Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other Ivy League institutions in the area.
But as a consulting forensic psychologist at the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital in nearby Belmont, my FBI criminal-intelligence-analyst husband can avail himself of the most marvelous libraries, museums, and scholars in the world anytime he wants. He can help himself to the Faculty Club to his heart’s content.
We can even reserve a guest room upstairs, and we have on more than one occasion been given enough whiskey or wine during dinner. But that’s not going to happen with Dorothy flying in, and I really shouldn’t have said yes when she asked me to pick her up later tonight and drop her off at her daughter Lucy’s house, which will get Benton and me home after midnight.
I don’t know why Dorothy asked me specifically unless it’s her way of making sure we get to spend a little alone time together. When I said yes I’d come and Benton would be with me, her response was “I’m sure. Well it doesn’t matter.” But when she said that I realized it does matter. She has something she wants to discuss with me privately, and even if we don’t get the chance tonight, we have time.
My sister left her return flight open-ended, and I can’t help but think how wonderful it would be if it turned out I’d always been wrong about her. Maybe her real reason for venturing north to New England is she feels the same way I do. Maybe she at long last wants to be friends.
How amazing if we become a united front when coping with our aging mother, with Lucy and her partner Janet, and with their adopted nine-year-old son Desi. And also their newest addition Tesla, a rescue bulldog puppy who’s staying with Benton and me in Cambridge for a while. Someone has to train her, and our greyhound Sock is getting old and likes the company.
My shoes swish through the hot dry grass, and sweat trickles beneath my clothes, down my chest, my back. I’m moving again, seeking shade as the sun settles lower and the slanted light shifts.
Every time I escape the glare it finds me again, the walled-in center of the Harvard campus a maze with its greens and lawns, its quadrangles and courtyards connected by paths and walkways. The stately brick-and-stone buildings draped in ivy live up to the stereotype, and I remember what I felt when I was given a tour at the age of fifteen. It’s as if I’m back in time with every step I take, sweetly, sadly.
It was on one of my few trips outside of Florida during my senior year in high school when I began exploring colleges and what I might amount to in life. I’ll never forget walking exactly where I am now and experiencing a limbic rush at the same time I was self-conscious and out of place. The memory is interrupted when I’m startled by a vibration, what feels and sounds like a large insect buzzing.
I stop walking on the piping-hot sidewalk, looking around, noticing a drone flying high over the Yard. Then I realize the buzzing is my own phone muffled by my suit jacket pocket, where it’s tucked away from the heat and sun. I check to see who’s calling. It’s Cambridge Police Investigator Pete Marino, and I answer.
“Is there something going on that I don’t know about?” he says right off, and the connection is pretty bad.
“I don’t think so,” I puzzle as I bake on the bricks.
“Why are you walking? Nobody should be out walking in this shit.” He’s curt and sounds irritated, and I’m instantly alerted this isn’t a friendly call. “So what the hell got into you?”
“Errands.” I feel on guard, and his tone is annoying. “And I’m walking to meet Benton.”
“Meeting him for what reason?” Marino asks as our cellular connection continues to deteriorate from good to spotty, back to okay and then fractured before it’s better again.
“The reason I’m meeting my husband is to eat dinner,” I reply with a trace of irony, and I don’t want a tense time with yet another person today. “Is everything all right?”
“Maybe you should be the one telling me that.” His big voice suddenly booms painfully in my right ear. “How come you’re not with Bryce?”
My chatterbox chief of staff must have informed Marino about my refusing to get back into the car at Harvard Square, about my violation of protocol and reckless disregard for safety.
Before I can answer, Marino begins confronting me as if I’m a suspect in a crime. “You got out of the car about an hour and a half ago, were inside The Coop for maybe twenty minutes,” he’s saying. “And when you finally exited the store on Mass Ave? Where’d you go?”
“I had an errand on Arrow Street.” The sidewalks in the Yard form a brick spiderweb, and I find myself constantly making adjustments, taking the most efficient path, the quickest and coolest.
“What errand?” he asks as if it’s any of his business.
“At the Loeb Center, picking up tickets for Waitress, the Sara Bareilles musical,” I reply with forced civility that’s beginning to waver. “I thought Dorothy might like to go.”
“From what I hear you were acting as squirrelly as a shithouse rat.”
“Excuse me?” I stop walking.
“That’s the way it’s been described.”
“By whom? Bryce?”
“Nope. We got a nine-one-one call about you,” Marino says, and I’m stunned.
He informs me that his police department was contacted about “a young guy and his older lady friend” arguing in Harvard Square about 4:45 P.M.
This young guy was described as in his late twenties with sandy-brown hair, blue capri pants, a white T-shirt, sneakers, designer sunglasses, and a tattoo of a marijuana leaf. The tattoo isn’t right but the rest of it is.
Supposedly the concerned citizen who called the police recognized me from the news, and it’s disturbing that my clothing description is accurate. I do in fact have on a khaki skirt suit, a white blouse, and tan leather pumps. Unfortunately it’s also correct I have a run in my panty hose, and I’ll strip them off and toss them when I get where I’m going.
“Was I mentioned by name?” I can’t believe this.
“The person said words to the effect that Doctor Kay Scarpetta was arguing with her pothead boyfriend and stormed out of the car.” Marino passes along another outrage.
“I didn’t storm. I got out like a normal person while he stayed behind the wheel and continued to talk.”
“You sure he didn’t get out and open the door for you?”
“He never does and I don’t encourage it. Maybe that’s what someone saw and misinterpreted it as him being angry. Bryce opened his window so we could talk and that was it.”
Marino lets me know that next I became abusive and physically violent, slapping Bryce through the open window I just described while repeatedly jabbing him in the chest with my index finger. He was yelling as if I was causing him injury and terror, and to put it succinctly, what a crock of shit. But I don’t say anything because of the uneasiness in my gut, a hollow
