by Donn Taylor
“Say,” he said, self-consciously changing the subject, “is it true that Professor Billig really thought the hippocampus was a zoo?”
“Don’t believe everything you hear about faculty.” I moved the two of us down the hall toward the classroom.
Leaning against a wall nearby stood a huge man who didn’t look like a student. Still talking to Arthur, I nodded to him and moved to pass by. Suddenly, the hulk put his shoulder into me, knocking me against Arthur and both of us against the opposite wall.
“Why don’t you look where you’re going?” he muttered as he advanced on us.
Arthur had his mouth open for a reply when my grip on his arm warned him to silence.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said to the hulk. “I’m unusually clumsy today.”
Surprise appeared on the man’s face as I guided Arthur past him and into the classroom. I shut the door behind us. I took a deep breath, mentally shifted gears and launched into the topic of the day—America’s entry into the Spanish-American War. Class went well, and by its end I’d almost forgotten the incident in the hall.
Arthur hadn’t. He was the first student to the door and, after a glance outside, he threw me a quick nod to say the hulk had gone. I nodded back.
Arthur came back to me and asked, “Who was that guy?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I never saw him before.”
A smile spread on Arthur’s face. “I was going to take him on and get myself killed, but you did something he didn’t expect. So we got past him before he knew he’d been had.”
“It probably won’t work again,” I said.
One corner of Arthur’s smile quirked a bit higher, as if he had a secret thought. He seemed full of those lately. But he asked, “Do you think that guy was trying to stop your investigation of Professor Fortier’s murder?”
“According to the news, the police aren’t completely convinced it was murder. And in any case, I’m not investigating it.”
“Sure.” Arthur rolled his eyes. “And in any case,” he mimicked, “thanks for listening to me about ... uh ... Professor Billig.”
I still had a few minutes before the memorial service, so I went back to my office to see how much damage Bruno Pinkle had done. There was no sign of Pinkle. Nothing seemed out of place, so I went to my bookshelf and took out the well-worn King James Bible. From behind it, I removed my “personal biometric USB pod fingerprint reader” my computer-guru friend Richmond Seagrave had given me last fall when he debugged the campus computer system.
Seagrave was the other witness who’d testified against Clyde Staggart twenty-odd years ago in our Special Forces days. Since Staggart had sworn to get even and had tried last fall to frame me for murder, Seagrave gave me that fingerprint reader for anti-Staggart insurance. He also gave one to Mara, my fellow framee of last fall.
I keep the gadget hidden because there’s no reason for anyone’s knowing I have it. But Pinkle couldn’t have used it if he’d found it because it’s set for my fingerprint only.
I put the device in my pocket for safe keeping and examined the desk. Pinkle hadn’t been wearing gloves, so his fingerprints would be everywhere. He was there legally, but caution told me not to override his prints. So I avoided the drawer knobs and opened the desk drawers by their edges. In the bottom drawer with my three plastic-encased CDs of class notes I found a fourth CD in a different style plastic case.
Using a number-two lead pencil, I verified my three. The fourth was a stranger and had no label.
I still had a few minutes before the memorial service, so I phoned Sergeant Ron Spencer at home. He was not home, but his wife agreed to have him call me. I thanked her and hung up. I didn’t like it, but later would have to do.
I was a minute or two late to the memorial service and slipped into one of the rear seats while a lady from the Music Department sang the last stanza of “Abide with Me.” The auditorium was packed, but I made a quick survey for any strange faces.
All the faculty were there, of course, with many students and a sprinkling of trustees. Emory Estes, Steven Drisko, and Gordon Samstag were there. Lately that trio seemed to show up everywhere I went.
In all the congregation, I saw only one stranger. He was a small man hunched on an end seat on the back row at the opposite side of the auditorium. He had ill-combed dirty-blond hair and wore a dun-colored suit that hadn’t been pressed since the Treaty of Versailles. He gazed at the bench ahead of him, and his face held an expression that might be either grief or boredom. I made a mental note to talk to him between the memorial service and the faculty meeting.
When the singer finished, Dathan Hormah from the Department of Religious Studies spoke a universalist prayer designed to accommodate any Sufis, Sikhs, or Shintoists among us and offend no one except his fellow Christians.
Then came the eulogy by President J. Cleveland Cantwell, newly returned from his fund-raising tour in Minnesota. His face lacked color, and he paused often to cough into his sleeve. My suspicion that he’d gone ice fishing when he should have been schmoozing monied alums around a fireplace might have some truth to it. I confess I don’t know what he said, for I was concentrating too much on that stranger and plotting to get out quickly and intercept him.
During the second stanza of the final hymn, he slipped out the far door of the auditorium. But he’d scarcely moved when I bolted out of the door nearest me.
And ran smack into Gordon Samstag. I was about to say “Pardon me” and continue my chase when Samstag put a restraining hand on my shoulder. I don’t make a habit of shaking off the hands of trustees. Not that many of them have a habit of laying a hand on me.
Collision or no, Samstag held me with a glance that made me feel like the wedding guest in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Press,” he said. “We need you to stop your investigation and let the police do their job. Many things are going on behind the scenes, things that mean a lot to the university. We can’t afford to have you banging around in ignorance like ... well, if you’ll pardon the cliché, like a bull in a china shop.”
He held me a moment longer with his gaze, then asked, “Do you understand?”
“I understand,” I said. I think he meant did I understand the importance of what he was doing for the college ... uh ... university, but what I actually understood was that my name was mud if I kept doing what I was doing.
He nodded. “Good. Please tell Professor Thorn this applies to her, too.” He pivoted and walked away.
I looked beyond him but saw only a multitude of students streaming out of the auditorium.
The man I wanted to talk to had disappeared in the swarm of bodies.
CHAPTER 17
When I got back inside, Dean-Dean had launched into his customary admonition about keeping our enrollment up, and my internal bassoon provided appropriate accompaniment.
“It is imperative that we maintain the highest academic standards,” Dean-Dean said in his scratchy voice, “and, above all, we must always continue the pursuit of excellence. But keeping our students satisfied is also essential. That’s really what it’s all about. And if you’ll pardon my quoting Shakespeare, everything else is just gelding the lily …”
At the faculty’s subdued twitter, Dean-Dean looked around in confusion.
“Gilding,” Dathan Hormah prompted.
I glanced at the chairman of English, whose lips formed the words “to paint the lily.”
Dean-Dean thrust out his chin. “Just as I said: gilding. That’s what it’s all about.” He called the meeting to order before anything else could go wrong.
I glanced around to see if the same three trustees were present. But for once they were absent. Mara sat grim-faced in her usual seat on the left side of the auditorium, directly across from where I usually sat on the right.
Dean-Dean had published no agenda, his usual ploy when he wants to slip something through before we have time to think about it. With all the wonderful
possibilities of campus life, you’d think college teaching would be like living in Shangri-La. But the stinky reality is that it often resembles recess time at an unsupervised schoolyard in a tough neighborhood.
The vice president for student services announced creation of a Learning Center where students could get tutoring. That brought up the usual questions about who would man the Center and what would prevent tutors from doing students’ work for them. The answer to the first question was that juniors and seniors would man it. Because of vagueness, the effective answer to the second question was:
Nothing.
One new faculty member asked if creating the Learning Center meant that the faculty had become the Learning Periphery. Dean-Dean promptly ruled him out of order. He also said that this was an administrative matter not subject to faculty vote.
That done, the chairman of the Education Department moved the approval of two new courses for his department. The first was to teach students how to use techniques of “transformative learning” to alter people’s basic ideas and attitudes. The second was a practicum in which students would use these techniques, essentially variations of drama, in presentations in the dormitories.
Which ideas and attitudes were the courses supposed to alter? Under questioning, the chairman said that the objective was eradication of societal evils like racism, sexism, classism, and lookism.
Also under question, the chairman defined “lookism” as the prejudice that some people were more pleasant to look at than others. Displeased with the resultant laughter, Dean-Dean gaveled the meeting back to order.
It soon became evident, however, that Dean-Dean had made a tactical error by scheduling the meeting after the faculty received their contracts rather than before. Freed from the threat of contract non-renewal, the faculty felt free to engage in genuine debate.
The chairman of the Sociology Department objected that the courses would practice sociology, and he questioned the Education faculty’s qualifications for that. The Education chairman responded that no special qualifications were required to fight racism, sexism, and similar evils—this time he omitted lookism—and one of the coaches asked why the two courses were needed if no special qualifications were required.
Dathan Hormah then voiced the cliché that the courses would put our students “on the cutting edge,” and a faculty nurse offered to provide tourniquets for those who got cut.
It was becoming just another routine faculty meeting when my internal musicians intervened. The piano began softly, high on the keyboard, and with a pang in my heart, I recognized Faith’s expressive touch. Instantly, I was with her in our house again, holding her hand as we watched the classic movie that featured that haunting melody. The movie was Enchantment, a poignant story of love denied by jealousy in one generation and mysteriously fulfilled in a later generation.
The movie’s leitmotiv song was the plaintive nineteenth-century ballad “Pretty Polly Oliver,” repeated on strings and soft flutes. Faith wept freely and my own eyes teared up as the young lovers pledged to each other in the present and the older lovers were reunited in the life beyond. We watched that movie often, with Faith squeezing my hand each time the melody returned.
In the years that followed, I would be reading in my study while she practiced on her Steinway, and she would play the melody exactly as I was hearing it now in the faculty meeting. It meant she thought we’d been apart too long. I would rush to meet her, astonished as always by the miracle that someone like her could need someone like me. An embrace and a few kisses would restore us, and we could return to our separate work.
Some mornings I would wake with her face close above mine as she sang that song:
Nor father nor mother
Shall make me false prove,
I’ll live for a soldier
And follow my love.
At least, that was her version of it. The actual word was ‘list rather than live, but Faith changed it to suit her purpose. Thus, over the years, that song wove itself into the golden fabric of our marriage.
My internal music stopped as suddenly as it had begun, returning me to the drab reality of our faculty catfight.
“Who gave us the mission of telling students what to think?” Weldon Combes was saying. “The mission of a college ... uh ... university ... is to teach them how to think and expose them to a sampling of the best that has been thought in all ages.”
“Amen to that,” Freda Broyles said, laboriously pushing her bulk into a standing position. “We’re not supposed to run a Midwestern version of Hitler youth.”
Dathan Hormah took issue with the Hitler comparison and asked, “What’s wrong with filling students’ minds with socially useful ideas?”
“Everything,” said a younger member of Hormah’s religion faculty. “Which one of us has the moral authority to decide for them which ideas are useful, or useful toward what end?”
Dean-Dean again gaveled for order, and in the ensuing silence Mara Thorn called the question and moved for a secret ballot. That was a bold move for a first-year faculty member. My white-knight impulse was to second her motion, but someone beat me to it. Dean-Dean looked like a man eating green persimmons as the faculty voted overwhelmingly for a secret ballot.
A scowling Dathan Hormah gave each faculty member an index card for a ballot, and Dean-Dean reluctantly named four faculty as a counting committee.
While the committee was out, one of the nurses asked when the faculty would vote on the question of coed dorms. Dean-Dean answered that it was an administrative matter not subject to faculty vote.
The counting committee returned and announced that the Education Department’s motion had failed by a vote of 22 in favor, 35 against. A mixture of cheers and muttering followed until Dean-Dean’s gavel stopped it. Without waiting for a motion, he adjourned the meeting sine die until the first Tuesday in March.
Yes, Dean-Dean has a problem with Latin. Faculty have explained to him that sine die translates “without day,” meaning “indefinitely,” and to follow that with naming a time to reconvene creates an oxymoron. Dean-Dean dismissed that correction and continues his undeclared war on logic and the Latin language. Nevertheless, I give no credit to the rumor that he thought carpe diem meant fish today, though that might well be true of a piscatory enthusiast like President Cantwell.
At lunch in the crowded campus grill I ended up again directly across from Mara and the inevitable Emory Estes. The two composition specialists were also there.
“I don’t see what’s wrong with telling students what to think,” the female composition specialist said. “How are they going to know if we don’t tell them?”
Emory Estes joined in. “It’s a good idea. I wouldn’t ever sell a car if I couldn’t convince the customer what to think.”
Mara caught my eye briefly, but her stony expression gave nothing away to anyone else.
“Some of these students!” the composition specialist exclaimed, seemingly unaware she was changing the subject. “One of mine wrote that William Wordsworth, as a boy, had found ‘splinters in the grass.’”
Mara showed an innocent smile. “Does that mean he was a ‘barefoot boy with cheeks of tan’?”
The composition specialist frowned. “Actually, I think someone else wrote that.” Then, in case we didn’t know, she added, “The word Wordsworth actually wrote was ‘splendor,’ not splinters.”
Mara repeated her innocent smile. “I don’t suppose that would hurt his feet as much.”
“I suppose not,” the composition specialist said.
I don’t know what else was said, for my mind got busy reviewing the faculty meeting for anything meaningful. Last fall, my internal musicians preempted a faculty meeting with the music score from a movie, and the first faculty statement I heard afterward was the key to solving the Laila Sloan murder. Today’s occurrence was only the second time my trickster musicians had thrust a movie music score upon me in a faculty meeting. Could this be a lead toward solving ... Solving wh
at? The source of my alleged affair with Mitra Fortier, certainly. But her unexplained death? I didn’t know.
I searched my memory for anything in the meeting that might point toward a solution for either problem, but I came up empty. I couldn’t even decide whether to suspect faculty members or those three trustees who seemed to pop up all over the place. Why should I expect a solution from the music when the three trustees weren’t even present?
At length, I gave it up and found myself alone. My lunch companions had left without a word. Some of them would no doubt spread more stories about my reclusiveness, but that was nothing new.
My real worry was that word of the alleged affair was bound to leak soon, and I was in no position to defend myself.
Nor did I have a clue as to how to proceed.
CHAPTER 18
Outside, I hurried toward my one o’clock class. The midwinter wind tried to amputate my ears but, fortunately, had only limited success. The campus circle was filled with students moving quickly to get out of the cold. But three students whom I recognized as football linemen were hanging around the exit to the grill, and another group of three lingered some fifty feet farther along.
The group at the exit spoke as I passed, and the farther group turned and moved toward the Liberal Arts Center ahead of me. When I looked back, the first group was following. The leading group passed my classroom door and stopped a few feet beyond. I went straight into the classroom without looking to see what either group did next.
Soon I was totally absorbed in repeating the Peace of Wedmore bit that I’d taught the other class section on Monday. More students seemed to be interested this time, and I was on my usual high by the time class ended.
The two groups of football players had disappeared, but four new individuals of similar build stood around in the hallway. They nodded as I passed, and I proceeded down the hall to my office. As I entered, I glanced back and found them still watching me. I was too immersed in my own problems to ask what the game was.