A Dinner to Die For by Susan Dunlap

semester, and he and Laura skipped them both. Laura told me later that if he had seen the young man again, he would have had the same extreme reaction. But by the beginning of the next semester it had all been forgotten, which was certainly good. I couldn’t have that kind of behavior in my seminars.”
    “Mitch was your student?”
    “Two semesters. I should have remembered Mitchell’s childishness when I went to the hearings. I shouldn’t have expected fairness. I should have been prepared for Mitch using every bit of influence he could. He knew how to work the media. He had friends with money. It’s the same old story.” She shook her head. “I just didn’t expect it to happen in Berkeley.”
    “And it made you angry,” I said.
    “Not foolhardy enough to kill him, if that’s what you’re leading up to.”
    It was. “Without Mitchell Biekma, there’d be no influence.”
    Wagging her finger at me, she said, “If I’d killed him, I would have done it before the hearings, not after. It won’t do me any good now.”
    Outside I could see Parker’s light moving back and forth against the fence in the neighboring yard. I glanced around the room, trying to get the feel of it, to understand this woman who had swallowed her surprising defeat here. On the desk, she had cleared spaces every three or four feet, but the books and papers had impinged on most of them. It was the desk of an obsessive; it was not the desk of a woman who would give up a righteous cause when one board turned her down. “Why didn’t you appeal?”
    She leaned back against the chair. She half closed her eyes momentarily, as I’d seen teachers do when choosing a strategy. “I was too sick,” she said. “Laura and Mitch invited me for dinner over there. To make up, they said. I was poisoned.”

CHAPTER 7
    “Y OU WERE POISONED AT Paradise!” I exclaimed to the still extant Rue Driscoll. “How?”
    “Food poisoning. I don’t think they intended to kill me. But I was nauseous for thirty-six hours. I couldn’t leave the house. I regurgitated six times, and I haven’t done that in fifty years.”
    I tried to recall a newspaper evaluation of Rue Driscoll’s mental state. Had her obsession with Mitchell Biekma led to delusions? Or could this bizarre accusation have some basis? “And that was after the board decision? Were you planning to appeal?”
    She shrugged. “I hadn’t considered it yet. I was astounded by the decision. The probabilities had been so clearly in my favor. … Foolish as it sounds, I hadn’t given thought to proceeding if the board’s decision came down against me. In any case, it was only three days after the last hearing that Laura invited me to dinner.”
    I nodded, trying to conceal my surprise.
    I mustn’t have been entirely successful, for Rue Driscoll said, “My reaction was the same as yours. I should have honored it. But you can’t suspect Laura of anything evil, she’s just too fine a person. She was my best student, so quick, so interested, willing to do the research to back up her theories. Laura insisted the invitation was for a reconciliation dinner. She said all the things nice people say in those circumstances, that we’d been friends too long for this to come between us permanently, that they would do whatever they could to minimize the noise, that they never intended to disturb me, that they appreciated me finding them the house the restaurant’s in, and—”
    “You found them this house? You’d better backtrack to the beginning. Did you first meet the Biekmas in one of your classes?”
    “They were in my last seminars on Virginia.”
    “The state?”
    She stared at me in amazement. Then waving a hand at the desk and the bookshelves, she said, “Virginia Woolf, young lady. I taught all the Woolf courses. Apparently, you did not matriculate from the University of California at Berkeley.”
    I hadn’t. My undergraduate days had been in Virginia, the state. I could have told her that