Chapter Twelve

All in one place

“So someone really is trying to mess with me,” I said, leaning my elbows on the carved up wooden table of the bar that Jess had chosen. “Like, me-me. Not someone in a random British murder-mystery limited series. Me.”

“Sure seems like it,” she said, plucking the lime out of her gin and tonic and giving it another squeeze. “I really wish I had a better explanation.”

“I mean, if it were just one weird thing, I could chalk it up to bureaucratic incompetency and call it a night. Sure I can’t still do that?”

She shrugged. “You can try. But when you add up someone trying to pull your application over the break,” she held up one finger, beginning a count, “someone emptying your mailbox—”

“We have no idea whether that’s even related,” I protested. “It could have been a complete mistake.”

“Not in the face of everything else. The application, the mailbox, and now this official delay letter that clearly targeted you and your interview and used Harvey’s name on official letterhead.” She held three fingers up to my face. “That’s too much for coincidence. Someone’s trying to mess with you, and they’re getting very close to succeeding.”

I sighed. We were sitting in a small, dimly lit bar off a side street in Palo Alto, a place I’d never noticed before, much less visited. That was the point, she told me; the odds of running into anyone from our community college were lower here in this university town. There were round wooden tables and low chairs and the occasional couch up against a wall.

The place was almost completely empty, which made sense; it was Saturday night, but only barely. After Andy had come jogging back down the stairs, a complete count of security cameras trembling on his lips, we walked back out to see whether we could determine which of the campus call boxes was closest to that part of the garage. Privately, I thought that this was almost certainly useless. If the caller had really wanted to cover their tracks, they could have just run further into campus and used a random box. That, or the call would come in with an ID that told the campus police exactly where it had come from. Either seemed equally feasible to me, whereas the proximity theory, despite Andy’s enthusiasm for it, felt overly plotted.

But he led Jess around the nearby paths, and I begrudgingly followed, and she noted all of the location information in her planner. I had to hand it to her—when she sat us all down at the fountain, ostensibly to finish her notes, Andy wasn’t expecting a direct question. But he got one.

“Is there any internal applicant besides Katie who’s considered a front runner this round?”

“Um, no. But you know,” he said, realizing almost as the words left his mouth that he shouldn’t have said them. “I don’t really know much. I’m just an alternate.”

“Sure, but we know you pay attention to things,” Jess said.

“That’s true. I try to, anyway.”

“So I know I can’t really ask about people’s application status. Is it fair for me to ask whether there are multiple internal applicants who will be interviewing?”

Andy looked pained, shifting back and forth on the concrete.

“There always are,” I said. “That’s not exactly a secret. People talk about their own application status all the time.” This was a slight exaggeration, but it got Andy to unclench his hands, just a touch.

“That’s true,” he said. “I can’t get into details, but there are a handful, and you probably already know that, so I’m not telling you anything new.”

“No, you definitely aren’t,” Jess said, raising an eyebrow at me when he glanced down at his phone. “And speaking of that, you’ve been incredibly helpful, but we do need to get back to what we were doing when, you know, you knocked on the door.”

“Oh my god, I’m still so sorry about that! I really didn’t mean to interrupt anything important.”

“No problem. At least, no problem if you let us get back to it.”

He took the hint and stood. “Thank you so much, Professor Thompson, Ms. Torres. I appreciate you taking me seriously.”

“Nice to meet you, Andy,” Jess said. “Keep your eye out. You know where to find your professor if you see anything else strange.”

“And see you in class Monday,” I added.

He almost saluted. I could see his forearm twitch. But he managed to redirect the gesture into a quick brush of the front of his polo. “I’ll see you around,” he said, and, carefully tucking his phone back into his pocket, walked off towards the campus police department.

I had finished my run through then. Did it two and a half times, in fact, took Jess’s notes, made a few changes, and then when my stomach growled loudly enough to echo off of the ceiling, we realized that it was late afternoon. And we called it a day.

Now, rotating my own tumbler in my hands, staring at the smudges my thumbs made in the condensation, I couldn’t bring myself to argue further. “Fine,” I said. “Someone’s trying to mess with me. I’m still stuck on why.”

“Really? That part seems pretty clear. You’re competition. From what your student said, you’re the internal competition. That’s not anything we didn’t already suspect, but it’s good to have it confirmed.”

“So you’re saying someone wants me out of the running. Who?”

She shrugged. “The most likely person would be someone else who’s up for the job and wants you out of the way. Or, if you don’t like that scenario, someone who doesn’t want you in the job, for whatever reason.”

I sighed and sipped my drink. I didn’t usually drink gin and tonics, but Jess had sat me down and gone to the bar and returned with them, and it really wasn’t the kind of day for turning any sort of alcohol down. “Fine. Let’s say you’re right about this. Let’s say someone wants me out of the running, for whatever reason. It’s not like whoever they are is going to put their hand up and identify themselves. Wouldn’t the best thing be for me to just take the interview, do as well as we know I can, and let the committee handle the rest?”

“Normally, I’d say yes. Normally, I’d give you a pep talk about kicking ass and letting your experience and talent speak for itself. But the thing is,” she said, pausing for a minute as a waitress plonked a plate of nachos down in front of us. “Mmmmmm. I love fake cheese.”

“You were saying?”

“Right. The thing is, I’m not sure we can ignore the other side of this.”

“Other side?”

“The side where people are dropping like flies.”

“Oh come on. Are you serious?”

She didn’t answer, just shoved a chip loaded with dripping cheese and olives into her mouth.

“You’re serious. You really think that whatever happened to Maggie—which I’m still not convinced wasn’t an accident—and what happened to Aurelia and what happened to Sasha is somehow related to me?” My voice squeaked on the last word. I didn’t care.

She pushed the plate a couple of inches in my direction. “Eat. You need it.”

I took a single chip, slid it into my mouth, and raised an eyebrow at her as I chewed.

“Fine. Yes. Well, not yes like I think that they are definitely connected, but yes like I think that we can’t write it off. There are strange things happening with your application, and there are strange, and violent, things happening to English Department faculty and people connected to the committee. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m seeing patterns where they don’t exist. But I’d never forgive myself if I ignored what I do see and something happened to you.”

“I appreciate the concern. I really do. But my interview is in less than forty-eight hours, and we know it isn’t going to be postponed. That has to be my first priority.”

“Higher priority than being alive?”

“I mean…maybe? I don’t exactly have a plan B at this point.”

She shook her head. “I get why you left Sam, but sometimes I wish you had waited another month or so.” I opened my mouth, and she held up a hand to cut me off. “I know, I know. You couldn’t have managed the interview process if you’d still been living there, I do get it. But Sam is large and male and the city is so much further away from all of this than Sunnyvale.”

“Honestly, I’ve been half-afraid that he’s going to show up and cause trouble,” I admitted. “A few times on campus I’ve seen someone who looks similar, from a distance, and it’s freaked me out.”

“That’s an interesting twist. I hadn’t thought about that. Does he know enough to mess with your application? Did you ever explain the process?”

“Several times,” I said dryly, “but I don’t think he retained enough.”

“Still. It’s a possibility.”

It said a lot about the situation that the thought of my ex deliberately interfering with my job application struck me as a better explanation, or at least a more manageable one, than a malevolent, anonymous colleague.

“Eat up,” Jess said. “I’m going to go get us another round, and then we’re going to work through our list of suspects.”

I had a chip in my mouth, and she was halfway to the bar by the time I managed to swallow it, but I still muttered, to myself, “We have a list of suspects?”

She returned, a moment later, with two tequila shots, limes, and a salt shaker.

“What, are we twenty-one again?”

“Don’t argue.”

I suppose we weren’t really twenty-one. Twenty-one year olds count down, make a big show of the shudder that bad bar tequila can give you, give the salt a slobbery lick, suck hard on the limes. We took our shots like businesswomen trying to run a meeting filled with sloppy near-retirees, all efficiency, something made far easier by the way the alcohol slipped smoothly down my throat. “Shit, this is good,” I told her. “What did you order?”

“Don’t worry about it. Channel Miss Marple. Or Jessica Fletcher.”

“Personally, I’ve always been partial to Ariadne Oliver.”

“Ari-who?”

“Agatha Christie’s self-insert character. Mystery writer who solves mysteries sometimes. Way more self-aware.”

“Okay, her. Be her then. Whatever lets us get down to the details. Who else do you know on campus who might have applied?”

I considered. “Lucy. John. Probably that one woman about our age who works mostly nights and whose name I can never remember. There have to be more internal than that, I think, but we don’t all know each other.”

“They may know you, though. Who else have you pissed off professionally?”

“That’s just it. Aurelia is probably the only one, and she’s not exactly in a position to do much now.”

Jess nodded. “And that’s why I’m taking this so seriously. You handled the writing lab as well as you could, but there was conflict there, and people know it. Andy won’t be the only one who’s noticed.”

“Noticed what?” I asked, my stomach tightening.

“That you were in both locations, for Aurelia and Sasha. And Aurelia being out of things doesn’t hurt you at all.”

I closed my eyes briefly. “I was in both locations.”

“They are going to eventually be looking for suspects, if Sasha wasn’t natural causes, and I don’t think we can assume that she was.”

The room began to spin. I was mostly certain that it wasn’t the tequila. I nodded.

“There is no way they aren’t going to question you more than they already have, and I know this place. The department is never going to put off a hiring process once it’s begun. There’s too much to lose. But if some fuckup cop decides that you had something to do with this, even tangentially, that’s going to take over all your time and energy.”

“So you think that they might think,” I said, involuntarily lowering and raising my voice at the same time, until I sounded like a very quiet hamster, “that I was involved?”

Jess didn’t break eye contact. “They might.”

“Fuck me.”

“And now you know what the tequila is for.”

Jess gave me a half smile. “Need another shot?”

“I think I’m okay,” I said, and then quickly amended, “for now.”

“Great. Because we need an actual plan. There’s Lucy and John, and then anyone else who was tied to the writing lab thing. Anyone else been acting strange?”

I considered. “Lucy for sure. She’s been practically throwing help at me, though that could be her feeling guilty for wishing Maggie was out of the picture.”

“Lucy has almost too many motives. She’s in the running, she’s another long-term adjunct, and she never managed to get Maggie on her side. Was she involved at all in the Latino/a Student Center thing?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“Still. Could have been. I’ll keep my ear out on that one. Who else?”

“John’s applying,” I said, “but he always does.”

“And he never gets hired. Maybe he’s tired of that.”

“Says he doesn’t want it. His whole thing is making them turn him down, and then when they feel somewhat guilty about that, nabbing the extra paid assignments out of pity.”

“Calculating.”

“Exactly.”

“So he’s still on our list. Who else is acting strangely? Anyone at all.”

“I mean, everyone, at least a little bit. Everyone is telling me how sorry they are, going out of their way to be understanding.”

“Fine, but does anyone stand out? Extra-overboard?”

“I don’t know, maybe Charles?”

“Right. The complaint. I still haven’t heard anything out of the ordinary, but that doesn’t mean much. These things can take a really long time to sort out.”

“And it doesn’t actually have anything to do with me.”

“No, not directly, but if he had anything to do with Maggie, he might be feeling guilty.”

“So so far we have Lucy and Charles, both potentially feeling guilty, which honestly makes them less likely to have it out for me.”

“Haven’t you read any true crime? Don’t the criminals always hang around, just a little too close? Especially if they’re obsessed.”

“Especially if they’re guilty.”

“Yeah,” Jess said. “That too.”

“So how are you imagining that this worked? Charles or Lucy just…somehow killed a couple of people and, I don’t know, did something to another? Do we even know what happened to Sasha, officially? Don’t we need a weapon?” I finished, feeling a little silly, like I’d slipped from real life into a game of Clue.

Jess shook her head and leaned in a little closer to me over the table. I found myself concentrating on the partial-words cut into the old, worn wood. MO. FU. PEN. “My guess is that it’s poison. Don’t ask me what kind. I failed bio. But we have one person who died from a fall. Another person,” another finger, “who became violently ill. And a third,” a third finger, “who died, and from what you’ve told me, it could have easily been from something she consumed.”

“The fall still doesn’t fit.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it just took longer for her. Maybe it didn’t hit until she reached the parking garage.”

We both sat, silently, for a few moments.

“So I can see why, maybe,” I began, “someone like Lucy might want Maggie out of the way.” It felt incredibly strange and surreal as I said it, but I continued, trying not to stay there in the moment. “But why the others? Why more than one person?”

“Isn’t that always the way? You kill someone once, and then it becomes an option. Maybe not easier, but more feasible, if that makes sense. And maybe it’s because she was on the hiring committee. And then Sasha was going to help you.”

“That’s kind of a stretch. And then we have to assume that she’s done a complete 180 and wants to help me now.”

“Okay, let’s say it’s Charles then. The letter you saw was reason enough to want Maggie sidelined.”

“Right, but then Aurelia?”

“Is she on his tenure committee?”

I had to stop and think about that one. “I don’t know.”

Jess tapped another note into her phone. “I can find out about that. It’s worth knowing who is.”

I nearly inhaled the sip of cocktail I was taking and instead spit it back into my glass. “Ew. Sorry, that’s gross. I just had this image of Charles as Rambo, taking out each member of his tenure committee, one by one.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I suppose that would accomplish…something.”

“See? I can’t imagine how anyone would think that was a good idea. One person, sure. But three?”

“I’ll still look into it. And you never know who knew what and what they might have said.”

“I guess so. So who are we left with?”

“You know, the only other person who stands out in this whole thing is our little friend from earlier today.”

“Andy? Seriously?”

“He’s been awfully present. And we know that he’s doing his own ‘investigation,’” she said, and I could hear the air quotes. “Seriously though, maybe it’s delusions of grandeur? Better to be a police intern when things are blowing up on campus. Lots more to investigate. And we have no idea how mentally stable he is.”

“I guess. I just feel like we’re not looking at this the right way. Everyone fits some of the criteria.”

“But nobody fits them all.”

We drank in silence after that for a good long while. I don’t know what Jess was thinking. I was thinking that the odds of more than one person caring enough to mess with me and potentially murder my colleagues was vanishingly low. It would require a level of tag-teaming that I didn’t think anyone on campus could reasonably muster. We academics don’t play all that well together. It’s hammered out of us, practically by design. And students can barely get it together to do group projects, which, at my most cynical, I often thought of as solo work for an audience anyway.

So one person, then. The names lazily flipped past each other in my brain. Lucy, Charles, Andy. Lucy, Charles, Andy.

“We could also be missing someone,” Jess finally said. “That or somebody on campus is way more of a professional at this than I’d ever like to consider.”

“Or it’s Sam in the end,” I grumbled. “Coming back to take his revenge on me for taking my revenge.”

Jess didn’t smile at that. “It definitely could be. We can’t rule him out. Do you have any idea how he reacted after you left?”    

“None at all.”

“Then he makes the list. It’d be more of a stretch, given that the actual violence hasn’t happened to you, but we can’t ignore Sam.”

“Shh!” I said, suddenly realizing that the bar was a lot more full than it had been when we arrived. “Keep your voice down if you’re going to use names.”

She gave an exaggerated glance over one shoulder, then turned back to me. “Really? You think he comes down to Palo Alto from the city to hang out on a Saturday night.”

I cringed. “You never know who knows whom.”

She smiled. “Only an English teacher. Only an English teacher would know exactly how to use ‘who’ and ‘whom’ and then find a way to incorporate that into everyday life. Okay then. Look, if you ever want to talk about what happened with the person we shall not name, I’m here. But in the short term, I think there’s something more important we need to do.”

“What?”

“I’m not letting you go back home alone. Not if someone’s lurking. Let’s go check out your place and make sure it’s all right.”