Dust to Dust

by Audrey Keown

  The ethics of spying weren’t cut-and-dry. Carl Jung had collaborated with U.S. intelligence during World War II, developing psychological profiles on enemy leaders. Genius that he was, he also foresaw Hitler killing himself.

  But spying on a civilian, a college student not suspected of any crime, would be problematic, ethically speaking. If Clyde had asked this guy to do that, it would underline with a big black Sharpie Clyde’s need to control the women in his life.

  “Hello there,” I said. “I’m a writer for the student paper at Carnegie Mellon, and I’m putting together a feature about Cl—Dr. Clyde Borough, and—”

  “What a coincidence. I just got off the phone with an old classmate of mine and Clyde’s.” Dr. Larsson sounded genuinely pleased. He had a smooth, radio voice. “What’s going on? Did the man win the lottery or something?”

  “Uh, well, we’re coming up on the anniversary of his tenure at the university.” I had no idea when Clyde had been tenured, but it was a safe bet that we were within a couple years of some anniversary worth celebrating.

  “A feature in the student paper, eh? Gosh, is there anything interesting to print about us old guys?” he said with mock surprise. He made small talk easily, like Clyde.

  “I trust you can give me a juicy story or two.”

  “Well, sure—Clyde’s a good friend and a real dynamo, too. We met in grad school, of course, a thousand years ago … under the shadow of these castle walls, actually.”

  A larger-than-life setup. I imagined him looking out his office window onto the school grounds, both hands cradling his head, perhaps.

  “And what year would that be?”

  “Aw, about 1982, I guess,” he said.

  “Thank you. So Dr. Borough is, of course, beloved by students. He’s been called a gifted teacher,” I said. “Did you see his innate brilliance right away?”

  “Sure, sure. Always a smart guy.” His tone was agreeable rather than decisive.

  “Can you share a memorable example? Something pithy and inspiring for our readers?”

  “Right. Yes. I …” The sound of shuffling papers came over the line. “Let’s see … just thinking through …”

  “Take your time.” I didn’t mean it. It was just before dinner, when I would need to leave the desk for turndown service, so I didn’t have all the time in the world.

  “You know, let’s come back to that one.” Dr. Larsson cleared his throat.

  “Okay. Next question. Our students are dying to know—how was Dr. Borough with the ladies?”

  In my experience, dominating behavior was the prep school for a master’s in abuse. Selena had said her father was controlling. If this guy could give me the name of a longtime girlfriend, she might be able to corroborate that story.

  “Aw, well, you know, he dated a lot of girls. None of them too seriously.”

  I wished I could conduct this interview in person. Dr. Larsson was probably communicating paragraphs with his body language, but his spoken words left too much out. Was he hiding something?

  “And his daughter goes to school there?” I asked. “Is she following in his footsteps?”

  “Ah, oh, it’s hard to say. She, um … I mean, Clyde actually had a point there where he didn’t know what he was going to do either.”

  “He dithered at school?” Dithered? This historical environment was really getting to me.

  “Mmm …”

  “Please, go on. It might be encouraging to some of our students who add a major halfway through their program to hear that their hero professor didn’t plow straight rows.”

  “It’s not that he didn’t take it seriously.” His voice had gone higher and thinner. “It’s just—he didn’t have a great thesis idea. At first. His initial proposal was rejected by his committee while the rest of us were already well on our way. Then out of the blue, he had this lightning-rod moment, and well, you know the rest.”

  I waited for him to elaborate.

  “Awards, fellowships, eventually Carnegie Mellon.”

  “Right,” I said. It was a steep ascent from Covenant to Carnegie Mellon. That thesis must have been great. “And did you feel that he earned his success?”

  “Sure, like I say, he got to work after the idea struck him, busted his rear to finish well. But he was always good at making connections.”

  The elevator dinged at my right, and Mr. Wollstone trudged past the desk on his way to dinner.

  Almost time to start turndown service.

  But Mr. Wollstone was always early to meals. He had to leave himself time to sit at the table and work up an abhorrence for whatever might be served.

  “So Dr. Borough’s daughter, she’s following in his illustrious footsteps?” I asked.

  “Well, she’s only a sophomore. It can be hard for kids to find their niche, you know?”

  If he couldn’t say that she was doing well, then either she definitely wasn’t or he wasn’t spying on her. If she wasn’t doing well, maybe Autumn was right about her instability. And if, on the other hand, Selena was mistaken about Dr. Larsson’s interest in her, then she still looked unreliable. A touch of paranoid personality disorder, perhaps?

  “And what about her mother—I mean, Clyde’s ex-wife? Did you know her?”

  “I think that’s getting too personal for the scope of your article, don’t you?” His tone was chastising with an edge of threatening, as if I were a student who had attempted plagiarizing.

  “Oh sure, sorry. It’s just I’m a big fan of Dr. Borough’s, and I don’t see how anyone could divorce him, do you?”

  “No, no. Exactly right.” Relief was evident in his voice. “Hey, what did you say the name of your paper was?”

  Dagnabbit. For a millisecond I thought about running a quick search on the office computer. But even though Chattanooga had the fastest internet in the country, I couldn’t get an answer quick enough to be convincing.

  “What did you say?” I said, as if to someone nearby.

  “I asked what the name of your paper is.”

  “Yeah, be right there,” I said to my invisible friend, and then quickly into the phone, “Sorry, Dr. Larsson, there’s a breaking story on campus—a fire, I think. Thanks for all your help.”

  I hung up and hoped he wouldn’t return my call.

  I rushed through turndown service. Since I wasn’t feeling particularly drawn to any suspect beyond Clyde, the urge to snoop in their rooms for clues was easy to overcome. I shoved the flower-and-mint basket back in the landing closet and hurried down to the first floor.

  There were many puzzles I had left to solve in this house, not least among them the purpose behind some of the weird equipment and rooms in the secret basement passage I had discovered last year. I would often find myself down there in the wee hours, perusing the books and letting my imagination run wild. Now I had to find a hidden way upstairs rather than down.

  What was left of the original servant staircase was the one I climbed every day to get from the basement to the front desk, but according to Mr. Fig, it used to continue up to the third floor and even had roof access. During the conversion from house to hotel, it had been closed off somewhere, but I didn’t know why … or what the space was used for now. More importantly, I didn’t know whether someone with evil intentions could have opened the staircase up again and used it.

  And who might have known it existed? Only Clarista or Mr. Fig were that familiar with the former layout of the house.

  Or someone who’d been here before the hotel conversion? Like Clyde.

  As a guest of the Morrows, he would’ve had no reason to be in the service areas of the house, but by all accounts he was a smart guy, and if he had paid attention when he arrived at the hotel, he’d have realized that things were different upstairs, that there was no staircase now where there had been before. But would that late discovery have left him time to plan the murder before his and Renee’s second night here?

  Swells of Vivaldi reached my ears from the dining room. After
two guests argued at the table last year, Clarista had decided classical music would ward off tension and had speakers camouflaged into the painted clouds on the ceiling.

  The door to the old servant staircase was itself disguised from view by blending into the wall mural a few feet from the front desk. A simple push and I found myself on the other side. In front of me was a short landing and, if I had kept going, the long staircase to the cellar and dressing rooms, lit by wall sconces.

  But to the left of the landing where I stood was the broom closet from which I’d fetched the mop on the night of the leak. If the staircase was blocked off, this would have been the place to do it, at the first floor before the staircase bent and turned up another flight.

  I opened the closet door, which looked like any other door downstairs but felt light, as if it were of a cheaper wood than the heavy oak used for the original interior. Brooms, a vacuum cleaner, and other such paraphernalia huddled in the darkness.

  I flicked on a light and stepped in to examine the walls. Two were just like the staircase and hall, painted white plaster. There was even a sconce, though unlit probably for many years now, on the back wall. I was on the right track.

  The third wall, to my right, was Sheetrock. I ran my hands over the smooth surface and felt no crack or opening a person could have made as an access point. But could they have removed the whole piece of drywall? Pulled it out or something? I put my shoulder against it and pushed. It didn’t give.

  I looked around for something to use as a wedge. The metal dustpan would work nicely. I forced the hard edge in between the wall and floor, wiggled and applied pressure on the handle. But nothing moved. The wall felt solid as stone.

  The grandfather clock chimed ten and, like a symphony crescendo, ended, leaving the entry hall more deathly quiet than before.

  I stood behind the front desk and closed my eyes again.

  “I owe you,” Mr. Fig had said.

  We’d entered the elevator, and he’d taken the master key from his pocket to unlock the strange, tiny cabinet full of keys. We rode down to the basement.

  I watched him slide the document box from the storeroom shelf. He lifted the lid, and there it was in my mind—the blueprint book for the house.

  I held my breath.

  No, it was useless. I couldn’t mentally bring up the original layout of the second floor, no matter how many times I walked myself through the memory. And I didn’t have the key to the little elevator cabinet, so I couldn’t get into the storage room without Mr. Fig here.

  I could see pieces of the first-floor blueprint in my head. That’s where we’d looked last year for the entrances to the forgotten passage. And no doubt the emotion I’d felt in the moment, the slightly heightened connection to the experience of my great-great-grandparents, had cemented the memory in my hippocampus. (I was learning about long-term memory storage this semester in my Biological Psychology course.)

  I could see Mr. Fig’s face at the moment he’d told me he had worked for my family. Why had he waited so long? And then, when I’d found the passage under the conservatory and it turned out he’d known the whole time—why? Why hadn’t he told me about that either? Or that he knew I was a descendant of the Morrow family?

  Before now, I’d chalked it up to him believing I wasn’t ready, for some reason. But now the questions provoked me, against my will.

  Because if there was another way upstairs, Mr. Fig would know it better than anyone. He’d worked here at the house decades before the remodel and for a dozen years now afterward.

  But no—Mr. Fig didn’t need a secret way upstairs. If he’d wanted to kill Renee—ugh, even thinking the words made my stomach turn—he could have done it when he brought the wine to her earlier in the evening.

  So who else might have found a way upstairs? Clarista, possibly George, or another employee who’d been paying attention. In other words, a bunch of people who hadn’t known Renee until she checked in.

  I was so sick of hitting walls.

  Some of our guests were watching a movie in the theater. Tom and Autumn had gone out after dinner, and I didn’t know when they’d return.

  The front doors were unlocked, though, and there was little chance of them needing anything at the desk on the way to their room.

  Maybe I could leave the desk for a few minutes without an issue.

  I needed those blueprints, so key or no key, I was getting into that storeroom.

  Dr. Leonard Chaves stood across from me, his arms tightly folded against his gray turtleneck, his thin body angled away toward the staircase.

  This was the kind of interview I hated. It reminded me of the stint I’d worked for the high school newspaper. I was great at talking to people and coming up with story hooks. Getting the words down in writing was the drawback, which was the reason I had quit—that and having to talk to people who, like Dr. Chaves, didn’t want to talk to me.

  I’d wanted to get him into the library, a disarming environment for a professor, but he had stopped in the entry hall seating area a few feet from the library door, clearly in a hurry to get this conversation over with.

  Truth was, I didn’t want to be talking to him now either. I wanted to be in the basement looking at old documents, but he’d returned from the conference just before I left the desk, and since he was evidently attending every single session of it, I had to take advantage of his momentary presence.

  I sat down, hoping he would do the same, but standing seemed to be his way of conveying just how little time he planned to spend with me.

  The man wouldn’t even lean against anything, despite the sturdy grandfather clock being a foot away.

  I was comforted by Mr. Fig’s voice in my head. When the professor had checked in, he’d said, “Chaves is derived from Flavius, the family name of several first-century Roman emperors as well as Constantine’s given name.”

  Leonard began to speak, and I had to step forward to hear him.

  “So you said there’s a problem with the payment method?” he asked.

  Holy laurels. I had said that. Now how could I back it up and use it to milk him for information? “More of a concern, I guess. I wondered if you could help me. See, it’s strange for us that the person whose credit card is on file has left the hotel but others are staying.”

  He shifted his weight and glanced toward the stairs. “I’m not sure how I can help with that.”

  I had a feeling Deena might be right about his general vibe.

  “You’ve known Clyde a long time, right?” I said. “If you could vouch for him, that would go a long way.”

  “I’ve known him more than a decade.”

  “So you can put in a good word?”

  “I could put in several words,” he said.

  I grinned mischievously. “But not good ones?”

  His shoulders reared up in a stingy shrug. “I mean, he volunteered to front the cash for this whole stay, and you know more than I do what kind of money we’re talking about there, but whether or not he’s good for it, I can’t say.” He still wouldn’t look at me. “If I were him, I would’ve picked the Holiday Inn.”

  Did Clyde actually have a lot of money to throw around, or was he overspending? “What kind of house does he live in?”

  “Mount Lebanon, three stories, nice green lawn.” He shrugged. “He used to take some of the department to a place in the Poconos, but I think he lost that in the divorce.”

  “He pays for those houses just by teaching?”

  A short laugh popped from him. “Do you know what an average professor salary is in the U.S.? Sixty-seven thousand a year, according to Indeed.com.”

  That was freaky specific. “Okay. So how does he make his money, then?”

  He shrugged. “Venture capital, maybe. Although I heard he’d sunk some money into a real stinker recently.” He turned toward the window, and the sideways stream of light caught the divots of acne scars that deepened his wrinkles. “But he always seems to land right side up. Things fall
into his lap. Opportunities, grants, all that.”

  Leonard stared at the floor while he spoke, lessening the dramatic effect of his widow’s peak. His hands turned to fists in his pockets. “Case in point, I’ve published extensively on dramatic monologues, but Borough’s the one who gets to teach on Browning.”

  “Robert Browning?”

  “Yes.”

  Of course. Browning was a Victorian. So the book left on the front desk must belong to Clyde. “Everyone seems to like him. If I said he sounds like a modern-day Gatsby—”

  “You wouldn’t be far off. At least until recently.”

  “Recently?” I said.

  “Someone seems to have it out for him. Vandalizing his house, that sort of thing.”

  That was right. Clyde had mentioned as much at his hotel. “So why don’t you like him?”

  “Who says I don’t?”

  “Come on.”

  The theater doors swung open, and guests flooded the hall—Parker Rogers and his dad Furnell, Velvet and Deena linked arm in arm, Mr. Wollstone, plus a young couple I didn’t recognize, and a family of five I’d checked in Tuesday night.

  Deena and Velvet still wore the fabulous dresses they’d put on before dinner tonight. Deena’s was an emerald-green ballgown that matched the feathered purse she carried, and Velvet’s was full-length ivory silk with a flattering cinched waist and black lace accents.

  On their way to the dining room earlier, I’d asked them where they got their fabulous outfits, and Deena had said Velvet borrowed them from the drama teacher at her old school. If only all our guests were so well connected, this place would feel every bit as historical as Clarista wanted.

  Leonard glanced their way and then moved closer. “Look, is this about Renee?”

  Blast. He was onto me.

  “Why would you say that?” I gave myself some time to change tactics.

  “I’m just not buying your story. Why not simply run Borough’s credit card and be done with it?”

  “Okay, you’ve got me. What can you tell me about Renee?”

  He sat down on the green velvet sofa opposite me. “She was a lovely person.”