Final Exam

by Maggie Barbieri

  I gave Mary Catherine a look and sent her a telepathic message to delay. She picked up on it and ran with it. “Aunt Coco, I have to run upstairs and get my bag. Can you wait for me?”

  “Sure, honey,” I said, and she took off. Crawford turned away so as not to have his eyes burned out by the sight of a twenty-year-old girl’s ass in the tightest jeans I had ever seen running up the stairs. I knew what this meant: no sign-in meant nobody knew she was there. She was spending the night and there was really nothing I could do about it after bringing her into this nightmare of a one-act play.

  We bid good night to the Brookwells, and when we were sure that they had gotten into their car and driven away, Crawford collapsed on the second to last step of the staircase, his head in his hands. “I feel like I’m going to throw up,” he said.

  “I guess you’ve never worked undercover?” I asked innocently.

  “I’m a graphic designer!” he cried. “I’m not supposed to be undercover.” He sat there for a few more minutes, his hands hanging down between his legs. “How old is that girl, by the way?”

  “She’s at least twenty,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. His first guesstimate had probably been in the nonlegal area and that would have sent him off the deep end for sure. “How in the hell did we get into this situation?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and put my ear to the TV room door. It didn’t sound like anything too exciting was happening and their voices were back to a normal timbre. “But what’s interesting to me is that the Brookwells don’t know that their son is missing. That is extremely disturbing.”

  Crawford stood. “Well, what do we do now?”

  I thought for a moment. “I have to get into the convent.”

  Eighteen

  I finally kicked Max and Fred out of the dorm at ten-fifteen, a good forty-five minutes before I would have had to write them up and submit their transgression to the Student Judicial Council. Tommy Moore never returned to finish sitting desk, so I stayed put. Crawford and Fred were off duty when they arrived, so they hadn’t broken any department rules when they dropped by and overstayed their welcome.

  It seemed like détente had been reached, and while Fred and Max were amicable, they had come to no significant agreement, except that they were to see each other over the weekend to talk further. While they recounted this development to us, Crawford stood behind them, imploring me silently to tell them something, anything. But I couldn’t. First of all, it wasn’t really my place to tell them; that fell on their priest. And second, I was chicken.

  I kissed Crawford good-bye outside the dorm. Fred and Max were talking quietly by the Crown Vic. “Good night, Chad.”

  “Listen, Coco,” he said. “You’ll have to have a talk with our niece. She can’t wear underwear out in public.”

  “After my next trip overseas,” I promised.

  “As long as it’s overseas and not into the convent,” he cautioned. He didn’t think my snooping around the convent to look for Wayne was such a great idea. I had to disagree. I thought it was an excellent idea. But I didn’t tell him that.

  After I bid him adieu, I went back into the dorm to call Tommy Moore. I hadn’t seen Mary Catherine leave the building and probably wouldn’t. I was sure her departure would be under cover of night or in the wee hours of the morning.

  Tommy was in his room and answered the phone on the first ring. “Everyone’s gone, Tommy. You can come back down,” I said. He came down the stairs a few minutes later, looking around the banister before he reached the lobby, making sure that I was telling the truth. I waved him down. “They’re gone.”

  He let out an audible sigh. “What was that?” he asked, referencing the event that had sent him scurrying a few hours before. “That guy was pretty mad.”

  “Long story,” I said. “Hey, are you going to finish out your shift? Because I have to go out for a half hour or so.”

  He took his place behind the desk and organized all of his supplies. “I’ll be here.”

  “Good.” I headed out of the dorm and down the side road toward the river. For some reason, the song “Cracklin’ Rosie” by Neil Diamond popped into my head and I couldn’t get it out. “Cracklin’ Rose you’re a store-bought woman”? I thought. What does that even mean? I hummed the song as I walked along in the dark, thoughts of Neil Diamond in his rhinestone-studded shirt keeping my mind off the fact that it was dark, damp, and downright spooky on campus after dark. The cemetery was to my right, the dark and uninhabited classroom building to my left, dark trees reaching over me and extending sinister limbs. But I had Neil Diamond to keep me company, at least in my head.

  I turned the corner at the end of the road, the convent door in front of me, its big brass knocker shiny, even in the dark. The nuns have people for things like keeping the door knocker clean, the stairs swept, the smell of beeswax redolent in the air. I approached the door, not sure what I was going to do. I was fairly certain that the door was locked—it almost always was—but I flashed on the keys in my pocket and Dean Merrimack’s rat face.

  “The one with the red dot is the master key,” he had said when he had handed them over.

  “Oh, yes it is,” I whispered. I tried the knob to see if the door was locked and it was; I gingerly slipped the key into the lock. The door opened silently and I stole in, trying to make as little noise as possible.

  I’ve been in the convent a few times and have always been amazed at how quiet it is. I spend my day surrounded by students in an area not too far from where I was now but it might as well have been a world away; at midday, the din in the halls is deafening. I looked around, my eyes adjusting to the dark. There were a few wall sconces casting a warm glow in the foyer but no bright lights; this place was closed for the night. I stepped gingerly onto the stairs, so clean that you could eat off them, and proceeded up to the fifth floor.

  A few months earlier, I had stowed my friend Hernan here. At that time, I had been informed by the lovely Sister Louise, she of the ink-stained hands, that the fifth floor was vacant, save for the presence of Sister Catherine, who was legally blind. But from what I had gathered during my one trip to this residential floor, all of the sisters’ rooms were now empty; Sister Catherine had been moved so that she could be closer to the other nuns. Hardly anyone joins the convent anymore, but at one time this place had been bustling. Empty rooms and only a handful of habited nuns was a testament to this fact of modern life. I made it up to the fifth floor undiscovered and stood on the top step wondering (a) what I was doing here and (b) what I was going to do now that I was here.

  I didn’t have to wait long to figure it out because while I was thinking, the door to the last room on the left opened up and a very relaxed-looking Wayne came out into the hallway, stretched, and padded down toward the bathroom, which was about four doors away from where I was standing. He didn’t see me and walked down the hallway, mouth-breathing, a bath towel around his neck.

  “Wayne!” I whispered. “Wayne Brookwell!” It didn’t quite have the cadence of “Bond, James Bond,” but I had found myself saying it more and more in the past week.

  He stopped, looked at me, and went white. And then he started running. Fast.

  “Oh, jeez,” I thought. “Here we go again.” I took off down the hallway but that kid was speedy. And he obviously knew all of the nooks and crannies in the old building because he went through one door and was gone before I could even get my bearings.

  I went through the door that he had entered and was submerged into pitch-blackness. I felt around the wall for a light switch but couldn’t find it. “Wayne!” I whispered loudly. “Come out. I want to help you.” I didn’t actually want to help him but I at least wanted to tell him that we got the drugs out of his toilet and that he needed to answer for that one. “Wayne!” I had no idea what room I was in and what I would find once I did get the lights on, but it was dark. And smelled like feet. It had the smell of a young, slack-jawed man, living alone. It was the smell of
Wayne.

  I moved farther into the room and banged my shin on something hard and metal, hollering out in pain. But yelling a very foul expletive was the last thing I remember because someone came up behind me and, presumably, hit me over the head. Instead of thinking “lights out,” because they really were, I just fell to the ground.

  I woke up in the hallway; I’m not sure how much time had passed. I had obviously been dragged out there because one of my shoes was abandoned by the door that I had entered. But the lights were on now, and Sister Catherine, she of the sketchy eyesight, was standing over me; obviously, old habits died hard and Catherine had returned to her old stomping grounds, for what reason, I’d never know. I sat up and took in her bonnet, long habit, and wimple. I rubbed the sore spot on the back of my head and winced.

  “Hello, Sister,” I said, struggling to get to my feet.

  “Who’s that?” she asked. Sitting up, I was almost as tall as she was. “Is that you, Sister Lawrence?” she asked. “Have you gotten into the chardonnay again?”

  I stood, a little woozy. I grabbed on to her bony shoulder for support. I fetched my shoe and put it on. “No, Sister. It’s Alison Bergeron. I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  “Alison? What are you doing here, dear?” she asked, staring up at me, her eyes huge behind thick glasses that probably did nothing to improve her sight. Her cataracts were visible behind the lenses.

  “I got lost, Sister. I’m sorry to intrude,” I said.

  “Got lost?” she said, her voice thin and reedy. “That must have been some cocktail hour down there in the faculty lounge.”

  I didn’t disabuse of her of the notion that we had semiregular faculty cocktail parties and took off down the hall, my head throbbing in time to my footfalls on the worn wood floor.

  I sneaked back down to the first floor and stole out of the front door without making too much noise. I gave myself a mental head slap for telling Sister Catherine who I was, but I comforted myself with the fact that she thought the professors were all drunks who had cocktail parties every week and couldn’t find their way home afterward. That would go a long way toward explaining why I was on the nuns’ turf after-hours if she chose to reveal my whereabouts.

  I sat on the front steps of the convent and rubbed my head. I had a goose egg, but it wasn’t too bad. I had had a concussion before and knew that this injury didn’t approach it in severity, but I would have a mother of a headache in the morning, that I knew. I got up again and began my trek up to the dorm.

  I almost had him and he got away. Again. I was going to have to go into training to get this guy. He was fast and I was not. Once my headache went away, I would start a full-blown exercise regimen, maybe even visiting the newly renovated St. Thomas gym to do all sorts of activities that would bring me closer to being able to run for more than fifteen seconds without breaking down.

  Oh, who was I kidding? I wouldn’t do any training. As it was, I wasn’t having sex or drinking, so that qualified as hardcore discipline for me. Eventually, my body would catch up.

  A figure emerged from the shadows, bowlegged but broad and solid. I slowed my walk to a near crawl and considered my options. Go back down toward the convent and the river? Or bid a quick “good evening” and continue up toward the dorm? I didn’t have time to make a decision because the figure approached me and I saw it was Monsieur Pinkie Ring.

  I didn’t think it would be wise to greet him that way so I remained silent.

  “Where’s Wayne Brookwell?”

  No hello? No nice to see you? Where did the love go? “I don’t know,” I lied. I didn’t know if it was the head wound or that I was just completely exhausted by the Wayne Brookwell situation, but I no longer found this guy to be a problem. Or a threat. Or a combination of both.

  He leaned in close and I got a new whiff of his cologne. Dear Lord; what a stench. “Do you know you’re bleeding?” he asked, more out of curiosity than concern. He put the pinkie-ringed finger to my lip.

  I followed suit and found that I had a bloody lip. “I must have bitten it,” I said. And that was the truth. I must have bitten it when I had fallen. He took what looked like a used tissue out of his pocket and attempted to wipe my face. I put a hand up; although he had lost all menace, I still didn’t want a perfect stranger touching my face not once, but twice. “I’ll be fine.” I rubbed at my lip vigorously, smearing blood onto the palm of my hand. I had a million questions to ask the guy, like who he was and why he was concerned with Wayne, but I was tired of investigating and started up the hill, hoping he would leave me alone.

  “Hey, lady!” he called after me.

  I turned.

  “Tell that asshole that if I find him, he’s dead meat.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why is he dead meat?”

  The man looked at me, apparently unable or unwilling to come up with an explanation. It was obvious that he never expected me to ask. He went with the ever-popular “none of your business” retort.

  “You seem really interested in him,” I remarked. “You’ve come all the way from Jersey, for God’s sake.”

  “Would you get off the Jersey thing?” he asked, exasperated.

  I shrugged. “I’m just saying. It’s a long way.”

  “Not if you take the GW,” he said, referring to the George Washington Bridge. “And then the Henry Hudson.” It was a momentary lapse, this conversation about the best route from Jersey to New York, and he seemed to realize it quickly. “Anyway, just tell him, would you?” he said, trying to summon up some menace again. He pointed at me for emphasis.

  I saluted him. “Will do.” It was like playing a part in a bad mob movie, but being as I had some experience with the real mob, I knew that this guy was just a bit player if a player at all. A man who would hand a woman a used Kleenex to clean her bloody lip wasn’t a killer, in my opinion.

  But who he was, why he was here, and why we were having a conversation about alternate traffic routes were just a few pieces of the puzzle.

  Nineteen

  Max called me the next morning, sounding more like her old self than she had in the past few weeks. “What’s that fancy French word you use all the time?” she started.

  I rolled over and turned off the alarm; I wouldn’t be needing it this morning. It was seven o’clock and I had been awakened by the trill of my cell phone—a jaunty jingle from a popular television show about women on the prowl in New York City—next to my head on the nightstand. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  “You know,” she said. “The one you used to use to describe your relationship with Ray?”

  “Insensé?” I asked, not remembering when I had described my relationship with my ex-husband as “insane,” but it was the only thing that made sense.

  “No, that’s not it. It was more like you weren’t friends, but you weren’t enemies, but you could be in the same room?”

  I searched my cobwebbed brain. “Détente?”

  “That’s it!” she yelled into the phone.

  I held the phone away from my ear and instinctively put my other hand to the lump on the back of my head.

  “I think,” she began solemnly, “that Fred and I have reached détente.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Does that mean you’ll be moving back home?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, as if that were the silliest idea I had ever had. “I have a lot of work to do.”

  “What?” I asked. “What work?”

  “On the marriage,” she quickly amended, but I couldn’t help thinking that she meant something else. What that was, I didn’t know, but I knew Max well enough to know when she sounds like she’s trying to put one over on me. She’s a good liar but we had a lot of history on which to draw. Had I been more cogent, my Max radar would have been on full alert.

  “So you’ll be going to counseling?” I rolled over and took half of the covers with me.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. Obviously, I had reached another silly conclusion in my sleepy s
tate. “But I don’t want to kill him. That’s progress, right?”

  “Indeed.” I sat up and attempted to wake up. The image of Kevin’s stricken face relaying the news of Max and Fred’s non-marriage entered my consciousness and jolted me fully awake; my mental to-do list now included tracking down Kevin and laying another beating on him for not resolving this situation. “Listen, it’s early. Can we continue this later?” I was afraid I might reveal something in my addled state and wanted to end the conversation quickly.

  “Sure,” she said, and hung up.

  I looked at the phone. She is always one for the precipitous good-bye but this was ridiculous. I looked over at Trixie, who was resting her head on my bed, looking at me in that sad way she has. “I think she just hung up on me.”

  Trixie raised one eyebrow as if to say, “Max always hangs up on you.”

  “No, really hung up on me,” I explained. “Not like she usually does. I think I pissed her off.” I stared at Trixie for a few seconds, contemplating how Max—who was still enjoying all the perks of living in my house, the lack of baked beans notwithstanding—could be mad at me. Once she talked to Kevin, hopefully all of her ire would be directed at him and I would be back in her good stead.

  I rolled out of the bed and put my feet on the floor, still trying to shake myself awake. I felt the lump on the back of my head again and my ire toward Wayne Brookwell awakened in me like an agitated beast. I stood and was happy to find that I didn’t have too bad of a headache, a state that I hoped continued the longer I was awake.

  I headed outside to walk Trixie and took a look at the growing stack of parking tickets under the windshield wiper on my car. I was wondering how long this parking-space war was going to go on and decided that I, for one, was in it for the long haul. I wasn’t moving and there was nothing that Jay Pinto and his merry band of potbellied security guards could do about it.

  I took Trixie on a walk down by the river and returned to the dorm twenty minutes later to dress and get ready for the day. I was teaching three classes, one of my lighter loads this semester, and looked forward to the end of the day. I decided to call Crawford and see if he could get away for dinner.