The Professor's Captive Wife novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Full Recording

The chair of the trustees looked at me over her reading glasses.

Then she looked at Theresa, still standing at the microphone with the August letter in her hand.

"Dr. Danforth," she said. "Step aside, please. Mrs. Thaxter has five minutes."

Theresa smiled and stepped aside.

She didn't sit down.

She stood by the fireplace with her page, a foot from her empty chair and the beaded bag on it.

I took the microphone off its stand.

My hands were wet.

I'd carried trays through this room for four years without once being looked at.

Now two hundred and fifty people were looking at nothing else.

"I'm not going to talk for long," I said. "I'm going to let other people do it. Tori?"

Tori walked out of the crowd in her borrowed blazer.

Her mother made a small sound behind her.

Tori took the microphone from me in both hands.

She took out her phone with the other.

"My name is Tori Ingram. I'm the student on the recording." Her voice shook, then held. "I'm going to read you one text. It came to me the night before I went to Professor Thaxter's office."

She read it.

"'If he hesitates, cry. You're good at it. And if anyone ever asks, the dean's office never heard of you.'"

A murmur went down the room.

"I never met the person who sent it," Tori said. "Professor Thaxter told me to button my shirt. I lied about him to four thousand people. I'm sorry. I'm telling you now because somebody should say it in the same voice that said the other thing."

She handed the microphone back to me and walked straight to her mother, who grabbed her by the blazer and didn't let go.

Faye had already plugged her phone into the club's speaker by the bar.

The old bartender had shown her where.

"This is a video from the staff table in this club's kitchen," I said. "From the night my husband proposed. Some of you have heard nine seconds of it."

Faye pressed play.

The room heard my second sentence for the first time.

I didn't watch the screen.

I watched the room.

The woman in black velvet put her hand over her mouth.

The department wife beside her went pink and looked hard at her shoes.

Then the video reached its last three seconds.

The chair of the trustees leaned forward and narrowed her eyes at the edge of the frame.

"Is that you at the next table, Theresa?" she asked mildly. "With your phone up?"

Theresa didn't answer.

The assistant stepped forward from the wall by the kitchen door.

He didn't take the microphone.

He just raised his voice.

"I've been suspended for copying Mrs. Thaxter's letters," he said. "I didn't. The IT log says her login, at a time I was asleep in Cranston. And this was in her shred bin."

He held up the plastic sleeve with the blue handwriting in it.

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