Mary’s watery blue eyes looked up from the desktop and seemed to focus. She suddenly jerked her hands out from under Adelaide’s. She grabbed at the file that Adelaide was holding in her other hand.
“Fine, Dr. Winters,” she snapped. “How many copies?”
I never thought I’d be glad to see a glimpse of the old bitchy Mary, but I was. The snap of her eyes and frigid tone was a frank relief, much to be preferred to the delicate wraith that moved around the office with no seeming purpose. That glance and tone used to be called ‘getting frosted’ by the students and faculty alike. We all used to tiptoe past her office trying not to draw her attention. Now we still tiptoed by, but for very different reasons.
Frost did not like it one bit that Adelaide had replaced her old boss, but her anger at Adelaide seemed to wake her up.
Adelaide knew this, of course, and used it to try to bring Frost around. She kept her Mrs. Claus face on, the one that fooled people into thinking that her halo of graying hair and her round face meant she was a sweet older lady. Adelaide was far more likely to give you a verbal kick in the pants than a cookie, however. She was probably counting on Mary’s animosity to snap her out of the repetitive behavior.
“Twenty-five,” Adelaide snapped back, matching Mary’s tone. “By 11 o’clock.”
“You’ll have them by 9:30,” Mary said with a trace of her former asperity, her frame erect in the faded floral dress that now hung on her thin frame. She walked steadily over to the copier, keeping her back ramrod straight. Once Mary’s back was turned, Adelaide allowed her concern to show on her face, and then she took my arm and hustled me out the door.
By unspoken consent we went down the hall toward her office. She had set up a table with a De’Longhi combination coffee/espresso machine on a table in the hall outside her door. Ground the beans and everything. I had one at home. Adelaide was clearly leading us in a new direction, a place where faculty and students all had access to good coffee. I put my money in the donation jar and made a cup of espresso. Adelaide did the same. Then we walked into her office. In contrast to the former occupant, who always kept his door shut and often even locked, doing God-knows-what behind that closed door, she almost always kept her door open.
“What is it about me that sets her off?” I asked as we sat down. Even to my ears I sounded like I was whining. But Mary’s condition rattled me.
“Kid, who knows? Whatever her affection for the old bastard was based on, I have come to think there was a healthy dose of hatred there too.” Well, Adelaide should know. She had good reasons to have thoroughly hated our departed and unlamented department chair as well.
“At some level,” she said, pausing to take a sip of the really excellent espresso, “she must be glad he’s dead and you are St. George, the hero. The dragon slayer. But me? I’m the replacement for the love object, so she hates me.”
I narrowed my eyes and glared at her.
“Did you talk this over with Willie?” Donald Willie was our colleague in Psychology and Religion and I thought he was a superficial idiot.
Adelaide chuckled.
“Not even close. No, you know there’s a lot of myths about conflict that feminists use to dive into the origins of patriarchy. My own psychological brew, if you will. No point in teaching Women and Religion if you don’t actually believe the stuff. Don’t worry about it. I think she’s beginning to realize she needs to retire this summer.”
She patted me on the back with her free hand as she said this, causing me to nearly spill my coffee. She calmly steadied my arm and then seemed to take a hard look at me in the process.
“Say, what’s with the cheerful black ensemble? Halloween is in October and this is May.”
Her shrewd eyes seemed to take in my washed out face and limp hair as well.
I gulped down the rest of the coffee and said, “Let me just put my head into my class and let Hercules know I’ll be late. I’ll be right back. I think you need to know what happened last night before you hear it from somebody else.”
Hercules Abraham, already retired Professor of Judaism who taught for us part-time, was team teaching the class with me. Or rather, I was learning a ton from Hercules and so were the students.
After I got back, I gave her a quick run-through of what had happened. I described the reception, Tom’s and my private tour up to the floor where the operating suites would be, hearing the thud and the cry, our trying to rescue her, and then the tragic end result. I described the young woman, whom I now thought of as the victim, as I had seen her at the reception. Her long blonde hair, her supermodel figure, her tight, determined face. And then her waxed features above the blanket on the hospital gurney as I’d last seen her. I couldn’t help but shudder once again at what it might feel like to drown in concrete.
Adelaide frowned. “You said the name was Courtney Carlyle?”
“Well, that’s the name the doctor who was her date gave the police. She had no identification and I suppose her purse is now encased in several tons of hardened concrete.”
“I wonder if that’s Karen Carlyle? She insisted people call her Courtney.”
Adelaide got up abruptly and walked over to gaze out the window behind her desk.
“You think you knew her?” I asked, amazed. “How?”
She spoke almost absently, without turning around.
“Well, if it’s the same young woman, she was a student here and she took my ‘History of Feminist Theory’ class last year. She was very distinctive looking, pretty much just as you’ve described. And, as I said, she insisted she be called Courtney instead of Karen.” Adelaide turned, put down her coffee cup on the desk, and moved slowly, almost reluctantly to her computer.
“Let me just pull my records and notes up.”
Tempted as I was to follow this up right now, I really needed to get to my class.
“Listen, Adelaide, I need to go. Can we meet after? Go over the records?”
She spoke without looking up from the screen.
“Sure. Here. After class.” And she kept staring at the screen.
Student? If Courtney Carlyle the doctor’s date was Karen Carlyle the undergraduate we had to get that information to help the investigation into her death. My curiosity was so strong I had to force myself out of Adelaide’s office and hurry down the hall to the seminar room.
# # # #
I slowed down as I reached the classroom door. I could hear voices and I didn’t want to interrupt the discussion more than my tardy entrance would already do. I entered quietly and navigated around the backpacks littering the floor by the students’ seats around the seminar table. I took a chair next to Hercules.
He had stopped speaking as soon as he’d seen me enter, however. Naturally he did. He was far too polite to keep talking while I entered.
Hercules was over 80, but you’d never know it. He was small and wiry, a French Jew who, as a young child during World War II, had been hidden from the Nazis in a small town in France with his mother. He taught Jewish studies and was a well-known scholar of the Talmud. He had approached me with the idea for this course, and even though we were understaffed this spring (I’d moved to part-time, we’d had one resignation plus the death of our department chair and another colleague, Donald Willie, the Religion and Psychology guy, was on sabbatical), Adelaide had agreed. She said it would be good for both of us. I didn’t know what it was doing for Hercules to teach with me, but I know it was helping me in ways I didn’t even know I needed. Plus, I adored him.
Hercules spoke gently as I wrestled my tablet out of my backpack.
“My dear—you take a moment. The time is only just