Academy Gothic

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Academy Gothic Page 24

by James Tate Hill


  The room was quieter than an 8 a.m. class. We were waiting for the reaction of the woman with the gun. It seemed the most important reaction.

  “Oh, do not cry,” said Myrsini. “That pedophile is not worth the salt in those tears.”

  Delilah spoke in a voice so quiet I flattered myself into thinking I was the only one able to hear it. “I want to die.”

  Myrsini’s heels cut a slow drum beat across the room. She sat in the desk closest to Delilah’s chair. “You don’t want to die, sweetheart. You just need some better clothes.”

  “I made him miserable,” Delilah said. “I wouldn’t let go of him, and his only escape was taking his own life.”

  Delilah was guilty, it seemed, only of falling in love with an asshole. She had wanted me to find his killer, hoping for someone she might blame other than herself.

  Carly stood above Delilah and reached for the hand not holding the gun. “There’s a petition signed by the faculty expressing a vote of no confidence in your leadership.”

  I looked sideways at Carly, my peripheral vision fixed on the gun pointed at her.

  “I didn’t sign it,” Carly said. “Neither did Tate. I’m sure everyone who did would change their minds in light of what’s happened.”

  “It’s too late,” Delilah said. “Dr. Parshall has already made his opinion quite clear.”

  “You’ve spoken to him?” I asked.

  “I haven’t even tried,” Delilah said. “His nursing home has called twice in the last few hours, specifically asking me not to visit him anymore.”

  “When was your last visit?” I asked, thinking Duncan in drag was the real Delilah non grata.

  “I told you. I haven’t. I didn’t think he even knew my name. It’s not like Scoot ever introduced us. God forbid the trustees ever meet the woman doing the majority of work on the curriculum.”

  Someone’s phone was vibrating. Delilah and Myrsini reached into their purses.

  “This is them again,” Delilah said. “This is she. Excuse me? I refuse to be spoken to in this tone. No, I most certainly did not just run through the lobby. Because I’m paralyzed from the waist down.”

  Chapter 38

  DELILAH ORDERED CARLY AND ME into her car. It was a polite request, an offer to drive, but she still had a gun, even if she wasn’t pointing it. Getting in, I asked her if the car happened to come from a police auction. “It did. A few years ago, I was looking for an inexpensive car for my daughter. Miss DuFrange told me about the auction. She was sucking up to get her Advanced Poetry Seminar back into the curriculum.”

  On the way to Rosewall Glen, I explained to the interim dean why she might be forming a search committee for three faculty positions. With each detail, her hand pushed a little harder on the gear controlling the accelerator.

  “If Tweel and DuFrange think they can blackmail me into resigning, they have another thing coming. Those two don’t know

  the first thing about running a school.”

  She was still listing her own qualifications as we approached the front door of the retirement home. Near the front desk, I heard the voices of the black receptionist, Nurse Margaret, and the security guard they called whenever an embroidered pillow went missing. He put on a pair of glasses and got a couple of inches from the guest book. He was older than many of the residents. I offered him my magnifier.

  “I’m Delilah Bibb.” The name’s rightful owner parked her

  chair between Margaret and the receptionist and showed them her driver’s license.

  “Where’s the other Delilah Bibb?” I asked.

  The receptionist put her hand on the shoulder of the security guard. “Clayton chased her into the parking lot.”

  “Did she make it to Dr. Parshall’s room?” I asked, taking a few steps in that direction.

  “He was receiving his bath when I stopped her from going in,” said Margaret.

  “Is he still getting his bath?”

  Margaret smirked. “I’m sure he wishes his baths lasted longer, but this is an assisted care facility, not a massage parlor.” The receptionist made an M sound.

  I pushed through the double doors to the residents’ rooms. Margaret called after me, saying visiting hours didn’t resume for another two hours. The security guard gave chase. He didn’t have much of it to give.

  From the mouth of the hall leading to Parshall’s room, I heard the stentorian voice of a professional reader. Sometimes you can discern the genre of book from the narrator’s tone. This one italicized words with a halting menace. In the reader’s defense, there are few ways to enunciate the words “undead” and “spirits” in consecutive order.

  I shouted Parshall’s name until he made the guttural sound of a soldier waking after an explosion, or a ninety-eight-year-old man after a nap.

  “Is that you, Nick?”

  “It’s me.” I walked over to his chair and examined the bathroom. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. “What are you reading?” I shouted.

  He slapped at the cassette player until one of his fingers landed on the stop button. “I’m not eating anything. There was some sort of confusion with my breakfast.”

  “No, I asked what . . . never mind. What kind of confusion?”

  “It was a new nurse. A red-haired woman. No sooner had she brought me the tray than Margaret showed up to take it away. Ten minutes later, this red-haired nurse came back with another tray. She just sat there, waiting for me to eat. I took a bite of bacon. She told me to try the eggs. As soon as I got some on my fork, Margaret had one of the colored fellows take away my tray.”

  “Are you hungry? I can find you another breakfast.”

  “Don’t bother, Nick. I think I know what’s going on.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s happened a few times,” he began, choking up a little. “I can’t remember if I’ve eaten or not. I think I keep imagining things.”

  I had a seat on the ottoman. “What kind of things?”

  “A few minutes ago, I saw that red-haired nurse outside my window. Or thought I did. She was floating there, Nick. Ghostlike.” Parshall ejected the cassette from the tape player and flung it onto the bed. “I don’t know anymore, Nick.”

  He kept talking. He hadn’t seen me step into the hallway. The security guard saw me just fine. He was doubled over, winded from

  the high-speed chase. He asked me nicely but not very loudly to stop right there.

  “Dr. Parshall needs to go to the bathroom,” I said, heading for the side door. “See that he gets there right away.”

  The gently sloping path to the flower garden hugged the building, windows getting further and further from the ground. In front of each window, a birdhouse rested on top of a pole, another of Katherine Cowlishaw’s lasting contributions. The poles in front of Parshall’s room rose more than twenty feet in the air. I stepped into the hedges and shook the first two poles that went to his room. I turned the corner to shake the other two. When I reached for the one leading to the window beside his bed, it wasn’t there.

  A solid piece of metal clanked against the building. It was nothing I had touched. Somewhere above the ground came the sound of labored breathing. My shin found something hard. My hand found the muddy end of the missing pole, angled toward the building.

  With some effort, I picked up the pole and heard something heavy hit the ground. Hedges crackled around the corner, beneath the room across the hall from Parshall’s. Swinging a twenty-foot pole is a slow endeavor. I hit bushes and then the building. A fist hit my jaw. The punch felt familiar, if not familiar enough to avoid a second one to my other jaw.

  I sat down in the bushes. A second later, he or she was upon me. I aimed my gaze skyward, providing the best view I had ever had of Benjamin Tweel’s angular face. He had a mouth no larger than a grape. Coarse hair from his red wig covered my eyes. I brought my forehead forward into his nose. I traded him places in the bushes. I held his wrists, my knees on either side of him, pinning him to the ground by
his dress. He tried my move with the forehead, but I wasn’t close enough. He appeared to be nodding in strong agreement.

  “Where’s your better half, Benjamin?”

  “Fuck you.” His voice was even higher with a broken, bleeding nose.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Ben. This happens all the time. A man likes to dress up in women’s clothing. His wife finds out, and the marriage is no longer tenable.”

  Tweel’s little mouth opened. He breathed through it, but didn’t speak.

  “Unless,” I said, putting one of my knees in his groin, “you were dressing up like Delilah Bibb so she would be blamed for whatever you were doing here. What were you doing here, Ben? Help me understand why you would want to be dean so badly that you’d commit homicide?”

  Tweel’s head turned sharply toward the corner of the building. Ten feet away, an old man’s wheezing breaths struggled to become words.

  “Let go of that woman,” the security guard finally managed to say.

  “This is the woman you chased into the parking lot,” I said.

  “She was trying to kill Dr. Parshall.”

  “I don’t know about all that, but you’re on top of her, and she’s the one who’s bleeding.”

  “She isn’t even a woman,” I said.

  Suddenly Tweel felt like talking again. “Get him off me! Please get him off me!” he cried in a crimped falsetto not much different from his conversational voice.

  “This here in my hand is a Taser.” The elderly guard pronounced the word carefully, as though he had been corrected the first time he said it. “I’m going to use it in a count of five.”

  He counted faster than he ran. On four, I eased away from the bleeding damsel, one knee and then the other. Tweel rushed to the side of his white-haired knight.

  “Is this your purse, ma’am?”

  Tweel thanked the old man, no longer bothering with his falsetto. There was the sound of the purse’s zipper. The next few clicks didn’t sound like lipstick.

  “You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to do this, Cowlishaw.”

  The guard started to say something. Tweel shoved him into a tree.

  “It’s a little pathetic,” Tweel said, “putting a bullet in a man who can’t even see you holding the gun.”

  “At least we agree on something, Ben.”

  “Look up in the sky, Cowlishaw. The way you do when you’re actually looking at something.”

  I fixed my eyes above the trees. Tweel got larger, step by crunchy step. The black barrel of my fate came into focus beneath the plunging neckline of a dress that looked much better on Benjamin’s wife. I changed my mind about seeing the gun and stared straight ahead. Tweel didn’t change his. Dead leaves beneath his feet sounded a little like wet snow. The gun sounded a lot like a gun.

  Chapter 39

  MY HEART THUNDERED AWAY. I felt it with my hand. I ran the same hand through my hair on both sides. The gun went off again and a third time. I checked the same parts in the same order. I looked up at the trees in time to see Tweel falling sideways. “Tate, are you okay?” Carly shouted twenty feet above me.

  “He missed,” I said.

  “He was about to shoot you,” said Delilah from a different window. “So I shot first. Plus, he was trying to take my job. Plus, he and Mollie killed Scoot.”

  “Sounds fair,” I said.

  I knelt beside Tweel’s dead body. They were getting easier to find. She had shot him once between the eyes and twice in the heart. I checked his wrist. Tweel’s pulse was halfway to Neptune. I helped the guard to his feet.

  “Maybe it’s time I move into one of those rooms up there,” he said.

  A number of people were gathered outside Dr. Parshall’s room. Most of them were talking. Nurse Margaret was talking the loudest. She stood outside the room across from Parshall’s, turning back nurses, orderlies, and a few residents in wheelchairs. It was my grandmother’s old room, the room from whose window Delilah must have shot Tweel. Margaret’s hands were in the center of my chest when Parshall told her I could come in.

  “Well,” Margaret said, “let’s have a little party in the room nurses aren’t allowed inside.”

  “If you didn’t have to have everything so goddamn clean,” said Parshall. “Dust promotes fellowship with the spirit world.”

  Margaret chuckled under her breath. Delilah was in the corner, speaking quietly, tearfully, to her daughter on the phone. Carly was admiring my grandmother’s unfinished mural of Machu Picchu, Lake Geneva, and the Taj Mahal, three places she never got the chance to visit.

  “They wanted to move somebody into her room, Nick. That was when I made an offer on this place. The food was getting terrible, anyway.”

  I had assumed the dispute was over the room housing his library. “It might have been cheaper to pay for the room,” I said.

  “Never rent when you can own, Nick. Didn’t they teach you that in business school?” Dr. Parshall grabbed my hand and squeezed it weakly. “She talks about you all the time. Come by some evening and the three of us will have dinner.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Margaret pushed Parshall’s chair into his room. Delilah followed them. I told Carly I would be a minute and closed the door.

  My grandmother’s bed had not been made in the years since she died. Beneath the sterile scent of any other room, I thought I found a whiff of acrylic paint and a drop or two of the rose oil she liked to dab behind her ears. I ran a hand across the mural and felt the texture of her brush strokes. I laid my other hand on the cold pillow case until it became warm.

  Across the hall, Margaret was helping Parshall back into his bed. Carly was explaining who the man was who had tried to kill him.

  “And who is Annie Oakley over there?” asked Dr. Parshall.

  “Delilah Bibb has acted as interim dean in the wake of Simkins’s death,” I said.

  “In that case, she and I have a lot to discuss,” said Parshall.

  “Another time,” said Margaret. “You’ve had a very trying morning, Dr. Parshall.”

  “I haven’t even had breakfast,” he said. “Aren’t I supposed to take some of my pills with breakfast?”

  Margaret put a hand on her hip. She held it there as she exited his room.

  “First things first,” said Parshall, raising his voice as much as he was able. “These two will be promoted to tenure-track positions. As long as we are clear on that, we can move forward.”

  Delilah’s head was level with Parshall’s pillow. “I would like to think all promotions and hires will be merit-based,” she said without looking in our direction.

  “Exactly. Mr. Cowlishaw is a preeminent scholar of the occult. Miss Worth is about to publish her first novel.”

  “About my novel,” Carly said.

  “They’ve pushed back the publication date a little bit,” I said.

  Dr. Parshall expressed his disgust with the state of publishing. Delilah made her own sound of disapproval, unrelated to publishing.

  Carly and I passed the nurse’s station, where the security guard was still being examined. Further down the hall, I got out my phone to call Thayer. It rang and rang. There was no voicemail. Thinking I had misdialed, I scrolled through the list of numbers I had called and guessed which one was his.

  “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Biggins,” said the newest trustee of Parshall College, in a better mood than when I had last spoken to him.

  I dug through the bin of voices for the Southern accent I had used for our previous conversation. “Mr. Skipwith. I just called to offer my condolences on the death of your fellow trustee.”

  “Such a shame,” said Skipwith, his mood improving with each word. “They both lived into their nineties. We should all be so lucky.”

  “Excuse me. Did you say they?”

  “Listen, Mr. Biggins, I truly hate to cut this short, but I’m en route to an important meeting that will ensure you never bother me again.”

  “Mr. Skipwith. Right here,” sa
id a voice somewhere in the vicinity of the trustee’s phone. I had last heard it behind a flashlight and revolver in Duncan Musgrove’s attic.

  “There’s my ride. Good day to you, Mr. Biggins.”

  Skipwith hung up before Wade’s fictional father could make sense of what he had just heard. I lingered near the sensor of the automatic doors that led outside, the doors sliding back and forth behind me. Carly said my name. I uttered the plural pronoun Skipwith had used to refer to the dead trustees. Only one trustee was dead. If Tweel had not been stopped, there would have been two.

  I was out of breath when I reached Parshall’s room. Delilah was speaking loudly, the words accreditation and assessment mingling seamlessly with the odor of disinfectant.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “Dr. Parshall, didn’t you say decisions of the trustees had to pass by a majority vote?”

  Parshall finished a long cough into a tissue. “That’s right.”

  “Suppose a vote ends up as a tie. What happens then?”

  “For God’s sake,” said Delilah. “I’ll rehire you. Are you satisfied?”

  “A tie isn’t possible, Nick. Sarah Freyman and I each have a vote, and the Skipwith boy gets half a vote.”

  “If Sarah should pass away, God forbid, who gets her vote?”

  “Sarah never had children, so her share of the college and accompanying vote would go to the closest Freyman relative. This relative, like the Skipwith boy, would also have half a vote.”

  “Suppose two half votes opposed your full vote.”

  “Well, that would be a tie. The vote would then go to the faculty.”

  “Would the faculty vote need to be unanimous?”

  “No, a simple majority.”

 

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