by Frankie Bow
The day after the trial ended, I gathered my courage and showed up at the Drive-Inn to confront Donnie. He’d obstructed a police inquiry, he’d deceived me, and he’d almost let Davison get away with murder.
Donnie sat down with me at one of the Drive-Inn’s spotless outdoor tables, and heard me out.
“You’re right,” he said matter-of-factly, when I had finished. “But wouldn’t your parents have done the same for you?”
“Well, yes,” I admitted. “But they would have, well, they would have had the decency to make me feel bad about it!”
Davison finished out the semester as something of a local celebrity. Jimmy Tanaka really was not well liked on this island, and the fact that Davison had lost his best friend Isaiah in an apparent hunting accident got him a lot of additional sympathy. When the semester ended, Donnie arranged for Davison to transfer to a prestigious private liberal arts university in Southern California. On an archery scholarship.
I guess you could say that Donnie and I are an item now. He still doesn’t know who tipped off the police to search his house. Couples don’t have to tell each other everything, right? Now that his divorce is final, he seems to be thinking of me as a possible “good maternal influence” on his son. He’s welcome to think that all he wants, as long as Davison stays on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
On the first day of class this spring semester, I started off with the usual review of the syllabus for the students, but after I covered the section on plagiarism I was able to add something new: “Last semester,” I announced, “I had two students hand in identical papers.”
Naturally someone asked, “What happened?”
“Well, since you asked. One of them was arrested. The other one is dead.”
Which was true.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Like Molly Barda, Frankie Bow teaches at a public university. Unlike her protagonist, she is blessed with delightful students, sane colleagues, a loving family, and a perfectly nice office chair. She believes that if life isn’t fair, at least it can be entertaining. In addition to writing murder mysteries, she publishes in scholarly journals under her real name. Her experience with academic publishing has taught her to take nothing personally.
