Academy Gothic

by James Tate Hill

  “Mollie told me what you’ve been up to,” he said in a voice even calmer than the one he had employed on the steps.

  “I suppose you were bound to find out.”

  “Listen, Cowlishaw, you probably think I don’t like you very much. To be honest, I don’t. But as much as I think Simkins killed himself, I was hasty to judge the motive behind your little investigation. It seems we have different means to the same ends.”

  I unclenched my fist, realizing he didn’t know what I thought he knew. “What end is that?”

  “Giving Bibb her walking papers. Look, I know we’re at Parshall for different reasons. That’s fine. The academy needs foot soldiers like yourself. Both of us have to do what we can to protect the institution.” He smacked his palm with the back of his other hand. “The distribution model is sacred. Disciplines are sacred. What business do we have standing before our students if what we teach them comes not from our heart but a soulless sheet of directives. Soft skills, man. That’s what they call them. Do you want to teach soft skills? I don’t want to teach soft skills.”

  “You lost me at distribution model,” I said.

  “It boils down to this: we need Bibb as our dean like Mars needs igneous rock.” A laugh started in his nose and unraveled in his lungs. He noticed I wasn’t laughing and cleared his throat. “I believe in the importance of other worlds. There’s got to be more than this.” He indicated the entirety of the library with both arms. “It would be a damn shame if at the end of my career I hadn’t inspired a handful of students to stare up at the nighttime sky and think, yes, I can get there from here.”

  Wade Biggins held out his empty arms for Tweel to inspect. Tweel crossed his arms. “How long have you been here, Mr. Biggins?”

  “Like three minutes.”

  “Here at Parshall, Mr. Biggins.”

  “Eleven years next fall.”

  He said it proudly, and I clapped him on the back for his years of service to the Parshall community, which is to say his father’s tuition payments. Wade’s back was as hard and flat as a book, maybe several.

  “Eleven years.” Tweel’s voice reverted to its low, modulated timbre. “How long do presidents of the United States serve, Mr. Biggins?”

  “I don’t know. Like five or six years?”

  Tweel expelled a puff of air through his nose. “Where would you be, Mr. Biggins, if Parshall College didn’t offer you refuge from the cruel world beyond these lawns, where failure is not only unrewarded, but punished?”

  Wade Biggins didn’t answer. In my classes, he sometimes had trouble with questions that contained too many words.

  I gave him another back pat, gentler than the first so as not to signal the presence of contraband. “He means he’ll see you in class,” I said.

  Tweel halted the eleventh-year junior with a hand on the shoulder he had previously squeezed. “A day may come, Mr. Biggins, when Parshall is no longer the inviting bosom you’ve known it to be these many years.”

  “What does that mean?” He looked to me to translate.

  “Dr. Tweel won’t let that happen,” I said. “He’s fighting to keep this bosom warm and inviting.”

  Tweel looked at me as if I had slept with his wife. He pushed another brief laugh through his nose. “You may go now, Mr. Biggins.”

  Wade Biggins went. Benjamin Tweel gave me an “after you” with his hand, and I followed the junior through the metal detectors meant to prevent people from stealing books. Even when the power was on, they weren’t functional. Simkins had obtained them from the big-box bookstore across town during their liquidation sale.

  “How’s that petition coming?” I asked Tweel, who resumed his position as sentry on the top step.

  He unfolded a piece of paper and rattled it in my direction. “It may prove unnecessary. From what I understand, Delilah has her work cut out for her with this Totten fellow. All the same, I’d be appreciative if you added your name to the vote of no confidence.”

  “I’d be glad to talk to Dr. Parshall, if it comes to that.”

  Tweel didn’t respond. Perhaps he wanted to be the one who talked to him, present the petition along with his own résumé and take over as dean, be the one who restored the academy to its former glory, the one his wife thought of when she closed herself in a room and crafted words into poems.

  I started in the direction of the swimming pool, leaving him to stare at the sky. If he were waiting for the stars, he would be there awhile.

  Chapter 31

  THE ODOR OF BACKED-UP SEWAGE had finally overwhelmed the pool’s more tranquil odors of mildew and

  ant spray. In the ceiling, the runaway train continued to circulate unheated air. Loud, continuous sounds are the equivalent of sun in my eyes. It was all I heard until I got to my desk.

  “You just need to calm down,” Carly told someone.

  The cluck and wheeze above her words didn’t sound like another loose belt in the duct work. Someone was crying.

  “He’s a good person,” Carly said. “He’ll understand.”

  “I just want to get out of here, you know?” It was a girl’s voice, unrecognizable under the burden of tears.

  Carly was the one faculty member who regularly received visitors during office hours, usually for matters unrelated to class. She was the big sister for female students, the older, unattainable crush for the boys. I had heard many an account of break-ups and parental disappointment from my adjacent cube. Students brought her baked goods and the occasional vase of flowers. “Why do they like you so much?” Mollie DuFrange wanted to know one morning Carly had received a cupcake with a candle. “All I’ve ever gotten is the word ‘cunt’ engraved in the center of my desk.”

  I took out my cell phone to call Thayer. When I pressed send, the phone sang an unhappy little tune that meant “game over” in old video games. The screen went black. It occurred to me that I had yet to charge it. I called the actor-detective from my desk phone.

  “I think your partner was one of Delilah Bibb’s students,” I said by way of a greeting.

  “Mom,” said Thayer. “I’m right in the middle of something. Can I call you back?”

  “Your partner is there, I assume.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “In case he escapes your supervision, you may want to put an officer on a fellow named Jefferson Totten. He’s staying at the Gray Knight, Room 22.”

  “The Gray Knight? Are you sure you want to stay there when

  you visit?”

  “By morning, they’re going to give Totten seventy-five thousand or a few well-placed bullets. My money’s on the cheaper option.”

  “I looked into that other one,” Thayer said. “The one you spent some time in before? Couldn’t find a thing about it.”

  He was talking about Carly. I listened as Carly continued to comfort her student. The girl’s sobs had gotten louder. “That’s fine. Worry about Bibb. Put an officer on her,” I said.

  “I’ll make those reservations.”

  “Room 22,” I reminded him before hanging up.

  I turned on my computer to check e-mail. Only one student had written to ask if we had class tomorrow. Some things they learned quickly. I opened the browser to review directions to Sara Freyman’s house on Norville Run.

  “Mr. Cowlishaw?” said Carly’s sniffling visitor outside my cube.

  “Islanda. Good of you to stop by.”

  Someone with lighter skin and hair appeared to Islanda’s right. “I told her you would go easy on her,” said Carly. “Islanda is one of the best students I’ve ever had.”

  “One of my best as well.”

  I offered Islanda a seat. She sat down slowly, wary of the lawn chair.

  “I’m really sorry for what I said in my essay. It was disrespectful to you and to your class. If you let me rewrite it, it will be the best paper you’ve ever graded. I promise.” She hugged herself in a too-large Parshall sweatshirt they no longer gave to new freshmen.

  “Actually, I foun
d your essay quite engaging, particularly the part about—”

  “I’m really sorry, Mr. Cowlishaw. I didn’t think you read our papers because you never give them back and this girl on my hall said she got a hundred on one of your assignments and all she e-mailed you was a blank document.” Islanda’s words ran together in a teary blur.

  “That’ll do for the apologies,” I said. “I’d like to hear more about that idea of yours for revitalizing the college. Where did you come across the name Sara Freyman?”

  Two whooshes, a white blur, and the appearance of what might have been Carly’s arm were followed by the sound of Islanda blowing her nose.

  “Who?”

  “In your paper, you referred to her as the wealthiest trustee. Where did you hear that?”

  “I wasn’t serious. I promise to take your class seriously from now on.”

  “That’s fine, Islanda. Where did you hear the name? Who told you she was a trustee?”

  Islanda thought about it. She leaned forward with her elbow on her knee and thought about it some more. As quickly as she finished her tests, her hesitation didn’t seem like a positive sign. I started to ask if it might have been Dr. Bibb, but as Delilah herself taught us in one of her seminars on designing exams, open-ended questions are a more accurate measure of what a student knows.

  “Dr. Tweel,” Islanda said tentatively, almost as a question. A moment later, she sat up straight. “Yeah, it was Dr. Tweel.”

  “When was this?”

  Islanda found the poise with which she had delivered her memorized presentation on her uncle’s pawn shop earlier in the semester. “He was on the phone. It was a few months ago. I’m an R.A., right? So I had a meeting with the new housing director to go over the spring semester—requests for roommate changes, broken furniture or whatever—and I get there twenty minutes early. I like to make a good impression or whatever. I didn’t know Dr. Tweel was the new housing director, and he didn’t know I was in the room waiting for him, so he was out in the hall on the phone for a few minutes.”

  “How did the name Sara Freyman come up?” As soon as I asked, I recalled Tweel volunteering last year to chair a committee on Budgetary Diversity. Its primary task was writing letters to the trustees asking for an increase in the school’s operating budget. Tweel was a frequent volunteer for additional duties, padding his vitae for a job at a better school.

  “I didn’t eavesdrop or whatever, but I remember the word ‘trustee,’ and Dr. Tweel mentioned F. Randolph Parshall, who I know is one of the trustees because I met him one time on account of I’m a Parshall scholar. He shook my hand and said how much he admired my people for what they had overcome.”

  “In your paper, you called Ms. Freyman the wealthiest trustee.

  How did that come up?”

  “I think he said something like, ‘Most of our money’s going to come from Sara Freyman.’ He said something about Dr. Parshall maybe dying. Is he still alive?”

  “By most definitions,” I said. “Do you remember anything else about this conversation? Anything at all?”

  “Just that Dr. Tweel was kind of pissed when he saw me waiting for him, but he’s always kind of pissed off. All y’all are. Except Miss Worth.”

  Islanda was waiting for me to speak. I was in the process of forgetting she was there, which is to say I was staring directly at her, rendering her all but invisible.

  “Mr. Cowlishaw? Can I write the paper over?”

  “Let’s hold off for now,” I said.

  The locomotive in the ceiling pulled into the station, dropping a heavy silence into my lap. The front door of the swimming pool opened and closed. The pair of sounds could have auditioned for a gunshot and accompanying echo.

  Islanda was standing. “Do we have class tomorrow?”

  I gave a pensive look to the spot where the ceiling met the far wall, giving me a view of Islanda’s face, which isn’t to say I could read her expression. “You have vision you don’t even use because heaven forbid you abandon your little charade of looking people in the eyes,” Mollie had once shouted during one of our arguments. Right as she was, a

  man who can’t see a face from five feet away puts little stock in what

  he can see.

  I pulled an ungraded student paper from semesters past out of a desk drawer and turned it over. I grabbed a pen and wrote some letters Islanda could mistake for her name. “I’ll send you an e-mail as soon as I know.”

  When Islanda was gone, Carly took her place in the lawn chair. “That was very forgiving of you.”

  “She did nothing wrong.”

  “How forgiving are you when someone has?”

  I couldn’t decide if it was a rhetorical question. I made it one by not answering. I had been right and wrong so many times in the past two days, I couldn’t tell if Carly was offering an apology or asking for one.

  “I haven’t slept since I left your motel room, Tate.” Carly let out a breath. It wasn’t warm when it reached me. “There are reasons why Delilah isn’t going to renew my contract.”

  “She found out about your publications, or the lack thereof.”

  Carly slumped forward in the chair. “I suppose it wasn’t hard to find that out,” she said.

  “Somehow you got your hands on some naughty pictures of our dean and the heir apparent. From what I hear, there are laws against blackmail, but you were only trying to protect yourself.”

  Carly stood up and sat back down. “What pictures? I didn’t—” She paused to listen to a pair of feet drumming toward us on the hollow floor.

  “You didn’t what?” asked Mollie. “Get your MFA from Iowa?

  Publish any of the stories you claimed to have published? Any other lies you’d like to come clean about, Ms. Worth?”

  “You told them? What did I ever do to you?” Carly brushed past her fellow writing instructor. She was a few inches taller than Mollie, but seemed very small as she returned to her cube. In a quiet, tearful voice, she said, “Thank you, Ms. DuFrange, for the most miserable week of my life.”

  “The truth will set you free, dear,” Mollie said around a growing smile.

  I stood up as Mollie became the third occupant of my lawn chair inside of five minutes.

  “Tate, where are you going?”

  “To see a trustee.”

  “Who, Dr. Parshall?”

  “Not that one. Sara Freyman. Poor thing works as a secretary at a law firm. Sweet girl when she isn’t poking people in the eyes.”

  “What are you seeing her about? Do you think she can save your job?”

  In truth, I hoped to make my way inside her home before she got there, see what I could find in the way of evidence of a murder plot. If she was home when I got there, I thought I would listen outside a window, maybe wait around and see if any interim deans or detectives showed up. “I have some business matters I want to go over with her.”

  “You aren’t going to walk, are you?” Mollie asked me this with a patronizing half-smile, as though I fancied myself capable of something so audacious as locomotion.

  “I always do.”

  “Students might be stopping by, or I’d offer you a ride.”

  “I’m on my way out,” said Carly. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  I stared at the felt-covered wall between me and the blonde with whom I had slept two nights ago.

  The brunette with whom I had slept last night crossed her legs. They were the kind of legs that benefited from a good crossing. “If you can wait an hour, I’ll give you a ride, Tate.”

  I shut down my computer.

  “Really?” Mollie asked. “You can’t wait one hour?”

  I put on my jacket. I didn’t mind waiting any more than I minded walking. It was the passenger seat of Mollie’s car, where our prior relationship underwent the most strain, which I was hoping to avoid.

  From Carly’s cube came the sound of zippers and keys.

  Mollie stood up, positioned herself where the door would be if my cubicle were
an office. “You know what? I doubt if anybody’s going to stop by. Let me just get my things.”

  Carly looked at me. Mollie looked at Carly. Carly started for the door.

  “That settles that,” said Mollie, retrieving her sweater from the back of her lawn chair.

  I followed Mollie up the crumbling steps that led out of the swimming pool. “I found Duncan, by the way.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “His attic.”

  “His attic? What was he doing there?”

  “Decomposing.”

  She stopped putting on her sweater, letting the left arm drag the ground. She looked at me sideways. “Are you kidding again?”

  “I wasn’t kidding before.”

  “Did you call an ambulance?”

  “It was a little late for that.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “They called him. A detective came over and made sure he was dead. Apparently, it’s a service they offer.”

  We stood on either side of Mollie’s SUV. When the doors had

  not unlocked after half a minute, I worried I was at the wrong

  vehicle. I couldn’t see Mollie through the tinted glass. I was listening for the crunch of gravel somewhere else in the parking lot when the doors unlocked.

  She inserted the keys into the ignition, but didn’t turn them. “Do you think his death is related to Simkins?”

  I noticed Mollie shudder in the driver’s seat. “Duncan killed himself,” I said. “I don’t think you’re in danger.”

  After a classical interlude and some starched banter on public radio, Mollie finally put the car in reverse. I gave her a block’s warning and told her to make a left on Fielding. She made it. Two blocks later, I instructed her to make a right on Carlisle. Mollie didn’t hide how much she hated driving, groaning when other cars approached, gripping the steering wheel as if it were a life preserver. She wished I could drive and let me know it most times I rode with her. Today, for once, she remained quiet, save the occasional exhalation after a lane change.

  “You just missed Olsen,” I said, second- and third-guessing myself until the large white steps and pillars of the courthouse confirmed we had gone too far. “You can take Bergen to Weston. It wraps around Massenberg, which becomes Olsen.”