Two Days Gone

by Randall Silvis

  “He’s a dickhead.”

  “How so?”

  “In every way so. He is the epitome of academic paranoia. Thinks the whole department is out to get him just because he’s Romanian. Because he has an accent. Because his gypsy grandfather was hanged at Buchenwald. Or so he claims anyway.”

  “And are you?”

  “Am I…?”

  “You and Professor Huston. Were you out to get him?”

  “We were out to get rid of him, yes. But only because he’s fucking incompetent. He’s a blight on the entire department.”

  “And that’s why he was denied tenure?”

  “He never should have been hired in the first place. He should be in a padded room somewhere.”

  DeMarco smiled. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small notepad, looked at what was written there, put it away again. “So it was you and Dr. Huston who led the vote against him.”

  “He’s not a doctor.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Tom. He doesn’t have a PhD.”

  “But you do.”

  “MFA, UC San Diego. PhD, University of Denver.”

  DeMarco nodded.

  “I mean, that has never mattered to me. The guy’s written two bestsellers.”

  “I thought it was four books,” DeMarco said.

  “Right, four, same as me. But only two of them, the last two, had significant sales. The first one barely sold at all. It’s my favorite though. For some reason I’ve always liked it the best.”

  “You’ve written four books too?”

  “It’s poetry, of course. Small presses. Not for the masses.”

  DeMarco nodded. He remembered what Huston had written. It’s easy to read between the lines once you get the hang of it.

  “So this Conescu,” DeMarco said. “Would he be capable, in your opinion? Of what happened to the Huston family?”

  “Are you saying Tom didn’t do it?”

  “I’m asking which of the two would be more capable.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” the poet said. “More capable? There’s no question. Not in my mind anyway. I mean Tom isn’t perfect… He has his shortcomings, sure, just like everybody else. But something like that? Wiping out the whole family? I just can’t fathom it.”

  “What shortcomings?”

  “Department wise mostly. He just wasn’t terribly concerned about the business of the department. If it wasn’t his family, his students, or his own writing, he had to be nudged, you know?”

  DeMarco thought, His own writing?

  “So you think Conescu might have been involved somehow?”

  DeMarco smiled. “We don’t know.”

  “But you think it’s a possibility?”

  “At this point, everything is a possibility.” DeMarco put his hands on his knees. “I should let you get back to your lesson plans.” He stood. “Thanks for taking the time to speak with me.”

  “Anytime, honestly. I’m more than happy to help.”

  DeMarco paused before descending the stairs. “By the way, just for the record, where were you last Saturday night?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Standard procedure.”

  “Well, let me think. I guess I was here.”

  “You guess?”

  “I mean I was. I was here all night.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Here? Just me and my muse.”

  “She have a name?”

  “I call her the Bitch. But it was just the two of us all Saturday night. I was in the bedroom at my computer until, I don’t know, well after midnight. Revising a manuscript for a chapbook contest.”

  “So if I have my resident computer geek dig into your computer and pull out all the time signatures on your hard drive, he’ll be able to confirm that?”

  A muscle twitched in Denton’s jaw. “They can do that? I mean, the computer keeps track like that?”

  “To the minute,” DeMarco said. He had no idea if it was true or not. He hoped it was. He smiled at the poet.

  “No problem,” Denton finally answered. “Absolutely.”

  DeMarco nodded, then headed down the stairs.

  Denton remained at the top. “Could you tell me though? Do you guys have any idea where Tom has disappeared to?”

  DeMarco did not look back. “Have a good day, Professor.”

  Twenty-One

  DeMarco stood in the center of the communal living room of apartment 312 North Hall. The girl who had answered the door, then went to 312C to alert Heather Ramsey of his presence, now stood with her back to him at the kitchen sink as she washed the same juice glass over and over again. When Heather came into the living room, the girl at the sink shut off the faucet and meticulously dried every millimeter of the glass.

  “I just have a few questions is all,” DeMarco said to Heather Ramsey.

  “I need to be in class in twelve minutes. It’s an eight-minute walk from here.”

  “Professor Denton’s class?”

  She nodded. “So I really don’t have any time right now…”

  “I’ll walk with you,” DeMarco said. He let her cross ahead of him and go out the door, then he turned back to the kitchen. The other girl had already moved away from the sink. On her way to the front window, DeMarco thought. The sound of his voice brought her up short.

  He said, “Could you tell me how frequently Miss Ramsey doesn’t return to her apartment at night?”

  The girl was small and reed thin, her eyes huge. “Uh…” she said.

  “Is it every night or just now and then?”

  “I don’t really…keep track, you know?”

  “Could you tell me what the university policy is concerning professors sleeping with their students?”

  Her eyes widened even farther. “I guess I don’t…really know anything…about that?”

  “Thanks very much,” DeMarco said.

  Outside, he cut across the grass to catch up with Heather Ramsey. She took long, adamant strides and walked as if leaning into a wind. Her hands were empty, fingers opening and closing as she walked. As he came up beside her, she offered a tight smile and said, “I saw you in Campbell Hall, right? You went into Professor Huston’s office?”

  DeMarco said, “And I saw you sneaking out of Professor Denton’s house this morning, right?”

  She cut him a quick look, then jerked her gaze forward again. Her gait stiffened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s not what your roommate said.”

  She shook her head and blew out an angry breath. “I hate this place.”

  “Are you the reason his wife left him? Or was it the girl before you?”

  Her pale face reddened.

  “Has he told you that he’s still sleeping with his wife?”

  When she looked at him this time, there were tears in her eyes.

  He said, “You need to talk to me, Heather.”

  Her pace slowed. She cast a glance about at the other students hurrying to their classes. None was more interested in getting to class than in trying to ascertain with a glance why she was being escorted by a state trooper. In a voice barely louder than a whisper, she asked, “What does any of this have to do with Professor Huston?”

  “That’s what I need to figure out. And that’s why you need to talk to me.”

  “I’m going to be late for class.”

  “You don’t use books in this class?” he asked. “You’re not even carrying a pencil, Heather.”

  Her pace slowed even more. Finally she came to a halt. “Everybody’s watching.”

  “Just smile,” he told her. “See? Big smile for everybody to see.”

  She tried one out but to DeMarco it looked more like a grimace. “Good,” he told her.
“So what’s that place over there? With the picnic tables under the awning?”

  “Student union,” she said. “The patio.”

  “Can we get a cup of coffee there?”

  She blew out another breath. “Whatever.”

  • • •

  Loud music blared from inside the union, an indecipherable clash of bass thumps and slurred hip-hop lyrics. DeMarco emerged onto the patio carrying two paper cups of coffee, set the hazelnut latte in front of her, kept the black dark roast Columbian for himself as he took a seat beside her at the scarred picnic table. She sat with her legs beneath the tabletop and faced the Union’s smoked-glass wall. He straddled the bench and faced her.

  “That music in there gives me a headache,” he said.

  She nodded.

  He sipped his coffee.

  She said, “How do you know he’s still sleeping with his wife?”

  “He told me they were dating.”

  “Really?” she asked. Then, “But just dating, right?”

  He looked out across the campus. The lawns and sidewalks were mostly empty now, students in their classes, in their dorms, maybe two or three in the library. He said, “After I saw you this morning, before I came here, I made some inquiries about your poetry professor. This last one was his third marriage, did you know that? He’s got four kids to the first two wives.”

  “He told me all that.”

  “Did he tell you he’s still sleeping with the last one?”

  “You’re just saying that. You don’t know.”

  “I do know that the dean has spoken to him twice, unofficially, because of complaints from the parents of previous students. Officially the university can’t do anything because the girls, like you, were all at least eighteen. He’s been at the university now for, what, nine years? My guess is he averages one or two coeds a year.”

  Her tears left small black circles on the weathered tabletop. “He says I’m special.”

  DeMarco laid his hand atop hers. “You are,” he told her. “But not to him.”

  Twenty-Two

  Thomas Huston awoke shivering. An hour or so after midnight, he had curled into a tight ball in a small room on the second floor of the university president’s new mansion. The ten-thousand-square-foot building had been under construction since March and the ribbon-cutting ceremony was not scheduled until May of next year. All four stories had been framed in, but there were no windows installed anywhere, no wiring or plumbing except beneath the concrete of the basement and garage floors.

  Just inside the basement entrance at the rear of the mansion, workers had stored some of their materials: boxes of floor tiles, rolls of electrical wire, a cardboard box full of electrical wall boxes and plugs, a stack of two-by-fours, and, taking up at least a third of the spacious room, a dozen or more rolls of Tyvek insulation. Slung over the stack of two-by-fours was a dirty chambray shirt, stiff with dried perspiration. Huston pulled the work shirt over his short-sleeved knit shirt, buttoned it to the neck, rolled down the sleeves, and buttoned them too. The shirt, like the dirty quilted jacket he pulled over top of it, was an extra large, but he did not mind how it looked on him, and the odor it gave off was no more offensive than his own.

  Then Huston crept upstairs to look around, wincing at every creak of the subflooring. Illumination from the sodium vapor streetlights flooded in through the open windows at the front of the house, so he kept to the rear, tried always to keep a wall between himself and the front windows, and ducked quickly past open doorways.

  On the second floor, he found a small interior room with only one opening, a door that faced the center of a much larger room. A walk-in closet, he told himself. Off the master bedroom. He huddled up in a corner of this room, pulled his bags of groceries close, and tried to sleep. But all he could think about were the evenings he and Claire had spent in unfinished buildings like this one.

  During his last two summers in college, he had worked on a construction crew but had lived with his parents. Claire O’Patchen lived with hers in a village six miles away. The young couple had tired quickly of making love twisted and cramped in the backseat of Huston’s battered Volvo parked along the side of a dirt lane, of pulling apart with every flash of headlights. Then one night, in search of a more secluded place to park, he drove past the construction site where he and the crew were building a two-story colonial.

  In mid-June, he and Claire made love on a sleeping bag in the cement-block basement. The first night went so well, despite the hard surface, that he took to carrying a sleeping bag and backpack in his car, of filling the backpack with a bottle of wine and an assortment of midnight snacks. By late August, he and Claire were spending most of their nights together beneath an open window on the second floor. Back at college in the fall, he quickly familiarized himself with every building in town under construction, places much more private than the frat house, much less expensive than a motel. Places where their only real concern was how far through the night Claire’s cries and moans might carry.

  Now he faced the corner of the closet and smelled the fresh wood, the scent of open air. He pulled his knees to his chest, squeezed himself into a ball, but he could not squeeze out the ache, the heavy, hollow anguish.

  The chambray shirt and quilted jacket seemed to have no effect against the chill night air. He convulsed with sobs and he shivered with cold. After a half hour of lying huddled against the wall, his body stiff with the tension of violent shivering, he climbed to his feet and made his way back to the basement. He carried a roll of the Tyvek up to the second floor, unrolled it and buried himself beneath the foil liner. He pulled the bags of groceries close and held them tucked against his stomach, something to wrap himself around.

  Somewhere before dawn, he awoke enshrouded in gray. He awoke thinking he still held the knife in his hand, and he recoiled from it and flung the knife away, rolled away from it and felt the strangely soft obstacle at his back, batted and kicked at the Tyvek and sent the bags of food scattering, kicked and flailed to get clear of the insulation until he had rolled hard against the opposite wall. There he lay blinking, breathing hard. His eyes felt scratched and sore, his throat scraped raw, body chilled to the bone.

  Gradually, the previous night came back to him, bits and pieces coalescing. He was in the president’s new mansion. It was morning, maybe six, six thirty. Construction workers would be showing up soon. Traffic on the streets. Too many eyes.

  Quickly, he gathered up and bagged the food and made his way down to the basement. He peeked out the rear entrance. The world outside was deep in gray. But he knew these fogs, had moved through them most of his life. In an hour, the world would be clear again. He had to get back to the woods. Plan his next move. Today is Wednesday, he told himself. Tomorrow night I can see Annabel.

  He pulled the ball cap down low on his forehead. Checked the pocket of the chambray shirt to make sure the mirrored sunglasses were still there. Patted his wallet. Then he picked up the grocery bags and stepped outside, moved stiffly but quickly down the gentle slope of the long backyard. Before long, he broke into a trot, a shadow through the fog. I need to start making my way to Annabel, he told himself. There’s a long way to go yet. Miles to go. Miles and miles before I sleep.

  Twenty-Three

  For the second time in the past four minutes, DeMarco knocked on the door of Professor Conescu’s office in Campbell Hall. The first time, three minutes earlier, there had been no reply, so DeMarco went to the English Department office and asked the secretary when might be the best time to catch the professor in.

  “Any time between eight and six,” she said. “Maybe even later, for all I know. I leave at six and he’s always still here.”

  “What days?”

  “Any day. I’m here five days a week and he’s always here. He teaches Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at ten, eleven, two, and three, but the rest of the time he’s in his
office. All day on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

  DeMarco looked at his wristwatch: 1:17.

  “I knocked but he didn’t answer.”

  “Oh, he’s in there,” the secretary said. “Trust me. He’s always in there.”

  So this time DeMarco knocked and knocked again. Every fifteen seconds he knocked three quick raps against the door, each series louder than the last. And finally a growling voice from behind the door demanded, “Who?”

  “Sergeant Ryan DeMarco of the Pennsylvania State Police.”

  Silence for another ten seconds. Then, just as DeMarco was about to rap on the door again, the dead bolt clicked. He waited for the door to be pulled open, but the metal knob did not turn. He reached for it, gave it a twist, and threw the door open.

  Conescu had organized his office so that the only part visible from the doorway was a narrow corridor leading to the window six feet away. To the left of the door stood a wall of metal bookcases. The books were crammed in vertically and horizontally, books on top of books. To the right, two metal filing cabinets, each five feet tall and with more books piled atop them, blocked the view into the office.

  DeMarco stepped forward to the edge of the cabinets, turned to his right in the narrow opening between the front of the cabinets and the forced-air heating unit beneath the window, and there, crammed into the corner with his desk facing the wall, sat Conescu, big and slouching and messy haired. He sat with his head cocked toward a filing cabinet, his gaze locked onto the gray metal. The knuckles of both hands rested against the edge of his computer keyboard. On the screen was a text document crammed with words from margin to margin.

  “I apologize for the interruption,” DeMarco said. “I just need a few minutes of your time.”

  Conescu sat motionless for a few seconds, then opened his hands, laid his fingers atop the keyboard. He typed furiously for a couple of lines, said, “Too busy right now. Come back at three o’clock maybe,” and hammered at the keys again.

  “You teach at three o’clock,” DeMarco said. He came the rest of the way into the room and took up a position to Conescu’s left, sat on the edge of the metal desk, his body only inches from the professor. Conescu stiffened, which made DeMarco smile. “So now will work better.”