No Nest for the Wicket(48)

“About causes. Against injustice. She was always marching into battle about something—writing letters to the editor, carrying around petitions, organizing demonstrations, telling people off. I remember saying to someone who found her irritating that the world was filled with people who never stood up for anything, except maybe their own self-interest, and she wasn’t afraid to speak out.”

“Sounds admirable,” I said. I meant it. I wouldn’t have minded meeting the woman he was describing. I wouldn’t have minded it if someone described me that way.

“Yeah,” he said. “Trouble was, I was seeing her the way I wanted to see her, not the way she was. It wasn’t really about the cause to her. It was all about the battle. She went around looking for things to get mad about. And she always found something. If I believe in something, I try to stand up for it, even if not everyone approves, but there’s big difference between that and reveling in the number of new enemies you create every time you do anything. If you disagreed with her cause, you were a fascist, or an idiot, or a Neanderthal. If you agreed with her cause but not with her methods, you were a wimp or a coward. If you agreed with her on everything, she could still find a way to tick you off.”

“Sounds uncomfortable.”

“It was,” he said. “Uncomfortable to be around, at any rate, though she thrived on it. Ultimately self-destructive. I remember when she told me that the history department had decided to get rid of her. She wasn’t upset; she was jubilant. Another big battle she could fight.”

“Were they? Trying to get rid of her, I mean. Or was she just paranoid?”

“Nothing paranoid about it,” he said. “They definitely had it in for her. They weren’t even subtle about it. She’d have had a great case against them—in the press anyway. Outspoken radical professor ousted by reactionary administration. Chauvinists punish uppity female. Except by the time it happened, she not only didn’t have any allies; she’d have had leave town to find more than a handful of people who weren’t already enemies.”

“Damn,” I said.

“What’s wrong?”

“I wanted to dislike her,” I said. “Out of—I don’t know. Retroactive jealousy, I guess.”

“She wasn’t hard to dislike,” Michael said with a sigh.

“She made people unhappy, herself most of all, I suspect,” I said. “But she didn’t deserve to be killed like that.”

“The problem was, once she got cornered—once it started to look like she was going to lose—she got … Well, she changed. She started thinking in terms of what she could get on people, and how she could use it against them. The affair with Marcus Wentworth—as I said, I think she wanted to use it to blackmail him into saving her job.”

“Do you think he was the only one? Or do you think she tried with other people?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t seeing much of her by then. And, hell yes, she probably was blackmailing people. Not for money, but to save her job. The last time I saw her before she headed out of town, she was even madder, and talking about getting back at people. Making them pay, making them sorry, ruining their lives. I warned a couple of the people I figured she had it in for. Kept an eye open for any sign that she was doing something like that. After a while, I figured … well, not that she’d calmed down—she was a marathon grudge holder—more that putting her life back together would keep her busy when she first left, and by the time she’d been gone a year or so, I figured she had newer enemies to torment. To tell the truth, maybe I was just relieved that she hadn’t decided I was one of her enemies.”

“What if something made her decide to come back after her old enemies after all?” I said. “Or what if she’d been harassing or blackmailing some of them all along?”

And, not that I was going to upset Michael by mentioning this, what if her turning up practically in our backyard wasn’t a coincidence, but part of some plot to cause him trouble?

“I’m beat,” Michael said after a short pause. “Let’s knock off.”

“As soon as we pick everything up,” I said.

“We’re going to lock up, aren’t we?”

“Yes, but we’re leaving him here to guard,” I said, pointing to Spike. “We don’t want to leave anything on the floor, where he could shred it or pee on it. For that matter, we should get those boxes up off the floor. He could do serious damage if he decided to pee on them.”