Eyes Like the Night

by Emma Accola

  “There’s no lock on the refrigerator?”

  “No. Some of the social warriors around here have a high-minded belief that hungry people deserve our compassion, not condemnation, and a lock amounts to a sort of insult.” She looked both sympathetic and amused as she checked out my left hand. “Did Micah Ekstrand give you that gigantic rock?”

  “He did,” I said with a grin, holding up my left hand.

  “You were holding out on me.”

  “A little.”

  Tiffany chuckled. “Half the female faculty is in lust with him.”

  I laughed. “Then it’s a good thing I’m around here to defend my territory.”

  “Then Micah can defend his territory too. When I was coming up the steps, I heard a couple of your students saying that if all professors looked like you, they’d get graduate degrees.”

  “They couldn’t have been the two who fell asleep in class today.”

  “Only two? Clearly you aren’t trying very hard,” Tiffany said with a laugh. She glanced at her cell phone. “I’d better get back to my desk. Those quizzes won’t grade themselves. Now that our offices are close together, we can do rescues. If I hear a student getting loud and rude, I’ll call you. Answer the phone because it will be me asking if you’re all right or need a rescue. You can do the same for me.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Let’s hope we won’t need to.”

  “I like this office better. Gary’s office made me think you needed a flea collar and a rabies shot.”

  Tiffany slipped away. I shut the door and started reading student essays on symbolism in Jane Eyre. A couple hours later, when my eyes were starting to cross, someone pounded on my office door so hard that I nearly jumped out of my chair. The banging boomed and shook the walls of my little office.

  “Open up, you bitch!” a woman shouted through the door.

  I grinned because I knew exactly who she was. Elina, the reporter from the student newspaper, had come. I pressed send on an email I’d composed hours earlier to Micah asking him to come to my office right away. Then I opened my door.

  Elina gave it a sharp shove, jerking the knob from my hand and banging it back so hard it crashed into the wall. Her face was purple with rage. “You dare screw up my article for the school newspaper?”

  Pretending to be shocked, I let my jaw drop. By now I knew my colleagues were putting their heads out of their offices into the hallway like so many prairie dogs peering up from their burrows. Elina’s voice rolled down the long hallways like summer thunder.

  “What are you talking about?” I squeaked out.

  She leaned over me. “I know it was you who hacked the school newspaper’s computer to shut down the printer. You don’t want everyone to know how you murdered Loren Hernandez and those other students. You won’t get away with it. By the time I’m done with you, you won’t be allowed to teach the janitors around here how to mop the floors.”

  I backed away from her, as if I were frightened. Enraged, she stepped inside my office, advancing on me as her finger stabbed at the air in front of my face.

  “You’re going to get what you have coming,” she cried.

  As soon as Elina was clear of the door, I kicked it shut with a slam that shook the walls. Then I threw over my ancient office chair and pulled down the metal bookcase. Elina jumped out of the way as the shelves clanged to the tile floors with a deafening racket. Screaming, I cleared everything from my desk with a sweep of my arm. The newly graded essays filled the air. I flung myself backwards toward the window as Elina’s expression changed from rage to alarm. Grabbing my purse off the floor, I banged it hard into my face. Pain exploded in my nose with a blinding flash. A hot, crimson stream of blood flooded down my lips over my chin and onto my white blouse.

  Frightened now, Elina grabbed the doorknob, but I was quicker. I wiped some blood on her knuckles before shoving her away from the door and pushing through ahead of her. I dropped onto my backside in the hallway and pushed myself away from her, scooting down the shiny floor as I cried and begged for her to leave me alone. The blow to my nose had my eyes watering so badly that I could hardly see her through the tears. The bloody handprints I was leaving on the floor were a trail of blurry red roses.

  “You’re crazy,” Elina yelled.

  My shocked colleagues streamed from their offices. A couple of professors rushed over between me and Elina, warning her to stay back. Tiffany appeared at my side, exclaiming about the amount of blood on my shirt. Elina began shouting that I had hit myself, but her words were drowned out by the cries of my colleagues. One of them handed me his handkerchief. My blood saturated it immediately. Tiffany pulled me to my feet and wrapped her arm protectively around me as the other professors kept themselves between me and Elina. She was now crying hysterically and pointing at me.

  “What the hell is going on here?” bellowed the dean as he strode down the hallway.

  More faculty and some students crept after him, their hands held anxiously to their mouths.

  “Gracie has been attacked,” Tiffany cried as she pointed to Elina. “Where are the campus police? We need police here now.”

  “I never touched her! She did that to herself,” Elina said, a note of hysteria causing her voice to rise.

  Tiffany clamped her arm around my shoulders and led me to her office. She eased me into a chair, murmuring words of comfort the whole time. She handed me the box of tissues as she stood guard in the hallway. We could hear Elina trying to defend herself, claiming she hadn’t touched me. Several professors, emboldened once the police arrived, said how they had heard her calling me a bitch while pounding on my office door. One said the blows had been so violent that a picture had fallen off his office wall. The police officers pulled Elina aside, their faces grim. As the gravity of her situation sank in, she started sobbing in earnest. Three professors cornered the dean, claiming they had been saying for years that something like this was bound to happen if the campus didn’t employ a full-time therapist for students who had anger problems.

  “I hope you’re happy,” one of them declared triumphantly.

  “Your beloved fiancé had better expel that nutcase for this,” Tiffany said with some venom. “Is your nose still bleeding?”

  I nodded, swallowing more blood. For a moment I took the tissues away from my nose so that Tiffany could see the stream hadn’t slowed. The warm torrent flowed so freely that I thought I maybe had used too much force when I swung the purse. I would definitely have a stomachache from how much blood I had swallowed.

  Tiffany cleared her throat, clearly made queasy, but she didn’t turn away. “The whole top of your blouse is saturated. How hard did that idiot hit you?”

  I blinked out more tears. “Hard enough.”

  Suddenly Micah appeared in Tiffany’s doorway. The emotions on his face warred between alarm and anger as he bent over me and put his hand on my shoulder. Tendrils of my hair had become bloody and were decorating my white blouse like grisly little paintbrushes. Micah’s jaw became set and hard.

  “That student who’s talking to the police punched Gracie in the face,” Tiffany said with a lot of heat. “You had better expel her for this.”

  Micah gave Tiffany a stony scowl. “This is my fiancée. I’ll take all necessary steps.” His eyes lingered on my reddened hands. “Will you be all right? Your nose isn’t broken, is it?”

  “No, but it hurts,” I said, my voice hoarse and nasal.

  Micah wasn’t appeased. “We should probably get you to the nurses’ office.”

  “No, it’s all right,” I mumbled in reply.

  “It’s not,” Tiffany said. “Look at you. Your nose will probably have to be cauterized. It may even be broken.”

  “She needs an ice pack,” said one of the male professors from over Micah’s shoulder. “The campus nurses should have one in their office.”

  “Or maybe there’s one in the first aid kit in the English Department office,” Tiffany said.

  “I’ll c
heck,” he said as he went away.

  Outside I could hear Elina insisting to the police that she hadn’t done anything wrong other than call me bad words and give my office door firm knocks. Her voice had become ragged and pleading. She claimed she wasn’t a dark, violent person capable of violence. I could hear her begging one of the officers to believe her after he cuffed her and led her away.

  “Why did that student attack my fiancée?” Micah demanded of the Dean of English.

  “Her name is Elina Sokolov. She claims that Gracie hacked the student newspaper so that the press wouldn’t work. She thinks Gracie was trying to hush up the article she’d written about her. And somehow she knows that you and Gracie are engaged.”

  “We are, and because she’s my fiancée, you can believe me when I say that Gracie needs help figuring out how to change the default printer on her word processing program. There’s no way she could have hacked the school newspaper and shut down the press, no matter what that student thinks.” Micah’s voice was taut with fury. “Can that reporter provide any proof?”

  “No, there is none,” said the dean, his voice carrying down the hall. “I texted the advisor for the newspaper. The press is offline, but no one knows why.”

  “Then that student’s accusations are unfounded and absurd.”

  “They’re unfounded, absurd, and beside the point. Nothing gave Elina the right to assault Gracie and bloody her face.”

  Underneath the wad of tissues, I was smiling. No, I was smirking. Elina had come into my lair and lay down for the slaughter. My plan couldn’t have gone better. When I stood up, I concentrated on my ruined blouse to keep from laughing aloud. Right now, at this moment, I needed to be weak and disoriented. Tiffany kept her arm around me as I walked slowly into the hallway to join Micah.

  “Can you drive me home?” I asked, making sure my voice was hoarse and weak. “I should lie down.”

  Inside my office, several of my colleagues were righting the bookcase and gathering the essays. One of them handed me my purse, his brow crinkled with concern. He tried not to stare and paled visibly at my reddened shirt which lay cold and clammy on my chest. Another approached me with an ice pack. Tiffany gently set it on my face and told me to hold it there for at least ten minutes. Someone suggested getting the janitors to clean up the floor and the door. Micah took my arm as he led me down the hall. Faculty members from all the departments housed on this floor were standing together in knots as we passed. I was a gory mess and they didn’t even try to hide their stares.

  “Let me give you my jacket to cover up with,” Micah said softly.

  “No, it would just ruin your jacket. We’ll be in the car in a few minutes.”

  Students gaped at us as we made our way from the building to the parking lot. I felt so conspicuous that I was relieved when Micah opened the car door and I could hide inside. I leaned my head back and debated whether to release the pressure on my nose. The cold pack hurt and I wondered again if I hadn’t gone overboard with the blow. Micah looked peaked.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t go to the emergency room? Your nose may need to be cauterized.”

  “No, it will be fine. My nose bleeds are hard to stop.”

  Micah started the car and began the drive home. I closed my eyes and lay back in the seat fighting the nausea that the swallowed blood had caused. My nose had become so stuffed up that the only way to breathe was through my mouth. The blood on my blouse began to stiffen. I couldn’t wait to take a shower and lie down. After a long, thoughtful silence, Micah began speaking.

  “When I got your email to come to your office immediately, I thought that maybe you’d gotten your hair caught in a zipper or you needed me to lift a heavy box.” His tone was casual and conversational, as if he were asking me what I’d eaten for lunch. “Instead I find you surrounded by people who claim you were assaulted by a student. How amazing that while under attack, you found the time to compose and send an email. I have to wonder whether you knew that student was coming to your office.”

  “I counted on the fact that she would,” I mumbled through the tissues.

  “You set her up.”

  “I created an opportunity.”

  “That student will have to be expelled for at least a semester. I can’t go easy on her, not when I’ve got four professors who will stand witness.”

  “This is where I remind you that I’m not responsible for another person’s behavior.”

  “Is this some of what Caleb saw under your angel face?”

  “Yup.” I gave a one-shoulder shrug. “Elina is a pawn of Harry Spice. That’s why I won’t press charges for assault. But that’s the most mercy I will show her.”

  “You must have read Niccolo Machiavelli.”

  “He wrote that one must either completely obliterate an enemy like the Romans did to the people of Carthage or make the enemy a friend.” I looked at the fingers on my left hand with their streaks of blood and the dark circles of gore in the cuticles. My lovely engagement ring would have to be cleaned. “And I will not make Harry Spice my friend.”

  “Can you be sure that no one saw what actually happened?”

  “None of the faculty in the offices across from mine has office hours at two o’clock. I took the precaution of checking their schedules. And I kept my back to the window just in case.”

  “What happened with the printing press?”

  “A strange and bizarre power surge burned out its mother board. I guess it was some kind of glitch in the software.”

  “Did Sludge help you with that?” Micah asked, his tone dry.

  I shrugged. “He might have.”

  “That student is going to pay a rather big price for this.”

  I tentatively lifted the icepack from my face. The bleeding had stopped, but my nose felt thick and raw. “Elina’s lucky I stopped her, though she won’t know that for a while. Had the school paper printed that hatchet job on me, she would never have lived it down. No one would have hired her. A badly done newspaper article will linger on the internet forever.”

  “That’s probably good since she didn’t actually hit you.” Micah shook his head. “You know that article will come out eventually.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “It won’t?”

  “No, because everything in it will no longer be true by the time the student newspaper gets its press fixed.” My nose felt hot and achy, but at least the bleeding had stopped. “Elina will thank me for stopping her from making a gigantic fool out of herself.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says Sludge. He’s sending me some information on Mariah Park, Loren Hernandez, and Lucie Eagan. Apparently each of them had gone into San Francisco and taken selfies.”

  “Selfies? Who goes to the City without taking a selfie?”

  “Yeah, but how many of them end up dead or disappeared the next day?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Shortly after dinner, cleaned up from my bloody nose, I looked over what Sludge had sent me from Loren Hernandez’s, Lucie Eagan’s, and Mariah Park’s social media postings. Most of what they had posted had to do with going to the gym, political commentary, movies they had seen, or pictures of themselves with their friends in restaurants. Yet, each had a selfie taken at a popular tourist site in San Francisco on the day before he or she died, respectively Coit Tower, Alcatraz, and Lombard Street. None was smiling in the picture and each was holding a hand in front of his or her chest. Micah and I stared at the computer screen.

  “There’s no way this could be coincidence,” I said.

  “Caleb didn’t believe in coincidence. He didn’t believe that the universe sends us messages.”

  “Harry Spice figured that we wouldn’t either. He forced these three people to go to those places and take those selfies. Then he counted on the fact that we would get access to their social media accounts and find these images.”

  Micah rubbed his chin as he thought. “And knowing that, we can’t discount the fact that this could
be Harry Spice sending us a red herring.”

  “Maybe. Probably. We won’t know until we go to those places and stand right where the students stood when they took the pictures. He’ll be watching to see whether we can figure out his riddle. It’s a challenge we’re meant to fail. He’s testing us to see what we’re made of.”

  “How can you be so sure about that?”

  “Because none of these students is wearing a jade dragon. I expected to find dragons.”

  Micah raised an eyebrow at me. “You’re assuming that Harry Spice took that jade dragon off one of those students. He would never be so obvious. Keeping trophies around from his victims would be really foolish, and I doubt that Harry Spice ever drew a stupid breath. Besides, how could he be sure that you would pick his pocket?”

  “He couldn’t, but we can’t discount the fact that he wanted me to get it,” I said quickly. “He got really close to me at the mailboxes and again in front of the restaurant. What if he was trying to make sure that I would get the jade dragon?”

  Micah’s eyebrows rose. “To plant evidence on you?”

  “Maybe, but that would only work if he had taken the jade dragon from one of the students. Assuming that dragon isn’t a red herring, it’s meant as a clue to something else.” I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms over my chest. “Let’s back up a bit. Did you notice anything interesting when you went through Caleb’s things after he passed away?”

  Micah thought for a moment. “The only thing I found that seemed kind of strange was Caleb’s sudden affinity for maps of San Francisco. That surprised me because we grew up here and his car had navigation. What would he want with paper maps? And they were ordinary street maps, like the kind tourists use.”

  Why would four people who grew up in or around San Francisco suddenly be behaving like tourists? There had to be a connection, I thought. The students were merely pawns to be moved around the chess board for Harry Spice’s entertainment, but what about Caleb? Whatever happened with Caleb was something different.