Free Rough Weather: A Spenser Novel by Robert B. Parker Page A

only want to know that she is an alumna, and what her maiden name is.”
    Ms. Gold looked like she approved of my use of
alumna
.
    “Well, I think we can tell you that,” she said. “We’ll take up the maiden-name business later.”
    “She may have graduated in 1980,” I said.
    She turned to the desktop computer and worked it for a while.
    “We have no Heidi Van Meer. We have a Heidi Washburn, but she graduated in 1926. And we have a Heidi Bradshaw who graduated in 2001.”
    “How about under her husbands’ names,” I said, and gave her the names that were in Healy’s background folder. “Mrs. Peter Van Meer. Mrs. J. Taylor Washburn. Mrs. Harden Bradshaw?”
    She did the computer thing again.
    “No,” she said.
    Her voice lingered on the
no
.
    “But?” I said.
    “Let me think a moment,” Ms. Gold said.
    I waited. She was ash-blonde and slim. She wore a pair of glasses with big blue frames. She was nicely dressed in a tasteful well-tailored cashmere-and-tweed kind of way. There was a wedding ring on the appropriate finger. After a time she exhaled softly.
    “Do you suspect Heidi Bradshaw of involvement?” she said.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m collecting information.”
    “Who are you working for?”
    “This is pro bono,” I said.
    “Really? I was under the impression that everyone involved is wealthy.”
    “I was there when the kidnapping went down, and couldn’t prevent it,” I said.
    “And it rankles you?” she said.
    “It does.”
    “So you are investigating basically in service to your own self-regard?” she said.
    “You could say so.”
    “Your self-regard seems very high,” she said.
    “And I want to keep it that way,” I said.
    She nodded and smiled and sat another moment.
    “We have a senior faculty member named J. Taylor Wash-burn,” she said.
    “Was he married to someone named Heidi?” I said.
    “I don’t know. It just seemed a sufficient coincidence that I should tell you.”
    “Would it be in your best interest,” I said, “if I didn’t tell anyone how I learned of Professor Washburn?”
    “His existence is hardly a secret,” Ms. Gold said. “He’s listed in our catalog.”
    “Can you tell if she ever attended this college?” I said.
    “If she did, it is unlikely that we wouldn’t have her,” Ms. Gold said.
    “Even if she didn’t graduate?”
    “This office is about acquiring money for the college,” Ms. Gold said. “Once you are no longer a student, you become alumni, which is to say a source of revenue.”
    “So you are quite assiduous,” I said.
    Ms. Gold smiled.
    “Like wolverines,” she said.

 
    Professor J. Taylor Washburn
had a B.A. from Penn and a Ph.D. from Columbia. He was an art historian. He taught a graduate seminar in low-country realism, and was the chairman of the Fine Arts Department.
    I learned all of this in the first five minutes of our conversation. I also learned that he had once been married to a young woman named Hilda Gretsky.
    “Was she a student here?” I said.
    “No,” Washburn said. “I met her at a gallery.”
    “In the city?”
    “Yes,” Washburn said, “downtown. One of my teaching assistants was having a show. Sadly, it was not very good.”
    Washburn appeared to be about sixty, with wavy snow-whitehair worn longish. His complexion was red, and his thick white mustache was carefully trimmed.
    “When were you married?”
    “Nineteen eighty,” Washburn said.
    “How long did it last?”
    Washburn looked out the window at the open quadrangle in the center of the campus with the redbrick Georgian library at one end and the redbrick Georgian student union at the other.
    “Two years,” he said.
    “What occasioned the breakup,” I said.
    He kept looking out the window.
    “She asked me for a divorce,” he said. “She told me she’d been having an affair with a man named Van Meer.”
    “Must have been hard to hear,” I said.
    “Yes.”
    I took a picture of Heidi from my pocket and put it on