“It’s okay,” I said. “Come in so I can shut the door. You’re letting all the heat out.”
“Is this a bad time?” she asked as she followed my orders. “I could come back later if this is a bad time.”
“It’s a horrible time, and don’t you dare leave,” I said. “Abe needs you. We’ve had a murder.”
“A murder!” Her hands flew to her face in a dramatic gesture of alarm. “Who?”
“Dr. Wright,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, in a much less agitated tone. “That’s terrible,” she added, about a second too late.
“You think so? Nobody else does.”
“Just because none of us likes her doesn’t mean it’s okay for some nut to knock her off,” she said, as she shed her coat, revealing a tight-fitting black knit garment that she probably thought of as a dress. I would have called it a tunic. “Besides, you know this is only going to cause trouble for all of us on the drama side of the divide. The police are bound to suspect us. Hell, I suspect us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Here’s hoping we all have alibis for the time of death.”
“Oh, God,” she said, her face suddenly falling. “I probably don’t. Assuming it happened between the time you called me and now, that is. And it’s all The Face’s fault.”
The Face was what most people called the president of Caerphilly College. He was a kindhearted man of great charm and personal dignity and arguably not a single brain cell. He owed his position to his inexplicable ability to extract large amounts of money from wealthy people and institutions. As long as he stuck to doing that and left running the college to people with some kind of administrative skills, things went smoothly. But Kathy Borgstrom wasn’t a wealthy potential benefactor, so the fact that she’d even encountered The Face was unsettling news.
“What did he want?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Kathy said. “I mean, who ever does? He kept asking to see Abe, and I must have explained about fifteen times that Abe was out of the office but that I’d track him down as soon as possible. I didn’t want to tell him where Abe was—the last thing you need is him showing up on your doorstep. And he kept wandering around, picking up papers and putting them down in the wrong places, reading stuff on the bulletin board, and asking questions about whether I was happy and did I think that the building needed painting and had I taken enough of a vacation this year. It was . . . unnerving.”
Studying her face I could see that she really was rattled. Which was odd. Normally an encounter with The Face produced monumental irritation, not anxiety.
“What does he care how happy I am?” she was asking. “I mean, do you suppose that’s what he asks people before he fires them?”
“He doesn’t fire people,” I said in my most reassuring voice.
“No, he leaves that to his minions,” she said. “Like Dr. Blanco. The most obsequious toady ever to slime his way into administrative services, and considering some of his predecessors, that’s really saying something. Anyway, the whole conversation with him was so creepy that I drove halfway out here before I realized that I’d left behind the files I was supposed to bring. I locked them in my desk drawer as soon as The Face showed up, of course, so it’s not as if they fell into the wrong hands or anything. But he was there a half an hour—maybe more—and then all that time driving around on top of the time I spent dealing with him, and only my word for it that any of it happened. And it’s not as if The Face would remember that he was talking to me if you asked him five minutes after he left my office, much less hours later. And—”
“Calm down,” I said, in my most soothing tones. “So you don’t have an alibi. Hardly anyone here has an alibi. You’ll fit in perfectly. Take a few deep breaths.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Look, what should I do?”
“Go around to the barn,” I said. “Abe’s probably still out there, and you can identify yourself to the deputies and explain that you only just arrived. Don’t go volunteering the fact that you don’t have an alibi unless they ask you.”
“Okay.” She retrieved her coat and tried to struggle into it while opening the front door, a maneuver that ended up costing time instead of saving it. “Will do. Why don’t you get some rest? You really look done in.”
“That’s just what I plan to do,” I said as I shut the door behind her.
The second she was out of sight, something struck me: She hadn’t asked how Dr. Wright was killed. If I were arriving at a house where a murder had just taken place, I think I’d be full of questions about how it happened—especially if I knew the murderer was still on the loose. Kathy hadn’t asked a single thing. Her first reaction to hearing about the murder had been to worry that she didn’t have an alibi. Did she have a reason to worry?