Hardscrabble Road(36)
“The kid in the water buffalo case wasn’t a conservative student,” Alison said, “and the trouble we had over it was over the secrecy of the proceedings, which is what is going on here. This is like a Star Chamber, Chris. It’s absurd. At the very least, I have the right to due process, to be able to confront the witnesses against me, to advice of counsel—”
“—Due process doesn’t apply to university committees,” Chris said quickly. “They aren’t adversary proceedings. You don’t have enemies you have to protect yourself against.”
“No? Did what’s his name in the water buffalo incident have enemies he had to protect himself against?”
“That went wrong,” Chris said. “It got out of hand.”
“This is about to.”
Chris licked his lips. Alison didn’t think she’d ever realized, before, how soft and weak and self-protective he was, and yet she should have. She’d known him for years. She had a sudden vision of that alternative lifetime again—Simon alive, herself as a housewife in suburban Boston—and then snapped herself back to the present. She was angry. She had been afraid, but now she was angry.
“Let’s not go into how I feel about being investigated because an idiot like Drew Harrigan made charges against me on a radio program targeted to the kind of illiterate asshole who never made it past high school, if that,” she said. “Let’s just go with what we’ve got. I came to you instead of Roger because you were easier to get to. You’d better go tell Roger if you know what’s good for you.”
“Roger isn’t going to just drop the investigation,” Chris said. “He couldn’t. He’s got a responsibility—”
“When I leave this office, I’m going to hire a lawyer,” Alison said. “There’s a woman in town I went to college with. She’s an attorney who works on high-profile media cases. She’ll know one locally who’ll suit my purposes. I’m going to hire a lawyer, and I’m going to give a press conference. And I swear to God, I’ll make the water buffalo case look like a day at the beach in comparison.”
“If you go to an outside source, the committee can suspend you from teaching.”
“Let them try it.” Alison leaned forward and took the two-page “testimony” off Chris’s desk. “The first thing we’re going to look into is this. Because you know what, Chris?”
“You can’t blame a student for having an opinion.”
“No, I can’t. But I can blame a nonstudent for claiming he was a student. Or she. Because my classes are small. The one mentioned, Church and State in the Europe of the High Middle Ages, never has more than ten people in it. Don’t you think I would have noticed if a student in my class believed in the devil or any of the rest of this nonsense?”
“If you really were that dismissive, the student may not have felt it was safe to speak up. He might have kept it all inside.”
“Bullshit,” Alison said. “Go talk to Roger, Chris. I’ve had enough.”
It was one of those times when what Alison really wanted was to see Chris’s face after she’d left the room, but even the medieval necromancers had never figured out how to manage that one.
It was too bad.
2
Kate Daniel couldn’t decide how she felt about the call she’d just had from Alison Standish. She would have liked to say bemused, but she’d never been sure what the word “bemused” meant. It was a little like finding out that her ex-husband was representing Drew Harrigan in a case in which they might have to have something to do with each other. It wasn’t that she minded hearing from people in her past, exactly. It was that she didn’t know how to respond to them. She had the feeling they all remembered the Kate Daniel who had always been called Katherine. She thought they’d expect to see her in A-line skirts from Villager and matching crew-necked sweaters and a circle pin. She couldn’t really remember what she’d worn in college, or as Neil Elliot Savage’s wife. What she remembered most of the time was being afraid. She was afraid of the girls she went to school with. She was afraid of Neil. She was afraid of herself. God only knew how she’d gotten the guts to get herself to law school, or out of her marriage, but here she was, and she didn’t want to go back.
To be fair, nobody seemed to be interested in seeing her go back. Surely Alison hadn’t. Kate was a little sorry that she couldn’t help Alison herself, because the case sounded absolutely perfect, right down to the false accusations from a conservative source, but there it was. Alison wasn’t homeless. She had good degrees and a tenured faculty position. Sherman Markey was homeless, or dead, and he had nothing at all. It was, Kate thought, time for her to find somebody to sleep with. She wasn’t looking for a relationship with depth. She was looking for sex. Sex cleared her head.