Chapter Sixteen
Alice parked on the far side of campus, hoping the ten-minute walk beneath the leafy oak and maple trees would help her relax before her meeting with Tom Dolan, the chair of the History Department. Soon she would learn if she was going to be teaching classes in the fall or abruptly fired.
The July air was thick and heavy, motionless, as if it was too tired to summon a breeze.
The last of the magnolia blossoms still emitted a weak scent, but most of the other blooming flowers and shrubbery were beginning to fade, as though the heat of summer had sapped their strength.
A few daylilies and coneflowers still clung to life.
Soon the groundskeepers would descend on the flowerbeds to replace them so the campus would be blooming once again when students and their parents arrived.
She squared her shoulders and drew a sobering breath as she opened the heavy door of James Blair Hall. The clicking of her heels in the vacant hallway ratcheted her tension higher. The departmental secretary wasn’t in, but Professor Dolan’s door was cracked open and the office lights were on.
“Tom?” she called out in the empty foyer. They were always on a first-name basis when students weren’t around.
Tom soon appeared in the doorway and opened it wider. He wore only a white polo shirt and sloppy beige cargo shorts. Why did so many academics treat their appearance this carelessly? He hadn’t even worn a pair of socks with his loafers.
“Alice,” he said with a polite smile, his face noncommittal, “please join us.”
Us? She scanned the office as she entered, her stomach plummeting at the sight of Anita Gebhardt from HR and Brent Bowers, the college’s attorney. They were both dressed like they belonged in a corporate law office. Anita’s bowl-shaped hair was paired with a floppy bow tie and boxy beige suit.
There was no need to panic yet, but she should have brought a lawyer. This suddenly seemed about as bad as it could get as she sank into the empty chair at the small conference table. Tom closed the door and offered a sad smile as he took a seat opposite her.
“How are you doing, Alice?” he asked, giving a good impression of compassion behind his round spectacles.
“Okay,” she said, and it was more or less true. Her life got remarkably easier after she quit obsessing over what was said about her on social media each hour.
“Good, good,” Tom said. He shifted uneasily and fiddled with a pen. “Well, we might as well get straight to it,” he said. “There have been a lot of concerns ever since this latest news about cocaine hit the press.”
Alice blinked. “Cocaine?”
Tom nodded. “Things were dicey even before, but, Alice, we can’t have a professor who has been accused of distributing cocaine. I’m sure you understand.”
Her jaw fell open as she swiveled to gape at Anita from HR and the college lawyer. “I have no idea what this is all about.”
Anita’s beige suit matched her beige hair and wan complexion.
Her mouth thinned and it looked like she was smelling something bad as she met Alice’s gaze.
“There have been credible assertions that you were the one who supplied Sebastian Bell with cocaine on the set of Emma. Cocaine is illegal in the United Kingdom, as it is here. Not only does possession of cocaine show poor judgment, it is especially egregious in light of Mr. Bell’s well-known attempt to stay clean and sober. ”
The assertion was so ridiculous she didn’t know where to start.
Alice had never done an illegal drug in her life!
She wouldn’t even know where to get cocaine, let alone expose Sebastian to it.
She’d been proud of the way he kicked a debilitating cocaine habit four years earlier, and thought it was well behind him.
“I don’t know where you heard this rumor, but it isn’t true,” she stammered.
“It’s all over social media,” the college lawyer said.
“Sebastian Bell’s agent confirmed that you were the source of his client’s access to cocaine, and it was the primary reason Sebastian wanted you to be on set at all times.
I’m sure you can understand there is no way the college can risk having you teach students, many of whom will be away from home and their parents’ protection for the first time. ”
“Are you firing me?”
“We’re putting you on indefinite suspension,” the lawyer said, opening a file and handing her a stack of papers. “We’d like your signature acknowledging the terms of your suspension.”
She turned her gaze back to Tom, whose incessant jiggling of his knee betrayed his unease. They’d known each other for five years. He used to call her “Goody Two Shoes.”
“Tom, you don’t believe this, do you?”
Tom shifted in his chair, then went back to jiggling his knee. “It doesn’t really matter what I believe,” he said. “From the outside, it looks pretty bad, so I’ve got to follow what the lawyers say. Sorry, Alice.”
Mr. Bowers slid the stack of papers closer to her. “Your signature, please.”
There was nothing worse than confrontation, but if she didn’t stand up for herself, nobody else would. “I won’t sign anything until a lawyer looks over this,” she said.
“That’s your right,” Mr. Bowers replied.
“I am notifying you in person and in writing that you will not be teaching in the fall, nor may you enter the college campus. You may use the college library databases, but only from a remote computer connection off campus. Any attempt to enter the college grounds will subject you to arrest for trespass.”
Arrest? Alice hadn’t so much as jaywalked in her entire life.
She wasn’t the sort of person who needed to be threatened with arrest to obey the rules, but the threat awakened terrible memories.
The humiliation of cold, steel handcuffs clamped around her wrists when security guards escorted her off the Emma set haunted her to this day.
“You will still be paid while HR convenes a Faculty Conduct Review,” Tom said.
That was a relief, but this was still a perfectly horrible and humiliating situation. “How long will the review take?”
“At least through the fall semester,” Tom replied.
“You may want to use the time searching for another position.” His expression was the picture of sympathy even though he always resented having a Jane Austen specialist foisted on his department.
“I’ll be able to write you a positive letter of recommendation, although if there is a threat of a lawsuit, I’ll need to refrain from any form of recommendation on your behalf until things are settled. ”
It was a nice way of warning her not to make trouble. “I’ll let you know soon,” she said as she took the fat stack of legal paperwork and left the office.
How long had they been preparing these documents?
Her palms sweat as she cradled the horrible stack of documents in her arms and left the building.
Normally she loved strolling beneath the tree-shaded paths through campus, but this might be the last time she would ever walk along these herringbone brick pathways.
They could arrest her if she dared set foot on campus.
Maybe it had been foolish to stop monitoring social media. This wouldn’t have caught her unawares if she’d been paying attention. She took a deep breath, savoring the scent of freshly mowed grass.
No, she hadn’t been a fool. Ignoring what the trolls were saying about her was the only way to keep her sanity, and she needed to focus on her blessings. Jack had helped her understand that. He could let problems roll off his back and bounced back with good humor and optimism.
Jack could help her cope with this. She didn’t want to wallow in the muck of social media by re-downloading those poisonous apps onto her phone, but she needed to know exactly what was being said about her, and who was saying it.
She set off for the country club, praying she could find Jack before her fragile hold on sanity slipped away.
Jack sat on the front steps of the country club, binoculars held to his eyes as he watched a group of golfers on the third hole.
The foursome were all avid golfers he asked to play a test round and evaluate the course for playability and identify last-minute issues for improvement.
Hosting test rounds was a routine part of launching a new golf course, but he’d never been this nervous before.
This was the first time he had an ownership stake in a golf course he designed.
Its success meant the difference between working until his dying day or having a safety net to pay his bills in case his health took a nosedive.
A movement in the distance caught his eye, and he trained his binoculars to zoom in on Alice.
It was impossible not to smile. She wore those high-heeled wedge sandals she looked so good in.
Espadrilles, she called them. They made her legs look fantastic even though her floaty skirt covered her knees.
Her hair was blowing in long, soft billows and looked pretty enough to be in a shampoo commercial.
Something was wrong. Her entire body looked tense and her face looked like she was trying not to cry. He dumped the binoculars, then strode across the fairway to meet her.
“Hey, pretty lady,” he called out as he drew near. She managed a half-smile.
“Hey, Jack. I need a favor.”
“Anything.”
“I’ve heard that another round of really bad gossip is circulating about me on the web. I don’t have the heart to look. Can you do it and tell me what’s out there? It has something to do with cocaine.”
A spark of anger flared. Alice and cocaine didn’t even belong in the same sentence, but he didn’t comment as he yanked his cell phone from his back pocket, opened an app, and searched for her name.
It didn’t take long to land on a story.
The comments were savage. Sebastian Bell was a widely respected actor, and Alice was the nobody who dangled cocaine before him to attract his attention.
The story claimed that when Sebastian tried to distance himself from her and the cocaine, Alice began stalking him.
By the time Sebastian sought help, he was hooked again and Alice had to be served with a restraining order.
“Well?” she asked.
Jack continued clicking around because there were countless posts on the topic.
One of them had a photo of a young, bleary-eyed Sebastian Bell staggering out of a nightclub with smears of white powder on his dark sweater.
It was probably an old photo from the worst years of Sebastian’s early addiction.
Most of the posts also included the infamous photo of Alice in handcuffs being led off the movie set.
Jack wished he could lie and downplay this, but she needed to know. He tried to soften his words. “It’s pretty bad,” he acknowledged. “They’re blaming you for supplying Sebastian Bell with coke and getting him hooked again.”
She gazed at the sky as though looking for answers. “It’s ridiculous. I don’t even smoke cigarettes, let alone smoke cocaine.”
People snorted cocaine, they didn’t smoke it, but her error just went to prove how naive she was when it came to drugs. He continued skimming posts. One man was quoted over and over in the posts.
“Who’s Graham Garfield?”
“He’s Sebastian’s agent,” Alice said. “He’s part creepy lawyer, part Lord Voldemort. Even Sebastian doesn’t like him, but he’s the best in the business.”
Part of an agent’s job was to defend his client’s reputation.
If the client took a financial hit, so did the agent.
Jack knew enough sports agents from men on the PGA tour to know that their job went well beyond negotiating contracts and managing publicity.
Product endorsements were a huge part of a celebrity’s earning power, and Sebastian Bell had endorsements from Rolex and Dior.
No wonder his agent was eager to foist the blame somewhere else.
“The college released me from teaching in the fall semester,” Alice said. “They put me on indefinite suspension while they conduct an investigation. From the way my department head spoke, it sounds like a foregone conclusion that they’re going to fire me for cause unless I go quietly.”
He looked away from the phone to draw her into a hug. “Oh, Alice, I wish I could stand in front of this craziness and take the brunt of it for you.”
His phone beeped with an incoming text, and he instinctively reached for it.
Sophie’s name appeared on the screen. He clicked it off and stuffed it in his back pocket, but not before Alice saw.
“Who’s Sophie?” she asked, pulling away from him.
“Nobody.”
Alice let out an exasperated breath. “She keeps texting you, and you keep saying she’s nobody, but your entire body tensed up the moment you saw her name.”
Sophie truly was nobody … at least, nobody he wanted to discuss. He’d never even met the woman, and owed her nothing. In the distance, the foursome was moving on to the 9th hole, and he hadn’t been paying attention.
“Let’s not do this here. She’s nothing for you to worry about.”
“The only thing that could make this day worse is for my boyfriend to be flirting with another woman behind my back.”
He shifted uneasily. The word boyfriend made him uneasy. It had all sorts of connotations he didn’t like. Japan beckoned, and even if it didn’t, he would never stay in Williamsburg or anywhere else for very long.
He reached for the binoculars. “I’ll come over to your place tonight and I can tell you about Sophie. Deal?”
She looked a little mollified. “What do you want for dinner?”
“Whatever is easiest for you.” Anything Alice made was terrific, and he managed a genuine smile before pulling her into a farewell hug, but inside, he dreaded the coming conversation about Sophie.