For example, the blue car she had seen on more than one occasion driving past her house was Detective Joe Keating’s—she had seen it in enough newscasts now to recognize it.
How about the many times she just happened to run into Flynn? Please! At the coffee shop, the gym, the market, her class, a supermarket clear across town, hello! And his living arrangement, and his knowing the Feizels, and the fact that he couldn’t help her with a computer problem even though he was a computer guy. Why hadn’t something registered? She had known right off that a guy like him would not, out of the clear blue, want to hook up with her, so why hadn’t it clicked that something was going on?
Dagne’s stupid witchcraft, that was why. She had bought into that ridiculous notion, had believed she had cast spells that would bring love and romance to her, because she believed in the metaphysical world. Which, if one laid out all the clues and facts in a nice neat little row, made her even more outrageously pathetic than she originally thought. She was a stupid girl, a real Miss Fortune.
So, all right. It certainly wasn’t the first time she’d been a complete idiot, and in the greater scheme of things, she probably could have handled the whole Myron thing, particularly after the Providence Journal ran a Sunday feature entitled, A Professor, a Student, and a Tangled Web of Deceit. In that article, she came off (no surprise here) as a tubby (Rachel Lear; a tall, big-boned young woman), air-headed (did not, according to authorities, think anything unusual with the number or type of “gifts” she was receiving from Professor Tidwell on a fairly routine basis), pathetic loser (a search of university records reveals that Miss Lear has been enrolled in a doctorate program for four years). Par for the course.
Her friends tried to come to her rescue. The reporter spoke at length with Dagne, who, Rachel was discovering, really liked the media attention. Dagne Delaney, a close friend of Lear’s, had sold a few of the items on eBay and collected around three hundred dollars for priceless artifacts. Dagne had vigorously defended Rachel. “I know it might seem really stupid, but you just have to know Rachel,” she told them. “She’s the nicest person you would ever meet, and very well mannered, and she just really thought Professor Tidwell was her friend. No, really, she did.”
Chantal said, “I don’t know nothing about that slimy professor, but he ain’t the one she had the hots for. Now Rachel Lear, she be the salt of the earth, you know what I’m saying? She’d take the shirt off her back and give it right to you if you needed it.”
Mr. Gregory was, as one would suspect, less sympathetic: “Yes, I would agree that Miss Lear is very kind, yet I can’t help but wonder at her atrocious lack of judgment.”
Jason was defiant: “I can’t stand what everyone is saying about Rachel. She’s the best! You don’t know her! You’re saying things that aren’t [expletive deleted] true!”
And not to be left out, Sandy: “She’s real good with people. She always carried aspirin for me, because I am prone to flare-ups of phlebitis when I sit too long in class. She didn’t have to do that. It was real thoughtful.”
And what would a Sunday exposé be without a little something from Mr. Valicielo? “Lots of strange people come and go over there, all times of the day and night,” he said. “And she cut that tree down, that one there, to let it ruin my fence. I seen her with an axe.” The reporter did note, thankfully, that there was no evidence the tree had been purposely cut down, but appeared to have fallen due to root rot.
Most of the feature was devoted to Myron, and how a professor who once had a promising future could mastermind such a scheme, pocketing almost fifty thousand dollars for his troubles. That part infuriated her the most. He had stolen upwards of fifty thousand dollars, had two jobs, and still he couldn’t pay her back?
The article went on to explain Myron’s fall from grace at the university, which she read with great interest as she devoured a sheet of chocolate chip cookies. In the end, she decided that you could never really know another person completely, and she didn’t feel quite as stupid in the end. Myron was, by that account, a master manipulator. She could at least say she had been betrayed by the best.
Which left the one thing that she could not get over: Flynn.
Flynn, Flynn, Flynn.