Academy Gothic

by James Tate Hill

  for Carly Worth.”

  “A Butter,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A note on Simkins’s desk said ‘a Butter.’ That’s one fewer thing that doesn’t make sense.”

  We drove across town past the state university, onto McNultie, then Cedar. The driveway was empty and the windows dark. I felt no better, knowing I wasn’t the only thing from which Mollie was running away.

  “Where to now?” Carly asked.

  “Let’s hang around, make sure Tweel doesn’t show up without a police escort.”

  We parked on the street four houses down. The only car engines were blocks away, so faint they might have been a strong breeze. After a time, Carly reached into the backseat. She opened her laptop, clicked a few times, and handed it to me.

  “This is the first chapter of a novel I began two nights ago. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. Then again, what do I know?”

  I stared at the screen, moving my pupils from left to right. “Sorry, I forgot.” Carly took back the computer and read to me.

  She reached for my hand, our fingers lacing together. The

  novel was a mystery set on the campus of a small, dilapidated college. A blonde librarian named Charlene enters the chancellor’s office to find him slumped over his desk.

  “A certain trustee will be disappointed by the lack of vampires.”

  Carly cleared her throat. “I hate vampires. It just seemed like something people would believe since everything has vampires in it.”

  She closed her laptop. I listened for cars or footsteps. There was only the half-throated chirp of the first bird in the neighborhood to wake up.

  “What is it like, reading everything with your ears.”

  “Like listening,” I said.

  “What do you see when you look at me?”

  My thumb and forefinger found her chin and guided her face within inches of mine. Her blonde hair curled around her ears, a few strands parallel to her cheek. She had a small nose and small eyes beneath light eyebrows. It was a face. It was a pretty face. If there were more effectual words for describing faces, I had been out of the practice of describing faces long enough that I no longer knew them.

  “You don’t like to talk about it, do you?” She ran a finger down the bridge of my nose. “Maybe that’s why we’re drawn to each other. You’d rather conceal that part of yourself every hour of every day than let people see who you really are.”

  My vibrating phone saved me the trouble of changing the subject.

  “I wish I had known you were sending me to an empty house,” Thayer said. “I would have brought my computer and finished the scene I was working on.”

  “I’m on Cedar. Nobody’s here either.”

  “I know. I went there first. The door was unlocked, so I had a look around. There was nothing but furniture and appliances. I’m leaving the haunted house now, Cowlishaw. Any other ideas?”

  “Maybe they’re at your partner’s house.”

  There was the sound over the phone of a car door closing. The ignition beeped. The sound of the motor never came.

  “I don’t think Stash is home,” Thayer said.

  “Where is he?”

  “The backseat of my car, pointing his service revolver at my head.”

  Chapter 37

  THE PARTNERS EXCHANGED NO WORDS before the line went dead. I told Carly the quickest route to Norville Run. All my calls to Thayer went directly to voicemail. Carly had just spotted the late trustee’s overgrown driveway when my phone buzzed.

  “Help! Please help!”

  The words weren’t surprising. That they came from a young woman rather confused me. “Where’s Thayer?”

  “You said to call you if anything bad happened.” Juliet Bibb steadied her voice. “My mom’s got a gun, Mr. Cowlishaw.”

  “What’s she doing with it?”

  “I don’t know. She just left the house. We had a big fight.”

  “There are no cars here,” Carly said.

  “I asked Mom about the pictures, Mr. Cowlishaw. She didn’t want to talk about it. I asked her if she killed the dean, and she slapped me.”

  “I think your mom was romantically involved with the dean,” I said.

  “Gee, do you think?”

  “Where do you think she went?”

  “I don’t fucking know. Why do you think I called you?”

  “She isn’t with me,” I said, motioning for Carly to turn around. No cars were in the vicinity. No lights were on. “By the way, I like you better when you’re crying.”

  “Fuck you,” Juliet said, but took my advice on the tears.

  “What did your mother say before she left?”

  Delilah’s daughter took jagged breaths. “She called me an ungrateful little twat.”

  “That doesn’t sound like your mom.”

  At the mouth of the driveway, Carly pointed left and right with her arms, turning up her palms. I shrugged my shoulders.

  “I asked her who my father was. All she ever told me before was that he was a cold man. I was made from her love and no one else’s, she used to say, but I always thought it was weird she wanted to move back to Grayford. She hated coming back to visit my grandparents, and Parshall, you know, is such a shitty school. I asked her if that dean was my dad. She just looked at me. Her face got dark pink. I asked her again. She tried to slap me again, but I grabbed her by the wrist. I looked her in the eyes and confessed that I had been faking my illness so I wouldn’t have to go to college anymore. She tried to slap me with her other hand, but I moved out of the way and told her I wished she were dead.”

  “How long has she had this gun?” I asked.

  “It was my grandfather’s. He used to take us to the firing range when we visited. What do you think she’s going to do?” Juliet’s question became a high keening, like the pinched-off neck of a balloon leaking air. “I grabbed Mom’s chair on her way to the garage. That’s when she took the gun out of her purse. She was crying. Not normal crying. Silent sobs, you know?”

  I checked my watch. I didn’t know what Delilah was going to do. I wasn’t sure what she had or had not done already. I thought I knew, however, where she might be.

  By the time we reached campus, I had appealed Mollie’s conviction, wondering if we could have misheard her in the video. Second-guessing comes naturally to a man who needs a magnifier for twenty-four-point font. Students who don’t know an answer on my quizzes like to guess all of the above. Once in a while, they’re right.

  Carly spotted Delilah’s car, her daughter’s retired cruiser, in the parking lot behind the library. Duncan’s Volkswagen remained in its final resting place. Of the other vehicles, none was Tweel’s hybrid, Mollie’s SUV, or the Mercedes-Benz of Jefferson Totten, with whom Delilah had a meeting scheduled for this morning.

  You can take old wooden stairs quietly or quickly. We opted

  for the former, leaving ourselves the option of surprise. Slowly as

  we climbed, the steps were no louder than a string quartet in a capacious auditorium.

  Carly peeked around the doorway on the third floor. “Her door’s open,” she whispered.

  I stepped around her. She wrapped her arms around my waist, looking up at me. She was mouthing words, a form of communication as useless to me as tiny cursive. I shook my head.

  “I said be careful,” she whispered.

  Two big strides brought me to Delilah’s doorway. I waved. After a count of five, I stepped inside to confirm she wasn’t there.

  My steps toward the classroom were careful ones, as they tend to be when moving toward a woman with a gun who doesn’t much like me, a woman whose aim might well have benefited from childhood trips to the firing range. I poked my head inside an inch at a time. Delilah’s red hair stood out against the pale wall furthest from the door. From twenty feet away, her hair color was no help in seeing if she had used the gun on herself. I sensed a heartbeat and breathing lungs, but a single bullet might n
ot have finished the job.

  “Just the woman I was looking for,” I said.

  Delilah’s gasp froze me in my tracks. The click of her gun, a sound with which I had become overly familiar, sent me backward a few feet.

  “You don’t belong here, Mr. Cowlishaw.” She was facing the windows. I tried to read her flat tone, somewhere between determined and resigned.

  “That’s not very nice, Dean Bibb. Scoot used to say everybody belongs at Parshall.”

  “Dean Simkins,” she said, “was a selfish, egotistical, morally bankrupt son of a bitch.”

  I slid the sentimental approach back into its holster.

  “Your daughter’s worried you’re going to do something with that gun,” I said.

  Delilah turned her chair around to face me. “If you could see where I’m pointing this pistol, you would be the one who was worried.”

  Quick footsteps in the hall didn’t give the floor a chance to creak. “Don’t shoot!” Carly ran into me, nearly knocking me over.

  Delilah’s high, warbling laugh died before it reached the ceiling. “Young love. How sweet.”

  I stepped slowly from behind Carly, positioning myself in front of her. Her legs shook.

  “Perhaps I should have taken a bullet for Scoot. Perhaps then he would have made love to me instead of unzipping his trousers to let me suck his penis for the last two decades. But that’s me: selfless to a fault. Everyone’s needs always come before my own: Scoot, Juliet, every single one of my oblivious students.”

  On cue, several coeds traversed the lawn outside the building, laughing the way they do when traveling in packs.

  “Those little pissants don’t realize I give two hours of my life to each of their papers. I used to dream of rolling across the Rose Garden of the White House, accepting an award for my contributions to higher education. I would ask former students with whom I had kept in close touch over the years to introduce me.”

  Carly was reaching into her purse. Suddenly the purse was on the other side of the room, its relocation coinciding with a gunshot.

  “Do you know how many students I’ve heard from after my class has ended? Not counting the prank calls and the baseless appeals for a grade change, the grand total is zero.”

  “Someone thinks you’re a wonderful person,” I said. “He sent you that lovely house plant, remember?” I had thought it was Stashauer until learning Delilah had not taught at Coastal State. I still didn’t know which of us had.

  “Yes, well. When I’m feeling down, I try to remind myself how I’d like to feel.”

  “Scoot must have loved you,” I said. “About twenty years ago, give or take nine months.”

  Something a little higher than Delilah’s wheelchair clicked into place. Carly covered her ears.

  “He was a leader, a visionary,” Delilah said. “That’s what I tried to tell myself all these years, but do you know what attracted me to Randall ‘Scoot’ Simkins? He bought me a drink. So yes, maybe I sympathize with these students who feel unwanted when every other college has rejected them.”

  “That’s what makes you such a great educator,” said Carly in a shaky voice. “Your empathy.”

  “Your lies are more believable on paper, Miss Butterworth. Sit down, both of you.”

  We sat in the desks we always chose in meetings.

  “Take out your notebooks and pens. You can tell my daughter . . .” Delilah stifled a sob, “everything I’ve said when this is over.”

  We had no notebooks, but she seemed flexible on that one.

  “We met at the annual Mid-Atlantic Teach for the Stars

  Conference in Cumberland, Maryland. That afternoon I had attended

  a panel on the double-entry notebook as pedagogical tool. Scoot

  hadn’t noticed me in the audience. I always sat in the back row. Believe it or not, Mr. Cowlishaw, I spent many years trying to deny my handicap, trying to be heard and not seen. I had a little trick for hotel bars. Once I was comfortable at a table, I would fold up my chair and tell the waiter, one who hadn’t watched me come in, that some previous patron had abandoned their wheelchair, which the waiter would carry away. I was in my late twenties, finishing my dissertation, and despite having never had sexual intercourse, I was, if I may toot my own horn, rather comely. I had on a black sleeveless dress. I used to get compliments on my arms. God knows I never got compliments on my legs.” She spoke with the calm and purposeful demeanor of a woman who knew exactly how her story would end.

  “I’d like to hear more about that conference.” I spoke with the unconvincing interest of a man trying to delay the story’s ending.

  “Both of you will have the chance to leave,” said Delilah,

  “after I put a bullet between the eyes of Jefferson Totten. Until then, do not interrupt me. I have no compunction about shooting you in

  the kneecaps.”

  A bird belted out a song Delilah didn’t care for. The echo of her gun whistled a tune not dissimilar to the bird’s. I was partial to the original artist.

  “Where was I?”

  “At the table in the bar,” I said.

  “Right. Scoot was at the next table with the other members of his panel. He was making toasts to himself. I don’t know how many drinks he had consumed, but no one else at his table was interested in another. When they left, his eye caught mine. More likely his eye caught the conference lanyard around my neck. He bought me a sloe gin fizz and ordered another for himself. He talked and I listened. We drank. He asked if I’d be interested in seeing some of his other papers. He had them upstairs in his room. ‘Meet you there in ten minutes,’ I said, and when he left the bar, I asked a different waiter if anyone had come across a wheelchair.”

  Delilah paused to listen to the birds. They were further away than she could shoot them.

  “‘Let’s take things slowly.’ Those were Scoot’s words as soon as he answered the door to find a woman in a wheelchair. He took off his clothes. ‘You can leave yours on if you want,’ he said. ‘I’ll go first,’ he said, ‘and we’ll take turns.’ I waited my turn. I waited twenty years.”

  “Juliet is under the impression that Simkins was the cold man you said was her father.”

  “I followed him from conference to conference. He always welcomed me into his room with a stupid grin and an open zipper. It became clear I wasn’t going to get pregnant doing what we were doing. Juliet’s father was a cold man. Frozen, in fact. I selected him from a three-ring binder. Years later, in town to attend my mother’s funeral, I bumped into Scoot at a restaurant, and he offered me a job. I should have guessed what he was and was not offering, but love makes idiots of us all, doesn’t it?”

  The front door of the building opened and closed. A pair of

  hard-soled shoes clacked up the stairs. Delilah turned her chair toward the door.

  “We’ll leave you to your meeting,” I said, standing up.

  “Sit down. I am not done with my story.”

  “We get the gist,” Carly said.

  The heavy footsteps reached the second floor.

  “This is the good part,” she said. “The part where I realize how foolish I was, thinking Scoot Simkins would someday acknowledge something between us, whatever it was, and become a father to my ill-mannered daughter. He would steer her in the right direction as he had steered this God-forsaken ship for so many years. Inwardly I always questioned how he kept this place afloat. As spectacularly disorganized as he was, he certainly had the magic touch, didn’t he? I’ll wait a moment and let Dr. Totten explain the secret behind Scoot’s magic.”

  Totten reached the carpeted hallway of the third floor. He moved tentatively toward the classroom. In my interactions with the man, Jefferson Totten had been anything but tentative.

  “In here,” Delilah trilled.

  Two steps into the room, I recognized the difference between hard-soled shoes and stiletto heels. Carly was motioning toward the door. Her windmilling arms summoned to my nose the faintest hint o
f olive oil and Bijan perfume.

  “What a hovel this place is.” As pleased as Myrsini sounded to say this, she probably hadn’t noticed the gun that was, in all likelihood, pointed in her direction. “Tate, you need to get away from here. I can tell by looking at the ceiling that there is asbestos in the tile.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Delilah asked.

  “Myrsini taught here for a couple of years,” I said.

  “Before your time,” said my neighbor. “When there was a sociology department.”

  “She gets nostalgic sometimes, wanders in to remember the good times.”

  Myrsini gave her Adam’s apple a workout with a vigorous laugh. “Fat chance. I am here to let you know Jefferson Totten won’t be making it to today’s meeting.”

  Delilah spoke with gritted teeth. “How do you know Jefferson Totten?”

  “Carnally,” said Myrsini. “Where he is going, I suspect that knowledge will not be hard to come by. He offered me a thousand dollars to pass along an address to a Delilah Bibb—that’s you with the cute little pistol, isn’t it?—where he wants you to send the materials. I will not be giving you that address. I will not be taking his money. I am here because I think you are disgusting. I am old enough to choose what I do, Ms. Bibb. These children with their stolen innocence and broken wills.” These words Myrsini bit off hard, spat them out, and ground them on the floor with her sharp heels.

  “What children?” Delilah’s confusion tamped down some of her anger.

  “I do not care if you admit anything. That is for judge and jury.”

  “Are you accusing me of some sort of crime?” Delilah located the anger she had temporarily misplaced. Her finger located the part of the gun that made that clicking sound.

  “Where is Dr. Totten?” I asked.

  “Downtown,” said Myrsini with a measure of pride. “He requested my presence for the second night in a row. When I got there, it was not me he wanted. He had pictures on his phone of little girls and boys. He asked if I knew where he might find any of them. These were not ambiguous pictures. I told him I would be right back. I had a productive chat with my friend, Officer Joseph, whose cruiser happened to be parked at the motel. Some of my colleagues in the pleasure industry, they say, ‘Myrsini, who are you to judge? What makes you the moral center?’ I taught in higher education for seven years. I know what exploitation looks like.”