the faculty to know each other. The department encourages interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly on grant projects, so don’t be shy about approaching anyone with ideas. We’re on the books to discuss your proposal, aren’t we?”
Laurel’s heart skipped a beat. Had she missed something? It occurred to her that she hadn’t checked her phone messages for probably a week now—but she couldn’t exactly ask him the date of their appointment. Instead she stammered, “I’m looking forward to it.”
“Excellent,” Unger said heartily. “Your aunt has been a credit to the university. We expect great things from you as well.”
Laurel blinked and had to scramble to remember what he was talking about. My aunt?
Laurel had only met her Aunt Margaret twice, both times when she was little more than a toddler, had not seen her since she’d arrived in Durham. The truth was, when Laurel had called to accept the Duke position she had not remembered the North Carolina family connection at all, not until she’d called her mother at Stanford to announce her decision.
Meredith had gone completely silent—in fact, the silence had gone on and on—until Laurel realized that she had for the first time in her entire thirty-one years succeeded in astonishing her dry and unflappable mother.
“North Carolina?” Meredith finally said, with an unaccustomed hint of Southern accent. And it had not been until that second that Laurel recalled that North Carolina was her mother’s home state—that even though she’d left right after high school, Meredith had grown up not half an hour from Duke, that her older brother and sister were Duke alumni, that Laurel’s Aunt Margaret was a celebrated professor on the medical school faculty.
To be fair, it was not a case of total amnesia on Laurel’s part. Meredith rarely mentioned her past. She’d left the South at seventeen, and headed for California, never to return for more than a few weekend visits.
And why was that, exactly? Laurel was just starting to wonder when a voice broke through her thoughts.
“Professor MacDonald?” The department chair was speaking to her, an edge in his voice. Laurel forced herself to focus and return to the party.
“Yes … thank you. I’ll certainly try to live up to that,” she said lamely.
Thankfully, there were others waiting behind her to pay homage and she stepped aside so the next supplicants could have their turn.
Laurel turned and very nearly collided with a bespectacled, somewhat unkempt little man hovering beside her. He gave her a shrewd look. “Hope your proposal is a knockout. Because he’s serious as a heart attack.” Laurel recognized the little man from the departmental Web site: J. Walter Kornbluth, the department’s acknowledged prodigy. At the age of thirty-two he’d already published two acclaimed popular psychology books on abnormal psychology, one of which, Head Cases, had been optioned for television.
It’s not enough to teach anymore, Laurel thought glumly. You need an agent and manager.
Kornbluth didn’t bother to introduce himself; he seemed to expect her to know him. “If you want a tip—forget about articles or grants, although bringing in some money doesn’t hurt. But these days anything less than a book doesn’t cut it.”
A book? Laurel thought. I can barely get dressed in the morning.
He continued smugly. “They dumped two associate profs last semester when they didn’t get the publishing deals they were angling for. No book deal, no grant money, no job.”
Kornbluth had taken out his Treo and was scrolling through his e-mail as he talked, a habit Laurel had found appalling in Los Angeles and which seemed to her even more pretentious at a faculty party.
She felt her hackles rising. “I can’t imagine that will be a problem. I’m excited about what I’m doing.”
“And what would that be?” The pompous little man peered at her over his horn-rims.
“Oh, I never talk about writing projects. Stops the internal momentum,” Laurel said lightly. And I wouldn’t talk to you about it if I did have an idea, she thought to herself. I know your kind. Sharks.
And even as she thought it, a voice spoke behind her.
“Don’t trust him.”
She turned, startled. Hovering on her other side was the good-looking professor she’d seen with the groupies, now sans nubile hangers-on. He was even more attractive up close … Laurel could feel his energy as a kind of heat radiating from him.
There was obviously a history between the two men—she could sense Kornbluth beginning to bristle.