The Jinx

Twenty-Six

A few minutes later I was standing in front of the Au Bon Pain at Holyoke Center with absolutely no idea as to where I was going to go next. The snow was still coming down steadily, and across Harvard Yard I could hear the bells of Memorial Church ringing the hour. Four o’clock, and there were no new messages on my Blackberry. I wasn’t due back at Jane’s until eight for cocktails and dinner, and it was probably too late to catch even the tail end of my friends’ shopping expedition.

A steady stream of students and tourists passed me by as I stood in the snow and consulted my mental to-do list.

First on the list was to thwart the takeover of Grenthaler Media. I’d pleaded my case with the Caped Avenger, and I had plans to see Barbara Barnett the next day. Grenthaler’s director of communications was putting out the appropriate press release. There was nothing much else I could do about it on a Saturday afternoon except fret. And I was definitely fretting. I was elevating fretting to an art form.

Second on the list, and, I hoped part of thwarting the takeover, was to prove that Barbara Barnett was guilty of attacking Grenthaler Media’s primary shareholder and prevent any further attacks. Here, too, I wasn’t sure what else I could be doing. Barbara seemed unlikely to suddenly confess. The police knew all about my suspicions, and O’Connell seemed to be on the case. Whether my earlier hissy fit had helped or hindered the effort was unclear, although at least it had served to extract an interview for Hilary. And the security guard seemed sufficiently competent, except for his tendency to ma’am people without cause. Again, all that was left to do was fret, but I was confident that I could fret about Sara and the takeover simultaneously. If fretting were a marketable skill, I would have been a billionaire by now. With my own reality TV show.

The third item on the list was my love life. I didn’t know why I even kept it on there. It had reverted to its usual state of bleak and ugly disorder. Perhaps I should just accept my fate and acknowledge once and for all that the Jinxing Gods saw me as nothing more than a plaything, a human target in their never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole. I might as well just give it up and take myself out of the game for good. Then I’d have more time to fret over things that actually had the potential to turn around.

I’d been rejected before; in fact, I’d been rejected in more ways than I could count. The episode of Sex and the City in which Carrie’s boyfriend broke up with her by Post-it had left me unmoved. I could top that Post-it blindfolded and with both hands tied behind my back. Watching Peter and Abigail practically make out in the middle of Copley Place left that Post-it in the dust. Especially when you took into account just having discovered that Peter’s backup was a serial killer. That Post-it crumbled into insignificance when compared to my actual life.

Or lack thereof.

That’s it, I decided. Right there, at that moment, standing in the middle of Harvard Square as the snowflakes danced around me, my choice came with startling swiftness and complete clarity.

I was giving it up.

I would resign myself to being perpetually single, buying my own jewelry, zipping the backs of my own dresses and never having a date to a wedding ever again, much less ever being a principal in a wedding. I knew that there were advantages to being single: the much clichéd but definitely valuable perk of full control of the remote, for example, not to mention no more apologizing for having nothing but Diet Coke and condiments in one’s refrigerator. But now I was going to embrace my singledom. Just think, I told myself with growing excitement, of the money and time to be saved on grooming alone. And all of the eccentricities I could cultivate, strange eating habits and odd wardrobe choices, now that I had abandoned any concern for attracting members of the opposite sex. I’d be free of the Jinxing Gods at last.

Of course, there were children to consider. I wasn’t sure if I wanted them, but this course did tend to rule them out, at least without the involvement of a sperm bank or adoption agency. And I probably lacked the appetite for single motherhood. Still, I had a couple of nieces I could spoil rotten. They would look up to me in an Auntie Mame sort of way, and potentially write fond memoirs one day, especially if I gave them particularly lavish gifts. I could afford it, since I wouldn’t need to save up for orthodontia, piano lessons or college tuition for my own offspring. And I could spoil the children of my friends, as well.

I’d come to a crossroads and I’d chosen my course. I now felt invigorated-refreshed even. I decided to begin with the spoiling immediately. Baby Hallard wasn’t due for nearly six months, but surely it wasn’t too early to start showering him or her with presents? The Harvard Coop was across the way, and it seemed to me that Baby Hallard was desperately in need of a cotton onesie with Harvard Class of 202X emblazoned across the front. It was the sort of obnoxious garment that I’d never dress my own child in, but now that I’d decided I’d never have my own child, that was no longer a problem.

Harvard Square had changed dramatically since I’d first encountered it as an undergrad. It was hard not to walk through it without saying silent eulogies to landmarks long gone. Favorite boutiques, the infamous Tasty diner where many a night had culminated in early morning indulgences in greasy, fried food, even shops I’d never entered-I felt nostalgia for them all now that the vast majority of them had been transformed into Starbucks or painted over with a similar brush. I couldn’t believe how many Starbucks there were, all congregated into an area a few blocks square. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been heavily caffeinated throughout my college years, but my caffeine had come from more individualized venues, with the sort of character-or, conversely, the simple lack of charm and pretension-that couldn’t be easily franchised in malls across America.

The Coop itself hadn’t missed out on the Starbucksination of the Square, but I eventually found my way to the annex where they sold novelty apparel. Nor had I been hoping in vain that I would find baby clothing with Harvard stamped all over it. There were a number of onesies to choose from in crimson on white, white on crimson, crimson-and-white striped, and even pink and blue, which seemed like it should be against the rules.

I made relatively quick work of selecting a couple of items for which Baby Hallard would doubtless be eternally grateful and waited patiently while the clerk wrapped my purchases in crimson-and-white tissue paper. I had a feeling I was going to enjoy the role of mad, frivolous auntie.

It turned out that neither my life-changing decision nor my shopping expedition had taken very long, so I decided to spend some time browsing through the books section before returning to the hotel to change for the evening’s activities. What had once been a maze of haphazardly shelved texts had also been transformed by a decorator who must have trained at Barnes & Noble. In fact, I realized belatedly, it now officially was a Barnes & Noble. I happily passed up the self-improvement section since I’d decided to let myself go to complete and utter seed. I probably needed some new and eccentric interests to go with my embrace of a Miss Havisham lifestyle. Perhaps I could take up rug hooking. Or spelunking.

However, none of the books in the Hobbies section seemed to call out to me, although I did toy briefly with a coffee table tome on papier-mâché. But it weighed as much as a few lead ingots, and the mere thought of hauling it back to New York left me exhausted. It was time for a fresh infusion of Diet Coke. I abandoned the book and went off in search of caffeine.

True to the Barnes & Noble décor, there was a café on the second-floor balcony, and since I no longer cared about things like cellulite I purchased both the brownie and the Rice Krispies Treat instead of wasting precious time choosing between them. I found an empty table and sat down to enjoy my version of afternoon tea. I quickly settled in to a nice rhythm: a bite of brownie, then a sip of soda, followed by a bite of Rice Krispies Treat, and then another sip of soda. Heaven. I hadn’t felt this good in days.

My table offered an excellent view of the first floor below me, and I gazed down at the shoppers in a state of chocolate/sugar/caffeine-drenched euphoria, amusing myself by counting Harvard scarves. I was up to sixteen when I noticed that one of the scarves was draped around a familiar pair of broad shoulders browsing the shelves. Its owner’s blond head was bent down to examine an open text, and there was something familiar about the blond head, as well.

It was Jonathan Beasley, studly professor by day, crazed killer by night.

My reaction was a bit slow. On the one hand, his sinister presence should have jolted me into a state of high alert. On the other hand, I was having such a nice time with my soda and empty calories that I didn’t want to interrupt it by panicking. It would be such a waste of truly delicious junk food.

Then he looked up in my direction. Our eyes nearly met, but I quickly pulled the bag with Baby Hallard’s onesies onto the table and ducked my head behind it. When I peeked back around the edge of the bag a moment later, Jonathan was flipping through another book.

I still didn’t panic. Rationally, I didn’t really think Jonathan would try to kill me or anyone else in the middle of the Coop. But a crazed serial killer was, by definition, crazed, and it didn’t seem to make sense to take any unnecessary risks. With a sense of calm resignation, I gave a last, wistful look at my brownie and my Rice Krispies Treat. Well over half was left of each. But I had to find a safe spot to call O’Connell and tell him where he could apprehend his suspect. Giving up on love didn’t mean neglecting my civic responsibility to help fight crime.

With a sigh, I collected my things and followed signs to the stairwell, staying as far away from the balcony railing as possible in order to keep myself out of Jonathan’s line of sight. The safest thing to do was find a ladies’ room and call from there, and I was pretty sure there was one on the third floor, which had the added benefit of being where they kept books about science, which didn’t seem to be one of Jonathan’s areas of primary interest. I headed up the flight of stairs, my legs powered by the amounts of caffeine and sugar I’d managed to ingest before being so inconveniently interrupted. The ladies’ room was deserted, and I locked myself in a stall and reached for my cell phone. I was getting so used to being perpetually freaked out that my hands were perfectly steady. I was in great shape to perform surgery or operate heavy machinery if the opportunity should arise.

Of course, all I wanted to do was make a simple phone call, but I should have known better than to think anything that I tried to accomplish that day would be easy. I stared at the screen of my cell phone in frustration as it searched fruitlessly for a signal. Nothing. I turned it off and then on again, but instead of the little bars indicating signal strength the space showed a lonely X. And the phone persisted in making the same whiny noise it had been making earlier in the day.

So much for the relative safety of the ladies’ room. I obviously needed to find a quiet spot closer to a window, but I’d stay up here with the science books. Holding the Blackberry in front of me like a dowsing rod, I kept my eye on the screen as I wandered through the rows of bookshelves, all stuffed with texts on various ’ologies, waiting for some little bars to appear.

I probably shouldn’t have been so confident that everyone’s favorite psycho killer wasn’t scientifically inclined. I had to skirt more than a few nerdy-looking types who’d plopped themselves down on the floor to better examine books about spiders and quasars, but I wasn’t expecting to turn a corner and nearly collide into Jonathan Beasley. He was leaning against the shelves with his back to me, a book propped open in his hands.

Whatever he was reading must have been gripping, because my gasp of horror didn’t register. I hightailed it back around the corner from which I came and made a beeline for the stairs. Except that I’d been so focused on my cell phone screen I’d completely lost track of where the stairs were. And I’d never been gifted on the navigational front. This deficiency, combined with being somewhat challenged in the height department, left me at a bit of a loss. I was essentially trapped in a maze of bookshelves I couldn’t see over, without a clue as to the direction in which my escape route lay. Which would have been all right if there weren’t a serial killer a few feet away who was likely only temporarily distracted by whatever he was reading.

I scampered up one row of shelves and down another, turning to the left and then the right, hoping eventually to locate a perimeter of some sort that I could follow. Instead I just found science nerds, using their breaks from the research lab or computer center to hang out in the bookstore and create a human obstacle course. When I judged that I was at least a few rows away from Jonathan, I stopped to ask one if he knew where the stairs were only to find that he didn’t speak English. The second guy I asked favored me with a look so blank that it left me wondering if I spoke English.

The calm resignation I’d felt a few minutes earlier was gone, morphing into a far less calm sense of panic. I quickened my pace as I threaded my way through the seemingly endless rows of shelves. Relief flooded through me when I finally spied a red exit sign on a distant wall.

I leaped over the sprawling limbs of a couple more science nerds, my eyes focused on the exit sign and salvation. I cleared the last row of books and headed for the door.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of crimson-and-white wool. Then an arm encircled my neck, nearly throwing me off my feet as it drew me into its grip.