The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(259)

                He frowned, concentrating. “That’s that freshman you’re really tight with?”

                I hesitated at his use of the present tense, but decided it’d be just too complicated to explain. “Yeah,” I said. “Her.”



                             “Sure. She was here last night, I asked her where you were. She just glared at me and walked away.” His voice dropped to a whisper, and he waggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx in those goofy old comedies my dad likes to watch. “I think she was in a hormonally induced bad mood, if you know what I mean.”

                “Do you remember who she was talking to, what she was wearing, anything?”

                He laughed. “What are you, a detective?”

                “No, Charlie, I’m not a detective,” I said patiently—thinking, I just play one on TV. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened to my friend.”

                He dug beneath his pillows, found a blue Nalgene water bottle, and took a swig of whatever was in it. “That’s deep,” he said. “Hey, wait a second … she was wearing a red Hingham Hockey sweatshirt! That’s why I asked her if you were with her, ’cause I figured it had to be yours, nobody else I know went to Hingham. She pretty much ignored me, though. She wasn’t talking to anyone, I don’t think. She seemed really angry and just sort of sat in a corner by herself, pounding beers. While I was manning the keg, she got at least three or four of ’em from me, and she never said a word, not even thanks.”

                “Do you know what time she left?”

                He considered the question, then shrugged helplessly. “I have no idea, sweetheart. I was so shwasted, I wasn’t paying any attention to the time.”

                I figured that was about all I’d be able to learn from Charlie, so I thanked him, told him to get some sleep, and turned to go.

                “Hey, Max!” he called after me. He pulled several folded sheets of typing paper from between the pages of his book and held them out to me. “She left this behind, I found it lying on the floor when I was cleaning up this morning and saw her name on it. Can you give it back to her?”

                I took the thin sheaf of paper from him and unfolded it. Across the top of the first page was the heading “Gender is as Gender Does,” and underneath it “by Katie Parker.” Scrawled across the bottom of the page in red ink was a big circled B+ and a handwritten message: “This is promising, Katie, as far as it goes. Problem is, it doesn’t go far enough. I expected a more fully developed job from you!”



                             Katie’s paper. She was a straight A student, so I could imagine the B+ flipping her out. Professor Farmer was a notoriously tough grader, though. I’d only gotten a B- from him on my final paper, two years earlier, and I’d been relieved to wind up above C level.

                “Thanks, Charlie,” I said dully. “I—I’ll take care of it.”

                I headed out into the frosty December air. Now what?

                The last anyone had seen of Katie had been at Prof Farmer’s picnic. I was not one of the professor’s fans—actually, I’d always found him sort of skeevy, and I really didn’t relish the idea of seeing him when I didn’t have to—but it seemed clear he must’ve been one of the last people to see her alive, and that meant I probably had to go talk with him. I had no idea where the expression “bearding the lion in its den” came from, but I knew what it meant—and I knew I was going to have to do it.