Bad Habits

by Amy Gentry

  Her words started tumbling out. “He’s married. Don’t say anything, I know. But it’s been awful. You don’t know what it’s like: the guilt, the hiding. Sneaking around. Knowing we can never be together. And things are getting worse. There’s something wrong with him, the past week. He drinks and drinks. I can’t ever find him, he’s not picking up his phone. And then you weren’t either. So that’s what’s going on.” She paused. “Do you hate me?”

  I was speechless. She actually wasn’t going to tell me it was Rocky.

  But she kept going. “And now—​oh, Mac, his wife knows. She offered something to me—​something big—​to give him up.”

  Bethany had offered Gwen the Joyner. That explained the letter, at least. I held my breath and then let it out very, very slowly. “Do you want to? Give him up?”

  “I’ve missed you so much, Mac. Everything is so horrible here without you.”

  “Gwen, what do you want?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “If what you want is to be with this person, then you need to tell him. He has to choose you.”

  Gwen breathed in deeply through her nostrils.

  “You mean an ultimatum?”

  “It’s what I’d do,” I said.

  “I’ll—​I’ll think about it,” she said. “I’m going to see him tonight, late. But, Mac—​can I see you first? Connor’s wrecked. I know something happened with you two, but the memorial service for Bird is tonight and you have to come. People are coming from all over for it, someone’s even flying in from LMU Munich.”

  “Munich?”

  “One of Bird’s colleagues from his Joyner years. They loved him there.”

  So it was Bird I had heard Bethany threatening on the phone that night. She had accused him of listening at doors in Munich. You think your life is worthless now? I’ll make sure of it.

  Bird had something on Bethany. Maybe he knew about Elizabeth Armstrong and her connection to Joyner. Whatever it was, she had threatened him if he didn’t stay silent about it. And now he was dead.

  I looked at the clock. “I’ll come,” I said. “But I’ll probably be a little late.”

  * * *

  I dropped Viridiana off on the way out of town. I was done watching movies about bad people.

  It was time to become one.

  Claire

  14

  At 4 p.m., the sky over Dwight Handler University was already a bruised purple, pollution-stained at the hem. All the colors were wrong, the thick snowflakes showing up black against the lurid sky and then flashing yellow in the streetlights before coming to a rest on the quad in swells as pale as a fish’s underbelly.

  It felt like it would never be summer again.

  The Aaron Handler Memorial Chapel had been on our campus tour. Just a few months ago, I’d stood on these stone steps with Gwen, gazing up at the stained-glass rose window and half listening as the tour guide informed us that Handler, a lifelong atheist, had commissioned this traditional chapel after the death of his infant son. In broad daylight, the chapel always made me feel a bit cynical. Now, hulking in the gloom amid the muted strains of its organ, it looked like the physical manifestation of Handler’s fear of hell. I shuddered.

  I leaned my weight gently against one of the heavy wooden doors and stepped in just as the organ let forth a burst of virtuosic arpeggios. Hovering behind a screen of open stonework in the narthex, I peered down the aisle to the altar, where a tripod flanked by flower arrangements held an enlarged photograph of a much younger and brighter-eyed Bird.

  The chapel was packed. As Gwen had predicted, nearly everyone was there. I spotted Connor and Gwen in the back row, not far from where I hid, and quelled a swift pang of grief that I couldn’t join them.

  In a reversal of the job-talk seating arrangement, the first-years filled the back rows, while the front pews held all the professors. I tried to pick out the backs of the faculty I knew—​it was important to make sure they were all here, for what I was planning. I made out Bethany’s red hair, Margaret’s earth tones, Grady, Dean Cadwallader, and a dozen more. The only conspicuous absence was Rocky. I noticed Gwen’s head moving nervously back and forth, as if she, too, were looking for him.

  The organ had stopped. As the echoes of the final sepulchral chord died on the air, Margaret ascended the platform, cleared her throat, and began.

  “In the passing of Qassim ibn Burhan, known to his friends here as ‘Bird,’ the Program has suffered a terrible loss. Qassim was a gifted student, an illustrious teacher, a generous friend. In a moment I will invite those of you who wish to speak of him as a friend or colleague to step forward to the podium. First, however, a colleague of mine who knew Qassim and his work perhaps better than anyone: Bethany Ladd.”

  And, unbelievably, Margaret launched into Bethany’s curriculum vitae, listing her professorial accomplishments as if she were introducing a guest speaker. “Without further ado—” she began, then caught herself, coughed, and descended wordlessly back to her seat.

  When Bethany took her place at the podium, I instinctively stepped backward behind the screen, dragging my foot on the stone floor. Gwen’s head whipped around, and I could see that her face was streaked with tears. She had obviously turned around hoping to see Rocky. I stayed stock-still behind the elaborate scrollwork and raised my finger to my lips, pointing at Connor and shaking my head. She gave a slow half-nod, as if too stupefied by grief to care, and turned back around.

  Meanwhile, Bethany, her distant face like a coin sculpted in dead white ivory, had begun speaking. “I never clip my students’ wings. I make a point of urging them to think past the very edges of their intellects, to push themselves to their limits and beyond, and to brook no opposition, not even from themselves. In that, it may be, I am mistaken.” Her voice cracked and faltered. After a pause, she started again. “Qassim was working on a tremendously important piece of writing when he passed. To honor his memory, I plan to finish his work and publish it as the introduction to an anthology of new work by some of my most gifted students.” Bethany put her hand to her chest, as if overcome by the power of this tribute. “There was no thinker at DHU more radically negative than Qassim. His work, though less precious than his life, may at least give us some recompense for its loss. Unbecoming: Toward a Radical Theory of Negation, coauthored by Qassim and myself, might help us make sense—​or, rather, ‘non-sense’—​of this tragedy.”

  During Bethany’s speech, the air in the chapel had thickened. A faint stirring of wordless but palpable interest seemed to rise and pool into a mild buzzing overhead, like flies in a light fixture, as students in the pews considered which of them might be included in the anthology. Even the smile on past Bird’s face suddenly seemed to hint at tantalizing possibilities.

  I slipped back out into the dark. I’d seen enough.

  The department was unlocked but deserted, as I’d expected it to be. Even Lorraine was absent, setting up the room for the reception after the memorial service. Thankfully, someone had thought to schedule the reception in a different room from the one that had hosted the job talk where the news had first spread. I wondered if they’d gone so far as to change the catering order.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for in Bethany’s office. Connor had only said that Bird urged him to look for some papers, not what they were or what they proved. Maybe there had been more information in the email Connor deleted, but I certainly couldn’t ask him about it now.

  The door to Bethany’s office was unlocked. The tiny room where I had spent so many hours alone with her looked more ordinary without her in it, the objects perfectly normal. Inside the largest desk drawer, I found a broad, flat wooden box with a brass lock on one side and pulled it out with shaking hands, already looking around for something to pry it open with. But the lid swung open easily on its hinges.

  Rows of little mesh pouches. Bethany’s expensive tea.

  My heart sank. The other drawers were equally disappointing. It was as if she ke
pt nothing at work, nothing at all, that wasn’t for display. I didn’t have the password for her desktop computer, but I had a feeling she wouldn’t keep anything important on the university server anyway.

  But there was one person in the department who would. Someone who kept all her passwords in a folder on her secretary’s desk. Margaret.

  * * *

  It can be useful having access to those files, Bethany had once said of Margaret. Useful and maddening. Margaret, it seemed, had never deleted or archived an email in her life. Clogged with administrative minutiae related to the chair’s office, her in-box held some twenty thousand emails. The message from Bethany setting up my research assistant job a couple of weeks ago was already buried. A search for Bethany’s name turned up fifty pages’ worth of emails.

  I skimmed through them at random, despairing. Despite the undercurrent of polite loathing, Bethany and Margaret were cordial enough in their correspondence about committee work and shared students. And anyway, Bethany would never say anything incriminating to Margaret.

  Then I saw it.

  From: Bethany Ladd

  Subject: Tess Filmore

  To: Margaret Moss-Jones

  October 2, 2011 at 10:55 p.m.

  I returned Tess Filmore’s admissions file to Lorraine today. Tess was supposed to be Rhonda Oakes’s, right? We really need to stop allowing faculty involved in contract disputes to handpick incoming students. Don’t want to rehash the Rhonda issue—​you know I think she should have been promoted. But she shouldn’t have been on admissions. Fair warning, if Tess ends up in your class: based on our interactions, I doubt she’s interested in working with anyone here.

  —​B

  I went cold all over, then hot, reading the email. So, Tess had been right. Bethany had poisoned the well with Margaret. I heard myself insisting over lunch that Bethany wasn’t the type to hold a grudge against a first-year—​as if that were the only way a person like Bethany could harm a person like Tess. The email had been dashed off in a hurry, with none of Bethany’s flourishes. She’d probably composed it soon after Tess’s rejection, easing the sting by throwing the blame for it on Margaret. Bethany seemed to consider herself an ally of Rhonda Oakes, the professor Tess said had been “crazy-black-womaned” out of DHU last year, but her feud with Margaret had probably played a role in her take on “the Rhonda issue,” too. Their academic rivalry was a kind of sport, with points scored by passive-aggressive emails and petty grievances. People like Tess and Rhonda were collateral damage.

  The fact that Bethany appeared to bear Tess no particular ill will made it even worse. She probably hadn’t even noticed she was selling Tess out. I thought of the casual way she had summed up Soo-jeong’s departure: International students never last long. The way she had used Connor, making him think he had a shot at the Joyner, when in fact she just wanted his “positive energy” for her book. We were not people to them. We were assets.

  But it got worse.

  As I dug further, I discovered that Margaret had been in talks with the Dean about Tess all semester long. Soon after the retreat, they were already bandying the idea of “gently encouraging her to seek another path.” After she challenged a white student for using the N-word in Margaret’s class, the infractions began to rack up. Margaret disapproved of Tess’s “inappropriate” slang, “primitive” arguments, and “aggressive” facial expressions. It was all sickeningly racist. Between them, Margaret and the Dean had railroaded her out of the Program, barely even bothering to soften their ugly biases for each other’s benefit.

  I’d failed Tess. I hadn’t believed her when it counted, hadn’t defended her to Margaret, hadn’t listened about Bethany. I’d delivered that letter instead of raising a stink. Wrapped up in my Bethany drama, I’d never gone to the Dean on her behalf. In a way, my silence made me just as bad as the rest of them.

  I’d missed too many chances to help Tess. But at least I could still hurt the people who’d hurt her.

  I made two hard copies of the Tess emails and put them in envelopes. I addressed one to Tess, the other to a reporter on the higher education beat at the New York Times. On my way out of the department, I metered them and dropped them in the outgoing mail.

  * * *

  I had spent more time than I intended to in the department and turned up nothing on Bird’s conspiracy theory. The memorial service would be wrapping up in half an hour. Time was running out, and I had no leads. Should I go to Bethany’s apartment next? What if Rocky was there? Where else could I go, if I didn’t even know what I was looking for? Connor had been vague about the contents of Bird’s email. A money-laundering operation, or was it real estate fraud?

  Real estate fraud. The farmhouse.

  Hadn’t Rocky said something about Bethany getting the farmhouse cheap after a development deal fell through? There’d been plenty of dirty land deals in the savings and loan crisis. And the architects who’d designed the house were German. Maybe they were from Munich, and Bird had heard something during his Joyner years there.

  I still had the key in my coat pocket. It would take me an hour to get there, but I had a head start on Bethany, who’d be sure to stay for the whole hourlong reception, fielding questions from students eager to get into the anthology. That gave me an hour to search the loft where Rocky had said Bethany did all her writing.

  I assume that’s what she uses it for, he’d said. Maybe for something else, too.

  * * *

  The snow slackened just as I reached the turnoff to the farm road.

  The winding road to the farmhouse seemed much longer in the dark. Although the overgrown trees shielded it from the worst of the snow, the narrow ribbon of blacktop was nearly impossible to distinguish from the frozen mud on either side. I crept along until the trees receded and the blacktop became a gravel road that glowed faintly in the moonlight. Derelict structures, the remains of barns and grain towers that had been plundered to build the farmhouse, loomed like ghostly sentinels on either side of the road. Then the farmhouse itself rose over the top of a hill, illuminated by spotlights so that it seemed to float above the dark hillside. I parked and crunched up the gravel drive toward the metal slab door.

  I pulled the antiquated key out of my pocket and then saw that there was no visible lock. For a second I panicked. Why would Bethany give me a key that didn’t work? Then a green light flashed in the door crack, and an answering light blinked in the seams of the leather key fob. I’d gotten it backward. The real key was electronic; the rusty piece of metal was only a key chain.

  With a soft swish, the door swung gently inward on hidden hinges.

  The room was a dark glass cave sliced through at odd angles by the outdoor spotlights, the refractions and doubled shadows leaving deep pockets of blackness in unexpected places. I couldn’t see any light switches; they must be concealed or perhaps operated by remote control. As my eyes adjusted, I made out the edges of reflective surfaces in the kitchen: a glimmer along the corner of the deep tin sink basin, a puddle of shine in the unscarred center of the chopping block. It seemed like ages ago we had all bustled around the kitchen making a spaghetti dinner like old friends, steaming up the walls with hot food and laughter, certain we were on the right side of the glass.

  The floating staircase was a stack of shadows. I climbed carefully, rising slowly past the deconstructed farm machines on the wall, fractured combines and plow parts jutting off the gray wood in the dark like the jaws of giant prehistoric fish.

  The loft itself was smaller than I’d expected, a clean white cave with high clerestory windows and just enough room for a bed and an industrial metal desk. I could see what Rocky had meant about there being plenty of privacy up here. The sight lines were carefully managed, the wooden display wall extending up into a railed pony wall that hid the low-line bed from the fishbowl of the first floor. Here at last, tucked away, was something I recognized as a working office: a single-board bookshelf
for the project of the moment, a printer, and a banker’s lamp, which I switched on with relief.

  The desk drawers held little but the draft pages of Bethany’s new book. The briefest glance was enough to show me it would be as incomprehensible to me as the last.

  I had an hour, but the clock was ticking. I looked around the tiny space. Where would Bethany keep her secrets? It had to be somewhere in the loft, the only sheltered spot inside a glass house. But there were no hiding places that I could see, no cabinets or furniture large enough to conceal a crawl space.

  There was only the bed.

  It seemed too easy, where a teenager would hide a diary. But then again, as Tess had once pointed out, Bethany’s behavior sometimes verged on the adolescent. I dropped to my knees and looked under the bed. Sure enough, shoved into the corner was a fat brown accordion file wrapped with string.

  I fished out the folder and started rifling through it. In one pocket I found two deeds to the farmhouse: a grant of sale to Robert Joyner from a holding company, dated 1989, and a quitclaim deed signing the title over to Bethany Ladd in 2001, the same year Bethany Ladd had been hired at his alma mater. The contracts from the Munich architecture firm were in the same pocket, and I had no doubt that if I investigated, I would find that they, too, were on Joyner’s payroll. Joyner had paid off Bethany handsomely.

  The reason why was in another of the pockets: a thick sheaf of faxes between Joyner and Peter Armstrong, curled with age and, judging from the fringe along one side, rescued from the shredder. Bethany had proof that Joyner knew about the rotten hedge fund.