my hair and put it behind my ear, reestablishing the look that I had so carefully constructed before I had left the house. He rested his hand on my left cheek, rubbing it slightly with his thumb, and leaned in and kissed the other one. “Good night. Maybe we can do this again?” he asked.
I nodded. “That would be great.” I got into the car and gave him a little wave as we drove off. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and saw that I had a text message from Max. It read: “You have mustard on your left cheek. It’s been there since the second period. xoxo”
Chapter 11
I went to school the next day with a spring in my step. For one night, at least, I was able to forget about Ray’s death and focus on something fun and pleasurable.
Every time I thought of Crawford’s face, I tried to put it out of my mind. Why the hell did I feel so guilty? After all, I had a lot of lingering hurt and ire left over from the Crawford “I’m married but not really” debacle of the spring. I had very strong feelings for him—of both the love and lust variety—but the sting of not knowing about his estranged wife, who was adorable and seemingly lovely, was still painful.
I bounced into the office area, nodded a quick hello to Dottie, our crazy “never met an eyeshadow she didn’t like” faculty receptionist, and went to my office. She was also dating one of Crawford’s colleagues, a fireplug of a man named Charlie Moriarty, with whom she had fallen deeply and madly in love during the Miceli case. I was surrounded by women dating cops. I wondered what would have happened had I set a small fire in the office area instead of ending up with a dead girl in the trunk of my car; would everybody be dating firefighters? Or if I had caused some kind of international mail incident by sending a toxic package to my cousin Giselle in Quebec? Would letter carriers be part of all of our love lives? I went in and fell into the chair behind the desk, musing on the attraction of civil servants to single women and closed my eyes.
A soft knock at the door interrupted my thoughts. “Come in,” I said, running my hands through my hair and standing. Frank, the mailman for our division, opened the door and tossed in a packet of mail, rubber-banded and thick; it hit me mid–solar plexus and I let out a little grunt in surprise. Frank is middle-aged, suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and lives with his mother, who also works in the mailroom. He’s been on campus for as long as I remember, going back to my undergraduate days. “Thanks, Frank,” I said, surprised to see him. He usually puts the mail in the boxes behind Dottie’s desk.
“Dottie said that you looked like you had a late night,” he said, “so I thought I’d bring you your mail this morning.” Frank is nothing if not painfully honest, something that on most days, I appreciate. Today was not one of those days. “Do you dye your hair?” Frank is also king of the non sequitur.
I dropped the mail on my desk and put my hands back up to my head. “No.”
“You should.” He started to pull the door closed. “And don’t wear red. It makes you look green.”
I looked down at my red blouse. “It’s garnet!” I called to the closed door. I hastily pulled a hand mirror out of my drawer and examined my face; it didn’t look green to me but maybe I wasn’t getting the whole picture. My phone rang as I looked for a larger reflective surface around my office. “Dr. Bergeron.”
It was Sister Mary, my boss. She wasn’t my biggest fan but she wasn’t my biggest detractor, either; she was somewhere in the middle on me. I attributed this to my geeky undergraduate years at St. Thomas. “Alison.”
I suppose I had to guess why she was calling. I stalled. “Sister.”
“Alison. We are sitting in Dr. Etheridge’s office awaiting your arrival.”
Awaiting my arrival. I gave up the hunt for a larger mirror and immediately went to my day planner, still turned to two days prior. I turned the page to the current day and saw in giant red letters “Staff meeting. Don’t be late.” And in smaller letters “You were late to the last one.” I resisted the urge to