Bond With Death Read Free Page A

never stoop to something so obvious as putting a stethoscope to the door, but the secretary always seemed to know what was being said in Naylor’s office, closed door or not. Maybe she listened on the intercom. Except that there wasn’t one. Mental telepathy? Sally couldn’t figure it out.
    â€œWhen do you think she’ll have a chance to look for them?” Sally asked.
    â€œYou can ask her when you leave,” Naylor said, which was as close to a curt dismissal as Sally had ever received from him. She got
up and thanked him for his time before going to the other office, where Wynona sat staring at a computer screen.
    â€œIt’s not that hard to find the evaluations,” Wynona said before Sally had a chance to ask. “I’ll get them for you this afternoon. He just doesn’t want you to see them because they’re awful. Students hate Curtin, and I don’t blame them. He’s lazy, and I don’t think he bathes often enough.”
    Sally could have told Wynona that it was unprofessional of her to make derogatory comments about one of the school’s instructors, but she knew Wynona wouldn’t pay her any attention. And if she did pay attention, she wouldn’t care. She was one of the people who actually ran the college, and if you crossed her, you could find yourself in deep trouble.
    For example, Wynona put the final class schedule together each semester and got it ready for the print shop. While the department chairs made out the first draft and arranged for times and classrooms, Wynona had the power to make changes. Not in the times. Those were untouchable. But she could change the classroom assignments. Instructors who got on Wynona’s bad side might discover that they had to walk quite a distance in the ten minutes between their nine and ten o’clock classes, for instance. The walk wasn’t much of a nuisance on good days, but it could be quite unpleasant on a very hot one or on a day when the rain was falling in sheets and lightning tore across the skies while the wind turned umbrellas inside out. There were plenty of days like that near the Texas Gulf Coast.
    So Sally just said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call when you find them.”
    â€œI’ll do that,” Wynona said, and Sally returned to her own office.
    Wynona called around two o’clock, and Sally went to pick up the evaluations. When Sally walked into the office, Wynona was reading the students’ comments. That, too, was unprofessional.
    So was Wynona’s appearance for that matter. She looked as if she should be working as a secretary in a disreputable auto repair shop instead of in the office of a college dean. She had big hair dyed a brassy color that had never been found in nature, she wore revealing
blouses, and she had been known to talk a little trash from time to time. Sally didn’t mind. She liked her, even though she wished Wynona would be a little more conventional now and then.
    â€œThese are just awful,” Wynona said, looking up and flicking the forms with a red fingernail that seemed to Sally to be too long for doing any typing. “If anybody ever got canned around here, Curtin would be the guy. But nobody ever does. Get canned, I mean.”
    â€œNobody?” Sally said as she reached across the desk and removed the green sheets of paper from Wynona’s hand.
    â€œNobody. We had a guy working in the counseling center around five or six years ago. Jay Sammons. He had some kind of breakdown and started insulting the students instead of helping them. But did they fire him?” Wynona shook her head. “ Nooooooo . They put him in a little office way in the back of the center and had him doing enrollment statistics all day. He finally left when his wife got a job in San Antonio. Otherwise, he’d still be stuck back there, like that crazy old aunt in the attic that Ross Perot talked about.”
    Sally thanked