Chapter 1

 

 

I was a college sophomore, and Mindy, my main squeeze, was a freshman at our small liberal arts college that fall of 1987. On the evening of the first Friday in November, a vicious dog—known across the college campus as "The Doberman"—had attacked us and bitten Mindy badly. She'd needed surgery to repair torn muscle tissue, but her injuries were now improving a little with each passing day.

I'd fallen and knocked myself out when I'd tried to protect my lover, and then she'd wound up having to protect me—not to mention having to bear the brunt of The Doberman's attack. So we'd both found ourselves in the emergency room—after one of the cops who'd happened to be in the neighborhood had shot and killed the dog. We'd been lucky that they'd been nearby, and I didn't like to think about what could've happened if they hadn't been there.

No—that's wrong! I hated to think about what would have happened if not for those two cops.

By the following Wednesday, she'd been able to give up one of the crutches she'd had to use in order to get around. Traveling on one crutch is a lot easier than traveling on two, so from then on she was no longer restricted to the immediate environs of our campus. Thus, we easily fell back into our routine of studying our school work at my apartment when my apartment mate, George, was around—and taking every opportunity to study the other's body there when he wasn't.

The next day, Mindy mentioned to Stephanie Young, who always sat next to her in our calculus class, that we would not be leaving town for Thanksgiving Break—the break being too short for the distance we would have to travel. Upon hearing that, Stephanie had immediately invited the two of us to their off-campus house for a Thanksgiving dinner with her and her twin brother Steve, whom Mindy and I didn't know.

We'd accepted gratefully—we'd been feeling a bit sorry for ourselves at the idea of spending the holiday with just ourselves. Not that either of us was ever sorry about being alone with the other, but that we wanted to share the holiday a little more widely. Stephanie was already planning to cook a turkey, so Mindy offered to make a pie and to help with the other fixings. I promised several bottles of suitable wine—say, a pinot grigio—and, that very evening, I placed an order with Frank—one of the seniors who lived downstairs in my house and was old enough to buy alcohol. (And, thinking ahead to the rest of the break, I ordered several more bottles of wine and a case of beer.)

Stephanie and her twin brother shared an old one-story house about three blocks from ours. They, too, were staying in town for the break. Mindy, who was very good at the necessary small talk, had long since teased their background out of Steph.

Their circumstances were a bit different from ours. They were born in March of 1968, just two months after I was born. Their parents had died in a boating accident in the summer of 1986, when the twins were 18 and just before they and I had begun our freshman year at the college.

They had no other siblings, and they weren't close to their remaining family. Those other family members, uncles, aunts, and younger cousins, were scattered along the West Coast—even farther from the college than our home in Fort Collins, Colorado. Steph, Mindy, and I were all pleased at the prospect of having friends to share the holiday meal with; Steph assured us that Steve would be, too.

Mindy's period arrived on time on the fifteenth, and lasted through the eighteenth. We got pretty horny again while we waited it out, but we were happy, nevertheless, when it came. She was still on the Pill, of course, but we knew that no birth control method is perfect. Pregnancy wasn't on our agenda, and it was good to have her state of non-pregnancy confirmed.

I had a visit from Li'l Abner and Sgt. Andy—the cops who had rescued us from The Doberman—just after eleven that Tuesday while I was at home and Mindy was in her English Comp class. Thus, I finally got to thank Abner for saving Mindy's life, but that wasn't the reason for their visit. They wanted to take a statement from me as part of a criminal proceeding against one Riley Carter for harboring a vicious animal, and, particularly, for criminal negligence.

The Doberman's bad disposition was well known throughout the town, and both Abner and Andy had witnessed the attack, so my statement wasn't completely necessary to support the harboring charge. But I was the only person who'd seen that the dog's gate hadn't been latched, and my testimony might make or break the negligence case. They would be looking for Mindy, too, to get a statement from her.

Our encounter with The Doberman turned out to be the second time that animal had attacked someone. Riley Carter, its owner, had been convicted of a misdemeanor and fined heavily for the first incident. This second offense meant a felony charge, one that, according to Sgt. Andy, ordinarily carried a prison sentence of up to four years. But Riley had done time on two previous felony convictions, and as a three-time loser could get up to eight years. If the negligence case stood up, it could result in even more time. Carter had sworn, they said, that he wasn't going back to prison.

Riley had managed to elude arrest until a few days earlier, when he'd been caught and jailed. He'd made bail earlier the morning that Abner and Andy talked to me, and so was out of jail. The two of them thought it would be a good idea for me and Mindy to try to keep our distance from Carter's house—known on the campus as "The Dog House"—for a while.

That night, The Dog House burned to the ground.

According to the newspaper, a neighbor had heard a shot from inside the house. He'd called the police, who found the house on fire when they arrived. The fire department had arrived quickly, but the house was already engulfed in flame. Onlookers reported that the smell of burning flesh hung heavily in the area as the firefighters tried, without success, to extinguish the blaze. They had managed, however, to prevent damage to nearby homes.

A day later, the paper reported that investigators had found two empty gasoline cans and Carter's body, a pistol beside it, in the ashes—and that all appearances indicated that he had committed suicide after setting the house afire.

Riley Carter had avoided going back to prison; he would not now find himself forsworn.

Our own problems seemed pretty mild in comparison with Riley's—and his solution. Both of us had three exams that Friday. That was a drag, but we both thought we'd done reasonably well on all of them. However, we did miss our Friday morning love-making owing to nervous pre-exam preparation during the hour before our first class—while George was out of the house.

Horny as we were that Friday evening, we didn't want to establish a pattern by often using the bottom floor of the library, whose security system I'd figured out how to penetrate, so I let Mindy in on the deepest secret that George and I kept. The two of us had spent many nights the previous year borrowing lock cylinders from doors in each of several different campus buildings. We had taken each of those locks apart and measured its tumblers with a micrometer. Then we had put the locks back together and returned them to the doors from which we'd swiped them—always later the same night we'd borrowed each.

After we'd made measurements on several locks from a single building, it was pretty easy to see the master-key configuration for that building. We'd found that the handle of an aluminum kitchen measuring spoon could be fashioned easily into a blank key and then filed appropriately. So each of us had made a key ring that gave him admission to many places on the campus at times when they were supposed to be locked up tight. We didn't want to steal anything or commit any crimes—we just didn't like being locked out of places.

That evening, before I let Mindy in on the secret, I took her to the empty football stadium. The gates weren't generally locked, so we had no trouble getting into the stands. But it was a cold November night, and—knowing what activity I surely had in mind—she looked at me as though she suspected I was crazy. She wasn't, she said, going to put her bare ass on one of those metal benches out there in the sub-freezing cold—even with our old quilt under her, and no matter what the reward might be.

I led her to the entrance to the press box, pulled out my magic key ring, and let us in. Then we had to put off what we had in mind while I explained to her where that key ring had come from. She looked at the other keys on it, wanting to know what buildings they worked in. When I told her, she got a familiar glint in her eyes. "Maybe," she suggested, "we should see how many different buildings we can do It in before school's out in the spring."

There was a game scheduled for the next day, and the athletic department had turned up the heat in the box, so that important sports reporters wouldn't freeze their asses off. The press box had almost as much floor space as my apartment, and there were some armchairs scattered about—as well as a pretty decent couch against the back wall. We had a very comfortable session on that couch, and we didn't freeze our own asses off, either. We figured that any tracks we left on the fabric of the couch would dry out by game-time.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It was nearly nine when I woke up on the day before Thanksgiving. I found myself lying on my side, naked, and in my own bed. Mindy's warm, naked little body lay in my arms, her back up against...