Quieter than Sleep

by Joanne Dobson

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “Listen, I’m sorry you had so much trouble with that sleazebag. But I really don’t think anyone seriously believes you killed him. Most people think he was murdered out of revenge. Probably because—well, you know—the tenure thing. Everyone likes Ned Hilton, but—”

  “Not Ned!” I was appalled. Reflexively I looked around the room for him, but his lanky figure and brown cowlick were nowhere to be seen.

  “I don’t think so, either. I know Ned, and he’s the kind who’s more likely to take his disappointment out on himself, you know? He’s been depressed ever since he came here, and this semester’s been even worse. How someone so good could doubt himself the way he does …”

  “You know, Greg, personnel decisions are all supposed to be confidential, but I keep hearing things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like—that the English Department voted to tenure Ned. That it wasn’t unanimous, but he had solid support. Then the Executive Committee overturned the vote because Randy was so adamant against Ned. Do you think that’s true?”

  Greg shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Astin-Berger liked to be cock of the walk. He probably wouldn’t have taken kindly to having a young male competitor tenured in the department, someone he couldn’t muscle around.” Greg went to work on the second half of his sandwich.

  For the first time that day I allowed myself actually to feel. Murder. A Xanax hangover. Abominable food. Departmental intrigue. Lurid gossip. And it was finally becoming clear to me that one of my colleagues must have committed homicide. It was a plateful, and none of it tasted good.

  The small groups of colleagues at the Commons tables were beginning to disperse, leaving the room in quietly conversing pairs. None of them, for some odd reason, happened to walk past our table, even though it was directly in line with the door. My heart sank. I was already a pariah.

  Miles Jewell, bulky in a conventional tweed jacket with conventional suede elbow patches, strolled out with Magda Vegh on his arm, gazing up at him attentively. She was still wearing the green malachite earrings, and her white cashmere knit dress clung provocatively to her body. Greg’s head swiveled to follow their progress.

  Miles was enjoying the attention. He gestured with his pipe stem to reinforce a point. His white hair flopped picturesquely over his shaggy eyebrows. A living, breathing, walking, talking stereotype—Enfield’s resident curmudgeon. Now that Randy wouldn’t be replacing him as department chair, I wondered if he’d stay on for another year. Or forever. That’s the way Miles seemed to want it. And it looked like Magda was angling for another year, too.

  At the open French doors of the Commons’ entry, Miles and Magda paused. The tenor of their conversation seemed to change, to become more hushed. Miles inclined his head a little closer to Magda’s, touched her white cashmere shoulder with one hand, and pointed in my direction with his pipe stem; Miles is not known for subtlety. Magda’s head swiveled instantly, and for one embarrassing second we were staring directly at each other. I broke eye contact first, as if I had not been watching them at all, but merely surveying the room. But if I had needed proof that I was indeed under suspicion, I had it now. I shoved the plate of Tetrazzini out of my direct line of vision.

  While Greg ate, I continued to look around. In the center of the room the wan beam of winter light from the high west windows had settled on the almost motionless figure of Margaret Smith as she sipped her coffee. Margaret certainly didn’t look like a woman who had caused a hysterical scene twelve short hours before. Her thin lips were as pinched as usual, her pale skin as bloodless, her gray eyes as hedged. With her unhealthy pallor and gray-brown hair, wearing a gray sweater and skirt, she resembled nothing so much as an illuminated granite saint.

  “Quick recovery,” I mused aloud.

  Following my line of vision, Greg snorted with suppressed amusement. “Now there’s a culprit for you. Yes, I have it! She’s had the hots for young Randy for years. Emboldened by a friendly word, she begins to move on him. Appalled, he spurns her lustful advances. Hurt and furious she follows him into the closet to plead her passion one final time. He laughs her to scorn, and in a purple fury she grabs him by the necktie—an obvious phallic substitute—and, voilà, a corpse on the coats!”

  I looked at him with disgust. “Greg, you know that’s not funny.”

  He subsided into an apologetic slump as I went on. “I really feel sick about all this. Since Randy and I both work—worked—on nineteenth-century American lit, we saw a lot of each other; I was the last one to talk to him; I found his body, for God’s sake. This murder feels to me like more than just an occasion for prurient speculation. All right, so I didn’t like him. So he annoyed the hell out of me. He didn’t deserve to die. The poor bastard enjoyed his life. His death is disgusting and needless, and I really don’t feel like gossiping about it.”

  “I’m sorry, Karen.” He had the grace to look genuinely ashamed. “It’s just my way of coping.”

  Two more colleagues walked past; neither bothered to greet us. Hmm. I watched them disappear through the big doors, then turned back to Greg. “I know that. But, listen, I want to talk a couple of things over with you.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to gossip.”

  “This isn’t gossip. Through no fault of my own I am knee-deep in this murder, and I want to do something about it.”

  “Do what?”

  “I want to try to find out who killed Randy. If his murderer isn’t found, I have a feeling I’m going to be under suspicion forever.”

  “Jesus Christ! You can’t do that. It’s dangerous,” Greg responded. “There’s a crazed killer out there!” He rolled his eyes in grotesque exaggeration.

  I sighed. But I was starting to feel more than just a little panicked. People were gossiping about Ned, but they were also leery of me. And that police lieutenant had looked at me funny. If I couldn’t talk to someone I was afraid I’d implode.

  As I leaned forward to confide in Greg, however, a slim figure in a long white apron reached over my shoulder and picked up the plate of cold food. Sophia! I swung around with a welcoming smile. It was not Sophia.

  “You’re done with this, aren’t you, Professor Pelletier?”

  “Oh, hello, Bonnie.” This was the student I secretly thought of as The Whiner—Bonnie Whiner, I’d named her. I hadn’t heard her approach us. How long had she been standing there?

  “Yes, I’m done. You can take the salad, too.”

  Bonnie balanced the salad plate on top of the cold pasta, but continued to hover.

  “Professor Pelletier, I’m so glad to see you. Isn’t it awful about Professor Astin-Berger? Why, just yesterday I saw him and he looked so happy. Surrounded by old books and papers and as happy as a clam. Such a brilliant man, don’t you think?”

  Bonnie was narrow-faced with a long thin nose and what I always think of as medieval eyes, bulgy and lacking visible eyelashes. Her real name was Bonnie Weimer. In my women’s poetry class, she sat front row center, always present, always alert, always annoying.

  “Yes, it is a terrible thing,” I replied, as she waited, intent and unusually silent.

  Another pause. Why did I get the feeling that Bonnie was listening for something in particular? Some piece of information? Some appropriate cliché? I smiled weakly, obviously inadequate in my grief. Then it hit me: she’d heard the gossip, too. She was waiting for me to say something incriminating, something she could repeat in the dorms.

  When I didn’t respond, she went on. “He was doing really important work, wasn’t he? What with the letter and everything …” She let the sentence trail off suggestively, and I tried not to react with too much interest.

  “The letter?” My voice was casual. Greg glanced over at me.

  “Well, you know, the letter. The one he found.” She looked at me sideways.

  “No, I don’t know.” My tone was testy. I was impatient with Bonnie’s prurience and her smug self-importance, but I wasn�
�t surprised by it. Bonnie was the class nay-sayer, intently focused on what was wrong with any text or any argument proposed by me or by her classmates. I would have welcomed a straightforward dissent. But Bonnie found fault in an elliptical, sycophantic manner, protesting in a nasal whine that really didn’t I think that Dickinson really didn’t get the rhyme right in that poem, and didn’t I think that Plath’s images were more psychotic than poetic, and, really, Elizabeth Bishop …

  “What letter?” I could have bitten my tongue as soon as I’d spoken. Now Bonnie was going to hoard her information in a particularly oysterlike manner. If I wanted it, I was going to have to pay dearly by answering her prying questions.

  I couldn’t manage that at the moment.

  “Bonnie, suppose we talk later this afternoon. You still have to turn in your take-home exam, don’t you?”

  “Well—okay….” She seemed chagrined at being put off. I smiled at her brightly.

  “See you later, then.”

  Greg sipped from his cup of cold coffee, gazing at me over the rim. “It’s not like you to be rude to students, Karen.”

  I sighed. “I know. But Ms. Whiner always gets on my nerves.”

  “Weimer, you mean,” he interjected. “Bonnie Weimer.”

  I waved his correction away, and told him about my final conversation with Randy, that he had mentioned something about a letter. Greg listened carefully and sat in thoughtful silence for a few minutes after I finished.

  Suddenly I wanted coffee. Desperately. I looked over toward the coffee urn. A slender blonde in a huge apron, her back to me, was just lifting it from its shelf. Sophia, finally. The big stainless steel urn looked far too heavy for her; I jumped up to help her. Then I saw the student worker wasn’t Sophia at all. It was Bonnie Weimer. Again. I sat down. Bonnie staggered into the kitchen, removing the coffee from my sight.

  Where was Sophia? When she’d fainted last night, I’d rushed over to her, but then the police had commandeered me. Mrs. Maher had called Mr. Warzek. “You’d think her father would’ve shown a little sympathy,” the housekeeper told me later. “But, no; he snapped at the poor thing—told her to pull herself together and get in the car.” Mrs. Maher clicked her tongue. “I was afraid he was going to slap her.”

  I would definitely call that girl when I got back to my office. Mother hen or not.

  It was close to two o’clock and the Faculty Commons was now empty except for Greg and me, Margaret Smith lingering over coffee and the Christian Science Monitor, and a custodian in a dark blue uniform mopping the floor in the far corner by the kitchen. The smell of Lysol mixed with the residual broccoli odor.

  “Can you get the key to Randy’s office?” Greg startled me out of my reverie.

  “Noooo,” I replied, astonished by the question. “Why?”

  “Well, he mentioned something to you about a letter and about his desk. Bonnie said he was excited about a letter, and she seems to have seen him in his office with it. Therefore, the logical first step would be to look for a letter. In his desk. In his office. Right?”

  “That would be breaking and entering, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not if you had a key, it wouldn’t. It would merely be illegal entry. I think. What do you want to do? Go to the cops with this information?”

  I thought briefly about the intimidating Lieutenant Piotrowski and his suspicious stare. It certainly wouldn’t hurt if I could come to him with some evidence of who the real killer might be. And then Jill’s words about rumors came back to haunt me. Everyone knew I was the last person to admit to seeing Randy alive. But obviously not everyone was as willing to believe in my innocence as Jill and Greg were. I would be in an extraordinarily awkward position here at Enfield until Randy’s murderer was caught.

  “Well, now that I think about it, I could easily get into Randy’s office—with the cookie key,” I said.

  “Cookie key?”

  “Yeah. The department passkey is on a ring with a gigantic plastic chocolate chip cookie. It hangs on a board by the secretary’s desk.” I thought for a moment. If I pretended to have locked my key in my office, I could go into the English Department office just before closing, when it was hectic in there anyhow, and nab the cookie key. Elaine wouldn’t notice if I didn’t bring it back by five. She probably wouldn’t even notice me take it.

  I raised an eyebrow at Greg: Let’s go for it.

  Four

  DICKINSON FLUSHES her soul into the poem, I read, and winced. With my red pencil, I circled “flushes,” wrote “word choice!” in the margin, and put the paper down with a sigh. Thirty-two more essays to go. It was seven P.M., and I took another gulp of cold coffee. Between students dropping off exams and reporters seeking sensational details, I hadn’t made much headway with my grading.

  Greg had scheduled our little investigative foray into Randy’s office for some time after nine o’clock. Irena, his wife, was due home from a couple of days in New York City, and Greg wanted to have dinner with her before he left for the college. Irena was an aspiring actress whose kooky blond beauty was suddenly much in demand. Her portrayal of one of a group of female thirtysomethings in a recent Michelob spot had led to a flurry of job offers. Earlier this week she’d had an unexpected call from her agent about a small part in Law & Order and had taken off immediately to Manhattan for the audition.

  Irena had become a hot item, and Greg hadn’t quite begun to deal with that. She didn’t even know he’d been tenured, Greg told me. She was supposed to call yesterday afternoon, but hadn’t. Hah, I thought, that’s why all the booze last night.

  I decided to read one more paper, then sneak off campus for a quick bite at Rudolph’s Café. You can get a fairly decent hamburger at Rudolph’s if you ignore the elaborate menu and just ask for it. And tell them to hold the Boursin.

  I picked up the next paper from the pile and glanced at the title: “Emily Dickinson’s Master Letters and the Language of Despair” by Sophia Warzek. Well, this should be a treat. Sophia’s papers were sensational: articulate, carefully reasoned, and original.

  Emily Dickinson’s so-called Master Letters are not so much documents of desire, she began, as they are documents of despair.

  She’d made this point in class recently when we’d been discussing Dickinson. Students had been fascinated by the three draft letters addressed to “Master” found in the poet’s papers after her death. They listened attentively as I told of the speculation surrounding the letters’ bizarre, almost shameless, appeals to some unknown beloved. Oh, did I offend it—Daisy—Daisy—offend it—who bends her smaller life to his, meeker every day … Scholars, I told them, differ wildly in their interpretations of the letters and in naming the “Master.” He’s been identified as various men—and, occasionally, as a woman.

  Leading candidates are the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, a distinguished Philadelphia clergyman, and Samuel Bowles, a noted journalist and editor, who was a good friend of the Dickinson family. The students looked at photographs in a Dickinson biography and unanimously chose handsome Samuel Bowles.

  It was then Sophia made her comment, hesitantly and with seeming reluctance, about despair, and the discussion took a more sober turn.

  The self-abasement in these texts, Sophia wrote, is indicative of a profound sense of powerlessness and hopelessness. Despair is reflected in the peculiar use—or abuse—of religious imagery, which makes a feeble attempt at cajoling the Master, but distances and deifies him as well. “I heard of a thing called ‘Redemption’—which rested men and women—You remember I asked you for it—you gave me something else—.” Clearly this man who is causing the writer so much pain is associated with the remoteness and the omnipotence of the Divine. The gulf between the lowly “Daisy” and the Seducer/Redeemer is impassable.

  I finished reading the paper with a sense of gratification. If I had done nothing else this semester, I had at least stimulated this one student to some very serious thought. I deserved a good hamburger.

  Before leaving
for the restaurant, however, I sifted through the disorderly pile of blue books my students had dropped off this afternoon, searching for Sophia’s final exam. I checked off each blue book in my class roster. What? Two exams were missing? That wouldn’t be so startling, except that they were Sophia’s and Bonnie Weimer’s. What possibly could have happened to keep these two conscientious students from turning in their final exams? I riffled through the exams again, then closed my class book. I was too tired to make any phone calls tonight, but I’d give both girls a ring in the morning.

  Eight-twenty. Time to get some supper or I’d never survive the evening. As I stood up from my desk chair, stretching, and arching my back to relieve the tension, the telephone rang. Immediately, as if in response, there was an imperious knock at my office door. Startled, I hesitated, ridiculously paralyzed into indecision.

  I picked up the phone and asked the caller to hold. Then I went to the door. Lieutenant Piotrowski stood in the corridor wearing a baggy gray polyester suit with a rumpled white shirt and a crimson tie, loosened at the collar. He looked a little like Babar the Elephant. Down at the far end of the hall I could see that the door to Randy’s office stood open. Inside, the light was on.

  “Lieutenant—” I glanced reactively toward my desk where the cookie key lay. Fortunately, it was hidden by the pile of exam books.

  “Miss Pelletier,” the policeman said.

  “Doctor Pelletier,” I countered, in what I immediately realized was an obnoxious manner. But I hate to be intimidated, and this man’s very bulk in my doorway intimidated me.

  “Doctor Pelletier.” Piotrowski drew the title out patronizingly, with the stress on the first syllable. I hadn’t gained any points with that move. “Doctor Pelletier. I wonder if I might request the favor of your assistance for a few moments?” Very formal. Very polite.