“I need to get your signatures on some papers for my Criminal Justice To Go class. Since it’s a class offered during the May interim, I need to complete special paperwork in order to get paid,” Marlee said, pushing two documents toward him on the table.
“So you leave on Monday and you take students to these prisons and jails and whatnot. What do you require of them other than just touring?” Dean Green’s voice was accusatory. This was not the first time Marlee taught the class, so she was puzzled by the dean’s questions. Had he not read the documentation she submitted in previous years concerning the class?
“In addition to participating in all the tours and asking questions, students have to write two papers. One is based on a book I selected dealing with the correctional system. The second requirement is a reaction paper based on the tours. I provide them with a list of things I want them to respond to in their reaction paper. Plus, each night after we’ve finished with our tours, we have a group meeting to process what they observed and experienced.”
“The vice-president is requiring all of the deans to provide more accountability for the classes in each of our colleges. For your Criminal Justice To Go class, I’ll need a list of every town you’ll be staying in and the motels you’ll be at each night along with an estimated time that you and the students will check in.” The dean looked Marlee square in the eye, not blinking even once as he rattled off his list of demands.
“That’s shouldn’t be too hard to provide. I already have a list of the towns we’re staying on a previous document I submitted to you. I can email you the names of the hotels. The times we arrive might be a bit harder to get to you, but I can give you an estimate,” Marlee said. The last thing she needed was a hiccup in the paperwork portion of developing the class, especially since it was starting in three days.
“Fine. I need it right now!” Dean Green growled as he returned to his study of maps on the round table. He looked up when Marlee did not leave. “What else do you need?” The old Mean Dean Green was back. He was surly as ever, which made Marlee feel like a fool for feeling a twinge of empathy for him when she entered his office.
“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for all your troubles going on right now.” Marlee could not help herself. Dean Green already had a knife stuck in him and the professor could not resist giving it a little twist.
“Sorry, my ass! Get the fuck out!” Dean Green shouted as he waved her away from his door and resumed looking at the pile of maps.
Marlee rounded the corner to her office with a smile on her face. She normally did not take pleasure in the suffering of other people, but Dean Ira Green hardly counted as a human being.
When it comes to old buildings, there’s nothing to be afraid of. They’re creaky and rickety, but rarely dangerous. The same can be said about old people. Well, most old people.
Chapter 3
The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and it was a perfect day to be outside, enjoying one of the first nice spring days Elmwood had seen this year. Marlee was in her office with the harsh fluorescent lighting, staring at a pile of exams that needed grading. It would not be that difficult, she just wasn’t motivated to do the work. Especially on such a nice day.
Marlee turned away from her grading and turned toward her computer. She emailed Dean Green the requested list of towns the Criminal Justice To Go students would be visiting, the hotels where they were staying, and their estimated time they would finish each day. Every time she taught the class, she had one more hoop to jump through. As she pushed the send button, she hoped this was the last of the extra paperwork requirements the dean had for this class. She would stop down to his office later to pick up the signed documents she needed to begin on Monday.
After looking at the pile of exams one more time, Marlee decided to take them home. The final grades were not due in the registrar’s office until the following Wednesday, but by that time she would be on the road with her Criminal Justice To Go class and didn’t want to be hampered by grading responsibilities. Gathering up the exams and shoving them in her book bag, Marlee locked her office door and proceeded to the parking lot. After realizing she parked in the back lot that morning and not the front lot, she walked the opposite direction to the correct location of her car. This was not the first time Marlee parked on campus and then forgot where she parked. With over three thousand students and a few hundred employees, locating a specific vehicle was not easy if the driver forgot where she parked.
It was only 1:00 p.m., but Marlee grabbed a Bud Light bottle from her fridge and took the bag of exams out to the patio table with the huge unopened umbrella. She sat in one chair and propped up her feet on another, her pale calves exposed to the bright sun as her capris pants rode up almost to her knees. As she looked at her sandal-clad feet, Marlee noted that it was indeed time for a pedicure.
Marlee unwrapped the sandwich she bought on her way home. After finishing the meatball sub and the Bud Light, she unpacked the exams and began grading. After three exams, her red pen ran out of ink and she rummaged around in her book bag until she found another. Noting the heat of the day, Marlee went inside and fetched another Bud Light bottle and brought it back to the patio.
It was Marlee’s next door neighbor, Sofie, who woke her up. The heavy sandwich along with two beers and the warm sun put the professor to sleep. A breeze had come up and ruffled a few of the exams from the patio table to Marlee’s back yard.
“Whoa! Guess I dozed for a bit. Thanks for waking me up, Sofie. Don’t want these tests blowing all over the neighborhood,” Marlee said as she jumped out of her chair to retrieve them.
“Looks like you got some sun,” Sofie commented as she walked from her detached garage to her house.
“I’ve just been out here since one o’clock, so not much,” Marlee said.
“It’s four o’clock now,” Sofie stated. “You might want to put something on your face to cool down that burn.” With that bit of advice, Sofie walked in the unlocked back door to her house and shut the door behind her.
After gathering up all of the papers, Marlee walked inside to take a look at her burn. Three hours was a long time to be in the sun, especially with her fair complexion, but it was the beginning of spring and the sun probably was not all that strong yet. She gasped when she peered in the bathroom mirror at the tomato-red face staring back at her.
“Oh my god!” Marlee glanced away from the mirror to look at her legs and feet, which had also been exposed to the sun for three hours. They were even redder than her face. Her feet were beginning to swell from the sun damage and her sandals cut into the seared flesh atop her feet. She rummaged around in the linen closet and found a large bottle of aloe which had expired only a year ago. She poured a giant dollop into her right hand and rubbed it all over her face. Then she repeated the action on her lower legs and feet. Even though she looked terrible, she was not in any pain.
The next morning was an entirely different story. Marlee’s face, neck, arms, lower legs, and feet burned with an intensity she had not felt since the mid-1980s when she coated herself with baby oil, put lemon juice in her hair, and laid out in the summer sun for six hours in an attempt to have the beach babe look she’d always longed for. That was her freshman year in college. She was now thirty-eight years old. Old enough to know better.
Marlee was feeling many things on Saturday morning, but a beach babe was not one of them. Her legs and feet were swollen and it hurt to walk, since every step pulled at the already-tightened skin on top of her feet. Peering in the bathroom mirror she was dismayed that her right eye was swollen nearly shut from the sun burn. Her face remained tomato red and the beginnings of a fever blister were forming on her upper lip. She found cold sore gel and gingerly applied a generous amount to her upper lip. With any luck, early application of the medication would reduce both the pain intensity and healing time of the fever blister.
After shuffling around the house, lamenting the time she spent in the sun the previous aftern
oon, Marlee remembered that she still needed to pick up some signed papers from Dean Green. He was not known to come to campus on the weekends, but he should have put the documents in Marlee’s mailbox in the secretary’s office. She had a key to that office, as did all faculty members in the department. Marlee put on a baggy T-shirt and a pair of loose-fitting plaid shorts and drove to campus.
An eerie silence hung over Scobey Hall as Marlee used her key to enter the locked building. A professor had been found dead right outside that very building a year and half ago and Marlee still had the creeps whenever she had to go there during weekends and evenings, when no one else was around.
Scobey Hall was rumored to be haunted. This rumor was in full effect when Marlee started teaching at Midwestern State University a few years ago and persisted, in part, due to the death of Logan LeCroix, a professor of French, in the fall of 2004. Get a grip, Marlee thought as she entered the stairwell. It was an old building and would be demolished soon. The faculty and staff were being relocated to a new building within the next year because Scobey Hall did not comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and it would not be cost effective to bring it up to code. The building was known as The Maze because of the narrow, winding stairways and the propensity of students to get lost when looking for their professors’ offices.
The stairs creaked as Marlee walked up to the second floor. She also heard other sounds coming from behind the stairway door to the second floor. It made no sense that anyone else would be on campus early on a Saturday morning, right after finals week. There were no cars in the lot and there was no sign of activity in the dilapidated old building. Still, she could not shake the feeling that someone besides herself was in the building. Of course, Marlee always had this feeling when she entered Scobey Hall during non-business hours.
Probably just the old pipes and the deteriorating heating system making noise, she thought as she approached the door to the secretary’s office.
Marlee swung open the door and turned on the lights. Nothing was out of sorts and she soon found the signed documents in a pile of papers in her mailbox. She grabbed the papers and backed out of the office, pulling the door behind her and preparing to lock it.
Just then she was hit in the back of the knees and she fell to the floor, writhing in agony.
Information comes from the most unexpected sources.
Chapter 4
Marlee’s fall to the tiled floor was a painful one. After being hit behind the knees, she stumbled a couple steps to the side and lost her balance. She landed face down, slapping her burnt legs, face, and arms on the hard floor. A daze swept over her as she struggled to make sense of what had happened. Marlee believed she was blacking out, because the next thing she felt after the intense pain was a wet tongue licking her ear. She shuddered and tried to move her head away from the offending person without much luck.
“Rusty! Rusty! Get away from there! Rusty!” yelled out a voice in a familiar drawl. Della Halter did a slow jog toward Marlee, who was still splayed on the floor before the office door. She was wearing one of her typical outfits; a light blue prairie skirt with a lace ruffle underneath, reminiscent of the early 1980s, bright blue socks, scuffed brown clogs, and a tie died t-shirt with the word FREEDOM boldly printed on the front, highlighting the fact that she was not wearing a bra. Her short, dark hair was matted on one side and fluffy on the other, suggesting Della just rolled out of bed, threw on whatever conglomeration of clothes were in reach, and came to campus.
“Marlee! What are you doing?” Della Halter yelled in an accusing voice as her enormous red furred dog continued to lick Marlee’s ear and neck.
“What am I doing?” Marlee shrieked as she turned her head to see Della and the large, overly-friendly dog. “Your dog just knocked me down!”
“Oh, she’s just so friendly and wants attention all the time. She won’t hurt anybody,” Della said affectionately as she reached over to scratch behind Rusty’s ears. At that moment, another large red dog bounded around the corner, ran up to Marlee, and began sniffing her undercarriage.
“Look who wanted attention!” Della called out with pride. “Shep, you wanted in on all the fun too, didn’t you?”
“Della, get these animals off me right fucking now!”
“They don’t mean any harm. They just really like people and want to be friends.” Della couldn’t comprehend Marlee’s hostility toward her dogs and reluctantly pulled them both back so Marlee could rise to her feet.
“Girrrrl, what did you do to yourself? You’re bright red!” Della stated the obvious.
“I was grading papers on my patio yesterday afternoon and fell asleep for a few hours,” Marlee said, grimacing as she stood upright and gathered her signed papers. “Why are you here? And why do you have your dogs in the building?”
“I had massive gas yesterday and couldn’t do any work, so I went home. Nearly farted myself to death. Thought I’d ripped a hole in my sheets last night. So I needed to come up here today to get some work done and I brought the dogs along. They come up here with me sometimes and I take them to my night classes. The students love it when Rusty and Shep run right up and greet them in class.”
Marlee doubted that everyone was as enamored with Della’s dogs, but kept the thought to herself. She was not a dog person at all, and hated the intrusive sniffing and jumping of untrained dogs.
“Did you hear the big news about Dean Green?” Della asked, itching to tell a story.
“You told me yesterday. Remember?”
“There’s more. A lot more. Yesterday he was fired and they escorted him off campus!” Della, like most of the profs in the department, was not a fan of the dean’s and was taking pleasure in the announcement.
“What? I just talked to him, around noon yesterday.”
“Yep. They shit-canned him, took his keys, and marched him off campus grounds. I heard he didn’t even get to come back to his office to collect his things. Administration disabled his computer passwords and they cancelled his university credit card.”
“Whoa! I never expected he would be punished at all for the sexual harassment claim, let alone be terminated,” Marlee said.
“Apparently there’s something else. I don’t know what it is yet, but I’ll do some digging,” Della said as she motioned her dogs to follow her back to her office. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”
“Okay, thanks,” Marlee muttered, attempting to make sense of Della’s bombshell.
“Oh, and Marlee,” Della called over her shoulder as she and her dogs noisily wrestled down the hallway, “don’t forget to put something on that sun burn. You look terrible!”
Marlee was not offended by Della’s comment on her looks. She didn’t put much stock in fashion advice from Train Wreck Barbie. Still hobbling, due to both the sunburn and the recent dog assault, Marlee made her way to her office. She hadn’t intended to stick around campus, but now wanted more information about Mean Dean Ira Green and his expulsion from campus. She checked to ensure the documents she asked him to approve indeed carried his signature and was relieved when she noted he finished that before being ousted. Marlee checked her campus email and didn’t see any information on Dean Green or his forced exit. She did, however, see an email from Stella DeVry, who had invited her to a picnic that day at her home. It was an end-of-the-semester bash, and several of the professors in the College of Arts and Sciences, along with people from the other colleges at the university, were invited to attend. Marlee was not feeling in much of a party mood, but knew the backyard picnic would be the best way to find out more news about the dean’s firing. She tended to the papers she retrieved from the secretary’s office and sent them through campus mail to the office that oversaw special interim classes like Marlee’s Criminal Justice To Go.
“Less than enthused” was an understatement. Marlee dreaded going to Stella DeVry’s party that afternoon. She was physically and emotionally exhausted and had no desire to hang out with some of the stuffed shirts
she spent much of her time avoiding on campus. Still, some of her friends would probably be there. And it was the best way to find out the dirt on Mean Dean Green and what he was up to besides sexually harassing non-traditional-aged students.
After showering, Marlee tried an old sunburn treatment her mother used when she was a child and suffering from too much sun exposure. She lightly dabbed vinegar on the sunburned parts of her body and let it dry before dressing in a different baggy t-shirt and shorts combo. The vinegar treatment worked and she hardly felt the sting of the sunburn at all.
The party invitation requested that each guest bring a dish to share. Marlee was not feeling very Betty Crockerish at the moment and purchased a cherry pie from a local grocery store. She took the pie home, removed the wrapping with the store’s name and price, and rewrapped the pie with her own plastic wrap. Some of the academics could be such food snobs and proclaimed they only ate home-cooked meals and desserts. Little did they know Marlee had been passing off prepared foods from the grocery store bakery and deli for years. Professors and students alike had raved about her chicken tortilla soup at the department holiday party in December. Her recipe was to purchase it from the local restaurant supply company, heat it up in her own crockpot, serve, and wait for the compliments to come rolling in. When asked for her recipe, Marlee rattled off a list of ingredients she guessed were in the dish, intentionally failing to account for amounts. Marlee actually loved cooking, but who had the time?
Marlee balanced her “homemade” pie in one hand and held a bottle of water in the other. The invitation had requested that everyone BYOB, bring their own bottle. Typically that referred to alcohol, but Marlee knew drinking today was out of the question, given her serious sunburn, the fact that she would be on the road with her Criminal Justice To Go class in two days, and her mission to get the dirt on Mean Dean Green.
Murder to Go Page 2