I checked out of the Kennewick Inn very early on Tuesday morning, figuring I could drive directly to Winslow College. It didn’t make sense to miss another day of work and draw attention to myself. I’d drunk two cups of coffee at the inn, but stopped in Kittery at a Dunkin’ Donuts for another coffee to go. I was exhausted. Brad and I had talked for several hours the night before, first in his truck, then in the rental cottage that he lived in. Despite what he’d done to Ted, I felt a little bad for Brad. He was a wreck, and once he realized that I wasn’t going to turn him in, he latched onto me like a drowning man coming across a lifeboat. He told me he would set up the meeting with Miranda for that night at 10:00 P.M. If she agreed, he would call me at my house from the public phone at Cooley’s. He would only let the phone ring twice, but the number would appear on the digital readout on my landline.
I made it into my office before anyone else arrived. After logging in to my work e-mail account, I wasn’t surprised to learn that my boss, Otto, had left early on Monday, the previous afternoon, having felt a cough coming on himself, and that he thought he’d take Tuesday off as well. Otto Lemke was easily the most suggestible man alive, especially when it came to any kind of ailment. Just letting him know on Sunday that I wasn’t feeling well had probably sent him into a spiral of psychosomatic illness. I spent the morning writing short descriptions of our archived collections to go on our internal site for students and faculty. When I’d done enough to justify a morning’s worth of work, I walked across campus to the student-run café where I got most of my lunches. The rainstorm from the previous day had left the world looking bright and washed, like a car emerging from a car wash. The cloudless sky was a deep metallic blue. The air was crisp and smelled of apples. At the café I got curried tuna salad on wheat, and took my sandwich out to one of the stone benches with a view of the line of oak trees, bright red and bristling in the high breeze, that split Winslow’s main quad. My life was good, and I wondered briefly why I’d gotten involved in the sordid affairs of Miranda and Ted and Brad. What I was planning on doing in Kennewick tomorrow night was a huge risk. It was dependent on Brad, who was so fragile you could almost see the cracks in him, and it was also dependent on Miranda’s not becoming suspicious when Brad suggested the meeting. I felt exposed, and less than 100 percent confident, but knew that I had gone this far, and would go to the end. Ted deserved to be avenged, and Miranda deserved to be punished, now more than ever.
That afternoon I had scheduled an off-site visit to a former student, now in her eighties, who was offering to donate items from her school years to the archives. These visits were often the best part of my job, and sometimes the worst. It all depended on the lucidity and expectations of the former student or professor. Sometimes all they had were a few battered textbooks and some class notes; these were often lonely people looking for someone to talk with for a while, someone who would have to listen to long tales from their college days. Sometimes, however, these former students would turn out to have treasure troves of archival materials. These were the girls who kept everything. The printed menus from the Midwinter Formal of 1935. Photographs from the March blizzard of 1960, when the drifts of snow were seven feet high. A handwritten poem from when May Gylys was the visiting writer. I never knew what to expect with these visits, and I only scheduled them when the person was within close driving distance. Otherwise, we would ask the donors to mail us their materials.
I nearly canceled that afternoon’s visit. I was still tired from lack of sleep, and was not sure that I had it in me to accompany some stranger down her own personal memory lane. But I told myself that I should keep my schedule as normal as possible, so I went, driving several towns west to Greenfield, where Prudence Walker, class of 1958, lived. She was raking leaves when I arrived and had filled several bags, all of which had already been placed on her curb for pickup. Her house was a neat, orderly Cape Cod in a neighborhood of Colonials and deck houses. I pulled into her driveway behind a new-model Camry, and Prudence Walker put down her rake and came over to greet me.
“Hello, there. Thank you so much for coming out. You’ve done an old lady a huge favor.” She was wearing a faded denim skirt and a green windbreaker. Her gray hair was pulled back in a bun.
“It’s not a problem,” I said, getting out of my car.
“It’s all boxed up, and right there on the front step. I’d carry it over to you, but it took all I had to get it from the attic to where it’s sitting. Apparently, back then, I decided I needed to keep everything. Most of it’s my scrapbooks, but I included all my notes from class, and syllabi, and there’s a bunch of exam papers, as well. You said you wanted those, didn’t you?”
“I’ll take it all. Thank you, again, for this.”
I walked over to the front step, and picked up the heavy box. Prudence Walker came with me, walking with an uneven gait that dipped her right shoulder down every time she took a step with her right leg.
“I hate to make you drive all the way out here, then send you off just like that, but I’m trying to get all these leaves raked up before we lose the sun. Can I get you a glass of water, or anything?”
“No, thanks,” I said, loading the box into my trunk.