Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 5. Whole No. 783, November 2006

No Neutral Ground by Sarah Shankman

The author of the Samantha Adams mystery series as well as the Louisiana-based novel Keeping Secrets, Sarah Shankman grew up in small-town north-eastern Louisiana — what she calls the no-dancing, no-drinking, no-fun part of the state. “I treasure my time in NOLA in the late ‘60s,” she says, “as part of the founding staff of New Orleans magazine.” She visits the city often, and is at work on a kids’ adventure novel.

Diana stood, distracted — furious, actually — on the St. Charles neutral ground. A late spring afternoon, the rain was pouring on that grassy median strip down the middle of the boulevard where the streetcars run.

It wasn’t like Diana to let her emotions get the best of her. The chair of the English Department of the university just across the way, Diana Banks was a focused woman. An extremely busy focused woman. On her plate: a creative writing seminar, the deadline looming for a collection of her own short stories, endless committee meetings, and a department contentious as the Balkans.

The peacekeeping was particularly wearisome. Just this afternoon, even before the incident that had moved her to rage, Diana had said to her friend Abby, “Cristabel is having another nervous breakdown. Peter’s complaining that Marcus isn’t pulling his load on the honors issue. And Gloria and Phil are at it again, duking it out on the hiring committee.”

“As if hiring itself weren’t demanding enough, right here at term’s end,” Abby, a university research librarian, commiserated.

“I know. We’ve got to make a decision this week on the new instructor. And snipe, snipe, snipe, that’s all Gloria’s done since Phil won the editorship of the journal. I wish she’d just go ahead and slash his tires, get it out of her system.”

Diana had called to see if Abby could give her a ride to pick up her car from the repair shop. Her friend couldn’t, but while Diana had her ear, why not vent a little?

Abby had laughed. “Well, you know what they say about academe.”

“The politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low? And we’re locked together forever, like lifers with no parole.”

“Tell me about it. Despite the pain of hiring, if it weren’t for the occasional new blood, I think I’d shoot my brains out. Speaking of which, did you see the new men’s baseball coach? A dead ringer for the young George Clooney. Hubba hubba.”

“You’re a naughty woman, Abigail Markson. I’m telling Steve on you.”

“How do you think we’ve stayed married twenty-six years? It’s my dirty mind that keeps Steve panting.”

But Diana hadn’t heard Abby’s answer. Her friend’s hubba hubba had taken her elsewhere.

Taken her to thoughts of Rob, an adjunct in her own department and one of the candidates for the full-time position. The candidate she was rooting for. No, amend that. The candidate Diana was set on hiring, come hell or high water.

Rob, Rob, Rob, that’s where Diana’s mind was now, while her body stood in the downpour, waiting for the streetcar. Behind her sprawled Audubon Park, its green lawns puddling, mighty spreading oaks spectral through the mist.

“The bod of a thirty-year-old,” Rob had whispered to Diana more than once, the sweet words more intoxicating than the small crystal pitcher of Sazerac that had become part of their pre-loving pas de deux.

Clever man, Rob.

What words could a woman hovering on the cusp of fifty more want to hear?

Now, from behind her, from Riverbend, Diana heard the hum of the streetcar approaching. Here it came, rain pelting off the top of the olive-green electric car from the 1920s trimmed with reddish mahogany. She climbed on impatiently, her black mood not improved by the dripping gaggle of tourists, the handful of laughing students.

Thank God, there on the river side of the car was a pair of empty seats. Diana piled her things in the aisle seat to discourage takers. She turned, then frowned at her reflection in the window, her brunette curls gone to frizz.

“Sexy, sexy hair” was another endearment Rob had murmured more than once, loosing it from the barrettes keeping it out of her face. Keeping it more professional.

Certainly no paean to her intellect had ever flipped the same switch as Rob’s honeyed pillow talk about her looks. Not for Diana, who’d been told since girlhood how smart she was.

“This little girl of mine’s gonna be a lawyer, you mark my words,” her daddy had said more than once. At seventy-five, he was finally retiring this year, crowned in glory, sheriff of the rural parish in the northern part of the state where she’d grown up. “Gonna be a lawyer and world-class skeet shooter.”

Her mother had given him a hard look when he’d talked like that. Smart girls, lawyers, didn’t find husbands, and she’d never approved of his dragging their only child along with the dogs and the guns on hunting expeditions. Though Diana had been a pudgy child, her teeth a train wreck, so what were her chances of a decent husband anyway?

But braces had fixed Diana’s smile, and she’d grown out of the pudge into a rather attractive woman. When she’d returned south from Boston with a shiny new Ph.D. in hand, the engagement ring she’d sported was even more dazzling.

“How long were you married?” Rob had asked her on their second date, about six months earlier, just before Thanksgiving.

Their second surreptitious date. Dinner at a place out by the lake where no one ever went anymore.

Diana closed her eyes and settled into the streetcar’s mahogany slotted seat, rainwater dripping off her cherry-red raincoat. Audubon Park disappeared, and a bit of her anger, too, as she let the memory of that evening wash over her.

It wasn’t really the done thing, a department chair dating an adjunct, one of that roving band of academic gypsies who subsisted by stringing together a class at one college here, another there, praying for full-time faculty to retire or die so a real job, with benefits and decent pay, would open up.

Also, Rob was twelve years her junior. Boy toy. Diana could just see the smirks.

“Honey, I was divorced before you were born,” she’d laughed, that second date.

“Awh, come on.” Rob had laid his slow grin on her. Cocked one eyebrow beneath dark golden locks.

He was a near dead ringer for Harry Connick, Jr., that lean, languorous home-grown crooner, that hunka hunka burnin’ love. Rob had then tapped her hand with one long finger, his touch like heat lightning.

Now the streetcar was passing Temple Sinai, a simple stone building with three tall iron doors. Diana never passed the temple without smiling at the memory of David Markson, Abby and Steve’s son, manfully delivering his bar mitzvah speech from the bema with not a hint of the stutter that had tortured his childhood. He was an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon now, doing a post-doc. Diana couldn’t be prouder of David.

She had no children of her own.

She often said that her students were her children. Not the same, of course, but she did invest enormous passion and energy in them. Something very much like love.

“Nawh, really, tell me,” Rob had insisted. “How long did that lucky man enjoy the supreme pleasure of your company?” Exaggerating his south Alabama drawl.

Sharecroppers, he’d said, his people. Po’ whites. Diana wasn’t so sure that that was true, but it fit Rob’s bad-boy image. The slightly dangerous English instructor/bartender/writer. He was working on a noir screenplay. L.A. Confidential meets The Big Easy.

Diana had been writing a collection of short stories for a couple of years now, stories linked by various characters’ connections to Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, just around the corner from her house.

“And how could that fool stand to give you up?” Rob kept pushing. “Or did he die of consumption or somethin’?”

No, that wasn’t what happened to Richard, the smart-as-a-whip, thin-as-a-whippet, handsome young Jewish dentist she’d met in grad school in Cambridge. Richard had always thought New Orleans was “ever so romantic” and had been thrilled to pieces when the university had tendered Diana a position.

He’d also been thrilled with the house they’d found in the heart of the Garden District, on Fourth near Coliseum.

He’d been thrilled with fixing it up, spending endless hours in antiques and junk stores on Magazine Street. Talking fabrics and color chips with designers. Meeting with armies of landscapers, gardeners, painters, plasterers.

What hadn’t thrilled Richard was Diana’s snuggling close to him after they switched off the ever-so-charming lamps he’d chosen for their ever-so-handsome bedside tables. He was the only man Diana had ever lived with, so it had taken her a long while to realize that she wasn’t the problem.

She’d been crushed, then furious, and, ultimately, humiliated when Richard, and the truth, finally came out.

“Three years,” she’d answered Rob, letting him lead her onto the dance floor of the place out by the lake where nobody went anymore. Nobody she knew, anyway. “We were married three years from start to finish.”

Diana loved to dance. She and Richard had been like Fred and Ginger on the dance floor, one of the ways, she’d realized later, he’d seduced her into marrying him.

And why? Now there was a mystery. Richard had said he’d loved her, truly, deeply loved her, but—

It was a big but.

She’d been talking about Richard earlier today in her creative-writing seminar. Obliquely, of course.

Revenge was the theme she’d assigned the class for their next stories, and they’d spent nearly an hour discussing that primal urge: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

One girl recounted her humiliation by a bully at summer camp, and how she’d stolen the bully’s diary and photocopied the juiciest pages, then turned them into mess-hall placemats.

There was talk of turning the other cheek.

Destroying someone with kindness.

And what exactly did that Bible passage mean: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord”?

It had been more than twenty years now since Richard had left Diana for Jeffrey, a lighting designer. At first she’d lain awake night after night, plotting to burn down their ever-so-elegant house, just around the corner, dammit, from hers. When she did sleep, poison, knives, guns, ropes, and bottomless caverns filled her dreams.

After a while, she’d rested easier, but she’d never forgiven Richard. She’d tried, but maybe she was too much her daddy’s little girl. She knew her dad had never meant the first half of that old lawman’s adage: Forgive your enemies, but never turn your back on them. When Richard was dying of AIDS, there was a little part of her that felt — not that she was proud of it, but there it was — Serves you right.

Diana had never married again. Not even close. Which is not to say that she hadn’t had her share of good times. This was New Orleans, after all, the country’s epicenter of good times. Laissez les bons temps rouler. Diana had dated quite a bit, in fact, keeping rather steady company with more than one beau.

But there’d been no one with whom she was willing to take the plunge — the risk of incurring that kind of pain again. Not that the decision was conscious. Diana had scores of rationalizations for avoiding commitment. Her suitors were too needy, too controlling, too depressed, too married to golf, too fat, or too just plain damned boring.

And they all drank too much.

Of course, nearly everyone in NOLA overindulged. The philosophy was you might as well drink, smoke, too, eat all the fried foods you wanted here in the murder capital of the U.S.A. Carpe diem was the general consensus, ’cuz any day now a bad guy might hit you in the head just a little too hard.

(In fact, just this week, there’d been two home intrusions in Diana’s very own block, one especially frightening, as the owners had been home, the burglars armed.)

Then there were the poisons spewed by the petrochemical plants up and down the river, delivering cancer to the water, the air, the land.

And don’t forget the surety that one of these days a hurricane would blow your house down.

Such fatalism was part of the city’s charm. That sense of living on the edge lent a certain frisson to the everyday, the humdrum.

Just like the part-time, no-strings (no-pain) pleasures of a handsome man.

As Handsome Rob had twirled Diana around the floor on that second date, he’d asked the question she’d heard a million times:

“How come nobody’s snagged you since?”

“Maybe I’m just too picky.” Her standard response.

“Picky? I can sure understand that. Woman like you, picky, that makes sense.”

Then Rob had flung her out with one strong arm, let her stay there distanced from his touch, his body’s heat, his scent — a mix of lime, smoke, leather, and sweat — until she began to long for him as if he were cool water on an August afternoon. An eternity, then he reeled her back in.

She’d laughed, trying to cover her yen for him. He was an adjunct, for chrissakes, and way too young.

Buckwheat Zydeco came on the jukebox with “Give Me a Squeeze, Please,” and she’d begun a step-pause-step-step by her lonesome.

“Or maybe nobody’s been able to keep up,” she’d teased.

In north Louisiana, where Diana was raised among the Southern Baptists and the even more conservative sects — Assembly of God, Church of Christ, Church of the Nazarene — dancing was frowned upon if not outright forbidden.

What was that old joke...?

Why do Baptists disapprove of screwing?

Because it looks too much like dancing.

There was, of course, the flailing around that the Pentecostals called divine: a kind of non-partnered floor-flopping punctuated by speaking in tongues and foaming at the mouth.

South Louisiana, NOLA its capital, was a whole other continent. In NOLA everybody danced.

“Can’t keep up? Oh yeah?” Then Clever, Handsome, Hot Rob had grabbed her in his arms and whirled her around the floor in one floating side step after another until she was breathless. And damp.

Then he’d taken her home and slid her right into bed.

Over her own thoughts, the drumming rain, and the hum of the streetcar, Diana heard a familiar voice from a few seats up. “I’ve got so much work, really, I’m ready to kill myself.” Pause. Giggle. “And a hot date with You Know Who.”

“I know. Me, too.” Sigh. “The work, not the hot date. But I’m kinda looking forward to doing that story for Banks.”

It was the mention of her own name that made Diana crane a look forward, and, yes, there two rows directly in front of her, she spotted the unmistakable red-gold mane of Amber Reynolds.

Amber would be the one with the hot date: a real dazzler, campus queen bee, and a bit of a bitch, but still, one of Diana’s favorites. Amber was a talented writer with a great eye for detail.

Beside her, Chloe McClain, Amber’s dark-haired, less attractive, and even more talented friend.

Diana was quite fond of both of them.

Probably going downtown to shop, she thought.

“I’m going to write about my wicked stepmother,” said Chloe, in that penetrating voice all girls seemed to have these days. Too nasal. Too loud. Broadcasting their business. “You know, about how I really tried when my dad married her, after my mom died, but she was so awful to me. Though she was sweet as pie when Dad was around. Then one day—”

The streetcar rattled on past the columned mansions of St. Charles, the sidewalks a tumble of concrete uprooted by dripping oaks. It stopped every couple of blocks. Thirteen miles from one end, Carrollton and Claiborne to its terminus downtown at Canal, though it was only about ten, the part of it from the university to Erato Street, just before Lee Circle, where Diana would get off to walk a few blocks to the auto shop. The trip would take forty-five minutes, more or less. Breakdowns on the streetcar line were more common than not.

Up ahead Diana spotted the Milton Latter Library, housed in a Neo-Italianate mansion, a gorgeous old pile occupying the entire block between Soniat and Dufossat Streets and one of the city’s two small hills.

And a landmark in her love affair with Rob. How fitting, she always thought, that it was a library where their games had begun.

Chloe’s voice rose even higher. “I was always telling Wicked Stepmom she ought to be more careful about locking the car when she parked it. And she always blew me off. Like, Yadda yadda, Chloe.

“Then one day she had borrowed Dad’s BMW that he loved more than life itself, and she drove it, like just two blocks, to the store, she coulda/shoulda walked her fat butt, and left it unlocked, naturally, in the parking lot.

“So I stole it.”

“Vivien Leigh lived there, in what’s the library now,” a tourist with a tight blond perm said to her red-faced husband, the two of them sitting directly in front of Diana, behind Amber and Chloe, “when she married a rich local lumberman.”

“Actually, it was Marguerite Clark, a star of the silent screen,” said Diana, leaning forward despite her desire for solitude. She couldn’t resist correcting the tourist, the schoolteacher in her, she supposed.

“Oh, really?”

Yes. The house had been built by a department-store magnate, then was bought by elegant Harry Williams, the lumber baron and aviation pioneer who was said to have charm to burn — the charm that won Marguerite, a rival of Mary Pickford. The house was given to the city for a public library by a later owner, in memory of a son who died in World War II.

“It’s worth seeing,” said Diana. “The two front downstairs rooms are gorgeous, with frescoed ceilings imported from France. The large reading room has a Flemish mantel over an onyx fireplace.”

It was the green Louis XIV French parlor that was Diana’s favorite, however, with its curtains and wall panels of cherry-red brocaded damask and a magnificent crystal chandelier.

“Let’s go to the Latter tomorrow afternoon,” Rob had said casually, about a week after they’d discovered themselves to be a sweet fit.

“The library?”

Diana had really meant it when she’d told Rob that, no, she obviously couldn’t resist his charms, but really, truly, they were going to have to be discreet.

“Just pretend that I’m married,” she’d said. “It simply won’t do to have us gossiped about around school. It isn’t appropriate.”

“Inappropriate,” he’d teased. Then he’d lowered his voice to that husky register that made her bone marrow vibrate and commanded, “The library.”

The truth was Diana was so lust-struck at that point, she’d have followed Rob if he’d jumped off the Huey P. Long Bridge.

“There’s something I want to show you,” he’d added. “I’ll meet you in the parlor. Wait for me there.”

At the appointed time Diana had settled herself onto the parlor’s crimson loveseat. Moments later, an older, elegant couple, in their seventies, had taken chairs to one side of Diana’s perch. They began leafing through travel books, planning a trip to France, obviously not their first.

Then another man entered the parlor. For a moment Diana didn’t recognize Rob. He’d donned serious horn-rims and slicked his hair back with a silvery gel. A baggy jacket made him look older — and heavier.

She had to stifle her hoot of surprise and delight. A disguise! Oh, Clever Rob. She’d said discreet and...

But he warned her into silence with a raised finger and a shake of his head.

“Here’s the book you asked for, miss,” he said, as if he were a librarian, handing her a large-format volume.

The older couple looked up briefly, smiled, then bent their heads back to their research.

“Let me show you what I was talking about.” Rob gestured with an open hand. Could he join her on the loveseat?

The book was a collection of exquisite erotica. Beautifully rendered line drawings of the seduction of a young man by a voluptuous older woman.

“Where did you find this?” she’d whispered.

“Shhhh,” he’d cautioned. Library. No talking.

The older couple smiled once more.

Five minutes later found Diana and her younger paramour locked together in the single-occupancy Ladies’ Room, half naked and crazy, crazy, crazy.

“Maybe we’ll come back and see the library tomorrow,” said the permed blond tourist. “Howard wants to go back to the hotel and take a nap before we have dinner.” She paused, then added smugly, “At Antoine’s.”

Of course. Sure, the Oysters Rockefeller were still good, and the pommes de terre soufflés terrific, but Diana could have told the blonde of a hundred better places both high and low, Bayona to Domilise’s Po-Boys. But tourists always wanted to drop Our dinner at Antoine’s into conversation back home.

Once again, the girls’ voices. “Shut up!” said Amber. “You did not steal your dad’s car!”

“Oh, yeah. I’d been scheming for this. I was so ready. I’d nabbed a pair of her panties out of the clothes basket—”

“Yewh!”

“And I left them under the driver’s seat with a ripped condom wrapper. So the cops find the car about five minutes after Dad dials nine-one-one, a Beemer emergency, all ranting. And then, when the cops bring it back, he’s going over his ride, inch by inch, and—”

“Hello! Panties! Condom! But how would he know for sure they were hers? Not the ‘ho of the banger who pinched it?”

“’Cuz she always wore this one kind of black panties, really expensive, and REALLY big—”

Diana laughed. So did Howard, the tourist hubby in front of her.

The wife elbowed him.

Not funny, Howard.

After the Latter, Diana and Rob had fun seeing just how creative (and discreet) they could be.

Let’s Pretend was a good model.

The operating principle was fantasy and role-playing (while hidden in plain sight).

And disguises were an essential part of secrecy, weren’t they?

The weeks leading up to Mardi Gras, with its masks and costumes, had been a particularly interesting time.

But there were parades and dress-up balls of one kind or another in New Orleans practically every day.

Not all of their encounters were production numbers, of course. Many nights Rob came visiting, and they made dinner and then love with no games, no frills.

Oh, maybe just a bit of “Let’s pretend I’m the cable guy.” Rob tapping on the sun-porch door, the front doorbell broken for eons. Diana answering his knock in the black silk dressing gown he loved.

Or she’d remind him, “...that time you had me meet you at the bar in the Maple Leaf, and we pretended that we were strangers.”

“Yeah, and you let someone buy you a drink before I got there, and then we almost came to blows over who you were going home with.”

“I loved that,” she sighed.

She loved him, too.

“I’m crazy in love with him,” cooed Amber.

Passengers up and down the streetcar grinned. Ah, youth.

“He is so much fun. Last weekend we went dancing at the Rock ‘n’ Bowl. He’s a mad dancer, and when we rolled out of there, like one A.M., he said, ‘Wanta go for a drive?’ And the next thing I knew, we were all the way down in Grand Isle. A friend of his has a beach cottage there.”

“Oh, I’ve always wanted to go,” said Chloe. “Was it as romantic as Chopin portrayed it?”

Now Diana smiled. Such smart, literary girls, alluding to Kate Chopin’s feminist-novel-before-its-time, The Awakening, while talking about boys.

“It was heaven,” sighed Amber. “He was fabulous, sweet as could be the whole time. And we stayed for the sunset the next evening. I’ve never seen such a sunset.”

“Oh, I wish I were in love,” Chloe longed.

“You will be. Any minute now. You’ll see.”

Love, oh love, the last thing that Diana had expected. Or wanted.

The affair with Rob was meant to be like all the others. Just for fun, right?

Though unlike her other lovers, Rob wasn’t just a roll in the hay who managed to hold her attention for a candle’s length. He also sported that perfect trifecta of intelligence, imagination, and sweetness.

Rob wasn’t just for laughs.

Rather, he made her laugh.

What a world of difference between those two.

(Though sometimes she asked herself, as their games-playing grew ever more filigreed, Is this love or sexual obsession?)

In any case, how ridiculous that the one who’d finally battered down the gates, bridged the moat, and scaled the steep walls to her heart/whatever was so inappropriate.

An adjunct! A baby adjunct. A man without a full-time job in the very field at whose apex she stood.

Okay, at thirty-seven, Rob wasn’t really a baby, but still...

The moment she’d realized that she could no longer imagine her life without him, she’d begun to fret.

What if he grew tired of her? What if he wandered? Someone at the university uncovered their secret and compromised her position? What? What? What?

Yet losing implied having. She had no claim on Rob. It wasn’t as if they used the L word.

Diana worked herself into a perfect frenzy. Her love-making took on a desperate edge. What new trick to titillate her lover? She spent hours poring over the Good Vibrations catalogue.

“Is something bothering you?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. You seem, what, worried about something. Need more space? Want to see less of me?”

“No!”

He laughed. “More of me?” The question delivered with that cocked eyebrow, a fiddling with his top shirt button. Followed by a sweet tumble.

Get a grip, she told herself. Don’t screw this up. Don’t be a ridiculous older woman. Don’t grasp.

And then, late February, Rob used the L word.

It just wasn’t the one she wanted to hear.

“Livingston,” he said. “It’s a small liberal-arts school in Cambridge, Mass. Great rep. An old friend’s in the English department there. Gave me the heads-up that they’re going to have a full-time slot. He has a lot of pull. You loved Cambridge, right?” Then he’d stopped, seeing her face. “Oh, honey bun, you know I don’t want to leave. I love New Orleans. I love being here with you.” Then, finally, finally, dear Lord, “I love... you.”

And there it was. He loved her, but also he needed a real job. With real tenure. Real benefits. Real pay. Real retirement.

“Have you already applied?”

“Well, yeah. I mean...”

“I know. I know.” She’d hugged him close. And then the question occurred. “Other places, too?”

He shook his head into her shoulder. “Livingston’s the only one where I have some kind of inside chance.”

What was he talking about? Was she not an insider at the university right here? Did she have no influence?

But what she didn’t have, unfortunately, was an opening in her department. No retirements on the horizon. No one on leave who might not return. And no one was ever fired unless — to use the infamous words of ex-governor Edwin Edwards speaking of himself as a shoo-in for a second term — he were “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.”

Then lightning struck. Diana had an inspiration. There was one possibility. A little tricky, but possibly doable. Probably. No, definitely. She would make it work.

And, oh, what sweet revenge: exchanging Arnold Venable for Rob.

“I just wish we could spend more time together,” Amber complained. “But he’s so busy. And then there’s—”

Chloe jumped in, “Yeah, but you’re busy, too. Like have you finished your senior thesis for the psych course?”

“No. But he’s helping me with it. I mean, he’s been reading what I’ve got, and he makes such great suggestions.”

“Well, sure, he’s—”

Then Amber interrupted. “Look! The Columns. Ohmygawd! We spent the most incredible night there.”

A heavyset woman across the aisle from Amber and Chloe shook her head. A frown of disapproval rumpled her handsome brown face. A church lady, no doubt.

Diana, however, smiled. The Columns Hotel, once upon a time a family mansion, had starred as Madame Nell’s bordello in the film Pretty Baby. In actuality, the turn of the previous century’s red-light district, Storyville, had been downtown, fronting Basin Street.

The Columns did, however, possess an aura of naughtier, bygone times: its bar elegant with chandeliers and fireplaces, the rooms upstairs tricked out in flocked-velvet Victorian finery. Diana and Rob had frolicked there one night in an amazing four-poster bed.

Now she spied their private balcony, right there. That’s where they’d sipped morning-after mimosas.

Arnold Venable had been the department chair for eons before Diana took that post, and few were the toes he hadn’t mangled. Even when young, which he certainly wasn’t anymore, Arnold had been imperious, affecting a British accent, grandly furnishing his office with Persian carpets, subdued lighting, and a slender walnut desk. Arnold didn’t hold office hours; he received. He held court. And he’d long ago perfected the art of slipping a silver dagger into one’s soft spots, his targets universal. University president to office cleaner, no one escaped Arnold’s withering blue gaze or razor tongue.

Immediately upon succeeding Arnold as chair, some six years earlier, Diana had been swamped by the English faculty’s campaigning for a piece of the pie of privileges he’d hoarded.

“Not fair that Arnold never takes a lower-division class.”

“Not fair that he’s had a lock on Shakespeare and the Romantic poets from time immemorial.”

Diana couldn’t agree more, having herself suffered from Arnold’s barbs and slights, and drawing up that next term’s class load, she assigned Arnold a section of English 101. Freshman grunt composition. Arnold refused it, sneering as if she’d handed him a bag of manure.

Fine. So be it. And, as was the university policy, Arnold taught less than a full load, though for full pay.

This pattern had continued year after year, with Arnold accruing an ever-growing debt of classes owed.

Just a week after Rob’s announcement of his application to Livingston College, Diana had casually, ever so coolly, brought up The Arnold Situation at lunch with an administrative dean.

He’d jumped. “We absolutely must do something. Just yesterday the president was laying down the law about tightening all financial belts, closing all loopholes. Now.” He’d leaned closer to Diana. “Do you have any ideas?”

Why, yes, she did.

“Three sections of 101?” Arnold had slammed through Diana’s office door without knocking. He’d delivered the question as if she were a ridiculous child who’d donned a clown outfit for a wedding.

“Yes. Three. Close the door, Arnold. Come in and sit down.”

Then Diana had the delicious pleasure of explaining to Arnold Venable that he’d reached the end of the line. Administration had done the toting — she handed the figures across her desk to him — and he was in arrears for so many classes untaught but salaried that he must a) teach whatever offered with zero compensation for the next two years, b) pay back the money advanced, or c) take early retirement, effective the end of the term, and the debt would be forgiven.

Within hours Arnold had begun packing the leather-bound tomes that lined the walls of his office.

Oh, what sweetness, what joy as, later that same evening, just as Rob, spent from love-making, sleepily pulled up the sheets, she whispered into his ear, “Guess what?”

And wasn’t it terrific that they’d been so discreet, that no one at the university knew that they were lovers? Now Rob’s application for the position could be tendered like any other candidate’s.

Any other, except, of course, that he had the advantage of being a known quantity. Well-liked by both students and faculty, Rob had done a terrific job with his classes. Yes, Rob definitely had the edge.

“Darlin’, you genius, you Wonder Woman!” He’d jumped out of bed and danced his happy dance. Then he’d grabbed Diana up and two-stepped her around the room.

He was a shoo-in, Diana exulted. He’d win the post, and then, and then... Well, after a semester or so it wouldn’t be so untoward, would it, if they were to “begin” dating? No, the age difference between them would never lessen, but with the change in Rob’s status, their having a liaison — and, well, who knew where that might lead? — wouldn’t be nearly so scandalous.

“When’s he going to tell her?” Chloe asked.

“Not for a while yet. The timing’s got to be right.”

Hmmm, thought Diana. Amber’s boyfriend already had another girl.

The church lady was shaking her head again.

From somewhere beyond the Mississippi, thunder rumbled, and the church lady rolled her eyes.

See? Lord don’t like that nonsense. That fooling around with somebody else’s man? You go doin’ that stuff, ain’t nobody gonna want you.

Oh, please. Diana read the church lady’s body language. It’s not that serious. Amber’s young, and men really are like streetcars. There’s always another one.

The stumbling block to Diana’s plan was the presence of those sworn enemies, Gloria and Phil, on the hiring committee. They — dammit — and Diana were the three designees from the English department, and while Phil gave Rob highest marks, Gloria was busy with equivocations.

Just to spite Phil.

The other five members, from various departments and branches of administration, were poised to approve Rob and get on with it. End of term and summer vacation were within sniffing distance. Everybody was antsy.

“I really think she has stronger qualifications,” said Gloria, tapping the application folder of a young blond thing from California. Yes, she’d interviewed beautifully, this smart cookie with the body of a Victoria’s Secret model.

“But her concentration is feminist theory. We don’t need another one of those,” said Phil.

“Now, wait a minute!” steamed Gloria, who was herself a feminist theorist.

Diana shook her head. What the hell was Gloria thinking? Did she really want a younger woman, particularly someone who looked like that, in her sandbox?

“Well,” said the dean, trying not to drool on the blonde’s app. “I have to agree, she is an attractive candidate.”

Diana was beside herself. She couldn’t support Rob too strongly for fear of arousing suspicion, though maybe that was just paranoia. Yet both Phil and Gloria would rather die than give an inch to the other.

“Well, what about Dawn Moriyama?” ventured another committee member.

Jesus. The Japanese-American candidate, a distant third on paper, and she’d stumbled badly in the interview. But once they got into ethnic-diversity territory, Diana’s ship would have sailed.

Phil looked at Gloria. Gloria looked at Phil. They both shrugged. Why not?

With that, Diana stood, collecting her papers. “We should sleep on this,” she insisted, slapping down her department chair’s prerogative like a trump card. “I think we’ve lost our way.”

Everyone groaned but agreed to one more meeting.

“He has so much to lose, if he doesn’t play it right,” said Amber.

The church lady shook her head so hard Diana thought she might cross the aisle, grab Amber, and shake her, too.

Now it sounded as if Amber were involved with a married man. A beautiful young thing like her, a whole world of gorgeous young single boys to choose from?

“You think she’s the vengeful type?” Chloe wondered.

She.

The wife.

“Do you think it’s possible,” Diana had said to Gloria, taking her arm as they crossed the quad after the committee meeting, “that your attitude toward Phil is clouding your judgment. Just a tad?”

Gloria had stiffened, pulled her arm free, and turned to Diana with a blank stare. “No,” she said flatly. “I don’t.”

“Now, Gloria...”

“Don’t you Now, Gloria me. I just don’t happen to think Rob is the best candidate.”

“You know Moriyama’s not going to make the cut. Do you really want that young hottie lusting after your classes?”

Gloria recoiled, then struck. “Don’t talk to me about young hotties, Diana. Not when you’re throwing all your weight behind your own.”

Just like that. Gut-shot, Diana reeled. Her skin stung with a thousand pricks of adrenaline. Her world tilted, whirled.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she finally managed.

“I think you do,” said Gloria with a wintry smile. “Just so you know, I’ve not discussed your... indiscretion... with anyone else.”

So clever, Gloria, hoarding her intelligence like gold until it would bring the greatest yield.

“I’ll give you Rob. You’ll give me the classes I want in perpetuity. And the editorship of the journal.”

“Gloria, even if there were reason to...”

Gloria’s smile was cruel. She had the goods, and she knew it.

“I can’t guarantee...”

“I’m sure you’ll work it out.” With that, Gloria gave Diana her back and strode away. Then she paused, turned. “Pleasure grows ever more expensive, don’t you know, Diana, as time moves along.”

Blackmail. That’s what it was. Blackmail, plain and simple. After she picked up her car should she drive to the NOPD district office on Magazine and report Gloria? Or did blackmail fall under Vice, housed on South Broad?

Right. Diana could just hear herself explaining the situation to a cop up to his ears in murder, home invasion, tourist muggings, drugs, child abuse, and the thousand and one other felonies perpetrated in New Orleans every day. The city was a sewer of crime.

No. Gloria had her. There were no two ways around it. Diana had been furious and sick with disbelief.

Though now that she’d this streetcar ride to collect herself a bit, to reflect, and to taste once more through the mouth of memory the many pleasures of her sweetheart, she’d realized her id would allow no other choice: If this were the price of keeping Rob, so be it.

But she still needed to frame her response to Gloria. Generous but cool, that was the ticket. Agreeable, yet firm. God forbid that Gloria think she now had carte blanche.

Maybe what she ought to do, after she picked up Picayune, her much-loved little brown Mercedes 280L roadster, was turn up her tape of Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” and take the causeway to her favorite dive in Abita Springs. Soothe herself with an oyster po’boy and a couple of beers. Yes, the long drive across the lake always cleared her head.

The streetcar rattled on. Diana could see the freeway overpass up ahead, beyond it Lee Circle where a statue of General Robert E. Lee stood upon a tall pillar, facing north, so he’d never have his back to his enemies. She wasn’t far now from her stop.

Rob wasn’t coming over till much later this evening. Nineish, he’d said. Then she could give him the good news, minus the complicating details. With Gloria’s vote, his job was in the bag. They’d crack open a bottle of champagne, celebrate. Maybe play one of their favorite games. Strangers assigned to a sleeping car on the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles? Or... wait. Rob had suggested something earlier on the phone. Still rattled by Gloria, she couldn’t remember what...

“Vengeful? Well, I never thought so, particularly, but when we were brainstorming in class today, I totally changed my mind.”

“Yeah,” Chloe agreed. “That story she told about how, a long time ago, somebody wronged her, and she fantasized about burning his house down? But then, like she said, everyone has revenge fantasies. The real question is whether people act on them or not.”

“I know,” said Amber. “But just the way she said it, Burn his house down, it gave me shivers.”

Wait a minute. Diana was about to pull the signal cord, gathering her things. The girls were talking about Amber’s married boyfriend, Amber did say he was married, didn’t she, and now they were talking about her class? Her story assignment? Her?

“He’s been so careful,” Amber continued. “And it’s really brilliant, the way that whole pitiful charade she’s insisted on, his being her secret boyfriend, has played right into his plan. But once he has the job, well, anyway, by Christmas of next year, he can dump her. And then we can go public. My momma is crazy about him, you know. She thinks he’s the spit and image of Harry Connick, Jr.”

“And your dad likes Rob, too, right?”

“Oh yeah, he...”

Diana didn’t hear Amber’s reply as she stumbled blindly through the rear exit door and fell out into the rain.

Her feet had barely hit the wet grass of the neutral ground when her stomach heaved and she spewed hot yellow vomit.

“Oh my God!” someone cried.

“Ma’am? Can I help you?” another asked.

But Diana waved them away. Please don’t. Don’t look at me. Don’t touch me. Don’t pity me. Don’t.

She didn’t remember much between that spinning moment and stepping out of a taxi at her own doorstep. She must have hailed the cab, must have realized she couldn’t drive, her ears ringing, her eyes blind to this world.

Once inside her house, Diana fell on all fours to the faded red-and-blue Kirman in the foyer, one of the ever-so-tasteful treasures Richard had left behind. She writhed. She howled like a dog. She tore at her hair, her clothes. She cursed Rob’s name. She cursed Amber.

And then Amber’s words cut through the din and the frenzy: pitiful, secret boyfriend, played into his plan, the job, dump her.

Amber, the golden girl. Amber, one of her favorites. Amber, whom she’d taken to her heart. Amber, the fresh young bitch.

Pitiful, pitiful, pitiful, the chorus resounded.

They’d made a fool of her. A tidal wave of shame washed her from top to bottom.

Eventually, after what seemed a year, a decade, an eternity of agony, Diana made it to the sideboard and sloshed three fingers of bourbon into a glass. As she tossed it back, her stomach lurched once, then settled, and the amber fire felt good.

Excellent, in fact. The burn in her belly would help her focus.

Not as if there were that much to decide, really. Not many options.

First, of course, she’d “compromise.” She’d withdraw her support for Rob’s candidacy and cast her vote for the young blond feminist.

That would be just deserts for Gloria and take care of the job question.

Not that it would be even a step toward addressing the hatred that had begun to bubble in her belly for Rob. Oh, Rob. Rob, Rob, Rob. A bubble that would eventually fill her to bursting, she was certain of it. Just like the hatred she’d felt for Richard. The hatred that had had her dreaming of fire, rat poison, knives, guns. The hatred that still lingered even now, long after AIDS had devoured him. And the need to get even. There was no way such humiliation could go unpunished. Revenge would be hers.

But first things first. No position for Rob. No reward for Gloria.

Though, wait. Not too hasty. What might Gloria serve up in return? Thwarted Gloria, who no more wanted the blond hottie hired than she wanted a third arm, the young woman just a tool in her scheme? Diana had long been witness to Gloria’s wrath. Gloria would not take being crossed lightly.

No. She couldn’t risk it. She needed to think.

Just then Diana’s phone began to ring. Let it. She sloshed more bourbon into her glass. Let it ring, ring, ring off the hook. There was no one on God’s green earth she wanted to talk to. No one. She couldn’t even imagine forming words.

Once again Diana doubled over with pain. Hot tears cascaded down her face like boiling rain. She felt as if someone had ripped her skin off in one piece, discarded everything inside but for her hatred, then left the husk. She was a semblance of a human being. But only a facsimile. She would never be whole again. Never.

Then a deep voice boomed through her answering machine. “Hey, darling, it’s Fred.” Her neighbor, a lawyer, and the head of the block association.

“Just wanted to remind you you need to be hypervigilant until the cops catch this burglarizing s.o.b. Not that there won’t be another one right behind him. Marcia Pennington said she thought she heard somebody snooping around her back porch this afternoon. Lock up and batten down, hon.”

Diana froze, staring in the direction of Fred’s voice, her glass halfway to her lips. Now she remembered what Rob had said earlier. Now she recalled the game he’d proposed.

Two hours later, a little after ten, Diana’s living room. Fred, in striped pajama bottoms and a faded Tulane T-shirt, stood with a strong arm around Diana. The red-and-blue flashers atop the small fleet of NOPD cruisers outside lit up the room, lending it an eerie carnival air.

“Like I said, I called her and reminded her to be extra vigilant,” Fred rumbled to the officer in charge, Officer Jackson, a mountainous black man whose powder-blue uniform shirt was damp with the rain still pouring outside.

“Absolutely.” Jackson nodded. “Way things been in this neighborhood recently, you can’t be too careful.”

“But I wasn’t careful!” Diana cried, her face smudged with tears. “If only I’d checked the outside door to the sun porch, he’d never have gotten that far. It’s my fault. I’ll never forgive myself,” Diana wailed, shaking her head. “Never.”

Behind them, back through the dining room, was the sun porch in question. Rob’s body lay half-in, half-out of the French doors between it and the dining room, his blood pooling on the hardwood in a dark red lake.

Fred hugged her tighter. “Now, darlin’, you know it wasn’t your fault. How were you to know that boy would come round so late to talk? Stupid ass, like that was the way to get a job? Busting onto your sun porch ’cuz your front doorbell’s broke?”

“But I should have recognized him,” Diana moaned, running a hand through her hair, clutching at her black silk dressing gown. “Like I said, he’d mentioned something at school today about dropping by, and I’d said, no, that wasn’t a good idea. It wasn’t appropriate...”

“Ma’am, it was dark. It was raining. Way he was dressed? Break-ins all over the neighborhood. It’s a shame, but what’re you gonna do?” Officer Jackson shook his massive head slowly, looking for all the world like a giant mournful Rottweiler. “I say, despite the mistaken ID, it’s a good thing you had that gun.”

He cast an envious eye on Diana’s 12-gauge Italian-made Verona lying on the loveseat in the living room where she’d tossed it before calling 911. Over four thousand dollars’ worth of high-tensile steel and Turkish walnut, the shotgun had been a gift from her dad after she’d won a statewide women’s skeet competition.

“And,” the officer went on, “what kind of fool goes around in the middle of the night tapping on folks’ doors, all in black, stocking cap pulled down so you can barely see his face? I’d’a thought he was a burglar myself. Yep, burglar for sure.”

Rob had let himself in, as he did every time they’d played burglar. He’d come through the unlocked outside door of the sun porch, then stood jiggling the locked interior French doors.

Diana had entered from the kitchen, the black silk dressing gown he loved half-open. She was naked underneath.

The way the game went, he’d jiggle the door harder. She’d shrink, then shriek, “Oh no! Please go away!”

Her gown would fall open. He’d bang the door, bang it again, and just before he looked to be about to dash a pane of glass, reach in, and unlock the deadbolt from inside, she’d open it. He’d race through and grab her up, her robe falling to the hardwood.

Sometimes they’d make it up the stairs. Sometimes they wouldn’t.

This time, he’d jiggled the door hard. And harder yet. But Diana didn’t open the door.

“You bastard!” she screamed, reaching for the shotgun she’d propped against the china cabinet. She threw its beautiful steely length to her right shoulder. Such a sweet fit.

Rob’s eyes grew wide. What? Then he’d laughed. A new wrinkle in their game. A twist.

“Oh, baby,” he crooned. “You got a gun? I got a gun, too.” He winked. “Got a red-hot pistol for you, darling.” His face was pressed against the glass.

Louisiana is a right-to-bear-arms state, but there might be some gray area here, legally speaking, considering that Rob wasn’t actually all the way inside the house.

Shoot ‘em. Then drag ‘em through the window. Every schoolchild knew that.

She obviously couldn’t let him in from the sun porch, however. Why would she open her door to a burglar?

Luckily, she’d had plenty of time to make a plan, weigh the options, after Fred’s call. Before Rob’s first footstep on the porch.

A woman alone in a house. A college professor. Department chair. Sheriff’s daughter! Recent home invasions in the neighborhood. A rainy night. A man in black.

This was, after all, Louisiana, where a jury had taken only three hours to acquit a Baton Rouge homeowner of shooting and killing a Japanese student whose crime had been ringing his bell. The kid had been dazzling in his all-white Saturday Night Fever suit before it blossomed blood-red, he and his friend mistaking the house for one down the street where a Halloween party was being held.

Diana wanted Rob as close as possible.

You didn’t have to be a crack shot; any fool could hit someone with a shotgun loaded with buckshot, and many heedless fools did. The pellets covered a fairly wide pattern from a distance.

But if you wanted to kill someone, you stepped closer, closer, closer still. Then the pellets would rip a huge hole.

That was what Diana wanted, tit for tat, to tear her lover to pieces.

“Come on, sweetheart.” Rob had urged her closer with an upturned hand, fingers wiggling, a tough-guy gesture. In character. Playing a role.

She’d racked the shotgun, loving that sound. Loving the well-oiled smell of it. Loving to shoot.

She’d pulled the trigger, racked again, firing twice through the French doors. The first blast had ripped Rob’s heart loose and flung it against his chest wall. The second took out his guts.

Fred stayed until everyone was gone. “Just a formality,” Officer Jackson had assured them of the crime-scene crew. “Want to follow procedure here. Dot all our i’s and cross all our t’s. I’m sure you appreciate that, being a lawman’s daughter. No question but this has every appearance of a home invasion.”

After the EMS vehicle carried Rob’s body away and the last cruiser departed, Fred urged Diana to come home with him, to spend the night with his family.

“No. No, thanks, Fred,” she assured him. “You’ve been a brick. I couldn’t ask for a better friend. But really, I’ll be okay.”

And she would be, Diana thought later, lying in the stillness of her bedroom, the lilac-papered boudoir where she and Rob had shared so many delicious romps.

She had her prestigious job. Her ever-so-terrific house. A raft of good friends. And she lived in the Big Easy.

Then, over the rain on the rooftop, she could hear Rob crooning Brother Ray’s words just as surely as if his head were on the pillow next to hers.

With that, Diana’s heart convulsed once more with loss. Dear God, she’d miss him so. Rob, the last of her lovers, she was sure of it. She could never, ever again expose herself to such grief.

Her final scream of anguish ripped through the sweet-scented room, and then quiet blanketed it once more. After that, there was nothing, nothing but her own breathing and the falling rain.

Just before tipping over into darkness, Diana thought, First thing. First thing, bright and early, she’d call Gloria and tell her about the awful accident.

Gloria would understand. Gloria would get it. And Gloria would keep her mouth shut, or...

And Amber?

Well, she was young, with the recklessness of a true beauty. What was one boyfriend, more or less, to such a girl? Besides, Amber was smart and clever enough to protect herself.

And Chloe? Chloe had already tasted the fruit of revenge and found it sweet.

With that, Diana turned over and dove headlong into the blissful sleep of the avenged.

She dreamed it rained so hard and rained so long that the pumping stations failed. The water rose and rose until all the streets flooded. She saw herself floating in her darling little Mercedes roadster, its top down, past Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, then hanging a right into the middle of St. Charles. She was waving like a homecoming queen, smiling and waving and flirting to beat the band, floating, floating, floating down the neutral ground.

Copyright © 2006 Sarah Shankman