by Dima Zales
Every time I’m asked, I mumble something about how I’m fine, really, and I guess it’s just the cold and the gray that’s got me feeling down. That’s Beth’s cue to explain her emotional state: “It’s Miss Mopey over there, her bad mood is dragging me down.”
We head back to the dorm – Brian’s coming as well so we can all continue to go around and around and keep not coming up with any good answers. As we walk through the lobby, I see Melanie there on the couch watching the news.
It’s no excuse, but I guess my crabby, crappy mood makes me do what I do. “Hey, Melanie,” I say, getting her attention. “You know it’s not going to be easy for you like in the movie, right? I’m not going to do something stupid and get my face melted off like what’s-his-name did at the end, just so you’ve got a clear shot at the Livingston scholarship.”
Her reaction is even better than I hoped; her face goes whiter than I would have thought possible and there’s panic in her eyes. “How did you – how could you possibly…”
I’m grinning, for the first time in several hours. I brazenly lie. “Your door was open when you were talking about it. I was walking by, and I wouldn’t have eavesdropped but I heard my name and I guess I just couldn’t help it.” I realize I’m being petty and mean and throwing away whatever progress I made building a better relationship with her during finals. I know I’ll feel guilty about it later. Right at this moment, though, being able to laugh feels more important.
Melanie looks utterly scandalized; she can’t think of anything to say in response. I say, very sweetly, “Goodnight, Mel,” and head upstairs.
By the time I’m back in my room, my amusement has evaporated. It took maybe thirty whole seconds for the guilt to set in.
Beth is still chuckling, and Brian’s not sure what to think. I don’t give either of them the chance to say anything. As soon as the door’s shut, I say: “I shouldn’t have done that. It was a shitty thing to do. And I swore I wouldn’t tell anything I saw.”
Beth is trying to calm herself, and Brian looks at me with something like pity. “You’re under a lot of stress, I mean, you’re going to have moments…” he says in what I’m sure is meant as a soothing voice.
I’m not soothed. I snap at him. “I’m going to be a doctor! You think that’s not going to be stressful? You think it’s OK for me to treat whoever I see like garbage if I have a bad day?”
He doesn’t flinch at all; he stands his ground. “No,” he says, very calmly. He takes my hand, leads me to sit on my bed. I let him. “But it was one moment, and you already feel bad about it. It’s not like you’re wandering around looking for – I don’t know – looking for puppies to kick or something.”
That’s true. When he puts it that way, I guess I can give myself a little break. “Besides,” Beth chimes in, “I know you said you wouldn’t tell anyone’s secrets, but it sounds like she was dreaming about you. That makes it a little less bad, doesn’t it?”
I’m not so sure about that, but I’ll take it. I don’t really have the energy to be angry at myself anyway. I might as well tell them the rest of the dream now, since they know the general idea already. I don’t get two words out before Brian says, “So she had herself as Indiana Jones and you as Belloq?”
I can’t help but laugh. “Exactly. I recognized the scene right away, I just didn’t remember the name. Belloq, he’s the French guy, right?”
Beth is staring at Brian. “How did you get all that just from ‘his face melted off at the end?’”
He looks shocked that she’s asking. “Everybody knows that. He opens the Ark and looks inside and him and all the Nazis get their faces melted off and die.” Beth rolls her eyes; apparently everyone doesn’t know that.
We remain distracted a few minutes more, but before too long we’re back on the question of Dr. Walters and what, exactly we do next. It’s Brian who comes up with an answer. He’s looking at the drawing, and he asks me, “So this girl down the hall, she drew that just from your description?” I nod. “You remembered a lot of detail, to come up with that.” Yes, I did. “How?”
“I – I just – I concentrated really hard. I don’t think I did anything special. She kept asking me specific questions, and I answered them.”
“I bet you remember a lot more,” he says, not quite looking me in the eye as he does. “Probably more than you think you do.”
“Could you see the dial on the watch?”
I don’t want to do this anymore! I don’t want to keep bringing it back, looking at every detail. I feel nauseous. My head hurts. But the image is there in my mind. The watch is up on the dresser. It’s far away. Hard to see it. But I can just…
“Maybe – big hand on the twelve, little hand – at a right angle?” That would be, what? “Three o’clock.”
“Three or nine?” Beth asks, in the quiet, calming voice she’s been using the last hour, or maybe day, I’ve completely lost track.
“Definitely three. It’s to the right of the big hand, not the left.” I feel like my brain is about to start leaking out of my ears. I try to lift my head, sit up from my position lying flat on the bed, and I can’t muster the energy to do it.
“I think that’s enough,” Brian says. Even if my eyes were open I couldn’t see him from here, but I’m guessing he’s horrified at how awful I look.
“I agree,” Beth says, and I can feel her looming over me. “Brian, help me.
I feel her hand under me, and then Brian’s. The two of them together slowly, gently lift me up to a sitting position. Beth opens the door and leaves, to return a moment later with a glass of water, which she hands to me along with two aspirin.
It hurts to swallow. I try to open my eyes, and that lasts about half a second; it’s so bright! I hear a pathetic mewling sound, like a sick cat. I think it came from me.
“Turn off the lamp,” Beth says, and I hear a switch being turned. I very slowly open my eyes again. It’s still bright, even though the only light now is coming in from the hallway through the gap under the door. “How long – how long have we been at this?”
“Two hours,” Brian says, still holding me up. He sits next to me now, and my whole body sags against him. Two hours? It feels like two days.
“Can I go to sleep now? I need to go to sleep now,” I think I say. I feel Brian’s arms around me, laying me down. I feel the covers being pulled over me. I feel his lips touch mine, but I can’t even summon the energy to return his kiss. I’m so tired – so sleepy…
Sara is lying in her bed, in her room. Her eyes are closed, but she hears voices nearby, whispering, just loud enough for her to make out most of what they’re saying.
A male voice that she thinks could be Brian’s says, “What we did was really dangerous!”
A female voice, maybe Beth’s, replies, “I know. But what were we supposed to do?”
The male again, “I don’t know. But this isn’t like Scooby Doo or something. We’re not going to have some funny little adventure and pull a mask off somebody’s head and drive off in our van when it’s over. Two people are dead! Really actually dead! Do you want to be next? Do you want her to be?”
Sara can’t hear what the female voice has to say to this. She sits up, opens her eyes…
…and she’s in the back seat of a car, a VW Beetle. She realizes immediately whose dream this is when she turns and sees a white-faced Joe Karver next to her. In the driver’s seat is Beth, who’s cackling like a madwoman and who occasional turns back to grin manically at Joe. The car is going much too fast, on potholed streets through what looks like the bombed-out ruins of a city. Beth seems to be deliberately hitting every pothole and heading straight towards a massive conflagration off in the distance. In the passenger seat Sara sees herself, sitting there calmly and every so often saying, “Isn’t this a pleasant drive?” while Joe looks on in speechless horror…
…Sara is in a bedroom suddenly, a bedroom she remembers. One she knows. She knows what she’ll see on the dresser, on the walls, but
now she looks more carefully around. There’s a datebook on the side table, and a prescription bottle. Without knowing why, she feels an overwhelming urge to look out the window; there’s something she wants to see – needs to see – outside. She only has a moment to look before the door opens, and she’s watching a scene that’s familiar and terrible. A man and a young girl, and she begins shrieking even before the girl does…
I hear someone – it’s me. I’m screaming – I’ve been screaming. How did I not wake Beth up?
She’s not here. What time is it? Eight-thirty. How long did I sleep? I don’t even remember going to bed. I’ve still got my clothes on from yesterday.
It comes back to me slowly. I was trying to remember all the details from the nightmares, Beth was asking me, Brian was writing it all down. And then I fell asleep, and I didn’t get up again until just now.
I try to stand up, but my legs don’t want to support me. My back is sore – everything is sore. My head is killing me. Why was I screaming?
I see it – it was the nightmare again, the little girl again. I feel my legs go completely and I grab onto the bed to keep from hitting the floor. I manage to lower myself down slowly, so I’m kneeling on the floor up against the bed.
The door opens, but I’m not even capable of turning my head to look. “God, you look terrible,” Beth says. I know I do, but however bad I look it’s nothing compared to how I feel.
It takes a while, but she gets me back up, forces me to shower and dress and go to breakfast. I briefly panic over missing my first day of classes, but she reminds me that they don’t start until tomorrow. I completely forgot that today’s a holiday, Martin Luther King’s birthday, so I haven’t missed anything.
Beth gets me back to our room, and makes sure I’m doing OK – as OK as possible, anyway – and then she leaves. She’s got business at the Psychology department. Even though it’s an official holiday, she’s got a hunch Ray the grad student will be there.
I’m still in my room. I haven’t been able to work up the nerve to look at everything Brian wrote down last night. Obviously I’ll have to – otherwise what was the point? But I don’t want to do it without him and Beth here.
Instead, I’m trying to take my mind off of the nightmares by looking at the syllabus for CHEM329, Chemical Aspects of Living Systems. It works; I don’t even notice an hour’s passed and I’ve read through the first two chapters of the text. It should be a fun class; I’m really looking forward to it.
I can only imagine what Beth would say about that. She’d probably pick the nightmares over CHEM329 if she had to choose. I guess a lot of people might, but I’m excited about it.
Beth picks this moment to come in the door. She stalks in like a woman on a mission. She sees me all caught up in my textbook and the sight snaps her out of it; she laughs despite herself. “That’s the Sara I know and love. You must be feeling better if you’re back to your old habits.”
She’s right. I can’t keep the enthusiasm out of my voice. “It’s really interesting! I can’t wait to…” Just like that the laughter’s done. She’s frowning now, sitting at her desk. “What?”
Her voice is sad, almost pitying. “You really were excited. I bet you completely put everything else out of your mind, didn’t you?” Yes. She doesn’t need me to answer. “I wish I didn’t have anything to tell you. You look a million times better than this morning. But I found out – you won’t believe it.”
“What?”
“You need to sit down for this,” she says.
“I already am,” I remind her.
“Right,” she goes on, completely ignoring what I said. “Well, first of all, Dr. Walters was married.”
Beth tells me everything she learned. She was absolutely right – all the dirt came out over break and Ray heard every bit of it. He was alone in the department office and bursting to tell someone. Beth didn’t even need to buy him a drink. “Well, just a Coke, when his throat got dry from talking,” she corrects herself. “It was the best fifty cents I ever spent.”
So Dr. Walters was married, and apparently most of his colleagues didn’t even know. He had a teenaged stepdaughter. Nobody had ever met or even seen her or the wife. Obviously that’s strange – what sort of person works somewhere for five years and never once mentions that he’s married and has a child?
There’s more. Last winter – December of 1988 – there was some sort of nasty incident between him and the stepdaughter. The wife filed for divorce shortly afterwards. Then, to top it all off, that was right around that same time Dr. Walters was coming up for tenure. The other professors took an unofficial vote and it went against him.
The way it was always explained to me is that, if you go for tenure and get denied, that’s almost as bad as being fired. Most professors, when that happens, resign right afterwards, and it ends up haunting them in their next job as well. The story with Dr. Walters was a little different. Ray’s theory was that Dr. Korben, the department chair, went out of her way to ease the blow. She kept everything unofficial and let him know privately, so he could have plenty of time to try and find another job without a big black mark on his record.
All of this fits. Beth and I recap everything she learned:
He’s obviously a secretive and dishonest man – keeping his marriage from everyone he knew.
He’s got to be tremendously angry – losing his wife, stepchild and job all within a few weeks would upset anybody.
He must have had to sell his house as part of the divorce – that explains why he lived alone when Beth went to his house last spring, and why he moved out in July.
And the “nasty incident” with the stepdaughter – that fits right in with what he’s been doing recently. But she couldn’t have died or – or – well, anyway, if she had, there’s no way that would have stayed quiet for a whole year. The police would’ve gotten involved; he probably would have lost his job then and there.
“You’re the Psych major,” I say after we’ve been through it all several times. “Is losing his job and his wife and his house enough to push him to – to what he’s – to killing those girls?”
“I don’t know,” she answers. “It could be he was already most of the way there. Maybe the daughter suspected. Maybe he was acting weird around her friends. Or more than weird.”
She looks nauseous as she says it, and that’s how I feel now too. “If we weren’t already sure it was him, I think this would settle it.”
Beth agrees. “I don’t want to believe it. I keep thinking about all those times I was alone with him in his office. God, I just want to go in the shower right now and wash it all away, you know?” Oh, yes. I know exactly.
I hug her, very tightly. “Thank you. I know how hard that was. I don’t know if I could have done it.”
She hugs me back, and neither of us let go. “You realize we’re nowhere close to done yet. We still don’t know where he even lives now.”
No, we don’t. We also don’t know what exactly happened with the stepdaughter, and as much as I don’t want to know, I feel like it’s a piece of the puzzle we’ll need to put everything together. I wish I knew how we could find out.
14
(January 15-18, 1990)
Beth and I go over to dinner early. Brian’s going to come over afterwards and we’ve got a thrilling evening planned: discussing what we know about the homicidal ex-professor who’s going to kill another teenaged girl on Sunday if I can’t do something to prevent it.
In the interest of getting some protein into my system, I’ve braved the chicken soup tonight. In between forcing spoonfuls of it down my throat, I overhear John, a little way down the table, say something that catches my interest.
“What’s that about a law student?” I ask him.
He turns to me, surprised at my interruption. “Oh. Nothing. I’m just helping her with resumes, while I’m doing my shift over at the computer lab.” I’d forgotten that he works in the library computer lab. There’s always a work-study
student on duty, to help anybody who’s having a problem, to unjam the printers and all that. And apparently to help people design and format resumes as well.
I wonder if a law student would know how to get hold of whatever legal documents there might be from Dr. Walters’ divorce? It’s got to be worth a shot. And it’ll also postpone going over all my recollections from the nightmares for a little while longer. I know how that sounds, and I agree, but I – I don’t know how I’m going to face it when we do all sit down and go through it.
“You’re meeting her tonight?”
“Yeah,” he says, clearly confused as to why I care.
“Good. You owe me a favor, and I’m calling it in. You’re going to introduce me to her and ask her to help me.” I didn’t mean for it to come out quite so much like an order, even though it is one.
He’s completely lost now. “What favor do I owe you?”
I try to keep the impatience out of my voice. I don’t do a very good job. “Diana Filardi.”
Comprehension dawns, followed almost immediately by more confusion. “That was Beth. She told me about Diana.”
I sigh. “Well, I was the one who found out and I told Beth, so she could tell you.”
Beth backs me up. “She did. I had no idea until Sara mentioned it to me.” Well, it is true. I don’t need to mention that if it had been left up to me, he probably wouldn’t ever have found out about it.
“OK? We’re all on the same page now? So what time are you meeting her?”
I walk over to the library with John. I wish I was with Brian so we could walk huddled together, because it’s bitterly cold. The wind is slicing right through all the layers I’m wearing. John doesn’t seem any more comfortable than I do.
When we get there, his law student is waiting for him in the computer lab. She’s the only patron there. I’m not sure exactly what I expected, but she looks just like any other student. She’s wearing a school sweatshirt and jeans; she’s got light brown hair tied up in a ponytail. When she sees John, she absolutely beams, and she asks him about his holidays with what looks like genuine enthusiasm.