Scoop to Kill: A Mystery a La Mode - By Wendy Lyn Watson Page 0,10
information about Bryan’s whereabouts on the morning of his death. “How did Reggie know that’s what Bryan was doing if they hadn’t seen each other since ten forty-five?”
Alice frowned. “I think Reggie just assumed that’s where Bryan was. Reggie came down to the atrium at about twelve fifteen, and he looked frazzled. I asked him what was wrong. At first he just waved off the question, and then he said Dr. Clowper was going to be pissed off.” Alice looked at Emily. “Sorry,” she said.
Emily shrugged.
“Anyway, he said he’d seen Bryan that morning and he still wasn’t done with the programs. Reggie’d offered to help him with the folding—they share an office, and it wouldn’t take Reggie long to enter his grades in his spreadsheet—but Bryan never came back to their office. Reggie said it was typical Bryan to leave you waiting for hours, and Bryan had probably found some hot undergrad to help him with the programs, so Reggie finally gave up and came down to the reception at twelve fifteen.”
I wondered why Reggie hadn’t checked the department office for Bryan. Maybe he just didn’t care whether Bryan got in more hot water with Emily Clowper over the unfinished programs. Or maybe he had looked for Bryan. Maybe he was frazzled because he’d found Bryan’s body. Or even because he’d killed him. Something there just wasn’t adding up.
Bree had gotten hung up on another part of Alice’s story. “Hot undergrad? Why a ‘hot’ undergrad?”
Alice rolled her eyes. “Everyone knows Bryan had a thing for pretty girls. He was always chatting them up in class and promising them extra credit if they’d help him with filing and stuff in his office. Totally creepy. I mean he’s their teacher, you know? That’s just weird.”
Some raw emotion flashed across Emily’s face, and her lips parted as though she were going to interject. But she relaxed and her expression returned to a stoic mask before I could decipher the reaction. Anger? Outrage? Jealousy?
My first instinct was to call her on it. Her relationship with Bryan Campbell was the nine-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, and I wanted to confront it. I had to think at least a little of their mutual animosity fell outside the reach of that federal privacy law. But before I could formulate a question that might actually get her talking, Finn tapped the corner of Alice’s legal pad.
“Ten forty-five to twelve thirty,” he said. “That’s a lot of time for Bryan to be MIA in a building crawling with people. Even if faculty didn’t regularly pop into the front office, surely someone—a custodian, a student, a parent, or guest—someone saw something.”
“The question is what did they see,” Bree said.
“No,” Emily responded. “The real question is why haven’t they come forward.”
chapter 5
They laid Bryan Campbell to rest just a week after he died, on a dreary Saturday afternoon. I took Alice to the funeral at the Jessamine Street United Methodist Church. She said she wanted to be there to support her Dickerson classmates, but I suspected she planned to report back to Emily.
I went to support Cal.
Cal’s sister, Marla Campbell, stood in the vestibule of the church. The League of Methodist Ladies stood in a tight knot around her, propping her up beneath the weight of burying her son.
Marla took after Cal, tall and rawboned with eyes the scorching blue of a gas flame, but a more delicate chin and hair the color of butterscotch candy transformed Cal’s stark masculinity into fashion-model beauty. That afternoon, tears streaked her striking face, and a veil of grief dulled her eyes. All the women were dressed in unrelieved black, save Marla, who wore a corsage of crimson and gold—school colors for both the Dalliance High Wildcatters and the Dickerson Dust Devils—on the lapel of her prim black suit.
I ached for the woman, but we’d never been close, and I hated to intrude on the intimacy of her pain. Instead, while Alice wandered off to find her classmates and teachers, I searched out Cal McCormack.
I found him inside the nave of the church. His arrow-straight posture, the hands braced at the small of his back, betrayed his military background as he stood a solitary vigil over the coffin of his nephew.
The lid of the polished oak coffin was closed, covered by a spray of crimson and yellow roses. On a nearby crimson-draped table, a hinged picture frame held two photos: one of a smiling young man, with Cal’s angular jaw and Marla’s burnished hair, in