Read Online Final Exam by Maggie Barbieri - Free Book Online Page A

had come from, where Wayne Brookwell was, and how the drugs and Wayne were related. That meant I’d have to talk to someone, sometime, about this situation.
    He glared at me some more. But coming from a five-foot-five grandfather, even if he was a champion kickboxer in his age bracket, it just wasn’t that intimidating.
    “Oh, okay,” I relented. “We will never speak of this again,” I repeated with tremendous gravitas. I crossed my fingers behind my back and said an Act of Contrition for the lie I just told.
    He gave me one final glance before saying, “Good.”
    He started to walk away, whistling a Miles Davis tune. “Oh, and one more thing.” He stopped a few feet from my room. “You’ll need to move your car.”
    “That’s my regular parking spot,” I reminded him.
    “That’s your regular parking spot if you don’t live on campus. The resident parking lot is up the hill past the auditorium.” He seemed to derive great pleasure in passing this information on to me.
    “That doesn’t make any sense.”
    He put his hands up. “Not my rules. The school’s. You’ll have to move your car into the resident lot before the students start coming back.”
    I started to protest to his back as he continued down the hallway.
    “Have a good day, Dr. Bergeron,” he called back.
    “You, too!” I said but I didn’t mean it. I hoped he had a very bad day. Like the one I had had the day before. I called Trixie and she came running, sliding to a stop in front of me. I watched Jay turn the corner and go out the main entrance of the dorm. Was it me or was this place an insane asylum? “Want to see your new room?” I asked her.
    Her enthusiastic tail-wagging suggested that she might. I opened the door and her tail became flaccid, eventually tucking between her legs. “It’s not scary, Trix,” I said, putting my fingers between her chain-link collar and the thick rug of fur around her neck. I dragged her into the room. “See? It’s just like home,” I said, but even the dog could tell I was full of it. She went into the shoebox-sized living room and, with a heavy sigh, fell into a heap on the floor, dust rising up around her from the Oriental carpet. She looked up at me, her doleful eyes watching my every move. I went to the bathroom door and pulled down the police tape.
    “Wayne?”
    I peeked my head around the doorjamb and saw a young woman, long curly, black hair hanging to her shoulders, her eyes behind a pair of glasses with black, Buddy Holly–esque frames. She was in jeans and a Princeton sweatshirt, her feet in a pair of pink flip-flops. She was going for the art-student vibe but even that couldn’t hide how cute she was under the helmet of hair and the outdated glasses.
    “Sorry. Wayne’s not here,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m Alison Bergeron. I’m the temporary RD.”
    She took my hand. “Hi. I’m Amanda Reese. I’m the RA on the third floor. Where’s Wayne?”
    Where’s Wayne? That was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “Not sure. I think he took a short leave of absence,” I said, trying not to arouse any suspicion, which made me ask myself why I felt compelled to cover for this guy.
    I recognized Amanda from around campus but knew that I had never had her as a student. The look on her face, however, led me to believe that she knew exactly who I was: the same Alison Bergeron who owned the car in which a student’s body had been found the previous year; the same Alison Bergeron whose ex-husband, the head of the biology department, had been found dead, missing his hands and feet, in her kitchen; the same Alison Bergeron who got herself involved in too many fracases to mention. I don’t know if it was my presence or the fact that Wayne wasn’t where he was supposed to be, but she seemed nervous.
    “He didn’t mention anything to me about a leave of absence,” she said, her eyes narrowing behind her thick lenses, her flip-flopped foot tapping on the marble.
    “It