Virgil sat back and took one of the whistling breaths that he and Bruce seemed to have a patent on. I waited not so patiently, my mind racing ahead with how to gather the promised postcards, greeting cards, and notes from various corners of my house.
“Okay,” Virgil said. I nearly hugged him. “Tomorrow morning. Give me your best shot.”
Then I did hug him. “Thanks, Virgil. Next time, dinner will be New York strip steaks and potatoes.”
“And beer,” he said.
“And lots of beer.”
Virgil left around ten o’clock. Bruce had picked up enough of our meeting to get the gist of what was ahead of me. He and Virgil spent a few minutes in my driveway before Virgil took off in his old Malibu. He had flung his jacket over his shoulder, his wide profile dwarfing Bruce, who was in his longish khaki shorts. I could only imagine that conversation.
“Where did you find her?” Virgil might have asked.
“Up in the air,” Bruce might have answered.
“I suppose there’s no chance you’re going to sleep tonight,” Bruce said, when he reentered the house.
I’d already pulled a box of greeting cards onto my lap in the den. I saved cards until I had a large enough stack and then gave them to Ariana who used them in the grade school where she volunteered as an arts specialist. She and the kids made small gift boxes out of the cards. She’d show them how to fold the card so the design on the front became the top of the box. Ariana was expert at using scorers to get the edges clean and crisp. Lucky for me, I’d been negligent in handing over the cards and now had a wealth of potentially useful handwriting samples for Virgil.
“I’m not tired,” I said. “And I’m sure you’re not, since you had that nice, long nap.”
He took a seat on the couch, one pillow over. “Okay. Hand over a bunch. What are we looking for?”
I shifted the box from my lap to his. “While you look through these, I’ll search some other places for cards. We need anything with handwriting from Keith, Hal, Pam Noonan, Liz… oh, make it any student or teacher whose name you recognize from Franklin Hall. Plus Dean Underwood.”
Bruce raised his eyebrows at the dean’s name. “Plain Phyllis?”
I shrugged. “Why not?”
“You’re the boss.”
Bruce ran his hand across his brow, as if I’d asked him to dig a ditch. “You’ll owe me.”
“Sure, sure.”
I got up and began my sweep of all the odds and ends spots in my house, all the places I put things on their way to where they belonged.
On a rack with computer peripherals I found a small pile of birthday cards from April that hadn’t made it to the stack I was gathering for Ariana. I usually sifted through them first, including only designs I thought were workable, and also to be sure some seven-year-old didn’t end up with too personal a message among her art supplies.
In the knife drawer in my kitchen were postcards from Hal and Gil, who’d been to Bermuda at the end of June to celebrate his degree, and one from Fran and her husband, Gene, who’d taken their yearly cruise to Mexico. I hoped the scrawled “see you soon” and “the buffets are great” were enough to make some decent comparisons.
The odds and ends drawer in my bedroom dresser was a gold mine of more postcards and thank you notes stretching back to Christmas. Embarrassing, but serendipitous.
In an end table drawer in my den were recent invitations, including one from Hal to attend his graduation. It was a professionally printed card, issued by the school, but he’d handwritten a note about how Bruce was welcome, too.
Dean Underwood, true to form, always handwrote her holiday greetings to her faculty. I never dreamed I’d be putting the note to this unpleasant use.
I had more samples of Rachel’s handwriting than of anyone else. I included several pieces so the set would be complete, though I didn’t agree with Virgil that Rachel was devious enough to have framed herself in order to look innocent.
I returned to the den with a grocery bag half full of relevant correspondence. Bruce had arranged his possibles in stacks, one for each student or teacher.
He pointed to the array. “I should have read these a long time ago. It tells me a lot about how you interact with your students.” He picked a note card off one of the piles and read. “Dear Dr. Knowles, Bijillion thanks for listening the other night. I was ready to give up totally and now I know I can do it. Yay. You rock! Love, Tanya.” He put it down and pulled another. “Dr. Knowles, you’re the best. I never thought I’d pass that test, and could never ever”-those words are underlined, Bruce noted-“have done it without your extra tutoring and encouragement. Franklin Hall needs a statue of you!”
He reached for a third, but I put my hand on his. “I get the idea.”
“I didn’t realize how involved you are outside the classroom.”
“What did you think I do all day?”
He shrugged. “You know, just teach for an hour and fifteen minutes then take off for the pool, and go back the next day for another hour and fifteen minutes.”
I held my hand to my head, palm out. “Where shall I begin,” I emoted.
Bruce drew me into a hug. “You rock,” he said.
Bruce turned in around midnight. By the morning, he’d be back on a regular sleep schedule for the next seven days. A good thing, too, since he had to be up early for his yearly physical, verifying among other things that he wasn’t diabetic, depressed, or prone to seizures. A drug test was also required. All to keep his license. Good to know the skies were safe with MAstar’s PICs.
I was satisfied that I’d gathered enough handwriting samples for Virgil. I wished he’d left the photos so I could get started now vetting the phrases on Rachel’s thesis pages. It was impossible for me to get anywhere from memory. I needed the pages with their gruesome bloodred marks in front of me. But Virgil had been firm about taking everything away with him, even though he’d be missing a chance to profit from the expertise of Ariana Volens, a professional.
“I’ve met Ariana,” Virgil had said, as if that explained why he wouldn’t let me give her copies.
The most I could coax out of my new (again) favorite detective was that I could stop by the office with my samples at ten in the morning.
“That late?” I’d remarked.
He gave me that look, before he realized I was kidding.
Nothing better to do than go to bed. I knew I’d sleep better with Bruce in the house, but I didn’t like that loss of my own confidence. I’d lived alone for many years and not been afraid. The only reason I had an alarm system in the first place was because of my mother. When she became disabled I wanted her to have a way to call for help, so I’d had a security system installed, with a panic button on every pad.
Another reason I’d felt safe had to do with the Henley crime statistic-no murders in recent history, let alone in Franklin Hall where I spent many hours a week.
All bets were off now, and I wondered if I’d ever feel completely safe again.
For tonight, I could relax. I fell asleep counting I-dots and loops and the relative weight of T-bars in fine penmanship.
CHAPTER 21
When Lucy quickly agreed to meet for coffee at Back to the Grind on Tuesday morning, I was mildly shocked. From the way she’d stormed out of the faculty meeting in Franklin Hall yesterday, I’d expected her to hole up somewhere until after Labor Day. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she withdrew and ended her career at Henley before it began.
I felt bad that I’d never invited her for lunch or even a girl-to-girl chat until now, when I needed her. How did I let myself get so busy that I couldn’t reach out to a new teacher in my building? Granted she was in the chemistry department, not math, but a distance of three floors was no excuse.