Academy Gothic
Page 20
I stepped sideways on the bed, eyeing the next frame. My heel slid a little on the quilt and I caught myself on the wall. I stepped elsewhere, but there was something under the quilt. This time I lost my balance in the opposite direction of the wall. The floor broke my fall.
My female caller had gone back to the living room, but the noise summoned her back to the second floor. I pulled back the quilt, thinking it a good place to hide. Someone else had thought so. How long ago they had thought so I couldn’t tell. The body’s arm was no warmer than the metal bed frame. What remained of the flesh beneath a cotton garment, possibly a night gown, was hard and delicate at the same time. The smell wasn’t as bad as Duncan’s more recent state of decay. I poked a finger inside the half-closed mouth. The teeth were missing, which is to say I had already found them.
“You must be Sarah,” I said. “You look nothing like your photograph.”
I heard someone at the base of the metal stairs. No lights came on. I crouched on the floor beside Parshall’s first woman graduate, whose choice to lie on a bed without a mattress, up a staircase less than conducive to a walker, might not have been hers.
There was the click of metal on the handrail, possibly jewelry. The handrail was on the right. It wouldn’t be the sound of a wedding band. The feet came slowly up the spiral stairs. I dragged Sarah’s quilt to the other side of the room, behind the stairs.
“Who’s up there?” asked the husband of Mollie DuFrange, whose adenoidal voice I had only mistaken for the fairer sex. I asked myself all the obvious questions about why he was here. The answers were never as obvious. The moon of his flashlight orbited the ceiling above the stairs. I hadn’t counted steps on my way up. Slowly Tweel’s head appeared. The flashlight beam skirted the bed, lingering on the toothless smile of the late trustee. The sight of a dead body didn’t produce a scream. His breathing didn’t quicken. Neither had I been startled, but such discoveries hadn’t surprised me since touching the cold cheek of my grandmother, having mistaken her for the bag of art supplies I had brought her the day before. Maybe Tweel had his own story for how he came to regard dead bodies so stoically. Doubting he’d want to share it with me, I unfurled the quilt over the opening in the floor.
Tweel let out a scream worthy of the first victim in a horror movie. I gave a few good kicks to what felt like his face and neck. Kneeling, I managed to grab one of his arms. The other arm took a swing. It hit the curved railing connected to the floor. We were even from before, but I threw in a couple of knees.
Tweel squirmed like a man under a quilt who doesn’t want to be there. He descended the stairs, and I lost my grip on his head. I let go of the quilt. Something heavier than a flashlight banged the railing near the bottom stair. Three little explosions like the ones in Duncan’s attic came in rapid succession. Bits of the ceiling fell like sleet against the quilt, which continued to cover the staircase. Telling Tweel who he was shooting at might not make him stop. At this point, who I was probably mattered less than where I was and what I knew. I crouched on the floor by the window as three more shots hit far-apart sections of the ceiling, white crumbs falling in front of my feet.
“I’ve got a lot more of those. Identify yourself and I might not use them.”
I waited for him to use them. There were only clicks and a pair of curse words.
Out the window, another car’s tires crunched across what might have once been a gravel driveway. It parked behind Tweel’s hybrid. Staying close to the wall, I moved clockwise toward the bed and pulled it over the wounded quilt. Sarah Freyman did her best to protect the ceiling, but four of the next six bullets still connected.
“You’re not getting out of there.”
I couldn’t think of a convincing argument to the contrary. The window was thicker and higher than I liked my windows. Outside, someone from the second car moved briskly toward the house.
They would probably take Tweel’s side in the matter of my getting out of here alive.
The front door opened, but didn’t close. “Who’s down there?” Tweel shouted.
The latest guest to our party remained silent.
“I’ve got a gun. I will shoot you,” Tweel said, but didn’t offer the same proof he had offered me.
A single shot hit the low-hanging chandelier on the second floor.
“Stashauer? Is that you? Don’t shoot! It’s Tweel.” The new guest started up the first set of stairs.
“Come on, man. Don’t be like this.” Tweel’s voice got further away until a door slammed.
Once they reached the second floor, the footsteps didn’t continue down the hall. They tapped their way up the spiral staircase. I liked that window more and more. I gave it a pair of useless punches.
The bed springs rattled. The quilt rose in the inches between the bed and floor, a dark hand crawling out the side like a skeptical mouse. I had just positioned my foot above the fingers when I heard my name in the accented, half-whispered voice of my landlord. I pushed aside the bed and removed the quilt. Sundeep climbed into the room. “Are you okay, Tate?”
“Better than her,” I said.
He checked the pulse of the late trustee.
“I think her blood pressure might also be low,” I said. “How did you know I was here?”
“You left the directions in your printer. I called your phone,
but you left it on the nightstand.” He placed the cell phone in my
palm. “You said there was nothing to worry about. This woman is dead, Tate.”
“You didn’t ask about her.”
A door on the second floor creaked like a beginner taking violin lessons. Sundeep crouched beside the stairs, aimed his gun, and fired it. The door closed hard. The patter of little feet could have passed for a well-fed terrier.
“He’s out of bullets,” I said. “Perhaps he’s better with ray guns and photon beams. His expertise is in the field of space tourism.”
“You know this individual?”
“You know him, too. A few years ago, he tried to rent the room next to mine.”
“Mollie’s husband?” Sundeep bowed his head and shook it, or the other way around—the moon wasn’t in one of its most generous moods. “You aren’t seeing her again, are you?”
“He doesn’t know it’s me he was shooting at. Help me lift this young lady onto the quilt.”
“Where are we taking her?”
“Your backseat. Unless you heard her call shotgun.”
We set Sarah down on the second floor. She couldn’t have weighed fifty pounds. We made our way to the only closed door. I ran a finger across the keyhole of the large variety found in castles and old jails. Sundeep came out of the adjacent room I hadn’t seen him enter. He handed me a knitting needle.
“Maybe you could just shoot him,” I said.
“I am not shooting anyone. Put it in the lock.”
I slid the knitting needle into the keyhole and pushed down until it resembled a horseshoe.
“This will buy us some time, but sooner or later, Tate, he is going to be a problem.”
“Rick?” Tweel called out, his voice muffled by more than the single door. He seemed to be in a closet or under a bed. “I’m sorry about what I said about your novel. I just—I’m a science fiction guy. I think you’re very talented.” Tweel was crying, his words mangled as if caught in a yawn. “Tate Cowlishaw is the one you need to worry about. Go shoot him.”
Chapter 33
WE SLID THE LATE TRUSTEE into the backseat of Sundeep’s hatchback. Careful though we were, she did not remain in one piece. I followed Sundeep to the rear bumper of Tweel’s hybrid. The windows of the house remained black. The room in which my colleague was temporarily sealed was on the other side. Sundeep crouched beside Tweel’s tires. He knew a trick for letting the air out. I knew a trick for putting holes in the tires, but I wasn’t the one with the gun.
“Now will you admit you are in danger?” Sundeep said as we backed onto Norville Run.
“Okay, I’m in danger. Maybe I could
borrow that gun for a little while.”
“Absolutely not. With your eyesight, someone is bound to get hurt.”
“I think someone getting hurt is the point.”
Sundeep cleared his throat with more force than any throat required. “Where are we taking this woman?”
“I was thinking your place.”
Sundeep faced me longer than I like my drivers to do in a moving car. “I am not keeping a dead body. You will call the police as soon as we get home.”
“Put her in one of the rooms where people have died,” I said. In my tenure at the Gray Knight, we had seen half a dozen overdoses and a pair of suicides.
“Put her in your room,” Sundeep said. “I won’t be there to watch her.”
“Where will you be?”
More traffic appeared as we left the part of town that didn’t have street lights. I reached in the backseat, made sure the quilt covered what it needed to.
“Make a left up here on McNultie,” I said.
“What is on McNultie?”
“Nothing is on McNultie. On Cedar, you’ll find the house where Mollie DuFrange lives.”
“Mollie? I thought you said you are not seeing her.”
“I said Tweel trying to shoot me had nothing to do with me seeing her. Either way, she should probably know her husband is involved in
a murder.”
“No. I will not be a party to your adultery. You can call her on the phone, the one I gave you to use and take with you when you go out finding dead bodies.”
“The phone died,” I said. “That was my fault. If the same thing happens to Mollie, it’s going to be partly yours.”
Sundeep grunted and sighed. He continued through the next two lights. At the third, he shook his head and made a left.
“You have made some bad choices, Tate. You do not need eyes to see this.”
“I’m still alive. I might be setting the bar a little low, but that’s something.”
“I am talking about love.”
We skirted the edge of the state university, where faux gaslights lined the brick sidewalks. From the street, I could see their library still had electricity. The last I had heard, they still had a long list of majors from which students could choose. Through a friend of a friend of a former teacher, Mollie had been hired there to teach a single section of composition four or five years ago. Around that time, she and Tweel bought a house well above their price range in the gentrified neighborhood favored by faculty of her part-time employer. They hoped one day to teach there full-time, even as adjuncts, but each August they returned to their cubicles in the deep end of the swimming pool.
“The advantage of arranged marriage,” Sundeep said, “is that you grow with one another, and over time the love arrives.”
“You met Jaysaree at a cocktail party after a tennis tournament.”
“And we are the exception that proves the rule.”
“I think it proves the other rule.” I gave him Mollie’s house number.
“You are missing my point. Tate, I remember how miserable you were with this woman. Jaysaree and I both liked Carly very much.”
“Maybe Mollie and I will do the happily ever after thing in a lovely mountain town. Maybe we’ll crash and burn before take-off. Either way, I’d like to warn her that her husband has a new hobby of shooting people.”
Sundeep parked on the curb. I told him he could turn around in their driveway, trying to establish which driveway was theirs.
“Someone is pulling into their driveway.”
I found the glowing tail lights behind us and opened the door. Getting out, I thanked Sundeep for the assist. He thanked me for the dead body.
The SUV’s engine cut off. I knocked on the passenger-side window. Mollie ran around the car and threw her arms around me.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you! I tried calling your cell phone. When you didn’t answer, I thought . . .” She didn’t say what
she thought.
“Did you know Ben has a gun?”
Mollie had been about to kiss me. “He bought it last year when students kept keying his car. Why?”
“He tried to shoot me a little while ago. That trustee I went to see turned out to be dead. It didn’t seem like Ben was eager to share this with anyone. If your husband didn’t kill Simkins, he’s definitely connected to whoever did.”
Mollie stood there, frozen. A car approached her driveway and kept going. I led Mollie to the house, took her keys, and unlocked the door with the second key I tried.
“I’m going to be sick,” Mollie said and hurried for the bathroom.
The busy oriental rug was even busier with colorful piles. I noticed stacks of books on the glass coffee table on which I had once broken a lead crystal wine glass, prompting a rule to leave all glasses in the kitchen because the end table was too close to the arm of the white sofa. I picked up a paperback the size of a phone book. I had just
made out the year and “North Carolina” when Mollie took it from me and set it on the coffee table. She sat me on the sofa and took the cushion beside me. The room’s disheveled state and her disregard of the mud on my clothes made it seem as though Mollie really was capable of change.
“I think Ben’s having an affair,” she said.
I turned this over a few times, trying to recall every conversation I had ever overheard between Benjamin Tweel and Delilah Bibb. Most were about composting and the show about plane crash survivors on a magical island. If the two of them were romantically involved, it explained why Tweel would think Stashauer would want to shoot him. I asked Mollie if she thought it could be Delilah.
“I don’t know. I just found out a few hours ago. Those are his things on the floor.”
I waited for the thought of Tweel and Bibb to sink in. It had a long way to sink. What about those pictures of Delilah and Simkins? What about Tweel’s petition to get Delilah fired? If all of it was an elaborate ruse for my benefit, Tweel punching me was a nice touch. My jaw was still convinced.
“How much of that were you able to see?” Mollie asked.
It took me a moment to realize I was staring, or my eyes were aimed, at the book on the coffee table.
“Enough,” I said, my standard answer when anyone asked how much I could see.
Mollie sighed. “I might as well tell you. It wasn’t going to be a secret much longer.” Her hand found my thigh. It didn’t feel the same as it had last night. “I was afraid if I told you, you would try to stop me. You’ve always been so supportive of my poetry.”
She must have meant my attendance at her poetry readings at the used bookstore, during which I calculated in my head the total from my last grocery delivery, making sure I hadn’t been overcharged.
“The writing has been on the wall for some time, Tate. There’s no longer a place in the academy for people like me. It’s a business like any other. If no one’s buying what you’re selling, well, time to sell something else.” She handed me the big paperback and ran her hand across it as if brushing away crumbs. “Like real estate.”
“I didn’t think anyone was buying that anymore either.” She gave a nervous laugh.
“I guess we’ll see.”
I stood up from the freshly stained sofa. “You’re welcome to stay at my place until this blows over. I’d rather we not be here in case Ben makes it home before I arrange for his ride to the police station.”
“What evidence do you have, Tate? As I recall, there’s no proof that Simkins was even murdered.”
“I have the body of a dead trustee.”
“You have what?”
“The one whose house you didn’t want to drive me to. Maybe she was murdered, maybe she wasn’t. There are people who can tell.”
Mollie stood up. She stared at the spot where I had been sitting. “You don’t seem particularly surprised by any of this,” I said. “What is the appropriate reaction for finding out, in the span of a few hours, that your husband has committed adultery and murder?”
Mollie’s words came easily and without deliberation. She was already letting go of the poet inside her.
“Where were you looking for me, anyway? I never gave you the trustee’s address.”
“I went to the Gray Knight. I figured you had gotten lost and went back to your room.”
“What made you think I was in my room if I didn’t answer the phone?”
“I told you: I called your cell phone. Do you think I’m lying? I know Carly must have lowered your expectations for honesty, but I
am not Carly.”
I tried to apologize. Mollie looked away.
“I should be going,” I said. “I know a cop you can trust if you think Ben would try to hurt you.”
Mollie said nothing. I started for the door and tripped over a
pile of clothes. Crouching to restack them, my fingers dwelled
on the glossy, elastic texture of the bright red garment I had
difficulty refolding.
“Don’t touch that. It’s Benjamin’s.”
“So were you last night. You didn’t mind where I put my hands.”
From an open suitcase a few feet away, I extracted a ball of socks no larger than an egg. A pair of jeans were much smaller than my own. Benjamin and I were the same height, give or take an inch. The size of the bras underneath the jeans were larger than he needed. I showed one of them to Mollie.
“They’re mine.” She spoke solemnly, as though it were a body in the suitcase rather than her underwear.
I dropped the bra into the suitcase and stood up. “I assumed you would have told me if you were going somewhere. But like you said, my expectations for honesty might be a tad low.”
Mollie sat on the rug with the items she liked well enough to take on her trip. In my mind, I backed away from her and opened the door. I wished her well and walked home in the cool night air.
In reality, I let her kiss me. I kissed her back. When she pulled away, my hand in her hair brought her forward, and we kissed until she pulled away once more.
“I need time, Tate.”
“This isn’t time,” I said, nudging the suitcase with my foot. “It’s space.”
“That, too.”