Final Exam Read online

  “Nope.”

  I sat down next to her and took a look around my bedroom, which I was sure wouldn’t look quite as neat and tidy when I finally did return from my dorm “suite.”

  “Max.” I was at a loss for words. “Max,” I repeated, my tone conveying my disappointment.

  She looked at me quizzically. “Alison,” she replied, sounding as grave as I felt.

  I took her hand. “It’s too soon. You’re not ready for an emotional, let alone sexual, relationship right now.” I knew how quickly she worked so jumping into bed with one of her “matches” was not out of the question.

  “Oh, don’t go all Vagina Monologues on me,” she said.

  I didn’t know what she thought The Vagina Monologues were about and I didn’t have the energy to tell her they have absolutely nothing to do with online dating, but I let it go. “Don’t do this. Don’t give up on your marriage yet.”

  She jumped off the bed and headed for the door. “It’s over. Over and out. Stick a fork in it. It’s done.” I heard her head down the stairs; for a little person, she’s got a heavy footfall.

  “Well, that went well,” I murmured to myself. I had known Max for a long time—coming up on twenty years—and I knew her to be flaky, mercurial, and a host of other, not-so-flattering adjectives, but I also knew her to be loyal, devoted, and the best friend a girl could have. She was more like a sister to me than a friend. But ever since she had met and married Fred, she had morphed into someone I didn’t recognize—first by getting married at all and second by moving out and past the marriage. I knew she was impulsive, but that? That was just plain crazy. And believe me, I know crazy. I stayed married to a man who cheated on me repeatedly out of some sense of honor and commitment.

  I didn’t want to leave her alone but a little part of me wondered if my moving out could be considered a small blessing for me. I immediately felt a little queasy at the traitorous thought.

  I continued my packing, stopping periodically to bend over and pet and kiss Trixie, who knew something was afoot; I was leaving Trixie here overnight until I could figure out my situation on campus. She circled my bed, moaning and snuffling, trying to figure out what was happening. It was almost as if she were saying, “Don’t leave me here with that other one.” Many a day I had returned home in the past few weeks to find Trixie practically crossing her legs in discomfort and staring at an empty water dish. There was no point in upbraiding Max; she was in some kind of postmarital fugue state and my admonitions would be met with the blank stare of the terminally sad. I assured Trixie that she was coming with me in the end and that we would be very happy in our new, albeit temporary, home. She looked at me like she wasn’t sure about that.

  I was done in about an hour and carried two suitcases and a small duffel bag filled with toiletries out to the car. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and cool, with more than a hint of spring in the air. I took a look around my backyard and prayed that I would be back soon enough to enjoy the chaise lounge that Crawford—romantic devil that he was—had bought me. And I wondered if my “suite” had a balcony or patio; the school sits majestically astride the Hudson River and the views are spectacular. I expected the worst and hoped for the best as I slammed the trunk shut for the final time before departing.

  I went back into the house to say good-bye to Max, who was in my spare bedroom, working furiously on the computer. “I’m leaving,” I said, leaning casually against the door. “I’ll be back tomorrow to get Trixie, though.”

  She looked at me, her fingers poised on top of the keyboard. “Call me when you’re settled in,” she said, surprising me. I thought she would have sent me off with a dismissive wave.

  “Can I give you a hug?” I asked.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” she said, her back stiffening. Her eyes filled with tears before they focused on the computer monitor, her face pale and drawn.

  “Are you surfing on Match.com?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she said, tapping away. “I’m putting my engagement ring on Craigslist.”

  I pursed my lips and thought about that. Maybe this was exactly the right time to leave.

  Crawford was waiting for me when I got to school. I pulled into my usual parking space and hit the button that popped the trunk. Visitation hours were still in effect what with it being noon on a Saturday, but we still greeted each other with an ironic handshake. “Thank you for coming,” I said formally.

  “My pleasure,” he said. He peered into the trunk. “Not too much stuff to move,” he said.

  “I’m not staying long, remember?” I said, and hoisted out my toiletries bag. I dug the set of keys out of my pocket that Merrimack had given me and consulted the instructions for their use. I fiddled with the old black key to let myself into the dorm by the side entrance, and took a look around the first floor. There was a big desk in the main foyer where the resident assistants in the building sat in the evening to welcome guests, accept packages, and make sure that the building was locked up at the end of the evening. Beyond that were two common areas on either side of the hallway: one was a television room, the other a dining room, a vestige from the old days when the residents of the dorm ate together at an assigned time. Being as spring break had commenced the week before, the dorm was essentially a ghost town. That fact, coupled with the old architectural bones of the building, lent it a decidedly spooky vibe.

  The newer-looking key opened up the first door on the right, which led to my new suite. Crawford followed closely behind me carrying my biggest suitcase; he let out a low, depressed-sounding whistle when I gave him a view of my new digs.

  I leaned in and discovered my suite was basically a long, narrow room with hardwood floors and one window next to a twin-sized bed. The suite part, I surmised, was the small living area to the left of the bedroom that contained a desk, an old musty chair, and a bookshelf, and that was separated from the bedroom by rather nice French doors. A bathroom was next to the bedroom, and while I’m a fan of period detail, the subway tile that encased the shower looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since it was installed in what I guessed was the 1940s. I looked at Crawford and said, “Get me some Comet.”

  “You’re not even in the door,” he said. “Let’s go in and see what else you need before I go to the store.”

  “Besides a blowtorch to burn this place down?” I asked, sitting dejectedly on the bed. A puff of dust flew up around me and I shivered in revulsion.

  “Is there a laundry area in this building?” he asked, pulling me up off the bed and placing me in the doorway between the bedroom and living room. He pulled the bedding off and threw it onto the floor. “I don’t want you sleeping on Wayne Brookwell’s dirty sheets,” he said.

  “That’s Wayne Butthole, to you.” I leaned on the doorjamb. “Forevermore, he’s Wayne Butthole.” I crossed my arms, and continued my visual reconnaissance of the area. “I hate him.”

  “Laundry?” Crawford repeated.

  “No idea,” I said. “I assume it’s in the basement but I can’t be sure.” Although I had parked outside of this building for the better part of a decade, I had never been inside, save for the lobby. The building was five stories high, with men housed on all but one floor, a floor that had been reserved for the overflow of female students in any given year. But Siena was still known as the men’s dorm and had been since I was a student here, years previous. It looked pretty much the same as I remembered it—ornate, varnished moldings; marble floors; heavy mahogany doors stained a dark, cherry brown. It smelled of Pledge and floor polish and decades’ worth of smelly gym socks and young adult hormones.

  Crawford picked up the pile of dirty bedding and started down the hall, his sneakers making a squish-squish noise as he proceeded. I went back into the bedroom and sat down on the denuded bed, surveying my surroundings. I couldn’t imagine spending one night here, never mind five weeks, but that was my lot and I had to suck it up. I don’t want to suck it up! I wanted to yell, but I made an attempt at maturity and
swallowed whatever feelings I had. The one thing I couldn’t ignore was my bladder, which obviously was past the point of no return. I got up and went into the bathroom, looking around as I did my business, taking in the rust stains in the porcelain pedestal sink, and the dirty ring around the tub. There were a few squares of toilet paper left on the roll and I made a mental note to tell Crawford to get toilet paper, too.

  When I flushed the toilet, a torrent of water, toilet paper, and various other bits of flotsam and jetsam that had been residing in the toilet since the Mesozoic Age came spewing up at me from the filthy bowl, and I put my hands over my face to protect myself, a little too late. The front of my shirt and my jeans were instantly soaked, and water poured onto the tile floor and puddled around my feet. I spat a few times, wondering exactly what I had almost ingested. I grabbed a less-than-clean towel from the towel bar and wiped off my face and hands. I looked at the floating detritus on the floor and stifled a gag.

  Crawford returned and knocked softly on the bathroom door. “Everything okay in there?”

  “No!” I called back while attempting to open the door with the ancient doorknob. I finally got it open and gave him a view of what the bathroom looked like.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked, and threw the soaked towel at him, catching him squarely in the solar plexus. “We are not off to a good start here.”

  He went into the bathroom and threw the towel on the floor, attempting to sop up the mess from the exploding toilet. I riffled through my suitcase, finding a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I stripped off my clothes and put them in a pile by the door. Once I was redressed, I stopped by the bathroom. “I’m going to go down to the laundry room and throw these clothes in, too.” I watched as Crawford raised the toilet seat and stared solemnly into the toilet. I had no idea whether or not he was handy and I wasn’t sticking around to find out. “It’s in the basement, right?”

  He didn’t turn around but put his hands on his hips, surveying the damage. “Right.”

  I padded down the hall toward the grand staircase, which led me to a laundry room that was much nicer than my new accommodations. Six new, state-of-the-art washers and companion dryers lined one wall; the other wall was lined with vending machines with soda, candy, and snacks. There was a change machine, and a machine to buy bleach and detergent. It was clean, well lit, and modern with signs advertising its Wi-Fi access. I looked around enviously. My basement was musty, dusty, and home to more than one mouse, I suspected. Okay, so things were looking up. A little bit.

  I threw the dirty clothes into the wash that Crawford had started and returned to the lobby floor, which was still empty. I had forgotten to ask Merrimack if any students were staying on campus during spring break and made a mental note to send him an e-mail once I unearthed my computer from the mound of my possessions in the middle of the little patch of floor between my bed and the dresser.

  “Do you want to get Chinese food, Crawford?” I asked, back upstairs and going through items in my open suitcase. He didn’t answer. I guess I owed him an apology for biting his head off and throwing the dirty towel at him, but I didn’t expect the silent treatment. “Crawford?” I went to the bathroom door and found him kneeling on the floor in his undershirt, the toilet off its seal, the top removed. A collection of rusty old tools, apparently gathered from the maintenance closet across the hall from my suite, were arranged around him. His shirt was draped over the side of the tub and he was dirty and wet, his dark hair flopping over his sweaty brow.

  “Crawford?”

  He leaned over and stretched out, ending up on his right side, his left arm disappearing into the gaping hole of the upended toilet. He came out with a Ziploc bag filled with something that I knew wasn’t Mrs. Brookwell’s famous home-grown tea.

  He looked up at me. “Call Fred.”

  Five

  “I don’t do floaters and I don’t do toilets.”

  I hadn’t seen Fred since he and Max split and I saw that his mood hadn’t improved during that time. I knew that he didn’t do floaters; Crawford was quite verbal on that subject every time someone turned up in the river in their jurisdiction. Fred’s mood seemed to have gotten worse in the past couple of weeks, which was completely understandable, given the situation. He stood next to the toilet, his ham-hock legs splayed and his hands on his hips, regarding the toilet with a mixture of revulsion and horror. Crawford still lay on the ground, a flashlight in his hand, peering into the waste hole on which the toilet had previously resided.

  Things had escalated since Crawford had made his interesting discovery. As it turned out, had I not been so cranky and preoccupied by my new living situation, I would have seen that there was hardly any water in the toilet, but I had been preoccupied with my full bladder. The heroin was in an airtight bag and had been jammed into the toilet, obstructing the flow of water into the waste pipe, which caused the explosion.

  I had called Fred who, in turn, called the U.S. Cavalry, or so it seemed. Two police cars—“cruisers,” as I like to erroneously refer to them—screeched to a halt outside the building, unloading a quartet of uniformed cops, three male and one female, young and old, big and bigger. Two detectives from the narcotics bureau also arrived, looking dazed and bedraggled, not unlike the people with whom they usually dealt. Crawford explained to me that the drug squad liked using guys who had a certain “grittiness” to them; if these two—Marcus and Lattanzi—were any indication, I’d say that the department had succeeded. I would have mistaken the two of them for junkies had I passed them on the street.

  I was pushed out of the way and told to sit in my “living room” with my hands in my pockets so that I wouldn’t touch anything. My “living room,” I wanted to clarify, was in Dobbs Ferry, not in this two-hundred-year-old building that smelled like Murphy’s oil soap and sweat.

  Lattanzi, compact and swarthy in jeans and a worn pair of cowboy boots, knelt in front of me, his pad resting on his knee. “Start at the beginning.”

  The beginning? Like how I was just minding my own business, drinking flat Diet Coke at a faculty mixer, and ended up living in an ancient building with cranky toilets? Or this beginning: I had had too much coffee before I left the house that day which facilitated my having to pee immediately upon entering my new digs? I looked at Lattanzi’s black eyes and decided to go with the short and sweet version.

  “I had to pee. I flushed. The toilet exploded.”

  “And this Brookwell guy? Ever met him?”

  I flashed on Wayne Brookwell’s face, his mouth hanging slightly agape in his official St. Thomas Web site photo. “Nope.”

  Lattanzi stood up. “Lucky for you your boyfriend can plumb.”

  “He can? He can plumb?” I asked, having no idea what he was talking about.

  The detective rocked back on his cowboy boots. “Well, he can stick his hand down a toilet. That’s more than I can say for his partner.”

  I heard Fred gag as Crawford came up with something not, shall we say, germane to the case.

  I went into the hallway and perched on the desk in the main part of the lobby. From what I was told, we were waiting for the Crime Scene people, who would dust the room and look for any additional evidence.

  I thanked the stars above that spring break was still on and that no one would be back to the building until at least lunch-time the next day. Because if Etheridge, Merrimack, or anybody else in the administration saw what was going on, I was toast. I wouldn’t put it past them to enter some trumped-up charge in my file to continue to withhold my tenure and get me off campus tout de suite. Even I had to admit: I was becoming a giant pain in the ass, even if the stuff in the toilet had no relation to me whatsoever.

  The cops, Marcus and Lattanzi included, were congregated outside of the suite in the hallway, chatting amiably about a variety of topics. I got bored sitting in the empty lobby and came back to the room, not obeying the cops’ command to stay out of the way. I stood
on my tiptoes trying to observe what was going on in the bathroom over Fred’s hulking frame.

  “Find anything else?” I asked, watching Crawford hand Fred something wet and nasty, which Fred put in a Ziploc bag. He took a permanent marker and wrote something in his chicken scratch along the top. He added the bag to a couple of others that sat on the sink next to the toilet.

  Crawford hoisted himself up from the floor, wetter and dirtier than he had been when he arrived to help me move. He wiped his hands on his pants. “That’s it.” He looked around the bathroom. “Is there somewhere else where I can clean up?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea. Let’s take a look.”

  Crawford exchanged a few words with the cops in the hallway, one of whom was plastering the bathroom door with yellow crime-scene tape. I felt a little sick: the reason I was here was because the administration at the school thought I was trouble. And now? They had all the proof they needed. I had only been on campus in my new capacity for under an hour and already my door was lined with crime-scene tape. I wondered if I could keep this quiet and knew that the answer was a resounding “no.”

  Crawford and I wandered up to the second floor of the dormitory and found a communal bathroom for the male residents of that floor. It looked like it had been cleaned and disinfected during the break and that was a relief to both of us. Crawford washed his face and hands thoroughly and dried them with several rough paper towels that he took from a dispenser on the wall. I leaned against one of the sinks, watching him and thinking.

  “What are you thinking, Crawford?” I asked.

  “I’m thinking that some moo shu pork would go a long way toward making this day disappear,” he said, looking in the mirror and wiping some grime off his temple.

  “No, seriously.”

  He nodded. “I am serious. I’m done here and you can’t go back in until Crime Scene finishes. I’ll leave Fred. Because if he doesn’t do toilets, he can wait around while they dust for prints. And he can also let the head of security know that he’s got a problem in Siena Hall,” he said rather testily, probably more so than he intended. It occurred to me that he might be losing patience with his partner as quickly as I was with my roommate. He looked pointedly at one of the urinals. “Meet you downstairs?”