The Far Time Incident

by Neve Maslakovic

  Helen got to her feet, the ungraded essays in one hand. “Well, you’re probably better off in the long run.” She paused on the way out to make one final remark. “I’ve always known he’d come to a bad end.”

  The door closed behind her with an abrupt click.

  I knew whom she meant, and it wasn’t Quinn.

  Drs. Xavier Mooney and Helen Presnik were ex-spouses.

  I had just gotten around to sorting a stack of office-supply request forms, which needed to be turned into orders by the end of the day, when Dean Sunder stuck his head in. “Julia, I’m going to take off now, unless anything else needs my attention.”

  His suit still looked pressed to perfection and his salt-and-pepper hair was arranged just so. My hair, on the other hand, had slowly started slipping out of its clip as I’d fielded phone calls, e-mails, and text messages, finding its way into my eyes and onto my neck. I sat up, pushed my glasses up my nose, and grabbed a firm hold of my brown locks, pinning them back into submission. No matter how unusual the circumstances, slouching and loose hair went against the aura of efficiency and competence that I aimed to project. “We’ve been getting a lot of phone calls from anxious parents and reporters wanting a quote, but nothing I can’t handle.”

  “Well, coddle the first and dodge the second, as usual,” he said from the doorway. “I was thinking—I’d like you to accompany campus security if they request additional interviews with our staff. We should extend them our full cooperation, of course, but I don’t like them wandering around the buildings, asking unnecessary questions. I understand the difficulty, since there’s no body and all…but this was just an unfortunate accident, after all. We’re all very shaken by what happened.” He added pensively, “It falls to me to think about what’s best for the school.”

  I understood what he meant. Donations. We were in the middle of the end-of-the-calendar-year push. Alumni had a standing invitation to drop in on any departments and labs to look around and see what their old school was up to these days. We did not want anyone to be scared away by the sight of Campus Security Chief Kirkland and Officer Van Underberg roaming the halls. If I accompanied them, I’d be able to reassure everyone that the school had things under control.

  To an outsider, Dean Sunder’s concern about alumni contributions at a time like this might seem crass, but in fact it was the opposite—where fundraising was concerned, the dean had always tried to take as much as he could off the shoulders of the researchers in the science departments and onto his own. His efforts fell into two categories: tapping government grants, which usually favored safe, baby-steps research projects; and targeting alumni, private patrons, and foundations, who were more willing to take on risky research projects like STEWie. Ewan Coffey’s donations to the school had been instrumental in getting STEWie up and running. The actor had been following the project’s results with keen interest—and with the satisfaction, I thought, of a gambler who had backed the right horse. (After his morning meeting with the dean, Ewan had returned to his movie set; the actor was back in Minnesota for the shooting of what rumor had it was the thrilling tale of a cabin-vacationing lawyer battling an angry Bigfoot in a blizzard, all while trying to win the heart of his somewhat younger but equally attractive next-door neighbor. It would no doubt do as well as all his other flicks.)

  Dean Sunder glanced behind him with that last sentence, as if there might be potential donors wandering around the 120-year-old halls of the Hypatia of Alexandria House at this late hour, or a few of Xavier Mooney’s molecules floating down the dimly lit hallway that his corporeal form had graced many times over the years. The dean turned back with a small shudder. “We really need more indoor lighting in here. It gets dark so early in the winter. See if you can get Maintenance to install a few more ceiling lights, Julia.”

  “Lewis, you knew Xavier better than I did—did he have any family other than Helen Presnik?” I asked, immediately regretting my choice of words. I wasn’t sure I looked upon Quinn as family anymore and I had no idea what Helen’s opinions on the matter might be; ex-spouses were a gray area family-wise, their status to be determined on a case-by-case basis.

  “I think there’s a sister. Mary and I met her at Xavier and Helen’s wedding.”

  “I’ll see if Helen has her address. Helen didn’t know of any particular wishes he might have had regarding a memorial service. I’ll schedule the Great Hall in the Coffey Library for Friday evening, like we discussed. I called Ingrid, hoping she’d be able to put together a light buffet at short notice. She said it would be no problem.”

  Ingrid was one of the linchpin personalities in town, always ready to take up a cause when someone needed help or to drop by with a stack of Swedish pancakes with lingonberry jam from her restaurant when a family was in trouble.

  “I suppose we should have flowers?” the dean said.

  “Sven’s Shop can provide them.”

  “And some kind of music, do you think?”

  “The Music Department offered to send over students to play something lively on Dr. Mooney’s collection of historical musical instruments. I also thought I might get an enlargement made of Dr. Mooney’s CampusProfs page picture.”

  “You’ve thought of everything, Julia. I don’t know what I’d do without you. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Mary, his wife of thirty years, and their two dogs awaited him at home.

  “You have a press conference at eight,” I reminded him as he left to dig his BMW out of the snow. “I expect it will be well attended.”

  I heard the sound of voices in the hall, and a moment later Chief Kirkland’s lanky figure appeared in the doorway. I put down the stack of office forms I’d only just picked up again. “Chief Kirkland, any news?”

  He shook his head in a curt and unambiguous negative.

  “We’ve checked everywhere we could think of. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh.” I felt my eyes begin to sting with tears. I took off my glasses and gave them a firm wipe with the lens cloth I kept on my desk. I had known Xavier for the seven years I’d been Lewis Sunder’s assistant; still, we’d only had infrequent contact regarding school business and exchanged small talk at the occasional lab party. I seemed to be overreacting. It was due to one simple fact, I realized. The professor had been a positive force in a complicated world.

  On the window cabinet, a folder bulging with conference travel receipts and reimbursement forms suddenly flew open as its rubber band gave out, spewing papers all over the floor. My administrator’s instincts kicked in and I left my glasses on the desk and hurried over to pick up the forms.

  “Looks like the snow isn’t letting up anytime soon,” Chief Kirkland said, bending down to help me. Outside, a compact snowplow chugged along under a streetlamp with the familiar grating noise of steel on asphalt; the path behind the snowplow had already acquired a layer of powder. “Are you heading out, Ms. Olsen, or—I’m sorry, is your name still Ms. Olsen now that Quinn has, uh, moved to Arizona?”

  “It is. I mean, I never had to change it. Both he and I happened to be Olsens when we met. I thought it was a sign that we were fated to be together.” I snorted at the recollection and went back to my desk for a fresh folder to transfer the papers into.

  The lanky figure by the window chose not to remark on that. “If you’re heading out, I’d be happy to escort you to your car to make sure it starts up in the cold—”

  What, was he being gentlemanly or was that a dig against my admittedly aged Honda? Deciding to give him the benefit of the doubt, I reached for my glasses, slid them back on, and said, “Thanks, but I have to finish these forms on my desk tonight. In the spirit of redundancy, Central Accounting wants both hand-filled copies and online ones.” I noticed that his usual shadow was not behind him. “Where’s Officer Van Underberg?”

  “At the station typing up his notes. I’ll be heading over there later—I suspect we’re in for a busy evening, with motorists stuck in snow and cars refusing to start. Wanda—my spaniel
—will be wanting her dinner and a walk first. I was on my way home, but I noticed that your light was on.” He hesitated, then went on. “Losing a colleague is not—easy.”

  From the way he said it, I sensed there was a story there, but did not want to pry. Instead I said, mulling over what he’d said like it was a matter of cold and indifferent semantics, “I don’t know if colleague is the right word. Xavier was a teacher and a researcher—there have been rumors that he and Dr. Rojas were up for next year’s Nobel Prize—and I spend most of my time making sure forms are filled out correctly.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Ms. Olsen. Professors Mooney and Rojas would hardly have been able to accomplish Nobel-worthy research without the support of the dean’s office. Though I have wondered why you’re content to be a dean’s assistant,” he added in what was for him an unusual outburst of curiosity. “You could be dean yourself. You practically run the place anyway.”

  “You need a science degree to be a science dean. Besides, Lewis spends most of his time shaking hands, smiling, and making small talk at fundraisers. His position is a political one, and I…well, I do my best to find solutions to the daily problems that arise around this place. When a bigger issue comes up, like Dr. Little and Dr. Baumgartner disagreeing about whether pure and applied research should be funded equally, Dean Sunder gets stuck in the middle. Meanwhile I prepare the budget and, as you say, practically run the place. That’s pretty satisfying to me, Chief Kirkland.”

  “Still. I used to be an officer in my young days. It’s better to be chief.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being an assistant,” I snapped, surprising myself. I decided not to point out that he, too, had a boss—as head of campus security he reported directly to Chancellor Jane Evans. “If I were in Dean Sunder’s place, the first thing on my to-do list tomorrow would be to make another statement to the media. He won’t have anything new to tell them because it will take Dr. Rojas some time to figure out what went wrong with STEWie. And after that, he has a tenure review meeting, then a fundraiser luncheon, then a committee meeting to determine whether the cutoff for the Dean’s List this semester should be an A grade point average or an A-plus, a discussion that will probably drag well into the late afternoon. Need I say more?”

  “Fair enough. So Dr. Mooney wasn’t a colleague, then. A coworker and a friend?”

  “One I’ll miss.”

  5

  By the end of the week, the final exams were behind us, Dean Sunder had given a heartfelt speech at Dr. Mooney’s memorial in the packed hall of the Coffey Library, and the campus walkways and roads had all been cleared of snow. The first quiet Monday of winter break began with Abigail walking into my office and demanding, “Where is Dr. Mooney’s didgeridoo?”

  I hit the Send button on a mass fundraising e-mail directed at science degree alums and looked up. “Abigail, you’re in early.” Graduate students were usually late risers, particularly during school breaks.

  “I wanted to stop by Dr. Mooney’s office one last time—just to say good-bye—”

  “Abigail, here, come in and take a seat.” I got up and hurried to get the cookie jar. Her hair was a more somber dark purple today and framed her face instead of sticking up above it. She didn’t talk about her childhood much, but I knew that it had been spent in and out of foster homes. Every textbook I’d ever seen her carry had a USED sticker on it. She seemed to have found a home here; other than the time she spent with her boyfriend, who was in the Athletics Department, she was always in the TTE lab. Dr. Mooney, in particular, had become a bit of a father figure in her life.

  Abigail accepted a walnut cookie. “Thank you, Julia. You’re very nice, you know that?”

  “So you went into Dr. Mooney’s office,” I said, setting the open cookie jar between us in its usual spot on the desk and dropping back down into my chair. “How did you get in, by the way?”

  “The door was unlocked. The movers are there.”

  Dr. Mooney’s office was being packed up into storage until the department decided what to do with his belongings. I made a mental note to ask Oscar to keep an eye on things. We couldn’t have students, even well-meaning ones, wondering in and out of the late professor’s office without permission.

  As if sensing my disapproval, Abigail pushed her thin, purple hair behind her ears and explained, “I just wanted to look around, that’s all. Other than a few half-packed boxes, everything was the way the professor always kept it—”

  “Cluttered, untidy, and teeming with interesting things,” I summarized the usual state of Dr. Mooney’s office for her.

  She relaxed and a smile crossed her face. “I was going to say that it was in a state of controlled chaos. The movers had only just gotten around to packing some of Dr. Mooney’s books. I took a moment to—to touch some of them—like the Hipparchus trigonometry tables that he brought back last year, you know the ones—” She paused to eat the cookie.

  The photographic copies Xavier had made of the ancient Greek astronomer’s work were one of his—and the ancient manuscript depository in the Coffey Library’s—most prized possessions.

  Abigail, having wolfed down the walnut cookie, reached for another. I had a sinking feeling that the cookies were destined to be her breakfast for the day. (Like early rising, grad students and nutritious meals were not a compatible combination.) “I rummaged a bit in the basket with all the snapshots he’d taken on STEWie runs… Someone must have plugged an air freshener into the room, because everything smelled like Thanksgiving… Then I found myself by the musical instruments shelf—the Music Department students had put everything back in the wrong place, but that wasn’t the problem. The Babylonian rattle, the Portuguese castanets, the Hawaiian nose flute, they were all there, but the didgeridoo from Dr. Mooney’s Australia far-time trip wasn’t. I took a good look around the office but the didgeridoo was definitely not there. It’s not like you can miss it, it’s pretty large, right? The movers said they hadn’t seen it or packed it away.”

  “Maybe someone from the Music Department kept it a little longer. I’m sure they’ll return it.”

  “I asked. They said they didn’t take it.”

  Now that she mentioned it, I didn’t remember the didgeridoo among the instruments showcased at Dr. Mooney’s memorial.

  She added, “I was hoping we could keep it as a memento in the grad student office—not to play, of course, just to have—though I don’t know who I should ask about that.”

  “Dr. Mooney left everything to the school in his will,” I said. “I’m sure something can be arranged.”

  Abigail grinned at me and got to her feet. “Thanks, Julia. Can I have one more of these?” she asked, hand hovering above the open cookie jar.

  “Have several.”

  From the doorway, she added, “And you’ll find out who might have the didgeridoo, right?”

  “I’m taking the budgetary forms around the buildings today. I’ll ask around.”

  After resolving a travel visa issue for an exchange student who was arriving from China for the optimistically named spring semester (which started mid-January) and rearranging a pair of tenure review meetings that had come into conflict scheduling-wise, I was ready to tackle the next big item on my to-do list, the budget for the next school year, due the first day of the new year. While the details had mostly been hammered out in meetings, I had yet to receive the necessary paperwork from a handful of professors and research staff. This state of affairs wasn’t unusual in the least, and would easily be resolved. Winter break meant that everyone would be holed up in their labs or offices. I donned my goose-down jacket, picked up a stack of blank Supply, Laboratory Space, and Office Space Request forms, and slid them into my bag along with several black-ink ballpoint pens, which were the best for filling out forms in triplicate. Prepared for my mission, I headed out.

  The building doors closed behind me as I paused to slide on my gloves and let my eyes adjust to the sunlight. Winter was the brightest of the fo
ur St. Sunniva seasons—the sun’s rays were reflected to summer strength by the freshly fallen snow, and the lake was like a large, round mirror, its surface a solid block of ice. (The 270-acre lake sat firmly on the official list of Minnesota’s ten thousand, though Dr. Braga of the Department of Earth Sciences had recently informed me that there were actually 11,842 lakes in the state.) On its shores, the stately birch and oak trees that shaded the brick Hypatia of Alexandria House in the summer held a reminder that spring was very much not just around the corner, their bare brown branches stark next to their evergreen cousins. The cold was character-building. At least it was a dry cold, I thought as I reached for my phone to turn it off so that any calls would go directly to voice mail. Then I took off a glove and had another go at it (the phone tended to ignore any activity made by gloved fingers). Before heading to work, I’d donned my “astronaut” boots—the warm, puffy, white ones with treaded soles that Penny Lind had both envied and hated—in anticipation of the walking I’d be doing around the science buildings. The only one that would require driving was Astronomy, which was located north of the lake, on the biggest hill on campus.

  I let a bundled-up student on a bicycle pass me, then set a course for the Earth Sciences building, the one nearest to the boat dock. From the dock, counterclockwise, the path brought visitors first to the Science Quad, then the Humanities Quad; the path then touched the south parking lot and continued on to the School of Law and the School of Medicine, known as the Law-Med Quad; then came the fourth, unnamed quadrant which housed the Coffey Library, the History Museum, and student housing, after which the path came full circle, ending back at the boat dock. Today a group of students who’d stayed on campus during the break were playing ice hockey next to the dock.