The Ghosts of Lovely Women Read online

  “Did you say she wrote about teachers?” Josh asked.

  *

  I got home and glanced into my back seat; I realized with a gasp that I had forgotten to drop off Kathy Olchen’s briefcase. “Damn,” I said. I rushed upstairs and found Kathy’s number on the faculty list. I dialed it, petting P.G. with my foot. Four rings, and then her answering machine with a terse message.

  “Kathy, this is Teddy. Rosa gave me your briefcase to deliver to you, and I forgot. If it’s okay, I’ll drop it off in the morning because it’s raining now and getting late. Okay — uh— call me if you need it before then.” I left my number and hung up.

  Then I graded papers. This was a perpetual action; it was not as frequent as breathing, but about as frequent as bathing. I was frowning at the sentence “Gatsby thinks outside the box ‘cuz he has the ability to dream.” Cliché, I wrote. Spelling. Informal diction.

  “I spend more time writing in the damn margins than they spend writing the paper,” I complained to P.G., who lifted his head in what I chose to see as agreement, although something in his eyes hinted at “You’re insane.”

  I would be insane soon, I thought, if I continued to grade papers in a silent room, sharing my observations with a Beagle. My sister had once discreetly hinted that my life was bland. She was right.

  I sighed and put a paperclip on the completed stack of essays. I was bland. Blah. If I were Lucia, I would probably have marched out of Derek’s guest room the night before and slithered into his bed. Somehow I would have produced red lingerie and a bottle of wine.

  No, my mind protested with its typical reason. Charlie had been there. I had been tired, shaken. And we’d known each other for precisely two days. Even if I could have gone back, I wouldn’t have done anything differently. “I am who I am, P.G.,” I said. He seemed to accept this.

  The phone rang with a jarring sound. I was hesitant to answer it in my current reclusive mood, and with my ever-present Richard fear. I did, though.

  It was Derek, his voice clipped. “It’s me — stay by the buzzer, I’m coming over.”

  “I—” He had hung up.

  I did that thing they do in movies — I stared at the receiver as though it would clarify my confusion. What was this? Where had Derek’s easy-going politeness gone? Was he somehow turning into Richard?

  The thought depressed me. I had found another e-mail from my ex when I got home suggesting that “we should meet” because we needed to “talk some things out.” I deleted it.

  When I realized there was an attraction between Derek and me I had been convinced that he was nothing like my previous boyfriend. I thought of Richard after the first time I’d gone to his house with him; we sat kissing on his couch in a darkened room, and I searched his face, in my idealism, for some sign that he was my destiny. He, temporarily sated, had smirked at me and lifted his remote to check the baseball scores.

  But Derek, after one brief and innocent evening, had kissed my hand and looked at me as though I were Maid Marian, and it had stayed with me, that kiss, burning on the top of my hand all day as a reminder of what might be.

  I was standing by the bell, as instructed, but I still jumped when it brzzzed in my ear. “Derek?”

  “Buzz me up.”

  I did, and then I opened the door. He was there almost instantly — he had run up the stairs. He walked rapidly down the hall; he pulled me into an embrace, kissed my hair, my ear.

  “Derek, what’s going on?”

  He was peering into my apartment. “Everything okay here? No one’s been back?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Let’s go inside.” He pulled me into my own home and sat me on my couch. His hands were shaking slightly. Suddenly I feared that someone in my family had been hurt… but how would Derek know?

  “What?” I demanded.

  “Kathy Olchen’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “She was run down by a car earlier this evening. She was going out to dinner with her brother, near Rosita’s Restaurant. Hit and Run.”

  “But I just called her.”

  He stared at me blankly. I felt blank as well; we were in that moment of shock when the brain doesn’t allow anything to process. Finally Derek shook his head. “I was worried about you.”

  “Accident,” I said through the ringing in my ears.

  “No, Teddy. I don’t think so.”

  His eyes were wide, his pupils larger than usual. “Her brother called me. She still had the brand new phone tree sitting out at her place, the one that lists me as department head. He called Anthony, then me. He says…” He swallowed and squeezed my hand. “Kathy’s apartment had been ransacked. Just yesterday.”

  “Like mine.”

  “That’s my worry.”

  “Oh, God. Poor Kathy.”

  “It’s terrible.”

  “I just talked to her. I just saw her. I mean, I saw her every day. Why would we ever assume that our colleagues, who are there and solid and healthy…” Images of the way Josh and I had teased her on the landscaping committee charged through my mind, leaving a trail of guilt.

  “Tom — that’s her brother — he saw it happen. The impact. The car burst out of a side street and then disappeared again. He thinks the car was gray, blue, maybe black. It was raining and getting dark.”

  “And you’re upset.”

  “Her brother thinks it was intentional. He said Kathy asked him to go to dinner with her because she wanted to “talk something out.” She had something on her mind, she said, and she needed his advice. That makes me upset for Kathy and worried for you.” It was disconcerting to me that Derek was so unusually agitated. I needed him to be calm so that he could help me process my own fear.

  “Do you want coffee or tea or something?”

  He sighed. “If you don’t mind, just this once, I’d like to smoke. Do you want me to go outside? In the hall?”

  “No, that’s okay, uh— I don’t have an ashtray…”

  “Don’t need one,” he said, pulling out a black pipe with claret-colored edging on its intricately-carved bowl.

  “You smoke a pipe.” I almost laughed.

  “Just once a month, as a treat. No Freud jokes, please. I actually started smoking because my college roommate had a pipe. Eventually he got me one as a gift. I used to smoke it all the time, but the doctor linked it to some stomachaches. Also warned of mouth cancer,” he said, already sounding calmer now that he had the tip between his lips and was concentrating on lighting a match and holding the flame over his tobacco.

  In an instant my apartment smelled like vanilla, apples, and wood. It was sweet and comforting as a campfire.

  Derek puffed for a moment, looking like a stereotypical professor or someone’s European grandfather. “I’ve been going over this in my head, all the way over. This is about Jessica, and you’re in danger.”

  “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “No. But when you put it all together, it seems likely. When did Jessica put up that website?”

  “Uh— I’m not sure. Last spring, while she was still in school.”

  “Because by summer she had already given you the card, telling you to look at it.”

  “Right.”

  “So at least Jessica thought you’d known about it for a whole year.”

  “Maybe. She hinted on the phone that she suspected I had never looked at it.”

  “Okay. But she was also still writing that journal while the website was running. She makes oblique references to the site in her journal, and she also mentions Kathy’s project.”

  “Right — but that’s just it — she only mentions them.”

  “And yet you and Kathy are the teachers from St. James whose homes were searched.”

  “And Kathy is dead,” I said, still not really believing it. “I was supposed to give her back her briefcase tomorrow. Now I can’t…”

  “What?”

  “She left her briefcase at work. Rosa asked me to bring it to her, but
I forgot. It’s in my car.”

  He was up in an instant. “I’m getting it.”

  “Derek — what? We have no right to go into her case, that’s—”

  “I want to know what the hell is going on around here. You could be in danger.” He left and I sat, stunned, on my couch. Moments before I had thought my life was too boring. Now I realized that I preferred it that way. P.G. lingered nervously at my feet; he could tell something was up. “It’s okay, boy,” I said.

  I buzzed Derek back in and he appeared holding Kathy’s briefcase, which he set on the floor. He flopped back on my couch, his pipe clenched in his teeth, and rubbed his face with his hands. Then he looked at me. He removed the pipe and said, “I’m the department chair. That gives me the authority to look at her papers if I believe that she was involved in something unsavory. That would be grounds for dismissal.”

  “But doesn’t that only apply to her classroom? I mean, this is her private property.”

  “What if it helps us catch a murderer? Anyway, it’s moot, because the case is locked. Maybe we can get your locksmith again…”

  We both looked at her briefcase, a forlorn thing. I thought of Kathy on the school grounds committee, spinning her combination locks with authority. I grabbed Derek’s arm. “I know the combination. I saw her at the meeting. Wait. Wait. It’s Four-two-oh. Four twenty.”

  Derek set his pipe down on my coffee table. “I think you’re right. I think I heard her say something about it to Janet Arrington at a department meeting. She said she liked the number 420 because it’s her little homage to Lincoln. Four score.”

  He picked up the case, set it in his lap, and spun the little gold dials. Then, pressing his fingers on the clasps on both sides, he pushed outward — and the locks snapped open.

  *

  Kathy, not surprisingly, was very neat, if her briefcase were any indication. She had pens and pencils tucked in their appropriate slots, a calculator in its built-in sleeve. Her papers were slotted into labeled file folders: “American History,” “World History,” and “Psychology.”

  “Three preps,” I said. “She was doing a lot of work.”

  “No one’s going to have more than two next year,” Derek said absently.

  Despite my current depression at the reality that we were touching a dead woman’s private things, I felt a little thrill of hope at Derek’s words. That meant he was coming back next year.

  “Check the psychology folder,” I said.

  He picked it up and flipped through it. Meanwhile I saw a little piece of St. James stationary on which Kathy had scrawled something in less-than-neat handwriting. Maybe she’d been in a hurry. “Customer Number: NR1415,” it said. It seemed like nothing more than a notation of some mail-order transaction. Then, at the bottom of the same pink square, it said, “2000 dollars so far. I think Teddy Thurber knows, too. I need evidence of this transaction.”

  “Look at this,” I said.

  He tore his eyes away from his folder to glance at my paper. “Huh.”

  “Any ideas? Can this number be related to the history department?”

  “Doubt it. People submit receipts for reimbursement, but we don’t need customer numbers or anything like that — you know the drill.”

  “Why is my name here? What do I know? I have no idea what this is!”

  It was disturbing to find my own name in Kathy’s briefcase. Suddenly I felt marked for death. Jessica, Kathy. Both of them dead, and both of them linked to me in some way. And Kathy said she thought I knew — but she was wrong. I didn’t know anything. Might someone else think I knew something? Someone who had killed Kathy? What was I supposed to know something about? Did this relate to Jessica?

  Derek interrupted my thoughts. “Listen to this. It looks like she was working on writing an article. Something she was going to submit to a scholarly journal. It’s about her psych project.”

  He paused, looking for the line he wanted, then read out loud: “The students, in discussing the psyches of those around them, have the potential to experience what Aristotle termed “catharsis,” which he meant as both purgation and purification. There is much that an average teenager wishes to purge in the emotional sense; in addition, he or she longs to start over. In acknowledging the potentially problematic psyches of those around them, they are giving themselves a chance to purify — to start anew.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Listen: ‘In last year’s projects I saw one student begin to come to terms with a parents’ alcoholism and perpetual denial of the problem; another theorized that her father did not like women and wished that she had been a boy. Her father knew only how to relate to his male children, she contended, and rewarded only “male” behavior in her when she was young — her attempts at sports, her toughness in standing up for herself, her appreciation of violent movies like The Terminator. When forced to acknowledge her “feminine” side, such as the pain of menstruation or her occasional tears, he would tell her to “man up.” She fears that her father is masking some perceived defect in himself: homosexuality, perhaps, or an unresolved conflict with his own mother. Perhaps, she posits, he was abused by his mother as a child, and therefore sees the male gender as the only “safe” one.’”

  “Wow. Is that Jessica, do you think?”

  “Would anyone else be capable of that kind of analysis? Wild as it may be?”

  “I don’t know. Boy, Lucia wasn’t kidding — Kathy was playing with fire here.”

  “Yes. I think it’s irresponsible… and yet I agree with some of what Kathy writes.” He seemed to be considering something — weighing it. “But this… can you imagine if the students took these theories home? Threw them at their parents, their brothers, their sisters? We aren’t supposed to be arming their ignorance, we’re supposed to be edifying their lives.”

  I sighed. “I can’t get a handle on all of this. And Derek — she has my name! What does she think I know? I don’t know anything!”

  Derek clamped an arm about me; it hinted at protective custody. “We’re calling the police,” he said.

  Thirteen

  “You talk like a child… Nora, you’re sick; you’ve got a fever.

  I almost think you’re out of your head.”

  —Torvald, A Doll’s House, Act III

  I didn’t attend Jessica’s funeral on Saturday; I was in a meeting with Derek, Detective McCall and a colleague at the police station. They were making us go over it again and again — what link might there be between Kathy, Jessica, me. McCall didn’t blink when we told her we’d broken into the briefcase. “Her brother has been very cooperative,” she said. “I’ll have him sign a release.” She was already reading over the material that had recently interested Derek and me.

  “Did Jessica ever speak to you about this project?” she asked.

  “No — uh, not that I can think of. I mean, if she mentioned it, I’m sure I didn’t think it was worth storing as a permanent memory.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I turned in Jessica’s journal, as well. “I don’t know if this will be of any help, but it’s an old journal she did for me. She never claimed it, and it was sitting in a drawer. It suggests that she was setting up that website while she was still a senior in high school. Her own little project — her way of achieving revenge for women of the past and establishing boundaries for women of the present. Something like that.”

  “Do you want it back?” asked McCall. “I can have someone copy it.”

  “That would be nice,” I said. I kept thinking there must be something in the journal that I’d missed — something that would explain it all.

  When we left the police station, Derek’s eyes studied my face in the sunshine. “You look like you slept all right. No fears about the new lock?”

  “Yes and no,” I said. I’d had some trouble falling asleep, and I’d taken the unprecedented act of drinking fairly hard stuff before bed, just to soothe my nerves. In my case that was Kahlua and cream, but it had the desired
effect. My mind, after all the talk of Kathy’s horrible death and our minute examination of any link we could see between her breakin and mine, had exhausted me, and I’d dropped into bed and into eventual slumber. “Murder is an exhausting business,” I said.

  “Sounds like the title of a Bogart movie.”

  “A bad one.”

  “The one Warner Brothers doesn’t talk about.”

  We moved toward my car. Derek had walked to my house and we’d driven in together, leaving a sad P.G. behind. Now we linked hands so naturally that it took me a moment to realize that we were walking that way — hand in hand. “You have plans for lunch?” he asked.

  “Uh— sort of.” My long-lost brother had called that morning and asked if I’d like a free meal. He often did this, and I often wanted free food. “My brother Will invited me. Would you like to join us? It’s just a casual pub lunch.”

  He shook his head. “You enjoy the time with your brother. You told me he travels a lot, right? I’ll call you tonight. Maybe we can do dinner.”

  “Will you have Charlie?”

  “Not on Saturdays, no. Monday and Thursday, yes. And last Tuesday, when you came. Cindy had a study meeting with her class group.”

  “Monday and Thursday works out very well with my schedule. I have class on Thursday night.”

  “Grad school?”

  “Yeah. My current course meets once a week. I’m plugging away — I’ve got about 20 credits toward my M.A.”

  “An accomplished woman.”

  I took out my keys and unlocked the driver’s door. “An ambitious one, anyway.” I turned to him; he surprised me with a quick, warm kiss, and then walked in his leisurely way around the car to the passenger seat.

  I could feel the silliness of the smile on my lips, but I didn’t manage to wipe it off entirely before he got in and saw me. His smile was silly, too.

  *

  Derek told me to park at my building and he would walk home. “That way I can help to check for unsavory characters,” he said. He wasn’t kidding, which depressed me. I was soon glad of his plan, though, because Richard, my stalker ex, was standing outside my building and pressing a buzzer that I presumed was mine.