“Hello, Emma,” she says. “How is everything going?”
She looks hopeful, but I don’t want to give anything away. I nod.
“Going well. I have a few things I’m trying to figure out, and I think you might be able to help me. Are there any pictures or participant lists for the criminal justice club? I have a bit of a hunch I want to follow up on, but I need to have the names of people who were involved in the club and any pictures that they might have taken for the University,” I say.
“Sure,” Nancy says. “I can get that for you. Just give me one second.” She starts typing commands into the computer. “All clubs registered with the University have to maintain records with the participants, insurance forms, dues, all those details. We maintain the records for the alumni association, so we should have them all the way from the beginning.”
“Thank you. I really appreciate it,” I say.
She prints out a stack of papers and hands them to me. I scan through them and notice the dates on the top of the last page. It should be listing the participants of the first club, but the years are off.
“Oh,” I say. “I think you missed a couple of years.”
“Did I?” she frowns. She looks at the screen and shakes her head. “Nope. That’s all of them.”
“Professor Harris mentioned the club has been going for twenty years,” I say.
“He must be counting the years that he taught before he transferred here,” she says.
“I didn’t realize he started teaching at another school.”
She nods. “Came here highly recommended, though.”
“I’m sure he was. I’ll clarify it with him when I can catch up with him. I went by his office, but he wasn’t there,” I say.
“I wouldn’t think he would be,” she says.
I was reading through the lists waiting for something to pop out at me, but now my eyes snap up to her. “What do you mean?”
“He’s probably seeing to the arrangements for the funeral.”
My stomach sinks. “Funeral?”
“Yes. For Marissa. The woman who was murdered? She was his housekeeper.” Nancy shudders. “They found her in his driveway. Can you even imagine? And he’s just too kind-hearted to make Marissa’s husband try to put together all the arrangements himself.”
My mind explodes in a rush of connections and flashing links as images and words settle into place. Holding up the file, I thank Nancy again and rush out of the office. My first stop is the library’s computer bank. It only takes a few minutes for the picture I was looking for to come up.
“That piece of shit,” I mutter to myself.
A few more minutes later, papers in hand, I leave the library and make a phone call. When I’m done, I head for the seminar room in the building across the street. Murillo is just getting her notes written on the projector when I storm in. She sighs and rolls her eyes when she sees me.
“I have no interest in speaking with you again, Emma,” she says.
“Either step outside with me or tell your students to leave,” I say. “You don’t want them to hear this.”
“I’m not going to do either,” Murillo says. “But you are going to leave. I have a study group to instruct.”
“Then I guess you don’t mind if they hear about you and Professor Harris.”
“I told you we wish to keep that confidential, but if you refuse, then I can’t stop you. Les and I are both adults,” she says.
“Is that what you told him when you found out he was sleeping with Julia?”
She straightens, her eyes widening and color rising to the tops of her cheekbones.
“I’ll be right back,” she says to the class filtering into their seats. “I suggest you take out your notes and start preparing yourselves. This session will go quickly.”
We walk out into the hall and she ushers me into an empty classroom.
“Tell me, Eleanor, did you always know? Or did you convince yourself that she was just a one-time thing?” I ask.
“What is it that think you know?” she hisses.
“Is that the way you’re going to approach this?” I ask with a mirthless laugh. “Alright. Then I’ll dispense with the small talk. You and Professor Harris have been together for a long time, yes?”
“Fifteen years,” she says with a note of defeat in her voice.
“But you aren’t married?” I ask.
“No.” She straightens up and her tone intensifies. “And we don’t need to be. Our commitment doesn’t require a piece of paper to make it valid. I’ve known from the beginning that Les doesn’t believe in marriage, and I made the decision that being with him is more important.”
“He told you he doesn’t believe in marriage?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Then would it come as a surprise to you to find out he’s married to Julia Meyer?”
“What?” she gasps, somewhere between incredulous and crushed.
I hold out one of the papers in my hand. “A copy of their marriage certificate. From another state, of course. He wouldn’t want anybody finding out he’s married to a girl who has been missing for thirteen years. That might bring up some inconvenient questions, now wouldn’t it?”
She shakes her head. “No. No, this can’t be. They can’t be married.”
“Oh, but they can be,” I say. “You see, I just got off the phone with an old friend of theirs. Corey Matteo. Does that name ring a bell?”
“Corey?” she asks. “That’s the TA Julia was stalking at her old school.”
I laugh. “You really believed that? It was all a story, Professor. Your Les was teaching at Larsonville when a certain young girl came to tour the school. She caught his eye, and he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Then another pretty girl passed his way, and he couldn’t stop thinking about her, either. That one ended up dead. At least, that’s the way it looks. I’ll have time to prove it later. Right now, all I’m thinking about is the first girl. Julia. By the time she came back for orientation, they
