Page 13 of No Safe Place

“Ms. Doherty!” Dean Darwell said loudly.

Colleen turned to her. She could see the woman’s eyes were wide and even a little bit wild behind her glasses now.

She’d gone full cat lady, Colleen thought. She seemed scared. Sort of terrified, in fact.

My, my, Colleen thought.

What the hell had happened to Olivia that night?

“Yes?” Colleen finally said.

“Ms. Doherty, if you...if you could formally put all of your requests in writing, I will speak to the college’s legal counsel to ensure that the best course of action is taken. Is that fair?”

It was Colleen’s turn to cock her own head at the dean now.

“Fair to stonewall and lawyer up on a father who’s merely trying to find out what happened to his deceased twenty-year-old daughter?” Colleen said as if she were considering it. “His only child whose safety and well-being he very unwisely put under your care?”

She lifted her bag and stood.

“No,” she said. “That’s not fair. Not even a little. I’m going to be up here for a few days talking to several other people about this matter. During that time, if you feel like—what is the term the police use? Oh, yes. Getting out ahead of this—I left my card and number at the desk. Good morning.”

14

If the office of Beckford College president, Martin Cushing, looked like one of those elegant moneyed chambers that most people might only see featured in the glossy pages of Architectural Digest, it was because it actually had been in AD’s September edition a year before in an article entitled, “Mixing Modern and Classic Styles.”

With a floor-to-ceiling bay window that overlooked the campus’s beautifully cultivated grounds, it had a varnished behemoth of an antique burled walnut desk, an Industry West sofa and love seat, a Henn&Hart coffee table. The table rode atop a Persian rug on the polished oak floor and along the fine wood recessed paneling was a copper sideboard by Arhaus.

Above the sideboard was Cushing’s favorite piece in the room, an oil painting from the college’s vast art collection, a Brevoort seascape of an inlet framed by a rocky cliff. As Cushing had told the magazine people, he loved Hudson River School seascapes not just for their Sturm und Drang drama but because they always reminded him of the beach beside his family’s ancestral place in Martha’s Vineyard.

Referred in the AD piece as “dapper and energetic,” President Cushing liked to think that he himself was a stylish mix of the modern and classic as well. That was why to keep up appearances this morning, he was wearing a beautifully tailored seasonally appropriate midweight gray wool suit that hung from his frame with a drape that was almost arrogant in its meticulous exactitude.

At a little before ten that morning, Cushing was center stage of his magnificent office sitting on his eight-thousand-dollar sofa. There was a yellow legal tablet in his lap and a MacBook Air laptop on the plush cushion beside him. A board of trustees meeting was upcoming and he was doing some last-minute polishing of his quarterly report.

President Cushing, Marty to his friends, was a big man. Six foot two, 275 pounds, most of it soft. Though with good tailoring, and he had that, it was well hidden. And with his nice blue eyes and razor part in his graying executive hair and his pleasantly bemused, slightly haughty standing expression, he looked solid and aristocratic like an expensive college president should.

What was the word his obnoxious, Wall Street trading, college buddy Frank used to describe him last time they played golf?

Prosperous.

The bastard, Cushing thought. Frank had the gall to keep telling him how prosperous he looked now. Once with a double pat to his midsection after he missed a putt!

But he was prosperous, wasn’t he? Cushing thought as he paused looking over his office.

Frank had been right on the money about that.

He was a millionaire now. An actual millionaire and it wasn’t like he even had to spend any of it with the way things were set up. The house was free, his meals, even his first-class vacations, granted he attached some silly college business to them.

Not bad for a boy from the badlands, he thought as he leaned back and grinned. Not bad at all.

The badlands in his case were Fort Mohave, Arizona, and they were bad all right. Dad was a copper miner, mother was a night cleaner at a hospital, the house a double wide that was once part of some kind of hippie commune oasis resort off Route 66. It was a shack really. It didn’t even have an indoor bathroom.

Fortunately for him, what this incredibly embarrassing home did contain was three doting older sisters and a mother who was the black sheep hippie daughter of a distinguished family back East. Mother had homeschooled young Martin like a little prince, hadn’t she? Taught him how to speak properly, how to always be neat and mannerly. She and his sisters showered constant attention on him and when his hillbilly dad’s height and good looks kicked in around age fourteen, he became pretty much the mayor of the little desert town especially when he went out for football.

But Mother had even bigger plans for him than small-town hero. She had squirreled away money to send him back East to school at the University of Virginia where one of her brothers had gone.

There at UVA, well-groomed and with a line of malarkey as slick as buttered sausage, as his father used to say, he had hit the ground running on a quest in one direction. Upward.

If there had been one roadblock in this quest, it was that Cushing was no scholar. He had struggled through as a C student even after conning several female classmates to do most of his work. Fortunately, what he was good at, with his shoeshine and a smile, was student government. He was even vice president one year, which made him enough connections to squeak into UVA’s famous law school despite his grades.

---