Mr. 8

by David J. Thirteen

  He looked over at her and she glanced up at him and laughed. He joined her, chuckling over the ridiculousness of the young men’s drunken antics.

  “Students of yours?” she asked.

  “Never saw them before. But I think it’s safe to say somebody has just discovered beer.”

  Linda laughed again. She wiped an imagined tear from her eye. “We’re getting old. It doesn’t seem that long ago we were walking home from some bar with our friends, shouting and joking. Only we’d usually do it at two in the morning. I’m pretty sure our neighbors on Mercer Street hated us.”

  “Yes, but now we’re respectable country folk.”

  He looked over the trees in the park. Each bare, black limb was wrapped with the small white Christmas bulbs, making them stand out against the charcoal sky.

  “Remember the first time we came here?”

  The wistful way Linda asked the question prompted Denton’s memory to superimpose the way the park looked on that summer day over the scene in front of them.

  “How could I forget?” They were barely settled in the house, but Linda was anxious to see the Farmer’s Market that was set up in the Square on Saturdays.

  “It was so hot that day,” she said. “I’ll always remember what a revelation those vegetables were. Farm fresh, what a difference from the city.”

  “Yeah, but we bought way too much.” They ended up with more than they could eat, and a week later their fridge was filled with rotting produce.

  “I’ll never forget those blueberry muffins.” Denton glanced up at the sky as if a platter of the baked goods was floating there.

  Linda rolled her eyes, playfully with exaggerated annoyance. “You and those muffins.”

  They’d been the best he’d ever had. Baked by some local farmer’s wife, the taste of them seemed enough to justify the move on that August morning.

  After touring the Farmer’s Market, they walked around the shops surrounding the Square, where they ended up buying a handblown glass vase. A little past noon, they settled into a booth at The Bee and Bonnet Pub for lunch, with their purchases piled next to them.

  “So, are you still mad about coming here,” he teased.

  At first, Linda hadn’t been very excited about the prospect of moving all the way out to Bexhill, but it was a stretch to say that she’d been angry. She knew that Denton couldn’t easily turn down the position. He only had a limited term appointment at Columbia and Milton was offering full tenure. If his book hadn’t been on the non-fiction bestseller list, there was no question that tenure would be unattainable for many years. The college may have been out in the sticks, but it was prestigious, and the job was almost too good to be true.

  Linda’s outlook was much improved by the time the moving truck was loaded. When the subject first came up, she couldn’t bear the thought of quitting her job at her SoHo gallery and leaving her friends. But after months of hearing them tell her they would kill to be in the country and have more time for their art, she began to look at it as a blessing. Also, she had discovered that Bexhill had a small but thriving art community of its own.

  “I’m still a little mad,” she teased back. “You’re going to have to do an awful lot to make it up to me.”

  They ordered a couple of pints that arrived ice cold. After taking a large drink to cool off, Linda said, “This town really is great. So quaint. We have to come to the Market every Saturday.”

  “Alright.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  And they had, right up until January. They bought all their produce at the Market, until it closed down in November. Then they did all their Christmas shopping there, avoiding the malls. But after New Year’s, the bitter cold hit, and the thought of walking around the same old shops again just didn’t seem very appealing. Since then, they went much more sporadically. They had become true residents of the town: Market Square was more for the tourists than the locals. It was where parents who visited their kids at school went to buy souvenirs to bring back home. Or where leafers, up from Manhattan or Boston, went to get some country crafts. Although it was hard not to feel drawn to it at Christmas, it was undeniably a special time of year.

  They reached the church and stood in front of the giant tree. It was a fresh fir from one of the nearby farms. A small sign at its base stated, “Donated by Ripsman Arbors.” Other than the lights and the golden star on top, there were no other decorations. They stood there, with their arms around each other, admiring it for a few moments. Then the rain began to fall.

  It came slowly, in unenthusiastic drops. Denton wiped the first few off of his glasses, but it soon became futile.

  They rushed back, cutting through the park. Halfway across, the skies opened up, and it became a downpour.

  Denton unlocked the car with his fob from ten yards away. They were running by that point, even though they were both already soaked. Linda jumped into the car, but Denton paused, one foot through the door.

  He stood frozen watching four squad cars barreling down Union Street one after the other, with their sirens blaring, the water that had pooled on the pavement spraying up from their tires. When they were gone, he sat down and closed the door. It had happened so quickly, Linda didn’t seem to notice his hesitation.

  Once again the night’s peace had been interrupted.

  Another victim of Mr. 8? Denton wondered, a knot of dread forming in his stomach.

  Chapter 3

  A 75% Student

  DENTON REED SPENT Sunday afternoon in the den marking assignments. It was his undergrads’ last project before the final exam. This was the assignment that always elicited the most audible groans when he announced it.

  The students were supposed to use the techniques from the course to examine one room of a house and evaluate a total stranger. It had to be three to five thousand words and have photos documenting the conclusions. But no one ever wanted to ask someone they didn’t know if they could poke around their bedroom and take pictures, so it was also the project where Denton encountered the most falsehoods and fabrications.

  At least now, none of the students argued they couldn’t do it because they didn’t have access to a camera, like when he first started teaching. The cell phones glued to their hands solved that problem.

  Over the years, Denton often considered changing or scrapping the assignment altogether, even though of all the projects, it was the best indicator of how well they had absorbed the material. Instead of getting rid of it, he had developed a lenient grading policy. He chose to ignore the lies and the attempts to fool him and marked them as if the students had done the work properly. And he soothed his conscience by giving bonus marks to the few honest students.

  It had already been a long, tedious day of wading through the papers, when he opened up Stephen Kaling’s document on his computer. Kaling was a 75% student; he always scored an average grade. He put in just enough work to show that he was smart but never enough to do well. A quick look over it and Denton was certain that Stephen knew his subject.

  There was always something that gave it away. Typically, it was by being too intuitive about the evidence in front of them. The line that jumped out at Denton was: “The copy of Henry James’s novel, The Golden Bowl, on her nightstand clearly indicates that she is an English major.”

  A single novel was hardly indication of much and was conclusive proof of nothing. However, if you knew the person was studying literature, it was likely the only thing in the room that could be used to mention it.

  At least, he hadn’t actually staged examples like some of the others had done. But then, that probably would have been too much of an effort for someone like Kaling.

  He read through the entire three thousand and seven words from beginning to end. He switched over to the grading system and entered 75. He was about to close Kaling’s document, when something in the la
st photo caught his eye. The picture was of the subject’s desk, close on a row of neatly lined up pens, to attest to her orderly personality. Slightly blurry and out of focus, in the background, there was a laptop. The top of it was covered in stickers. From the angle that the photo was taken, the stickers appeared to form an infinity symbol.

  With his heart rate rising, Denton went back through the project, until he came across another photo of the desk in the background. He zoomed in on it and saw the same pattern. Now unmistakable from the new angle, it was a figure eight. Although indistinct in the enlarged image, Denton recognized banana labels from various brands forming half of one loop. The rest of them had been gathered from random sources and were mostly indecipherable in their pixelated state. He did identify the square, blue sticker that Milton had issued to active students last spring for their ID cards and the head of Porky Pig. The cartoon swine had been decapitated, a jagged tear clearly visible along the neck.

  It’s probably nothing, he thought. I’m beginning to see eights everywhere. But there was something nagging at him. He flipped back and forth between the two pictures a few times, before he focused in on the pens. She was neat, practically fastidious. Kaling had used the pens to point it out, but Denton had seen signs throughout the room. Not only that, Kaling had written, “She has an orderly mind.” That wasn’t a guess from a sophomore psychology student; it was a statement from a friend, possibly even a relative.

  Why would someone so neat put random stickers on her laptop? And if she did put them there, then any pattern would be intentional.

  Denton went back over the project, zooming in on each photo, trying to see if there were any other clues.

  He found the second eight hidden in the paperback on the nightstand. In the primary picture of the book, the eight couldn’t be seen. The cover was in close-up and the angle was from directly above. But the book appeared again, off to the side in a shot of the neatly made bed. The top fifty pages or so curled up revealing an eight scrawled in the margin. Although, perhaps it was a three, since only half of it could be seen. The doodle was dark, the pattern repeated over and over again. Each arc hinted at a full loop. Denton could picture the girl’s hand obsessively tracing the circles with her pen.

  If he hadn’t examined each section of each photo so carefully, he would have missed the third one. It was on the dresser. The subject kept her makeup and other odds-and-ends on the top of it. The photo showed them straight on. From that point of view, they appeared to be neatly arranged. But a mirror on the wall beside it, revealed something else in its reflection. Spread out across the full surface of the dark wood top, the bottles, tubes, canisters, jewelry, and other sundry items formed two perfect circles.

  Were three—or rather, two and a half eights a coincidence or proof? And proof of what?

  Denton removed his glasses and rubbed his strained eyes, trying to free them of their burning. The room was hushed, with just the sound of rain lashing against the windows. At some point, the CD he’d been listening to had ended without him noticing and Bill Evans’s mellow piano had stopped.

  He crossed the room to put a new disk in the player, glad to have a distraction.

  The den was his room of the house. Linda had her studio; he had this. It was an addition to the old house, put on sometime in the forties. Linda called it his man-cave, however it was far from a sports and beer atmosphere. It did have a cool, damp feeling about it, but it wasn’t in the basement. It was two stairs down from the rest of the ground floor. There was no door, just an open archway, but its awkward location off of the laundry room gave it complete privacy from the rest of the house. Denton called it his study, and he used it as his home office, and he treated it like his sanctuary.

  His old stereo was on the left-hand side of the stone fireplace, nestled in the built-ins, along with stacks of his jazz CDs. On the shelves on the other side was the makeshift bar, with his collection of scotch and a few crystal tumblers. When he had set up the room, he had pictured sitting in one of the leather arm chairs with friends sipping whisky by the fire. In five years, the only person that he’d had in there for a drink was Bill Stahl, and that was during his first winter in town.

  Denton thought about calling Bill up to tell him what he had discovered but decided against it. He had already made enough of a fool out of himself.

  First thing Saturday morning, he had called Bill up to ask about the police cars from the night before.

  “Did he strike again?”

  Bill had been clear: no. Nobody had been found dead on Friday. No major crimes had been committed. He had no idea what the police cars were doing, but as the lead investigator on the case, if anything happened, he’d be the first to know. Even if he weren’t the lead, it was a small enough department that someone would have told him about a murder by now.

  He called back twenty minutes later to tell Denton that he’d checked with dispatch, and the patrol cars had gone out to an accident on Route 52. There was a tone in his voice that made Denton suspect he was sorry to have brought him on board for the investigation. When he got off of the phone, Denton felt every bit of the silly academic jumping at shadows that Bill obviously thought he was.

  He wasn’t about to call him now and tell him about the pictures and drive the point home even harder.

  He imagined what he’d say. “Hey, Bill. I was grading a student’s paper, and I found two and a half eights in some photos. She’s the next victim. You have to head out there right away. Oh, and no I don’t have any idea who she is, or where she lives.”

  Denton cringed at the thought of it.

  He hit play, and the warm summery notes of Sketches of Spain filled the room, giving a little relief from the gloom.

  The only good thing about losing credibility in Bill’s eyes was that he hadn’t asked for his findings on the Grimshaw apartment. Denton had a six page document on the computer detailing everything he had been able to determine, which wasn’t much. The report was a mess of half substantiated conjectures. Would he even have given himself a 75 on it? There was too much conflicting evidence to make sense out of the victim. He was a slob but bought expensive new clothes. He was a loner but went out socializing regularly. And there was no explanation to the most important question: why was he obsessed with eights?

  Just like there was no explanation for that unnamed literature student to be obsessed with them. Or why she was driven to deface her laptop with one, or mar the margin of her book.

  What was the connection?

  He stared out the latticed window behind the desk at the barren and waterlogged side garden.

  If he wasn’t wrong—if it was something after all—a woman’s life could be in danger. He needed to find her and get some proof. If he could put the pieces together, he could take it to Bill and stop this thing.

  Chapter 4

  140 Shakespeare

  DENTON DROVE STRAIGHT past blake street, with all of its nearly identical row houses. At one time, the small homes were owned by Milton and used for faculty housing. They were still called teachers’ cottages by the locals. It was easy to see all the way down the leafless tree lined street, but the clock tower he was looking for was hidden by the Ames Library. The bland postwar structure practically formed a wall along the border of the campus.

  The houses on Keats and Hardy were larger. Built back when Bexhill was thriving, they mostly had three stories, sometimes four because of a turret in their architecture. The town and its wealth had declined in the ’60s and ’70s, and now these once great homes were shabby and teaming with students. Some had been bought up by fraternities and sororities, but most had been chopped up into cheap apartments.

  As he drove up and down the streets, Denton considered getting out and searching by foot, but it seemed unlikely he would be able to enact his plan; the brown bricks of the monstrous Ames building blocked any possible view of Mansfield Hall and its tower, from s
treet level.

  Turning onto Shakespeare, he spotted a parked squad car. Behind it was a sedan Denton knew well. It was usually seen in his next-door neighbor’s driveway.

  There were still two hours until his first class started. On any normal Monday, Denton would have lingered at home with a couple of cups of coffee, and finished his grading or caught up on the psychology journals piling up on his desk. But coffee wasn’t needed that morning. He had been awake for two hours before the alarm went off, his mind turning over the scant details of the mysterious English student and the dead deliveryman. Was their obsession with eights the only thing they had in common?

  After discovering the eights in the project, Denton had made it a goal to identify the subject. He poured over the pictures again, pulling up city and campus maps off of the internet. As the futility of the task began to build, Denton considered e-mailing Kaling and just asking him directly who his subject was.

  But what reason could he give for needing to know? The whole point of the assignment was that it was anonymous. Telling Stephan that after seeing the photos, he feared for the woman’s life, posed a distinct problem: tenure or not, it would go badly for him if some student started spreading it around campus that he was unstable. What would Foley do, if a rumor reached his ears about him having paranoid delusions? Especially if there was an e-mail for proof? Denton didn’t even want to think about the fallout. Suspension? Counseling? Long heart-to-hearts with Simon Foley? Nothing good, that was for certain.

  So he persisted and tried to reason out the answer himself.

  In the end, he’d gotten lucky. Two of the pictures in the document showed the room’s window and in the distance was the Mansfield Hall clock tower. The view of it was at an angle, and the clock’s face looked off in a different direction. Using the maps, he narrowed down the apartment’s location to the area southeast of campus. There were lots of student housing in that direction and a third or fourth floor window should have an unobstructed view of the side of the tower.