I’m not sure if he was hiding from me, or busy working, or busy—well, doing something else. Since I moved in, Cooper hadn’t had a single overnight guest—which for him, at least if Jordan is to be believed, might be a record dry spell. But given how frequently he was gone from the townhouse for days at a time, I could only assume he was crashing at the home of his current flame—whoever she might be.
Which was typical of him. You know, not to rub it in my face that he’s getting some, while I’m most definitely not.
Still, I had a hard time appreciating his courteousness as the weekend wore on, and I was still no closer to figuring out who was killing the Virgins of Fischer Hall. If, um, anyone was.
Which might be why, when Monday morning finally rolls around, I’m the first one in the office, latte and bagel already ingested, deeply engrossed in Roberta Pace’s student file.
The file’s contents are remarkably similar to Elizabeth’s, although the two girls came from different sides of the country—Roberta was from Seattle. But they’d both had interfering mothers. Roberta’s mother had called Rachel to complain that Roberta needed a new roommate.
Which startles me. How could anyone not like Lakeisha?
But according to the “incident report”—one of which is filled out whenever a staff member has an interaction with a resident—when Rachel spoke to Roberta, it turned out to be Mrs. Pace, not her daughter, who had the problem with Lakeisha. “It’s not that I don’t like black people,” Mrs. Pace had told Rachel, according to the report. “I just don’t want my daughter to have to live with one.”
This is the kind of stuff, I’ve discovered, that people in higher ed have to deal with every day. The good thing is, usually it’s not the kids with the problem, but their parents. As soon as the parents go back home, everything ends up being okay.
The bad thing is—well, that people like Mrs. Pace exist at all.
I force myself to read on. According to the report, Rachel called Roberta down to the office and asked her if she wanted a room change, the way her mother said she did. Roberta said no, that she liked Lakeisha. Rachel reports that then she let Roberta go and called the mother back, gave her our standard speech in such cases —“Much of a college education takes part outside the classroom, where our students experience new cultures and ways of life. Here at New York College, we do everything we can to encourage cultural diversity awareness. Don’t you want your son/daughter to be able to get along with every sort of individual when he/she enters the workforce?”
Then Rachel told Mrs. Pace that her kid wasn’t getting a room change and hung up.
And that was it. That was the only thing in Roberta’s file. The only sign at all that she’d had any sort of trouble adjusting to college life.
Except, of course, that now Roberta is dead.
I hear the ding of an elevator, and then Rachel’s heels clacking on the marble floor outside our office. A second later, she appears in the doorway, a steaming mug of coffee that she’s brought down from her apartment in one hand, and the morning’s Times in the other. She looks startled to see me at my desk so early. Even though I live four minutes away from it, I’m almost always five minutes late to work.
“Oh my goodness,” Rachel says, looking pleased to see me. “Aren’t you here early! Did you have a nice weekend?”
“Yeah,” I say, closing Roberta’s file, and kind of sliding it under some other stuff on my desk.
Not that I don’t have every right to be reading it. It’s just that I feel kind of reluctant to tell Rachel what I suspect—about the girls being pushed, and all. I mean, technically, I probably should have said something about the key, or the condom, at least, or that both girls had recently met a guy…
But I can’t help wondering—what if Cooper is right? What if Elizabeth and Roberta really did fall, but I make this big stink about how I think they’d been murdered? Would Rachel mark down in my employment file that I suffer from paranoid delusions? Could something like that keep me from passing my six months’ probation? Could they fire me for it, the way they had Justine—even though I’d fully kept my hands off the ceramic heaters?
I’m not about to risk it. I decide to keep my suspicions to myself.
“Mostly,” I say, in reply to Rachel’s question about my weekend. Because, aside from calling about the Marks and Todds, I’d done nothing but walk Lucy, watch TV, and fiddle around with my guitar. Hardly anything worth reporting. “You?”
“Terrible,” Rachel says, shaking her head. Although for someone who’s had such a bad weekend, she looks really great. She has on a new suit, really well-cut. The black brings out the ivory in her skin, and makes her hair seem an even deeper chestnut. “Roberta’s parents came in,” Rachel goes on, “to pick up their daughter’s things. It was just a nightmare. They plan on suing, of course. Though on what grounds, I can’t imagine. Those poor people. I felt so sorry for them.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That had to suck.”
The phone on Rachel’s desk starts ringing. “Oh, hello, Stan,” she says, when she answers it. “Oh, thank you so much, but I’m fine, really. Yes, it’s been just awful—”
Wow. Stan. So Rachel’s on a first-name basis with Dr. Jessup now. Well, I guess if a couple of kids in your dorm—oops, I mean, residence hall—die, you get to know the head of your department pretty well.
I start going through the briefing forms the weekend desk attendants have left me. I can generally get payroll, the budget, any memos that need to be typed, and the desk coverage schedules done by eleven in the morning. Then I have the rest of the day free for cruising the Net, gossiping with Magda or Patty, or trying to figure out who might be killing girls in my place of work, which is how I’ve already decided I’m going to spend this particular Monday.
I just haven’t quite figured out how.
I’m just finishing up the payroll when this pair of Nike-encased feet appear in my line of vision. I lift my head, expecting to see a basketball player—hopefully with a semilegible note I can add to my collection.
Instead, I see Cooper.
“Hey,” he says.
Is it my fault my heart flips over in my chest? I mean, I haven’t seen him in a while. Like almost seventy-two hours. Plus, you know, I’m totally man-starved. That has to be why I can’t take my eyes off the front of the jeans he’s wearing, white in all the places where the denim’s been stressed, like at his knees and other, more interesting places.
He also has on a blue shirt beneath his rumpled leather jacket—the exact same blue as his crinkly eyes.
“Wh—” is the only sound I can get to come out of my mouth, on account of the jeans… and the my-being-a- total-loser-who-is-completely-in-love-with-him part.
I watch as he takes a newspaper out from beneath his arm, unfolds it, and places it in front of me.
“Wh—” I say again. At least, that’s how it sounds to my ears.
“I wanted to make sure you knew about this,” Cooper says. “You know, before Us Weekly starts calling, and catches you by surprise.”
I look down at the paper. It’s the New York Post. On the front page is a large, blown-up photo of my ex- fiancé and Tania Trace dining at some outdoor café in SoHo. Underneath their images are the words, in eighteen-point type at least:
THEY’RE ENGAGED!
13
She shut you out.
What’d you do to deserve this?
She shut you out.
Put you out of service
Did she think you’d take this lying down?
Does she think you like playin’ the clown?
