I looked past his shoulder toward Phillips’ office, deciding how best to end this conversation and leave him behind me. I didn’t want this to end like our last confrontation.
“You should have been kicked out back then,” he snarled. “And you don’t belong here now.”
I got my degree, so the rest was simply personal, as far as I was concerned. And despite what Rayburn implied, I had attended the University for academic approval, not his. The worst anyone could do now was dismiss from me a summer camp job for something I didn’t do.
“Are you sure you’re not just jealous of something?” I pointed out instead, watching him fume inside.
Rayburn had wanted me arrested for assault. Emily threatened to sue the school. Everyone shut up. Emily graduated. And a year later I did too, barely showing up for a writing class and somehow getting remarkable grades.
“This isn’t about me,” he snapped. “I’m honestly trying to give you some advice. This is all coming back on you already, and there’s no saying it won’t get worse. You may not be guilty of anything other than indiscretion, but indiscretion is what creates appearances, and appearances can easily be mistaken for the truth.”
I got the warning. It made sense. But I didn’t dig his tone, and he wasn’t honestly trying to help me. He was more honestly trying to undermine me, some self-serving ploy.
“Dr. Rayburn, sometimes shallow, ignorant people are going to look at things however it serves them best, no matter what. Integrity also means recognizing when you’ve done nothing wrong, despite appearances, as much as it means recognizing when you’ve done something wrong,” I retorted.
His mouth snapped open with a response, but I didn’t let him give it.
“The truth is, yes, maybe I was in the wrong places at the wrong times, and shouldn’t have been there, but I didn’t do anything wrong. So while I appreciate your concern, I’m innocent. These things would have happened whether I had been around or not. Either way, I don’t give a shit what you think,” I snapped.
He looked at me, more surprised than satisfied, I think, but he didn’t have a response anymore, other than to glare at me. He no longer pretended to be looking out for me – just looking at me, pissed off.
“I’ve got to go talk to Phillips,” I told him, starting toward Phillips’ office.
Rayburn stood still for a second, and I sensed him start after me, even as I opened the door to Phillips’ office. He arrived just in time to catch me stumbling backward, to absorb some of my shock, holding me tightly as I struggled to grasp what I was seeing exactly, not that there could be much mistaking it - the hair flying, except of course where it was caked to her face by sweat - the dangling jaw, the bare breasts swinging like pendulums. I stared in horror at Dalia’s beautiful, sprawled body, bent over the top of Phillips’ desk, over which he stood, himself naked and glistening with sweat, a big, stupid grin on his own face, grunting like some animal.
I erupted with fury, trying to charge into the office, but Rayburn still held me, grabbing me under my shoulders and tossing me to the ground. He slammed the door shut. The image burned in my mind, the same way I burned to douse Bonafide’s ivory towers of hypocrisy and self-righteousness in gasoline, and bring both of these sons of bitches to a great, fiery ruin.
*19*
I sat in my cabin, troubled by the image of Phillips’ face, and Dalia’s too, the whole scene still pounding in my head. I wished I hadn’t seen that, though it was good to know it happened. It changed everything I thought I knew about both of them, no matter how sickening. It dirtied everything I thought and felt and had done.
This was an unforgivable betrayal. I believed she loved me, even though I didn’t really pretend I was in love with her - but I had certainly been warming to the idea of sleeping with her. Maybe it was just an ego trip. But to see another man on my ego trip crushed all the depraved pleasure I could have had. No matter how beautiful the ocean is, it is awful to swallow, and worse to drown in.
I wished Charlie wasn’t dead.
She wouldn’t have done this to me.
Lester walked into the cabin, interrupting my remorseful meditation.
“Dude, you alright?” he asked, probably taking a single glance at me and sensing the aura of disturbance that must have been emanating from me.
“Yeah, man,” I muttered. “Just a fucked up day.”
“With that girl dying?” he asked. “You’re, like, batting two for two, hah?”
“Fuck,” I groaned. “I wasn’t thinking about it that way.”
“Shit,” he said, walking into the room and throwing a knapsack onto his bed. “What the hell are you thinking then?”
“Do you want to know,” I asked, “or need to know?”
“Just curious,” he assured me, kicking his sandals off. “I mean, come on, that’s two girls in two days, both dead right after hanging out with you, and you’re telling me you’re not thinking about it.”
“I didn’t do anything but talk to them,” I swore.
“Swimming with Charlie in a bikini and you didn’t get any action?” he asked in disbelief as he dropped onto his bed.
“Dude, I would have in a second if I could have,” I said, remembering her floating downstream, away from me, giggling, still alive.
“You poor soul,” Lester said, shaking his head.
“I can’t believe she’s dead,” I sighed.
“So what the fuck else happened to you?” he asked.
“It doesn’t sound like much in comparison,” I said, “but I was just walked in on Dr. Phillips having sex with Dalia.”
He snickered as he reclined on his bed. “No shit,” he said. “That sounds funny, not disturbing.”
“If Dalia had been chasing you for two days, and you saw that, it’s disturbing, I’m telling you,” I explained. “Not funny.”
“You’re the fucking man,” Lester said. “Dalia too, hah?”
“Sort of,” I said, exhausted.
“Well, don’t worry about it too much,” he said with a chuckle. “She’s just like that. It’s not personal.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, my interest peaked, though I knew right away I didn’t want to hear the truth. I had seen and learned enough for one day.
“Dude,” he said, like he had a great secret. “She’s got serious daddy issues. I mean, totally needs approval. Like, needs help kind of stuff.”
“What?” I asked in disbelief. “How do you know?
“It’s true,” Lester said, grinning. “I’ve known her since we were kids. She dated my buddy Max. I know way too much about her, dude.”
“Whatever, man,” I said, not sure of what else to say.
“I’ll show you,” he said, sitting up and pulling a laptop out of his knapsack. He walked over and sat in the wooden chair at the desk next to my bed, booting the computer up.
I believed him, since he was so ready to show me, but I had to see it to believe it too, whatever dark secret he had on his computer.
“Dude,” he said. “Don’t tell her I showed you this, because me and Max swore to her we deleted the file forever and completely.”
I sat up on my bed and watched him navigate through his computer, before finally launching a video file. I watched in morbid fascination as the media player launched and a video of Dalia appeared, dancing in front of a webcam or something, smiling and making faces at it.
“She made this for Max, right before he dumped her after graduation,” Lester explained as we watched Dalia undress. “He was leaving, she was desperate to make him stay. She was devastated, totally psycho. You know, her father abandoned her and her mother shacked up with one of our teachers, lived across town, never had much of anything to do with her after that. She was really clingy. So me and Max put this out on the Internet and wouldn’t take it down until she left him alone.”
I looked away, walking out of the cabin into the night without saying a word. I’d seen enough. I had seen that video before.
*20*
There was a distraught buzz about the camp the next morning. I didn’t want to come out of my cabin, realizing I didn’t want to be here at all. There was so much trouble tied to me, in just a couple of days here. It could only get worse. It perplexed me, because nothing seemed unusual in the events preceding anything else, but at some point, everything I involved myself with seemed to come crashing down around me.
Hell, even New York City.
I wasn’t sure what made me the center of the maelstrom. A string of good luck in the recent past that needed to be balanced out? I couldn’t remember any good luck since college. Backlash from a rash of bad decisions on my part? Pure, chaotic coincidence? Plain, rotten, bad luck?
These questions swiftly became irrelevant. Because things got worse. The whole camp was freaking out.
Dr. Phillips was missing.
*21*
Only a morning had passed with no sign of him, but events had been so tragic, and tensions were so high, that even the slightest fracture of the ordinary quickly approached catastrophic in everybody’s calculations. It was troubling. In God knows how many years of writing camp, no faculty member had ever just disappeared, and certainly not following the deaths of two campers.
I learned the news from Marianne, visibly upset as I passed her on the main lawn.
“Jones,” she cried out as she saw me. “Have you seen Dr. Phillips?”
Probably in more ways than I ever cared to, I thought, picturing his happy, reckless grin hovering, bouncing above the back of Dalia’s head.
“Not since yesterday,” I said.
“Yeah, well, not you or anyone else,” she said, like it should have a powerful impact. When it didn’t seem to register on me, she continued, “He’s missing. No one else has seen him since yesterday, but he missed a meeting this morning and he’s not in his cabin or his office. He’s just gone!”
Panic stirred across the whole camp, a hysteria driven by the recent memory of two deaths already and now the fear of a third. I didn’t mention what I’d seen but wanted to tell them to ask Dalia where he is. I didn’t really care where Phillips was, though. And more than anything, I wanted to blot the whole scene from my mind.
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Twitch of the Death Camp is available for purchase or loan in the Amazon Kindle Store.
Seeing Crows Page 26