“When we first got them, they nearly destroyed it more than once. Fortunately, we have a neighbor next door who thinks of these dogs as shared pets-he even helped us pick them out at the pound. He has a remarkable ability with them. I would swear to you that he just talked them out of ruining the garden.”
“I believe it.”
She looked weary; her weariness, I suspected, was caused by more than a lack of sleep.
“Last night you said that Lucas lost his good reputation,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Because he was drinking?”
She looked surprised. “Drinking? No, no. That came later.” She leaned forward, lowered her voice. “You don’t know about the scandal?”
“No. What scandal?”
“At the college. Lucas was accused of cheating.”
“What? I don’t believe it!”
“Well, that’s a good start then,” she said with satisfaction. “A very good start. I never believed he cheated on anything. He was too smart to need to cheat. But they kicked him out of that college anyway.”
“This doesn’t make any sense.” The morning suddenly seemed colder. “Come inside, I’ll make some coffee and you can give this story from the beginning.”
SHE TOOK A SEATat the kitchen table. “When was the last time you saw Lucas?”
“In about 1975 or ’76.”
“Hmm. Yes, that was just before the whole mess happened. Things started getting bad in about 1977. Lucas almost had his master’s degree. He had just turned in his thesis. He was so proud of that thesis…”
Her voice trailed off, and she looked away from me. I busied myself with the coffeemaker. When it looked as if she had regained her composure, I asked, “What was the thesis about?”
“It was a study of one of the old neighborhoods in Las Piernas, how it was changing, what might be done to help make life better for the people that lived there. It was one of the neighborhoods included in the redevelopment plans.”
“I suppose it makes sense that Lucas would choose something like that for his thesis topic. He was doing work with Andre Selman.”
“Hmph. Andre Selman,” she said. “Someday the Lord just might teach me how to forgive that man.”
“Why?”
“I’m not saying he’s responsible for everything that happened to Lucas. Far from it. Some of that started in our own family, and before our family. But Andre Selman caused a whole lot of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“At first, he looked like a hero. Helped Lucas get a job on campus, teaching that statistics class. Took Lucas under his wing for the redevelopment study for Las Piernas. Told Lucas all this high and mighty stuff about how he was going to help Lucas go to a big university, get a scholarship-all on account of the work Lucas was doing for him with the redevelopment study. Even shared his office with Lucas; let him keep all his books and his work there. Lucas thought the world of him.”
I poured two cups of coffee, gave one to her. “That must have been what was going on when I knew Lucas. If he wasn’t out in the field doing research, or teaching a class, he was in that office. He seemed happy with his work and with the project. Although now that I think about it, he did warn me not to become involved with Andre.” “That doesn’t surprise me. Lucas said that professor was always making a fool out of one woman or another.”
I tried not to flinch. Failed.
She didn’t notice. “Of course he was happy with Dr. Selman,” she went on. “Try to understand what that kind of attention meant to him. Lucas was the first person in the Monroe family to get a college education. His father, his father’s father, his uncles and great-uncles-none of them ever went to college. I was the first college graduate in my family, and there were days when I would have sworn to you that Lucas’s father married me because he wanted his children to go to college and thought I could get them there. Charles never did too well in school, not because he wasn’t bright, but because-oh, he just let things distract him. But Lucas, he was driven. He loved school, loved sociology. He thought he could make a difference in the world.”
“I saw that when I was his student. You must have taught him something about teaching-he was very good at it.”
“Thank you,” she said softly, “but I think he was just naturally gifted.” She looked away from me then, looked back out toward the garden. “Yes, he loved school…” Her voice trailed off. But when she looked back, her expression was one of indignation, not sadness. “You can imagine,” she said, “how shocked we were when he called up to say he was being kicked out of the college.”
“What happened?”
She shook her head. “You know, Irene, the biggest problem was that it took so long to figure out what really did happen. The trouble started when Lucas turned in his thesis, and this other professor, a Dr. Warren, convinced everyone on the committee that they should reject it.”
“Wait a minute-Warren? Andre never got along very well with Dr. Warren. What’s the connection? And what was the reason for rejecting the thesis?”
“He claimed that Lucas had cheated to make the data come out just the way he wanted it to-said Lucas had faked the numbers.”
“I don’t believe for a minute that Lucas would have resorted to something like phony data,” I said.
“Andre Selman said the same thing. Said there must be some mistake. Made a big show out of taking out the thesis and going over it and acting real surprised. In fact, when Lucas got called before the committee,he was real surprised, too.”
“Why?”
“It wasn’t his thesis.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Oh, there was a thesis with ‘by Lucas Monroe’ on the front of it all right, even lots of pages in there that were from his original thesis-most of it, really. But mixed in with the pages Lucas wrote were ones that weren’t his.”
“How could that be?”
“Well, that was the question, of course. Andre Selman stood up for Lucas in front of the committee, went on and on about how he knew that Lucas did fine work and was honest and so on. Then he said, ‘Lucas, you must have your own copy of this thesis. Can you bring it in?’
“And of course, Lucas says he doesn’t even have to go home to get it. Everything is in his office.”
“Which is also Dr. Selman’s office,” I said.
“Exactly right. Now what do you suppose he found there?”
“It was missing.”
She shook her head.
“It was there,” I said slowly, “but Lucas’s own copy matched the committee’s.”
“Yes.”
“But he must have had notes, or some other way to prove-”
“This is where they really did him dirty. This is how someone knew they could get away with this. Did you ever see Lucas’s handwriting?”
“Yes. It wasn’t the best.”
She laughed. “It wasn’t legible, you mean. He used to have trouble reading it himself. Couldn’t always make out his own handwriting if a week or two went by. So he had been typing up his notes since high school. And the same thing was true of his college work; he used to type almost everything. He’d take his notes and forms from the field and type them up. The good part was, it made him go over everything, organize it.”
“I was talking to someone about this the other day. I remembered that he hated to write on the black-board,” I said. “He even typed up overhead transparencies to teach his stat class.”
She nodded. “So going back to that day-he’s in this office, frantic. It’s like something from theTwilight Zone. He’s searching and searching for something to prove his innocence, and everything he looks at seems to prove his guilt. Things are missing, or they’ve been changed.”
“Who had access to the office?”
“Only a few people. The chair of the department, Lucas, Dr. Selman, another research assistant, and the custodians-who weren’t likely to be typing up fake pages to a thesis. Lucas said the chair of the department was in the clear as far as he was concerned. At first he was just plain puzzled. Figured somebody must have broken into the office. But of course there was no sign of that, and so the committee was growing openly skeptical about Lucas’s innocence.