I watched Ariana clean her bowl with her long, thin index finger, which she then licked, a microcosmic symbol of what I loved about her. She had this endearing quality of being able to find the best in any culture. One minute she was burning incense, the next she was reading an international geopolitical thriller; she ate rice cakes one day and ordered fries with ketchup the next.
“Should I be worried about you?” Ariana asked.
“Nah. I mean, it’s hard not to be upset about what happened to Keith. It’s going to take time to get used to. He was a strong presence on campus.” I almost said, “We were blessed to have him,” but that moment had passed.
The notes to Come Fly With Me filled the room.
I looked over at my cell phone, charging on my end table. Bruce calling.
“I’m going to take this,” I said.
Ariana got up and pointed to the clock on the kitchen wall, a room away. Twenty after twelve. “I should be going anyway.”
We waved good-bye and blew kisses as I unplugged the charging cord and swished the phone on.
“You home?” Bruce asked.
“All fed and watered,” I said. “Ariana, the cook and the queen of soothing gestures, is just leaving.”
We spent a few minutes catching up on the day-Bruce had worked an evacuation drill and one real emergency call between nine and eleven thirty tonight, meaning hardly any turnaround or downtime.
“We worked with the Marines on the drill,” he said.
“Very cool. We could handle the truth.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t you remember in A Few Good Men where Jack Nicholson yells out at Tom Cruise, ‘You can’t handle the truth?’ ” Bruce’s imitation of Nicholson left a lot to be desired.
“Oh, yeah. How could I forget?”
“One of my faves.”
I was ready to ask him about the hang-ups. I tried to sound casual.
“Did you get my texts?” I asked.
“Yeah. But I couldn’t tell what you meant. Did I call when?”
“Did you try to get me a couple of times today?”
“Not since I talked to you earlier. I slept till about five, then ran around doing errands, then the madhouse here. Why?”
If it wasn’t Bruce, then who? Someone else at MAstar headquarters? Gil was the only other person I knew. If she wanted to track down Hal, she would have left a message. In any case, there were more telephones in the town of Mansfield than those at MAstar-one other number in my address book teased at the back of my head, but I couldn’t remember-so I was fighting a losing battle trying to figure it out. I had to stop letting petty things get to me.
“Why?” Bruce repeated.
“Oh, nothing. I got a couple of calls with no message and just wondered.”
“You sound funny. Everything okay there?”
My mouth was ready to form the word break-in but closed just in time, and opened on another note.
“Oh, yeah, just this thing with Keith and all.”
“I should be there.”
“Nah, you’d be in the way.”
“So you say.” I heard the familiar finger-snapping. “I almost forgot. How’d it go with Archie?”
“Nothing to it. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. Right now, I’m going to bed, even if you can’t.”
“Love you.”
“Love you.”
“Lock up,” he said.
Like never before, I thought.
CHAPTER 12
I’d successfully avoided contacting my students until it was too late to return their calls. Technically, it was never too late to call a student in a college dormitory. Half the girls were up all night, the other half during the day, so there was always the chance that one of them would need her math teacher. As many calls involved personal distress, such as “He never calls me. What shall I do?” as homework, such as “Do you really expect us to do three problem sets every week?”
I wished now that my biggest problem was giving dating advice.
I patrolled my house twice, checking doors and windows. I hated shutting off all ventilation, but there was no other way to completely alarm my perimeter. I put in the alarm code, not simply out of habit tonight. I was tempted to test it to see if the human monitors two towns over were really paying attention. I wished I’d thought to take the rake in from the garage, but retrieving it now would mean undoing all the protections first and I couldn’t bear to be unalarmed even for that short time.
The unfamiliar feeling of vulnerability unsettled me. I crawled into bed, then crawled out and wedged a chair under the bedroom doorknob. I climbed under my crisp lavender sheet again, and climbed out again to make sure the door between the kitchen and the garage was locked, something I never did unless I was leaving town for a few days.
Reading in bed was one of my favorite pastimes, but tonight I couldn’t concentrate. I opened the drawer in my night table and took out a clipboard with a half-finished crossword. The puzzle was due to my editor in a few days and I hadn’t looked at it at all yesterday or today.
The sad part: I’d been working on a chemistry-related crossword, with Keith’s help. The overall shape of the puzzle was a beaker. Some clues were simple; for “tongs” the clue was “they come in a pair and hold hot things.” I’d asked Keith if he’d contribute a few difficult ones. Not too hard, though, since the puzzle was destined for a kids’ word games book. He’d given me several, starting with “crucible,” for which the clue was “porcelain container for reactions.”
“These are perfect for middle-schoolers,” I’d told Keith. “I didn’t know you had experience with preteens.”
He’d shrugged and said, “I used to be one.”
I doubted it, but then I never would have guessed that Keith was seeing someone. Unless he’d made up a girl to keep his old cousin quiet. I wondered who she was, if she was real. I couldn’t think of a Bonnie on the faculty. I counted three faculty members who could pass for Annie in one form or another-all of them were married, happily from all outward appearances.
Was Annie or Bonnie a student? I hoped not. Elteen had said she was young, but I couldn’t take her literally. Keith might have referred to her as simply his own age. My very last thought was that the “girl” was not part of Henley College. I could hear Ariana saying, “I told you so” about my narrow view of the world.
I cast aside the puzzle that reminded me too much of Keith. Maybe some other year I’d be able to return to it. For now, I’d have to come up with a different theme. I’d already done one shaped like a helicopter with words and clues from aviation history, and I’d covered many other modes of transportation as well.
I attached a clean puzzle grid to the clipboard and tapped the blank squares. Usually I could count on a last-minute inspiration, but tonight I wasn’t sure. Not even the lingering aroma of Ariana’s tea concoction was enough to inspire me.
When the phone rang, my body twitched and the clipboard went one way and my pencil the other. At one thirty in the morning, I dreaded picking up the phone to hear a dial tone. Or worse, a threat. Or news of a second murder. The negative possibilities were endless.
I checked the caller ID. Rachel’s cell phone number. I was almost happy to see it.
“Hi, Dr. Knowles. I know it’s late and I shouldn’t be calling. But I can’t sleep in this bed.”
“Where are you?” Please don’t say jail.
“I’m home in my own room, but it feels weird not to be in the dorm.”
“I forgot some of you were sent home.”
“They closed my dorm. Everyone who couldn’t get home is in Paul Revere with, like, maximum security. I don’t want to be here with my mother still freaking out, but I don’t know why anyone would want to stay at the dorm either.”
I thought of three girls who were very happy to be there, close to what they perceived as “the action.”