The accused learned through the student grapevine that the department got into serious trouble because of this and that Dean Broadhurst was furious.
Lyle blamed Trenchant for blowing the whistle, conveniently forgetting that it was a student who had written the letters.
Chapter 8
Lyle droned on and on with a litany of sins attributed to Diana Trenchant, carefully circling the truth. "Whatever problem the department had, she was usually responsible," he asserted. The folds of paper falling from the court stenographer's machine stacked higher and higher. Janet was beginning to look very tired.
The 'suspect SmurFFs' were introduced and Lyle identified them. "Yes," he intoned, "When I spoke to Trenchant and told her she had the option to resign and nothing further would be said or done to her, I gave her all of the handwriting evidence, all of these SmurFFs, at that time."
Now, Henry allowed questions from the rest of the committee who started to slowly wake up after enduring Lyle's long and repetitious testimony. Nearly 20 minutes was spent answering their inane questions regarding how many courses were involved and who found the 'suspect' critiques. Most of their questions had been answered previously in the material given them—the dean's letter and Lyle's memo.
Esther, however, alertly noticed that some of the SmurFFs in question had no dates and inquired how these could be said to come from a certain year.
The answer given was a model of obfuscation. Lyle replied, "The critiques from those two years came in a packet to me from Randy and Ian. Those were the years that Trenchant was indeed involved in teaching this course."
Satisfied with the answer apparently, Esther questioned why one of the suspect SmurFFs had a note stapled to it.