The Sinner

“No. I don’t have time to kid. One of my criminology teachers quit last week, no notice, along with one of my special ed people and two British Lit professors.” His eyes twinkled behind his glasses. “You’re not by any chance a big fan of Beowulf, are you? I’d gladly put you to work in the English department, too.”

Bryce smiled. “No one is a fan of Beowulf, Professor Merle.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Bryce. Call me Dilday. Or whatever version of the name you prefer these days. As I recall, you had several pretty good ones.”

Bryce shook his head. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I was seventeen. I was an ass.”

Dilday grinned. “Yes, you were.” He held out a slim file folder. “Here, this is the syllabus our last teacher used. You could adapt it to suit yourself, or you can work straight from his plans. It doesn’t matter to me. You’ve got the credentials, and we need a teacher. We don’t pay squat to adjuncts, but you don’t care about that, anyway.”

Bryce took the folder but didn’t open it. “Hold on. I haven’t said I’ll do it.”

Dilday didn’t look fazed. He just smiled, toying with his letter opener, the same letter opener he’d always used. Its handle was carved in the shape of a zebra. In Heyday everything was zebra-this and zebra-that. It was one of the cutesy affectations Bryce had despised most about this Podunk town. So why did the sight of this particular letter opener suddenly make him feel a little nostalgic?

“In fact,” Bryce went on, steeling himself to resist all appeals to the past, both overt and covert, “a list of the reasons why I can’t do it—not to mention the reasons why I wouldn’t want to—would stretch out from here to D.C.”

“I know,” Dilday said patiently. “But you’ll do it, anyway, because you’re a nice boy. You always were.”

“Really? I thought we just agreed I was an ass.”

Dilday shrugged. “Ass is attitude. Ass is window-dressing. Ass is, at heart, simply fear in fancy clothes.”

Bryce paused a moment, his nostalgic goodwill toward this old man diminishing. “I thought you taught algebra, not psychology.”

“Oh, forget about me. And let’s, just for the moment, forget about you at seventeen, too. All that stuff is irrelevant now. I’ve got a crisis on my hands, Bryce. I take it you haven’t heard about what happened here a couple of years ago?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“I thought someone might have told you, since that journalist Tyler Balfour turned out to be your brother. But then—I guess communication between you and Kieran has been pretty spotty.”

“You might call it that.” Bryce shrugged. “So how about if you tell me? What the hell does Tyler Balfour have to do with anything?”

“He damn near destroyed this college with his muck-raking, that’s what.” Dilday took off his glasses and started cleaning them on his tie.

The gesture took Bryce back fifteen years in one split second. He could almost smell the chalk dust and the cheap perfume of the cheerleader who had sat next to him in Algebra. He had almost had sex with her under the football bleachers one night, but she had chickened out at the last minute.

“No, let me rephrase that,” Dilday said carefully, arranging his glasses on his nose again. “He didn’t nearly destroy us. We did that to ourselves. Balfour is an investigative reporter for a paper in Washington, D.C. But you can’t kill the messenger, can you? What happened to us was our own fault. We had a problem here, and he came to town and found it. Then he went home and published a big exposé and—”

“Hang on,” Bryce said. “When you say you had ‘a problem’ here, what exactly does that mean?”

“It means—” Dilday sighed. “Well, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. Some of our female students had formed a call-girl ring, and—”

“My God. I remember that.” Actually, Bryce had thought it was hilarious at the time. Rich sorority girls turning tricks in pokey little Heyday for mall money. He had read the first of the series, but then he got caught up in a trial and missed the rest. He’d meant to go back and read it all, but in the end he hadn’t cared enough. Heyday was boring. Even underage prostitution and local politicos caught with their pants down couldn’t make it interesting.

And he certainly hadn’t remembered the reporter’s name. He would never have put it together with the Tyler Balfour who had turned up out of the blue in old Anderson McClintock’s will.

“Still…how did that become a big problem for the college? Surely a little bad publicity, a few rotten apples—”

Dilday shook his head. “You underestimate how sensitive these things are. College campuses are supposed to be like protected bubbles, where parents send their children to make a safe transition to adulthood. Whether it’s realistic or not, we have an obligation to provide a secure environment. When word got out that their daughters were getting involved in things like that…”

Bryce was finally catching on. “They began to pull them out.”

Dilday nodded. “Seventy-five the week the series was published. It tapered off after that, and some came back, but we’re still down a net total of eighty students. In a small campus like ours, that’s a lot.”

“But what does this have to do with me? Surely I can’t be held responsible for the sins of my brother. Half brother. Especially one I didn’t even know existed until about ten months ago.”

“It’s not a question of responsibility. I need you, that’s all. I need someone with credentials, which, after a law degree and eight years in the FBI, you’ve got in spades. I need someone who’s independently wealthy, who’s able to make do without a real salary. And most of all I need someone who has some panache, who might bring in a few extra students.”

“Panache?” Bryce crossed his ankle over his knee and lay the file folder on his lap. “That sounds like a euphemism for something. What?”

“You know what.” Dilday Merle gave him a straight look. “You are a celebrity right now, Bryce. You just shot somebody while you were defending a gorgeous actress, and you got knifed doing it. That’s exciting. They’re just kids. They’ll eat that stuff up with a spoon.”

Dilday’s main talent as a teacher had always been his down-to-earth clarity. And he was certainly being crystal clear right now. Bryce had to hand it to him—he wasn’t trying to do a smoke-and-mirrors dance about his motives.

“But it won’t work,” Bryce said. “Even if I wanted to teach your class, which I don’t, I won’t be in Heyday long enough. The term goes until, what, May? I wasn’t planning to stay here more than a month or two at most.”

“So stay longer. You own this place, or at least a third of it, right? Stick around a while. It won’t kill you. You’ll have plenty to do just straightening out your inheritance.”

Dilday was right, of course—wasn’t he always? In only a week, Bryce had discovered just how hopelessly tangled his ties were to Heyday. He had tenants and mortgagees, employees and sycophants and a couple of enemies. He even had someone trying to sue him over an illegal dumping that had supposedly fouled the soil twenty-five years ago when a dry cleaner had occupied one of his buildings.

Absently he opened the folder and scanned the contents. The absconding Dr. Douglas had put together a pretty good class, basic and easy to teach. All the major theories and paradigms were covered—subcultural, gender-based, social structure, social process, developmental, it was all there.

He remembered this stuff from school, and what he didn’t remember he could refresh easily. It looked so orderly, so pure and hopeful here on the page, all well-intentioned and academic. Nothing chaotic and bloody, unpredictable and heartbreaking. It might be a nice change of pace. It might help him remember why he’d gone into law in the first place.

And he would have something to bring to it. Something practical and concrete, based on his years of real-life work. It wasn’t just “panache.” It was experience.

He glanced up, wondering if Dilday could sense his weakening willpower.

“Just this one, Bryce,” the old man said. “I’m desperate. Classes start in three days. And it’s only a few months. It might be fun.”

Bryce looked up and smiled dryly. Who would have thought that Dilday Merle could, just for a minute, sound exactly like Lara Lynmore’s desperate lawyer?

“I give you my word of honor, I’ll be looking for someone to replace you,” Dilday said. “Please. Just until I can find somebody else.”

“You know,” Bryce said, wondering why he was such a bloody fool, but knowing he was going to say yes. “I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that line before.”

THREE DAYS LATER Bryce confronted his first classroom full of students. Thirty-eight of them. Dilday must be in heaven. Three days ago, there had been only twenty. But then the word went out that Bryce McClintock, notorious bad-ass and bodyguard to the stars, would be teaching it and, just as Dilday had predicted, enrollment had soared.

Bryce had expected the first day, at least, to be intimidating, but they looked like nice kids. Some of them weren’t even kids. At least two of the male students were in their late twenties, and that woman in the last row must be somebody’s grandmother. Bryce found himself curious. What were their stories? Why were they here? What were they hoping he could teach them?

The real surprise was that Ilsa, Kieran’s housekeeper, was one of his students, too. She had come up to him just before class and confided in her husky, accented whisper that Kieran had encouraged her to go back to school, so here she was.

Bryce had been friendly but carefully distant. It was actually kind of scary, when you thought about the number of ways in which beautiful Swedish coeds with ulterior motives could easily spell trouble for a young professor who was her boss’s brother.

Maybe he was being unfair. Maybe busty, beautiful Ilsa was a dedicated scholar. But somehow he doubted it.

The first half of the class had gone well. The kids seemed to hang on his every word. Only one boy had found the nerve to mention Lara Lynmore or Kenny Boggs.

“Mr. McClintock,” the kid said eagerly. “You shot that stalker, and you aren’t even like a professional bodyguard. That’s like, so awesome.”