Third Degree (A Murder 101 Mystery)

immediately, marked as “undeliverable.”
    Curious.
    I dialed his cell phone again, expecting to be confronted with his full voice-mail box, and was surprised when he answered. So surprised, in fact, that I began to choke on the muffin I had bought in the cafeteria, a piece of which I had just shoved in my mouth.
    “Alison?”
    I started coughing, spewing muffin crumbs all over my desk and my computer monitor. I finally managed to swallow the crumbs, washing them down with the remainder of my cup of coffee. “Kevin?”
    “Alison?”
    “Where the hell are you?” I asked, rather indelicately, given that I was speaking to a man of the cloth.
    “I’d rather not say.”
    “And why did you leave?”
    “Again, I’d rather not tell you.”
    “Okay,” I said, seeing that I wasn’t going to get anywhere. “Are you all right?”
    He sighed. “I guess.”
    “Does your family know where you are?”
    “They know I’m fine and that’s all they need to know right now. You spoke to Jack, right?”
    “Briefly.” I didn’t understand all this cloak-and-dagger stuff but he obviously didn’t want to talk about it so I wasn’t going there. I had already picked the scab off the wedding conversation wound with Crawford and I wasn’t going to take any chances that I had blundered into something distasteful again. “Just tell me that you’ll be back?”
    “I don’t know if I will. I can’t say any more.” He sounded bereft. “Listen, I have to go. I’ll call you soon. I promise.” And then he was gone. The men in my life were hanging up on me with regularity. Time to find some new guy friends.
    I continued my presemester work with the candidates for Freshman Comp, along with reviewing some papers for the senior seminar course that I’d be teaching this and the following semester. Students had been asked to choose an author to study in depth and I was relieved to see F. Scott Fitzgerald and Kurt Vonnegut among the choices of the ten students who were taking the course this semester. I wasn’t so happy to see a few contemporary authors whose books were blockbuster sellers but whom I considered a little cut-rate, and I made a mental note to talk to the students on the list whose authors didn’t pass muster. I’m all for the “Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a baby” thing but St. Thomas isn’t, so it looked like Dan Brown would be off the list. I looked out my window and toward the cemetery that rested on the hill beyond the access road behind the building and contemplated the various goings-on in my life.
    I was being harassed to change something in my life by a nameless, faceless letter writer who thought I either suffered from erectile dysfunction or some other peccadillo that was getting in the way of my emotional health.
    A woman named Ginny Miller had become a major thorn in my side.
    One of my best friends had gone missing and was being extremely coy about where he was and why.
    And oh, yeah, the topper? My boyfriend, the one who adored me and wanted to spend the rest of his life with me, thought we should spend some time apart.
    I considered all of this as I stared out the window at the various tombstones that dotted the hillside behind my office. And I felt sick to my stomach most of the time. When I added all of it up, I became pretty depressed.
    I walked into the main office area and approached Dottie’s desk. She was engrossed in the Daily News ’s Jumble and was trying to unlock the word that was comprised of the letters v-i-e-s-o-l .
    “Olives,” I said. Because if it’s one thing I know, it’s how to spell “olives.”
    She looked up at me, not aware that I had been standing there figuring out her Jumble. “Thanks,” she said, and folded the paper up, sticking it into a half-open drawer. She eyed me suspiciously. “Can I help you?”
    I picked up our conversation from a few days prior as if there had been no interruption. “So if Charlie asked you to marry him, you are absolutely, positively sure that you would say yes? How can you be so sure?”
    Dottie has been wronged by more than one man and her attennae went up. “Why? What do you know?”
    “I don’t know anything,” I assured her. “I just want to know how you can be so sure that you want to spend the rest of your life with him. Doesn’t he annoy you or get on your nerves? And haven’t you lived alone for a long time?”
    “Honey,” she said, waving a hand dismissively, “I’ve lived alone so long that anything