Final Exam

by Maggie Barbieri

  “Really quiet,” he said meaningfully. He raised an eyebrow. “Understand?”

  I nodded slowly even though I didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about.

  “Sit tight. Do your job. Keep your nose clean.”

  “That’s my plan,” I said. The presumption that I wouldn’t do those three things irked me slightly. I wondered how many people had seen two police cars and two unmarked vehicles peel into campus yesterday, and I decided that whoever did was given the evil death glare—the same one I was getting at that moment—from Jay. I guess he was under the same strict orders as everyone else on the campus with the same mantra: “We’re one big, happy family! Nothing bad ever happens here! It’s heaven on earth!”

  Except it wasn’t. We now had exploding, drug-filled toilets to add to our roster of “bad things that happen at St. Thomas.” As if murder hadn’t been enough.

  “So, we’ll never speak of this again?” Jay asked pointedly.

  “I can’t guarantee that,” I said, honest to a fault. Because I was going to find out where those drugs had come from, where Wayne Brookwell was, and how the drugs and Wayne were related. That meant I’d have to talk to someone, sometime, about this situation.

  He glared at me some more. But coming from a five-foot-five grandfather, even if he was a champion kickboxer in his age bracket, it just wasn’t that intimidating.

  “Oh, okay,” I relented. “We will never speak of this again,” I repeated with tremendous gravitas. I crossed my fingers behind my back and said an Act of Contrition for the lie I just told.

  He gave me one final glance before saying, “Good.”

  He started to walk away, whistling a Miles Davis tune. “Oh, and one more thing.” He stopped a few feet from my room. “You’ll need to move your car.”

  “That’s my regular parking spot,” I reminded him.

  “That’s your regular parking spot if you don’t live on campus. The resident parking lot is up the hill past the auditorium.” He seemed to derive great pleasure in passing this information on to me.

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  He put his hands up. “Not my rules. The school’s. You’ll have to move your car into the resident lot before the students start coming back.”

  I started to protest to his back as he continued down the hallway.

  “Have a good day, Dr. Bergeron,” he called back.

  “You, too!” I said but I didn’t mean it. I hoped he had a very bad day. Like the one I had had the day before. I called Trixie and she came running, sliding to a stop in front of me. I watched Jay turn the corner and go out the main entrance of the dorm. Was it me or was this place an insane asylum? “Want to see your new room?” I asked her.

  Her enthusiastic tail-wagging suggested that she might. I opened the door and her tail became flaccid, eventually tucking between her legs. “It’s not scary, Trix,” I said, putting my fingers between her chain-link collar and the thick rug of fur around her neck. I dragged her into the room. “See? It’s just like home,” I said, but even the dog could tell I was full of it. She went into the shoebox-sized living room and, with a heavy sigh, fell into a heap on the floor, dust rising up around her from the Oriental carpet. She looked up at me, her doleful eyes watching my every move. I went to the bathroom door and pulled down the police tape.

  “Wayne?”

  I peeked my head around the doorjamb and saw a young woman, long curly, black hair hanging to her shoulders, her eyes behind a pair of glasses with black, Buddy Holly–esque frames. She was in jeans and a Princeton sweatshirt, her feet in a pair of pink flip-flops. She was going for the art-student vibe but even that couldn’t hide how cute she was under the helmet of hair and the outdated glasses.

  “Sorry. Wayne’s not here,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m Alison Bergeron. I’m the temporary RD.”

  She took my hand. “Hi. I’m Amanda Reese. I’m the RA on the third floor. Where’s Wayne?”

  Where’s Wayne? That was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “Not sure. I think he took a short leave of absence,” I said, trying not to arouse any suspicion, which made me ask myself why I felt compelled to cover for this guy.

  I recognized Amanda from around campus but knew that I had never had her as a student. The look on her face, however, led me to believe that she knew exactly who I was: the same Alison Bergeron who owned the car in which a student’s body had been found the previous year; the same Alison Bergeron whose ex-husband, the head of the biology department, had been found dead, missing his hands and feet, in her kitchen; the same Alison Bergeron who got herself involved in too many fracases to mention. I don’t know if it was my presence or the fact that Wayne wasn’t where he was supposed to be, but she seemed nervous.

  “He didn’t mention anything to me about a leave of absence,” she said, her eyes narrowing behind her thick lenses, her flip-flopped foot tapping on the marble.

  “It was sudden,” I said. Trixie came out from the living room and introduced herself to Amanda. “This is Trixie.” I looked at the dog. “Trixie, this is Amanda.”

  Trixie held up her paw and allowed Amanda to hold it.

  “I didn’t think they allowed animals in the dorms,” she said, dropping the paw.

  “Special dispensation from the pope,” I said. She didn’t get the joke. “Special circumstances, really. I live alone and I wouldn’t have anybody to take care of my dog while I lived here.” And no, I wasn’t lying: living with Max these days was like living alone, and she certainly wasn’t going to take care of Trixie while I was away. “Now, is there something I can help you with?” I steeled myself for some kind of spring break confession about irresponsible sex or a wet T-shirt contest but there was none forthcoming.

  “Are we still having our house meeting tomorrow night?”

  “House meeting?”

  “Yes. When all of the RAs get together and discuss the upcoming events and any issues that exist in the dorm.” She looked at me as if I were a moron. “House meeting,” she repeated.

  “Sure. We can have a house meeting,” I said. I wondered if she’d like to hear about my “issues,” namely, that I didn’t have a toilet. “Where and when?”

  “Seven o’clock in the TV room,” she said, leaning in to get a better look at my accommodations. “All of Wayne’s stuff is gone,” she whispered to herself.

  “Sure is.” I looked around. I hoped it was. If I discovered anything like what I had found yesterday, I wasn’t going to be happy. “So I’ll get to meet the other RAs tomorrow?”

  She nodded. “There are six of us. Me, and five guys.” She stepped out of the room and back into the hallway. “There’s only one floor of women here. You knew that, right?”

  “I knew that,” I confirmed. “Hey, were you close with Wayne?”

  She flushed a pink that was close to the color of her flip-flops. “No. Why would you ask that?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. He lived here, you live here . . . just thought I’d ask. I thought maybe you knew where he went.”

  “Why would I know where he went?”

  “Just thought I’d ask,” I repeated. When she didn’t move from her place in the hallway, I asked her, “So, tomorrow at seven? TV room?”

  She nodded and took off down the hallway, her flip-flops slapping a guilty staccato on the marble floor. She knew more than she was giving up. Or she was madly in love with slack-jawed Wayne. Or both.

  The next thought hit me like a ton of bricks.

  Could he have been her dealer?

  Eight

  The next school day passed without incident and I managed to keep my nose clean for the entire day. I spoke with Crawford at lunchtime and he told me that he had found a woman in the squad who had a hook in Scarsdale. She had reached out to a detective there and found out that Wayne had not been reported as a missing person, at least not so far. But the detective promised to keep an eye out and an ear to the ground and to let Crawford know if anything tu
rned up.

  We were running out of metaphors so I hoped this wrapped up quickly.

  I got back to the dorm just in time to pay the pizza guy, who was waiting for me at the front desk when I walked in. I skidded to the front desk in my high heels; my first duty as RD was going to be to have a conversation with the custodian about the high gloss on these floors. There was clean and then there was dangerous. We had entered into the latter category with Mr. Janitor’s overzealous buffing.

  I had called for a pizza before I left my office thinking that I would be back at the dorm in minutes; I had gotten waylaid by a student who was not guilty about spring break, but guilty about the D he was getting in my creative writing class. If he had channeled all of that guilt into his creative writing, he would have had something to work with, but instead, he was frozen. We worked through a few scenarios, with my mind on my impending pizza delivery, his on getting a grade higher than a D.

  I took my pizza back to my room and opened the door. I spied Trixie sitting on the bed, dutifully awaiting my arrival. She jumped off and ran circles around me, nearly knocking me over. I knew what we had to do before we got to eat our pizza, so I put her on the leash, stuffed a New York Times delivery bag into the waistband of my skirt, and took her out the side door into the parking lot.

  I was still wearing my heels, but the only place I could see to take her was the cemetery, directly across the parking lot from the dorm. It wasn’t a straight shot, but up a little hill, which I reasoned I could scale in my black suede pumps. I started across the lot and up the hill, using my heels to dig into the soil. Going back to change my shoes wasn’t an option; Trixie had to go and any time I wasted going back to my room to change my shoes was going to be time taken away from eating my pizza before the house meeting. Trixie scampered up the little incline, dragging me behind her.

  I realized that walking my dog in a cemetery probably wasn’t the most reverent or polite thing I could do, but the dog had been cooped up in my dorm room since lunchtime and needed to go out. I didn’t have time to do a leisurely riverside walk like we had in the morning and at noon, so this was going to have to do.

  After everything I’d done and the decisions I had made, I was going to hell anyway, so if my dog took a dump on a long-gone nun’s grave, what was the harm? I led Trixie down one of the paths between the graves and as far away from a final resting place as I could and looked around as she paused, sniffed, ran in circles, and then got down to business. I said a silent apology to Sister Margaret Dolores Russell, born 1845, died 1941.

  “Look, Trix,” I said, wiping off Sister Margaret’s grave marker, “she died on Pearl Harbor day.”

  Trixie was not impressed.

  I got up and continued walking. Off in the distance, I could see the Science Building, where my ex-husband had spent many a day teaching, hitting on colleagues and students alike, and being a general shithead. Next to that was the library, a building that was virtually unknown to most of my students. And beyond that was the dorm where I had lived for most of my time here, right next to the new dorm that was going up. From what I had read in the latest campus newspaper, the building was going to be state-of-the-art, with Wi-Fi, flat-screen televisions in every lounge, satellite cable service, popcorn machines, and rooms decorated by some fancy designer who got to put his name on every piece of furniture. I looked at my old dorm and sighed. I guess things had to change, but was the change for the better? My dorm had had Murphy beds that folded into the walls to make more room for the two girls per, laminate-topped desks bolted to the floors, and televisions with rabbit ears. And we had been very happy. At least I had. Max had always complained that living at St. Thomas wasn’t any better than living at a women’s reformatory.

  Trixie was taking an inordinately long time, peeing on every gravestone she encountered. We wended our way through the cemetery, where I read some of the grave markings; others were worn away from years of exposure. Most of the sisters buried there had lived long, long lives, and many had survived well into old age without Wi-Fi.

  Trixie sniffed at the grass and squatted to pee again. “Oh, for God’s sake, Trix. We’ll be back. You can mark your territory later.” I knelt down and petted her, accepting her kiss. To my right, I heard rustling and my back straightened. “Who’s there?” The hair on Trixie’s neck went up and she let out a low growl, straining at the leash. “Down, Trix,” I whispered. I stayed in the crouch, listening for more rustling.

  The next sound was far more menacing as a beer bottle sailed past my head and hit the gravestone next to me, that of one Sister Catherine Marie LaGrange. The bottle shattered, shards of it landing in my and Trixie’s hair. Trixie let out a yelp of surprise and bolted, dragging me after her. I flew into the gravestone directly in front of me, the top of the stone hitting me squarely in the diaphragm. I sucked in one last gasp of air before the wind went completely out of me. I hit the ground, landing on my back, staring up at the last remaining slants of daylight in the clouds.

  The rustling got louder and I heard the sound of footsteps. In between gasping for air and wondering if you could die from having the wind knocked out of you, I sat up and saw a figure running through the gravestones. I couldn’t see the front, but from the back, the figure was tall, male, and thin.

  And if I could have guessed, I would say slack-jawed.

  I tried to speak but couldn’t. Trixie was in hot pursuit, having freed herself from my hold on her leash, jumping over gravestones and weaving in and out of the rows of dead nuns. I finally took in some air and screamed his name.

  “Wayne! Wayne Brookwell!”

  But Wayne, or whoever it was, ran up the hill and out of sight. Trixie wasn’t chasing him anymore, so when I was able to breathe again, I got up to find her.

  She was crouched on the grave of Sister Mary Lawrence Cassidy, born 1893, died 1995. I got closer and saw that Trixie was eating the remains of a ham and swiss on rye. She looked up at me guiltily.

  “You almost killed me, Trix,” I said, clutching my midsection. The pain was intense and I realized I had tears streaming down my face. I wiped my cheeks with the arm of my sweater and pushed my hair back, looking around. Still not a soul in sight, the bottle thrower long gone. I grabbed Trixie’s leash and hobbled back to the dorm.

  Nine

  I was still breathless from nearly being impaled on a gravestone. “I think I saw him,” I said. I was back in my room, sitting on my twin bed, talking on my cell phone. Crawford was at his desk in the squad.

  “You’ll have to be more specific,” Crawford said.

  “Wayne. Wayne Brookwell.”

  That got his attention. “Where? When?”

  “A few minutes ago.” I explained how I had been walking Trixie in the cemetery and how I was about 99 percent positive that Wayne was only a few rows of graves away.

  “So, he’s alive.”

  “I think so,” I said. “But not for long if I get my hands on him. Between having to live in this dump, and getting a beer bottle thrown at my head . . . and, oh, yeah . . . getting pulled over the top of a gravestone, I’m getting more and more ticked off by the minute at this guy.” I took in another deep breath. Yep, still hurt. “Even if he has the loveliest parents in the world.”

  Crawford asked me to hold on; I could hear his muffled voice as he talked to someone in the precinct. “Radio car is on its way over.”

  I groaned. “Why?”

  “Because anyone who throws a beer bottle at your head deserves a tune-up.”

  “A what?”

  “A talking-to.”

  I didn’t think that that’s what it really meant, but I let it go. “How are you going to find him?”

  “I told them to start with the cemetery and take it from there.” He paused again. “Now I’m pissed.”

  “It’s okay, Crawford,” I said, knowing that him being angry at Wayne would not help the situation. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you really okay? Or are you just telling me that so I won
’t make a big deal out of this? Because if we find Wayne, he’ll have bigger problems than a brick of heroin in his toilet.”

  I touched my midsection, and while it was sore, it wasn’t excruciating. “I don’t think I broke anything but I could be bleeding internally,” I said, only half joking.

  “Do you want me to come over?” he asked.

  “Under normal circumstances, I would say ‘yes,’ but I have a meeting tonight with my resident assistants.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “And with the internal bleeding and all, I don’t think you’d enjoy being around me.”

  “Right.”

  I thought of something else. “Hey, did Lattanzi or Marcus say anything about the stuff from the toilet?”

  “Haven’t seen them. But I’ll hook up with one of them tomorrow and see if they found out anything. I haven’t heard anything on the prints that were taken, either, but I’m guessing we’re also not going to get anything back from those.” He sighed. “Unless you can find Brookwell on your own, you’re stuck there until the end of the semester, I’m afraid. First chance I get, I’m coming over to poke around with you.”

  “That sounds vaguely dirty.”

  He chuckled. I heard his radio crackle again in the background. “I’ve gotta go. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine. Thanks for listening.”

  The house meeting commenced right at seven o’clock, just like Amanda said it would. Internal bleeding probably would have been the only thing that could have kept me from attending, given Amanda’s insistence the day before. She was as jittery that night as she was the first time we met and I watched as she took a seat on an upholstered ottoman directly across from me, her leg going up and down in a nervous rhythm. She was in the same getup as when I had first met her: pink flip-flops, jeans, the Princeton sweatshirt. Fortunately, the other RAs seemed like an amiable, if laconic, bunch. One, Bart Johannsen, had brought his lacrosse stick, which he twirled repeatedly during our meeting, making me dizzy. He was a giant kid whose Scandinavian genes had presented themselves in an impressive genetic specimen: Bart was well over six feet, built like a redwood, with a tanned face and a head of platinum-blond hair. Another, Michael Columbo, bounced a basketball. Michael was a boy in a man’s body—giant feet that he didn’t know quite how to maneuver yet, and long arms that swung at his sides when he walked. Yet another, one Spencer Williamson—a nebbishy-looking kid who looked like he was straight from central casting—I had had in class in an earlier year. He sat across from me, looking dolefully at the back of Amanda’s head. Although these kids had gone through a rigorous interview process and were responsible for the students who lived on their respective floors, they didn’t seem any different from their charges, so I wasn’t sure what had set them apart from the other students who had interviewed for these coveted spots that afforded them free room and board for the duration of their tenure.