by John Farrow
After that, she’d like to work on third-world agricultural concerns, and may take another year or two of study for that. No specific plan as yet, although she’s aware of her options while being open to anything. Émile could take her home right now and show her off. “I wonder if your parents, when they fly in from Oregon, would consider, I don’t know, giving you up. What do you think, Sandra?”
His wife is puzzled, but Kali gets it. “I’m officially jealous.”
Anastasia gets it, too. “My folks say they’re willing to take on a chunk of my student loan. If you’re willing to make them an offer … they might be persuaded. I did work my way through school, scored a scholarship or two—”
“Or four,” Kali corrects her.
“Or four. The debt’s not too bad. You can swing it.”
“Actually, we’ve been thinking of selling the farm. I could take a look at my credit line.” Émile’s happy to have his remarks rewarded with a laugh. He and Sandra exchange quick smiles, as it’s true about the farm. And moving here.
Everyone pauses as Caroline’s mobile device announces a response. Her look is soon distressed. “Oh my God,” she whispers.
“What?” Anastasia rests a hand in the crook of Caroline’s elbow and leans in to get a peek at the iPhone screen.
“Death at—” She draws the letter a in the air and circles it, to indicate the at sign on a computer keyboard. “Dowbiggin. That’s his subject line.”
“What’s that about?”
“Something’s happened.” Caroline reads the text. “Vernon says a girl’s been found on campus.”
“What do you mean, found?”
Anastasia’s question goes unanswered as the phone suddenly plays a hard-rock song. Caroline checks the screen, answers, and says, “Vernon?” She listens. “Oh my God.” The phrase is spoken quietly.
“What is it, Caroline?” Émile Cinq-Mars asks.
The girl continues on with her caller. “It can’t be, that can’t be. No, we haven’t seen her—” She listens and she’s fidgeting now and when her eyes pass over her uncle’s she’s clearly upset, verging on panic. “Find out!” she commands her caller. “Ask them! Find out, Vernon!”
He has apparently signed off, and Caroline taps a button to conclude her end of the conversation. The others await news. Her eyes look hurt.
“A girl’s been found on campus. Dead. Vernon heard someone say there wasn’t any blood, so maybe she fell down the stairs.”
“What stairs?” Kali asks.
“I don’t know what stairs!” Caroline snaps back. She implores her uncle with her eyes. “Vernon says the library’s been evacuated. By the police. Uncle Émile?”
He’s the one who’s lived these scenes before, who’s investigated murders, who’s taken biker gangs apart, if the myths be true, with his teeth. He’s plowed the Mafia underground in his home city of Montreal where once they were kingpins, where once they governed the darker alleys. Given all that myth and hearsay, she wants to know, and pleads through her facial expression, if he will help. Can her uncle, the retired policeman, discover what’s going on? Why is there a dead girl on campus, and more importantly, who is she?
“I have no standing here,” Émile demurs. That’s not good enough, of course, a judgment reflected on the faces of the four women, including his wife’s. A wait-and-see attitude will only compound their worry. Appearances count for something, as does action, and Émile concludes that in this circumstance it’s probably beneficial to appear to be helping out. Especially with four women waiting for him to act, not because he’s the only man, as they’re not inclined to lean on men, but because he’s in the business. “Okay. To be on the safe side, let’s go over there. Me and you, Caroline. Find out what’s up.”
“Everything will be fine, I’m sure,” Sandra adds, and understands why she’s saying that even as the words spill out. She can handle only so much sadness right now and has already maxed out her limit.
Caroline retrieves her jacket from Kali, who crosses her arms again, then she and Émile wend their way back through the café, pausing at the front door where they brace themselves for the ferocity of the storm.
FIVE
Philip Lars Toomey can count on the atmosphere to be convivial, the coffee at the Green Briar Café to be piping hot, to set him on a proper footing for the day.
In the muggy air of the shop the professor makes his first contact of the morning with a campus crowd, less active now that school is not in full swing. Students are noticeably more relaxed, most likely for the same reason. He eases into an enjoyable mix of casual fashion and flare, pretty faces and ambient conversation sprinkled with laughter, not all of it self-conscious. Animated by the storm, people enjoy being safely indoors and in the company of others. Toomey’s professorship has not been earned through academic slogging; four years after his retirement from the front lines, time taken up instead by classroom duty, the pleasure of a college atmosphere has not lost its impetus. Spending time, legitimately, among the young spared him from being mothballed, resuscitating his life in other ways.
He counts himself lucky.
Although he’s the oldest in the room at the moment, in his mind he’s not old, a hale fifty-four, his next birthday pending in the oncoming month of June. From the age of fifteen he’s been more broad across the middle than the chest, yet he won’t call himself overweight, either. He admits to being pear-shaped in a vaguely feminine way. Early in life, a receding hairline marked his appearance without ever proving extensive. Five feet nine, Toomey does not feel tall, yet hates to think of himself as average. He’s never known how to quantify himself. Not receiving the image in a mirror he’d hoped for as an adolescent, he chose a frumpiness of attire and augmented that with a grumpiness of disposition, an odd compensation. He then sloughed that off in his fifties when he hit upon the realization that women his age weren’t looking for the same attributes they were avid about in their twenties. As a consequence, he might be able to compete now. Among other improvements, his bachelorhood stands out as a plus these days rather than being a stigma, or at least a detail that provokes suspicion. Currently, his dress and demeanor strike others as more mid-management in style than professorial, not in the least spy-like, and certainly Toomey is more attentive to his haberdashery than when his sole purpose in putting on clothes, in grooming himself, was to go unnoticed. Living undercover, perpetually in the shadows, he developed good technique and the persona to pass through the world with apparent invisibility. Freed from that rigor and having discovered a desire to do so, he’s been nurturing a personal, yet salient, élan. He calls it conservative, not wanting to come across as some idiotic aging man desperate to rediscover his youth—privately, he concedes that that is exactly how he ought to be pegged—but conservative, with a touch, a soupçon, of dash.
I’ve got dash, he bolstered himself one morning, the thought taking him by surprise, and since that moment he dresses to that sartorial threshold.
Coffee in hand, Toomey sips as he walks out, then gets blasted by the wind and huddles among others beneath a canopy. Everyone is getting wet anyway. With his messenger bag over his head and his cup and a little brown sack in hand he makes a run for the BMW, two cars down. Brutal. Behind the wheel again, he knows he’ll dry off. Sips his coffee and breaks apart a chocolate chip muffin. The more difficult foray will be between the parking lot on campus and the building that houses his office. And yet, he finds the storm invigorating. Its nature is treacherous and wild. He has no class to teach, no schedule to maintain, he’s free to enjoy it, and Toomey does exactly that.
Everywhere, people scamper about, twenty feet from car to store, or from a bus stop to the shelter of an awning. Any attempt to stay dry is hopeless, and Toomey delights in those students who concede defeat and let the rain soak them to the bone, twirling and dancing in the cascade, flinching, then laughing under the startling flashes of light. Thunder causes the ground they prance upon to tremble.
He must watch o
ut for them, the carefree, and also for those who mindlessly burst into a sprint, as it’s difficult to see through the rain and the attention of those caught out is compromised. He wends his way out of Hanover onto a country road. He locates the taillights of a car ahead, a driver does the same behind him, and cautiously the vehicles, at reduced speed, motor through the deluge. Lights on in homes indicate their arrival in Holyoake and Professor Toomey makes it onto the campus safely. He continues to be circumspect driving down a side of the green—a smaller replica of the famous one in Hanover—and on to his parking spot behind the initial threshold of buildings. Toomey notices in his rearview mirror the arrival of police cars behind him, their lights flashing, and he’s tempted for a moment to pull over in case they’re following him for some picayune infraction. Yet they veer off, he carries on, and in the rear parking lot he sits in the car a while, chewing more of his muffin and mulling his twin choices—stay or run—hoping for a letup, which the voices over the car radio have reiterated will not happen anytime soon. The announcer, a sober one now, might as well be speaking to him directly, “Professor, man up, get out of the car, get wet, you will survive.”
Such a voice never does address him, but that’s the advice he follows.
He’s running. Out the corner of his eye he’s struck once again by the beauty of the campus. Classic Ivy League, or, in this case, imitation Ivy League, and wouldn’t it be grand to reincarnate as a student here? As he puddle-hops his way to a back door and into his building, Toomey reminds himself that teaching here isn’t half bad either, and in this lifetime, too, even if his credentials are sketchy.
Inside, he creates a pond where he shakes the water off.
* * *
Philip Toomey’s office is cramped, a typical professor’s digs. A studied look, given that the hundreds of books on the shelves have gone largely unread. A select few have been scoured multiple times. He will not bother with the rest. He also possesses bound documents up the wazoo, inscribed in officialese. A few of these he’s authored himself. Bundles of papers and more piles of books limit his view of the Green, although on sunny days the tall windows admit a dusty glow. Today, the glass is smeared with condensation, he feels he’s inside a fishbowl. Putting his cup and messenger bag down, he removes his trench coat and uses the inner fabric to dry his face and fluff his hair, then sits, finishes the coffee, and ditches the paper cup into a waste bin that holds debris from the last three days, to be emptied overnight eventually. He swivels in his seat one way, then the other, and tilts back. Overall, he feels pretty good. He clasps his hands behind his head and revels in his contentment.
He’s safe now. He’s survived a dangerous life. He’s lucky to be alive and luckier still to be in love.
Or lust.
Or lust.
Smiling at the voices in his head, the professor gets cracking on his work.
The untidiness across his desk he keeps under surveillance if not entirely under control. Resting on a stack lies the transcript of an interview a colleague in criminology recently gave to a television station in Boston. On Mother’s Day, a week and a half ago, a young man in New Orleans fired a gun into a crowded public space, causing terror and a stampede. The shooter, who luckily, some say miraculously, didn’t kill anyone, eluded police officers nearby who were hampered in their pursuit by the dense, panicked crowd. The outraged colleague of Toomey’s decried on Boston television “the vegetative lives of a subset of a subset of humanity” that American cities tolerated, who lived, he claimed, without morals or the slightest regard for human life.
His colleague’s thesis on what could be done about the matter asserted that the only hope for the nation depended upon superior parenting.
Like that was going to happen anytime soon.
As a spy, even as a former spy, Toomey was nothing if not self-aware. He knew exactly what was going on with himself. He wanted out of the woodwork. When TV required an expert, they should not be dialing his dumb-assed colleague with his theories on subsets and a pundit’s desire for better mommy-son relations on Mother’s Day, even when the mother was on drugs and the son may never have met her. He wanted to be the one the networks called—the local stations, at least—when things went wrong, to propose the tough and logistical standards necessary whenever young men fired guns into crowds with cops nearby, in some cities with frequency and apparent impunity. Politically difficult, he still wanted to show what could be done, that even in this age of gangs and a reactionary component in society, where there was a will there may yet be a way to make certain that a gun would never rest in the hands of a miscreant at a Mother’s Day celebration again. Or, if one showed up, that the carrier of the weapon was incarcerated until both his generation and the next were pensioned off. If the gun was fired, of course, that required a whole other level of response.
His ideas might not work either, nor would they be popular, nor were they fully formed yet, the subject having nothing to do with his field of expertise. At least he’d spare himself listening to subset babble and bad-mommy talk.
Although it’s more than that. He is, after all, self-aware.
He has lived as a spy for most of his adult life, and done the shadowy work, that now he wants to be front and center, to have his say in public. That’s all there is to it. Out from the dark side of the street, having lived as a shade, he wants to stand in the light, be noticed. While he hoped for a cool posting in the State Department when the time came to step back from the fray, a fun job at a university is proving to be an interesting second choice. The only downside is that his job lacks the exposure that, rather suddenly and surprisingly, especially with his new sense of style, he now craves.
Is it wise to desire public attention? Especially these days, when he’s continuing to make a contribution? And when, as it happens, he has a secret lover in her nest? He has to ask the questions and live with being unsure of the answers. He keeps a notebook, composing what he might say if he finds himself free to express his mind while also possessing an appropriate venue—as on local television. Or he might keep his theories to himself as time goes by. Yet this constitutes his first private discourse with himself this morning, before moving on to more substantive matters. “The Role of Police in Crowd Protection,” subtitled “The Anticipation of an Incident,” awaits him. He might make it a paper, then see that the media receives copies. Or not. For now, he’ll scratch a few notes and judge over time how well his ideas are formulating.
Or, he’ll flip a coin.
If he does get on TV, he won’t speak with a frog in his throat, as did his subset of a subset vegetative colleague. Nor will he look utterly self-conscious as that man did. The Boston station has to be looking for a more viable, more impressive alternative, and Toomey spies an opportunity in the making.
He is able to keep himself both stimulated and occupied with his morning labors, but as the clock ticks around and the rain is incessant against the windows other stirrings emerge. Oh lust. Suppressed for so long. He wants to think about that more deeply, it has become a preoccupation, lust. He suspects that love and lust need not be considered mutually exclusive whenever the lust side of the quotient is clearly the more pressing, the more powerful and overwhelming. Love, in comparison, seems little more than an inkling, lurking as a fugitive in the bushes waiting for him to pass by. Maybe holding a knife to his throat. In these matters, he happily acknowledges both his lack of experience—that must be why it’s fun!—and his general flailing ineptitude. And yet, for all that, he is enjoying success with his new enterprise.
He’s taken lovers before. On occasion his job predicated an involvement with a woman, and once with women in general when he had had to fake a weakness for prostitutes. He’s been in what he was willing to call love on three occasions since adolescence—once with an enemy, once with a colleague, and once with a mystery woman whom he had loved but not trusted. In each case, he had been burdened by an inner conjecture, namely that he was insufficiently handsome or adept to be cons
idered a desirable man, that the best he could hope for was a favor granted. True love, or its complement, true passion, would remain but a fable to him, an illusion, decidedly elusive. Time and good fortune might be teaching him otherwise, and the moment arrives on this day to risk the rain again, grab a quick bite, complete his usual Friday errand in the cemetery, then visit Malory.
Toomey packs his bag, stuffing the diary into a side pocket but omitting the book on Chinese industrial development he brought from home which he’s concluded is inadequate and now assigns to the ignominy of an office shelf alongside the largely unread. He checks his look in the mirror that hangs on the back of the door. Does he have it today? Oh yes: dash! Even in this circumstance, being wet, he’s pleased with himself. Accennn-tuate the positive! Wide-set brown eyes. Thick, darkly pensive eyebrows. A nose bending straight down from the bridge, suggestively pugilistic. E-limmm-inate the negative: a sad-sack mouth that’s learning to smile, to show off those pearly whites. What an amazing change to his fortunes. Incredible what a pressed shirt can do for his morale! Who knew? Although the key is the constant company of a girlfriend he’s agog for. Toomey grins to the hilt back at himself, and decamps, knowing that he will be passing through a lengthy building for a while before braving the tempest outside.
In his judgment, this is what no one suspects, that in driving onto the campus, a benign daily sojourn, that in working here awhile, and in walking right on through the campus hours later, first for lunch and an errand—his secret exchange—then to his car to depart Holyoake and embark across the river to White River Junction, Vermont, into a shabby neighborhood on the opposite side of the Connecticut River, he is becoming his own man at long last. He is giving the bum’s rush to the false identities of a lifetime and finding his own heart’s blood, aware of his own pulse for a change.
The thrill of it is already overwhelming as he steps outside into the teeth of a whole gale. Thunder sucks the air right out of him, vibrating the ground he’s running on, the earth he’s slipping and sliding on.