Aefle & Giesla Page 13

  When Megan declared she wanted to take a break, DeeDee rushed from the room before anyone could stop her. But before she reached the ladies’ room, she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  “Why didn’t you just call me Timid Tommy?” Tom asked, hurt eyes boring into her heart.

  “Why’d you give Megan all that ammo against me?”

  “What ammo?”

  “The bat and the windshield?” She put her hands on her hips. “And why’d you blindside me? You could have told me your sister was going to take this tack. Instead you wined and dined and sweet-talked me last night, as if we were on the same side.”

  “We are on the same side!” His voice rose, and he grabbed her by the elbow to take her out into the hallway where he continued in a deep, hushed voice. “The same side being the one that wants this to go away and for Buck Bewley to leave you alone.”

  “By making me look like I’m a maniac. Sorry if I’m not overjoyed at that strategy.”

  “I had no idea this was going to be Megan’s strategy!” he sputtered. “She just told me she was going to posit that you would have left the altar regardless of my stupid stunt. I didn’t know how she planned to do that… and I also didn’t give her the info on the bat incident or anything else. She probably got that from Oyster Point sources is my guess. One could argue--”

  “I don’t give a shit about ‘one’,” she said through gritted teeth. “Your sister’s arguing that I’m a dumb bitch who doesn’t know her own mind. How’s that gonna help me as I try to save my business?”

  “It’s a deposition, not a news headline.”

  DeeDee groaned. “Dickie Faulkes’ll make it a news story. He’ll make sure all of Oyster Point gets word of that list of DeeDee McGowan’s Greatest Mistakes. Good God, Tom. How could you? I thought you understood what I’m up against.”

  “I do! I do understand! More than you know. You’re swimming against the tide, not just against Buck but against a small town of small minds. I know. Believe me, I know. What I didn’t know was how Megan was going to pursue her questioning. I’ll tell her to stop. I won’t tolerate it.”

  She stared at his gleaming eyes. Was he telling her the truth? Was he sincere? Tom didn’t lie. He might run from a fight. But he didn’t lie. She relaxed, and her voice softened. “Okay,” was all she said on a breath.

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, talk to your sister. I’m still not real happy. We can’t unring the bell. What’s on the record is on the record.”

  “Maybe she can get it stricken,” Tom said.

  A flurry of footsteps and voices carried to them, as Jane-Ann and Megan rounded the corner, striding their way.

  “There you are!” Jane-Ann cried as she approached. She was clutching some papers. Megan walked purposefully forward, a take-no-prisoners look on her face.

  “Megan,” Tom began, “could I speak with you privately?” He looked at DeeDee as he said this, and she knew he intended to tell Megan to cool it with her DeeDee-as-Village-Idiot offense.

  “Just a sec,” Megan said, holding up her hand. “First listen to what Jane-Ann has to say.”

  Jane-Ann faced her client, holding the papers in both hands in front of her.

  “I was trying to tell you before things got started that we have a new offer from Dickie. Ms. Charlemagne here has persuaded me that you should consider it before we go any further.”

  “What is it?” DeeDee asked, caution growing in her heart. She felt her body tense.

  Jane-Ann handed her the papers. “It’s a fair-market offer for your dealership. Buck’s willing to pay for it, DeeDee, while it’s still worth something. He drops everything if you agree to take his offer -- all lawsuits, including the one against Dr. Charlemagne here.”

  Stunned, DeeDee studied the papers. The amount was indeed a fair offer -- as much as she could expect to get in this economy if she put the dealership on the market today. And if she put it on the market tomorrow, it might even fetch less -- it was, after all, in danger of being cut by the manufacturer.

  Her eyes warmed. She knew she should take it. It was money in the bank. The chance for a new start. All problems solved.

  But her dad’s dealership? His life? His legacy to her? It was all she had left of him.

  No, not just of him, but of her childhood, her innocence, her entire past.

  She sucked in her lips. Try as she might, she couldn’t stop a tear from rolling down her cheek onto the papers. Dammit to hell. Damn Buck and damn Tom and damn all the lawyers in the world. Her hands trembled as she held the papers.

  And then, in an instant, they were snatched out of her hands -- by Tom! In the silent hallway, the sound of ripped papers echoed as he forcefully tore them in two.

  “Of course she won’t consider this! She isn’t the villain here. It’s Buck Bewley. He’s a bully. He bullied her into this legal morass, and now he’s trying to bully her into selling her business to him.”

  “Tom!” Megan said sharply. “That’s not for you to decide. It’s a good offer. An excellent offer. DeeDee could start over on it.”

  Tom grabbed DeeDee’s arm and escorted her out of the hall, calling over his shoulder. “Tell Dickie Faulkes to shove it. And his client can do the same.”

  ***

  As soon as Tom had seen DeeDee’s eyes fill with tears, he’d ached to embrace her, to comfort her. She never cried in public -- her heart must have been breaking. He knew what the dealership meant to her. Last night, she’d told him several stories about it, and her voice had been filled with affection. It was more than just a business to her. It was heritage.

  He was steaming, too, from Megan’s treatment of DeeDee. He’d had no idea his sister had intended to use that tactic. When she’d told him she was going to show that DeeDee wouldn’t have gone through with the wedding no matter what, he hadn’t realized this was what she’d meant.

  “Come on,” he told DeeDee as he escorted her into an elevator. “I’ll take you back to your hotel.”

  “I don’t want to go there. I’ll go crazy there. And I can’t go back to Oyster Point.”

  “Why not?” Although he did think it was a good idea for her to simmer down before hitting the road anywhere.

  “The damned baseball bat, Tom! Jane-Ann’s right -- if I’m within twenty feet of that moron and his car, I’ll go ballistic!”

  “I thought you got rid of the bat.”

  “Hell, I could buy another one. They’re not rare items.” She balled her hands into fists and hit the wall. “Fuck. I am crazy. Your sister’s right.”

  He grabbed her and held her close, feeling her body shake as she struggled against crying. By the time they arrived at the lobby, she was sniffling and pulling away, already taking charge of herself and the situation.

  “I’ll be okay,” she said, straightening her shoulders. “You don’t need to babysit me.”

  Poor DeeDee. Always trying to be strong.

  “It’s not babysitting. I want to be with you. Let me take care of you today. Let me show you around town.”

  She sighed and looked at the ground. After a long pause, she looked up and smiled. “I’ll let you buy me a cup of coffee. Then we’ll decide on the rest.”

  ***

  Coffee led to a walk, which led to lunch and then sightseeing. They went to the Walters Art Gallery for him and the Industrial Museum for her, then drove past the sites Thomas loved in the city. Thomas took great pleasure in showing her his Baltimore, expounding at great length about various spots that charmed him in Charm City.

  Throughout the day, he ignored his cell phone buzzing, figuring it would be Megan trying to reel him back in to persuade DeeDee to take Buck’s offer. He wasn’t sure what the right thing was for DeeDee to do. He just knew she couldn’t decide now.

  They parted briefly for afternoon naps, with Tom promising to get opera tickets that evening for a local group’s presentation of Madame Butterfly.

  Only then did he check his voicemail, and as he’d suspected, Me
gan had left several messages. One, however, was from Beewater.

  “Sorry we missed you at the faculty meeting today, old boy,” the whiny prof’s voice said. “I had Belcamp do a presentation on his work on Renaissance forgery instead.”

  As he strode into his apartment, Tom called Beewater back.

  “What meeting?” he barked into the receiver after identifying himself.

  “The one I told you about yesterday,” Beewater said. “When we were scheduling your presentation on this big discovery of yours.”

  “You didn’t mention a meeting this week…” But then Tom remembered the interruption from DeeDee and how Beewater had continued talking when Tom had retrieved the call. Crap. “Never mind. I’ll be there for the next one.”

  “If there is one.”

  “What does that mean?” Tom’s heart raced -- was Beewater pushing him out before then?

  “I mean faculty are scattering to the winds for the summer, Thomas, like arable soil in the Dust Bowl. We might not all be in attendance to sit with bated breath as you bestow your news upon us.”

  Relieved, Tom decided to delve into his tenure quest while he had the department chair on the line. He told Beewater about his renewed attempts for letters of support and asked if he could have an extension in getting them in.

  “I don’t know, Thomas,” Beewater said. “The university is getting rather persnickety about ‘i’s being dotted and ‘t’s’ being crossed. Draconian budget cuts, slashing and burning of departmental resources -- we’ll be lucky to even have a tenure position to offer at this rate.”

  Tom mentally rolled his eyes. To Beewater, an across-the-board budget freeze amounted to a “draconian cut” clandestinely designed to undermine the humanities.

  “I’ll meet the original deadline,” Tom said, now at his apartment door. He unlocked it and went in. “And hopefully, you and the university will meet yours.”

  “Well, certainly we will. If all is in order.”

  “What wouldn’t be in order?” At his patience’s end, Tom refused to be diplomatic. “I’ve done groundbreaking research -- and have more to share -- that reflects well on the university. I get good marks in student evaluations. I’ve published in prestigious journals. I’ve presented at conferences. What else is there?”

  “Yes, you’ve done quite a lot. So have all of us who labor in the fields of the academy. So it sometimes comes down to how many angels one can fit on one’s pinhead, so to speak.”

  “One’s pinhead....” Tom inwardly growled. “You mean how many inconsequential items you can judge.”

  “Come, come, Thomas. Nothing is really inconsequential. If that were so, we wouldn’t be concerned with your little Aefle at all, now, would we?”

  Thomas stifled a groan as he sank onto his sofa, trying to control his rising temper. “What, pray tell, is consequential regarding my tenure application that I might be missing?”

  “It isn’t what you’re missing, Thomas. It’s what you should have missed. The jungle drums of our esteemed university have pounded out the story of your wayward mission on the Eastern Shore.”

  “What?” Tom sat up. “Where did you hear about it?”

  “Does it matter? A resourceful student reporter is on the trail. She said she couldn’t reach you and came calling at my office. I, of course, played the astonished department chair, an easy role since it sprang from genuine circumstances. What on earth were you thinking?”

  “It’s none of your…” Thomas stopped himself before saying anything he’d regret. This was bad enough. No point in riling up Beewater. “It’s none of the university’s business. It was a silly joke, no worse than other pranks at the university.” He searched his memory for an example of one. “No more serious than the day the Environmental Politics department faculty dared students to confiscate the extra toilet paper rolls in all the campus restrooms.” Actually, in Thomas’s mind, his own escapade should have ranked lower on the scale of silliness. At least his adventure hadn’t caused the whole campus uncomfortable inconvenience.

  “But that was civil disobedience, not a Dionysian revel, Thomas. The university is getting a bit skittish about its reputation. Professors involved in unseemly lawsuits after drunken sprees isn’t the stuff of good public relations and hardly rises to the level of eco-activism.”

  Thomas sighed. If the reporter knew of the lawsuit, it wasn’t a leap to figure out how she’d gotten the story. Dickie Faulkes or Buck himself had probably planted the seed, getting the information as easily as Megan had gotten her intel on DeeDee. The world was an open Google book. “All right. What do I need to do to make it go away? Who’s the reporter?”

  “Oh, I’d lie low. Don’t respond to the lovely reportress. The student newspaper is just a nuisance anyway, always looking to gin up some scandal or another.”

  Ah, yes, Tom remembered a story a year ago that had centered on Beewater’s tendency to hire only the most voluptuous student assistants. The headline had been “Beewater’s Busty Babes,” and had included a photo array that looked as if it had come from a men’s magazine. It had caused quite a chuckle.

  Tom thanked him for his advice and hung up. Heaving another sigh, he strolled to the window and cursed as he looked south to the green quads of the university.

  Lie low. Just as DeeDee was doing. They were both exiles of a sort.

  He pulled out his phone and looked through all the missed messages now. He saw one from an out-of-state cell and guessed it was the student reporter. This was probably the last issue of the paper before graduation. He’d take Beewater’s advice and not respond. The story would die with the advent of summer, when intrepid student journalists headed to the beach or their parents’ air-conditioned family rooms, their zeal dampened by the lure of lazy afternoons.

  As was the case over the past few years, whenever Tom was stressed he yearned to dive back into his research, to lose himself in the life of Aefle. Never was the pull stronger than at that moment. With the thrill of his recent discovery of Aefle’s love life still fresh, Tom yearned to revisit the world of his little monk, knowing that whatever had befallen the man, it was all settled now.

  For a few hours, he lost himself in Aefle’s story, comforted to come across a passage bemoaning the lack of privacy in the monastery:

  “Myneholie Brethren do watcheth over their sheep all hours long. Is it to guide us in our pathe, or to delighteth in viewing our sins?”

  Good question, Aefle.

  As Tom worked, an unfamiliar longing nagged at his thoughts. He wanted to talk to DeeDee. He wanted to complain to her about Beewater and how unfairly the tenure process was treating him, the silliness of the student newspaper story, the general hypocrisy and disconnectedness of his peers. He wanted, for the first time that he could remember, to enjoy her condemnation of his “insulated” life.

  He turned quickly, retreating to the shower and preparations for his evening out at the opera with her.

  ***

  It didn’t go well.

  Both he and DeeDee were in worried moods as the performance started -- a local civic opera group performing at the city’s Lyric Theater. She’d hardly said anything on the ride up town, and he’d been disappointed by her silence. He realized he’d counted on her cheerful chatter to raise him from his own funk.

  And, although the production was adequate, it was hardly soaring. The Butterfly was a bit plump and old for the role. The Pinkerton was a bit scrawny for a Naval officer and sang with a piercing, not rounded, tenor. And the chorus was small and under-prepared.

  Butterfly had special meaning for Tom -- it had introduced him to the wonders of music -- and he’d wanted to share that with DeeDee. He’d even prepared notes about the opera to go over with her during breaks. But she remained quiet and distracted during his presentations, once even suggesting he “keep his voice down.”

  When they strolled into the cool night air at the end of the opera, she still said little. Despite the so-so performance, surely she’d appr
eciated Puccini’s stirring music.

  “So, what did you think?” He couldn’t keep the hopefulness from his voice. “Pretty special, huh?” They walked to his car in a nearby parking garage.

  “Yeah. Very nice.”

  “Didn’t you find it moving?” How could she not like Puccini? Maybe she needed him to explain more about it. He thought he’d done enough with his history of the opera and the works of the composer, but perhaps his efforts had been less than adequate, given his depressed mood. “I could get you a recording if you like. And maybe a study guide…”

  “Well, sure. I mean…” She stopped and looked at him, pulling her wrap up around her shoulder.

  Poor DeeDee. It was probably hard for her to find the words to express her reaction to this great piece of music.

  “Yes?” He waited to hear how she would describe the experience, eager to help deepen her appreciation once she’d found the words to articulate it.

  She cocked her head to one side. Was she batting her eyelashes at him? She fanned her face, as if overcome with emotion. Well, then. This was something. Wonderful DeeDee -- she got it, how amazing this work was. He felt gratified. He couldn’t wait to tell her more, maybe over a drink.

  “Oh, Thomas, I can’t thank you enough. It was wonderful -- I’d never seen or heard anything so beautiful,” she said breathlessly.

  He warmed with contentment, a small smile lifting his lips.

  “Why, it was like music from heaven,” she said, her voice thick with the southern twangs of the Eastern Shore. Very thick, in fact. Too thick. “It was amazing. It was awesome. I wasn’t worthy of listening to it. My life was changed forever by hearing it….”

  “Wow, DeeDee, I had no idea. I mean I was hoping --”

  A lopsided grin curled up her face. The eyelash batting stopped. So did the fanning. So did the pretense. And he knew -- she was putting him on, pulling his leg.

  “I was hoping you’d like it,” he finished, looking down.

  She continued, in her normal voice, tinged by a drawl, but not drenched in it. “Don’t pout, Tom. I liked it. I really did. It was pretty.”