The Arizona Triangle by Sydney Graves

Author:Sydney Graves
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Lena Duby’s office door was open, but I knocked anyway, just to show my manners. The title “dean” had led me to expect a serene suite of glossy, oak-floored, high-ceilinged rooms with Victorian furniture and bay windows and maybe an ornamental fireplace. But her office in the 1960s-era Neville Hall, a Soviet-bloc-type textured-stucco construction with concrete walkways and scuffed linoleum floors, was fluorescent lit, chaotic, and crowded with unpacked cardboard boxes and a strong odor of air-conditioned dust. Lena Duby turned out to be as unprepossessing as her digs, a hobbity creature with a rounded jaw and small far-apart eyes, her gray hair tousled and chin length. She motioned me in, blinking and bumbling like a female Mr. Magoo.

“Rose was such a good teacher,” she told me after offering me a wooden classroom chair and handing me a glass of ice water poured with clumsy haste from a sweating pitcher on her book-piled desk. “Her students loved her, and I felt very much that she connected with them, inspired them.” Her voice was wheezy, hesitant, with odd pauses between words, as if English weren’t her native language even though she’d lost any trace of an accent. “I was so disappointed to get that email, to hear she wasn’t Navajo after all.”

“I can imagine the tough position it put you in.”

“It was anonymous,” she said. “Do you have any idea at all who the sender might have been?”

“Anyone who knew the real truth about her. Old friend, family member, lover, someone she drunkenly confided in at a party. No idea at the moment.”

The dean made a soft clucking noise. “Whoever they were, they wanted her to be punished for it. May I ask, why are you investigating this email? Did Rose hire you to find the person?”

“No,” I said. “Oh, I am sorry. I assumed you knew.”

Her face was genuinely blank. “Knew what?”

“Rose was found dead this weekend. It appears that she hanged herself.”

The dean’s face went stony. “Oh my word,” she said. “Hanged herself.”

“I’m so sorry to tell you like this,” I said. “I shouldn’t have assumed that you’d been notified.” This was disingenuous, of course, because I had been hoping to catch her off guard with this news.

“Rose is dead? That’s—I’m absolutely shocked. I had no idea. She hanged herself. Oh my.” She licked her lips, took a quick, hard breath, fumbled her glass of water to her dry lips, and took a loud gulp. When she could talk again, she went on in a rush, eyes blinking rapidly like a nervous tic. “Rose seemed to accept the fact that I had to let her go, no hard feelings, no anger whatsoever, she wasn’t nearly as upset as I had feared she would be, not defensive at all.”

“How so?”

“She apologized for the deception,” said the dean. “Sincerely. And we had a very productive conversation about it. She was articulate about her reasons for it. In fact, in the end I encouraged her to write an essay about it, and she said she would think about it.

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