Full Circle

by Shannon Hollis

  “—like to welcome our next guest, archaeologist Dr. Daniel Burke!”

  Cate’s shoulders drooped and she gave up. Of course. It was Wednesday night. All of Stacy Mills’s careful efforts to get Daniel into the Oakland TV studio on time had evidently paid off.

  Common sense told Cate to flick the remote one more time and go find that action movie. But for some reason, her fingers wouldn’t listen to common sense. Instead, they hit the record button and TiVo began to do its job. Not that she’d ever watch the program again once she’d recorded it. But she’d keep it around as sort of a modern cautionary tale and label it Here Be Dragons.

  “Dr. Burke is with us on the third leg of a cross-country tour for his new book, Lost Treasures of the World,” the attractive, redheaded program host told the cameras.

  Cate figured the odds of the woman going back to the hotel with Daniel after the show were two to one. After all, he’d had his day of mourning.

  “Tell me, Dr. Burke, what does it feel like to have earned this kind of recognition for your work?”

  Daniel, Cate saw, looked as if he hadn’t slept. Poor baby.

  “I want to clarify that it isn’t all my work,” Daniel said. “I lead highly qualified field teams who add to our knowledge every day. I’m just the front man, the logistics guy who pulls these things together. Giving me credit for our discoveries is like giving you credit for a successful show when you’re surrounded by the production people who make it happen.”

  “That’s very modest and very true, Dr. Burke. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our studio production team.” Her brilliant smile panned from one side of the screen to the other, and then she turned back to Daniel. “But what about Daniel Burke the private individual? We’re familiar with your work in the field, but not many know who you really are underneath.”

  “There’s a good reason for that, as you can imagine.” The audience laughed.

  “It’s natural for a celebrity to want to keep his private life out of the spotlight,” the woman agreed.

  “That’s just it,” Daniel said. “I’m not a celebrity. I’m an archaeologist who made some discoveries and wrote—er, published a book. If I could keep people focused on the work of preserving antiquities, that’s all I’d ask.”

  “But let’s face it, Dr. Burke, for most people—if I may say so—a dashing adventurer who happens to be single and handsome is a more interesting subject than the preservation of antiquities. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Daniel’s face clouded and his dark eyes looked dangerous. Cate could see it was a struggle for him to remember he was on live television and his instinctive response wasn’t going to be edited out later.

  “I realize our culture has come to expect that if you’re in the public eye, you forfeit your privacy. But I’ve learned lately that the price for that is too high.”

  “What do you mean?” The interviewer leaned forward, exposing impressive and no doubt custom-designed cleavage.

  “I suppose you’ve seen this week’s issue of Entertainment News?”

  The interviewer’s smile was tight and she straightened. “You don’t strike me as the type to read that kind of publication, Dr. Burke.”

  He shrugged. “On page twenty-four there’s an article about me and an unnamed woman. That woman was very important to me, and because of the article she’s no longer in my life.”

  The redhead looked shocked and put a hand to her chest, drawing the camera’s close-up back to the cleavage. Cate sighed and wondered what would come out of Daniel’s mouth next. A public declaration of undying love? That would rake in the headlines for sure. Everyone loved a tale of woe and loss.

  Except, she had no doubt, the dean of humanities at Vandenberg University. And playing this recording for him probably wouldn’t earn her any brownie points.

  “Dr. Burke, that’s terrible!” the interviewer said in shocked tones. “Are you going to file a lawsuit against the publication?”

  “It’s under consideration,” Daniel said smoothly. “I’m an American with a reasonable expectation of privacy, which has been grossly invaded. However, if I receive a printed apology from the Entertainment News and in particular the photographer, who seems to have climbed up on a roof in order to shoot pictures of me and my companion in our bedroom, I’ll drop consideration of a suit.”

  “On a roof! To shoot into a bedroom? Good heavens. Who’s the photographer?”

  Cate couldn’t tell if the interviewer was faking her disapproval or not, but that was beside the point. Entertainment News was going to rake in the bucks on this week’s issue, and that would probably soothe the sting of the printed apology by quite a bit.

  “A woman named Dulcie Cavanaugh, who used to shoot for National Geographic but seems to have come down in the world.”

  Ooh, preemptive counterstrike! And on national television, too. If Ms. Cavanaugh thought she was ever going to get a serious job again, Cate speculated, she had another thing coming.

  “Dr. Burke, this is quite a commentary on the lengths the paparazzi will go to get a story. So, on a less emotional note, what is your next project?”

  “I’ll be going to Asia Minor for the summer,” he said. “There’s a site in the mountains east of the traditional site of Troy that looks very promising.”

  “Do you expect to find treasure?” she asked eagerly.

  His smile was flat and lacked the seductive sparkle Cate remembered from his Jah-Redd Jones interview. “No,” he said. “I’ve given up that expectation. The problem with treasure, I’ve discovered, is that it’s all too easy for someone to take it away.”

  LATTE IN HAND, CATE MADE IT into her office undetected the next day, probably because it was only seven in the morning. Even Anne, who said she got more work done before the faculty came in than any other time of the day, wasn’t in yet.

  Cate needed the next half hour to regroup and find her courage. In the center of her blotter was the stack of message slips, with a couple of new ones added. Morgan Shaw had called again. Julia Covington wondered when Cate would be getting back. The dean’s administrator advised that disciplinary review was scheduled for two o’clock, right before the staff meeting. Cate had a feeling she wouldn’t need to bother with the latter.

  After two o’clock, she’d no longer be on the staff.

  The outer door opened and Anne came in. She’d shrugged off her sweater and put her briefcase away before she noticed that Cate’s door was open and there was a body in the chair.

  “Cate! What are you doing here so early? I’m so glad you’re back. It feels like weeks since you were here.”

  Cate smiled ruefully. “I feel I’ve lived a whole lifetime, as a matter of fact.” She held out the box containing the necklace, which she’d wrapped in fuchsia-pink tissue. “This is for you, from sunny California.”

  Anne ripped it open with the eagerness of a child at Christmas, and held up the sparkling bauble. “It’s lovely! It looks just like that candy we used to get when I was a child.” She put it on, and the necklace gave a jaunty air to her plain blouse. “I might need to update the look to match it, though. Maybe you can give me some fashion tips.”

  “We’ll go shopping. After today, I’ll probably have tons of time on my hands.”

  Anne wilted against the doorjamb, fingering the necklace as though it were made of worry beads. “I have to tell you, it’s not looking good.”

  Cate tried to prepare herself for the worst. “Tell me.”

  “Well, you know how part of my job is to keep my ear to the ground and my mouth shut.”

  “And you do it well.”

  “So I was in the faculty break room and I heard a small crowd of the lecturers talking. Speculating.”

  “About what? Laying odds on how long I’ll last?”

  “No. Worse. About your love life. About—about the banana. And other things.” Anne clasped her hands nervously. “Cate, I think you should sue that paper, too. I don’t know if photos can be construed as
libel, but it certainly is damaging to your career.”

  “I think you mean slander. And it isn’t slander if it’s true. Unfortunately, Daniel really did feed me a banana.” She paused. “And I enjoyed it. Maybe you should pass that on to the lecturers. I might get a date out of the deal.”

  “Cate, I’m serious.”

  “So am I. So let’s back up a little. What do you mean, I should sue, too? Who else is suing?”

  “Well, Dr. Burke, of course. I saw him last night on TV.”

  Of course she had. Anne was a huge fan of Daniel’s—the principal reason why Cate had been able to follow his career on the quiet, as it were. And the skunk had never gotten around to signing a copy of his wretched book for her.

  “I can’t believe he said that about you on national TV. That you were important to him. Is that really true, Cate?”

  “I’m sure it is.” For all the good it did her.

  “So you two got together at the conference? And then this photographer spoiled everything?”

  “In a nutshell, yes.”

  “Well, Cate, my God, you’re not going to let that come between you, are you? He said you were no longer in his life. What happened?”

  If anyone but Anne had asked her that, she would have told them to mind their own business. But this was Anne, who had taken her home to her apartment on 9/11 because she couldn’t get back to Queens. Who had stood by her during the department war last spring. Who had made endless cups of tea after classes were over and given her wise advice when Cate had needed it.

  She couldn’t blow Anne off. She was her friend and friends deserved the truth.

  “It wasn’t him, it was me,” she said at last. “I know that sounds like a cliché, but in this case it’s the truth. He wanted something long-term, but when this thing came out in the paper, I realized exactly what it could mean.” She indicated the building with a vague movement of her hands. “And I was right. I’m going to lose my job because I fell in love with Daniel Burke.”

  She stopped, shocked she had actually said the words aloud.

  “What was that?” Anne’s gaze held amazement and humor. “Did I hear you say what I thought you said?”

  “No.” Cate shook her head as though a mosquito were flying around it. “It’s pointless to even think about him. God, forget I said that.”

  “I can,” Anne told her. “But I’m not sure you can.”

  With her usual acuity, Anne had hit the nail on the head. Cate was never going to be able to forget. Hell, she’d carried a torch for Daniel for eight years without even knowing it, after only a few kisses. What did she have to look forward to now—another eight years of holding men up to Daniel’s standard and finding they always came up short?

  That was, if she planned to find someone else. At the moment it didn’t feel very likely. Not with this ache in her heart and the tears so close to the surface that a word could trigger them. Not with the need so deep inside her that simply hearing his voice on the TV program was enough to give her erotic dreams.

  “I have to,” she said to Anne now. “I told him I couldn’t live his life—always in the spotlight, always wondering if the next newspaper item is the one that will turn public opinion upside down and cause something else to be taken away from me. The media flurry and all that babble about how young I was when I came to Vandenberg was enough.”

  “Since when have you cared about public opinion? Not that I’d dream of reminding you that that media babble resulted in a very nice grant.”

  Cate glanced at her. “How would you like the lecturers speculating about your fondness for bananas? Or wondering how big your boobs really are?”

  “Point taken.” Anne sighed. “Well, if you want to go out for dinner after work, let me know. You know I’m available if you need to talk this out.”

  Cate got up and hugged her. “You are the best friend a person could have. Let’s see what happens at two o’clock and go from there.”

  Anne began to close Cate’s door, then leaned in. “Don’t forget to return your calls.”

  “I won’t.”

  Somehow, between e-mail and returning most of the calls and going through the post, the morning disappeared. Anne brought her chicken soup for lunch, saying, “Because you’ll need the strength.”

  And then it was two o’clock.

  Outside the dean’s private conference room, Cate took a deep breath, straightened her suit jacket, turned the handle and went in. At the conference table sat the dean of humanities, Roger Pathak, and her department head, Wilson Trowbridge. She supposed she should be grateful they hadn’t called in the head of academics and the president of the institution. On the table in front of each man were a pad of paper and a copy of the Entertainment News, and her personnel folder sat next to the dean’s elbow.

  “Sit down, Dr. Wells.”

  She sat on the other side of the table, wishing she had a pad of paper, too. Then maybe she’d feel less like a child being called up on the carpet and more like a mature professional armed with a good argument.

  “Dr. Wells, we’ve called this meeting to discuss the consequences of the article in this paper—” he glanced at it “—the Entertainment News. Are you familiar with the contents of it?”

  “Yes.” Along with half the nation.

  “Do you have an explanation?”

  “For what, sir?” The pictures? The paper? The fact that the only reason she was here was that the faculty couldn’t resist the urge to gossip?

  “I would think that would be obvious. But for the record, I’ll spell it out. For the fact that you are in several of these pictures in—shall we say—very compromising positions.”

  “Sir, I believe our focus should be on bringing the paper to accept the consequences of invading my privacy. I was in my capacity as a private citizen at that time, not representing the university, and what I do with or without bananas in the privacy of my own bedroom is my business and no one else’s.”

  “Dr. Wells, are you aware of what is being said about you on this campus?” Dr. Pathak demanded.

  “No.”

  “I won’t go into the salacious details, but there is a firestorm of speculation about—about—well, suffice it to say that your character is being called into question not only among the faculty but among the students. And, consequently, their parents who pay their tuition.”

  “What, doesn’t anyone else have a love life? Why is mine so interesting?”

  “Everyone else keeps theirs in their own room,” Dr. Trowbridge pointed out.

  “Mine was in my own room, too. It wasn’t my fault that Dulcie Cavanaugh and her big telephoto lens joined us.”

  “The fact remains that you are a laughingstock,” Dr. Pathak said. Like this was her fault? Like she’d chosen this? “We can’t allow our parents and benefactors to believe that our faculty routinely have themselves plastered all over the tabloids and then come back to class to teach their children.”

  “Oh, come on, sir,” Cate said, goaded past endurance. “You can’t tell me you’re going to bring some kind of moral component into this. Not in this day and age. Not in New York.”

  “This school has a reputation that has stood for 120 years,” he informed her. “If students deride the school, parents will join them. And benefactors. And funding sources. We can’t allow that.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “We very much regret the necessity to consider such alternatives as these. We discounted suspension and termination immediately, of course.”

  Thank God for that. For the first time since she’d seen the wretched article, Cate felt the Gordian knot of tension under her rib cage ease a little. She wasn’t going to lose her job. She could handle a lot if that was no longer hanging over her head.

  Dr. Pathak opened her personnel file thoughtfully. Even from across the table and upside down, Cate could see the title of the document lying on top.

  Application for Tenure.

  Oh, my God. No.
/>   “Your tenure package recently went to the committee for review, I understand.”

  “Two months ago,” Cate whispered. It was a beautiful tenure package, too, with her publications, conference invitations and awards in all their shining glory. Eight years of doing the right things, talking up the right people and writing for the right journals was going to pay off in one of the coveted tenured positions at Vandenberg.

  “I’m very much afraid, Dr. Wells, that the tenure committee has turned down your application,” Dr. Pathak said. “I’m very sorry.”

  “Turned it down?” How could they do that? It was a perfect package. She had been the perfect candidate, and had just attained the perfect promotion to associate professor before they’d lured her over here with promises of early tenure. There was no way they could have turned it down. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m afraid that when push came to shove, this unfortunate business biased them in favor of Dr. Dileone, who was also competing for this position. You would have been my choice, of course, but my opinion wasn’t solicited.”

  She’d always thought his smile was fake and now was no exception. “Sir, with all due respect, this is insane. I’ve done nothing wrong. You should be supporting me and threatening lawsuits against the paper, not ruining my career!”

  “We realize there is less culpability here than, say, a faculty member abusing a student, but the public reputation of the school must be upheld at all costs. Clearly the tenure committee felt rather strongly about it.” He rose and held out a hand. “Personally, I regret the school had to act in this way. Hopefully it will all blow over in a day or two, and you can get on with administering your exams and preparing for next term.”

  It was on the tip of Cate’s tongue to say, “There won’t be any next term because I quit!” but years of doing the right thing had taught her to think first, blurt later. So she swallowed the words and, instead, turned on her designer heel and walked out of the conference room.

  Her next call would be to Columbia. Maybe they hadn’t filled her position yet.