Page 20 of Dirty Valentine (A J.J. Graves Mystery #17)
“Sure,” Margaret said, shrugging. “Thomas was a brilliant man. Charismatic, charming, ruggedly handsome, adventurous. But he was a horndog.”
I raised a brow at how she said it. “Are you the MA that’s listed in his appointment book?”
Her cheeks flushed with color, but she met the question without flinching. “Yes. Thomas and I had a physical relationship. On and off. Mostly off these past weeks.”
“When did it start?”
She blew out a breath. “Oh, gosh. It’s hard to explain.
If you want to get technical I guess it started about fifteen years ago when I was his TA at William & Mary.
Thomas was a visiting professor there for a semester, and I was finishing my master’s degree.
Then he went back to his digs and his life here, and I went on to get my doctorate at UVA.
Thomas had a short attention span, so it would last for a few months and then he’d go off on a dig and it might be more than a year or two before I’d hear from him again.
So I threw myself into my studies and my doctoral research, and when he came back into town I’d make time for him in my schedule if I wasn’t in another relationship. ”
She paused and then smiled slyly, like a cat that ate the canary.
“And then three years ago I got the position here at King George University, and I think he wasn’t pleased about that.
Thomas was very competitive and I’m very good at my job.
Not just the teaching side, but the research and funding side of things.
He was no longer the golden boy on campus, and some of his budget was diverted to my department. ”
“How’d he handle that?” I asked.
“He was angry,” she said, smiling. “Very angry. He stormed into my office and yelled at me. Threw a paperweight at my chalkboard. And then he seduced me right on the desk. Best sex of my life.” She cleared her throat and looked down at her joined hands.
“But the pattern of our sexual relationship stayed the same. Except that early last year I met a man I was serious about. Thomas wasn’t happy I wasn’t there to scratch his itch, but I’m sure he found someone else.
He always did. But we still worked close together on research, especially when he started digging into this stuff with Bridget Ashworth. He was like a dog with a bone.
“And then my boyfriend dumped me just before Valentine’s Day,” she said, bitterly.
“Spent a year of my life with the guy and he decided that was the best time to end things. Darren is a business professor here on campus. It just so happened Thomas was in the vicinity. Darren broke things off and one thing led to another. Again.”
“Did Patricia know about your relationship with her husband?” Jack asked.
“I’m sure she did,” Margaret said. “Thomas never rubbed his lovers in her face, and I certainly never acted inappropriately when she was with him. But not all of his enthusiasts were so subtle, especially the grad students.”
“There were other frequent initials in his appointment book over the past few weeks,” Jack continued. “Know anyone with the initials BD? Appointment was always during the day.”
“Brian Dunlowe,” she said immediately. “He’s the provost for the university, and he has a lot of sway when it comes to funding.
I know Thomas had been meeting with him, and that he didn’t want me to know about it.
I’m sure Thomas was giving him a preview of this sensationalized witch hunt.
Pardon the pun. And I’m sure in the end Thomas would have gotten his money. He was very persuasive.”
“How about JMH?” I asked. “Does that ring a bell?”
Margaret narrowed her eyes in thought, but shook her head. “No, that doesn’t ring a bell.”
“He met with someone with those initials the night he died,” Jack said. “There was an appointment for dinner at seven thirty. It’d be nice to see if he made that dinner date. To be able to trace his last hours of life.”
“I understand,” she said. “If I think of someone it could be I’ll let you know.”
“Dr. Randolph,” Jack said, “we need to know where you were Monday night between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m.”
She seemed surprised by the question, but regrouped quickly.
“At home grading term papers,” she said.
“It’s finals so I haven’t had time for a social life.
I live alone, but I can show you the papers—they’re all time-stamped in the online grading system.
” She turned toward her computer. “I submitted the last batch of grades at one forty-seven. The system keeps records of everything.”
It wasn’t a perfect alibi—she could have graded papers earlier and submitted them later to create a false timeline—but it was something we could verify.
“Thank you for your time, Dr. Randolph,” Jack said, rising from his chair. “We may have more questions later.”
“Of course. And Sheriff?” Margaret’s voice caught. “I hope you find whoever did this. Thomas had his faults, but he was a good man. And a great historian.”
As we left her office, I found myself thinking about the complexity of human relationships—how love and guilt and fear could tangle together into patterns that led to tragedy.
“Let’s take a quick look at Thomas’s office while we’re here,” Jack said as we walked down the hallway.
“Maybe there will be something to point us to JMH,” I said.
Thomas Whitman’s office was on the ground floor in the archaeology department, tucked away in a corridor that smelled of earth and old stone.
Unlike Margaret’s cluttered academic nest, Thomas’s workspace was meticulously organized.
His desk was clean except for a few carefully arranged stacks of papers, his bookshelves were arranged by subject and author, and even his computer monitor was positioned at the perfect ergonomic angle.
He had two white-paned windows that needed a good cleaning, and the walls were covered with photographs from his various dig sites—images of excavated foundations, carefully catalogued artifacts, and students learning the painstaking work of archaeological recovery.
But it was the map that caught my attention—a large, detailed survey of King George County that covered one entire wall, marked with colored pins that corresponded to various research sites.
“Look at this,” I said, moving closer to study the map.
Red pins marked the locations where Thomas had found the unmarked graves, while blue pins indicated officially documented historical sites.
The pattern was striking—almost all of the red pins were clustered around areas that had originally belonged to Bridget Ashworth’s property grant.
Jack joined me at the map, his eyes tracing the pattern of markers. “He was systematic about it. Every unmarked burial corresponds to property that was transferred after Bridget Ashworth’s execution.”
I counted the red pins. “Seventeen unmarked graves? Patricia said they’d found burial sites, but she didn’t mention this many.”
Jack’s jaw tightened as he traced his finger across the map. “Either she didn’t know the full extent, or she was holding back.”
Seventeen people. The number sat like lead in my stomach. “That’s not a few random burials—that’s systematic elimination. If Thomas was right about this…”
“If Thomas was right about the conspiracy,” Jack said. “That’s a lot of people who would have had to disappear to make room for the land grab.”
We spent the next thirty minutes going through Thomas’s files, looking for any reference to JMH.
His research was extensive and carefully documented, with cross-references and supporting evidence that painted a picture of a man obsessed with uncovering the truth.
But there was nothing that pointed to who he might have had dinner with on the night he died.
“Nothing,” I said, closing the last folder and rubbing my tired eyes. “If JMH exists, Thomas was being very careful about keeping that connection private.”
Jack leaned back in Thomas’s desk chair, surveying the organized chaos of the office.
“Could be someone he was trying to protect. If he was meeting with a family member who was willing to share information about their ancestor’s involvement, he might not have wanted to create a paper trail that could expose them. ”
As we locked up Thomas’s office and headed back toward the parking garage, the weight of what we’d learned settled over me like a heavy blanket. Thomas’s extracurricular activities shed new light on a few things.
“We need to take a deeper look at Patricia Whitman,” I said, voicing what we were both thinking. “The grieving widow act seems a little thick now that we know her husband had a tendency to stray.”
“One of the oldest motives in the book,” Jack agreed. “Maybe the setup was just window dressing.”
The storm clouds that had been threatening finally opened up as we reached the Tahoe, fat raindrops hitting the pavement with the violence of accusation.
By the time we were inside the vehicle, the drops had turned into a steady downpour that drummed against the roof and turned the campus walkways into rivers.
“The question is what to do next,” Jack said as he navigated through the streaming rain. “We need to verify Margaret’s alibi with the online grading system, and we need to have another conversation with Patricia Whitman.”
“The one where we ask her if it bothered her to share her husband’s affections,” I said, watching the windshield wipers fight their losing battle against the deluge.
“That’s going to be a fun conversation,” Jack said grimly. “But first, how do you feel about stopping for a donut?”
“I was just thinking I could use a snack.”
The rain was coming down harder now, turning the Virginia countryside into a watercolor painting where the edges of everything blurred together. It seemed fitting, somehow, for a case where nothing was quite what it appeared to be, and the truth was as elusive as shadows dancing in the mist.