grade tampering.”
Jane’s eyes widened. “Cheating? He’s going to accuse the professor of cheating? To what end?”
Sandra shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. Maybe for money?”
Jane felt as if she’d been insulted herself. Indignation for the professor’s honor swelled in her chest. “That is the most mean-spirited, awful thing I have ever, ever heard—”
“I totally agree,” Sandra quickly interrupted. She shook her head at the half sandwich Jane offered her. “Thanks, but I already ate.” She blew out a breath, addressing the reason she was here. “But protesting how heinous the accusation is isn’t enough. By all accounts, Alex Broadstreet is a very, very clever man. He wants to bring Saunders University into the twenty-first century, to shed the ‘quaint’ aura and turn Saunders into a college that all the moneyed captains of industry want their children to attend. The professor isn’t fast-tracked enough for him, so he has to go. And Broadstreet undoubtedly feels he’s just the man to make him do that.”
Broadstreet could “feel” that all he wanted to, but that still didn’t change the fact that Gilbert Harrison was the most principled man June had ever met. “I still don’t see how—”
Sandra smiled at her. Whether the journalist was aware of it or not, she was also guilty of delivering a slight, almost-derogatory shake of the head, as well, as if to say that Sandra thought her to be naive. She might be a lot of things, Jane thought, but naive was no longer one of them. Not after Drew.
She raised her chin defensively as her eyes narrowed. “He can’t do anything honestly.”
Sandra laughed shortly. “I don’t think Broadstreet troubles himself with things like strict honesty. It’s all in the phrasing.”
“Phrasing?”
“You know,” Sandra urged, “It’s like saying, ‘So when did you stop beating your wife, Professor Harrison?’ When the person protests that he didn’t stop, it doesn’t really matter that he didn’t stop because he’d never started, the implication that he beat his wife is there, in the mind of the listener. The seed has been planted. And Broadstreet will be the first with a shovel in his hand to add some nice, warm dirt so that it can thrive.” She looked at Jane pointedly. “We need to make sure that there isn’t any ‘dirt’ he can use.” Sandra relaxed a little, now that she’d gotten rolling. “In addition, there’s that urban legend—”
She really needed to get more sleep, Jane thought. She was having trouble following Sandra as the former cheerleader leaped from one thing to another. “Legend? What legend?”
“You know.” Everyone in their graduating class had heard talk about it. About one of their own being on the receiving end of some scholarship or bequest of money that no one had ever heard about before. “About the mysterious benefactor.” Since Jane said nothing, Sandra continued to elaborate. “Money that suddenly appears to help a financially strapped student—” She stopped abruptly when she saw Jane’s face go pale. “What’s the matter?”
Jane had never really paid much attention to rumors and campus gossip about the so-called benefactor who anonymously gave all kinds of aid to students in need. When the money had first turned up, she’d made a few attempts to track down the source of her sudden windfall, but quickly came to a dead end each time. She’d finally just come to think of it as her own personal miracle. No one she knew had that kind of money to lavish on a newly orphaned student and there was no family, however far flung, to have come to her rescue. That qualified it as a miracle.
Until now.
“It’s not a legend,” she told Sandra. “I had money placed into an account for me when I was attending Saunders.”
Sandra stared at her. The reporter in her was making copious mental notes. “It just suddenly appeared one day?”
Hearing Sandra say it, it sounded almost ludicrously unbelievable. But truth had a way of being stranger than fiction.
“Basically, yes. There was a letter saying the money was to pay for the remainder of my tuition. Whatever was left over was to be used for housing and books. I got a job waiting tables off campus and the earnings plus the ‘gift’ was enough for me to stay on at Saunders and get my diploma.”
Sandra could barely contain her excitement. Maybe they could show that the professor somehow had a hand in this, maybe through quietly soliciting donations from charitable foundations for deserving students. The wheels in her head began whirling.
First things first, she warned herself. “Who was the letter from?”
“The administrative office.” Jane could still recall how stunned she’d been, opening the letter and holding it in her hands. She’d thought she was dreaming. She remembered weeping for a long time.
Sandra leaped to the logical conclusion. “So it was a school scholarship—”
But Jane shook her head. “No, that’s just it. It wasn’t. Not the way the letter was worded.”
Sandra looked at her intently, as if willing her to have total recollection of the event. “And just how was it worded? Exactly.”
Sandra was asking more of her than she could give. Again, Jane shook her head.
“I can’t remember.” And then, to prevent the other woman from thinking that she was some kind of an air-head, she explained, “You have to understand, my parents had just been killed in a car accident. I was all alone in the world and I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly about anything. When the letter came, it was like the answer to a prayer. I couldn’t believe it. If that money hadn’t come when it had, I would have had to drop out of school.”
The way Smith had.
The thought brought her up short. Where had that come from?
And why?
With renewed verve, Jane pushed on, her sandwich completely forgotten. “All my parents had was a small insurance policy that would have barely taken care of burial expenses. Eventually, I had to sell our house to pay off most of their other bills.”
It had been a point of honor with her, even though Drew had called her a fool for doing it when she’d told him what she had done. She didn’t add that her father had had a problem hanging on to money. That he spent it faster than he earned it, striving for a lifestyle he couldn’t afford. No one, except the professor, knew about that. Not even Drew. Though her mother had loved her father, they’d argued a great deal about his compulsion.
There was no doubt in her mind that her parents were probably arguing about it the day they were killed. The driver of the semi that hit their car swore that the driver looked as if he’d had his face turned away from the road.
Sandra digested the information, trying to turn it to their best advantage. “Do you think there’s a chance that the professor might have had something to do with your windfall?”
Not likely, Jane thought. The salary of a college professor was far from a king’s ransom. Certainly not enough to secretly bestow the kind of money it took to attend Saunders on a number of students. Or even one student for that matter.
“I sincerely doubt it. When I worked in the administration building in the accounts office, I got to see what Professor Harrison, along with the rest of the staff, earned. Not nearly enough money to play fairy godmother. Why?”
Sandra shrugged. “I’m looking for something, anything, that might put him in the very best possible light in front of the board. If we could somehow show that Professor Harrison gathered together funds from other sources to help needy—” she quickly substituted another word and hoped that Jane didn’t notice “—um, deserving students, then maybe…”
That wasn’t the way to go, Jane thought. “I’m sure he would have said something to me in all this time if he was involved in some kind of charitable action.” Her eyes met Sandra’s. “We can’t lie