Eyes Like the Night

by Emma Accola

  Tiffany nodded solemnly. “I remember when Micah took a month-long leave of absence after Caleb was killed in a car accident. People who went to the funeral said he was like a robot. The gossip mill has it that he has no close family left. I feel for him.”

  “Imagine that on top of a divorce. It must have been a rough time for him.”

  “Yeah. The irony is that if he were looking for women to comfort him, there are a lot of attractive, intelligent, educated women on this campus who would be only too happy to oblige.”

  I couldn’t deny a certain dark pleasure at the fact that Micah didn’t find anyone on campus desirable. “The wedding ring is a clue to stay away.”

  “Apparently so.” Tiffany’s face softened. “He’s not a complete android, you know. He’s the biggest advocate of the campus cats.”

  “The campus cats?”

  “There are five feral cats that have been caught, neutered, and released to live here on campus. They’re the resident mouse patrol. Micah has his student help organize donations of cat food and feeding stations.”

  I thought of the tabby cat I had seen walking across the roof of the neighboring building. It was part of Micah’s project? “No kidding.”

  Tiffany’s gaze drifted around the student center. “Micah taught criminal justice here before he became a dean. He got his bachelor’s degree when he was twenty and his doctorate when he was twenty-three. Smart, smoking hot, single, and ambitious.”

  “Yeah,” I said softly because I knew all that and more about Micah Ekstrand. Then I wondered a bit about the depth of Tiffany’s interest.

  “But you already know a lot about him because you were a witness for the prosecution in the Harry Spice rape case.” Tiffany went on, giving me one of those searching looks. “And you’re the type of person who would check out her opposition.”

  Just the mention of the trial stiffened my spine even though more than a year had passed. To me Harry Spice was a vicious predator, but to others, he was a computer genius who had made his fortune by the time he was twenty-five. During the trial, many journalists had described him as handsome with his thick dark hair, generous mouth, and tall, lean figure. All along he’d had his advocates, and they hadn’t been shy about questioning the evidence against him. When the jury had come back with a guilty verdict, I thought his conviction would have put him away for years, but over the summer his software company had issued a press release announcing that he was being released from his unjust incarceration. The statement mentioned his relief and gratitude that a judge had ruled that the evidence provided by the forensic dentist was unreliable.

  Harry Spice’s happy announcement had sent Tamra into a tailspin. She called me when she got the news, crying so hard that she could hardly get any words out. She begged me to go into hiding with her, but I had refused. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t, not after getting a year-long appointment at Bailey College and a place to live near campus. No one in my position would have refused an offer like that.

  “Yes, I was a witness against Harry Spice,” I replied carefully. “It sounds like you followed the case.”

  “A little. Standing up against him was brave of you. He’s not known for his forgiving nature. Lots of unnamed sources claim he has no compunction about tearing up anyone who stands in his way.”

  I couldn’t miss the hint of a question in her statement. “You sound like my mother. She cried. But I couldn’t let him get by with what he did to my roommate, not after seeing him outside our apartment.”

  “Is it weird for you, being around Micah, after he and his brother worked so hard to make the jury doubt you?” Tiffany asked.

  Another word came to my mind, but I dissembled. “I didn’t take it personally. And the trial was a year and a half ago. Let bygones be bygones.”

  “That’s taking the high road.” Tiffany let the subject drop, much to my relief. “By the way, I saw that you’re on the ad hoc committee that’s redesigning the department’s website. How did you end up doing that?”

  I brushed away an errant strand of hair in a gesture that I hoped appeared casual. “I happened to be the first person that the dean saw when he was looking for warm bodies.”

  In truth, I was in the English Department office getting a new dry erase marker when I overheard the dean asking for volunteers. Several other English professors had begged off due to having too many other tasks to occupy themselves. Ordinarily, such a task wouldn’t go to someone like me who was only contracted for a year, but when I offered to take part, the dean had gratefully accepted. He congratulated me on my can-do spirit, and I thanked him. Of course I had involved myself only because I had heard him say that Micah Ekstrand was chairing the committee, but the dean didn’t need to know that.

  At the committee’s first meeting, Micah acknowledged me with a nod and then acted as if his eyes were blind to me. Since that day, he had been steadfast in his refusal to engage in any way except cool, detached efficiency. Several times I had brought students to the Student Services Department where he was dean. Always he had maintained a cold distance, like a sharp and sparkling icicle, pretty, chilly, and out of reach.

  Tiffany stretched and raised her eyebrows at me. “So, shall we head back? I know you must have papers to grade and I have to get ready for class.”

  As we walked, Tiffany pointed out the building that housed a tutoring center available for English students. Then she showed me where the campus counselor was for students who were having problems with stress, depression, eating disorders, and other issues. Finally, when we reached my office, she paused and looked past me inside.

  “Usually you have to be here twenty years to get a prime piece of real estate like this. I really want to envy you this office and its view, but I just can’t quite do it.” Tiffany’s eyes flicked around inside my office like tiny birds that didn’t know where to land. “Who doesn’t dream of a leopard-print ceiling and tiger-striped walls? That ugly-ass rhino head is something out of a nightmare. A giraffe-print loveseat? Really? It’s probably the only one in the entire city. What are those dog-looking figurines? Hyenas? Did a zoo throw up in here? Please tell me Gary’s townhouse isn’t decorated like this.”

  “This office shows more restraint. His home has a lot more eyes and carnivores.”

  “You’ll never get laid in a place like that.”

  “It saves me worrying about birth control.”

  “Tomorrow I’m bringing you a flea collar,” she said over her shoulder as she walked away.

  Alone again, I sat down and turned my attention to the roof of the next building. The tabby cat was gone and with it my excuse to daydream. I swung my chair back to my computer and logged into the learning management system, the program where the students uploaded their papers, did online assignments, and posted discussion board comments. So far twenty-five of the students in one of my literature classes had uploaded their papers on King Lear, and I expected emailed excuses from those who hadn’t. I glanced at the stack of hard copies and saw that the top one was from Lucie Eagan. Before I started grading it, I ran the plagiarism checker on the digital version she had uploaded. Nearly one hundred percent of her essay came up as plagiarized. It was a patchwork quilt, stitched together from a dozen websites, and none of her sources had been cited.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I said aloud, irritated by the insult to my intelligence. “Lucie, Lucie, Lucie. How did you make it through an entire year of college-level composition and not learn how to make citations? You had to know you would be caught plagiarizing.”

  I clicked on the icon that would send an email to her. Instead a window opened that left me gasping: Gracie Meadows, moron isn’t a big enough word for the total and complete imbecile that is you. I don’t call you an idiot because it would be an insult to stupid people. Too bad there’s no vaccine to fix your utter lack of intelligence. You’re enough of a simpleton to think that you’ve won, but you’ll be running away from your life the way Tamra did. Funny how people can disappe
ar like that. Poof and they’re no more.

  My hands shook as I sent this to the printer. Lucie Eagan hadn’t written this. It had been posted by Harry Spice. In spite of my brave words to Tiffany, I had expected consequences. One didn’t go up against a man like Harry Spice without leaving blood on the floor. An expert hacker, he could insinuate himself into every part of my online identity. Nor were my students safe. Now that he was in the campus’s learning management system, he could see all their work, grades, and upcoming assignments. If Harry Spice wanted to, he could delete their submissions, or worse, drop all of them from my rosters. Quickly I changed my password, hoping that would slow him down for a few minutes. My fingers shook as I found the business card of Ray Biles, the campus police officer who was assigned to the English Department. He had written his cell phone number on the back after I had told him about Harry Spice. My trembling fingers had to dial it three times before I got it right and he answered.

  “Ray, it’s Gracie Meadows from English,” I said, my voice quivering. “Can you come to my office? I’ve received a threat.”

  “Who threatened you?”

  “Harry Spice, the man I testified against. I told you about him at the start of the semester.”

  Ray became very stern. “Is he in your office now?”

  “No, it came through the LMS.”

  “The what?”

  “The learning management system,” I said, trying to keep the impatience out of my voice. “It’s the computer program we faculty use with the students.”

  “All right. I’m on the far side of campus. Sit tight. I’ll be right there.”

  I got up and paced. For the past two months, since Harry Spice’s release, I’d been waiting for my turn. It had started this way for Tamra, with online threats and insults, and she called me from a bus stop in Texas, saying she was going off the grid to hide in Georgia with relatives. She warned me that Harry Spice would find me at Bailey College and begged me to join her, but I had refused. No, my situation here was too good to give up and Harry Spice be damned. I pulled out the campus telephone book to find the phone number that would ring at Micah’s desk. I knew my name would come up on his telephone’s caller ID, but I hoped he would answer anyway. He did.

  “Is there something I can help you with, Gracie?” he said, not bothering to stifle a loud sigh.

  “Harry Spice used the LMS to threaten me.”

  The impatience left his voice. He became gruff. “What kind of threat?”

  “He leveled a bunch of insults at me and said I would go the way of Tamra. In case you didn’t know, last summer she went into hiding.” I squeezed the phone so hard my fingers ached. “Please come over here. I want you to see this.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  I resumed my pacing, nervous prey under all the watchful eyes of Gary’s animals. The screen went dark as the computer logged me out, like a shadow across my mind. Harry Spice had made his move. The proverbial other shoe had dropped and the grace period on my peaceful existence had ended. He quite simply terrified me, the same way the witch in The Wizard of Oz had when I was a little girl. Harry Spice was powerful and malevolent and bent on revenge. Worse, he had the means and motivation to make sure that all those involved in his incarceration would pay dearly for the year he’d spent behind bars.

  When a knock sounded on my door, I almost jumped out of my skin. I checked the peephole to make sure it was Ray before opening it.

  “Show me this message,” Ray said.

  I gestured for him to sit down in my chair before taking the mouse and bringing up the login screen. Quickly I typed in my new password. I then logged into the LMS and clicked through several screens to get to the one that would list the submissions from Lucie Eagan’s class. Micah appeared in the doorway. He and Ray greeted each other with a sharp nod. When I got to the screen with Lucie Eagan’s paper and clicked on her name, her essay appeared with no indication of plagiarism. Confused, I scrolled up and down, but all I found was Lucie’s paper on King Lear. There was nothing of the threat or plagiarism I’d seen earlier.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “This is not what I saw before. This is something different. On the other version of this student’s essay, nearly every word was highlighted as plagiarized.”

  “What happened?” Ray asked as he skimmed through the paper. “I don’t see any threat.”

  “I don’t know. This isn’t what came up before.” I used the mouse to move back to the screen that listed all the students who had uploaded their King Lear essays. There was only one entry from Lucie Eagan, and we appeared to be looking at it.

  Ray leaned back in my office chair. “All right. So where’s the threat?”

  I swallowed hard. “I don’t know. I can’t explain this. It was there.”

  Micah and Ray exchanged glances, their faces carefully blank.

  “No, really,” I said, growing insistent. “This isn’t what I saw before. And while I was waiting for you two, my computer logged me out. It shouldn’t have done that. It ordinarily takes twenty minutes of inactivity to log me out.”

  “Did you save the threat on your computer or a thumb drive?” Micah asked.

  “No, I didn’t even think of that. Why would I? But I did print it. The copy is in the English Department’s printer.”

  “Then let’s go get it,” Micah said.

  The two men followed me down the shiny floors of the hallway to the English Department office. The communal printer was in a separate area that also housed a duplicating machine and the faculty mailboxes. Several copies were already waiting in the printer tray to be picked up. I went through them and only found a roster, an essay, and a couple meeting agendas, none of them mine. There was no sign of the threat that Harry Spice had sent me. A young student clerk glanced at me from her desk in the main area of the office.

  “Did you see someone out here in the past few minutes?” I asked her brusquely.

  Micah and Ray stepped up behind me. The student clerk stiffened in alarm. She’d only been working in the office for a couple of months, mainly answering the phone and directing students to where they could drop off their papers. Seeing a uniformed police officer, a professor, and a dean staring at her made her drop her pen. She fidgeted nervously.

  “Um, I caught a glimpse of someone a little while ago. He was in and out in a few seconds. I think he just dropped off a paper.”

  “Or picked one up,” I said, turning to the two men. “He could have gotten the copy out of the printer.”

  “Describe the person you saw,” Ray said to the student clerk.

  The student’s voice was weak with anxiety. “Ah, he had dark hair and was wearing a black tee shirt. I only caught a glimpse. There are a lot of people in and out of the office.”

  “Did he get anything out of the printer?” Micah asked.

  “I didn’t notice,” the student said. “I can’t see the printer from my desk. I’m sorry.”

  “Harry Spice has dark hair,” I said to Micah and Ray.

  “So does nearly every male on this campus who’s under the age of fifty.” Ray crossed his thick arms over his chest. “I’m going to call your student Lucie Eagan and see if she’s let someone have her college username and password or if she knows whether someone has hacked her account.”

  “Someone did,” I said, adamant. “I know what I saw.”

  Ray gave me several slow nods. “You saw a threat on your computer screen for a moment that you sent to this printer and now it’s gone. That’s what you’re alleging.”

  “I’m not alleging,” I said sternly. “It happened.”

  Ray regarded me with a face as hard as granite. “Is there anything else?”

  “At the moment, no,” I replied, trying to sound credible to two men who were expected to take my word on faith.

  “Gracie, there’s no proof that anything at all happened here,” Micah said, his voice soft but not gentle. “We only have your word that you received a threat.”

  “
That’s not enough?”

  “It’s not enough for me to file an incident report, if that’s what you mean,” Ray said before directing his attention to Micah. “I’ll know more after I talk to Lucie Eagan. Maybe somebody hacked her account and that threat was supposed to be a joke meant to get Lucie into trouble. Some people have a perverse sense of humor. At the very least, she should change her password.”

  “Then the person with the perverse sense of humor had to have known me well enough to be aware that my friend Tamra had gone into hiding because she’s so scared of Harry Spice,” I snapped. “And there’s nothing funny about that.”

  “No one said this was funny.” Micah raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Bear with me for a minute. According to the LMS that you showed us a few minutes ago, Lucie posted her paper yesterday morning. She only had that one posting, yet you say that there was a threat. So if you didn’t delete it, what happened to it?”

  I shrugged, mute.

  Ray gave me a few moments to reply before turning to Micah. “I’ll question Lucie Eagan and get back with you.”

  “Why are you getting back with him and not me?” I snapped, annoyed at being shut out.

  “Because he’s in charge of student conduct issues. That’s why you called him, isn’t it?” Ray Biles shot back. He gave an abrupt nod to Micah before turning on his heel and striding away.

  “You believe me, don’t you?” I asked Micah softly. During the trial he’d never given credence to my statement of having seen Harry Spice leaving the apartment I had shared with Tamra on the night she was assaulted. Why would he take me at my word now?

  Micah looked thoughtful as he watched Ray leave. “Gracie, let me take a look at your computer.”

  Though I didn’t know what he was trying to find, I led Micah back in my office. He sat down at my desk and put his fingers to my keyboard, not at all distracted by the row of little red-eyed turtles that graced the top of the screen. With a complete lack of haste, he went into the settings, clicking through several screens before sitting back in the chair.