found the body.”
“How did he get in? I thought those rooms were always kept locked.”
“They are – at least the doors the public uses are. But there’s a back door that workmen use. It opens up from the crawl space that has all the heating equipment and plumbing for the building.”
I leaned towards her. “Rosalie, maybe you shouldn’t say anything about this to anyone else.”
She looked stricken. “You mean I might compromise the case?”
“I guess, until the case is solved, the fewer people who know about the details the better.”
“I haven’t told anyone but you,” she said.
“Good.” Her eyes still sought reassurance. I did my best. “Rosalie, it’s okay. When you told me, you knew it wouldn’t go any further.”
“Because you’re in a relationship with a police officer, too.”
“Right.”
The cloud lifted. “It’s like a sisterhood, isn’t it?” she said.
“That’s what it is,” I said, “a sisterhood, so if you want to talk about this to anyone, you can talk to me.”
“What can she talk to you about?” Neither of us had heard Livia come into the office. Her hands clutched the poppy-painted silk scarf draped around her shoulders, and the shadows under her deep-set eyes were so dark she looked as if she’d been beaten. I remembered her hopes for Ariel and felt a pang in case I had made things hard for her on the phone.
I turned to her. “We’re just ironing out the details about the class.”
Rosalie rose with a start. “I’ve made up a file with copies of the syllabus and the class list. Ariel kept her grades on our shared drive on the computer, so I’ve printed them out for Joanne.”
“Sounds like everything’s in order,” I said, standing.
“Not quite.” Rosalie frowned. “I called the bookstore. Ariel was using Political Perspectives as her text in that class, but the bookstore is out of it, and by the time they can get it in, the class will be over.” She took a key from her desk drawer. “Joanne, would you mind going to Ariel’s office and getting her copy of the text? I should have done it, but I just couldn’t bring myself to open that door.”
I took the key. “There’s no reason you should,” I said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
I tried to be matter-of-fact, but the truth was I dreaded going to Ariel’s office. I’d been in it only a handful of times, but it was as characteristic of her as her thumbprint. She had surrounded herself with a cheerful clutter of books and journals, and a gallery of soft-sculpture figures of family and friends that she’d made from scraps of odd and lovely material. She was a person who loved process. A few weeks earlier, she’d called me in to show me how she’d placed a low table in front of her window and begun to grow a flat of tomato plants from seeds.
The office had celebrated the many pleasures of her life, but when I turned the key in the lock, I walked into a room that was oddly impersonal. Ariel’s desk was clear; the books on her bookshelves were neatly arranged according to subject and author, but the folk art and the photographs were gone. So were the table she’d placed under the window and the tomato plants that sprouted to life on it. I checked the section of books devoted to introductory politics: Political Perspectives was not there. I glanced through the other texts: Political Perspectives was still among the missing.
I walked back to the main office. “Rosalie, did someone take away Ariel’s things?”
“Not that I know of. Is something missing?”
“Everything that was personal.”
Rosalie followed me down the hall and peeked around the corner. Her face became troubled. “It wasn’t like this last Monday. I had to take some photocopying in, and it looked the way it always did. The police were in here last night, but I can’t imagine they’d remove anything.”
“They wouldn’t,” I said. Then I closed the door, locked it, and handed Rosalie the key. “Maybe Livia will know something about it.”
But when we got back to the main office, there wasn’t a soul in sight.
I started for the stairs. Then, haunted by the absence of Ariel in that room that had once teemed with her life, I doubled back and rapped on a door that was seldom rapped on any more.
It had been two years since I’d been in Kevin Coyle’s office. His frequent assaults on mine made reciprocal visits unnecessary, but a quick glance around the room assured me that all was as it had always been. His floor- to-ceiling bookshelves were jammed with thick books made from cheap paper. Their covers were dense with Cyrillic lettering and maps splattered in blood. The politics of Eastern Europe had a painful history of exsanguination. The brown overstuffed reading chair was still in its place by the window, and the illegal hotplate upon which Kevin made coffee and toasted sandwiches was still in plain view. But that day, as always, the most prominent feature of Kevin’s office was the four games of Risk he had set up on the dining-room table with the sawed-off legs that dominated the room.
In the good days, students, mostly male but some female, would spend hours in Kevin’s office, playing Risk, talking politics, eating toasted sandwiches and drinking Kevin’s execrable coffee. It had been a long time since students had ventured through that door, but Kevin had left everything at the ready – waiting for the Restoration.
“You’re like Miss Havisham,” I said.
“You think I don’t know whom you’re talking about,” he grunted, “but I do. Miss Havisham was that loony old broad in Great Expectations who got jilted at the altar and kept everything just as it had been on the day of her wedding. You’ll note I’m not wearing a wedding gown and there’s no mouldering wedding cake in sight. You’ll also note that I’m not insane. On the contrary, I’m a sane man in an insane world. May I offer you a cup of coffee?”
“Did you make it within the last two days?”
“Within the hour,” he said. “I’m turning over a new leaf.”
“Then I’ll take a chance. Kevin, I need some help.”
He brought me the coffee in an orange and brown striped mug whose earth tones were as faded as the earth-friendly activism of the seventies. The coffee was surprisingly good, and I told him so.
“I’ve learned the secret,” he said mysteriously.
“Kevin, I’d love to sit here and talk coffee with you, but I need some information. As the one department member who’s here day and night, do you have any idea who cleared out Ariel’s office?”
He couldn’t suppress the triumph in his eyes. “She and I did.”
“When?”
“A week ago Tuesday. It was around eight-thirty at night. I was here, working on my appeal, and I heard noises coming from down the hall. I went over to investigate. I was listening at the door when I heard a crash. I didn’t wait to be invited in. Ariel was on the floor. She’d been standing on her chair getting down the books from the top shelf of her bookcase when she slipped. She was all right, just shaken up a bit. She told me she’d been packing up her things, which was a fairly obvious statement since there were boxes all over the place. I asked if she needed some help getting the boxes downstairs to her car. She said she did.” He lowered his voice. “I have a private dolly on loan from the library.”
“That’s obliging of them,” I said.
“It would be if they knew I had it,” he agreed. “At any rate, it took us two trips to get everything into her truck, but we made it. Of course, I was curious about what she was up to, so when we loaded the last box on, I asked her, in a jocular way, whether it was moving day. She said no, she was just simplifying because she didn’t know what lay ahead.”
“Did she seem frightened?”
“Not frightened, just tense and resolute. Before she got in her car, she kissed me.” Remembering, Kevin touched his cheek. “Then she said, ‘People were wrong about you. That’s the next battle, and I’m not looking forward to it.’ ” Kevin’s face darkened. “Until that moment, it was a wonderful evening, but I pushed it too far. That’s a flaw of mine. Have you noticed?” He glared at me, waiting for a response.
I let him glare. Finally, hating silence, he continued. “That’s when Ariel and I had the exchange that Ann Vogel and her friends are getting such mileage from.”
“What exactly was the exchange?”
“It was obvious Ariel had learned something, so I pressed her to tell what she knew. She said she couldn’t
