Academy Gothic

by James Tate Hill

“Janice,” I said, remembering that Mrs. Musgrove’s name rhymed with Denise and not the name with which it shared its spelling. When they were newlyweds, Duncan said how much he loved this alternate pronunciation, her exotic jewelry made of found objects, how she styled her hair into a corkscrew, this woman who weighed more than three hundred pounds and moved across a dance floor with what he called “a sinewy grace.” For the past two years, however, after Janice dropped out of the physical therapy school whose tuition Duncan had paid, claiming a phobia of injured people, he had opted for the traditional pronunciation of his wife’s name.

  “Who is this? Is Duncan okay?”

  “Janice, this is Tate Cowlishaw. I’m one of your husband’s colleagues. Your husband left a faculty meeting about half an hour ago.”

  “I know that. He called me from this phone before he left. At most, if every light is red, it takes him eleven minutes to get home, door to door.”

  “He seemed upset. He probably went for a drink.”

  I set my magnifier on a memo pad beside the phone. “These thoughts are the intellectual property of Sir Duncan Musgrove, PhD” was printed at the top of each sheet.

  “What do you mean he was upset?” Mrs. Musgrove’s voice was talcum-soft, a twenty-nine-year-old trying to sound ten. The first time I met her, I thought she was putting me on.

  “We had a wake for our dean. Duncan was disappointed not to be a pall bearer.”

  “Scoot Simkins? Duncan hated that man. I don’t believe a word you’re saying. Duncan’s there, isn’t he? Put him on.”

  I could feel the grooves of the prior memo. I couldn’t tell what it said. White on white isn’t the easiest to decipher. “Duncan isn’t here,” I said. “If he hasn’t come home in twenty-three hours, give the police a call. I imagine he’s at the bakery, ordering a small replica of your wedding cake.”

  Janice Musgrove was breathing heavily, like a very large woman who has just stood up. “I remember you,” she said in her powdery voice. “The one with bad eyes.”

  “They’re not so bad once you get to know them.”

  “I’m not crazy, Mr. Cowlishaw.” She claimed this in a reasonable tone. The craziest ones have that talent. “I think someone has been threatening him.”

  I tried to picture Duncan in all his salty belligerence on the receiving end of threats. Having seen him crumpled on the floor outside Simkins’s office, it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. Could his wife have mistaken guilt for fear?

  “Lately I’ve seen less and less of my husband.” She spoke with strain, her words in the back of a drawer just out of reach. “He used to stick his head in the bedroom and ask if I wanted to watch one of his old detective movies. I used to say yes. He would sit in the rocking chair in the corner while I lay on the bed. At some point in the movie, he would reach across the nightstand and hold my hand. Do you know how hard that was, Mr. Cowlishaw, knowing he was leaving our bedroom to return to his other home? Most days he came home just to get the mail.”

  “Perhaps he stopped to say hello to this other woman.” I felt my watch. The value of my time, trading so low for so many years, had experienced a sharp uptick in light of recent events.

  “That’s the thing. There is no other woman. He told me so.

  Last night he came into the bedroom. He lay on the edge of the

  bed, sobbing into his old pillow. He said he wanted to help me get out of bed. Let’s get out of this house, he said, out of this town.”

  “He might have been lying. Cheating spouses have been known to do that.”

  “Duncan doesn’t believe in lying,” said Janice. “He says scientists don’t have to.”

  “What time was this when he got into bed with you?”

  “Late. A little after two.”

  The timing didn’t clear him from nailing shut the door of Simkins’s office. “Why do you believe he was being threatened?”

  “This morning, while he was making me pancakes, he got a phone call. At one point I heard him say, ‘Don’t you dare come near her. Do what you want with me, but don’t you dare touch her.’ I asked who he was talking to. Greedy assholes was what he said.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine. If I see him, I’ll let him know you’re looking

  for him.”

  “Mr. Cowlishaw?”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell him I love him.”

  I returned the phone to its cradle. The locomotive in the ceiling that kept the pool a toasty sixty-three finally kicked off. When I got to my cubicle, a blonde who smelled and kissed like Carly Worth stood up from my desk.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said.

  My computer monitor was on. I tried to decide how I felt about her using it. It seemed inappropriate and oddly endearing, like someone asking you to move with her to New York after a first kiss. Who was I to judge? I had answered Duncan’s phone, and we hadn’t even held hands.

  Carly put her thumb on my chin and turned my face two inches in each direction. “Your bruises are multiplying.”

  “The first one was getting lonely. I sprang for the matching set.”

  Carly kissed my jaw very lightly, left then right. “I never knew Mollie hated me,” she said. “Is it because we’re together?”

  I returned the recently used mouse to its home beside my empty paper clip holder. “Her jealousy sounded more professional in nature.”

  “Oh, I caught a student using your computer,” she said. “When was this?”

  “A few minutes ago. I didn’t catch their name.”

  A few times I had walked into my cubicle to find a student typing away, one of them writing a paper to my own class. I let him finish. It was the least I could do since I had no intention of reading the paper. I put in my earphones and minimized the browser on the screen. Carly leaned against the wobbly partition, watching me open a new browser. A search of “Hammond Thayer actor” yielded his personal website with video clips of selected work. I went with the first entry under musical theater, hit full screen, and unplugged my earphones to let Carly have a listen.

  “What do you think of the short fellow?” I asked, hoping there weren’t more than one.

  “What is this, Tate?”

  “Godspell, apparently.”

  I plugged my earphones in again and closed the page. My software began reading the browser I had minimized, an article

  about cremation.

  Carly pulled out one of my earphones. “It was me, okay?”

  I faced her while my left ear heard the temperature required to cremate a body.

  “My Internet was down. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  The article described the weight of the ashes relative to the weight of the body before cremation. It didn’t tell me who decides when and if to cremate the deceased, my own lingering question from the memorial service. Forty-eight hours seemed a quick turnaround for a man without a will.

  Carly moved behind my chair. I aimed my gaze at the monitor where her reflection would be. She rested her chin on my head.

  “This is so stupid,” she said. “Promise you won’t laugh.” Her nervous breath sailed over my shoulder. “Seeing the urn onstage gave me an idea. Vampires turn to ash when they die, right? There’s a scene in my novel when . . . anyway, I wanted to know how much ash there might be.”

  “I thought it was dust.”

  “Whatever. It’s not like they’re real, Tate. You can call it what you want.”

  “I suppose they could weigh whatever you want them to, since they’re not real.”

  Carly laughed. “Maybe you should be a writer.”

  “I’d be terrible with the part where everything gets tied together.”

  She pulled out my chair, making room for herself on my lap.

  Her cheek pressed against mine rather painfully. Her hair covered my face. Two women inside of an hour had blinded me with their hair. It suggested a pattern, but murder has a way of lending meaning to the ordinary.

  I typed “
Rosewall Glen Retirement Village” into the search bar.

  “What’s that?”

  “Home of our esteemed trustee and grandson of our school’s founder, F. Randolph Parshall. He should be able to clear up a

  few things.”

  “Do you need a ride?”

  I hesitated, working through the calculus of whether or not to accept a favor. There are additional equations for favors from someone you’ve slept with and hope to sleep with again. Mollie and I had failed, I occasionally believed, because I had asked her for one too many rides to the supermarket.

  “It’s no big deal, Tate. I’d love to meet Dr. Parshall.”

  Ultimately, the only arithmetic that mattered was the current time, four thirty, and the end of visiting hours at Rosewall Glen, six o’clock.

  Carly hooked her arm around mine as we approached the parking lot. Delilah’s black sedan was gone. Two spaces down from where Carly was parked sat Duncan’s tan VW bug. Duncan Musgrove was not a man who walked places. For years after elevators had stopped working, he continued to push their buttons and wait half a minute before resigning himself to the stairs.

  I circled the Volkswagen. There were plenty of dents. The front fender resembled a pouty lip. The passenger side window was cracked. None of this suggested foul play. Duncan called them beauty marks. He told anyone who asked, and most who didn’t, that he had bought his Bug for two hundred dollars. “Fuck the bank,” he liked to say. “They can keep my Saturn.”

  “Do you think he’s working with Delilah?” Carly asked. I had filled her in on my conversation with the worried Mrs. Musgrove.

  “Their exchange at today’s meeting didn’t suggest colleagues on the same page.”

  “Maybe that was for our benefit.”

  I opened the passenger door of Carly’s car. Another vehicle started on the street a hundred feet away. A set of headlights shone in the rear windshield as soon as we pulled out of the parking lot. They held fast to our bumper through a pair of intersections and a detour into a gas station.

  “Is somebody following us, Tate?”

  “It seems that way.”

  Carly banged the steering wheel. “Damn her. I thought she had a presentation to prepare.”

  Carly sped up. Delilah, if it was her, did the same. Not until we pulled into the driveway of Rosewall Glen were there more than a few car lengths between us. We parked by the entrance, our traveling companion lingering by the front gate with the engine running. The black car’s headlights brightened the woods as we made our way inside.

  The receptionist lifted a guest book onto the counter with a heavy sigh. She handed me a pen. I feigned an incipient sneeze and handed the pen to Carly. Signing is easy. It’s those little lines people like you to follow that make it next to impossible.

  The receptionist read the names Carly had written. “Cowlishaw.” The middle-aged black woman said my name as if it were a lovely fish she had eaten on her honeymoon. “You didn’t know a Miss Katherine, did you?”

  “She was my grandmother.”

  “I thought you looked familiar.” The receptionist led us to the corner of the lobby where they hung seasonal decorations. She reached over a giant Easter basket to pull a frame off the wall. “Miss Katherine painted that.”

  I took the frame from her and held it at arm’s length. Blue and orange were possibly involved. Carly stopped staring out the window long enough to turn the painting a hundred and eighty degrees in my hands. It didn’t help.

  “It’s Grandfather Mountain,” said the receptionist.

  “So it is.”

  The receptionist returned it to the wall. “Funny you’re here to see Parshall. As I recall, your grandmother couldn’t stand that man.”

  “She liked him well enough,” I said. “Particularly when he wasn’t around.”

  The smell of bodies just this side of eternity got stronger past the double doors. The walls held artwork and crafts made by current residents. It reminded me of an elementary school. Carly paused halfway down the hallway to gag.

  “You get used to it,” I said.

  People here remembered my grandmother so fondly because

  she got used to things with a wide smile. A retired art teacher from

  the public schools, she didn’t have the money for a long stay in a place as fancy as Rosewall Glen, but decided to splurge when the doctors gave her less than six months. Its proximity to my new job at the Grayford Bank was the primary selling point. When the doctors shortened her prognosis to three months, she began tipping the nurses and orderlies with fives and tens. After she died, one of the staff gave me an envelope filled with fives and tens. I tucked it under her arm inside the casket.

  In the larger lobby without furniture or carpet, a pair of staff members spoke in raised voices, more aloof than angry. We crossed the room, passing a half-circle of wheelchairs in front of the giant television. I heard the voices of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. High as the volume was turned up, tourists on the Outer Banks might have heard them as well. The residents not interested in the movie faced the wall of windows overlooking the gardens.

  “What does he look like?” Carly asked.

  “White hair,” I said. “He’ll be the one in the wheelchair.”

  I moved out of the way of an elderly woman pushing the chair of someone she called Mom. Near the nurse’s stand, a young black man and a full-figured white woman bickered dispassionately. Their language made their loud, robotic voices sound even stranger.

  “You’re reading it like a brochure,” said the rusted voice of F. Randolph Parshall, seated in the wheelchair directly in front of them. “Let the words come naturally, like conversation.”

  They tried again. He gave them one line apiece before cutting them off.

  “Your resumes noted a background in the arts. I don’t see it.”

  “I played clarinet in my high school marching band,” said the young black man, sounding sincerely contrite.

  “I could live without the clarinet,” said Dr. Parshall. “What’s your excuse, woman?”

  “I’m a nurse, Dr. Parshall. You asked if I had ever been in a play, and I said yes. You didn’t ask if I liked it.” This voice was sharper than the dull blade she had used to recite Shakespeare. “And if you’ll excuse me, sir, I’m late for my rounds.”

  I touched the nurse’s arm when she came near us. “Excuse me. Is he in his right mind?”

  “Dr. Parshall?” The nurse gave a fake laugh. “He’s his usual self.”

  “Does he know where he is? I heard him say he hired you.”

  The nurse put a hand on her sizeable hip. “He hired most of us.”

  Dr. Parshall purchased Rosewall Glen a few years ago. The previous owners wanted to move someone into the room near his. He wanted it to remain empty.”

  She walked away, hand on hip. She must have meant his library, the room beside his filled with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I made my way behind Parshall’s chair. I had been back only a few times since my grandmother left in the way most residents leave.

  He hadn’t mentioned purchasing the place, but Parshall was never showy with his wealth, regarding his family money as a mildly favorable trait on par with good teeth.

  “You ought to be playing that clarinet in an orchestra,” Parshall told the black man in an orderly’s blue uniform. “I suspect any symphony would require a bachelor’s degree. I know a terrific institution right here in Grayford that would be lucky to have you.”

  The orderly noticed us waiting and shook our hands with gratitude. “Dr. Parshall, I believe your grandchildren are here to see you.”

  “I don’t have any grandchildren.”

  The orderly had already made his escape. Carly and I stepped into the positions of the untrained actors. I extended my hand.

  “Dr. Parshall, you’re looking well.”

  “I look terrible. I take it your eyesight hasn’t improved, Nick. How’s your grandmother?”

  “Dead,” I said.
<
br />   “I hope that hasn’t stopped you from communicating with her. You of all people, Nick, ought to know better.”

  “Who’s Nick?” Carly asked.

  “I call this young man Nick,” said Dr. Parshall, “after the esteemed Russian scholar of the paranormal, Nikolai Cherkasov. I guess you could call it a nickname.” Parshall unfurled a raspy, winding laugh that luck prevented from becoming a cough. He reached for Carly’s hand, which he kissed. “And who is this exquisite vision, Nick?”

  “Carly Worth teaches writing at our fine institution.”

  “It’s truly an honor to meet you, sir.”

  “The honor is completely and thoroughly mine, Ms. Worth. Are you a writer yourself?” His speech was labored, each word a heavy stone hoisted from the bottom of a well.

  “I am.”

  “Carly just sold her first novel,” I said.

  Dr. Parshall placed his hand over his heart. The gesture caused

  the immediate arrival of two nurses and an orderly. They went away after checking his vitals.

  “Perhaps my room will offer more privacy,” he said.

  I pushed his chair to the end of the hall. His was the last room on the left, across from the room my grandmother occupied in her brief residency. Being on the corner, theirs were the only rooms with two windows. Like all the others, Parshall’s room consisted of a full-size bed, nightstand, an open wardrobe, and a chair with an ottoman. Carly and I helped Parshall into the chair without wheels and sat ourselves on the foot of his bed.

  “Carly Worth,” said Dr. Parshall and whistled through his teeth, which he liked to remind people were still his own. “It warms my heart to know the written word is alive at Parshall College.”

  “More alive than some things,” I said. “I assume you’ve heard the bad news.”

  “What bad news?”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised he hadn’t heard. Dean Simkins had been the only liaison between Dr. Parshall and the college’s day-to-day operations. He might have come across the obituary, which people his age are wont to read, if The Chanticleer still existed as a print newspaper. I gave him the short version, the one that included bullets and left out my own suspicions.

  Dr. Parshall stared at the moonlit colonnade of trees out his window, possibly his own reflection. “I take it you’ve spoken to Scoot.”