by Ted Bernard
When many hands shot into the air, he called on the provost.
“Sir,” Helen Flintwinch began, her mouth turned down in an expression of disgruntlement, or was it disappointment or distemper? “With due respect, I believe that what you propose is a suicidal set of actions for this administration and likely for Gilligan in the longer term as we go forth rudderless and weakened.” Beneath the provost’s apparent heartlessness, Redlaw could sense hints of hesitation and guilt and perhaps even sympathy for his come-to-Jesus moment.
And in fact she continued more kindly. “We have had many good years together, Mitch, you and I. And I have mostly admired your wisdom and even keel as an academic leader. Therefore, I am astounded that you would so cavalierly and so unwisely go over to the enemy, these ruffians on the quad, not to mention pay so little heed to what I believe is the majority opinion here. I mean, how far do you intend to push this, Mitch?”
“As far as is necessary,” he replied.
“Well, I obviously do not see the situation the way you do. And so, regrettably, I want no part of your imprudence.”
Redlaw had no response.
After several other voices had been heard, or not heard, the selfsame voices that had droned-on aggravatingly over the past seven years, voices that today added nothing to Mitchell Redlaw’s conception of the future nor budged his resolve, and when the phantom had written mene, mene, tekel upharsin — impending disaster — just above the head of Vice-President Battersby, the president excused himself. He walked the long hallway toward his office. Beth, who had no vote, bereft and alone, followed him out the door and without a word turned away to a future she realized would be somewhere else.
As he entered the presidential suite, a work-study coed at the front desk greeted him with a bright smile, “How’s it going today President Redlaw?”
“Hi Brittany. Never better.” And for once, he meant it.
17
When Helen Flintwinch entered his office, she found him gathering personal items from his desk, stuffing them into his briefcase and a cardboard box: papers; his rolodex; a Gilligan coffee mug; his laptop; a plaque honoring 2006, his banner fund-raising year; his bottle of Irish whiskey; a few books, including, she noted, Burt Zielinski’s Climate Nightmares.
“Mitch, the vote was lopsided: only three in your favor. Rules tell us to convey this to the Board as a vote of no confidence. That is, unless you’ve changed your mind.”
He straightened up and walked to the window, his back to Flintwinch. He could hear the chimes on Stiggins striking one o’clock. He did not expect to be evicted so soon in the day. He turned back to the provost. “My impassioned reasoning did not move the needle much, did it? But that’s not what matters to me and I surely have not changed my mind. Further, you can tell your esteemed colleagues that I am hereby submitting my resignation.”
He returned to his desk, plucked a single sheet of letterhead with a one-line statement, his bold signature at the bottom. He handed it to the provost.
“You’re a fool, Mitch.”
The president smiled, true to his soul, this moment. “You could be right, Helen. But my vindication, I believe, will descend upon us, possibly soon, and then Winthrop, Morse, Larnaca, and Tulkinghorn will all have become moot. If we live to tell the story, we shall long regret what we have wrought.”
“Poppycock,” she declared, matching his antique cliché with an equally decrepit expression. She began to sidle away. Before she left the room, she turned around and spoke more tenderly, “After all this is behind us, Mitch, and you’ve landed another opportunity, I hope we can get together over an Irish coffee.”
Although Redlaw’s anguish had weakened him and his whole body had quivered in the rush of events, at that suggestion, a wave of rage coursed through him. He looked across his office toward the provost standing pathetically in the doorway. “Don’t hold your breath, Helen,” he said.
She departed wordlessly.
He gathered the last of his possessions and his briefcase and walked to the outer office. His executive assistant was speaking. “We are so sorry, President Redlaw. This is not how we imagined this day to be. Everything seems so, so unfair and tragic. We all shall miss you, terribly.”
Redlaw nodded. He put on a wan smile. He placed his box and briefcase on the floor. He went around to hug each of his staff ending with Brittany, now blubbering, perhaps deeply forsaken for the first time in her life. He was moved by her tears and tried to come up with a profound farewell. All he could muster was, “I hope we shall meet in times to come.”
He walked into the hallway and out the back door.
18
Outside The Jenny, Astrid declined a lunch offer.
“Astrid!” José, hyperkinetically shuffling, protested. “You avoiding me now that you’re some kinda millionairess off to celebrate with those hacker geeks in virtual space?”
“José, shut up. Nobody breathes a word of that. I do have some kind of intellectual life, you know.”
She hated to be so brash, for she had come to enjoy palling around with José, but the situation with the child was becoming urgent. She ran down Harrison Hill to Eastman Quad and climbed the stairs of Morgan Hall to her room. She opened the door and came upon a scene of utter chaos, her bed, chair, and desk covered with all manner of detritus: dirty laundry, text books, weeks-old copies of The Press, an orange Gilligan Frisbee, a tangle of wiring, headsets, earbuds, recharging devices. She had no time to straighten the mess, made worse by her almost total absence in the past week. As the world goes over the cliff who will ever remember that Astrid had not tidied her room? That was the question.
She pulled her laptop from her backpack, fired it up, went deep into its register to build firewalls around her search. She rapidly typed: missing child bartholomew county ohio.
~
Katherine ran from The Jenny to her apartment. She opened the door and paused to listen. Everything was still. She bolted up the stairs. Carrie, her downstairs neighbor, a student at Southeast Tech, sat watching an episode of Being Human on her tablet. Macy, at her side, was curled up on the couch, sound asleep, her head on Carrie’s lap.
“Hi Carrie,” Katherine whispered, trying to regain her breath and sound normal. “Has all been well?”
“You bet. This is one curious, lively, hungry little being. Long as I kept feeding her cheerios and toast and let her toddle around exploring everything, she was a plenty happy girl. Easiest baby-sitting ever.”
“Well, that’s a big relief. I can take over from here for a couple of hours. Can you still return later?”
“No problem. Today’s my day without classes. What time?”
“Say, three-thirty?”
“I’ll be here,” Carrie gingerly placed Macy’s head on a pillow and loped down the stairs with a good-bye. Katherine glanced across at the serene little being, recalling somehow the first line of a Bronte poem, a poem her dad recited to her years ago: Come hither child — who gifted thee? She wondered: Who did gift thee, Macy? And why?
Hearing the door close, Katherine reverted to her predicament. She picked up her phone and tapped-in Astrid’s number.
“Astrid? Katherine. Do you have news? … Uh huh, okay. Have the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts been contacted?”
“Oh, I see. A cabin? Uh huh. No sign of a Boy Scout?”
“What about the troop leaders?”
“Right. Quite unexpected.”
“Okay, so far, so good. Why don’t you come over for lunch? We can discuss the next troop meeting. I’ll fix a salad. Great. See you soon.”
“Sheesh,” Katherine fretted out loud.
Macy sat on the carpet scattering and shuffling and delivering and taking back pieces from Katherine’s Scrabble game. She wore Pampers and one of Katherine’s outsized t-shirts. Her pajamas were in the washing machine. Macy ill-clothed; Katherine’s larder bare as Mother Hubbard’s. Katherine had no need for the stress of a lost child.
She and Astrid sat at the kitc
hen table. A simple lunch of greens, goat cheese, and artisan bread. Though Astrid had dropped off Macy in the wee hours, this was the first time she had been at Katherine’s in daylight. She gazed at the pictures on the wall. “Are those scenes from Italy? Didn’t you live there?”
“Yes, they are and I did live there a couple of years,” Katherine replied. “I worked in Florence. Seems like decades ago. I’ve aged that much in the past ten days.”
“Yeah, girl, you’ve got the weight of this melodrama on your shoulders for sure, especially now that Lara’s off to the Caribbean. If there’s any way I can help, you know, just ask.”
“That’s sweet of you, Astrid. Let’s see how the rest of the day pans out.” Katherine turned pensive, a habit she wished she had not picked up from Stefan. After another moment, she asked, “And how are you weathering this high wire act of exposing a tycoon who could waste us all?”
“Well, I’m kind of used to living on the edge given my penchant for snooping. Yeah. So … as far as my intellectual life goes, I feel uneasily on hold. Before Blackwood, I had plenty of days when I was emotionally wonky, sometimes in a kind of surreal memorable poetic way, trying as I was to negotiate the snooty honors program while grappling with elevated levels of existential angst regarding the nature of knowledge, technology’s intrusion on my well-being. Like, I feel as if I’ve had some kind of implant in my brain, the prospect of omega, the sugar high of hacking. You know?”
“I do,” replied Katherine, though she took in only part of Astrid’s stream of consciousness.
Astrid shifted in her chair to the lotus position, her scuffed and filthy feet in full view of their salads. “Before all this Morse shit made me even crazier, I was writing an essay having to do with learning, geekdom, infogasm, paradox, the void, and such.”
Katherine looked into Astrid’s hazel eyes and two observations flashed across her mind: a) a woman so brilliant must quickly become bored with drones like me, and b) funny how I take her appearance for granted nowadays — her rainbow tam over long dreads, her piercings and henna imprints; the boho-chic pantaloons, loose-fitting top, bralessness and bangles; the bare feet. When I look into those eyes, I see this crazy smart, sensitive, venturesome woman, somehow all contained by that lily-white skin stretched over bird bones.
“Getting to Macy,” Katherine said, “let me repeat what I think you told me on the phone. First, there’s no missing child report in Bartholomew, right?”
“Right. I searched every which way and got nothing recent. Of course, there are a number of New Barnstable teens gone missing in the past couple of months. Off to the bright lights of the big city, I suppose. Pathetic if the city is Columbus.”
“Hmm, that is so strange. I mean it’s not like this little tyke dropped out of the sky.”
“For sure, unless you’ve heard Rahbi’s return of the mystical child.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. It’s way too weird — transcendence, releasing the lower three chakras, activating DNA, quantum healing, a child prophet, and such.”
Katherine’s mouth went limp, her brain overwhelmed by Astrid’s scrambled mess. She needed her to come back to Earth. “Otherwise, Astrid, you discovered something about a woman in a cabin.”
“Yeah, it was a hunter’s cabin. It may actually be on the edge of the Barstow property.”
“What a convergence. What about the woman?”
“She was around twenty. Dead.”
“Dead? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
“Buddha, Isis, and Krishna too. Look, the coroner estimated her to have died sometime yesterday, the day Macy found us. The woman had multiple tracks on her arms and the last needle she ever used hung from a vein on her left arm.”
“Heroin overdose?”
“Apparently.”
“Good God! Any evidence of a child having been there?”
“Well, yes. The owner of the cabin is a grandfather. He had not been there in a couple of weeks. He said that the kids’ games and belongings scattered about the cabin and dirty pampers in the trash were his grandchildren’s. He remembered that they did not pick up after themselves the last time they were there. So, if Macy’s mother was a fugitive hiding in that cabin a few days, Macy would naturally have gone to the kid’s things. There was nothing stolen and no indication of a second adult or a break-in.”
“And if that woman was not Macy’s mother,” Katherine cut in, “then why isn’t some other mom going crazy over her missing child?”
“Right. Somebody ought to be freaking out, unless that somebody is dead. By the way, straight-line, the lookout ledge where Macy wandered in, is only about a kilometer away from the cabin.
“Have the police identified the dead woman?”
“Yes, tentatively. A receipt from an urgent care clinic in Olean, NY issued to a Jessica Crabtree is all they found. It was in her windbreaker pocket. So, they’ve put out a missing person bulletin to surrounding states.”
“Anything turn up?”
“Not yet. But following a Canadian hunch, I searched for missing people in Ontario and came across this on the RCMP site.” She opened her laptop and turned it toward Katherine.
“RCMP?”
“Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They do stuff the FBI might do here. Interprovincial crimes, federal investigations, such like.”
“This seems like an interesting possibility, though this person is called Cynthia Shevchenko.”
“If she’s on the lam in the USA having kidnapped her child and is here without a passport, would you expect her to use her given name?”
“No. Hmm, she went missing from Sudbury with a child named Sofia last December … almost a year ago.” Katherine read on. “Oh dear! A runaway for a good reason. Alleged sexual abuse of the child by the father. I see. What do you suppose we ought to do? Should we tip off the Bartholomew Sheriff and tell them they’ve stupidly limited their search to the U.S.?”
“I’d say procrastinate because …”
“Oh, excuse me,” Katherine interrupted. She reached over to pick up her vibrating phone and went into her bedroom.
Astrid wandered to the living room and sat in lotus on the rug across from Macy who was trying to stack Scrabble letters.
“Macy girl, you happy?” she asked as she carefully added an “m” to the stack.
“May-zie gooh girl. May-zie wan cheery-ohs.”
“Uh huh. Be even happier with Cheerios, eh? Macy, what about mama?”
“Mama gon night-night.”
Katherine returned.
Astrid looked up quizzically.
“More emergence,” Katherine said, “Novel properties of this damned system that nobody could have predicted. They keep rolling in.”
“Oh crap,” Astrid called over her shoulder as she went to the kitchen to pour the last of the Cheerios into a coffee mug. She came back to the living room. Macy took a fistful. She said, “Eee-yum.”
“Should I be prepared to flee back to Canada?”
“Maybe farther.”
“What is it?”
“It was Redlaw on the phone,” Katherine replied, her uneasiness apparent. “Sounded like he was in a car. Bluetooth maybe. His voice was hollow and tentative somehow. No presidential timbre, you know?”
“What’d he say?”
“He said we should be prepared for a surprise but not to lose our resolve.”
19
Em placed her head on her folded hands on the oak table. She was impossibly sleepy in Brownlow Library. She could not force herself to focus on the pages she had been trying to read. She remembered nothing of them. She dozed off. Twelve minutes later, she quaked upward, rubbing her eyes, her neck stiff, fingers tingling. Dans l'enfer, où suis-je?. An incoming text.
She reached for the phone.
~
It was 7:00 PM in the Occupy village. The atmosphere was tense, brimming with confusion and rage. Menace in the air. Ambient adolescent fears of expulsion and armed police aggression fueled the
apprehensions of the rebels, timid and bold. Insurrection hung heavy over the village, a shroud on their pretentions. Nick whistled, called for order, vainly fought to calm a hundred agitated greens. Many minutes passed before they were ready to obey. “No matter who’s president,” Nick cried out to them, “we must continue this resistance. And we must also meet our obligations as students. We have not been told to cease our protest. So, let’s keep up with our schoolwork, and be ready for new developments at a moment’s notice. Despite Redlaw’s departure, about which we know very little at this moment, we have the upper hand. Let’s not forget we have come a long way through non-violent civil disobedience.”
Nick paused and walked among the legions, a technique that had worked before. He found a stool and climbed upon it. At the top of his lungs, he shouted, “Blackwood shall not be desecrated, I promise you that. And GUO will never burn shale gas. We won’t leave this place until we achieve these goals. We shall never capitulate.”
Some cheered and chanted, “Nick! Nick! Nick!”