Free Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript by Joanne Dobson

Hardcastle book in with them?”
    “Who knows? She shrugged and clicked on the TV. “You were in a real slash-and-burn mood.” She began channel surfing.
    I took a closer look at my daughter: Was she losing weight? “How about some oatmeal, Amanda? I’ll make it the old way, with butter and brown sugar.”
    “Oatmeal with butter and brown sugar,” Charlie repeated. “And raisins? I haven’t had that since I was a kid.”
    “You got it now,” I said, grinning at him.
    “Maybe later for me,”Amanda replied. “I don’t have much appetite.” She clicked through another half-dozen channels. “Oh, look, a rerun of Cagney and Lacey. Cool!”
    ***
    That afternoon, Charlie watched the football game, Amanda dozed, and I picked up Tough Times.
“So, you think you can play with the big boys, Danger. Well, you got another think coming.”
“I’m no hard guy like you, Vecchio, but I’ve got what it takes. And more.”
“Oh, yeah. Like you’re gonna pull that trigger. Little girl like you. Anything happens to me, and my boys’ll be all over you like shit on toilet paper.”
Kit gave him the steely glance she reserved for heartless thugs. “Bang, bang,” she said. Then she pulled the trigger. The bullet whipped just past his left ear, as she intended. It zipped across the vast empty factory space and embedded itself with a thunk in a discarded wooden packing case. Jack Vecchio made his final move—a recoil that sent him back against the catwalk’s low steel rail. Coolly, Kit watched him stumble, overbalance, and fall headfirst, a long, fatal drop, to spatter like a squashed white spider on the unforgiving concrete floor.
The End
    The End? Already? I sighed. Okay, so it was a little over the top. Quite a bit over the top, actually. But, oh, to be Kit Danger, bold, and brave, and strong.
    I rose from the chair and went into the kitchen to start the chili for supper. I wondered how much of Kit Danger there was in Sunnye Hardcastle. I wondered if there was any in me.

Chapter Eight
    I worried about Amanda, but she rallied after a few days at home and returned to school on Sunday. Wednesday, opening day, I was free to slip into conference mode. I drove to campus under a lowering sky experiencing the usual pre-conference combination of excitement and dread. An academic gathering is something like a carnival. A participant steps outside of her daily identity, for one brief shining moment divorced from her daily self: appearance, personal history, even course load. She is “Woman Thinking,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson might have phrased it, would he not have considered such a statement to be a contradiction in terms.
    In the coffee shop Claudia Nestor passed me carrying a tray with two chocolate glazed doughnuts and a mug of milky-white coffee. “So the big day is finally here,” I said. “How’re things going?”
    “Diversionary modes of occluding the class binaries,” she muttered.
    “Claudia?”
    “Held hostage to fashionable political and theoretical agendas,” she hissed.
    “Claudia?” She neither saw nor heard me. Dear God , I pleaded, just let her make it through the conference with her sanity at least semi-intact .
    And mine, too, after God knows how many hours as Sunnye Hardcastle’s escort.
    Miles Jewell, English Department chair since God was a boy, stopped me as I approached Dickinson Hall juggling my briefcase, a large coffee, and an egg-and-bacon sandwich in a white paper bag. He was well protected from the frigid weather in a grey wool overcoat, a crimson scarf with the Harvard insignia in white, and the kind of brimmed felt hat I think is still called a fedora.
    “Karen, what’s this I hear about you canceling a class today?” His thick white hair flopped over his thick white eyebrows.
    A chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the weather. I’d deep-sixed my freshman class that afternoon because of the conference. “The opening reception is at four o’clock.”
    He frowned.