The Darkest Place

by Daniel Judson

  He rode east on Sunrise Highway, then made the right turn onto Tuckahoe Road. He followed that narrow street along the eastern edge of the campus, driving from north to south. He passed the gym, thought briefly of his general lack of activity, then pushed it from his mind. A half mile down Tuckahoe Road, Kane turned into the parking lot of the Fine Arts building. He parked. His office was in the Humanities wing of the single-story building, but on the other side. He could not see his window from the parking lot. And those waiting for him in his office couldn’t see him.

  He climbed out and hurried through the cold and entered the building. Dolan was waiting for him inside the door. Kane stopped short, startled at the sight of him. Dolan was slightly built, as tall as Kane, maybe a little taller. He wore bad suits and polished black shoes, was the head of campus security, took his job seriously, made certain everyone knew that he took it seriously. He had held his position for twentysomething years, held it when Kane was a student fifteen years back. Dolan didn’t like Kane then, though Kane right now couldn’t remember why. First he couldn’t remember how he got the scratches, and now this. Was his mind slipping? Too much drink, not enough sleep, grief eating away his gray matter. His first thought was that it had been a run-in over something Kane had written about Dolan in the college newspaper, something meant to be funny, something that was funny, that everyone but Dolan thought was funny. But no, wait, it wasn’t that. It didn’t start there. There was a small stone outbuilding behind the gym, out by the skeet shooting range. It had been a chapel, back when the college was a working plantation a few hundred years ago. It was abandoned, off limits. Very few students even knew about it. Kane used to go there with girls, sneak in with them. Break in was what Dolan had called it, slapping Kane with a semester of probation. Then the article came. And still, all these years later, Dolan unwilling to forget.

  Dolan’s eyes went straight to the scratches on Kane’s face. He let his stare linger there, taking this chance to let his disdain show. Never miss a chance to do that, you old fucker, Kane thought. Then Dolan turned and led Kane down the hall, as if Kane didn’t know the way to his own office. He saw that his door was open. When he was near enough to see into it, he glimpsed the two men waiting inside. Across the hall was Mercer’s office. Kane glanced toward it, maybe a little panic in the way his head turned, with a snap. Had Dolan seen that? The guy had eyes in the back of his head. Mercer wasn’t behind his desk. He was sitting on the ragged couch that faced it. He never sat on that couch. It was for visitors. Their eyes met for a moment, and then Kane was ushered into his own office by Dolan. Dolan pulled the door closed and stood beside it like a guard, his arms folded.

  Kane remembered the article now. While he was a student the college had become part of the Long Island University system. The position of college president had been vacated and replaced by a chancellor. Kane had quipped that it was a good thing that the “little man in the bad suit” hadn’t gotten the position because one fanatical chancellor in human history was enough.

  Kane’s office was small, barely enough room for the desk and two chairs and bookshelves that lined two of the walls, let alone four grown men. Without enough seats to accommodate them, they stood—Kane just inside the door, Dolan behind him, and the two detectives in front of him, beside Kane’s desk. They stood with their backs to the single window, their gray overcoats blending nicely with the gray sky beyond. The detectives introduced themselves. Ligowski and Donahue, both in their fifties, both healthy-looking men. They could have been undertakers, by their dress and their manner. Still, Kane knew they were cops. They had that air of authority, of no-nonsense courtesy. Ligowski had a round face and large head covered with short salt-and-pepper hair. Donahue had a thinner face and a small mouth with slight lips. Deep creases cut through his pale skin. Maybe a fellow drinker, Kane thought. The room smelled already of three different aftershave lotions. Joining those scents now was the raw smell of Kane’s sweat.

  Ligowski and Donahue each studied the side of Kane’s face as he shook hands with them.

  “You’re a professor here?” Ligowski started. Donahue removed a notebook from a pocket inside his overcoat and opened it, ready to write.

  “I’m an instructor,” Kane corrected.

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m an instructor, not a professor. I only have a bachelor’s degree. Technically, I’m a visiting lecturer.”

  Ligowski nodded. “And you teach writing? Creative writing?”

  “And a course called Forms of Fiction. Also, Intro to Film.”

  Ligowski smiled. “Nice work. And you’re a writer, too, right?”

  Kane nodded.

  “Books?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Published?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “Working on another?”

  Kane said nothing, wondering why the cop cared, unless of course, like so many other people Kane had met, this cop thought he had a story that needed to be told, that he himself couldn’t tell, that maybe Kane would be interested in telling for him.

  Donahue swung in then. His voice was hoarse. Maybe the cold, maybe too much bourbon.

  “We understand that a young man named Larry Foster was one of your students,” he said.

  Kane remembered the name, but just barely. No face came to claim it. Kane knew that the kid had been in his afternoon writing workshop, though. He could remember that much, and told the detectives that.

  “Did you know him well?” Donahue said.

  “No, not really.”

  “What does ‘not really’ mean?”

  “I guess it means I didn’t know him at all.”

  “Did you notice that he had been missing from class the past two days?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t take attendance. And the workshop he’s in only meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays for an hour and a half. And since today’s Tuesday . . .” Kane didn’t feel the need to complete that sentence.

  Donahue nodded, writing something down. It seemed to Kane by the amount of writing Donahue was doing that he was probably writing something more than what Kane had just said.

  Ligowski took another turn. “Do you remember seeing him on Thursday?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t really remember if he was there or not.” Donahue was still writing away.

  “Do you remember when the last time you saw Larry was?”

  “No.” Kane hoped again for a face to place with the name, but still nothing came.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, Mr. Kane, but Larry Foster was found dead last night.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?” Donahue asked.

  “Mercer told me.”

  “Who?”

  From behind Kane, Dolan spoke. “Dr. Armstrong Mercer. He’s the head of the Humanities department. I asked him to get Kane on the phone, to make sure he was coming in today.” Dolan’s tone was that of a man trying to be helpful, till the end anyway, when the subject of Kane’s attendance came up. Then he sounded like what he was: a little man with a grudge eager to point out shortcomings. As if Kane’s needed to be pointed out to anyone.

  “Don’t you normally teach today?” Donahue said.

  “Yeah, I do. But I was running late.”

  Ligowski spoke next. His tone changed, he was acting more casually now, as if the official part of their visit had come to an end with the breaking of the bad news. Just men now, trying to figure out what happened and looking for all the help we can get, was what he was trying to convey. But it didn’t make Kane feel any more at ease.

  “We were wondering if you had any of Foster’s writings around your office here, anything that might help us understand him.”

  “What do you mean? What do you need to understand?”

  “It’s how we approach cases of possible suicide.”

  “You think he killed himself?”r />
  “We just need to cover all the angles. You can understand that.”

  Kane thought about it, then nodded and said, “I don’t keep students’ writings.”

  “You have to grade them, don’t you?”

  “The students hand me their papers, I give the pages to the Humanities office with a work order. From there they go to Office Services, where copies are made for the number of students in that particular class. When I get the copies back, I hand them out to the class and give the original back to the student. From there the student reads aloud and we all make comments as a group.”

  “Could any of Foster’s writings be in the Humanities office, or out being copied?”

  “It’s possible. I don’t know.”

  Dolan said, “I can check into that for you.” Kane had almost forgotten that the man was behind him, listening, watching.

  Donahue wrote something in his notebook, something of length. Ligowski was staring at Kane’s scratches. Kane waited. It didn’t take long at all.

  “How’d you get those?” Ligowski said.

  Donahue looked up from his pad then.

  “It’s a long story.”

  Ligowski smiled. “We always have time for a good story.” There was nothing at all friendly about his smile.

  “It’s nothing, really,” Kane said.

  “Lady friend, maybe?”

  Kane said nothing.

  “They look fresh. Were you with her last night?”

  Kane hesitated, then said, “Yeah.”

  “Care to give us a name?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s none of your business.”

  Ligowski shrugged, smiling again. “Okay. If you say so. Is there anything more you can tell us about the Foster boy? His mood of late. Maybe his writing was on the morose side, something like that.”

  “No, not really.”

  “Not sure who he is?” Ligowski offered.

  Kane said nothing. It seemed to him suddenly that the less he said, the better.

  “Big class?”

  Kane shrugged. “Twenty kids.”

  “I have a hard time keeping my own kids’ names straight sometimes,” Ligowski said.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Donahue flipped back several pages in his notebook. He didn’t seem all that interested in what Ligowski was saying.

  “I was wondering, do we have your right home address?” he asked. “We went by your place this morning but you weren’t there.”

  Donahue found the page he was looking for and tilted the notebook so Kane could see what was written. Kane told him that the address was correct.

  “You said you were running late,” Donahue said.

  “Yeah.”

  “But you weren’t home.”

  “That’s right.”

  “We were there maybe a half hour ago. We asked your neighbor, and she said she hadn’t seen you around in several days. You take off like that, she said, for days at a stretch.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  Donahue shrugged. “Care to tell us where you go?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Ligowski was still smiling. “I believe he goes elsewhere, Donny,” Ligowski said. “The French have a word for it, I think, though I’ll be damned if I know what it is.” He extended his hand. In it was a business card. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Kane. If you think of something that might help us, please don’t hesitate to call, okay?”

  Kane waited, then took the card without looking at it. Ligowski nodded once, and immediately Dolan opened the door. He held it as the two men filed past and out into the hall. After that Dolan paused, looking at Kane.

  The hate was there, so clear. Kane just looked at Dolan. There was nothing at all to say, or so Kane thought.

  “You might want to wash before you come in,” Dolan said. “You smell of cunt.”

  Then he was gone, following the detectives down the hall. Kane looked across the hall, toward Mercer’s office. But Mercer wasn’t sitting on his couch now. He was nowhere to be seen. Kane waited till he heard the door at the end of the hallway open and shut, then left his office and went to the men’s room. He ran cold water in the sink and splashed it on his face, then looked at his reflection. The scratches shimmered.

  After a moment he started to wash his hands with warm water and soap. As he did this the door opened and someone entered. Kane didn’t look to see who it was, but soon enough someone was standing at the sink beside him. Kane didn’t need to look to know that it was Mercer. He could tell by the thermos Mercer began to rinse out.

  Mercer was almost sixty now, but with the exception of the deep wrinkles in his face, no one would have known that by looking at the man. He was solidly built, had gotten that way by working labor jobs on his summers off from teaching. Sometimes he worked road crews, other times he signed on with a contractor and did construction work. His deep wrinkles were the result of decades of summers in the hot sun, digging ditches or hammering at something. His thick, dark hair always seemed to be in need of a cut, hanging often in front of steady blue eyes. He seldom wore anything to class other than flannel shirts and jeans and work boots, and he carried his papers and books around in a military-style knapsack. But you could get away with that kind of behavior when you’d earned your PhD by the time you were twenty-three, and when your personal life wasn’t so obviously set on self-destruct. Still, Mercer wasn’t a Boy Scout. His fourth wife, Joanne, wasn’t much more than a third his age and had been a student in the MFA program only a few years back. Mercer had been her adviser, and they had gotten married not long after she graduated. The administration looked the other way, if it had even looked at all.

  “I think you did well enough in there,” Mercer said.

  “You could hear that?”

  He nodded. “A closed door doesn’t do much in this building. Dolan smells blood.”

  “I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the guy’s a Nazi.”

  “He’s a clean freak, at least. But people listen to him here.”

  “That’s scary.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me. He wasn’t all that fond of the idea of you being hired. You know that. He almost queered the whole thing.”

  “You know why, right?”

  Mercer nodded. “I know your history with him. The guy has no concept of right and wrong beyond what he learned in Sunday school. If he had his way, everyone who wanted to work here would have to submit to a drug test and baptism. He’s a born-again fool, but you don’t want to play into his hands. That’d make you an even bigger fool.”

  Kane turned off the water. He was still staring at his reflection, not so much at the scratches now as the look in his eyes, the sadness, the despair, always there—except when he and Meg surrendered to their need to collide, and then of course, at least from what Meg has told him, something else entirely.

  “What are you telling me, Doc?”

  Mercer gave his thermos a final rinse, then stepped to the paper towel dispenser beside the sink, tore off a piece, and began to dry the outside of the thermos.

  “I know what you’ve been through. Believe me, I know. But you’re going to need to walk a straight line for a while, or at least a straighter one. You’re going to have to do that if you want to keep your job.”

  Kane looked at him. “I take it you’ve heard something.”

  Mercer shrugged that off. “I don’t need to hear anything. I’ve been here almost thirty years. I know how it goes. I’ve seen it happen before. You’re a good teacher, Deke, and the kids like you. But there’s more to it than that, and you know it. You know it but you just don’t seem to care.”

  “I care, Doc.”

  “There’s what people say, and then there’s what people do. You don’t want to end up like Bill Young, do you?”

  Kane thought about that. Young was his favorite teacher back when Kane was a student at the college. Young had been his advi
ser, the first published novelist Kane had ever met. Five novels published, reputation established. Kane was in awe. But then, what, insanity? A desire for chaos certainly. And where was the man now? Teaching at the community college in Riverhead, something like that, last anyone knew. All but slipped off the face of the earth. Not that Kane wouldn’t mind that himself, not really, not now. To disappear, from others, from yourself. Could a man who never existed really have lost anything? If a tree fell in the woods . . .

  “Is it that bad?” Kane said. Young’s self-destruction was epic, and more or less common knowledge, out there for all to see. Kane had watched it, had, or so he liked to think, done what he could to stop it, or at least slow it. And, now, here, being talked to the way Young had certainly been talked to, and more than once.

  Mercer shrugged again. “Why didn’t you tell the cops the name of your lady friend?”

  Kane hesitated, then said, “You know why.”

  “And she’s the one who gave you those scratches?”

  Another hesitation. “Yeah.”

  “You don’t sound so sure.”

  “Apparently, there are some holes in my memory regarding last night. Hers, too.”

  Mercer thought about that. “You might want to stay away from her for a while, Deke. Get a good night’s sleep and lay off the drinking. Normally I’d tell you to go home, looking like you do, but you need to finish out the semester right. You know what I mean? You need to show them that you can do it, show them you want to keep this job.”

  Kane nodded. He heard it all, heard the sense in it. Still, Meg beckoned. It was all Kane could do to think of something other than her.

  “Thanks, Doc,” he said. It sounded hollow even to his own ears.

  “Listen, you’re welcome to stay with Joanne and me. For as long as you need. She’d love to keep an eye on you. She worries about you. You know she loved your books. She’s read them several times. Loves how you write women.”

  “That’s good to hear. But I’ll be fine. I pay enough for my apartment, I might as well use it, right?” Still, he had no intention of going there. It was cold and dark and lonely. There was enough of that inside of Kane, he didn’t need his surroundings to be that way too.