Woman in the Fifth

he would personally ensure that I never entered a center of higher education again.’

‘And where was Shelley during all of this?’

‘Her parents had taken her home to Cincinnati — where she was kept locked away from the press.’

‘And meanwhile …’

‘I stayed in Douglas’s basement and ignored all knocks on the door and all phone calls. But I did email a statement to the press, in which I categorically denied that I had ever demanded the abortion, as she had never told me that she was pregnant. And as we had practiced safe sex …

‘Well, this created a new feeding frenzy. The next day the television crews caught Shelley and her family en route to church, and started hurling questions at her like, “Are you lying about being pregnant? Did you make it all up … ?” Shelley looked like a deer caught in the headlights. Later that afternoon, the family lawyer issued a statement, saying that I was being even more of a monster by calling Shelley a liar … and how they would have certified medical substantiation of her pregnancy within forty-eight hours.

‘In the middle of all this madness, Doug was fantastic. He ran interference for me, keeping all intruders at bay and screening all phone calls … except for one from Megan which came right after Shelley’s lawyer appeared on TV, saying that I was a beast. Megan must have gotten the number from Susan — who, in turn, had to have been told by Robson where I was hiding out. Anyway, when I got on the line, I started saying something lame like, “Megan, darling, I know this is awful. And I know you must hate me for all this. But I just want you to know—”

‘She cut me off. “I never want to talk to you again,” she said, crying. Then she hung up.

‘Naturally I called her straight back. Susan answered — and said, her voice completely calm, “You will never see — or hear from — your daughter again.” And then she added, “If I were you I’d kill myself.”

‘But it was Shelley who did that. Late that night, while everyone was asleep, she left her parents’ house. Around two hours later, she jumped off a highway overpass a mile from where they lived. She landed right in the path of an oncoming truck. The cops said someone saw her standing on the overpass for several minutes before she jumped. This led them to surmise that she was waiting for some large vehicle to approach.’

‘Or maybe she was trying to find the courage to jump.’

‘She left no note, or any hint that she was planning to …’

I fell silent and reached for the whisky bottle, pouring myself another substantial slug.

‘Do you think she jumped because she was about to be revealed as a fantasist?’

‘Perhaps. Or maybe her father had been making her life hell for her. And if her obsessive behavior was anything to go by, she was certainly not in the most balanced and reasonable state … which, in turn, was all due to me breaking it off with her.’

‘Harry — if the diary proved anything, it’s that she lived in a fantasy world. She didn’t reveal the extent of her compulsions while you were getting friendly with each other … which means she was either very good at disguising her manias or you were completely blind to them. But knowing you, I sense it was the former. Had she shown telltale signs of obsessiveness—’

‘I would have ended it well before we slept together.’

‘My point entirely. But instead, she wove this fiction about “having your baby”. Robson went public with it. You countered, saying she was making it up. When faced with probable exposure as a fantasist, she killed herself.’

‘That’s one interpretation.’

‘Was it your friend Douglas who found out all the details of the suicide?’ Margit asked.

I nodded.

‘And did he inform you about Robson and your ex-wife?’

‘Doug finally did tell me about the rumors going around. He also admitted that he had known about them for the past few months — but felt uneasy about telling me, in case it blew over. I understood — especially as I never told Doug that I knew that, a couple of years earlier, his ex-wife had been sleeping with the college librarian … who was also a woman.

‘Anyway, Doug was also unable to accuse Robson of leaking both the story and Shelley’s diary to the press. He was coming up for promotion in a few months and, if he crossed Robson, he was finished. Still, privately, he was appalled — and encouraged me to simply disappear. “You start exposing Robson now, and it’s going to look like you’re trying to deflect responsibility. It’s really best if you just vanish.”

‘The next day, the Cincinnati medical examiner revealed that Shelley hadn’t been pregnant when she killed herself. Within an hour, the family lawyer issued a statement saying that it was medically plausible that her period had been several weeks late — and that the pregnancy test might have been faulty. “Whether or not she was actually carrying Professor Ricks’s child,” he said, “is less important than the fact that she thought she was pregnant — and that Ricks, upon hearing the news, dropped her and insisted on the abortion … a demand which sent her fragile psyche into a downward spiral, eventually resulting in her suicide. Ricks, in essence, murdered this poor young woman.”

‘Well, this spin on the story played everywhere — and I decided to take Doug’s advice. I got him to go over to my house when Susan wasn’t there to collect my passport and laptop. I went downtown to my bank. When I walked in, the manager told me that my custom was no longer welcome here. I said, “Fine by me, because I’m closing my account.” I had twenty-two thousand dollars in a savings account. I transferred fifteen of that into a mutual fund for Megan. I took the rest in cash — and grabbed my things at Doug’s and got into my beat-up Volvo and left town. Eight hours later I was in Chicago. I found a cheap hotel — four hundred and fifty dollars a week — off Lake Shore Drive. I parked my bags and drove out into the ‘burbs and stopped at the first used-car lot I found and accepted three grand in cash for my Volvo. Then I caught a cab back to the subway, returned to the hotel, and began a life of … well, nothing, really. My room was shabby, but adequate. It had a lumpy bed, and an old television, and a toilet that flushed, if you were lucky, on the third go. But the management asked no questions, and I paid my weekly bill on time, and didn’t ever complain or say much to them during the weeks I was there.’

‘How many weeks?’

‘Six.’

‘What did you do during that time?’

‘I forget.’

‘I see.’

‘It’s the truth. I remember sleeping until noon every day and always having breakfast in the same little luncheonette, and never buying a newspaper or magazine because I was afraid of reading something about the case. I never checked my email. I spent a lot of time at the movies. I bought paperbacks in second-hand shops, I drank in down-at-heel bars near the hotel, then watched shit television half the night. I suppose I was in total shock. I never had any sort of emotional highs or lows. I just dragged myself through the day like the walking dead. Until, one evening, I came home from an all-day session at the same multiplex cinema. The night porter on duty told me that a guy had come by that morning, asking for me. “He looked like some sort of process server to me,” he said, and added that he was certain to come back very early the next morning, “because that’s what those assholes all do“.

‘I went upstairs and called Doug. He asked me why the hell hadn’t I answered any of the emails he’d sent me, and did I know that Shelley’s father had made good on his threat to sue the college? The college, in turn, had decided (at Robson’s urging) to sue me for defamation of their public reputation, gross professional negligence and so forth, and had hired a private detective to find me. “If you’re calling me, the gumshoe has obviously tracked you down,” Doug said. When I explained that it seemed I was about to be served papers, he told me to flee immediately. “Get out of the country now, otherwise prepare to be destroyed in the courts.”

‘So I said, “OK, I’ll get the next flight to Paris.”’

‘And once you got here?’

‘I did manage to get back into contact with Megan — and we actually started a correspondence until her mother found out and put an end to it. I haven’t heard from my daughter since then. But after they reached some sort of smallish payoff arrangement with Shelley’s dad, the college did decide to drop its threatened action against