Mind Change

by T'Gracie Reese

  His smile vanished.

  What was he talking about?

  Who was waiting for her?

  Who could not be put off?

  What was she going to have to deal with now?

  “There’s a pair waiting for you in there that wouldn’t be denied.”

  “Who?”

  “You’re going to have to find that out for yourself. Just realize there was not very much I could do about it.”

  Everyone was silent for a while.

  Finally, she squared her shoulders and took a deep breath.

  “All right, Adam. Whoever they are, let’s deal with them.”

  So saying, she walked past Marsh and through the door.

  A huge figure stood before her, beaming.

  “Jackson! Jackson Bennett!”

  “Hello, Nina. Bay St. Lucy asked me to give you their best. We all miss you, Nina! But nobody as much as this guy!”

  He pointed to a small chair, from the cushion of which was descending a small, tan and white animal.

  “Furl! Oh, Furl, you’ve come to visit me!”

  But Furl merely sauntered across the room, rubbed against her ankle in one direction, turned and rubbed back against it in another, and said:

  “Aaarrrgggh.”

  Which in cat means:

  “So what have you gotten yourself into this time?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY: THE DARK SUN

  When Jackson Bennett entered a room, he became the dark sun around which everything else in the space orbited. Here in the middle of Nina’s Hobbit House, his darkness was belied by the brilliant celestial light that was his smile, while his mass held in regular and fixed orbits Adam, Mars, Nina, Venus, Peter Stockton, Jupiter, and Furl––a declawed asteroid that had landed on the surface of Nina.

  Their little universe chugged along, ultimately smelling of fresh hot coffee and problem-solving minds.

  “I wasn’t sure you were coming,” Nina said.

  Jackson merely shrugged (as though any movement of his mammoth shoulders might be signified by a term such as merely.) “I was in such a hurry to get up here,” he rumbled. “I guess I just disconnected, grabbed Furl and hit the road. Sorry if I worried you.”

  “I’m just glad you’re here.”

  Jackson bent forward:

  “Nina, we’re worried about you, you know that.”

  “I’m worried about me, too.”

  Peter Stockton:

  “All right then. Can anybody tell me what’s being done to get Mr. Barnes out of jail? Because I’ve done all I can do, and he’s still sitting there.”

  To which, Adam Marsh replied:

  “First things first. I think I ought to tell the two of you that Mr. Bennett here and myself are now both actively involved in the case. Richard agreed to have us as co-counsel about an hour ago; we hope you’ll go along with the same agreement.”

  “I can’t pay either of you.”

  “Neither can he, so it’s okay.”

  “Well,” she said, stroking a dubious Furl, “as long as that’s taken care of. I didn’t want there to be any bothersome financial details.”

  “That only happens,” said Jackson, “when there’s money involved.”

  “If you gentlemen wish to be paid––and paid well,” Peter Stockton said, “then I and my associates can…”

  Marsh shook his head:

  “You’re just as impossible for us to deal with as Nina. She has too little money and you have too much. We don’t have software that can deal with that many zeros. One transaction with you would break down our whole accounting system.”

  “All right then. I’m just saying…”

  “Don’t worry about it, Pete. But as for the other thing you were saying, about Barnes and his getting out—well, the whole investigation right now is centered furiously on the university’s financial situation.”

  Stockton nodded:

  “Those accusations, you mean, about the provost embezzling money.”

  “Those are the ones. Jackson and I have been pulling every string we can. He’s got more of them because he has contacts in the governor’s office, and the governor’s office has contacts deep in the university’s financial world. All of the people who handle the money, and who make any investments that are to be made. As far as we can find out—and remember, all this broke little more than a few hours ago, so nothing too exhaustive has been done yet—is that it’s impossible.”

  “What is?” growled Stockton.

  “The kind of embezzlement scheme Rick’s article—or let’s just say the article, because somebody sure as hell wrote it—accused the provost of working out. He couldn’t have done it. He never had that kind of financial access.”

  “That,” said Nina, “would square with Rick’s story. If Rick wrote that the provost was stealing money, then that would be true. But he never wrote it.”

  “And still,” grumbled Stockton, “he’s behind bars. And he doesn’t deserve it. Hell, he’s not the one that’s liberal. He just writes what they tell him to write. Okay, so tell me about something else.”

  “Name it,” said Marsh.

  “What’s happening with the university?”

  Marsh shook his head:

  “Nobody really knows, but it’s a mess. While Lucinda was, well––in control––it really did seem that she had a chance of winning. A great many people, not only here in Ellerton but around the country, were supporting her. And only a shockingly small number were supporting a hundred and fifty thousand dollar a year Assistant Directors of Planning Design and Research Marketing.”

  “What is that?” asked Jackson Bennett.

  Marsh answered:

  “Something that you put a suit around and give money to.”

  Stockton:

  “But now?”

  “Now, Peter, the other side has learned about Lucinda’s—situation.”

  “Her possible situation,” Nina said. “We don’t know that she’s ill.”

  “True, Nina, but if she isn’t ill, then you weren’t eating oysters with her. And if that’s the case, then it follows that…”

  “I hate,” Nina said, quietly, “logic.”

  Jackson Bennett:

  “That’s all right, Nina. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t seem to apply to what’s been happening here at dear old Ellerton.”

  Marsh:

  “At any rate, it comes down to this: if the contracts Lucinda gave out are considered legally binding—then a great many people have been let go into early retirement, not all of them being unhappy about the situation. But if they’re not—and they’re not if she’s mentally incapacitated—then this whole thing has been a farce. Adjuncts are still adjuncts, and Vice Directors of Global Awareness and Cultural Enrichment are still what they are, whatever they are.”

  “My God,” said Stockton.

  Marsh nodded:

  “There are hundreds of lawyers working on this thing as we speak. It’s like I said––a mess.”

  Silence for a time. Then Nina:

  “Adam, Jackson—and you too, Peter: there are two things most important to me right now. First, I know I didn’t shoot the man. And I know just as strongly that Richard Barnes didn’t either.”

  “All right,” said Jackson Bennett. “So where does that leave us?”

  “It leaves us,” said Nina, “asking who did. If Barbara Richardson is right, and I can’t believe she would be wrong about a thing like this, someone delivered a message to the provost. He read it and became infuriated. He went to Rick’s house and was shot. Now the question is, by whom? Someone got into Rick’s house and typed that letter on the word processor, somehow got a copy of the same letter over to the stadium, then, knowing that Rick had a shotgun there, just sat there and waited for the provost.”

  “Could all that have actually happened?” asked Marsh.

  “If you eliminate everything impossible,” said Nina quietly, “whatever remains, no matter how bizarre, must be the truth. Conan Doyle
.”

  More silence.

  Finally, Jackson Bennett:

  “You said there were two things, Nina, that were important to you now.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the other?”

  She looked around the room, then said:

  “I want to see Rick.”

  The visiting area of the city jail looked like any number of bureaucratic spaces. There were gray tables, gray metal chairs, gray walls, gray pictures on the walls, and gray people coming and going on gray errands.

  The officers all resembled mail carriers except they had guns.

  Nina was signed in, said a quick farewell to the three men who’d brought her, and followed the armed mailwoman assigned to her along a winding series of corridors.

  Finally, she entered the large room that was the visitation area.

  She was told to sit at a non-descript table in the middle of the room. She looked around her. Most of the other tables were vacant, but there were two or three other visitations taking place. The room had been divided into two parts by a ceiling to floor glass partition. Free people sat on one side of it, prisoners the other. To her left, she saw a middle-aged and harried-looking blond woman reach up to touch the glass, several inches behind which was the face of her husband.

  An officer observing the event grunted something, and shook his head.

  Other than this small drama, not much was happening in the visiting area.

  Until Rick entered the room from a door tucked into a corner far behind the glass wall.

  She caught her breath.

  Not because he smiled at her upon entering, nor because he was wearing a bright orange jump suit like she’d seen work-gang prisoners wear. But because he looked so completely at ease, moving with a gentle, slightly stooped grace across the room toward her.

  She stood up, noticing that two officers had stationed themselves on either side of her.

  Rick was brought to the wall. He sat down.

  So did she.

  For a time, he simply sat there, smiling and shaking his head.

  What could be said?

  Do not discuss the case.

  All right.

  Then what?

  He continued to look at her, probably wondering the same thing.

  Finally, she moved an inch or two closer to the glass, took a deep breath, and said, quietly:

  “That was the worst first date I ever had in my life.”

  Both of the officers standing beside her, a man and a woman, broke up laughing.

  It took them a while to stop.

  There was, after that, only one more thing to say, and she said it:

  “I’m going to get you out of here. I’m going to find out who did this thing. And then you’ll be out of here.”

  So saying, she got up, turned, and left the room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE: FESTIVAL OF THE FOOLS

  A reader of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame will be struck by the experiences of Pierre Gringoire, an unsuccessful writer of Masques, who is kidnapped on New Year’s Day, 1491, and carried into the Festival of Fools, a gathering of motley robbers, cutthroats, drunks, and madmen, which takes place annually in the Place de Grève in Paris.

  The same reader will see how closely parallel to Gringoire’s experiences were those of Nina Bannister, upon her exit from the city jail.

  She had attained to within ten feet or so of the Peter Stockton limousine and the three men standing beside it waiting for her—when a Gathering of Fools subsumed her and carried her away in a strange, shouting, tide-like, drunken march that seemed to be moving toward the middle of the campus.

  “Nina!”

  This from Adam Marsh, who was peering around the bizarrely-clad sea of people surrounding Nina with a sense of panic.

  “Nina!”

  This from Jackson Bennett.

  “Nina!”

  This from Peter Stockton.

  “Nina! Nina! Nina!”

  This from various of the people engulfing her, many of whom seemed to be slightly drunk.

  “Come with us! We’re all fired!”

  She recognized the massive man who’d welcomed her to the table at Nick’s following her meeting with the uncountable administrators two interminable days ago.

  The huge man put a huge arm around her and shouted in her ear:

  “We’re all going back to the gym, where Lucinda gave us the contracts two days ago.”

  “Who?”

  “All of us!”

  And then she realized. This Feast of the Fools was, in fact, the Feast of the Adjuncts.

  They had gathered en masse, just as they had when they were told they would soon be running the university.

  And now, apparently, that dream was over.

  She wondered as the mob made its way across the campus, a few students laughing as they stared at it, some of them apparently recognizing part-time teachers who’d taught them in past courses––if these multi-aged, multi-ethnicitied, multi-clad, wildly-costumed people had dressed fantastically for this one occasion, this last time for them to come together as true, regularly salaried employees of the university—or if this was simply the way part-timers always dressed, hobo-like and ramshackle.

  There were various adjuncts at her side now, some she recognized, others not. They were shouting and singing, here and there a fragment of the school song, the old fight song, and somewhere, from the edge of the crowd, some Latin versus from Gaudeamus Igitor.

  The massive man introduced himself:

  “When we met at Nick’s the other afternoon, I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Tom Scott, mathematics.”

  “Hello, Tom.”

  “We’re glad to have you with us. We heard about all that horror with the provost. Somehow they thought you were involved in it?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “But you’re cleared now. You know about all the other stuff that’s been going on?”

  She shook her head.

  “I know about some things. But in the last few hours so much has happened…”

  He nodded:

  “We’re in the same situation. Rumors, rumors. The bottom line is, they’re saying Lucinda is mentally incompetent. She’s been replaced by the vice provost. We’ve all been informed that the contracts offered us are invalid.”

  “So what are you doing now?”

  “What we should have been doing all these years—meeting.”

  “Do you think you can accomplish anything?”

  “Who knows? This is all new. Maybe Lucinda Herndon is mentally incompetent, we don’t know. But for the first time in most of our careers, if you can call them careers, an administrator has treated us as though we were better than window washers. Okay, so we can’t become full-timers. Okay, so the nine hundred or so bureaucrats will go on and keep their jobs. But we will band together now, and we will show the university what a mess they would be in without us.”

  Nina looked around her, up at the lacy-clouded Mississippi sky, and, not quite so high but equally impressive, a small sea of hand-painted signs, saying Adjunct Rights! and We Count For Something! and On Strike For Better Wages!

  They were approaching the old gym now.

  The last time she’d stood in this spot, Rick Barnes had been with her.

  She tried to get her mind in order, but failed, miserably.

  What was she even doing here in this strange crowd? How did their interests intertwine with hers? She had, or should have, only one job now. It was not to reform a major research university; it was rather to figure out what had actually happened the previous night.

  Think, Nina, think.

  No one else seemed ready and eager to help Rick.

  But someone had lured the provost to Rick’s house, let him get inside the house, and then shot him.

  Surely, the provost had many enemies.

  But one of them had managed to get a fake message to him outside the stadium, a message warning of an article that accused hi
m of embezzlement. The message had been left visible on Rick’s computer.

  But how…

  Jane, Jane, Jane Austen:

  “A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.”

  How could…

  How could…

  But it would not work. She found herself being captivated by this sea of fools, this mob of adjuncts as they worked their way into the old gymnasium.

  They were out of the entry hallway now, working their way into the seats.

  Not so far away from her, she saw Tyra, and she remembered the day before, the quote from Milton:

  “They anon with hundreds and with thousands trooping came attended: all access was thronged, the gates and porches wide, but chief the spacious hall thick swarmed, as bees in spring time…”

  Part-time teachers, now become bees in springtime.

  Bees in springtime, teaching the nation’s youth.

  And making two thousand dollars a course.

  The microphone was squawking; she saw Tom Scott, he of massive math, who had disattached himself from her and now stood in the middle of the gym floor, addressing the Feast of Fools: “All right, people! Some time yesterday, I got word that you had elected me to be the head of this faculty. Ex-faculty.”

  Voices from the audience:

  “Hear! hear!”

  And:

  “Scott for president!”

  And a few catcalls, a few more cheers:

  Finally, Scott:

  “I guess all of us have heard the same things now. President Herndon is—well, under evaluation.”

  Silence for a time.

  “No one knows the exact status of our contracts, but it doesn’t look good. It looks, in fact, as though things are going to revert to the way they were.”

  “Noooo!”

  “Down with the way things were!”

  “Up with the adjuncts!”

  But Scott merely raised his arms and smiled.

  “Take it easy. Whatever is going to happen, as far as I’m concerned, we’re still the faculty, and we’re still the administration!”

  “Huzzah!”