“But Bryan didn’t pass the exam,” Alice said.
“Exactly. But if a student isn’t going on for the full Ph.D., the graduate school will let him write a thesis, a sort of abbreviated version of the dissertation, instead of taking the exam. Bryan’s been working on a project since he got here, one he planned to turn into his dissertation eventually. Technically, he would need my signature as one of his advisers to get the A.M. degree.” She frowned, and turned to Finn. “Remember the whole brouhaha with Dr. Howell?”
He shook his head.
“Oh, of course not. That would have been before you moved back to town. Dr. Howell was a very unpopular dean of the business school. The entire faculty hated him, but the Board of Trustees was afraid to fire him because they were worried he’d sue.”
“For what?” I asked.
“Who knows? Discrimination of some sort, breach of contract, whatever. Just something to drag the university into court. Anyway, the school made him disappear by creating this new job for him: Vice President for Global Outreach, or something like that.”
“So they promoted him to get rid of him?” Finn asked incredulously.
“I guess technically it was a promotion. But he doesn’t do anything. They fixed up a nice office for him in the chapel building, they pay his salary, and he doesn’t do squat. Ever.”
“Seriously?” Kyle asked. He’d grown so quiet since his discovery that I’d almost forgotten he was there. But the prospect of getting paid to do nothing was enough to drag him into the conversation.
Emily nodded earnestly. “Seriously. The speculation is that the Board of Trustees thought it would be temporary, that Howell would use his time to find a real job at another school. Pride and all that. But they overestimated his desire to work. Apparently, Howell’s perfectly happy to putter around his office, go to lunch at the faculty club, and pull out his regalia for graduation. The rumor is that he spends his days trolling old census records, working on his family’s genealogy.”
Bree waved her hands above her head. “Hello? This little episode of Dickerson Insider is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with Bryan Campbell?”
“I was just thinking,” Emily said, “that if the school was anxious enough to get rid of Bryan, they might have been willing to fudge the requirements a bit. Give him his master’s without my approval.”
Alice sighed expressively. “I bet the administration would do just about anything to get rid of him. ‘Here, take the degree. Just don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.’ ”
Emily chuckled darkly. “Exactly. It wouldn’t be the first time the dons of Dickerson ignored their principles in order to get rid of a troublemaker.”
Someone, though, had gone beyond fudging rules to get rid of Bryan. Someone had killed him.
chapter 10
My cousin Bree adores karaoke.
Me, I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, so I sit back, babysit her cocktails, and bask in her reflected glory.
That particular Wednesday, she donned a bright orange tube top and tight skirt, threw on a hot pink shrug for modesty, teased her fire-engine hair up to Jesus, and greeted her admiring fans at the Bar None with a pageant-worthy wave and a shower of blown kisses. Her platform sandals added three inches to her already statuesque height, and her hair spray added another four. A strange stillness descended on the crowd as she moved through, a sort of hushed reverence as every male eye tracked her progress.
I hung back with Finn and Emily. There was a subtle intensity to Emily’s features. I’d seen the same expression on Alice’s face many times, including the first time she watched my new French pot ice cream freezer work its magic on simple vanilla bean-flavored custard. Emily and Alice shared some fundamental inquisitiveness, some innate drive that made them alert to new puzzles and challenges.
And apparently karaoke night at the Bar None was a puzzle. Or a challenge.
Bree cozied up to the bar, spreading her arms and leaning on it as though she owned the joint, while Finn pulled out bar stools for me and Emily.
Andi Talmidge worked the bar, but she looked more like she ought to be shelving paperbacks at the local library. A fireplug of a woman with neatly permed gray hair and a tidy mauve tracksuit, she bustled about in her bright white running shoes, the look of fierce determination on her face rarely wavering.
“Bree!” she cried, one of her rare smiles lighting up her face. “Scarlett O’Hara?”
“You know it,” Bree said, leaning across the bar to give Andi a brief hug. “And throw in a couple extra cherries, if you don’t mind.” Bree usually stuck to margaritas and beer, but when she sang she always opted for the syrupy sweet of Southern Comfort and cranberry juice. She claimed it helped her stay on pitch. Sort of the redneck version of warm water with honey and lemon.
“And for you folks?”
“Beer,” Finn said. “Something in a bottle. Surprise me.”
“Beer,” I said. “Light, in the bottle. Maybe a Pearl?”
Emily cocked her head and studied the real estate behind the bar. She wrinkled her nose a bit.
I’d never paid much attention to how the Bar None smelled, other than to note the obvious pall of grease from the deep fat fryer, but that little twitch of distaste made me sniff more closely. Beneath the comforting smells of onion rings and barbecue sauce lay the sour scent of hops and softening citrus fruit, underscored by the tang of mildew from old bar mops. The bar smelled like the bottom of a hamper.
Suddenly, beer didn’t sound so appetizing.
“Mineral water, please,” Emily said. “Light ice, and a squeeze of lemon.”
Andi bent forward, a rusty bark of laughter escaping her lips. “Sure thing, Princess.” She trundled off, shaking her head as she went.
Emily glared at Finn. “What’s wrong with water?”
Bree patted her on the back. “Nothing wrong with water. But the only bottles behind that bar are filled with booze. You’ll have to live with water from the soda gun.”
Emily masked her distress at this news quickly, but not before we all saw it. Bree, Finn, and I all cracked up.
“Sorry, Em,” Finn said. “Welcome to Dalliance.”
Emily straightened her spine. “It’s not like I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I don’t mind a little tap water. I can even do without the lemon.” She softened her comment with a self-deprecating smile.
“That’s my girl,” Finn said, looping his arm around her neck and giving her a squeeze.
Andi delivered our drinks, and we raised our glasses and bottles in a toast before Bree set out to put her name on the performance list. She tended to favor ’80s songs—Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar—but that night she’d decided to go disco with Gloria Gaynor’s anthem, “I Will Survive.”
Finn and Emily started a slow waltz down memory lane, laughing over a polka band at some lounge in Minnesota. Feeling like a third wheel, I let my eyes roam the bar searching for familiar faces. Danny Tibert from the Dalliance PD was on the stage, rocking back and forth awkwardly as he warbled out a Phil Collins tune. I saw Vonda Hudson from the 911 call center sharing a pitcher with Karla Faye Hoffstead, who’d been doing my hair since my junior prom. And there were Ted and Shelley Alrecht, at their usual table near the stage. By the look on Shelley’s face, they were in the “fight” stage of their complicated nightly ritual of emotional tug-of-war.
Just beyond Ted and Shelley, at a table in the shadows at the corner of the stage, I saw a familiar face. I probably wouldn’t have noticed him, but he looked out of place among the cowboy hats and T-shirts. His narrow head and high-cheekboned face were clean shaven, and he was dressed more for cat burglary than karaoke. He wore a black turtleneck, and a chunky gold watch glinted on his wrist as he raised a highball glass for a drink.
A blond woman sat at his table, her back to me. She must have said something, because he leaned in and tipped his head to hear her better amidst the din of the crowd and Danny Tibert’s cate
rwauling. That’s when I recognized him, the gesture jarring loose the memory of him at Bryan’s funeral.
Whatever his companion said made him laugh, and he rested his hand over hers. Even from across the room, I could tell it was no casual touch. His fingers lingered over hers, then slipped across her wrist in a delicate caress.
The woman’s attention remained fixed on the man, and I couldn’t see her face at all. But given her hair color and the petite size of her frame, I knew she wasn’t the woman who had accompanied him at the funeral.
I leaned over and tapped Emily on the arm. “Who’s that?”
Keeping my hand below my waist, I pointed as subtly as I could. She followed my gesture, and I saw the corners of her mouth tense.
“Jonas Landry,” she said. “Our fearless leader.”
Ah, the chair of the English department.
“Is that his wife?” I asked.
Emily rolled her eyes. “No. It’s the chippie du jour.”
“He’s single?” I could have sworn the woman at the funeral was his wife. They’d seemed to be together, and who brought a date to a funeral?
“Oh, no,” Emily said. “He’s married. That’s just not his wife. That’s just one of many girlfriends.”
I confess I was dumbstruck for a moment.
Don’t get me wrong. My daddy had two wives, and my ex tomcatted around town for over fifteen years, so infidelity didn’t shock me. But this guy was trotting out his girlfriend in front of God and everyone.
My surprise must have shown on my face, because Emily laughed, an unexpectedly girlish giggle.
“Isn’t he worried about getting caught?” I asked.
“The only people he’d be worried about, well—they aren’t likely to be at the Bar None for karaoke night.”
I thought about what Reggie had said, about how Bryan’s working relationship with Jonas Landry had gone south in the fall. Maybe Bryan knew about Jonas’s harem.
I suggested as much to Emily.
“Oh, I’m sure Bryan knew,” Emily said with a nod. “Everyone did. It’s one of the worst-kept secrets at Dickerson.”
“Does his wife know?” I asked, half dreading the response. I’d played the part of unwitting wife for years before I took a turn at “woman scorned.” I couldn’t recommend either role.
“Sally? Sure. She’s on the faculty at Dickerson. Ironically enough, she teaches women’s studies.”
“Doesn’t she care?”
Emily shrugged. “She’s not thrilled about it. I know the other female faculty talk smack about her for putting up with such a dog. But she’s not about to leave him.”
“Why not?” Finn asked. I’d been so caught up in the drama of Jonas and Sally Landry, I’d almost forgotten he was there.
“The Landrys have turned the two-body problem on its head,” Emily replied.
I signaled to Andi that I needed another beer. “You lost me.”
Emily leaned into her story. “Academic couples face something we call the two-body problem. See, in any given year, there are only a handful of jobs at each academic institution, and schools are often geographically isolated from each other. So if you have two would-be professors trying to land jobs together at the same time . . . well, it’s really hard. A lot of times, one member of the couple leaves teaching in favor of some other profession. Or some crap school takes advantage of their desperation to be together and snaps up professors they shouldn’t be able to get.”
“I’d never thought about that,” I said. “But how did the Landrys deal with the problem?”
“Easy. Jonas is incredibly successful. He publishes like crazy, and now he’s got this book that’s getting him national attention. Dickerson will do anything to keep him. Even continue to promote his wife.”
Ah. “So Sally’s riding Jonas’s coattails,” I said.
“Exactly. She’s bright enough, but she’s not a very good teacher and none of her articles have hit. She published her dissertation, but with a third-rate academic press and it was panned by the reviewers. Basically, she’d have been out on her ear years ago if the administration wasn’t so desperate to hold on to Jonas.”
Finn drained the last of his beer. “Sally puts up with Jonas cheating, because without him she’d lose her job.”
“Bingo.”
“But,” Finn said, “why does Jonas stay in the relationship if he’s so obviously unhappy?”
“Who says he’s unhappy? Sally is a good hostess and can make intelligent small talk at university events. Plus, being married makes Jonas more attractive to the conservative members of the school’s Board of Trustees. And, of course, there’s no better way to keep your girlfriend from making demands on your time than by saying, ‘Gee, honey, I’d love to watch a chick flick and cuddle on the couch, but I gotta get home to my wife.’ ”
Finn narrowed his eyes and gazed across the bar at Jonas Landry with something akin to admiration. “Brilliant,” he said.
I elbowed him—gently—in the gut. “Despicable.”
“Despicably brilliant. Or maybe brilliantly despicable. Either way, this guy’s got it all figured out.”
Emily bobbed her head from side to side. “Mmmmm, not entirely. Like I said, the Board of Trustees of Dickerson is pretty conservative. A lot of good Southern Baptists. A good old-fashioned sex scandal might tarnish the golden boy over there enough that the Board would give him the boot.
“But,” she added, waving her glass in a general salute to the Bar None, “the Board of Trustees does not do honky-tonk.”
For a second, we couldn’t hear a thing as the crowd went wild. Bree had taken the stage and slipped the shrug from her shoulders to reveal her wondrous buxomness in her tangerine tube top. She knew just where to position herself, so the lights turned her hair to a fiery halo and cast her face in seductive shadow.
She stood very still, her head bowed, until the room grew quiet.
Into the near silence, the dramatic opening chord sounded followed by the trilling piano run. Bree raised her head, her gaze searching into the distance above the audience’s heads.
“First I was afraid. I was petrified,” she sang, her voice clear and vulnerable. She built the emotion of the song like a virtuoso, until the high hat disco beat kicked in and my cousin’s sexy hips began to sway back and forth in time.
The crowd went crazy, hooting and hollering as Bree belted out Gloria Gaynor’s defiant lyrics. The song crescendoed to its powerful conclusion, and Bree brought the house down.
As applause rocked the room, Emily hopped down from her stool and raised her arms. “Wooo!” she screamed, bouncing up and down like a groupie at a Bon Jovi concert.
She took her seat again, leaning forward to close the distance between us. “She’s amazing,” Emily said, yelling to be heard above the demands for an encore.
“Oh, yeah. She’s got a voice on her,” I replied.
To be honest, a lot of Bree’s appeal was pure showmanship. If you closed your eyes, you could hear when she went flat. But she could put on quite a show, no doubt about it.
“About Jonas,” I said, dragging the conversation back to more pressing matters. “If Bryan knew that the Board of Trustees wouldn’t approve of Landry’s shenanigans, do you think he might have blackmailed him?”
Emily’s smile faded, and I felt bad for bringing her back to earth. The whole point of the evening was to give her a break from her worries, and I kept reminding her all about them.
“I doubt it,” she said. “I mean, maybe. But if Bryan was blackmailing Jonas, it was probably for advancement in the graduate program. And he got what he wanted from Jonas.”
I looked at her sharply, and I saw the moment she realized what she’d said. Without meaning to, she’d intimated that Landry had voted to pass Bryan on his exam. Whatever the vote, it hadn’t been unanimous. And if Landry supported Bryan passing, that meant Emily’s insistence on failing the boy would look all the more suspicious.
“Let’s just drop it,” E
mily said.
I nodded. After all, we were out to have fun.
But even Bree’s sex-on-a-stick rendition of Madonna’s “Material Girl” couldn’t banish my feeling that I’d learned something important at the Bar None.
chapter 11
The next morning, as I nursed a bit of a sore head from my evening at the Bar None, Cal McCormack called and asked me to meet him for lunch at Erma’s Fry by Night Diner. I had a horrible feeling he wanted to discuss Alice’s ill-fated espionage attempt. As much as I wanted to weasel out of it, the goody-two-shoes angel who’s always whispering in my ear made me go.
Erma’s is just a couple of doors down from the A-la-mode. It’s not a fancy place, just a standard-issue diner with Formica tables and wobbly wooden chairs, air thick with the scent and sounds of food frying on an industrial grill. Erma’s didn’t serve nouvelle anything, just heaping plates of hash browns, chicken-fried steak, and cream gravy. All the food tended to shades of beige, but it was delicious.
Dr Pepper bottles filled with plastic daisies nestled against the table caddies of off-brand artificial sweeteners and big bottles of hot sauce. The Dalliance old-timers—judges, plumbers, doctors, and cobblers—crowded the long counter that fronted the kitchen, bumping elbows as they sipped black coffee, traded gossip, and made the deals that kept the town running.
Cal and I raised some grizzled eyebrows when we took a table together near the back of the diner. He held my chair for me and handed me a vinyl-covered menu.
“How’s Sherbet?” he asked as he took his own seat.
I grinned. “He’s better. A dumb ass, but a healthy dumb ass.”
Cal’s mouth widened in a lazy smile. “He’s just a little fella,” he said. “He’ll make better choices as he gets older.”
“Really? Is that how it’s supposed to work?”
“For cats,” he said. He gave me a teasing wink. “For people, once a dumb ass, always a dumb ass.”
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