Софи Келли - A Night's Tail

Eric’s maple leaf cookies had turned out perfectly—thin and crisp but not crumbly and with just a hint of maple sweetness.

“These are delicious,” I said.

“According to the chef, it’s the recipe,” Melanie said. “Please thank Eric again.”

I nodded. “I will.” I picked up my bag and was about to leave, but something made me stop. Some instinct, maybe?

“You helped him cheat,” I blurted.

“I already told you,” she said, a tinge of annoyance in her voice. “I didn’t have anything to do with stealing those tests.” Her shoulders were rigid.

“I believe you,” I said. “But you did help Wallace get his marks up, and it wasn’t by tutoring him.”

Silence hung between us like smoke in the air. I didn’t need her confirmation. The look on her face was enough.

She put both hands flat on the top of her desk as though bracing herself for whatever was coming. “What I told you before about not wanting to jeopardize my chances of moving up in this business by having that old scandal come up was true.”

I nodded but didn’t say anything.

“There was a lot more to it. I didn’t help Lew steal those tests. That’s the truth. And I didn’t know for a long time that he had.”

“But you did help him cheat in some way, didn’t you?” I said.

“Yes. I did his assignments. Not perfectly, mind you; no one would have believed that. I just did them well enough to get his class average up.” She slid her right hand over the desktop as though she was feeling for blemishes on the wooden surface.

“And the university suspected.”

She nodded. “Suspected but never proved. I needed the money, Kathleen. It sounds like an excuse because, well, it is. And it’s the biggest mistake I ever made. I should have gotten a job waiting tables or selling my blood. Anything would have been better. That one mistake has been following me around for twenty years.”

I studied her across the desk. Nothing in her body language or her tone suggested she was being anything less than one hundred percent truthful. “Was it just chance that Wallace decided to approach the town about setting up his business? Or was it because you were here?”

“He was looking at the state in general because there were some tax breaks for a new business like his, but I think he chose Mayville Heights because he’d discovered I worked here. He told me he saw a magazine article about me when he was flying home from somewhere. It was one of those inspiring up-from-nothing pieces that I probably shouldn’t have agreed to.” She rubbed her left temple as though she had a headache.

“Wallace was blackmailing you.”

Melanie shook her head. “No. Believe it or not, he considered us friends. As far as he was concerned, friends help one another out.”

“Did you help him?”

“At first I said no.”

“So what changed?”

She leaned back in her chair and her expression turned thoughtful. “In a way, I guess he did.”

I narrowed my gaze at her. “You’ve lost me,” I said.

“The second night he was here, I was working late and as usual Lew was up wandering around. He walked by the office, saw me and we started talking, really talking. Lew was trying to fix things in his life. He’d connected with his mother’s family. They were good people from the way he spoke about them and it seemed to inspire him to make some changes.” She smiled. “I think there was a lot of one step forward and two steps back. He’s always thought he was God’s gift to women and from what I could see he couldn’t seem to get it through his head that he wasn’t. But he said he was trying to fix his mistakes.”

That explained his settling the lawsuits.

“I told him I thought we should come clean and just take the consequences. He said he had more to lose than I did.”

“He took those tests.”

She nodded. “And paid someone else to take the blame. I’d always suspected he had. Lew said if he admitted he’d cheated it would destroy any chance of him having a second chance at football.”

I frowned at her. “Wait a minute. A second chance at football?”

“Lew told me that he had a part-time job lined up as an assistant high school football coach, starting in the fall. I don’t know if he would have been any good, but when he talked about it I could tell how much it meant to him. He swore that he was going to make the supplement business a success and use the money to do good things and become a successful coach and inspire young people. I told him that he would be stuck with the weight of that secret for the rest of his life.”

“Sisyphus,” I said.

Melanie made a face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t understand.”

“Sisyphus was a king from Greek mythology. A pretty despicable guy. Zeus punished him for his treachery by forcing him to roll a huge boulder up a hill. Just before it reached the top it would roll down again. Sisyphus was left rolling that boulder up the hill for eternity.”

Melanie nodded. “That’s what those lies we told felt like to me: a big boulder that could flatten us both.”

It was impossible not to feel some sympathy for her.

“I didn’t kill him, Kathleen,” she said. “I was upstairs in my old office drinking and writing my resignation letter when Lew died, and I can prove it.” Her voice got a little stronger. “I Skyped my best friend in California and we talked for half the night. You can call her or the police can. You can check my computer.”

I nodded. This time I did believe her.

chapter 15

There was no sign of the guys when I got home. No sign of Owen or Hercules, either. I checked my watch. I had time to call Julie Kendall.

I went upstairs and changed into my tai chi clothes. Then I picked up the phone and dialed Julie Kendall’s number. A woman with just a hint of a French accent answered on the fourth ring.

“My name is Kathleen Paulson,” I said.

“Bridget Lowe said you’d probably be calling.” Julie had a warm, friendly voice. “You, uh, you found Lew.”

I found myself nodding even though she couldn’t see me. “I did . . . I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” she said. “We’ve been divorced for a long time but I never wanted anything like this to happen to him. Even in my angriest moments.”

“Do you mind if I ask when the last time you spoke to him was?”

“I hadn’t heard from Lew in probably five years and then about three weeks ago, out of the blue, he called me, wanted to meet. He said he was going to be in Montreal in a couple of days and it was important. I was just curious enough to agree. We met at a coffee shop and he handed me a check.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. “A check?” I said. “He owed you money?”

“I would have told you no,” Julie said. “Lew said it was money he should have given me when we divorced, my half of what I thought was a pretty much useless piece of property in Indiana of all places. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Did he tell you why he was doing this now?”

“He said he’d changed. Then he hit on our waitress.” She laughed. “He may have changed but not completely. We talked for a while. He told me he’d made contact just by chance with a cousin on his mother’s side of the family. I don’t know if you know but he was just nineteen when his mother died. Anyway, they ended up getting together and he met the rest of the family—his mother’s sisters and his cousins. She’d run off, it seemed, with his father and hadn’t been in contact with them. Meeting them all, being welcomed by them all, did something to him. Something good.”

I shifted on the bed, tucking one leg underneath me. “Do you happen to know if he was in touch with anyone else from his past?”