Sticks and Stones

by Janice Macdonald

  “I do not,” I replied, “that was a code to higher aquatic mammals.”

  “Say hi to Flipper for me the next time you snooze,” Leo snorted.

  Denise got as comfortable as one could in a hospital room, a darned sight more comfortable than me, and started right into business. Thank goodness none of this had changed her.

  “They’ve arrested Rod Devlin for murdering his ex-wife.”

  “I knew that,” I said smugly.

  “Well, did you know that they have dropped the inquiry into the graffiti and fire and are pushing this to the foreground?” Denise was furious in her dead calm way.

  “You’re kidding, right? How did you hear that?” Then I stopped. Leo looked arch behind Denise’s set shoulders. There was one way for sure that Denise got her news these days.

  “Mark tried to get a statement from the police spokes­person yesterday, and they closed him down completely,” she stated. “They’re not going to do anything.”

  Maybe, I thought. Or maybe they had other things in mind for Mr. Paulson. How far would someone go to get a Pulitzer Prize? If you could manufacture an addicted little boy, why not paint a few doors and set a little fire? My mind, hazy as it was on the pain medication, was painting some pretty ugly pictures. Suddenly remembering my too obvious facial expressions, I refocused on my guests. Denise was examining the flowers, but Leo was giving me a funny look. I heaved myself upward, trying to sit, and collapsed immediately with a scream. Denise looked up, alarmed. Leo pressed the nursing button, and pretty soon a nurse bustled in with some codeine-laced Tylenols for me. It was a shame to be off Demerol, but what the heck. Into all this, Steve entered. I smiled wanly at my knight in leather jacket, and then ­grimaced afresh, when I realized he was carrying a pile of unmarked exams. There is no escape from some tortures.

  Or maybe there was. The pills began to take effect, and without any concern for my company, I drifted back to Morphius.

  When I next awoke, Leo and Denise had left and Steve was sitting at my bedside, reading a Robert J. Sawyer paperback. He looked up and smiled a smile that made me push back thoughts that I might look like the wreck of the Hesperus.

  “Hey,” he said softly.

  I smiled back, trying to shift without moving my foot. He bounced to the end of my bed to raise the head. Soon I was feeling a bit more sociable. I spotted the exams on the side table to my left.

  “Thanks for bringing those over. I’m going to need a ­couple of other things in order to post marks, if I can impose on you some more.”

  “No problem. It sounds as if you’ll be here the better part of a week, so I figured you’d want these out of the way. If you want, I can help later.”

  “You never know.” I grinned. “They might be happier I marked them while under the influence of codeine than if I’d been totally sober.”

  Steve laughed. It was good to hear his laughter. It reminded me that there was a sane world beyond all the crazy things that had been happening. Thinking that, my mind snapped back to the one question I’d been waiting for the others to leave to ask him.

  “Denise says the police have dropped the investigation. Is that true, or are the police just no longer talking to Mark Paulson?”

  Steve smiled wryly.

  “Mr. Paulson has been making a bit of a nuisance of ­himself. I think my colleagues are just a bit tired of his wanting to broadcast every tendril of evidence that goes floating past his nose.”

  “He has been wanting to get hold of me these past few days, you know. He cornered me in HUB the other day. Was it yesterday? Hey, what day is it? Students are going to be freaking out over their mid-term grades not being posted.”

  “Relax, you’ve still got a day or so, and I’ll be in after my shift to help you. So Paulson wants to talk with you, does he? Any idea what about?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t a clue. In fact, I’ve been feeling a little creeped out by him all along. Am I being too paranoid, or do you think he could have staged all of this in order to make a name for himself reporting on it?”

  “I think that might be a bit too Byzantine, but if it makes you feel any easier, I’ve got an officer posted on your ward. No one nasty is going to get near you, I promise.”

  “I wonder what he wants from me? Mind you, I wonder how I got caught up in any of this, beyond being Gwen’s prof.” Steve sighed and agreed that that was the sixty-four thousand dollar question.

  “But we’re on top of it, don’t worry. And we’ve caught the one guy who actually killed someone. You rest now, and knit up, and we’ll work on getting the rest of the bad guys behind bars, okay?”

  Steve stood and made a pathetic attempt at smoothing my covers and plumping my pillows. I gritted my teeth and smiled as he inadvertently jostled the pillow my foot was resting on. Love hurts, after all.

  “I’ll be in after my shift. Take care, Randy.”

  “Not much else to do.” I kissed him goodbye and faded away, probably before he’d even reached the doorway.

  46

  I WOULDN’T WANT TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR the futures of the students whose papers I marked in the next two days. Objectivity was not my strong suit. I alternated between laisser-faire as the codeine swept through my system, and slash and burn as the effects of the pain pills wore off. As a result, my averages seemed satisfactory as I filled in the results list. Life is a crap shoot; if my students learned that out of four years of university they would be well educated.

  Steve had said there would be nothing to worry about anymore, but had stationed a uniformed policeman near my door on the ward anyway. He even followed my wheelchair to physio, although he stayed discreetly in the anteroom as I made a fool of myself trying to climb and descend mock staircases with crutches.

  Even though it made me scream in pain at times, I enjoyed physio just because of the continuity of faces. Louise, my ­therapist, was there every morning to put me through my paces. Up on the ward, I’d found a different nurse a day, due to the steep cutbacks the Klein government had made to health care. The continuing motif was the harried look they all displayed, rushing to do far more than they had the time or energy to perform.

  One thing you had to say for the cutbacks, they impelled you to get well in a hurry. Hospitals, never my favorite places to begin with, had taken on a haunted aspect. I couldn’t help thinking I’d be far healthier on the outside. So, after lunch and a nap, I would work on the arm-strengthening exercises Louise had given me from my bed. If they did anything to reduce underarm flab at the same time as they built up crutch-­wielding muscles, I would remember Louise in my will.

  So, about five or six days after I’d taken my fateful tumble, I was sweating away, pulling myself up on my little trapeze and lowering myself back to the mattress in slow counts of seven. I had made it through two repetitions when that weird feeling that “something is not right with the picture” occurred to me. I lay back, panting, and looked around. Everything seemed the same. I looked through the doorway to the ward beyond. There was something niggling … and then I had it. My sentry was gone.

  A flashback of being pushed down the stairs ran through my mind. I hadn’t realized until he was gone how secure that uniformed man had made me feel. The sweat on my upper body turned cold and made me shiver. I thought of ringing for the nurse, but then wondered if maybe I was over-reacting; maybe the policeman had just gone off for a moment to use the facilities.

  I waited, listening to my heart beating much faster than it had been during my bout of exercise. I tried to think of when I’d noticed him last. Surely it had been a while, long enough for my torpid unconscious to finally notice his absence. While I knew he would likely be busy, I reached for the phone to call Steve.

  No joy. Steve was apparently en route to Fort McMurray, getting the evidence against Rod Devlin all in order with what the Mounties had uncovered there. Well, I likely had used up more of his time than I was entitled to, anyhow. Maybe the police guard had gone off for a bite to eat. I
tried to think if I had noticed some pattern to when a guard was there and when one wasn’t. It struck me that I’d been protected around the clock, but maybe I was wrong.

  I left a message on Steve’s pager, anyway.

  This was ridiculous. Rod Devlin was behind bars and I was in a busy hospital in the middle of the day. Nothing bad was going to happen to me. I reached for the exercise triangle, trying to recall how far I’d been when the panic had set in. Just as I was huffingly into the middle of my fourth set of reps, I felt my throat dry up.

  Mark Paulson was standing inside my room, pulling the door closed with his left hand. He was holding his right arm awkwardly behind him. My earlier Gothic thoughts of him inciting Gwen’s murder and torching Grace’s office to ensure himself a Pulitzer raced through my head, and I was scrambling for the nursing button when he pulled his hand forward into my sights.

  He held out a paper cornucopia of flowers.

  My shoulders sagged.

  “Hi, Randy. Do you mind a visitor?”

  He came forward hesitantly, the way people frightened of hospitals tend to walk. I was mollified a bit, but still wary, as he came around to the chair side of the bed.

  “Denise told me your room number. I hope you don’t mind me bugging you at a time like this, but I still really need to talk to you.”

  “I don’t know anything, honest. I’m just lying here, out of commission,” I babbled.

  Mark looked puzzled, and then laughed. “I’m not here to get an interview, if that’s what you're thinking. Although, when you’re feeling a bit better, I wouldn’t mind getting your take on the events.”

  Mark sat down in the chair without being asked, still holding the flowers. I began to wonder if they were for me, or whether they were some sort of protective coloration he’d used to get through the front doors.

  He looked up at me like a basset hound, and the tumblers started to fall into place. This wasn’t a reporter nosing out a story. This was some sort of personal thing.

  “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Denise,” Mark said.

  “Denise? What about her?”

  “Well, I thought, what with Christmas coming up,” he paused, and I started to feel the corners of my mouth turning up in spite of myself. I felt as if I was being propelled back into junior high at the same speed as Michael J. Fox had used in his souped-up Delorean.

  “Would you, as her friend, happen to know what sort of perfume she likes?”

  I laughed, which wasn’t kind, but completely unavoidable.

  Mark looked a bit puzzled.

  “I think you couldn’t go wrong with Obsession, Mark,” I ­giggled.

  Mark began to nod, in all seriousness, and tried to pull his notebook from his inner breast pocket. He discovered, through this action, that he still held the flowers, which he presented to me with all the grace of a Beaver Scout to the Queen, and scribbled the name in his book.

  I looked at the flowers, which weren’t quite as nice an assortment as Leo had brought, but were well meant. All in all, I supposed Paulson had just been doing his job. I looked at him, so earnest in his attempt to please Denise, and ­realized that my antipathy had not been for him. It had been a sort of jealousy; I was in the middle of awful things, and he had taken away my confidante, Denise. It was playground politics, not some awareness of evil.

  Mind you, it was his publishing of the letter to Gwen that had started all this. Or pushed it on, at any rate. That was a question that I'd wondered from the beginning.

  “Did you meet Gwen Devlin before you published her ­letter?”

  “Me? No. I never did. I tried to get hold of her on the phone, but no luck. I heard she was really a super person, though. I spoke with several of the students on her floor in residence after the murder.”

  “How did you get the letter, then?”

  “What?”

  “Her letter from the Party Animals. How did you get it?”

  “It arrived in a press package from a source at the ­university. That was why I wanted to speak with Ms Devlin, to ascertain that it was actually what was in her letter. One of the lawyers for some of the other girls verified it as a Party Animal letter, though, so we ran it.”

  “Who was sending you a press package? I thought the ­university was trying to keep things quiet? I know our chairman was really adamant about not spouting things to the papers for fear of making things worse, or the university look bad.”

  Mark shrugged. “Someone thought differently. It wasn’t Denise, I know that. I asked her point blank, since so much of what it was doing was the same as she was advocating. But she swears it wasn’t her, and I can’t imagine why she’d lie about something like that.”

  “No, I can’t imagine Denise lying about anything, to tell you the truth.” I smiled, and Mark beamed in the way lovers have when they are talking about their objects all sublime. What he had told me was puzzling, though. Back when Denise and I had been positing the culpability of the press in reporting on the poison pen letters, neither of us had questioned how the press had received its information. Now that we knew Mark personally, Denise wasn’t in a mood to be objective, and I was suddenly curious.

  Part of me still blamed the printing of that letter for Gwen’s death. If her husband hadn’t read that letter, would he have been so moved to murder her? He’d hurt her before, but perhaps, with the letter out there he’d felt he could get away with it. Whoever had sent the letter, though, wouldn’t have known it would trigger Rod Devlin’s rage. That letter was a direct attack at Gwen, and if Devlin hadn’t written it, then someone else had also had an ax to grind against his wife. I stared at my flowers, and then at the pile of exams I had just finished marking, and an idea began to form. Perhaps there was a way to flush out whoever had written that letter.

  “It’s funny, when you think of it, all this boils down to words in the wrong people’s hands.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Mark. There was a glint in his eye. The boy was a born reporter; he could smell the story brewing before I was even sure I was going to spin it.

  “Well, Gwen died because of that letter. The Party Animals, by writing that letter, and then whoever leaked it to you, signed her death warrant, even if they didn’t know it. I wonder how much they did know. Whoever wrote that sure knew she had left her children, right? Surely, if they were trying to do the right thing, they wouldn’t have used such a pointedly personal letter as Gwen’s for your sample, right?”

  Mark nodded. I was just warming up, but thinking on my feet—so to speak—had always been a strong suit and what made lecturing, even on those days when I was under-­prepared, bearable.

  “Well, my role in all this, I suppose, has been to do with written information, as well. First, I had Gwen’s journal, which was helpful to the police in locating her therapist. Her essay pointed to issues with her ex-husband that the police here and in Fort McMurray looked into, since they had a probable cause to do so. And now,” and here I took a deep breath before moving into uncharted territory, “there is more evidence of a sort in mid-session exams being written by ­people who lived on the Party Animal floor in residence.”

  Mark’s ears were almost twitching, like a hunting dog on point.

  “You have information on the case in your exams? What sort of information?”

  I was ad libbing desperately, and I had honestly meant to discuss this with Steve before saying anything to anyone else, but there is nothing like talking to someone who really wants to hear a story to make the storyteller work up all the embroidered angles.

  “One of the essay topics in the exam dealt with the subplot of an anonymous letter being written in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Let’s just say certain students seem to have decided to use the exam as a form of confessional for their own involvement in that situation. One of the students even ponders whether the original note written as a joke hadn’t been enhanced by a second party before it was discovered, to make the original pranksters seem more culpable. Now
I can’t imagine who in Twelfth Night would want Sir Toby Belch to look worse than he already appears, so it made me wonder if the student hadn’t been transposing some real life event onto his reading of the play. In other words, perhaps the note you published wasn’t the note he wrote.”

  Mark was starting to splutter. I had him; trouble was I ­wasn’t sure how far to take this. I wished Steve had been around to talk this over with.

  “Mark, I am not saying you screwed up the letter. I am saying you were screwed. Someone wanted that letter printed, rather than a more sophomoric rendition. The question is, why? As soon as the officer in charge gets back to me, I’m ­giving him these exams as evidence.” I smiled, I hoped ­winsomely.

  Paulson took the hint. Besides, he was already writing in his head, I could tell the look. It wasn’t a look you saw very often in undergraduates, mind you.

  “Thanks for the tip on Denise’s gift, Randy. And thanks for the other tip, as well. I’ll talk to you soon, okay?” He was already halfway out the door.

  I waved. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. But I didn’t mind manipulating him to suit myself. The way I saw it, looking at my mangled leg, he owed me. Or someone did. And with any luck, I’d be meeting whoever that was soon. On my terms, this time.

  I stretched my arm to its fullest length and snagged the telephone. By now, I had the number to Steve’s precinct memorized. I called and asked if I could get a message through to him, only to be told he wasn’t going to be back in town till the next day at noon. Damn. The newspapers hit the stands before six a.m. Gritting my teeth, and preparing myself for a lecture, I asked for Staff Superintendent Keller.

  47

  AFTER CHEWING ME OUT ROYALLY, KELLER AGREED to replace the officer (who had been off for lunch) with an undercover guard. Once I’d called the English department for some course numbers I wanted to check up on, I was set. Now, all I had to do was sit and wait for someone to rise to the bait of my pile of mid-terms. They sat there on the side table, silently accusing me of, well what, exactly? It wasn’t perjury, or slander or plagiarism. What did one call manipulating the press? Self-preservation?