“So if there isn’t any grant money for the humanities, why does Professor Gunderson run that office?”
“I have no idea,” Reggie said with a shrug. “At first, he got assigned to the office as an interim director, because the last guy left without any notice. He wailed about what a sacrifice he was making for the university, but then a month later he actually applied for the position on a permanent basis. No one else wanted to deal with the bureaucratic headaches, so he got the position.”
“And took Bryan with him,” I mused.
“Oh, no,” Reggie said. “Bryan only started working there this spring, after he failed his comps. Bryan couldn’t teach when his status in the department was up in the air. Of course, he wanted to go back to doing research with Dr. Landry, because Landry’s about to hit the big time with his new book. But even though Bryan worked for Landry last summer and so he was already familiar with Landry’s work, Landry said no.”
“Why?”
Reggie shrugged. “The official story was that it wouldn’t be appropriate for Landry, as chair, to work with a student with a complaint against the department. But that’s BS. I think Bryan did a half-assed job last summer, and Landry wanted someone who could pull his weight.”
“What makes you think that?”
Reggie smirked. “I heard Landry bitching about Bryan just before fall semester ended. He said something about how Bryan spent too much time on the effing Internet reading effing blogs.”
His smirk faded and he looked a little abashed. “It’s not like I was eavesdropping or anything.”
Which meant, of course, that he had been eavesdropping.
“It’s just that Landry was talking on his cell phone as he left Sinclair Hall, and I was sitting outside grading papers. It was right after Thanksgiving, when we had that weird heat wave, remember?” I nodded. “Usually Landry is laid back—trying to be the cool cat, you know?—but he was on a tear that day. I couldn’t help but overhear what he was saying.”
Reggie took a sip of his coffee. “Anyway, the bottom line is the department didn’t know what to do with Bryan, but Dickerson doesn’t pay anyone unless they work. Sticking him over in the research office was an easy fix. But I don’t think Gunderson particularly liked Bryan either. He just took one for the team, as they say.”
Geez, I thought, despite all the tearful tributes at his funeral, it was looking more and more like Bryan Campbell was utterly friendless. I wondered how one young man with so much promise could have become such a pariah.
“So,” Reggie said, snapping my attention back to my more immediate concern, “Alice said you’re interested in enrolling in Dickerson.”
I raised my glass of iced tea in a mock toast. “You make it sound so appealing. How can I resist?”
Reggie was a lousy ambassador for Dickerson. Once the conversation turned from his own place in the universe and departmental gossip to the life of an undergraduate, he completely checked out. He answered my questions with disinterest bordering on, well, a coma. When I could pry more than a sentence out of him, he showed utter disdain for the students he taught, the ranks of which I ostensibly wished to join.
Eventually, I decided Alice had had plenty of time to check through Reggie’s pictures, and I was feeling less and less good about helping her romance the boy, so I suggested we head back to Sinclair Hall.
As we approached Reggie’s office, I heard the rumble of a male voice coming from inside. I stepped up the pace and beat Reggie to the door, only to find Alice sitting in Reggie’s seat chatting quietly with Cal McCormack, who was sitting at the other desk in Reggie’s office.
“Hey, Tally,” he drawled. “I thought you weren’t meddling.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“Huh. Seems you and I are gonna have to break out the ol’ dictionary and look up ‘meddling.’ Because I just caught this little lady going through Bryan’s desk.”
chapter 9
That night, before we hit the Bar None, Alice, Emily, and Finn had another strategy session/gossipfest at the Remember the A-la-mode.
When we were all gathered around a table—everyone except Kyle, who had camped in a booth with his schoolbooks, pretending to study—I gave my niece the hairy eyeball. “Are you gonna tell your mama what happened, or am I?”
She looked stricken, betrayed.
“Tell me what?” Bree asked.
“It wasn’t a big deal, but Aunt Tally went to get a cup of coffee with Reggie so I could have a few minutes alone in Reggie’s office.”
“And why would you want to be alone in Reggie’s office?”
“Because it was also Bryan’s office,” Alice admitted.
Finn’s jaw dropped, and Emily looked completely horrified. Bree, on the other hand, didn’t look terribly surprised. Pissed, but not surprised.
“Alice Marie Anders, are you telling me you pawed through a murder victim’s personal belongings?”
Alice shrugged. “I didn’t get around to the pawing part. Detective McCormack didn’t let me.”
That was the last straw. Bree slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand. “Hand to God, little girl, you’re gonna be the death of me,” she moaned.
“Mom, it’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. My daughter’s in trouble with the law.”
“I’m not in trouble,” Alice huffed. “And you’re one to talk. Didn’t you and Aunt Tally break into Wayne’s office last year? You actually committed a crime.”
Bree glared at me, and I raised my shoulders in a helpless shrug. Alice was absolutely right. We were terrible role models.
When I didn’t offer support, Bree turned on me. “I can’t believe you helped her,” she hissed.
I held up my hands. “In my own defense, Alice told me she needed me to keep Reggie occupied so she could snoop around and make sure he didn’t have a girlfriend, because she was thinking of asking him out.”
“Oh, well, in that case, I guess it’s okay,” Bree drawled. “If you were just helping her to act like a crazy stalker instead of helping her commit a B and E.”
A tiny part of my brain recognized that she had every right to be PO’ed at me, but I chafed at having my reckless, party-girl cousin, who had spent a lifetime relying on me to bail her out of messes and marriages, accuse me of irresponsibility. Especially in front of Finn and Emily.
“Hey,” I snapped back, “she was threatening to pick the lock to his office door. At least with my help she just entered, without the breaking part.”
“Honestly, Tally—”
“Mom! It’s not Aunt Tally’s fault. I manipulated her.”
Without hesitation, Bree refocused her ire back on her child. “You mean you lied to her. Do I need to haul your skinny be-hind back to Sunday school?”
Alice blushed pomegranate pink. “I didn’t exactly lie,” she said. “I am going to ask Reggie to go to a movie with me. Kyle told me the Dalliance Rec Department is showing the Rocky Horror Picture Show outside, at Lonestar Park, in a couple of weeks.”
From my position at the table, I had a good view of Kyle. The boy looked gutshot. If only Alice knew the power she had to squish his heart to smithereens. Emily, too, appeared troubled by Alice’s interest in Reggie. I wondered if she shared my concern about the age difference between the couple, or if Emily, as Reggie’s teacher and adviser, knew an even better reason Alice should keep her distance.
“See, I didn’t lie to Aunt Tally. I just didn’t tell her the entire truth. I planned to look through both Reggie’s and Bryan’s desks.”
Now there was no mistaking the panic on Emily’s face. Was she upset that Alice would take such a risk? That Alice was too deeply involved in a potentially dangerous situation? Or was she worried about what Alice might find in Bryan’s desk?
Bree had plenty of wrath to go around that night. She pointed a purple manicured finger at Emily Clowper. “Did you put her up to this?”
Emily appeared genuinely distraught. “Me? Absolutely not.”
Bree didn’t look convinced.
“Listen, I gave Alice my office key already, and that key opens all of the offices on the first floor of Sinclair, including Bryan and Reggie’s. If I’d put Alice up to this, I would have told her to use the key, and she wouldn’t have had to involve Tally at all.” Emily laid her hand over her heart as though swearing an oath. “I would never ask Alice to dig through Bryan’s things.”
“I wish I’d known that thing about the keys,” Alice muttered. Then she sighed. “Look, Mom, it was all my idea. Besides, I didn’t get to do much digging before Detective McCormack came in.”
She lowered her face and looked up at us through her lashes. “But I did find this . . .” She ducked down to search through her bag, and sat up with a cube of paper.
A calendar, one of those page-a-day things.
We all stared at it in amazement, as though she had produced the Holy Grail out of her knapsack. Even Bree’s anger faded in the face of this relic from Bryan’s desk.
Finally, Finn reached across and picked up the cube of paper and turned it over in his hands. He read the cover. “Three hundred sixty-five days of baseball trivia, an academic-year calendar.”
Across the room, I saw Kyle perk up. Kyle didn’t play sports, but I guess he had a more intellectual interest in baseball.
Alice took the calendar back. “This is what I thought was interesting,” she said.
She flipped through the calendar to the page for November 15 of the previous year, then turned the little cube around so we could all see it better. There was a note scrawled in all capital letters: “NO OSTERGARD!!!”
“Who or what is Ostergard?” Bree asked.
“I don’t know,” Alice conceded. “But it looks like it mattered to Bryan a lot. See?”
She flipped back to November 10: “OSTERGARD?”
Then she flipped forward to November 26: “O—DEFINITELY FAKES.”
“Weird,” I said.
We all turned to Emily. After all, Bryan moved in her world.
“What do you think?” Finn asked.
Emily looked troubled. “I’m not sure. I’ve never heard of a student named Ostergard. But the name is familiar. It looks like Bryan was quite a baseball fan . . . maybe it’s a player?”
Kyle piped up. “There was a player in the 1920s named Red Ostergard, but he only played a year. I doubt he’s talking about Red Ostergard.”
We all stared in stunned silence at Kyle. Who knew the boy had that kind of trivia at his fingertips?
Emily frowned. “I just don’t know. It might be significant. It might not.”
Alice’s face fell.
“No, no,” Emily said, reaching out to pat the girl’s hand. “I appreciate the effort. And it might actually mean something. I just don’t even know where to begin looking for significance.”
Alice shrugged and pushed the calendar away, and went to get a soda. Emily and Finn started chatting, and Bree watched their exchange with unconcealed interest.
Kyle picked up the calendar, and started paging through the days. I’d never seen the boy so interested in reading. His usually sullen expression took on an intensity that gave his face definition and provided a glimpse of the man he would become.
I was marveling at the thought that our favorite juvenile delinquent would one day—possibly soon—be a grown-up, with real responsibilities, when Kyle frowned. He flipped a page of the calendar, flipped it back, and again.
“Uh, there’s a page missing,” he said.
Alice, who had returned to the table with a can of Dr Pepper, swung her head around to look at him, her expression deeply peeved. “What?” she snapped.
He met her gaze defiantly. “I said,” he enunciated with exaggerated care, “there’s a page missing.”
“I don’t think so,” Alice snipped. “I started at the very beginning and checked every single day, right up to the murder.”
Kyle sniffed, clearly not impressed. “Well, the page that’s missing is after the murder, smarty pants.” He rolled his shoulders, as though the mantle of “man with answers” didn’t feel comfortable there. “I mean, it’s not like that guy knew he was going to die. He had plans.”
For a moment, we all just stared at Kyle, stunned at both what he’d said—the unwitting pathos of it—and by the fact that he’d strung so many words together at all. Bless his heart—Kyle was a silent boy. As Grandma Peachy would say, most of the time he wouldn’t say shit with a mouthful. Three sentences amounted to a veritable dissertation.
Finn finally reacted, fishing a stumpy yellow pencil from his shirt pocket as he crossed the floor to Kyle’s booth. He slid into the seat across from the teen. “Show me,” he said.
Kyle sat up a little straighter. “Here.” He held open the calendar. “This is where the missing page should be.”
Holding the pencil at an angle, so the side of the lead touched the paper instead of the point, he shaded the page below. My by-the-book nature winced at what surely amounted to tampering with evidence . . . assuming, of course, there was anything on the page that actually mattered.
Something in Finn’s expression changed, and I knew he’d found something.
“I don’t know what it means,” he grumbled.
“What does it say?” Emily asked.
“It’s just letters. ‘K-U-S’ or ‘K-V-S’? Geez, the kid’s printing is tough to make out. Maybe that’s an ‘R’ instead of a ‘K’? That’s the first line; then there’s a phone number, and then more letters ‘Q-U-I-T-A-M.’ ”
Bree piped up. “The first letters could be initials.”
Alice added, “Maybe the other letters are initials, too. Two sets of initials.”
Finn pulled Kyle’s notebook, which he’d ostensibly been studying before he got sidetracked by the baseball factoids, to his side of the table, flipped to the back, and started scribbling.
“Quit a.m.?” he suggested. “Quit in the morning? But quit what?”
We all turned to look at Emily, who knew Bryan better than the rest of us, but she shrugged. “He was a smoker,” she offered.
Finn pulled a face. “Maybe. But who plans to quit smoking on a random Wednesday morning at the end of April? And why in the morning?”
“What about the phone number?” I asked, grabbing my purse off the floor and pulling out my phone.
Finn read the numbers out loud, and I tapped them in and hit send.
The phone rang three times; then a little click indicated I’d been rolled over to voice mail. “Hello,” the message began, “you’ve reached the Law Offices of Jackson and Ver Steeg. Our regular business hours are—” I clicked my phone closed.
“Well, I think the first three letters are initials. An attorney named Ver Steeg?”
Finn smacked his forehead with his open palm. “Of course. Kristen Ver Steeg. She and her partner, Madeline Jackson, have an office over on FM 410, across from Lantana Plaza.”
Farm Road 410 snaked around the outer perimeter of Dalliance proper and featured all the new big-box stores and chain restaurants that marked Dalliance’s transition from “small town” to Dallas bedroom community. I’d lived in Dalliance my whole life, save for the summers I spent on Grandma Peachy’s ranch just north of town, so my usual orbit didn’t take me out to FM 410 all that often.
“They have a general civil litigation practice,” Finn continued. “Contracts, torts, wills and estates, even a little family law.”
We all looked at Emily expectantly. “The name’s familiar,” she conceded. “I think I’ve seen it on some of the documents I’ve received about the administrative hearing.”
Alice frowned. “So if all of the pieces of the note go together, Bryan must have been quitting something that had to do with his lawyer. Maybe he was going to tell the truth, withdraw his allegations?”
Emily blew out an impatient breath. “I don’t know. Honestly, the university didn’t tell me more than they had to, and after he lodged a formal grievance, I was advised to
keep my distance from Bryan. But I can’t imagine he was backing down.”
Finn nodded. “Emily’s right. Bryan faced expulsion from the graduate program, and challenging Emily’s decision to fail him on his exams was his only hope of holding on. He’d invested three-plus years of his life into getting a Ph.D. I can’t believe he’d suddenly decide to give up the fight. Besides, what’s the ‘AM’ for? If he were going to give up his claim, why on Wednesday and why in the morning? It’s just weird.”
Alice squinted and got that faraway look I’d come to recognize as her “peak concentration” face.
“Maybe,” she said slowly, “maybe the AM is Texas A & M? Maybe he was transferring to a different grad program, so he was going to give up his effort to stay at Dickerson.”
Emily looked skeptical. “I suppose it’s possible, but A & M has a competitive graduate program. It’s hard to imagine he could get in there after flunking his comprehensive exams here. Twice.”
Alice looked crestfallen.
“It was a good guess,” Bree said helpfully, earning her an acid glare from her daughter. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.
Emily bobbed her head from side to side, seeming to weigh some idea in her mind. “Maybe he was giving up on the doctoral degree altogether and had figured out a way to pry an A.M. out of the school.”
“A.M.?” Bree and I asked simultaneously.
“Artium Magister, Latin for Master of Arts. Dickerson uses the Latin terms for all their degrees, just like Harvard.”
“Really?” Finn scoffed. “I mean, Dickerson is a fine school and all, but Harvard?”
Emily shrugged. “It’s all about image,” she said.
“So how hard would it be for Bryan to get this other degree?” Bree asked.
Emily waggled her hand back and forth in a noncommittal gesture. “A lot of doctoral students apply for their master’s degrees after they pass their comprehensive exams, and they are given the degree as a sort of formality.”
Scoop to Kill Page 7
