“Dean Simkins and I liked to go off the books,” said Totten. “It never seemed fair to hold a school of Parshall’s limited resources to the same standards as, say, the state university up the road.”
Delilah sniffled. “Our vision is hardly the same as the state university.”
“Exactly, Dean Bibb. Exactly.” Totten’s syllables widened. What might have been a laugh dripped thickly from his lips. “Do you know what I was before I joined the noble cause of administration and accreditation? A philosopher.” He pronounced it slowly, a child wrapping his tongue around a species of dinosaur. “Sooner or later, Dean Bibb, we have to recognize the selfishness of our own passions.”
“Oh, absolutely. What you’ll see in the later slides is a description of our move away from content-based learning. I’m so excited about the benefits our students will begin to see when—”
Totten overwhelmed her with another yawn, louder and less sincere than its precursor. “You lost me again, Dr. Bibb. Save the PowerPoint for conferences and faculty colloquiums. Turn it into a tedious little paper and publish it in one of the pamphlets read only
by you and the editor who has to fill two hundred pages a year with inane bullshit.”
“Excuse me, Dr. Totten. Your language is—”
“Lose the attitude, honey. The dean of this school has one obligation: to keep this college open for business. Dean Simkins understood that obligation. Year after year, he fulfilled that obligation. In exchange, he was paid a very fair salary by the powers that be.”
The wall below my hip thudded with a sound like a miniature jackhammer. I took a step back. My phone was vibrating. A side button killed the sound, only to resurrect it as a piercing bell. I muffled it between my hands, carried it to the elevator, and sealed it up behind the closed doors.
“Of course not,” Delilah said when I returned to the wall. “Perhaps it was one of our ghosts. Dean Simkins,” she sneered, “tasked one of our lecturers with ridding Parshall of harmful spirits.”
“Why do you insist on denigrating the contributions of your
late dean? Were it not for his wisdom and selflessness, the accreditation board would have received a recommendation years ago to
revoke this school’s privilege to confer meaningful degrees on
its graduates.”
She was no longer crying. When next she spoke, Delilah’s voice echoed with the helplessness of someone trapped in a mine shaft. “Tell me what to do. I can do whatever Scoot did.”
Two floors down, the building’s front door slammed against the inside wall. I listened for the creak of stairs. They never came. I made it to the elevator just in time to situate my phone between the closing doors, causing them to remain open.
“Seventy-five,” Totten was saying when my ear found the warm spot on the wall. “Annually, of course.”
“Hundred?” Delilah asked.
Totten’s laugh, like all his reactions, seemed both offended and intended to offend. “Seventy-five thousand, dear. I assure you, with his generous salary, Scoot managed to live quite comfortably and still afford his contribution to the Jefferson Totten Fund.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Delilah in a shrinking voice that said otherwise. “Scoot would never do that. Never.”
“Sometimes the truth is less attractive than we’d prefer, but if we try real hard, we can learn to love it all the same.”
My phone rang again between the elevator doors. I kicked it
inside. The doors closed, and the elevator began its slow descent to
the first floor.
“Parshall College,” said Totten, possibly standing, “has been on a ventilator for years. The question you need to ask yourself, and answer sometime before eight o’clock tomorrow morning, is whether you want to be the one who pulls the plug.”
“I need to think about it.”
“Do that. I trust you’ll do your thinking alone.”
Totten’s footsteps shook the floor. My own weren’t without noise as I took the stairs two at a time, holding fast to the hand rail. On the second floor, I pushed the button for the elevator and waited.
Chapter 22
“LOOKING FOR THIS?” The anger in Juliet Bibb’s voice was accompanied by a measure of anxiety not there when she had hurled a plant over my head.
Another voicemail announced its arrival as I pocketed my phone. Jefferson Totten thundered slowly down the stairs. There was something I had wanted to ask Delilah’s daughter. I was trying to remember what it was when she brought her hand across my cheek.
“You sent them, didn’t you?”
“You have an unhealthy hatred of botanicals,” I said, rubbing my tender jawline.
“The pictures, you jerk.”
Totten exited the building more delicately than Juliet had entered it. “What pictures?”
Juliet Bibb stepped off the elevator and threw her arms around me. Delilah’s daughter was shaking. I let her cry until her breathing steadied. I repeated my question.
“Bad pictures.” Juliet reached for the purse that had fallen to the floor between us. Her hands continued to tremble.
“Why don’t you just tell me about them.” I thought I could save us both some trouble.
“My mom,” she said, still fumbling with the flap of the envelope.
I took the envelope. “What’s your mom doing in the pictures?”
“S-s-s-sexual,” she said.
I tapped the top of the envelope, feeling my eyebrows rise. I forced them down. “You mentioned she’s been out on dates recently. Do you recognize the . . .” I tried to decide between lover and paramour.
“The m-m-man who died,” she said. “S-S-S-Simkins.”
I opened the envelope and removed several sheets of standard printer paper. The pictures were in black and white. Large as they were, I could make out Simkins’s desk and file cabinets. The person closest to the center had on a tie. Not until I made out the outline of heads, Delilah’s much lower than that of the late dean, did I grasp the sexual nature of the photograph. Only the angle seemed to change in subsequent photos. The last sheet contained lines of type.
“Did someone e-mail these to you?”
“Not me.”
“To your mom?”
Juliet nodded her orange head. “I check her e-mail whenever she mentions sending me back to college.”
I moved my eyes from left to right. “Do you recognize the name of who sent it?”
“It’s a fake address. They used a proxy server. I know a little about computers,” she said, sounding as though she wished she didn’t. The elderly floor quaked a bit as she composed herself enough to continue. “It’s from ‘[email protected].’”
“Does your mother know about these?”
“It was marked as read in her inbox. They sent it yesterday morning.”
It would have arrived before I got to her house, possibly around the time the meeting was canceled. The faculty had long suspected, with vague indifference and moderate repulsion, that Simkins and his associate dean worked together on matters beyond the academic. Dissenters noted that the two of them seemed disinterested in pleasure, carnal or otherwise. What the pictures seemed to confirm might be less interesting than knowing who took them.
“I was only kidding yesterday.” Juliet choked out a sob. “She didn’t really kill anyone. Mom would never kill somebody. Would she?”
Juliet Bibb fell into my arms again, the bristles of her crew cut rubbing against the cheek she had slapped.
“There are usually explanations for these things,” I said.
Juliet sobbed quietly on my shoulder. We might have been thinking of the same explanation.
“Why don’t you go upstairs and talk to your mom. Leave out the part where you saw me.”
Juliet got on the elevator. I held the envelope in my hand. I put my foot between the closing doors, remembering what I had wanted to ask her.
“How often does your mom drive your car?”
<
br /> “She used to never drive it. Now she drives it like all the time. Why?”
“No reason,” I said, withdrawing my foot to let the doors close.
Chapter 23
“TATE, CALL ME,” Mollie said in her first message. “Call me soon,” she said in her second message. “Sooner than that, if possible. If you’re anywhere near campus, I’m teaching in one-oh-six until ten forty-five.”
Passing the dorm on my way to Mollie’s classroom, someone called my name. He sounded as young as a student, but more enthusiastic.
“Detective,” I said, stepping onto the dorm’s porch. “Glad to see you’re on the job.”
“I’ve been here for an hour, but no one can tell me where to find Ms. Gladstone. She isn’t answering her phone.”
I had hoped the murder investigation would take precedence over the missing file cabinet, but beggars can’t be choosers. “She might be in class. Some of them have been known to go.”
I opened the envelope. Thayer started pacing the porch before I could show him naughty pictures of the interim dean.
“I couldn’t sleep all night, Cowlishaw. I had a thousand ideas for new plays. Sets, casts, stage directions, you name it.”
I handed him the sheet without pictures, the one with the fake e-mail address. “Add this to your list of ideas. How are you with tracing e-mail?”
Thayer read the presumably fake e-mail address three different ways—surprised, pensive, and cheeky—as if directing himself through multiple takes. A pair of female students on their way into the dorm stopped to watch. “Weird,” said one of them before going in.
I showed him the pictures. I told him about Simkins’s salary and Delilah’s new status as the interim dean.
“Looks like possible extortion or blackmail. If she wants to report it, we can investigate.”
“Given the nature of the photos, she might not be inclined to share them. I’m reporting it on her behalf.”
“Sorry, but with budget cuts, if she doesn’t come forward herself, we can’t consider her the victim of a crime.”
I returned the pages to the envelope. “That must be what happened to Simkins,” I said. “He couldn’t come forward, so there was no murder.”
Thayer pulled a big breath into his little lungs. He let it out slowly with each word. “Ms. Gladstone isn’t in class, according to her schedule. Her roommate said she hasn’t been back to their room in a couple
of days.” Thayer moved to the edge of the porch. “What kind of
budget does Parshall have in mind for structural repairs, Cowlishaw?
I walked around the theater earlier. Nobody’s going to pay to see a
show in that mess.”
“Our students pay forty-five thousand a year for a piece of paper worth far less than theater tickets.” I started down the steps toward the library. “I know where Nikki might be.”
Thayer remained on the porch, surveying the dilapidated campus. I had witnessed similar hesitation in parents of prospective students. Each spring, the faculty took turns giving campus tours. Like all the students with no other choice, Thayer made his reluctant way into the tangled, unmowed grass.
“Why are all the lights off?” the actor-detective asked inside the library.
“I believe they’re on,” I said. “The electricity is off.”
I led him through the stacks to the dark classroom. Placing my ear against the door of the utility closet, I heard the tiny clicks of fingernails against a laptop keyboard. I knocked lightly on the door.
“It’s Mr. Cowlishaw, Nikki. My friend is here to help you find your file cabinet.”
Thayer looked at me and at the door. “We spoke on the phone yesterday,” he said. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
The closet was silent. A tide of dim light washed under the door. Remembering that the room didn’t lock, I let us in.
Nikki’s laptop gave her face a lunar glow. Our jittery shadows suggested candle light. They were scented candles, cranberry or raspberry.
“I remember you,” said Nikki. “You were here a couple of years ago when my friend’s car stereo got stolen. You never found it. Big surprise.”
Thayer pulled a pen and a note pad from his back pocket, policeman-style. “Can you give me a description of the file cabinet? I promise I’ll do my best.”
Nikki sat up in what appeared to be a plaid sleeping bag. She rearranged the stack of pillows against the wall behind her. “It was a fucking file cabinet.”
“What were the dimensions?” Thayer asked.
“I don’t know. Three drawers. Like a foot taller than you.”
Thayer’s head didn’t clear the top of the A-V cart. “Metal or wood?”
“Metal.”
“And what color was it?” Thayer had the learned patience of a man in his sixth year of a job he never saw himself working.
Nikki went back to her typing. “Black.”
“Any identifying marks? Any scratches or dents?”
“A black file cabinet,” I said. “Three drawers high.”
“That’s what I said.”
I opened Juliet Bibb’s envelope and held one of the pictures in front of her computer screen. “Did it look like that?” I asked.
“Oh my God! That’s so gross!” Nikki shielded her eyes with both hands.
“Sorry about that.” I used the envelope to cover all but the edge of the picture. “The file cabinet there. Does it look like yours?”
She seemed to peek through her fingers. “I guess so. Was that Dr. Bibb and Dean Simkins?”
“Perhaps you should keep that to yourself,” I said.
Thayer squeezed past a pair of candles to have a look. He scribbled in his note pad.
“But it isn’t mine,” Nikki said. “Mine has something scratched into the top drawer.”
“What kind of something?” Thayer asked.
“A drawing, I guess.”
“Could you be more specific?”
Nikki closed her laptop and crossed her arms. “A penis, if you must know. This idiot who goes here, Wade Biggins, who acts like he’s eleven years old most of the time, he thought he was being funny. None of this matters, anyway. Besides the paper for Miss Worth’s class, my senior project was on that flash drive. I asked Dr. Tweel for an extension on it, and he said no. I’m just going to be here another year.” Her voice flickered like the candle against the wall.
“You’ve given us some solid leads,” Thayer said. “We’ll do our best.”
I walked the actor-detective to the edge of the parking lot. He asked for the envelope, extracted the sheet without pictures, and gave me back the rest.
“I’ll see what I can find,” he said.
“One more question,” I said. “Who decides when to cremate someone with no family or will?”
Thayer pulled on an imaginary goatee. Maybe I just couldn’t see it. “After it’s been awhile, if the morgue’s overcrowded, they’ll do a little spring cleaning, so to speak.”
“In your expert opinion, would you say twenty-four hours constitutes a long time?”
The actor-detective knew his line, but didn’t say it.
Chapter 24
THE TANG OF DRIED URINE GREETED ME on the first floor of Suddreth Hall. Far as I was from the men’s room, the odor might have originated from the unkempt adjunct, who was playing his class an acoustic ballad. I stood in the back of Room 106 and waited for Mollie to reach the end of the poem she was reading her class. An obese boy in the last row was snoring. When the poem was over, I clapped my hands a few inches from the boy’s ear. He joined me briefly in applause before returning his head to the crook of his arm.
“Excuse me, class.” Mollie led me into the hall with her cold
hand. The building was rather warm. “Have you seen Duncan?”
she whispered.
“I saw him yesterday. So did you.”
“He hasn’t shown up for class today. His eight or his nine-thirty.”
“His speec
h at the memorial service,” I said, “seemed valedictory in nature.”
“His car is in the parking lot, Tate. I called his house. Janice said he never came home.”
“Has she called the police?”
“She’s scared to. She thinks Duncan might be involved in something he shouldn’t be.”
“Why don’t you call the police?”
Mollie looked left and right. “I don’t trust them, okay? I think you know why.” She eyed the envelope in my hand. “What’s in that?”
“Formative assessments.” I shifted it to my other hand. “Since when do you care about Duncan Musgrove?”
“He’s one of us, Tate. Like it or not, so was Simkins. There aren’t that many of us left to . . . choose from.” She snatched the envelope from my other hand. She used it to fan her face. “Maybe Janice knows something and doesn’t realize it. Maybe you know where Duncan is. Didn’t the two of you used to go out for beers?”
“What makes you think I can find a missing person? Not so long ago, you wouldn’t let me go to the grocery store, lest I bring back the wrong brand of chickpeas.”
“In my defense,” Mollie began and swallowed the old arguments before they came up, “you seem much more . . . independent now.”
It was a compliment on par with “literate” or “well behaved.” Mollie gave me back the envelope. She looked both ways and gave me a long kiss. A shy, teenage smile flickered beneath her perfect triangle of a nose. A round of applause erupted inside the classroom, accompanied by cat calls. The boy in the back kept his head down.
“Don’t worry,” Mollie whispered. “I’ll tell them it’s going to be on the test, and they won’t remember a thing.”
She went back inside, quieting her students with a request to take out a pen and a piece of paper. The instructor across the hall stepped outside to close the door to the commotion.
“I guess you found what you were looking for,” Carly said, slamming her classroom door. It echoed like gunfire through the first floor.
Chapter 25
THE MUSGROVES LIVED FOUR MILES from campus in Hannon Valley, a part of Grayford known for the smaller mall and a proliferation of gas stations. It was nowhere you wanted to run out of gas. I had never ventured to Hannon Valley on foot. The primary deal-breaker was an eight-lane intersection with elaborate turn lanes and a series of quick-changing turn arrows, a blind pedestrian’s worst enemy. A mile up the road, the street would decrease by two lanes, but I was wasting enough time on an errand whose only purpose was to show Mollie how independent I was.
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