Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Thirty-Six

I was hopeful that the woman at the Whitesboro College alumni office might be only slightly younger than Martha Washington, just because I wanted her to have been around when Melanie Joan Krause was a student.

But Jeannie Holton looked to be about my age, with short brown hair and big black glasses that she made work. And I was about to find out, quickly, that she had a sense of humor. With strangers it always made me feel as if we were somehow speaking a common language.

I started by telling her that no matter how many search engines I used, I couldn’t find the year that Melanie Joan Krause had graduated from Whitesboro.

“Shocking,” she said. “And here I’d always thought that Wikipedia knew everything.”

She made us two cups of chamomile tea. As she did, she explained all the health benefits of chamomile. I told her that I’d heard about some of them. But, she asked, did I know that it could help with menstrual cramps.

“Don’t toy with me,” I said.

She blew on her tea and sipped some. I did the same. It tasted like honey. Maybe a hint of apple.

“I have been fascinated by the life and times of our school’s most famous alum since I took this job,” she said. “One of the reasons I came here is because I knew she had. I was hopeful there might be something in the air.”

“There wasn’t?” I said.

“Just from the water pollution plant over on Leland Avenue,” she said.

“So do you happen to know what year she graduated?” I said.

“Well, now,” she said. “That’s the thing. She didn’t graduate.”

“You already looked it up?”

“I never had until you called. I don’t recall it ever coming up before. She just told people she was a Whitesboro grad and we were damned happy to have her.”

“Oh, ho,” I said.

“ ‘Oh, ho’?” she said.

“Just something I often say when I stumble into something resembling a clue.”

“And this might be one?”

I grinned.

“No clue,” I said.

Whitesboro, she said, had been a small community college when it had opened in the 1970s, just a few buildings around which the current campus grew to its present size. She said that because it was such a small operation when Melanie Joan Krause had first arrived on campus, her academic records were sketchy, at best.

“Like bringing new meaning to an incomplete grade,” I said.

“Like that,” Jeannie Holton said.

She held up the manila folder on the desk in front of her, one that she said contained Melanie Joan’s academic records. The folder looked light enough that if she let go of it, it might simply float away.

“I’ve noticed that Melanie Joan has said that most of her college experience had simply disappeared into the fog of time,” Jeannie said. “But I think one of the reasons is that she was barely doing enough work to stay in school. Our girl is a bit of a fabulist.”

I slapped my forehead.

“How could I have possibly missed that?” I said.

She poked a finger on the folder.

“And after her second semester junior year,” she said, “it turns out there’s no academic record at all.”

“She skipped senior year?”

“Not exactly.”

“As I recall,” I said, “nobody who knew me at Boston University got the impression I was chasing a Rhodes Scholarship my senior year.”

“But did you have enough credits to graduate?”

“I did,” I said. “But I was sweating out my Spanish final until the morning I got to take the walk with my classmates.”

“Well, you did a lot more than Melanie Joan did,” Jeannie Holton said. “She took one class her senior year, and that was a writing seminar for which no grades were even given out.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “It was with Dr. Charles Hall.”

“Obviously you know who he is.”

“The husband behind door number one,” I said. “But not for all that long.”

“I’ve done my own investigating, as best I can,” she said. “She married him a few months after a graduation exercise that did not include her. By then she was working part-time at the local newspaper.” She grinned again. “Or so she says.”

“Wait,” I said. “You think she was even fabulizing about that?”

“I never checked,” she said. “Have you?”

“Going to,” I said. “Soon as I leave here.”

Then I said: “I haven’t been able to find a death notice, so I’m assuming Dr. Charles Hall is still among the living.”

“Define living,” Jeannie Holton said.