“Yeah, but what if she loves cookies and can’t eat them, and there I was, waving them under her nose,” Alice said. “When you come down to it, I was torturing her.”
“That may be,” I said. “But you can’t just go around losing people’s papers when they annoy you.”
“Except she did, all the time,” Kathy said. “That’s one of the reasons she hated me so much. She was doing this to students all the time—to drama students, that is. That’s why we started this thing where people who were afraid she’d do it to them would give their papers to her in front of me. So they’d have a witness.”
“Stupid me,” Alice said. “I should have done that. I thought turning it in a week early would be safe.”
“You need to tell the chief about all of this,” I said.
“All right,” Alice said. “If you’ll go with me.”
“We’ll all go together,” I said. “Right, Kathy?”
Kathy turned pale. Then she nodded and began burrowing in her cavernous black tote bag.
“Before we do,” she said. “Here.”
She handed me a thick file folder.
I opened it. The first page was a typed table of contents for the documents in the file. It was her evidence against Dr. Wright.
“We should take this to the chief, too,” I said.
“That was my idea,” she said. “I brought two copies. One for Dr. Wright, so I could try to talk some sense into her, and one for Abe, that I was going to give him if I failed, so he wouldn’t be totally blindsided. The chief doesn’t need both. Give that copy to Abe. He and Art and Michael might be able to use it.”
“Don’t they already know about it?” I asked.
She hesitated.
“Not really,” she said. “I told Abe I had some information about her treatment of students that might be useful. I don’t suppose he had any idea how much information.”
I glanced down at the file, which was over an inch thick.
“We should make sure it’s okay with the chief,” I said, tucking the folder under my arm. “Let’s go.”
We marched downstairs, making a strange procession. Alice went first, holding her head high, looking like a defeated queen marching to her execution. Kathy just looked anxious, scurrying along with the tote bag containing her file clutched to her chest. I brought up the rear, keeping an eye out to make sure neither of them suddenly changed her mind.
As we reached the bottom of the stairs, I felt a familiar slight twinge of pain in my abdomen. But it didn’t repeat during the whole long way down the hall to Michael’s office, so apparently it was just another Braxton-Hicks contraction. I couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or disappointed.
As we turned into the hallway to the library, the doorbell rang. I looked over my shoulder and saw Rose Noire scurrying to answer it.
“Is this the residence of Professor Waterston?” boomed a resonant voice. The Face had arrived. I breathed a sigh of relief that Rose Noire would be dealing with him. I’d once had to make conversation with him for ten minutes at a faculty party, and it had seemed the longest ten years of my life. I hurried after Kathy and Alice.
The chief and Sammy were standing at the end of the hallway.
“More witnesses for you,” I called, as our procession approached.
I found myself remembering a long-ago fall when mice moved into the basement of our family house. The chief’s face wore the same look of truly mixed feelings that Mother’s had each time our cat caught a mouse and proudly deposited it at her feet.
We all filed into Michael’s office and, being old hands, took seats on whichever boxes and stools we thought would be preferable to the awful chairs. The chief, who followed us in, frowned slightly. I suspected he was about to ask to speak to his witnesses alone.
“Kathy and I convinced Alice that she should come and talk to you,” I said. I made the mistake of patting Alice’s hand in a comforting manner, and she seized mine with a death grip.
“Don’t be afraid, Alice,” Kathy said. Having seen what had happened to me, she patted Alice on the shoulder and managing to avoid being grabbed herself.
With much encouragement from Kathy and me, Alice sobbed out her story of Dr. Wright’s persecution and her fears that having touched the statue would make her the chief’s prime suspect. It took rather longer than necessary, but probably less time than it would have taken him to extract it from Alice by himself.
“Thank you,” the chief said, finally. “Let this be a lesson to you not to withhold information in the future.”
“You’re not going to arrest me?” Alice asked, sniffling slightly.