by Rick Homan
“Were you at Buddy's Bar three weeks ago on Friday night?” I yelled as he slammed the door.
He let out a snort and sneered. “Why don’t you go read a book, little girl?”
“I want to know if you saw one of my students there. Kate Conrad? Blond? About so tall?” I held up my hand about six inches over my head to indicate her height.
He squinted at me. “Come to think of it, I wasn’t there that night. I was out night shooting hogs.”
He revved the engine, and drove away fast enough to kick up some gravel. I managed to sidestep it.
Night shooting hogs? I don’t think I had ever heard those three words in the same sentence, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what they meant. I walked back to the tree, picked up my mirror and hurried home.
By the time I arrived at my Hutch, the afternoon light had faded to gray. I was shivering, not because of the cool air, but because my effort to confront him had failed so miserably. He didn’t care if he was on my turf, or if I was a professor on this campus. I supposed that in his mind his family’s history in Edwards County outweighed all that. I think my being a woman—and a small one at that—also had something to do with it. I swore I would make him pay for that “little girl” remark.
Furious as I was at his bullying, I was even more afraid his truck would come roaring down the road I lived on. After letting myself in, I locked the door, pulled all the shades, and turned on all the lights before calling Sheriff Adams. The call went to voicemail, and I said I had some information, and I was at home and concerned for my safety on campus.
When I put my phone down, I didn’t feel any better. Going through my two-room house to make sure no one was hiding there took about ninety seconds. Once I knew I was alone, I turned off all the lights and peeked out from behind the shade on my front window to see if there was anyone or anything coming along the road. From my kitchen window, I scanned the tree line, which was probably thirty yards from my back door. Would I be able to see someone sneaking up on me? Only if he was carrying a big flashlight.
I jumped when my phone rang. For once, it was comforting to hear Adams’ baritone drawl.
“Dr. Noonan, I got your message. Have you called campus security?”
“No.”
“Hang up and call them immediately. Once you have talked to them, call me back.”
I called campus security, gave them my name and address, and felt better when they said the cruiser would be there within a minute or two. I turned on some lights so the officer wouldn’t find me sitting in the dark.
Was it more embarrassing to admit to myself that I was trembling in my boots or that I hadn’t thought of the obvious thing to do when faced with danger on campus? Before I could sort that out, the cruiser was at my door.
This officer was not the one who had picked me up near the athletic fields a week ago Sunday. He was tall, thin, and prematurely bald. I let him in, and he stopped to take in my arrangement of beach chairs on green artificial turf.
“Why don’t we sit here,” I suggested, as I walked to the cafe table by the back window.
The officer joined me and took the other chair. His own weight, plus the amount of equipment strapped to him, made me wonder for a moment whether the folding chair would hold him. “I understand we have a situation here?” he asked.
“We might. A few minutes ago—maybe half an hour now—I was walking along College Avenue and I saw a pickup truck at Dr. Schumacher’s house. I stopped to talk to a man named Huey Littleton, and . . . uh . . . I asked him a couple of questions. He seemed to get angry with me.” Listening to myself, I was amazed at how pointless this sounded. The officer was probably already speculating about my menstrual cycle.
“Did he threaten you in any way?”
“No. He didn’t actually say he was going to do anything. He just seemed really angry, and he took off in his pickup truck going really fast.”
“I see,” he said, making some notes. “Do you have any reason to think he will come to your home looking for you?”
My heart sped up a little, hearing those words, but I kept my voice even. “No. I don’t think he will. I just got upset, and thought I should call.”
“You did the right thing. I’m going to let dispatch know about this. I’m off duty at nine, but the night officer will be on the lookout for Huey’s truck. If he shows up anywhere on campus this evening, we’ll find out what he’s up to. Also, we’ll have the patrol car make an extra pass on Montgomery Avenue every hour tonight. If you notice anything that doesn’t seem right, call security right away.”
“I will. Thank you for getting here so quickly.”
“No problem.”
When he got to the door he stopped and looked at my sitting area again. “That’s nice. I never would have thought of that.”
I smiled. “It was cheap.”
He nodded. “Looks comfortable though. Good night, Dr. Noonan.”
I locked the door, put water on for tea, and called the sheriff.
After I identified myself, he asked, “Have you spoken with campus security?”
“Yes. The officer just left. It was just a precaution. Everything is under control.”
“I wish everyone would take precautions instead of waiting until there’s an emergency to call us. You said you had some information. Can it wait until tomorrow morning?”
“Yes. Nothing urgent. Would you like to come by my office at nine o’clock?”
“I’ll see you then.”
I poured hot water into the teapot, left it to steep, changed into sweatpants, and did some stretches to quiet my mind. It had been an unsettling day, but somewhere in all the chaos were some answers. I wanted to let it all go and get a good night’s sleep, but that stabbed child would not be ignored.
After pouring myself some tea, I plugged my camera into my laptop, loaded the photos onto my hard drive, and saved them all to my online account. Flipping through them reminded me just how alarming the image was.
In my email account, I re-read Kate’s message, sent the day before she died. She had said she used “some art-history books,” the bibliography in our textbook, and some “things online” to understand “what one of the coffins in the mural might mean.” Not much help there, but if she found sources that helped her understand what the image meant, it probably was not unique to the Eden Commune. Other examples were out there somewhere. I just had to find them.
In folklore, such as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, many frightful things happen to children—baked in an oven, eaten by a wolf, and so on—but I could not think of a single one that dwelt upon the wounds and physical suffering of a child. There is plenty of blood in Christian art, especially in depictions of Jesus and the martyred saints, but I could recall only one violent incident involving children: The Massacre of the Innocents, King Herod’s decree that Jewish male infants be killed in order to eliminate any potential King of the Jews who could rise to challenge his authority. There were reference books in the library in which I could survey visual treatments of this story.
Before turning in, I accomplished one more chore. I sent Lionel an email inviting him over for a glass of wine at five the next day so I could tell him how my research was going. I would also see if he would come clean about Chicago.
Chapter 28
Sheriff Adams sat in the chair by the desk in my office and leaned forward. “You did what?”
“I saw the pickup truck in front of Dr. Schumacher’s house, and I went over to ask if he remembered seeing Kate at Buddy's Bar on Friday night three weeks ago.”
“I have deputies who have backed down from questioning Huey Littleton,” he said, a little louder than necessary.
“I wasn’t questioning him.” I decided to leave out the part about the spray paint on my car. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He wasn’t there that night. He says he was night shooting hogs.”
Adams froze for a moment and stared at the wall before pulling out his notebook and jotting something down.
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br /> “Why would someone shoot hogs at night?” I asked.
The sheriff frowned at me. “Wild boar. These hills are full of them. Some of the boys think it’s fun to hunt them at night. I don’t care for it myself. The preferred weapon for hunting boar is an assault rifle. Half the time they end up shooting each other.”
“Are you serious?”
“Well, not half the time, but it has happened.”
“I guess you could ask whoever went hunting with him to confirm his alibi.”
“No need. He’s lying.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Weather’s been cool. The boar can feed during the day. No reason for them to be active at night.”
I had to admire the sheriff’s grasp of the local lore. “So maybe Huey was really at Buddy's Bar the night Kate was killed, and he’s trying to hide it. He might know something that would tell us who the real killer is.”
“It’s possible. I’ll look into it. By the way I called Teresa Zannetti. She agreed to talk to me so long as it remained confidential. She confirmed what you said. Devon Manus did not abuse her when they were in high school.”
“This changes everything. You can clear Devon now. He didn’t do it, and it looks like Huey Littleton was involved.”
“Hold on,” he said. “This does not mean that Manus didn’t commit the murder. It’s one less reason to suspect him, but it does not clear him.”
“Sheriff, you have to tell him and his parents that he’s no longer under suspicion so he can return to school. He’s in danger of losing a semester.”
“That’s not how it works,” said Adams.
“But now there are other suspects. If Littleton is lying about being at Buddy’s the night Kate was killed, he must think admitting he was there would make him look guilty. That means she must have been there. Littleton or someone who was at Buddy's Bar that night must have killed Kate. You said yourself it would be dangerous for someone from the college to go there.”
“Please do not quote my own words to me. I said I would look into it, and I thank you for the information.”
“There have to be people who saw her there. If Huey Littleton was there. . . .”
“Dr. Noonan, I want you to understand what is happening. By going after Littleton, you may have started something. His people and people from the college have been feuding off and on for a long time.”
“Then why would Jacob hire Huey to work on his house?”
“The English and the Germans have lived alongside each other and done business with each other for 150 years. But when somebody gets out of line, people choose up sides to settle it. If this gets out of hand, I cannot guarantee your safety. So, think very carefully about what you do next. I hope you will decide to stay out of it and let me do the investigating.”
He stood up, nodded, and left my office.
Feuding? Adams was right. I wasn’t from around here, and I didn’t understand the world I had moved into. I was wasting my time trying to identify the murderer. My time would be better spent researching Kate’s discovery, and announcing it to the campus.
Byron Hawley followed me to my office after art history class on Wednesday morning, saying he wanted to talk about his paper on the mural. Since it had been only a week and a half since I handed out instructions for this assignment, he deserved points for initiative.
Once seated by my desk, he pulled from his backpack a stack of pages held by a binder clip and handed them to me. “Maybe you could just take a look at these,” he said.
Flipping through them, I could see he had looked up relevant topics like “mural” and “commune” on Wikipedia and other websites and printed out the articles. “It looks like you’ve done some research,” I said.
“So, is that okay then?” he asked.
I didn’t understand his question, so I ignored it. “Do you recall I suggested you come up with a topic? Did you give that some thought?”
He grinned. “Sure. The mural.”
“Yes, but what about the mural?”
Still grinning, he shrugged.
I set his pages on the corner of my desk where he could reach them. “These articles should be helpful when you’ve decided what aspect of the mural you want to write about. Is there something about the mural that’s especially interesting to you?”
“Just . . . the whole thing.”
“That might be why you’re having trouble getting started. Do you remember when we talked about common knowledge? If you say a mural is painted on a wall, communes were formed in the early 1800s, and the Eden Commune had a mural, that’s all common knowledge, so you aren’t saying much. Your topic needs to be more specific.”
His eyes wandered to the scene outside my window. He looked up when I stopped speaking. “I told you I was going to need some help with this paper.”
“Yes, I remember.”
He slid the pages on my desk closer to me. “So, can you help me out?”
“I am trying to help you by suggesting you focus on a topic.”
He scowled. “What I mean is, can you help me out the way I helped you?”
“With my car?”
His expression brightened, and he nodded.
“Are you saying you want me to write your paper for you?”
That seemed to shock him. “No. I wouldn’t ask you to do that.” He tapped his fingers on the pages. “You can see I’ve done some work here. I was hoping you could give me credit for that.”
“Do you mean give you credit for writing a paper because you copied some articles?”
“Basically, yeah.”
I held back from yelling at him. “That was not our understanding. There was never any agreement to trade favors.”
He had that look that babies get when they’re expecting a spoonful of applesauce and they get strained carrots instead. “But I helped you, so it only seems right you should do something for me.”
“No, Byron, that does not seem right. Here’s what I will do. I will find out how much a shop would charge to remove spray paint, and I will write you a check for that amount. In the meantime, take these pages with you, think of a topic, and write a short paragraph defining it. When you’ve done that, come back and I will help you write your paper.”
He snatched the pages from my desk and stalked out of my office.
I locked up my office and went out for a walk, taking the long way around to the snack bar at the Student Center to pick up a sandwich.
I had been a fool to believe Byron when he said he wanted to remove the spray paint because he didn’t want me to think badly of the school. I felt sad and sickened by his attempt to manipulate me. I didn’t want to become cynical, but it was becoming very hard to find anything at Fuchs College I could believe in.
Chapter 29
Perhaps because of Abbie’s pep talk both my art history class that morning and my art appreciation class that afternoon felt less like burdens. I almost enjoyed them. I could feel myself giving up the idea of sharing what I loved about art history and instead meeting the students on their own level and giving them a pleasant and informative experience. Providing a service was less satisfying than teaching a discipline, but I began to think I could live with it until a better job came along.
When I got to the library shortly before three, I found Gertrud Schiller’s Iconography of Christian Art in the reference section and looked up “Massacre of the Innocents.” It showed me how that story has been represented in paintings, sculptures, mosaics, and all kinds of visual art since the middle ages.
It also showed me detailed photos of works of art from the walls of churches, the pages of illuminated manuscripts, and the panels of triptychs. None of them included a wounded child.
Instead, Christian artists had traditionally caught the horror of the incident by creating a crowd scene in which mothers fought with soldiers wielding swords. In each example, the babies were tiny details. There was no focus on the wounds as there was in the mural.
&nbs
p; Just to be sure, I looked in the index under “child” and “children,” hoping to find a subhead such as “with wounds.” I also looked under “wounds” hoping for a subhead such as “child with.” I found nothing.
I also consulted the The Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography, which does not limit itself to Christian art. Again, I found no image similar to the one in the mural.
Since I hadn’t gotten lucky with either of these general iconographies, I needed a more specific reference. I fantasized about finding a book about murals in the chapels of nineteenth-century American communes, and searched for it, but there didn’t seem to be such a thing, even through interlibrary loan.
Using the library’s catalogue, I did a keyword search for “iconography” and found several in the collection: Pagan Celtic Britain: Studies in Iconography and Tradition; Route 66: Iconography of an American Highway; Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography; and Medieval Spanish Iconography among others. None of these was especially promising for my present project, but, so the afternoon wouldn’t be a complete loss, I checked out Pagan Celtic Britain and Dark Mirror so I could peruse them at my leisure and add them to my database of research tools.
It was after four, and I needed to prepare for Lionel’s visit. I went home, swept the floor, wiped down the bathroom, put all my extra books back on their shelves, and made sure no stray items of clothing had wound up under the bed or in otherwise embarrassing places.
As I worked, I pondered the sorry state of my research. Kate somehow discovered a meaning for the image of the stabbed child, and she did so partly with materials in the college library. Therefore, the answer was on a page in a book within my reach, but without knowing all the links in the chain that led her to that page, it was lost to me. I needed to speed things up. Although Jacob would need months to get an article ready to send to a journal, I wanted to be sure I announced Kate’s discovery to the campus before he could use it as his own.