Obligingly Revealing

[mayhap]

Squee! I found the fairy tale that I wrote when I was twelve! (Although I'm still looking for the sequel, which was dedicated to my family physician's first son upon the occasion of his birth. If nothing else, I suppose he has a copy of it in my medical records.) It was rather difficult, because my mom isn't here and she's the only one who knows where everything is in this house and the original documents are (presumably) on a bunch of Zip disks that I used to back up our doomed computer and have never since been able to access because I don't have a Zip drive, but I did locate it, cleverly concealed in a folder labeled "[mayhap. (This just goes to show that my mother does understand the alphabet after all, and her claims to be incapable of replacing a book on my shelves in the correct place are utter tosh.)

In the same folder is a printout of a first chapter of an Elizabeth Peters-esque mystery which I will probably type up and share with you too, because I am that much of a masochist it is that funny. The male protagonist defies description. Heck, I'm doing this one first, it's quite a bit shorter, and has slightly better punctuation.

Edit: I didn't correct any errors, I swear. That doesn't mean that I don't know better now. :D



I had been making a sincere attempt at finishing my article about Heinrich Schliemann and the Trojan gold [Heheheh, this sound familiar to anyone? -ed.] when Oliver walked in.

Of course, I hadn't given Oliver a key to my apartment. No one gives Oliver a key to anything. He has a collection of lockpicks unrivaled by those of master criminals and an infuriating knack for using them.

When Oliver arrived I knew there was no hope of finishing it. I ignored him for a few minutes, pretending to be absorbed by the laptop balanced on the arm of my battered recliner. although all that I was doing was redistributing footnotes among the pages.

"I have good news and bad news." Oliver announced.

I ignored him a little longer as I conscientiously saved my document, even though all that I had accomplished since the last time I saved it was to substitute 'authentic' for 'genuine' and move a footnote about Nazi Germany to page fifteen.

"Claire for heaven's sakes put that thing down and listen to me." Oliver said irritably.

"I was listening. You had good news and bad news." I said tranquilly. He clearly wasn't going to elaborate unless I abandoned the laptop, so I set it gently on one of the stacks of thick German books that had accumulated around my chair.

"I have good news and bad news." Oliver began again. He never said anything without a calculated desired effect, and when interrupted he tended to return to the beginning of his premeditated speech. "The good news is that Cooperidge is dead. The bad news is that I love you."

I opened my mouth and then closed it, feeling inadequate. Finally I passed over the first impossibility in order to refute the second one. "You can't possibly love me. You don't love anyone. You're being silly."

"I'm here, aren't I? I must love you." He clearly considered this logic unassailable.

I assailed it. "What's so unusual about you being here? You break into my apartment at all hours of the day and night; you borrow my books and glue bookplates in them; you make endless sandwiches and leave behind a carpet of crusts. What would be unusual would be if I were to actually write two complete sentences of anything without you showing up and interrupting me."

Oliver's face had assumed a puckered look, which cleared.

"Of course, you haven't heard the rest," he said, donning his patient professor's smile. "See, right now the police are searching for me in connection with Cooperidge's murder. They have a warrant for my arrest. And while admittedly this isn't the first place they would look for me, they're going to show up to ask you some questions eventually."

"Arrest?" I repeated stupidly. Despite the fact that he had little regard for the law the idea of Oliver's being arrested seemed incongruous, a little like the idea of anyone murdering the incurably tedious head of the art history department at Leafbourough College. "You killed Cooperidge?"

"Of course not."

"Then why--?"

"It happened like this. Cooperidge showed up at my door this morning, demanding to know why I hadn't returned his message. I said that I hadn't gotten a message from him.. He stormed around for a while, refusing at the top of his lungs to believe me until finally I persuaded him to listen to my answering machine. He calmed down and remembered that he had called someone else about it instead, whatever it was. I didn't ask. I made myself some coffee and he appropriated it. He sipped it for a while and told me about all of his problems while I ignored him and graded a couple of exams. He looked like he was settling in for the morning so I took his cup away from him and rinsed it out and then he dropped over dead on my sofa. Thirty seconds later the police arrived. They said the neighbors called them. They showed considerable interest in the corpse on my sofa and the upshot of the whole investigation is that I am the only conceivable suspect and am supplied with an abundance of motives and a perfect opportunity. I'm not sure if they've actually gotten the warrant yet but it shouldn't take them too much longer."

"Ah." I said, nodding. The whole story was patently absurd but the air of gravity that Oliver had assumed lent an air of verisimilitude. "Mm." I added, which seemed to deplete my well of conversation on that subject. I returned to the previous one.

"But why are you here?"

"Because I love you."

"But that's absurd. You can't possibly love me."

"Why not? Actually," he said confidingly, "I'm not precisely sure why I'm here myself. I realized this morning as I was waiting in a dreary little room to tell my story to the fourth policeman that I loved you, hopelessly, and that I had to see you again. I was also kind of hoping that you could help keep me from being arrested."

I felt a certain throbbing in my right temple that I associated with conversations with Oliver.

"This is about money, right? You're avowing your love for me because you want to borrow some money for a plane ticket to Brazil or wherever it is you want to go and then never pay it back, right?" I began to seriously consider how much it was worth in cash to not have Oliver raiding my apartment whenever fancy dictated.

"Of course not." he yelped indignantly, "And anyway, it wouldn't work. I lent my passport to a friend and I haven't gotten another one."

A fresh horror struck me. "You can't conceivably think that I'm going to go out and solve the mystery?" I howled.

Oliver winced. "No," he said sadly, although that was obviously precisely what he had been hoping. "In fact, I think maybe I can clear everything up in a few days. Just so long as I'm not arrested."

"So you're going to solve the case yourself," I mocked, "disguised and maintaining some kind of alternate persona--"

"I hadn't thought about disguises." he interjected.

"Don't you think that, in the course of investigating a murder, you might possible run into the policemen who are investigating the very same murder? I can hardly imagine that they're not going to notice you if you're not wearing some kind of disguise."

"That's true." he conceded. "I don't suppose you had anything in mind?"

"Anything in mind?" I repeated incredulously. "You waltz in here in the middle of the night, you demand that I hide you from the police and you want to know if I had any particular disguise in mind?"

Oliver wisely ignored me. "Is it okay if I make some tea?"

"Go ahead. I don't care."

He clattered around in the kitchen while I picked up my laptop and mechanically shut it off. He returned bearing tea, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. I gave the cup he proffered a dubious sniff.

"I've mastered the unknowable complexities of your teapot, believe it or not." he commented lightly. I gulped about half of the cup's contents, not particularly caring what he'd done to it.

Oliver arranged himself all over the couch, managing somehow to face me. "Do you think I could disguise myself to the point that the police wouldn't recognize me?"

My brain noted that he had carefully avoided phrases that involved my assistance, other than as a provider of ideas. "I don't know." I studied his face, trying to approach it professionally. "With some judicious makeup, you might pass for twenty-five or so, but I don't think you could age convincingly. You could experiment with hair color, lighter or darker. Clothes, of course--people make a lot of assumptions based on those. Maybe some tinted contacts, those would be easy to get. The rest would all be mannerisms and playacting ability. I honestly have no idea if you could pull it off or not."

Hahaha, how could I Claire ever doubt Oliver Stu's playacting ability? Oliver Stu can do anything, by the sound of it! Also, why the hell does my wish-fulfillment boyfriend " break into my apartment at all hours of the day and night, borrow my books and glue bookplates in them, and make endless sandwiches and leave behind a carpet of crusts", other than the fact that it is hilarious to me? I must be a strange, strange person. But then, I knew that already.

Also, does anyone have any idea how this murder was pulled off? Because I sure don't.

Comments

[mayhap]

*blushes*

Thanks!