by Donn Taylor
Mara and Mitra, I thought. I instantly associated them with M&Ms, the candy-coated chocolates. Not entirely appropriate: Mara could be sweet enough when she chose, but Mitra was more like anchovies.
Mitra engaged Mara in spirited conversation, and Mara shook her head. Mitra spat out a final statement and walked away. More unreality. Things like that didn’t happen at a faculty reception.
Then another trustee accosted me. This one was Gordon Samstag, a gray-haired master banker, member of the board of half a dozen corporations and chairman of Overton University’s board of trustees. If Steven Drisko’s wealth made him a centipede, Samstag must be a millipede.
“Professor Barclay,” he said, “I’d like to thank you for solving that ... um ... nastiness on campus last semester. That murder was a terrible blight on our reputation, but it’s best that the moral rot has been excised.”
“I hope things get back to normal,” I said.
“We all hope so.” He fixed a serious gaze on me. “Will you investigate something else now?”
“Only better ways to teach history.” Why did so many people want to know what I was going to do next?
“Good.” He showed a practiced smile. “No use stirring things up needlessly.”
He patted my shoulder and made the trek back to trustee territory, where Steven Drisko’s wife was laughing with Emory Estes, owner of a local used car lot. If the college didn’t renew my contract, I might have to ask Estes for a job.
With that thought I surrendered to unreality. The gym faded from my senses, and my internal orchestra caressed me with the slow movement of Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 2. By the time its last chord subsided into silence, I could almost believe in human perfectibility.
My reverie must have lasted quite a while. When reality returned, the people had left. I looked frantically for Mitra Fortier, but she was nowhere in sight. I saw Mara stride briskly into the exit, head held high as if daring anyone to question her. I gathered my hat and overcoat and made my own exit through a nearer door.
Outside, I snugged my coat collar against the Midwestern winter. The remnants of last week’s snow lay on the ground, slowly fossilizing into ice. A wind off the plains brought an Arctic blast that would freeze the hide off a fur-lined rhinoceros.
The gym ... uh … Fitness Center ... sits on the back side of the campus, but the walkways are well-lighted. The wind sliced at my cheeks and sent shadows from the elm trees dancing along the walkways as I trudged back to the campus circle. There I had to decide—home or meeting Mitra Fortier in her office? I didn’t relish returning to the now-silent piano in the home where Faith and I raised our daughter.
That and the prospect of losing my job decided me. So I followed the campus circle around to the Science Center and descended the stairs to Professor Fortier’s basement office. Her door was closed, but the lights glimmering through its frosted glass window revealed Mara Thorn standing before it.
She looked up in surprise. “I didn’t expect to see you here, Press.”
“She told me to meet her here if I valued my job.”
Mara wrinkled her nose. “She told me the same. She wanted me to investigate. I refused, but she said if I valued my job I’d meet her here. I knocked, but she didn’t answer.”
“That’s not like her,” I said. I knocked loudly and called, using the nickname Faith had given her. “Mitzi?”
Still no answer. With my gloved hand I tried the door and found it locked.
Mara’s chin lifted a fraction of an inch. “Do you still have the pass key?”
She meant the one I’d pilfered from the dean’s office last fall when both he and the police were falsely accusing me. I nodded and took out my key ring. The door opened easily.
I stepped through the doorway with Mara close behind. Shelves on three walls of the office were filled with books. A desk that had seen better days stood near the far wall with four hardwood chairs flanking it. A computer monitor rested on the desk, its cables leading to the computer underneath.
Protruding past one end of the desk lay a stockinged foot in a black high-heeled shoe.
I bounded around the desk and knelt beside the prone form of Mitra Fortier. There was no doubt she was dead. Sadly, I looked up at Mara and shook my head.
Without warning, my internal orchestra broke into the Can-Can sequence from Gaite Parisienne.
CHAPTER 2
Without a word, Mara took out her cell phone and withdrew to the hall. While she called 911, I made a final study of Mitra Fortier. Her yellow haystack-hair spread wildly on the floor around her head, but her body bore no obvious marks. Nothing in the scene suggested a struggle. Her heavy coat lay folded on a table by the door. She wore the same clothing she’d worn at the reception—a royal blue blouse with a modest, dark skirt. Her clothing remained in good array except for a small spot of dried blood on the blouse inside her left elbow.
Returning to the hall, I used my gloved hand to turn the door’s spring lock to the “off” position. I couldn’t admit I’d used an unauthorized pass key to enter the office. Mara handed me her phone in silent concession that I would know better than she when to call the college administration. I guess she’d forgotten that I carried a good phone now.
While we waited for the police, I tried to push Mitra’s death from our minds. “How have you been?” I asked Mara. That sounded too trite, so I added, “I gather things haven’t gone smoothly.” How could they, with her recent conversion from Wicca piled on top of adjustment to a new teaching job and being accused, along with me, of both murder and immorality?
She sighed. “Any way but smooth. Department politics is bad enough, but those rotten rumors about us ... ” Her lips pressed tightly together. “We’ve been bitten by the Blatant Beast.”
Score another point for Mara’s erudition. The Blatant Beast was Edmund Spenser’s allegorical figure for slander. Few people have persevered as far into The Faerie Queene as Book VI, where Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy, seeks out and binds the beast.
She sighed. “Spenser advised the beast’s potential victims to ‘avoid the occasion of the ill.’ Maybe the rumors will die down if we’re not seen together.”
“We can hope so,” I said. But in Spenser’s epic romance, no medicine could heal people who suffered the Beast’s poisonous bite. To slanderous imaginations on campus, the absence of evidence against us would only prove we’d covered our tracks well.
I decided to change the subject. “You said something about department politics?”
She wrinkled her nose. “My boss, Dathan Hormah.”
No wonder. Dathan had re-christened the Bible Department as the Department of Religious Studies during our college’s Great Renaming. He was thick as crows on carrion with the college dean, his neighbor in the Meribah Valley suburb. He also had no sense of humor. I once asked him, “If a Christian hangs out in Starbucks, does that make him a Latté Day Saint?” His response was not a smile, but a five-minute lecture on theology.
Mara’s blue eyes blazed. “Professor Hormah hired me as a Wiccan so he could diversify his faculty. He thinks I double-crossed him by converting to Christianity.”
“And the other department members?” I asked.
“They’re both married men afraid to show cordiality to a female former pagan. So much for that business about the lost sheep. They feel safer packed in with the ninety and nine.”
“They’re probably jealous of the way your classes fill.”
She sniffed. “They needn’t worry about that. Dr. Hormah limited my classes to twenty-five, and that forced students to enroll in other sections.”
“Any sensible student would rather look at you than those other guys.”
Her blue gaze gave me a mild scorching. “You’re coloring outside the lines again.”
“Hey, you’ve moved the lines,” I said. “So now they’re excluding compliments?” In the past, they’d only referred to her abhorrence of being touched, the legacy of her ill-fated teenage
marriage. She’d broken out of that and served an enlistment in the Army, then clawed her way up through college to a PhD in Comparative Religion, an achievement few could even dream about.
Her voice softened. “I’m sorry, Press. The rumors and the contract situation have me on edge. You’ve been a good friend, but I’ve fought everything else out by myself. This won’t be an exception.”
Where were the police? While they dallied, my head echoed with a flute playing Mendelssohn’s “On Wings of Song,” and I brooded about the campus situation. All the efforts to make things normal again had been in vain. Another death meant that nothing would be normal for a long, long time. And Mara and I, innocent as we were, stood once again at the center of disruption.
As the first faint wail of police sirens reached our ears, she spoke in a soft voice. “I’m sorry about Mitra, Press, but you know the trouble this means for us.”
I did know. The jaws of the Blatant Beast would savor fresh blood.
I knew our involvement would cause us trouble, but at the moment I was too submerged in emotion to think more about it. Despite my outward calm, finding Mitra Fortier dead had shaken me to the core. She’d been a close friend to Faith. We’d often made a threesome at concerts and restaurants. I hadn’t seen much of her in the three years since Faith’s death, but I still considered her a friend. With her death, I lost another part of Faith’s world that I carried in my heart.
The police sirens drew closer.
“Press?” Mara walked into my line of vision. “Are you going to call someone or shall I?”
I dragged myself out of thought and dialed the home phone of the college dean. As I did, a premonition formed in my mind. It told me I’d again be forced out of my persona as history professor and into a self I’d left behind more than two decades before. I had no wish to revive that self.
I didn’t want to talk to Dean Billig, either, but I had no choice. We’d learned at the reception that our president, J. Cleveland Cantwell, would leave town immediately after the reception on a fund-raising expedition. In his absence, Dean Billig would be in charge, a condition which always conjured up visions of the sorcerer’s apprentice—the Disney version, not the original.
The Great Renaming in which Overton Grace College became the graceless Overton University also gave Billig the title “Vice President for Academic Affairs.” Faculty wits made the obvious wordplay about his potential for affairs. Dean Billig is his actual name. Thus, in pre-university days when he was appointed dean, he became Dean Dean Billig, and the faculty promptly shortened that appellation (not entirely affectionately) to Dean-Dean. He received his PhD in psychology by correspondence without ever leaving our campus. So he grows self-conscious around faculty who earned their degrees in residence at major universities, going eye to eye with tenured professionals in cutthroat oral examinations.
Dean-Dean answered on the fourth ring with his high-pitched voice.
“Preston Barclay here,” I said. “I have bad news. We’ve found Professor Fortier dead in her office.”
Dean-Dean sputtered for several seconds. He is the only man I ever knew who could sputter in the pitch range of a contralto. As he did, my internal orchestra rollicked through a cheerful number with a bassoon in the lead. Something about Dean-Dean always calls up that bassoon.
When he got through sputtering, Dean-Dean gasped out a single word—“Again?”
“No, not again,” I said. “So far as I know, this is the first time she’s been dead.”
There are reasons I’m the campus pariah, and Dean-Dean brings out the worst of them.
He sputtered again. “Professor Barclay …” He was breathing hard, like a lapdog chasing a cat on a hot day. “Don’t you do anything but go around finding more bodies?”
“I use extra-body shampoo,” I said.
He sucked in his breath. I could almost hear his synapses straining to make connection. “That ... that is totally illogical,” he said.
“So is your implication that I’m responsible for the body’s being there to find.”
He was silent for a while. “I suppose we have to call the police,” he mused at last.
“We’ve already done that,” I said. “The law requires it.”
“I’m aware of that, Professor Barclay,” he snapped. He paused, apparently ambushed by a thought. “You said ‘we.’ Who else is there with you? Is it that ... that Wiccan again?”
“Former Wiccan,” I said, “assuming you mean Professor Thorn. But yes, Professor Fortier asked us to meet her at her office after the reception.”
Dean-Dean invoked the Deity, but not in a meaningful context. “You two bring me more trouble than all the rest of the faculty combined.”
“Someone else brought the trouble,” I said. “We merely announced it.” I was glad he hadn’t yet thought of shooting the messenger.
“I’ll be right there,” he said. “Don’t go away.”
For various legal and practical reasons, we weren’t about to leave.
Mara showed a sardonic smile. “You’re still running for Most Popular Man on Campus.”
“I’m only running away from involvement,” I said. “Speaking of which, remember to say we found the office door unlocked.”
She nodded, no more eager than I to admit our pilfered pass key.
The basement hallway felt hot and stifling. I shed my overcoat and slung it over one arm. I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with the police. It’s said in a classic understatement that police procedures in Overton City are somewhat informal. A few of the officers are first rate, though. Maybe we’d luck out and get one of them.
The sirens arrived outside and lapsed into silence. Heavy steps clattered down the stairs and two uniformed policemen charged into the hallway.
My heart sank.
CHAPTER 3
It sank like hot lead through tissue paper. The policeman in charge was Bruno Pinkle. He stood about my height, five-feet-ten, but carried a bulk at least twice mine. With a surly round face full of pockmarks, he looked like a boxer who’d retired ten years too late. To say he considered me no friend was like saying Stalin’s Gulag was inconsiderate. In the distant past he’d taken one of my classes with less than favorable results.
Pinkle gave me a hostile stare and growled, “I might have known I’d find you here.”
“The body is in the office,” I said.
Pinkle opened the office door, efficiently confusing any fingerprints the doorknob might have contained, and clomped inside. His associate kept a suspicious eye on Mara and me. Actually, he kept both eyes on Mara. In his place I’d have done the same.
Mara, however, turned her blue gaze on me and raised an eyebrow. She must have wondered how I managed to be persona non grata to so many people at once.
Pinkle clomped back from inspecting the corpse and called for Homicide. His partner took Mara several steps down the hall to get her story while Pinkle listened to mine.
When I finished, he asked, “What did this female professor want with you this late at night?” He made it sound like a lovers’ tryst.
“She didn’t say.” My answer was literally true. Mitra hadn’t said definitely that the subject was about keeping my job. In any case, I wasn’t going to raise that issue with Bruno Pinkle because I knew which way he would vote.
Pinkle shifted from one foot to the other and said, “Just remember, Professor. You ain’t doing the grading this time.”
“Just remember that neither are you,” I said.
Fortunately, that conversation was interrupted when Weldon Combes, chairman of the Physics Department, emerged from the stairwell. He was a tall man of about forty, with short-cropped sandy hair, fighting a losing battle against an expanding forehead. Combes was good at physics, but not physiques. He was too skinny to make an hors d’oeuvre for the average cannibal.
Alarmed, he asked, “What’s wrong, Press? I see police cars outside.” Then he noticed Professor Fortier’s open door. “Oh, no … Not Mitra …
”
“She’s dead, Weldon,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, no,” he said again and put a hand to his forehead. “How did it happen?”
“That’s just what we plan to find out.” Bruno Pinkle awoke from his customary stupor and placed a restraining hand on Combes’ chest. “Now tell me who you are and what you’re doing here at this time of night.”
I also wondered what brought Combes there that late.
Pinkle closed Mitra’s office door, took the bewildered physics professor by the arm, and guided him several steps down the hall.
“My office is right there,” Combes said, pointing to the office next to Mitra’s.
“We don’t need no office,” Pinkle said.
The other officer placed yellow crime-scene tape over the now-closed door and resumed his vigil over Mara and me. Behind his back, Freda Broyles came out of the stairwell and took three steps into the hall. Freda, chairman of the Math Department, was a heavy woman of about sixty or so with a personality like a horned frog. She was shaped kind of like one, too.
That made two professors who’d need to explain their after-hours presence.
Freda froze with a shocked expression as she saw the tape over Professor Fortier’s door, then reversed course and disappeared back into the stairwell.
Our policeman guard whirled to look at the now-empty hallway. “What was that?”
I shrugged. “Maybe a rat or a cop.”
“You have rats in this place?” He threw a worried glance around the premises.
“Without rats and freshmen,” I said, “our psychologists would be out of business.”
He muttered something derogatory about techniques of running railroads and muttered, “I don’t like rats.”
Mara watched with one eyebrow raised but said nothing. After that, we stood silently in the overheated hallway. My forehead beaded with sweat, and so did the cop’s. Mara showed no sign of perspiration. I never learned how she managed that.
The approach of another siren outside announced the arrival of Clyde Staggart, Overton City’s Captain of Homicide and no friend of mine. More than twenty years ago when he was my boss in Army Special Ops in Central America, I’d stumbled onto evidence he was taking kickbacks. Another lieutenant and I had testified to that under oath. Staggart was allowed to resign his commission in lieu of court martial, and he swore revenge against everyone who testified against him. Last fall he’d tried to pin Laila Sloan’s murder on me, with Mara as my accomplice. The fact that Mara and I solved the case did not improve our relationship with him.