Scoop to Kill

by Wendy Lyn Watson

  Ah yes, no ice cream for Dr. Emily Clowper. She probably ran marathons, too, or did that hot yoga stuff.

  As though he read my mind, Finn piped up. “Don’t let Emily fool you. She has a sweet tooth.”

  She glared at him. “I like sweets,” she conceded, “but they’ll kill me. Literally. So I resist temptation.”

  “Hmmm. I seem to recall a certain evening at Ciao Bella that involved multiple desserts.”

  Emily blushed. “All tiramisu. Every time I’m near a piece of the stuff, I absolutely inhale it, and then spend the evening shooting up extra insulin to compensate.” She lowered her eyes. “Some temptations are simply too great.”

  Eww. I really didn’t want to be privy to this conversation.

  I ducked behind the counter and dished up two scoops of cherry-vanilla, Finn’s favorite flavor, and topped it with a ladle of warm bittersweet-chocolate fudge and a dollop of whipped cream.

  Bree filled a glass with ice water for Emily, popped open a can of Diet Dr Pepper for herself, and slid Alice a can of the full-sugar variety. I handed Finn his ice cream and smiled as he tucked in with gusto.

  “Em,” Finn said around a mouthful of my French pot ice cream, “you have no idea what you’re missing.”

  I tried to ignore the pang I felt at Finn’s use of Emily’s pet name. It was none of my business how long they’d dated, how serious they’d been, how much tiramisu he’d fed her, or even whether they were back together. I tried to ignore that pang, but if we’re being brutally honest, I failed.

  “So what’s the scoop?” Bree asked as she took a swig of her soda.

  Alice piped up. “Dr. Landry asked Reggie to cover Dr. Clowper’s May-term American lit class, and Reggie asked me today if I’d be willing to work as a TA.”

  Kyle laughed. “T and A?” he scoffed. “Not sure you’re qualified, Ally.”

  Alice glared at him. “TA. Teaching assistant. Grading and helping students who are struggling and stuff. Usually, that’s a job for graduate students and sometimes senior undergrads, but the department is a little shorthanded”—she glanced sheepishly at Emily—“and it’s short notice. I mean the class starts the week after next, right after spring finals. I’m local, and I aced the class last fall. Reggie said I’d be a natural.”

  Something about the way Alice said Reggie’s name, a smug note of satisfaction in her voice as she repeated his praise, made me wonder whether this Reggie person might be a little bit handsome. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kyle’s teasing smile turn into a glower, suggesting he’d noticed the very same thing.

  “Who’s this Reggie person?” I asked.

  “He’s another graduate student,” Alice said. “He and Bryan shared an office.”

  “Reggie’s ABD,” Emily added. “All but dissertation,” she clarified. “He’s completed all of his course work and just has to finish his research and defend his dissertation, and then he’ll graduate. He’ll be a great mentor for Alice.”

  Bree looked dubious. “I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” she said.

  “Come on, Mom,” Alice wheedled. “I can still pull my weight around the shop. It will look great on my résumé, and I’ll even get paid.”

  Emily nodded. “It would be a great opportunity for Alice, so I suggested her name to Reggie.” I caught the subtle emphasis Emily put on the word “I,” and by the way she stiffened, I guessed Bree had, too. Everyone in the room knew that Alice had this opportunity because of Emily’s largesse. “Alice will do a wonderful job,” she added more graciously, “and it will free up Reggie to work on his dissertation.”

  I knew my cousin well enough to realize that, at this point, if Emily said the earth was round, Bree would cry “flat!” By the time Emily finished her argument, Bree was already shaking her head.

  Alice’s face set in a mulish expression, ready to duke it out, but Bree tipped her head toward Emily and Finn. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Alice huffed and rolled her eyes, but Bree didn’t budge.

  “What are they saying about Bryan around campus?” Finn asked, trying to bring the conversation back to more neutral territory. Though I suppose talk of a murder shouldn’t really be considered “neutral.”

  “Nothing interesting,” Alice reported. “Just that Bryan was a tool, and he was gunning for Dr. Clowper, and no one is really sad about him being dead.”

  “Alice Marie Anders,” Bree chided, “that’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”

  “Mr. Harper asked what people were saying, and that’s what they’re saying,” Alice said. “It’s not my fault people didn’t like Bryan. He was a hard-ass.”

  “Language,” Bree warned.

  “Really? You’re going to complain about my language?”

  Finn and Kyle both sputtered with laughter, but Bree just rolled her eyes.

  “He was a jerk,” Alice insisted. “He spent all of his classes talking about the novels he was supposedly writing and how brilliant he was and how the faculty at Dickerson were totally overrated, never talked about the class readings at all, and then asked these crazy-hard questions. I don’t know anyone who got better than a C+ from him.”

  We all looked at Emily for confirmation. She shrugged. “His teaching skills were not the best,” she said. “I told Dr. Landry that he shouldn’t put Bryan in the classroom, but we are incredibly short staffed. With more students coming to Dickerson and more required literature and writing requirements, the number of students the department is supposed to teach has doubled over the last twenty years, but the size of our faculty has stayed exactly the same. Landry loves his research, so he’s not about to increase the number of classes we each have to teach. As a result, he’ll put anyone with a pulse in front of a classroom.”

  “Who’s this Landry person?” Finn asked.

  “Jonas Landry. The department chair.”

  “That reminds me,” Alice said. “I stopped by your office and picked up your grant proposal materials for you.” She pulled her keys out of her knapsack, and found a little white rectangle, about the size of a pack of gum, on the ring. “I downloaded it onto my flash drive,” she said.

  “What is that thing?” I asked.

  Everyone except Bree laughed, and I felt like an idiot.

  “This is a flash drive,” Alice explained. “It’s like a little computer disk. Dr. Clowper, if you want to let me use your laptop, I’ll copy the file onto your desktop.”

  “Sure,” Emily said, handing over her bag.

  Alice pulled out Emily’s laptop and powered it up. “I found all the files you asked for—the budget justification, the research proposal—except the budget spreadsheet.”

  Emily winced. “I probably saved that on the university network drive instead of my hard drive, and that drive is password protected. Stupid.”

  “Well,” Alice continued, “I couldn’t find the electronic version of the budget, but I did find a printout in your top desk drawer, right where you said it would be.” She tugged a bright blue file folder out of her messenger bag and handed it across the table to Emily.

  “Thanks, Alice. The deadline for the application is next week, and I don’t want to have to start from scratch. I can re-create the spreadsheet on my home computer, as long as I have the printout. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.”

  “Nope,” Alice said. She laughed. “Though I had to do some fast talking when Dr. Landry and Dr. Gunderson caught me in your office. Gunderson about flipped his lid, but Landry calmed him down. Gunderson’s such a fussbudget.”

  Emily grimaced. “Sorry about that. But I promise they’re both harmless.”

  “They’re the other two members of Bryan’s exam committee, right?” Finn asked. “What did they think of Bryan’s allegations?”

  Emily took a sip of her water. “To be honest, I’m not really comfortable talking about that matter. I haven’t spoken yet with the provost or university counsel or my representative from the faculty senate, but even if the complaint ag
ainst me is moot, I shouldn’t talk about Bryan.”

  Finn reached across the table and rested a hand on her forearm. “Everyone here is on your side, Em. You can trust us.” He gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “I already told you this is off the record,” he added with a crooked smile.

  Emily returned his smile, and I saw again that flash of warmth and intelligence in her eyes—the one I knew Finn saw when he looked at her.

  Suddenly restless, I pushed away from the table, gesturing at Bree’s can to see if she wanted another. She shook her head, but I went to get one for myself.

  “It’s not about trust,” Emily explained. “I really cannot comment on a student’s academic progress. There’s a federal law called FERPA—the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act—that prevents it. As long as the student’s over eighteen, we can’t even talk to our students’ parents about their grades.”

  “What about when the student is over eighteen, but dead?” Bree asked, her tone arid.

  Emily narrowed her eyes as she met Bree’s quizzical expression. “I honestly don’t know. That’s why I need to speak with the administration before I comment on Bryan’s status in the graduate program.”

  “But you can talk about what a crappy teacher he was, huh?”

  “His skills in the classroom had nothing to do with his progress toward his degree.”

  Either Emily didn’t want us to know about her conflict with Bryan, or she was even more of a stickler for the rules than I was. Frankly, I was a little skeptical that the boy would go to such extremes over a single failing grade unless there was some truth to his allegations. In any event, she wasn’t going to talk about her beef with Bryan or his beef with her.

  Alice finished working her magic with Emily’s laptop, handed the bag back, and dropped her keys—with their magical little computer disk—into her own satchel.

  “What have you heard, Finn?” I asked. “Any details about what happened that day?”

  Finn sighed. “Once again, Mike Carberry got the assignment.” Mike had seniority at the Dalliance News-Letter , and he went out drinking with half the police force. He tended to land all the big crime stories. “This time, it really makes sense, since we’ll want access to the victim’s family, and Cal McCormack is not my biggest fan.” Finn quirked an eyebrow in a silent salute to me.

  Cal and Finn had been barely civil to one another since eighth grade. We’d all been in the same class, and back then Dalliance High was pretty small. Finn didn’t have much patience for Cal’s adherence to the rules, and when Cal narced on Finn for smuggling a pint bottle of rum into a school dance, his disdain turned to full-blown animosity. Meanwhile, Cal had always been protective of me, playing big brother even though we were of an age, and he made no secret that he didn’t approve of Finn’s rebellious ways. He worried that Finn would break my heart. Even though I was the one who dumped Finn in the end, Cal publicly laid the blame at Finn’s feet.

  We were all grown-ups, now, but that history lingered just below the surface.

  “Thankfully,” Finn continued, “Mike’s a talkative guy. The cops are still piecing together a time line, but it looks like Bryan was killed about an hour before he was found, somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven thirty a.m.”

  “An hour?” I asked. “He was in that office for a whole hour without anyone finding him?”

  Emily chimed in. “Most of the faculty and gradstudent offices are on the next hall over. We don’t have any reason to walk past the main office, much less go inside. And since it was a Saturday, none of the administrative staff—the receptionist, the office manager, the advisers—were working.”

  “So what was Bryan doing in the office?” Bree asked.

  “He was supposed to print off the program for the presentations and awards ceremony and then make copies before the formal program started at one o’clock,” Alice volunteered.

  “He was supposed to do that on Friday,” Emily grumbled.

  Alice nodded. “But he didn’t. Reggie told me he saw Bryan at around ten forty-five. Reggie had just arrived at Sinclair Hall and was on his way back to his office to enter some paper grades before the Honor’s Day program, and Bryan was heading to the front office to make the copies.”

  Alice paused to dig through her backpack again, and pulled out a legal pad. She popped the cap off a ballpoint and began writing a list.

  “So Reggie arrived at Sinclair at ten forty-five, and he saw Bryan in the hallway, heading to the front office.” She skipped a couple of lines and made a tick mark in the margin of the pad. “Around eleven thirty a.m., someone kills Bryan in the front office.” Another tick. “Bryan’s body is discovered at twelve twenty-eight p.m.”

  Bree and I exchanged a look of concern. Alice had taken herself out of the story entirely, reducing the account to a clinical statement of times and events. At some point, she was going to have to come to grips with what she’d seen that day. But it was neither the time nor the place to push her.

  Kyle, who’d been watching us from the periphery, spoke up. “What about the blood?”

  “What do you mean?” Alice asked.

  “Well, I heard this guy got his head bashed in with something heavy—”

  “A heavy-duty stapler,” Finn offered. “One of those big ones that can staple a hundred pages together.”

  “Right,” Kyle continued. “Someone beat him to death with a heavy metal object, so they must have had blood all over them, right? Whoever it was, it couldn’t have been someone who was at that big party. You all would have seen the blood.”

  I thought the boy made an excellent point, but Emily shook her head.

  “That probably rules out most of the guests, but all of us who work in Sinclair Hall, well, we basically live there. Between workout clothes and spare outfits for after all-nighters or for emergencies, like covering someone’s class, we all have clothes in our offices.”

  “Still,” Alice said, smiling brightly at Kyle, causing Kyle’s cheeks to blaze, “that means whoever killed Bryan either worked in Sinclair Hall or wasn’t at the Honor’s Day events. That rules out a bunch of people right there. We just have to nail down who had the opportunity and the motive to kill Bryan.”

  “Alice,” I said, “on Saturday, when Emily asked you where Bryan was, you said someone told you he was still running off the programs.”

  “Reggie,” Alice confirmed with a nod.

  It seemed to me that this Reggie guy had an awful lot of information about Bryan’s whereabouts on the morning of his death. “How did Reggie know that’s what Bryan was doing if they hadn’t seen each other since ten forty-five?”

  Alice frowned. “I think Reggie just assumed that’s where Bryan was. Reggie came down to the atrium at about twelve fifteen, and he looked frazzled. I asked him what was wrong. At first he just waved off the question, and then he said Dr. Clowper was going to be pissed off.” Alice looked at Emily. “Sorry,” she said.

  Emily shrugged.

  “Anyway, he said he’d seen Bryan that morning and he still wasn’t done with the programs. Reggie’d offered to help him with the folding—they share an office, and it wouldn’t take Reggie long to enter his grades in his spreadsheet—but Bryan never came back to their office. Reggie said it was typical Bryan to leave you waiting for hours, and Bryan had probably found some hot undergrad to help him with the programs, so Reggie finally gave up and came down to the reception at twelve fifteen.”

  I wondered why Reggie hadn’t checked the department office for Bryan. Maybe he just didn’t care whether Bryan got in more hot water with Emily Clowper over the unfinished programs. Or maybe he had looked for Bryan. Maybe he was frazzled because he’d found Bryan’s body. Or even because he’d killed him. Something there just wasn’t adding up.

  Bree had gotten hung up on another part of Alice’s story. “Hot undergrad? Why a ‘hot’ undergrad?”

  Alice rolled her eyes. “Everyone knows Bryan had a thing for pretty girls. He was always chatting them up in
class and promising them extra credit if they’d help him with filing and stuff in his office. Totally creepy. I mean he’s their teacher, you know? That’s just weird.”

  Some raw emotion flashed across Emily’s face, and her lips parted as though she were going to interject. But she relaxed and her expression returned to a stoic mask before I could decipher the reaction. Anger? Outrage? Jealousy?

  My first instinct was to call her on it. Her relationship with Bryan Campbell was the nine-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, and I wanted to confront it. I had to think at least a little of their mutual animosity fell outside the reach of that federal privacy law. But before I could formulate a question that might actually get her talking, Finn tapped the corner of Alice’s legal pad.

  “Ten forty-five to twelve thirty,” he said. “That’s a lot of time for Bryan to be MIA in a building crawling with people. Even if faculty didn’t regularly pop into the front office, surely someone—a custodian, a student, a parent, or guest—someone saw something.”

  “The question is what did they see,” Bree said.

  “No,” Emily responded. “The real question is why haven’t they come forward.”

  chapter 5

  They laid Bryan Campbell to rest just a week after he died, on a dreary Saturday afternoon. I took Alice to the funeral at the Jessamine Street United Methodist Church. She said she wanted to be there to support her Dickerson classmates, but I suspected she planned to report back to Emily.

  I went to support Cal.

  Cal’s sister, Marla Campbell, stood in the vestibule of the church. The League of Methodist Ladies stood in a tight knot around her, propping her up beneath the weight of burying her son.

  Marla took after Cal, tall and rawboned with eyes the scorching blue of a gas flame, but a more delicate chin and hair the color of butterscotch candy transformed Cal’s stark masculinity into fashion-model beauty. That afternoon, tears streaked her striking face, and a veil of grief dulled her eyes. All the women were dressed in unrelieved black, save Marla, who wore a corsage of crimson and gold—school colors for both the Dalliance High Wildcatters and the Dickerson Dust Devils—on the lapel of her prim black suit.