by David Bell
She looks up, her eyes flaring. “Oh, really. Really? You’re going to tell me about the world. Please.”
“You have no proof of what you’re asserting,” I say, sounding very much like the professor I am. “If you go in and tell them I stole your book, they’re not going to believe you. Whose word are they going to take? Yours? Or mine?”
“Because you burned my manuscript, right?” Some of the heat goes out of her eyes. They look more like banked coals than a blazing fire. “That’s the way it always is for women, isn’t it? Who gets to be believed? And who doesn’t?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t tell you that enough. I said there might be more money from the book down the road. It’s all yours. I don’t care about that.”
She stuffs the hat and gloves into her coat pockets. She comes toward me, and I stand up, keeping my hand near my pants pocket. And the knife.
But she goes past me, over to the counter, and takes the bottle of Rowan’s. She pulls the cork and tilts the bottle, guzzling a more-than-healthy shot. She brings the bottle down but doesn’t put it on the counter. She holds on to it.
“Good-bye, Connor.”
I start to say good-bye, and I feel a twinge of relief passing through me. Madeline is turned to the side, half of her body obscured from my sight.
I can see only one of her hands, the one closest to me.
The one not holding the bottle.
Like a dancer, she spins toward me, and I see the bottle arcing toward the side of my head as she turns.
I duck. I lift my arm.
But none of it is fast enough, and I don’t even feel the pain of the blow as the darkness descends. I realize I’m fading as I hit the floor, as I hear Grendel scampering into the kitchen, barking and barking. . . .
PART II
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
REBECCA
PRESENT
Rebecca makes it to class right at the wire.
She hates to be tardy, but she woke up late this morning, reluctant to emerge from beneath the warmth of the covers, leave the house, and trudge the three blocks in the freezing air to reach the bus stop.
But she did it.
Except then the bus arrived late, and by the time it dropped her off near Goodlaw, she was way behind and ran through the wide first-floor hallway, dodging around her fellow students, the cleaning people, and the professors to make it to class on time. Dr. Nye hated it when students came late. Some of them strolled in almost ten minutes after class started, and when they did, he always sighed, acting like they’d done him a grievous injury.
Rebecca makes it on time every day. And she wants to keep that streak intact. With Nye eventually reading her thesis and deciding if she could graduate with honors or not, she didn’t want to risk irritating him.
But when she goes through the door into Goodlaw Hall room 117, she sees not Nye standing at the front of the room where he’s always perched, looking over his notes, his brow furrowed like he isn’t quite certain he can pull off teaching what he has to teach. Instead, she sees Dr. White and Dr. Hoffman. The two men stand off to the side, their heads leaned in toward each other, whispering in low voices. The students who are already in the room sit in silence at their places, looking like obedient kids from a posh boarding school instead of the ragtag batch of creative writing majors they are. Normally before class they lean over toward one another, telling jokes, showing one another videos, laughing and joking and complaining about anything they could think of.
Rebecca wonders what the hell is going on and tries to slide into her desk unobtrusively. Once, when she was nine, her parents went out and the usual babysitter was sick with mono. Her parents called her mom’s great-aunt Sylvia, who must have been eighty-five years old, and she came over and sat with Rebecca while her parents were gone. That’s what it feels like to have White and Hoffman standing at the front of the class and not Nye. No one knows how to act, so they stare straight ahead like mannequins.
Except for the two frat boys next to Rebecca, the ones who always look right through her. They start whispering to each other. The one closest to her says to his friend, “Do you remember when Hoffman told that girl to add more details about her breasts to her poem?”
“Dude, she was pissed,” the other one says.
Rebecca takes out the book of short stories they’re reading, wondering if they’re still going to have a quiz, but Dr. White clears his throat and steps forward. He rubs his hands together, his forearms exposed by the perfectly rolled-up sleeves. Rebecca has never taken a class with White, but she’s heard he’s difficult. Very, very difficult.
“Okay,” White says. “I’m here because we have an announcement to make. As you can see, Dr. Nye isn’t in class today, and I’m sorry to tell you he won’t be for the foreseeable future. He’s dealing with a personal problem, unrelated to his work at the university, and so your class will be taught by Dr. Hoffman for the rest of the term. As I’m sure you know, Dr. Hoffman is an excellent poet and teacher, and you’re in very capable hands going forward.”
White gestures toward Hoffman, who smiles and nods to the students like he’s a game show contestant.
The guy next to Rebecca mutters under his breath, “God, not Hoffman.”
The guy next to him says, “I thought I’d never have to see him again. I don’t even care if he does cancel class every time he’s hungover.”
“Excuse me,” White says, looking over at them.
Rebecca stiffens in her seat. She hates to think she’d be lumped in with the guys who can’t keep their mouths shut.
But she knew Hoffman. Just a little. She’d been to that party at his house a couple of years ago, the one where she first met Madeline. The one with the thing that happened in the alley. And she remembers Hoffman having too much to drink and insulting her home county.
He did kind of seem like a jerk. But now he’s teaching her class.
Where the hell is Nye?
“If you have any questions,” White says, “feel free to ask, and I’ll try to answer them.”
Rebecca hates to have a one-track mind. She hates that her first thought isn’t about what might be wrong with Dr. Nye—illness, injury, accident—but instead goes right to her own problems. Who is going to direct her thesis if Nye isn’t here?
But she can’t help it.
She starts to lift her hand and ask, but White barely takes a breath between asking for questions and cutting them off. He doesn’t even look at Rebecca.
“Okay, then,” he says. “I’ll hand this over to Dr. Hoffman.”
And White breezes out of the room so fast, it looks like his shirt is on fire.
And then Hoffman steps forward and sits on the desk. Despite the cold he wears a short-sleeve button-down Hawaiian shirt and lightweight blue pants made for summer.
“I took a cursory glance at Dr. Nye’s syllabus before I came down here,” Hoffman says, “and I found the whole document to be both prescriptive and restrictive, so I thought we’d branch out in some other directions. Which reminds me of the professor I had at Yale who refused to assign letter grades. Let me tell you a little story about her. . . .”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Hoffman starts to talk, and the student on Rebecca’s left, a woman she sometimes talks to before class and who always smells like patchouli and has an elaborate tattoo on her right hand, leans over and says, “He’s an amazing professor. I learned so much about writing from him. I think he’s a mad genius. He gave me so many useful suggestions for my poems. He thinks I should go to graduate school.”
Hoffman has a deep, resonant voice. He sounds smart. And he has a big vocabulary, using words Rebecca has heard but isn’t sure she understands.
Rebecca isn’t sure who to believe—the students who hate him or the one who loves him.
After ten minutes, Rebecca realizes Hoffman
isn’t going to stop anytime soon. And she can find no connection between the story he’s telling and the subject of the class, which is short story writing.
So Rebecca stops listening. Her eyes lose their focus, and she stares straight ahead. Her mind wanders, and she finds herself thinking of Madeline O’Brien. Ever since the night of Nye’s talk at the library, Rebecca has replayed the scene of the woman in the back of the room with the red hair, the one who tugged on her eyebrows. Rebecca wouldn’t say she knew Madeline well. They took one class together when Rebecca was a sophomore and Madeline was a senior, and while they rarely spoke to each other, Rebecca admired the way Madeline conducted herself. Professor Richter taught the class, and Rebecca thought she was brilliant, but Madeline spoke up frequently and didn’t shy away from openly disagreeing on matters both big and small. Rebecca never disagreed. She rarely participated. She liked to listen and write down her notes and absorb the discussion.
Hoffman finishes his story fifty minutes later and dismisses everyone.
Rebecca’s classmates appear to have been lulled into a stupor by the lengthy story, and they gather their things and shuffle away, yawning like sleepy children. Rebecca grabs her things and jumps out of her seat. She follows Hoffman out of the classroom.
“Dr. Hoffman?”
He turns, smiling. “Hello.”
“I wanted to ask you a question,” Rebecca says. “If you don’t mind. If you have a minute.”
“Sure. Come along. I always have time for an eager writer.”
He leads her down the long hallway, his pace languid, his legs propelling him forward as he says hello to nearly every student or faculty member he passes. When they reach his office, he pushes the door open and pauses. He looks around and lifts a giant stack of papers and books off one chair and points to it, indicating that Rebecca should sit there. Hoffman clears off another chair, and Rebecca wonders how the man sits at his desk if both chairs in the space are covered with crap.
“That was a great class, wasn’t it?” Hoffman says.
It sounds like a rhetorical question, but he watches Rebecca expectantly, as though he requires an answer.
“Yes, it was,” she says. “Awesome.”
“One of my favorite stories,” Hoffman says, leaning back, the chair squeaking. He folds his hands across his stomach and crosses one sneakered foot across the other. “I never tire of sharing it with my students. And they always seem to enjoy it. Now, what’s on your mind?”
“Well, I know you’re taking over for Dr. Nye, and I guess we don’t exactly know when he’s coming back.”
“I think it’s safe to say he’ll be gone for a while,” Hoffman says.
“Oh. Okay. Since he’s going to be gone for a while—”
“You see—what’s your name?”
“Rebecca Knox.”
“Have we met before?” he asks.
Rebecca isn’t sure what to say. “I kind of went to a party at your house a couple of years ago.”
“Kind of? How can you ‘kind of’ attend a party?”
“Well, I was there. Yes. My friend invited me.”
“You see, Rebecca Knox, Dr. Nye has been having some personal issues for a few years now. I’m sure you’ve heard about them.”
“I guess I know about his wife dying and stuff.”
“Right. Everyone seems to know about his new book, the one that I guess you can buy in some of the finer retail establishments and grocery stores all over Gatewood. The one he toiled laboriously on for . . . what? Three weeks or so before he published it? I thought it sounded familiar when he discussed it at the library, but most of those thrillers sound the same. I don’t read them. Well, things have been kind of unstable for our friend Connor for a while. And now he finds himself in the middle of something that doesn’t look good at all. I’m not really at liberty to say more than I already have.”
Hoffman remains slightly reclined in his chair, his thumbs moving over and over each other in tiny loops. Rebecca tries to make up her mind about him. He seems to talk just to hear himself talk. She wonders how much more interesting he would be if he talked about something relevant to her.
“Okay,” she says. “I see. So can Dr. Nye still direct my thesis?”
“Oh, no. He won’t be working with any students anymore. Not at all. He’s already faced the wrong kind of scrutiny once. And this latest incident isn’t going to look any good either.”
“There was an incident?” Rebecca asks.
“Do you remember Madeline O’Brien?” Hoffman asks.
A sizzle of electricity shoots up Rebecca’s spine. She stiffens in the hard wooden seat. “I know who that is.”
“Well, our friend Dr. Nye was the last person to see Madeline alive. Did you know that? This is all a matter of public record, of course. Not that you students follow the news. But it never looks good to be the last person to see someone alive.”
Rebecca flashes to Madeline—if that was actually her—in the back of the library. Is Rebecca now the last one to have seen Madeline?
Or was Nye right—Rebecca was just seeing what she wanted to see?
“And now,” Hoffman says, “well, let’s just say . . . the wicket’s getting stickier.”
Rebecca isn’t sure what Hoffman means. She isn’t even sure she knows what language he is speaking, although he’s trying to hint at something about Dr. Nye and the reason he’s absent from class. And maybe he’s trying to say it has something to do with Madeline and her disappearance. Hoffman is wrong about something—Rebecca followed the news about Madeline closely when she disappeared, had gone to the trouble of buying herself a canister of pepper spray and taken a self-defense class at the university health center. But nothing else happened in town, and before too long, the police and the media stopped talking about Madeline.
Rebecca remembers that Hoffman was at the reading at the library. Had he seen Madeline too? Whatever he is trying to convey, he looks pleased to be saying it, and his thumbs continue their perpetual motion against his belly.
“Is something going on with Madeline’s case?” Rebecca asks.
“Madeline?” He says the name like he’s never heard it. Like he hadn’t just brought her up a minute earlier. “I don’t know anything about that. She was an excellent student. Very talented. In so many ways. But that’s all I know.”
“Okay,” Rebecca says. “So Dr. Nye isn’t directing my thesis anymore. I just met with him about it yesterday. Is he okay? I mean, should I be doing something for him?”
“Can you bake a cake with a file in it?”
“What’s that?”
“He can take care of himself,” Hoffman says. “He can use all his royalties to hire a good lawyer. But if you’re worried about your thesis, I can direct it for you.”
Rebecca feels relief replace some of the rigidness in her spine. “Really?”
“Sure. It’s all about the students. What kind of thesis is it?”
“I’m writing a series of linked short stories,” Rebecca says. “It’s the same character during a few different periods in her life.”
“Fascinating,” Hoffman says. “But poetry tends to be my strong suit. Have you ever written any?”
“Not for a long time. I don’t really—”
“If I were you, and you want to work with me, I’d seriously think about writing some poems. Maybe you can write them in various forms about this character you’ve dreamed up. I’m sure your fiction is delightful, but under the guidance of Dr. Nye, it might tend toward the commercial and the jejune. But if you stretched yourself and wrote some poetry, that would really be something. The thing I really feel I excel at is taking a student’s work and enhancing it. Providing advice, help with form and structure and language. Finding the right concrete detail for the right moment. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“I guess. . . .”
>
“Madeline was a student who was equally adept at poetry and prose. Were you close to her?” Hoffman asks.
“Not close. We took one class together. . . .”
“Such a shame,” Hoffman says. “I think about her from time to time. Has she been on your mind lately?”
“Well, in a sense . . .”
Rebecca told Nye about thinking she saw Madeline. She’d thought about telling her roommate or one of her other friends, but how weird would she sound mentioning the eyebrow thing when that was the only real “evidence” she had?
But then Hoffman leans forward and stops twiddling his thumbs and acts like he is all receptive to whatever Rebecca has to say about Madeline, so why not get his opinion too? He is obviously a weirdo but also smart. And he’s been teaching at Commonwealth for so long he knows all the ins and outs.
She’d tried with Nye, and he wasn’t interested.
Could Hoffman be just weird enough to care?
“Okay,” Rebecca says, taking a deep breath before she plunges in. “You know the other night at Dr. Nye’s reading? You were there too. There was this person in the back of the room with red hair. . . .”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CONNOR
PRESENT
Something wet and cold against my face.
Wet and cold. Wet and cold.
Like someone’s running a washcloth over me.
“Emily?”
For a moment, I see her. The deep brown eyes. The auburn hair.
This is the way she woke me up on thousands of mornings. A kiss on my cheek . . .
So much better than an alarm clock.
The cool sensation stops. My eyelids flutter. Bright light comes through, spearing me in the face. Like a dam bursting, pain rushes through my head. It’s localized on the right side, and I tentatively reach up. My right arm has been pressed beneath my body, and it’s asleep and feels like a club. My hand gets the pins-and-needles treatment, which hurts almost as bad as my head. I flex, trying to work circulation through.