Bond With Death Page 10

  “Maybe they didn’t want to cover their tracks,” Desmond said. “Maybe they wanted us to think Dr. Good set up the account.”

  “That could be it,” Frankie agreed. “But why?”

  Sally couldn’t figure out the why of any of it, but that was nothing new. She’d been puzzled all along.

  “We’ll find out why when we find the person who did it,” Desmond said. “We’ll just have to keep working on that. Meanwhile, if people will keep their offices locked, maybe it won’t happen again.”

  “I hope that memo will include something about computer security and passwords,” Frankie said. “I have to say, Dr. Good, that we inspected your computer this morning while you were out. Your office was wide open. Is it that way now?”

  Sally wondered if the computer center staff thought it was fine for them to invade her privacy. She didn’t see any difference between them and the person who’d sent the e-mail. Well, they weren’t malicious. She’d give them that.

  “My office is open, I’m afraid,” she said.

  “I thought you’d say that, and it’s more convenient for us, I guess. We’d have needed to get a passkey from the police if it was locked.”

  “Why would you need to get into my office again?”

  “We’re taking your computer. We might be able to find something more if we can spend some time looking at your hard drive. Don’t worry. We’ll leave you another computer.”

  Sally felt a touch of panic. “But I have all my tests saved on that one. And all my assignments and student information plans. What about my privacy?”

  “Surely you’ve backed everything up. You know that a hard drive can crash at any moment.”

  “I have most things backed up,” Sally said.

  She didn’t add that she had a drawer full of little floppy disks but no idea what was on any particular one of them. She did have things saved, but finding them would be a real chore.

  “Most things?” Frankie said.

  “Just about everything. But I’d prefer to keep my computer. I’m not sure I like the idea of people snooping through my files.”

  “You haven’t been downloading any pornography, have you?”

  Sally smiled. “No, but I do get e-mail about penis enlargement.”

  Fieldstone cleared his throat. Desmond squirmed. Frankie smiled and said, “Don’t we all. I promise you that we won’t open any of your files. We’re just going to check the computer for suspicious programs and look for a clue to the phantom e-mailer. We’ll get the computer back to you as soon as we can. You really do need to be more careful about security from now on.”

  “I’ll see that the memo emphasizes that,” Fieldstone said. He stood up. “Dr. Good, I’d like for you to stay for a few minutes after the others leave.”

  Frankie and Desmond took that as their cue to go. Sally stayed on the couch, wondering what else Fieldstone could possibly want with her.

  When the others had left and the door was safely closed behind them, Fieldstone told her.

  15

  When Jack got home that afternoon, Hector was waiting for him.

  Hector was a cat. He wasn’t exactly the cat Jack would have chosen if he’d been looking for an animal to live with him, but he hadn’t been looking. The cat had just showed up one day, so beaten and bedraggled that he reminded Jack of the way Hector of ancient Troy must have looked after having been killed, tied to a chariot, and dragged three times around the walls of the city by the triumphant Achilles.

  Jack, being a soft touch, had fed the scruffy cat, who must have approved of the gesture. He stayed at Jack’s. He’d never become very friendly, but he’d proven to be courageous and a good cat to have around when Jack was in danger.

  “You want to eat, right?” Jack said when he got out of his car.

  Hector walked over to the food bowl in a corner of the garage without comment, and Jack poured some dry food out of a sack for him. Hector waited until Jack had put the sack down and watched him for a few seconds before he deigned to eat.

  At first Jack had tried to persuade Hector that being a house cat was a good idea and that living inside was preferable to rambling around in the outdoors, but Hector had disagreed. He was never going to become domesticated if he could help it.

  Jack left him to his meal and walked back out to the driveway to pick up his copy of the Hughes Journal.

  For a long time, the Hughes Weekly News had been the only newspaper in town. Its name was something of a misnomer, as the paper had, until recently, rarely printed any actual news except of the most innocuous kind. Its purpose was to sell advertising, and as troublesome news or opinions might somehow offend an advertiser, none of that sort of thing had been allowed.

  The publisher of the Hughes Journal, seeing an opportunity to offer the town something a little different, had started printing a weekly paper that was a bit livelier than the Weekly News. There were editorials in the Journal, and they were all considerably more contentious than anything that had ever appeared in the Weekly News. The new paper was picking up advertising, so Jack assumed the editorials weren’t bothering anyone. Maybe people even enjoyed them.

  He went inside, tossed the paper on the kitchen table, and thought about what he could have for dinner. The little sandwich he’d had for lunch had been okay, but it had been awfully small. He was already hungry again, and it wasn’t even four o’clock.

  He looked in the freezer and found a Marie Callendar chicken potpie. He knew it contained about ten thousand fat grams, but he didn’t care, because he also knew it would be tasty. Fat grams be damned. He wouldn’t eat it at four o’clock, however. If he did, he’d be hungry yet again before time for bed. He’d read the Journal, which would take about two minutes, and then grade a few research papers before heating up the potpie.

  Jack always staggered his research papers for the composition classes. Rather than have all the papers come in at once at the end of the semester, thus burying him beneath a ton of computer printouts, he always had one class do the paper early, with the others following at regular intervals during the course of the semester.

  He’d have to boot up the computer to grade them. Although there were now services that promised to write original papers that would never be published on the Internet and never be resold, the papers were expensive. Jack had found that most students who wanted a canned paper went for one of the cheaper services. If he ran across a suspect paper, he Googled suspicious-sounding phrases. Often he located the original paper within minutes.

  Word had gotten around about the Googling, and soon the paper services would figure a way around it. But for now Jack was satisfied that it worked well enough. And, to be fair, there were only a couple of students a year who didn’t do their own work. Maybe the cheating was held to a minimum because someone had told the students that Jack and other HCC instructors were giving an automatic F in the course to anyone who used a plagiarized paper and that everything would be checked with a search engine. Well, to be honest about it, Jack told the students himself, every semester. He wanted to give them every chance to do the right thing. Some of them still tried to fool him, however, as if they were playing some sort of game. The ones he caught soon learned that what they thought was a game had serious consequences.

  Jack went back out to the garage to check on Hector, who had already disappeared. He was somewhere nearby, Jack knew, lurking in the shrubbery, waiting to eviscerate some unsuspecting soul who happened by Jack didn’t often go outside at night for fear that Hector wouldn’t recognize him. Jack had no desire to be eviscerated.

  Back in the kitchen, Jack picked up the Journal and went into his den to read it. He flopped down in a chair, kicked off his Bass Weejuns, and opened the paper to the editorial, which was the thing he looked for first. It was usually the most interesting thing in the paper.

  When he saw the title above the editorial, he unflopped, sitting up as rigid as if his backbone had suddenly fused into a bumpy skeletal rod. He read the title
of the editorial again, then read it a third time.

  Shaking his head, he went to the telephone.

  It took Fieldstone a while to get around to what he wanted to say, and Sally waited impatiently. She wanted to go back to her office and find out what kind of computer had been left there.

  When Fieldstone finally got to the point, Sally came to attention.

  “You’re saying that Seepy Benton, Dr. Benton, I mean, was at Harold Curtin’s house the night Curtin died?”

  “That’s right. I sent him there. I didn’t know when he’d go, of course, and neither of us could have known what would happen after he left. I thought that Dr. Benton might be able to persuade Curtin that his opposition to the bond issue didn’t make any sense.”

  “Did he?”

  “No. Curtin was adamant about his position. Dr. Benton couldn’t budge him.”

  “It’s too bad that he had to visit Curtin on that particular evening,” Sally said, wondering why Seepy hadn’t said anything about his visit when he was talking to Jack. “Have you told the police that he was there?”

  “No. That’s what I wanted to ask you about. You know Detective Weems better than I do, and I thought you might be the one to talk to him.”

  Sally thought someone should have talked to Weems before now. Waiting to tell him that Benton had visited Curtin would just make Benton’s actions seem suspicious.

  “Lieutenant Weems isn’t my biggest fan,” Sally said. “Anyway, we don’t know that Curtin’s death was anything other than bad health. I don’t think you should be worried.”

  “Don’t the police find fingerprints? If they do, Dr. Benton’s prints will be there in Curtin’s apartment.”

  Sally knew where Curtin had lived. It was a small garage apartment that couldn’t have had more than a couple of rooms, not exactly the kind of place she hoped to spend her last days. She could understand why Curtin had been bitter.

  “It won’t matter if they find fingerprints. In fact, they won’t even look, not if Curtin wasn’t murdered. But I think it would be a good idea if Weems were informed about the visit. Chief Desmond is the person to do it. He and Weems have worked together.”

  “Desmond was there, too.”

  “In Curtin’s apartment? Desmond and Benton both? Together?”

  Sally realized she was babbling, but she couldn’t help it.

  “Together,” Fieldstone said. “It was a delicate situation.”

  “It’s just a bond issue,” Sally said in exasperation.

  “No, it’s more than that. Surely you’ve heard the rumors. Both Curtin and Larry Lawrence were going to run for the board if the bond was defeated. And they were going to try to get me fired.”

  “Wait a minute.” Sally couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Larry Lawrence was there?”

  Sally wondered how much Fieldstone knew about Desmond and Lawrence’s daughter. If he knew what Sally had been told today, he should never have sent Desmond.

  “It was an informal meeting,” Fieldstone said, “but I wanted Desmond to be there in case there was any trouble. Mr. Talon was representing the board.”

  Sally almost strangled, but she managed to say, “Roy Don Talon was there?”

  Fieldstone looked hurt at her tone. “I thought it would be good to have board representation.”

  Sally got control of herself. She said, “And was there trouble?”

  “No. Words were exchanged. That’s all.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “There might have been a little shoving, but nothing more than that. As I understand it, Curtin had been drinking a bit. He’s had something of a problem since he left us, you know. In fact, he might have been drinking more than a bit. He was functioning, but not very well, according to Dr. Benton.”

  “Good grief.”

  Fieldstone gave her an apologetic look. “You can see why I’m worried.”

  Sally could see, all right. She didn’t blame him. When all this came out, and she was certain that it would, the college would be put in a bad light. People might be inclined to vote against the bond issue if they thought college administrators, board members, and police were trying to strong-arm the opposition.

  “So will you talk to Weems?” Fieldstone said.

  Sally sighed. Then she said she’d do what she could.

  When Sally got back to her office, she had to get her key out of her purse to open the door. The first thing she saw was that her computer was gone. The replacement looked as if it had come out of a closet where it had been gathering dust and spiderwebs since 1995. She hoped it had a color monitor.

  To calm herself, she finished grading the paper she’d started before Fieldstone had called. Then she went over to see Wynona Reed.

  It was getting close to five o’clock. No one roamed the quiet halls. Most of the faculty had already left for the day, leaving only the secretaries and deans to occupy the building. In another hour or so people would be arriving for their evening classes, but at the moment the campus was quiet and almost deserted.

  Wynona was working at her computer. Sally waited until she looked up.

  “Has anybody been asking lately about getting an overhead projector moved to a room?” Sally asked.

  Wynona scratched the side of her nose with a long red fingernail.

  “You mean besides A. B. D. Johnson?”

  “Yes. He’s lost one, and I’m trying to find it.”

  “People move those things around all the time.”

  All the overheads sat on little carts that had signs attached to the side. The signs said, This projector is not to be moved from Room ___. The blank was filled in with the room number written in heavy black letters.

  “I know people move them,” Sally said. “They’re not supposed to, but they do. I thought that if somebody had asked about one, you might remember.”

  “You could just go around and look in every room. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that not a single one is where it belongs.”

  Sally knew better than to take a bet from Wynona. She liked to visit the casinos in Louisiana and on the Indian reservation in east Texas. She was a consistent winner at the slots, or so people said.

  “I thought you knew everything that goes on around here,” Sally said.

  “I do. You could probably figure out who took the overhead if you thought about it.”

  “I’ve thought about it. I don’t have any idea.”

  “Anyone who’d take a stapler would take an overhead.”

  “Ellen?”

  “Bingo. I could be wrong …” Wynona paused to let Sally think about how unlikely that would be. “ … but she did come by the other day complaining that the bulb had burned out on the one in her room. She asked me to call media, but you know how that goes.”

  Sally knew. Sometimes it took a little while to get a bulb replaced. Sometimes it took a long while.

  “Thanks, Wynona. I knew you’d have the answer.”

  “See all, know all. If there’s a skeleton in a closet, I can always rattle the bones.”

  “I believe it.”

  Sally left the office and walked down the deserted hallway to the classroom that Ellen Baldree preferred to teach in. Sure enough, there were two overhead projectors in the room. One belonged there, and one belonged in the room where A.B.D. taught. Sally rolled the cart to A.B.D.’s room and left it there. Maybe it would be there when he taught tomorrow. Maybe not.

  When she got back to her office, she realized that she’d forgotten to close and lock the door. She’d have to focus better and try to remember to do that.

  She looked at her telephone. The little red light was blinking to indicate that she had a message, but she didn’t feel like talking to anyone. She’d check it tomorrow.

  She locked the office and went home.

  The light on Sally’s home answering machine was blinking, too. She had a feeling that she knew who’d called, but she checked the caller ID to be sure.

  Her mother had called at 4
:35, but there were several calls before that, all of them from Jack Neville. She wondered what Jack wanted. Whatever it was, it must have seemed urgent to him. She wished now that she’d checked her messages at the college.

  Jack would have to wait. Sally would have to call her mother first. But not until she checked on Lola, who was lying in wait on the bed. When Sally came into the room, Lola jumped to the floor and started to scratch the rug.

  “Stop that,” Sally said.

  Lola stopped and looked up at Sally for less than a second. Then she started to scratch the rug again.

  “You’re going rip a hole in it,” Sally said.

  Lola gave her a look that implied complete disdain for the fate of the rug.

  Sally decided that bribery was the way to go.

  “How about a kitty treat?” she said.

  Lola stopped scratching the rug and padded away to the kitchen. Sally trailed along behind her. She got a “hairball prevention” treat out and pitched it on the floor. Lola sucked it up and looked around for more.

  “That’s all there is,” Sally told her, and Lola stalked back to the bedroom, tail in the air.

  Sally needed a treat, too. She poured a glass of white wine and, feeling fortified, called her mother.

  Editorial in the Hughes Journal

  ARE THERE WITCHES IN OUR COLLEGE CLASSROOMS?

  The Hughes Journal has learned that one of the instructors at Hughes Community College is distantly related to a witch named Sarah Good, who was convicted of the crime of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 and executed. Before her death, Sarah Good cursed her judges and promised one of them that “God would give him blood to drink.” Two days ago, Harold Curtin, a former employee of the college who was an active opponent of the bond issue now before the citizens of the Hughes Community College district, died under suspicious circumstances, choking on his own blood. It would, of course, be irresponsible to suggest that there is any connection between the long-dead Sarah Good, her distant relative, and the death of Mr. Curtin, and the Journal draws no such conclusion.