want me to fail? I jumped through all of those hoops, did everything you told me to do. I know I failed with this one, but isn’t it good enough? Am I good enough for you now?”
“I—”
Whatever Aimee Kohler-Rowski had been planning to say was cut off by a scream of outrage and frustration from Jane. The tiny blonde woman shook with rage, small fists clenched with fury. “Do not take him back, Aimee. Do not, or so help me, I will kill you, too.”
Benjy gasped, unable to take his eyes off the drama on stage. Blindly, he reached his arm out and gripped Josie’s. She slapped his hand away, but her own eyes had opened wide. Too? She’d said too?
“Jane! What are you saying?” Aimee looked horrified, her face and white-blonde hair washing out of color even more under the stage lights. The other woman turned on her.
“Oh, don’t you even pretend to not understand what I’m talking about.” Her face was drawn into a snarl, teeth gleaming like a wildcat’s. “You know damn well I meant to poison this dumbass, but Eric ate the wrong salad. He had the table manners of a two year-old, for God’s sake.”
“You tried to poison me?” Sanborn said, outraged, his face turning bright pink.
Jane turned on him again. “You stole my job and gave it to Lydia. I hate you. I hate everything about you. From your worthless head to your stupid toes. All you are is a pretty face with the intelligence quotient of a turnip. How dumb are you? Writing those stupid letters to yourself? Stabbing yourself in the arm with that knife like it’s going to convince people you’re the victim? You think you can talk your way out of anything just like you got your job here and how you’re going to convince Aimee to go back to you? You’re living in a dreamworld, mister!”
“YOU DIDN’T GET THAT JOB BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH,” he said, roaring so loudly he didn’t need the mic.
With a guttural shout, Jane charged Sanborn, jumping on him and wrapping her legs around his waist and her hands around his throat. Her narrow shoulders, clad in a dry-weave hybrid fabric, hunched as she attempted to choke the life out of him. He went over backwards, taking her with him.
The auditorium doors swung open. Boots thudded as police in riot gear swarmed through the side entrances and rushed the stage.
Chapter 44
“Well, that escalated quickly,” Benjy said.
After the initial wave of violence, the audience had collectively saved their phone videos and gotten to their feet. The police had ushered them out of the auditorium in a surprisingly orderly fashion. After exiting, Benjy and Josie walked back to their dorm amid the dispersing crowd. Among the random snippets of conversation, they heard a lot of people rehashing the theatrics as if it were the latest hit show. Things like:
“If you try to kill someone, but accidentally kill someone else, is that manslaughter? Or do you get two sets of charges…”
“Two for the price of one…”
“There’s no way for her to dodge it. She confessed on, like, a million videos…”
“Do you think we’re still having midterms?”
Josie looked up and was surprised to see Drew. Same clothes, same everything—he hadn’t been gone that long. Jogging toward them down the hill, he met them on their way up. “Is it over? What did I miss?”
“You came back. How did you manage that?” Josie asked him after a hug—he got a bro-slap from Benjy. Emergencies didn’t get cancelled, did they? She was confused, no doubt.
“I got halfway to the hospital and Dr. First called saying she’d cover for me. As kind of an apology,” he said by way of explanation. “I think she feels bad, you know, about the thing.”
“She’d damn well better,” Josie said. If she ever met that woman…Josie didn’t know what she’d do, actually. But covering for him…well, that was pretty thoughtful. Dammit. Josie didn’t want to like the woman.
“Dude, you missed the best show ever,” Benjy said with an excited skip. He pumped his wiry arm. He was all angles and knobby joints like a swimmer who’d failed at basketball. “I can’t wait for season two.”
Josie eyed him, hoping that last part was a joke.
“What on earth is he talking about?”
Josie said, “Well, the good news is, this case is over, and I didn’t get hurt. No stabbing. No shoving. No concussions, so that’s all good. No worries there. The bad news is, I’m the worst detective ever. I think I should give Greta back my ID. I mean, I didn’t find Dean Handley’s killer—she outed herself. The whole thing literally unwound itself right before our very eyes.”
“Live-streamed on Facebook,” Benjy said, scrolling on his phone. After he located the video, he handed his phone to Drew, and they let him watch the broadcast as they walked to Mandel Hall.
“Holy crap,” Drew said. When he was finished, he returned Benjy’s phone to him. “I guess that solves that problem.”
Recalcitrant and resentful, Josie sighed. She kicked a stone off the path in front of her. “I just want to go back to the dorms, pack up my stuff, and go home to my dog, sleep in my bed with my boyfriend, and pretend this whole thing never happened.” She felt like an utter failure. All she needed now was a phone call from Greta Williams.
Her phone rang. Seriously?
But it wasn’t Greta. “Ms. Tucker,” President Olsen said, his southern drawl thicker than ever, “I’d like to speak with you.”
#
“What we have here is a damage-control situation, people,” President Olsen was saying as Josie entered his office. Seated at his massive desk, he was surrounded by a large percentage of the school’s administrators many of whom Josie had noticed either in the faculty dining hall or coming and going out of the administration buildings, including his personal admin, Shirley Hansen, whom acknowledged Josie with a stern nod.
Ulp. Josie was in for it.
Ida Mae Rubens was also on hand, to Jo
sie’s surprise. The woman must have been commandeered by the president directly after her impressive mic drop and subsequent exit stage left. She directly flanked President Olsen on his left side.
“Shut the door, Shirley. This war room is officially sealed.” He addressed the room at large, his drawl thick, but his words rapid and forceful. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are at crossroads. If ever you have wanted to be part of history, that day is now. Today is D-Day for Bader University. For the first time in modern history—and by that, I mean the invention of the Internet and the cellular telephone—Bader is about to be bathed in a scandal so lascivious, so insidious, we may never recover. Our very survival depends on how we confront this obstacle. Our lifeblood—the money we receive from foundations and individual donors—may dry up faster than spit on a sidewalk in a Texas summer.”
“How can we stop it, sir?” a voice from the back of the room, its source unseen, said.
“I’m glad you asked,” Olsen said, checking his Rolex. “Because in less than thirty minutes, we’re holding a press conference, broadcasting from this very office. Ms. Rubens here will stand on one side. Ms. Tucker, you’ll stand on the other.” He looked at her. “Do you have a gun or a badge?”
Josie could feel her eyebrows shooting upward. “No, I don’t.”
“Shirley, can you get this woman a blazer? Something to toughen her up?” He glanced at her t-shirt. “Not that I don’t like the Stones myself. I never was a Beatles fan. Also, have you ever handled a gun?”
“No, sir.”
He shook his head in what might have been dismay. “We’d better work around that then. Are you averse to wearing your hair in a bun? I think it’s a more austere look—‘badass’ is the aura we’re going for here.”
Josie shrugged into a navy blue blazer that Shirley Hansen had made materialize out of thin air and accepted a rubber band for her hair as well.
“Very good. Now, stand here and look confident.” He gestured to his side, opposite of where Ida Mae was standing.
Josie crossed her blazer-clad arms over her chest. “Good talk,” she told Ida Mae.
“Shut it.” Ida Mae scowled, wrinkles appearing in her prominent, mocha-colored forehead.
“I’m serious.” And she was. The woman had been caught in a horrible position and she’d handled it with aplomb.
Ida Mae’s eyebrows went up and then she shrugged, possibly accepting of Josie’s overture, which was as much of an olive branch as she was capable of offering.
“Chit-chat later, please,” President Olsen said. “Tucker, can you look less defensive?”
Josie put her hands on her hips and widened her stance. With the blazer over her Rolling Stones shirt, she suspected she looked like a thrift shop reject.
“That’ll do,” he said. He slapped his hands on his desktop at the edge of the university’s emblem engraved on it. “All right, people, are we ready to do this?”
“Do you need your notes, Billy?”
“No, Shirley, I do not need my notes.”
“Up to you then.”
“Someone get this woman a task to perform or a government to overturn.”
“Have it your way.”
“I will and I’ll thank you for it.” He looked around. “We’re good? All right. Turn on your cameras.”
Chapter 45
Josie zoned out for the first part of President Olsen’s speech. Someone had located some professional lighting boxes, and the glare off the tall white cubes was making her mind turn fuzzy. Luckily, all she had to do was stand there and look “badass,” as he’d requested. She did her best on that front, hoping it wasn’t actually “deer caught in the headlights”—and snapped awake when she heard her name mentioned.
Oh God, was he going to ask her to talk? She hadn’t been paying attention and felt like a student who’d been caught snoozing in class.
He was saying, “…due to the resourcefulness and thoroughness of our in-house security, namely Detective Tucker, with the full cooperation of Professor Rubens, who will be a welcome and prestigious addition to our faculty, we were able to identify and extract the prime suspect in the tragic death of Dean Eric Handley. We are satisfied at this time that the party responsible for his murder is in the custody of the Northam PD—as evidenced by numerous,” he allowed himself a chuckle, “video recordings that have since been posted online and on various social media outlets.”
Josie kept her expression neutral—which was the best strategy for her transparent face. She’d been told her face was like glass and showed every little nuance of what she was feeling. If she allowed the shock and disbelief of his words to come out, their whole strategy would be exposed for the fraud it was.
In fact, maybe it was better if she just kept her eyes trained on the opposite wall.
President Olsen spoke for a few more minutes, and then it was over. They turned off the cameras and lights, and several of the faculty came up to shake the president’s hand as if were the actual President and had just given the speech of his life on the White House lawn.
She eyed him, wondering if he had political aspirations. She’d consider voting for him.
#
“So you’re saying that I don’t have a roommate anymore?” Leah’s mouth was slack as she mulled it over. “Do I get a 4.0 for the semester?”
“No, goofball. That’s only if your roommate commits suicide, not extortion,” Tiffany said, squinting through her smoky eye makeup.
What was left of Josie’s Scooby gang—namely Tiffany, Tyshawn, Brandon, and Leah—were crowded in the doorway of Josie’s dorm room, watching her strip the designer sheets off her bed and toss them, along with her clothes, into an enormous plastic bag she’d stolen from the Zap ’n Slap. Drew had gone to get his Jeep to pull it up closer to the door so they wouldn’t have to lug everything up the hill. How in the world had frail Mr. Peepers gotten everything into her dorm room so quickly and by himself?
Benjy was also somewhere on campus. He’d mentioned something about procuring temporary housing as a perk of his interim job at Bader—hopefully not in the basement of a freshman dorm. Because if so, she would never visit him.
Josie paused, straightening up to look at the group of kids she’d come to think of as her own, even in such a short amount of time. “This isn’t goodbye,” she told them.
Tiffany rolled her eyes. “Quit worrying about it. We have your address. We’ll be there tomorrow at noon to watch this Betty marathon or whatever.”
“It’s Duffy,” Tyshawn said.
“No, it’s Muffy,” Leah said.
“It’s hot chicks kicking vampire butts,” Brandon said. “I’m so there.”
“Fine. Mock me,” Josie said. “You’re nice kids. Now, get out of my room.” She was already mentally preparing the menu of snacks she’d make for their visit—which was tomorrow at her place. Because it was true. She had voluntarily opened her apartment up to these kids. She’d invited them in. Strangely, it didn’t feel like a mistake. Yet.
Man, she was looking forward to see her dog. And her kitchen. And her bed.
Leah stealth-attacked her with a hug while she wasn’t paying attention. “See you tomorrow, short stuff.”
“Fine. Whatever. Just don’t pat me on the head.”
Brandon waved—a concession to politeness since he’d met Drew, who apparently was an alpha dog in this young pup’s eyes. Or something.
“You want me to bring anything?” Tiffany asked. “Some chips? A bottle of Fireball?”
God, no. “Just bring yourselves. Make sure Tyshawn comes and doesn’t spend the day studying. You know what? You should date him.”
Tiffany eyed him, while he looked disconcerted. “Hey, I’m standing right here,” he said. “No need to talk about me in the third person.”
The girl frowned. “But he’s celibate.”
“Exactly.”
Tyshawn hightailed it out of the room while Tiffany watched, considering the idea. “Maybe.” Then she nodded. “I
could probably change his mind.”
“That wasn’t my—”
But the tiny, gunky-eyed ninja had already gone back into her own room across the hall and shut her door.
Oops.
Chapter 46
A few days, a couple of good nights’ sleep, and some great meals later, Josie rode the elevator up to the floor of the hospital Drew had texted her he was on. She said she was just stopping by to say hi and bring him lunch. Even though her “stopping by” had entailed a brisk half-hour walk down Brookline Avenue, but the weather was good—and ooh, Marshall’s had a sale. Normally, she wouldn’t have cared about a sale at a department store, but for some reason, she was interested in buying a few housewares and jazzing up the apartment. Maybe it had been that brief stay in the dorms that had made her appreciate her own place more.
“Hey, look what the cat drug in,” Krissy said on seeing her. Working the desk on this floor today, Krissy was one of the nurses who had worked with Drew in his former private practice before they’d all been consumed by the larger clinic attached to this hospital.
Josie handed the woman a burrito, which she’d bought with the expectation that she’d run into her favorite nurse. The odds were good—the woman seemed to live there. “Shredded chicken, no beans, extra guac.”
“Aren’t you just the sweetest thing?”
“No. I’m really not,” Josie said, and they both laughed because they knew it was true, which was why Krissy was her favorite. The no-nonsense nurse was a kindred spirit—more useful with a hopped up drug addict, out of his mind, than with a crying child.
“He’s down the hall. I’m guessing you’re looking for him, but I can’t imagine why,” Krissy said, then barked a laugh that made Josie grin.
Marching down the shiny linoleum-tiled hallway, wafting an oasis of Mexican food aroma behind her in the sea of disinfectant, Josie once again mused on the fact that she’d managed to escape bodily harm this time out of the gates. Maybe she’d begun a new streak. Any new events in the future might be concussion-free. Because, lord knew, she did not need any TBI—traumatic brain injury—problems in her future. She had enough trouble with her bad dreams. The card from karate instructor slash mental health counselor, Victor, was still in her wallet, and she fully intended to call him for a session. She just hadn’t decided yet whether to ask for self-defense or therapy…
