by Bill Crider
“We’ve been trying to recruit more faculty members, and even some students,” Larry said. “Ellen was helping us. She gave us some names, and we picked up some volunteers after people read our ads in the paper.”
“That’s a good story,” Jack said. “It’s too bad I don’t believe you.”
“Why not?” Sally said.
“If she was just a member of his little conspiracy, he wouldn’t be so worried about her. There’s bound to be more to it than that.”
“I was also worried about her,” Larry said, “because she’s a … friend.”
Oh, Sally thought, realizing by the way he said the word friend that Jack was right. There was a little more to Larry’s relationship with Ellen than he’d implied at first. She’d never thought of Ellen as the type to have a romantic relationship, but then she’d never thought of Larry that way, either. His wife had been dead for several years. Maybe he was lonely. Maybe Ellen was, too.
“Look,” Larry said, softening his voice, “I’m sorry I tried to act tough with you, but I’m worried about Ellen. And we’re just standing around here doing nothing.”
“We were about to look in the office,” Sally said. “You can come along.”
“I’ll check the bedroom,” he said, and went into the other hallway.
“He knows where her bedroom is,” Jack said.
“We’re all grown-ups here, Jack. At least most of the time.”
“I didn’t mean to act like a jerk. Larry started it.”
“Jack, please.”
“Sorry. Let’s check the office.”
The office held a computer desk with a flat-screen Dell monitor on it, a small writing desk, an ergonomic chair that could roll between the two desks on the hardwood floor, and a portable color TV that sat on a low table.
Ellen Baldree was there, too, lying on the floor, legs and arms outstretched, mouth open, eyes closed.
“Damn,” Jack said. “She’s dead.”
22
This time Jack couldn’t resist.
“I knew we shouldn’t have come in here,” he said.
“At least there’s no knife in her back,” Sally said. “You said there’d be a knife in her back. Of course, she’s lying faceup, so it’s possible that there’s a knife and we just can’t see it.”
“How can you make jokes about this? We’re here in the house illegally, and a dead woman’s lying in the middle of the floor. Not only that, the dead woman is our friend.”
“Shouldn’t you say was our friend?”
“Holy Moly,” Jack said. “I never knew you were so cold-blooded. The joke was bad enough, but verb tense?”
“Calm down and take a deep breath, Jack.”
“I don’t need to take a deep breath. And I’m not excited.”
“Just humor me.”
Jack exhaled, then took a breath.
“Smell it?”
“Yeah, I do. Smells like cheap wine.”
“Not so cheap,” Sally said, pointing to a bottle on the floor beside the writing desk.
“Oh,” Jack said, bending down to look at the label. “Well, it smells like moderately priced wine, then.”
At that moment, Larry Lawrence came into the office behind them.
“Ellen!” he said when he saw her. “My God, what have they done to you?”
“Nothing,” Sally said. “If you’ll look, you’ll see that she’s breathing, and if you’ll listen, you might even hear her snore.”
“In other words,” Jack said, “she’s snockered.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” Sally told him, and she pointed out the bottle.
“But that’s not like her at all,” Larry said, pushing past Sally and Jack to kneel beside Ellen. He lifted her head. “Ellen. Ellen. Wake up.”
“It might be a while if she drank that whole bottle of wine this morning,” Sally said.
It looked to Sally as if Ellen had been sitting at the writing desk before she passed out, so she went over to see what Ellen had been working on, if someone in her condition could be said to have been working.
A sheet of white paper lay on the desk, and Ellen had been writing on it with a ballpoint pen.
“Should we call nine-one-one?” Jack asked.
“That’s for emergencies only,” Sally told him. “A drunk woman isn’t an emergency. Larry, why don’t you take her to her bed. She’d be more comfortable there.”
“That’s a good idea,” Larry said.
When he picked Ellen up, she was limp as linguine. He turned sideways so he could get through the door with her and carried her off down the hall.
“She didn’t look uncomfortable to me,” Jack said.
“I don’t know if she was or not, but I didn’t want Larry around while I’m snooping.”
“Snooping? What snooping? I don’t think snooping is a good idea. We should just leave now.”
“Not yet,” Sally said.
She took the paper off the desk and tried to read it. At first glance it seemed to be nothing but an incoherent scrawl, but Sally was skilled at reading papers written by freshman students under strict time constraints. She thought she could read just about most people’s scrawl, whether they were drunk or sober when they had set it down.
“Here’s her glass,” Jack said.
It was lying on the floor behind the wine bottle, and Sally saw that a ballpoint pen lay there as well. Jack picked up the glass and bottle and set them on the desk. He didn’t bother with the pen.
“What does that note say?” he asked.
“It looks like an apology to me. I think she must have started to drink and to write it at about the same time. The first part is more legible than the rest.”
“Guilty conscience,” Jack said. “She had to fortify herself to write it. The more she wrote, the more fortification she needed. No wonder she wasn’t in class this morning.”
“Her first class isn’t until nine. She probably started writing this around eight, thinking she’d be finished by time to leave for school.”
And she would have, Sally thought, if she’d been able to do it sober.
“She didn’t have the nerve to write it,” Jack said. “She wanted to write it, but she needed help.”
“Write what?” Larry asked, coming back into the office.
“A note to me,” Sally said. “She was apologizing for something.”
“What?”
“Nothing important,” Sally told him. If Larry didn’t know about the e-mail, she wasn’t going to tell him.
She folded the paper and put it in her purse. She wasn’t going to leave it there for Ellen to find and tear up when she was sober again.
“She didn’t have anything to apologize for,” Larry said. “The college treated her shabbily, and she was helping us bring a sense of fiscal responsibility to the place.”
“That’s baloney,” Jack said. “You both had an ax to grind.”
Larry held up his hand, palms outward.
“Not true. We’re just civic-minded citizens, doing what we think is best for the town and the school.”
“Hoo-boy,” Jack said. “Surely you don’t expect us to believe that.”
“Believe whatever you like. It happens to be the truth.”
“If the bond doesn’t pass, the college is going to have some financial problems,” Sally said. “We need to upgrade all the computers in the faculty offices, buy new classroom furniture, update all the labs, overhaul the air-conditioning and heating system, fix up the library, and do a million other things.”
“That’s the problem with everyone at the college,” Larry said. “Well, not everyone. Ellen saw the light.”
“What light would that be?” Jack asked. “The one on the front of the oncoming train?”
“No, the one that illuminates the part of your brain that tells you the students can sit in the old desks for a few more years and that everyone can get by with the old heating and AC system. And that the old
computers are just fine for what you use them for. Playing solitaire doesn’t require state-of-the-art machines.”
“We use computers for research,” Jack said. “And word processing. Not games.”
Sally thought it was remarkable that he kept a straight face while telling that whopper.
“Who else besides Ellen have you recruited from the faculty?” she asked.
“That’s private information.”
“I don’t believe you’ve recruited anyone,” Jack said. “But I think the Gnome was trying to recruit me.”
Larry gave Jack a speculative look. “He thought you might have caught on to him. But he wasn’t trying to recruit you. He was just feeling you out, trying to see if you were interested. He thought you might be one of the first to sign up after Ellen did.”
“I don’t know what could have given him that idea. He and I were never friends, and I never encouraged him to think I had any differences with the college.”
“I think Ellen gave him the idea,” Larry said. “She thought that maybe you’d be interested after …”
He paused and looked at Sally.
“After what?” she said.
“After you threw him over for Jorge Rodriguez.”
Jack was indignant. “Hey, she didn’t throw me over. We were never even an item. I’ve been going out with Vera Vaughn.”
“Ellen told us about that, and Harold decided not to call you anymore. He figured all your energy would be directed elsewhere.”
“Is that a crack?”
“Just an observation.”
“All right,” Sally said before they could carry the conversation any further. “That’s enough of that. Is Ellen doing all right?”
“I hope so,” Larry said. “I still can’t believe she got drunk and passed out.”
“The evidence is overwhelming,” Sally said. “Are you going to stay here for a while and look after her?”
“Yes, I’ll do that.”
“Then Jack and I should get back to the college. We both have office hours. But before we go, I have one more thing I want to say to you if you’ll let me.”
“Why do I get the feeling that I couldn’t stop you even if I said no?”
Jack laughed, but Sally ignored him. She said, “I know that you think Chief Desmond is a rat, but he’s sorry for what happened with your daughter, and he’s trying to do the right thing. You should concentrate on helping her and forget about this bond issue.”
“Desmond can’t change what he did, no matter how bad he feels about it now. And I’m not going to change my position. Now that Harold’s dead, a lot of people are counting on me to pick up the slack. I’m not going to let them down.”
“How long were you at the college?” Jack said. “Twenty-two years? Twenty-three? You made a good living there for all that time, and when you retired, you got a generous settlement. The school’s still paying for your health and dental insurance. But you want to stab everybody there in the back because one guy made a mistake. That’s pretty dumb if you ask me.”
“I didn’t ask you,” Larry said. “And you don’t know what my daughter’s been through, so don’t tell me what’s dumb and what’s not. Just go back to the campus and keep your office hours.”
Testosterone strikes again, Sally thought.
She touched Jack’s sleeve. He looked at her, and she shook her head.
“Sorry,” he said, and they both turned and left the house.
23
Sally couldn’t concentrate on the papers she was supposed to be grading because she kept thinking about Ellen Baldree. She even felt a little sorry for her.
Ever since her arrival on the HCC campus, Sally had known that Ellen didn’t like her. That had become obvious when Sally had taken over as department chair, and it still was. And all the while that Ellen had been pretending to be the model of a cooperative professional, she’d been wondering about how she was going to make Sally suffer for having gotten the job that Ellen craved for her own.
It struck Sally that Ellen wasn’t all that much different from the women who had been accused of witchcraft in Salem. She was a woman alone, embittered by her experience and without many friends, even in the English department. In fact, Sally wasn’t sure Ellen had any friends at all, which might be another reason she’d signed on with the Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility. She could have been looking for a community to be a part of, a group that would welcome her.
She’d been welcomed, all right, especially by Larry Lawrence, who was as bitter and lonely as Ellen. Or even more bitter.
What bothered Sally most about her speculations was that she herself wasn’t really that much different from Ellen when she thought about it. Her situation was in fact about the same.
Except that Sally had friends. Jack was a friend, and so, oddly enough, was Vera Vaughn.
And then there was Lola. Ellen didn’t have a cat like Lola, or any cat for that matter, and Sally was sure Ellen’s life was the poorer for it.
Sally also had her mother. Maybe Ellen had a mother, but Sally didn’t know if that was a benefit to Ellen or not.
Ellen had also found a love life, something Sally had not done since her husband’s death. She didn’t feel any great loss, not so far. She’d been mildly attracted to Jack, and strongly attracted to Jorge, but when neither of those romances had worked out, Sally hadn’t been bothered in the least.
Oh, all right, she admitted to herself that losing Jorge to Mae Wilkins did bother her a little. If she were really a witch, she’d put a spell on Mae’s house so that no matter how hard Mae tried, the floors would never be quite clean, the windows never quite sparkling, the rooms never quite tidy.
Sally didn’t like the way her speculations were leading her. She’d started feeling sorrier for herself than she felt for Ellen, and that was bad. Self-pity wasn’t among her favorite emotions.
She opened her purse and took out the note that Ellen had been writing to have another look at it.
Ellen had felt guilty enough to apologize for the e-mail stunt, but, according to the note, only because Jennifer and Sherm Jackson had told her about the events of the previous evening. It seemed their behavior was too over the top even for Ellen.
But there was more to the note than that. Unfortunately, Sally was having trouble making it out. Not only was it almost illegible, but Ellen had either spilled wine on it or drooled on it, causing the ink to smear. Sally preferred the wine hypothesis, but either way, the paper was impossible to read.
No, not impossible. Sally wasn’t going to give up so easily. She’d taught creative writing for years before the advent of computers and campus computer labs. She’d had students whose handwriting was so small that she had to use a magnifying glass to read it, students who deliberately tried to obscure their spelling errors by scrawling or blurring the words, students whose writing was so naturally bad that it gave chicken-scratching a bad name. And she had read every single one of their papers and commented on every one of them as well. She wasn’t going to be defeated by anything that Ellen had written.
Sally wondered if the final portion of Ellen’s note said something about the Garden Gnome’s death. Was it possible that Ellen had not gotten drunk entirely because of what she’d done to Sally? Was there something else that Ellen felt guilty about and wanted to tell Sally?
Concentrating on the writing, if it could be called that, Sally was almost certain she could make out the word blood. The only connection she could make with that word was between it and the way Harold Curtin had died.
And that connection started Sally down a completely different trail. What if the Garden Gnome had committed suicide, leaving behind the notes about “blood to drink” in order to implicate Sally in his death.
Or, to take it in another direction, what if Ellen had killed Curtin herself, after getting him to write the “blood” notes in order to put the blame for his death on Sally.
Either of those scenarios would make a twisted kind of sense to s
omeone like Ellen or the Gnome, but even if they made sense, Sally told herself that it wasn’t her job to find out who had killed Curtin. That was Lieutenant Weems’s job. The city paid him to do it, and Sally was happy to let him. She had been mixed up in a couple of murders, and she hadn’t liked it either time. On the other hand, if Ellen or Curtin wanted to tie her to Curtin’s death, Sally wanted to give Weems all the help she could.
She wondered if he had investigated the fact that Jennifer and Sherm Jackson had arrived at Curtin’s house almost as soon as the HCC delegation had left on the night of Curtin’s death. But it wasn’t her job to tell him about that. Surely Desmond had told him by now.
Sally didn’t like to think that Jennifer or Sherm or the two of them together would kill someone, and she couldn’t think of any reason why they would kill Curtin. But the look in Jennifer’s eyes the previous evening was enough to convince Sally that Jennifer might be capable of anything, no matter what Sally might want to think. Still, Sally wasn’t a law enforcement officer, so she’d let Weems worry about the Jacksons. He could check their alibis and the evidence, and then he could either eliminate them or implicate them.
She put aside the note Ellen had been writing, telling herself that she would read it later, when she got home.
Right now, she needed to get some student papers graded. She took one off the top of the stack and got started.
Unlike Sally, Jack was feeling chipper. He’d stood up to Larry Lawrence, who outweighed him by a good forty pounds. So what if Larry was a few years older? He was bigger and probably stronger than Jack and the way Jack saw it, Larry was the one pushing for a fight.
He knew Sally didn’t see it quite the same way, and he’d even apologized for acting like a jerk.
But his apology hadn’t been sincere. If there had been a jerk in the room, it had been Larry. Larry had forced him to take a stand, and he’d done it. Several times. He wished Vera had been there to see him. He was sure she would have thought him courageous instead of foolish.
