Academy Gothic

by James Tate Hill

  Traffic in front of me came to a stop. Stopped cars are the good kind, the ones that don’t kill you upon contact. Cars in the lanes to my right revved their engines. I started across in a half-jog, waiting by the smoke-belching grill of a tall truck while vehicles in the center lane made left turns. One last occupant of the turn lane honked his horn, braking in time to force me only a foot into the intersection. I pushed off using the hood and performed an unintentionally acrobatic broad jump onto the narrow median, my shoulder colliding with the sign post.

  “Why don’t you get a cane?” Mollie had asked me years earlier.

  “I think those are for blind people,” I replied.

  “It would make drivers more careful around you, Tate. I worry about you.”

  I reached the other side of the intersection with the pride of a gambler who’s won a five-dollar jackpot. I stopped congratulating myself at the next intersection.

  I cut through a pair of parking lots, deciphering the large signs of a fast food barbecue joint and the chain store that rented televisions to people who can’t afford to buy them. A gangly, chattering vagrant called out to ask what I was looking for. “Duncan Musgrove. You seen him?”

  The man walked beside me. “What he look like, boss man?”

  “Short and stocky. Gray hair. Walks like a penguin.” I turned onto a side street narrow enough for stop signs, my strong preference over traffic lights.

  “Five dollars,” said the probable crackhead. He was tall enough that his breath sailed over my head. The rest of him smelled a lot like the first floor of Suddreth Hall.

  “Too rich for my blood.”

  He tried frantically to renegotiate, but seemed unable to think of other numbers.

  Bringing my face a few inches from mailboxes, I discovered that house numbering was irregular. I guessed six times until I guessed correctly.

  “I might be awhile,” I called out to the lingering crackhead from Duncan’s porch.

  He got shorter, presumably after sitting down on the curb. “Desert Market,” he repeated in the pleasant tone of a salutation.

  No one answered multiple knocks. The front door was locked. I made my way around the back of the blue bungalow straight out of the Sears catalog, not unlike the clothing of the man who rented it. He had moved here after one of the four ex-wives got the house he was a few years from owning outright. The back door was also locked. I tried to guess which window was the bedroom. Knocking on the second from the back produced a sound like a sheep trying to hit a high note.

  “Janice?”

  “Don’t kill me,” she said.

  “I won’t,” I said. “Can you let me in? It’s Tate Cowlishaw.”

  Janice directed me to a spare key under a fake stone by the back door. Thinking of my new friend out front, I locked the door behind me. The friendliness of crackheads is always a little suspect.

  The back door opened into a carpeted laundry room thick with

  the sour odor of the clothes piled waist-high on the floor. A yellow sheet stapled to the ceiling served as the door to the kitchen. The

  smell of food, or what used to be edible, told me which room it was before my eyes made their slow inferences. It wasn’t the smell of

  food that had been recently cooked. Recent didn’t feel like a word I would be reaching for in the Musgrove home.

  A round table against the wall was covered with bright boxes of children’s cereal. Between two of them sat a plastic milk carton, half-full. It was warm to the touch. The lid was off. An empty bag of pork rinds leaned against a Styrofoam take-out container. A pan on the stove held the crispy remains of those pancakes Duncan had made for his wife yesterday morning. A mixing bowl contained the rest of the batter.

  More take-out boxes were stacked on the Formica counter. Thin black lines like cracks in the Styrofoam were visible on the tops and sides. The cracks moved when I touched the container. I lifted the lid to find a colony of them, glistening with movement.

  “I’m in here,” Janice shouted, or tried to. She didn’t have the breath required to raise her voice.

  Neither the thickly carpeted living room nor the dark, wood-paneled hallway was a respite from the odor. If anything, an earthier, feral scent underscored the rotting food. I gagged, trying to recall if Duncan had a dog. It seemed unlikely that a domesticated animal could be responsible for such a smell. The white porcelain of a bathroom caught my eye. I ducked inside it and shut the door.

  “Not in there, Mr. Cowlishaw. In here.”

  “I’ll be right in,” I said after flushing my morning coffee and a small amount of Malai Kofta.

  I pulled my shirt over my nose and stood in the doorway of the master bedroom. I spoke through my buttoned collar. “Janice. It’s good to see you again.”

  Duncan’s wife whimpered in the queen-sized bed. She occupied enough of it that only a cat or two could have fit beside her. A ceiling fan above the bed circulated the pungent air, still potent through my shirt.

  “Miss DuFrange said you didn’t want to call the police. They’re generally better at finding people than your average college instructor.”

  An extensive series of breaths finally controlled her tears enough to allow speech. “Duncan told me not to.”

  I sat in the corner chair where Duncan must have watched the movie with her earlier in the week. “When was this?”

  “Three twenty-eight yesterday afternoon. It was three twenty-two when he kissed me good-bye, and I asked him to wait with me until the minute turned to twenty-seven. March twenty-seventh is

  our anniversary.”

  I decided not to ask the chances of his leaving her. “What were his exact words regarding the police?”

  “‘If anything happens to me,’ he said, ‘don’t call the police.’”

  “Was he expecting something to happen to him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I let out a breath and regretted that I would have to replace it. “What about his cell phone?”

  “It’s in the living room. He didn’t take it with him.”

  “Has anyone else called it?”

  Janice shushed me before I could get the question out. “Listen.” All I heard was the slipstream of traffic four blocks away. “Even the mice know he’s gone. They’ve hardly stirred since he left.”

  “Our mice on campus aren’t so sentimental,” I said. “How about you hop up and help me find that cell phone?”

  “Oh, I can’t do that.”

  “Sure you can.” I stood up and offered her a hand.

  She pushed my hand away like an eighth helping of cobbler. “You don’t understand, Mr. Cowlishaw.”

  “Maybe I could roll you to the edge of the bed and . . .” I trailed off, not sure if I was being insensitive.

  “It is not possible,” she said, trying again to summon the wind to raise her voice. Her frustrated words floated toward me with the odor I now recognized as human waste, pushing its way through the defenseless fibers of my cotton shirt. “Not for two years have my feet felt the floor of my own home. And yes,” she said, straining to keep her words together, “I am aware of the smell.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” I said through my shirt.

  “Duncan always took care of my . . . needs.”

  “You must be hungry, Janice. Can I bring you something to eat?”

  The pillowcase crackled as she shook her head. “I’m trying to go without,” she said, launching into a long sob that more resembled a lioness fighting off sleep.

  I noticed a red plastic cup on the night table. I carried it to the bathroom and returned with water. I set it within her reach on the night table, beside an old-fashioned telephone, the kind with a cord. I listened to the dial tone and asked her for Duncan’s cell number. I dialed it and followed the ring tone, a Muzak version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” to the top of the old television in the

  corner of the living room.

  It was a 1960s TV with a wooden exterior and little legs. I a
sked Janice to hang up the land line. This much she managed. Cheap as Duncan was, his cell phone was older and larger than mine. I read its display with my magnifier. Most of the missed calls were Janice from the land line. Everything prior to yesterday morning had been deleted. The last number that had been called seemed familiar. I mouthed and said it aloud until it resembled a jingle. I pushed send.

  “Randallman Dudek,” said a girl who didn’t sound pleased to be answering a telephone.

  I pulled my shirt away from my mouth long enough to speak. “This is Duncan Musgrove,” I said and waited to see if that meant anything to her.

  “Mr. Musgrove!” She sounded pleased. Her accent was Southern. “Are you calling to reschedule?”

  I took my conversation through the kitchen to the laundry room and the gentler fumes of soiled clothes. “I suppose I am.” I used my own voice, not confident I could do Duncan.

  “Ms. Randallman was disappointed you didn’t show up.”

  “Is that right? Usually it’s my presence that disappoints people.”

  The secretary gave Duncan a big, ingratiating laugh. “Marianne has appointments through lunch, but she can squeeze you in at two.”

  “Two would be lovely. Could you give me that address again? I think I got lost earlier.”

  The secretary laughed softly, affording me the patience of a man worth her time. She gave me the downtown address, Grayford’s lone skyscraper, a mile from the college. “Anything else you’ve forgotten?”

  “Sure. Who are we suing again?”

  This time she only laughed, and I hung up while I was still ahead. I wasn’t that far ahead. I slipped Duncan’s phone into my left pocket.

  “Were you talking to the extortionists?” Janice wanted to know when I returned to the bedroom.

  “In a manner of speaking,” I said. “Did Duncan ever mention talking to an attorney?”

  Janice lay perfectly still beneath the bedclothes. Before, she had the habit of fidgeting, perhaps for circulation, perhaps involuntarily. She was thinking of divorce. I was thinking of Marianne Randallman’s ex-husband, Detective Rick Stashauer, wondering if their connections to Parshall College were coincidental.

  “I take that as a no,” I said.

  “Tuesday everything was fine again. We were going to go somewhere together. For the first time in a year and a half, Duncan kissed me like he meant it. He said—”

  “I don’t think this is a matrimonial attorney, Janice. This is the kind who sues people. Any idea who your husband might want to sue?”

  Janice resumed her arm exercises, making a snow angel with narrow wings. “I remember something he said before he fell asleep in my arms Tuesday morning. He called me Big Mama. He hadn’t called me that in a long time. He whispered to me, ‘Big Mama, make them stop.’”

  “Make who stop?”

  “He didn’t say. He just lay there, letting me hold him until he fell asleep.”

  Janice asked for a wet wash cloth and the bucket beside the toilet. I brought them to her along with the boxes of cereal.

  “It’s a lot easier than it seems,” she said. “Nobody decides never to get out of bed. You decide one day and then another. After a while, you have no choice.”

  Chapter 26

  MY WALKING COMPANION STOOD UP from the curb to greet me. He asked if I thought it would rain, if I had tried the new crispy ranch chicken sandwich at the national burger chain, or if I thought he would be a strong applicant for entry into Parshall College next fall. It was hard to say what he was asking since the only words he used were Desert Market.

  “He isn’t home,” I said.

  The vagrant seemed to dispute this with his two favorite words, this time in declarative form. I lowered my sunglasses.

  “Desert Market.” He pulled something from behind his ear and showed it to me. A cigarette. He pointed to it and pointed to the house.

  “Desert Market lives in the house?” I asked.

  My friend gave a huge nod. A smile ran away from his face. It had better places to be.

  “Desert Market isn’t home,” I said.

  He started along the walkway to Casa Musgrove, motioned for me to follow. He made a left before the porch and continued around the side. An aluminum ladder rested against the house, ending a few feet below the roof.

  “Desert Market,” my friend said in the manner of presto.

  I climbed a few rungs of the ladder. My friend clapped his

  hands. I kept climbing as he returned to the sidewalk. The ladder

  led to an outline no larger than a microwave. A bent nail stuck out

  a few inches on the right side. On the left side, painted the same canary as the house, I felt a pair of hinges.

  I knocked four times. “Desert Market. It’s Cowlishaw.”

  I waited half a minute and pulled on the nail. The panel opened to a square of darkness. The air inside was dusty and thick. In my lungs, it felt like the opposite of air. I reached inside and couldn’t feel the floor. The ceiling was a few inches from the top of the opening. I climbed to the ladder’s top rung, holding onto the thin panel with both hands, and lowered my feet into the attic.

  They touched sooner than I expected. I lost my grip on the flimsy door and hit my head on a support beam. Sitting down, my head remained in close contact with the roof. I estimated the clearance at three and a half feet. I said Duncan’s name a couple of times, but my sixth sense told me I was all alone. The only sounds were the creaking ceiling beneath my knees and the murmur of the television in Janice’s bedroom. The half-open panel illuminated the corner closest to it and little more. I was turning around, on my way back to that brighter place when my foot sank into a piece of foam several inches thick, the egg-shaped padding found in couches left on the curb. It stretched further in either direction than my arms. I crawled forward, feeling the floor with both hands the way the near-sighted search for their glasses in cartoons.

  I came upon a hardcover book sized between a collegiate dictionary and one of those novels about Cold War submarines. An unsharpened pencil bookmarked it two-thirds in. A few inches beyond it sat a metal drum about a foot in diameter. It had no lid. A synthetic smell reminded me of Halloween. I reached inside. There were thin plastic wrappers with sticky residue that came off on my fingers, a scent of maple and cinnamon. Beneath the wrappers were little rectangles of card stock, perforated on the wider ends. The wax on one side suggested scratch-off lottery tickets. I shoved my arm into the trash can and found a pile of coarse hair. It stayed together when I lifted it, as hair does when it’s part of a wig.

  To the left of the trash can was a bed sheet wadded into a ball. It had ruffles and seams, but seemed too large to be clothing. It smelled of cigarettes. Under it was a thick cord. The left side was taut. I traced it in that direction to a piece of furniture with two drawers. On top of it, barely clearing the ceiling, I felt the once-standard glass face of a television. It had four knobs, two large and two small. The small one on the right turned it on.

  Voices arrived before the fuzzy picture. I turned down the volume. It was a ten-inch black-and-white set, possibly older than me. With the light, I could see the logo of Duncan’s hometown Pittsburgh Steelers on the side of the wastebasket. Holding the wig against my jeans, it looked orange or red. The sheet was a dress with a plaid pattern. The hardcover was a large print Bible. To the right of it I noticed a stack of books. Past them was an entire book- shelf two levels high.

  I turned the second small knob on the TV to the far left, sharpening the contrast. The additional light danced on the edge of something several feet long, darker than the foam on the floor. I crawled toward it. The spoiled food in the kitchen seeped through the ceiling. The length of darkness had a plaid design, a distant relative to the wadded dress. It was a couch cushion. Three of them were arranged in a row. On top of them lay a pair of legs as firm as the ceiling.

  I felt the gold stud in Duncan’s left ear and the horse head adorning the breast of all his shirts. I was c
lose enough to smell what might not be the kitchen. His arm lay crooked beside his face. In his hand, light from the TV caught the shiny surface of what I knew was not a stapler.

  Wary of fingerprints and warier of Grayford’s law enforcement, I used one of the plastic wrappers to feel the scabbed blood on his cheek. Hard spots of diminishing size led from the back of his head all the way to the wall. I pushed up his lips far enough to find his teeth intact, confirming as much as I was able that he had done this to himself. I wondered with renewed suspicion what else he and his pistol had done.

  In my left pocket, Duncan’s phone chimed with the Motown classic to which, I now remembered, Duncan and Janice had danced their first dance as a married couple.

  “This is Musgrove,” I said.

  “Hello there,” said Stashauer in a falsely cheerful tone meant to be menacing. “Why don’t you save us both a little trouble and tell me where you are.”

  I put a little sandpaper in my voice and said, “You might not like what you find.”

  “Is that some sort of threat, Musgrove? I warned you once. That’s all you get.” Wind from a brisk walk or an open car window put static between his words.

  I discovered a handwritten note above Duncan’s head. “Don’t let them hurt her,” it said in neat, uncommonly large letters written in black marker. Writing of such generous proportions was hard to come by.

  “Never mind, Musgrove. I’ll see you soon.”

  A police siren swirled in my ear before I hung up and dialed Stashauer’s partner.

  “How soon can you get to Hannon Valley?”

  “I’m meeting a contractor at the college to get some estimates on theater repairs. What’s in the Valley?”