Kathleen O'Brien - The Sinner

But when he clicked off and looked down at the silent cell phone in his hand, he had to face the truth.

He knew what he’d really been hoping.

Fool that he was, he’d been hoping that, in spite of everything, Lara Lynmore had been thinking of him.

He’d been hoping that somehow, even out there in Tinseltown where the New Year’s Eve parties were just getting started, she might sense that, here in Heyday, it was a cold and lonely midnight.

MORESVILLE COLLEGE WAS small in acreage, but big on charm. The view people always saw on the postcards, shot from Stagger Hill just above Heyday, was downright quaint. The school’s half-dozen Federal-style redbrick buildings were sweetly tucked into the surrounding flowery woods—they always photographed it in the spring—like so many giant Easter eggs.

Seen from ground level, in the visitor’s parking lot at the tail end of the winter break, it looked much more institutional. Bryce locked his car and gazed around. Maybe it was just the absence of student bustle, but he thought the campus looked run-down and tired.

He wondered what that was all about. When he’d last been in Heyday, the college had been thriving, really making a name for itself.

He poked around a little, getting oriented. By the time he reached the office of Dilday Merle, chairman of academic affairs at Moresville College, for their ten o’clock meeting, he was five minutes late. But since he wasn’t sure what the hell this meeting was all about, anyway, he wasn’t terribly worried.

So, 301…that was the corner office, four big windows with great views. Bryce whistled under his breath. So Dilday Merle had finally made good, huh? Bryce was glad to see it.

Fifteen years ago, Dilday Merle had been the Algebra II teacher at Heyday High. On his next-to-the-last visit home, Bryce, who had fooled around and flunked Algebra II at his own school in Chicago, had ended up attending summer school in Heyday. He’d been assigned to Dilday Merle’s class.

The guy had been geeky and ancient even then. Bryce had thought he was a total loser. And he couldn’t believe that the slow-witted Heyday kids hadn’t already seen the entertaining possibilities for making fun of Dilday’s name. Bryce and the dorky teacher had locked horns early, but to his surprise, Dilday Merle had won the battle. Bryce had never stopped being cocky and obnoxious, but he had damn sure learned algebra.

They shook hands now with warmth that was, on Bryce’s side at least, quite sincere.

“Bryce McClintock. It’s been a long time.”

“Yes. It has.”

The pleasantries didn’t last long. Dilday looked scatty, with thick black glasses overhung by shaggy, unkempt eyebrows and Albert Einstein hair, but he was mentally as sharp as a shark’s tooth.

“All right,” Dilday said. “Let’s get down to it. You know I want something, or I wouldn’t have asked you to come over. Maybe you already know what it is?”

Bryce lifted one brow. “Money? I’ve just been here a week, but so far that seems to be the odds-on favorite.”

Dilday laughed. “Oh, no. Money’s not my department. Our president, Dr. Quentin Steif, he’s the official back-slapper and fund-raiser. I’m sure he’ll be calling you before long. No, my area is academics. I am hoping I can talk you into teaching a criminology class.”

Well, that did cut to the chase. Dilday had always known how to keep students awake and edgy. Bryce could feel his curiosity pricking. He sat up a little straighter. “You’re kidding.”

“No. I don’t have time to kid. One of my criminology teachers quit last week, no notice, along with one of my special ed people and two British Lit professors.” His eyes twinkled behind his glasses. “You’re not by any chance a big fan of Beowulf, are you? I’d gladly put you to work in the English department, too.”

Bryce smiled. “No one is a fan of Beowulf, Professor Merle.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Bryce. Call me Dilday. Or whatever version of the name you prefer these days. As I recall, you had several pretty good ones.”

Bryce shook his head. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I was seventeen. I was an ass.”

Dilday grinned. “Yes, you were.” He held out a slim file folder. “Here, this is the syllabus our last teacher used. You could adapt it to suit yourself, or you can work straight from his plans. It doesn’t matter to me. You’ve got the credentials, and we need a teacher. We don’t pay squat to adjuncts, but you don’t care about that, anyway.”

Bryce took the folder but didn’t open it. “Hold on. I haven’t said I’ll do it.”

Dilday didn’t look fazed. He just smiled, toying with his letter opener, the same letter opener he’d always used. Its handle was carved in the shape of a zebra. In Heyday everything was zebra-this and zebra-that. It was one of the cutesy affectations Bryce had despised most about this Podunk town. So why did the sight of this particular letter opener suddenly make him feel a little nostalgic?

“In fact,” Bryce went on, steeling himself to resist all appeals to the past, both overt and covert, “a list of the reasons why I can’t do it—not to mention the reasons why I wouldn’t want to—would stretch out from here to D.C.”

“I know,” Dilday said patiently. “But you’ll do it, anyway, because you’re a nice boy. You always were.”

“Really? I thought we just agreed I was an ass.”

Dilday shrugged. “Ass is attitude. Ass is window-dressing. Ass is, at heart, simply fear in fancy clothes.”

Bryce paused a moment, his nostalgic goodwill toward this old man diminishing. “I thought you taught algebra, not psychology.”

“Oh, forget about me. And let’s, just for the moment, forget about you at seventeen, too. All that stuff is irrelevant now. I’ve got a crisis on my hands, Bryce. I take it you haven’t heard about what happened here a couple of years ago?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“I thought someone might have told you, since that journalist Tyler Balfour turned out to be your brother. But then—I guess communication between you and Kieran has been pretty spotty.”

“You might call it that.” Bryce shrugged. “So how about if you tell me? What the hell does Tyler Balfour have to do with anything?”

“He damn near destroyed this college with his muck-raking, that’s what.” Dilday took off his glasses and started cleaning them on his tie.

The gesture took Bryce back fifteen years in one split second. He could almost smell the chalk dust and the cheap perfume of the cheerleader who had sat next to him in Algebra. He had almost had sex with her under the football bleachers one night, but she had chickened out at the last minute.

“No, let me rephrase that,” Dilday said carefully, arranging his glasses on his nose again. “He didn’t nearly destroy us. We did that to ourselves. Balfour is an investigative reporter for a paper in Washington, D.C. But you can’t kill the messenger, can you? What happened to us was our own fault. We had a problem here, and he came to town and found it. Then he went home and published a big exposé and—”

“Hang on,” Bryce said. “When you say you had ‘a problem’ here, what exactly does that mean?”

“It means—” Dilday sighed. “Well, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Some of our female students had formed a call-girl ring, and—”

“My God. I remember that.” Actually, Bryce had thought it was hilarious at the time. Rich sorority girls turning tricks in pokey little Heyday for mall money. He had read the first of the series, but then he got caught up in a trial and missed the rest. He’d meant to go back and read it all, but in the end he hadn’t cared enough. Heyday was boring. Even underage prostitution and local politicos caught with their pants down couldn’t make it interesting.