Academy Gothic

by James Tate Hill

  Carly stood behind me.

  I took Mollie’s hand. Our fingers locked. Our lips came within an inch of touching. My finger made a barrier between them.

  Mollie aimed her gaze over my shoulder. “You don’t even know her, Tate. There’s still time. For us.”

  The cackling down the hall grew louder until a pair of gunshots brought it to a close.

  “Did you just shoot me?”

  “You’ll live,” Thayer said in the beleaguered voice that preceded the clink of handcuffs.

  Mollie pulled against my hand. I wrapped both arms around her and held on tight. She bucked and screamed. A minute later, her body went slack in my arms. She was crying. They didn’t seem like real tears until I felt them on my shoulder.

  Chapter 40

  WE DROPPED THAYER OFF in the parking lot behind the library. He gave me his left hand to shake. His right held a wad of paper towels against his crown. He needed stitches, but refused medical attention until he had taken a victory lap around the theater.

  “When are you going to tell him?” Carly asked, parking the golf cart in front of the former sub shop.

  “Who knows? Maybe Parshall will go for it. There are three faculty members no longer in need of their salaries. If not, I’ll blame it on a ninety-eight-year-old’s faulty memory.”

  Mid-morning sun warmed our backs as we knocked on Wade Biggins’s door. I had promised Carly her folder from Simkins’s file cabinet. On the third knock, the door finally opened.

  Wade said our names and yawned. “I’m sorry I slept through class, Miss Worth.”

  I told him classes were canceled until Monday.

  “Really? Sweet.”

  I made my way into the foyer. “Just to warn you, Wade, some cops are going to be coming by in a little while.”

  “Shit. Where am I going to hide everything?”

  “Just hide your marijuana, and you should be fine. They’re interested in that file cabinet with the bullet wounds.” I tapped the front of the other file cabinet on which he had carved his favorite section of Michelangelo’s David.

  “Perhaps you can return this one to its rightful owner before they get here.”

  “Who does it belong to?”

  I explained the journey Simkins’s file cabinet had made from Simkins’s office to the janitor’s closet in the dorm. When it disappeared, Stashauer searched the dorm, finding a file cabinet he assumed was Simkins’s. He moved it to the library, of whose contents Tweel had become so protective, tripping the breaker switch to dissuade visitors.

  “Nikki Gladstone?” A wide grin parted Wade’s overstuffed cheeks. He rubbed his hands together and slid the base of a nearby hand cart under Nikki’s file cabinet.

  “Sure you don’t want to put on some clothes first?” Carly asked.

  Wade stepped backward through his front door in his white bathrobe and slippers. “No way, Miss Worth. You chicks love it when guys do nice things for you. I want to be ready when she, you know, thanks me.”

  I led Carly around the minarets of library books into Wade’s

  billiard room.

  “Wow. Wade might have a future after all,” she said.

  “As a thief?”

  “As a furniture mover. He’s put everything in the exact position Simkins had it in his office.”

  I aimed my eyes at the crown molding, if there was any, and turned in a slow circle. Stand-up cabinets and bookshelves lined two walls. Behind the desk sat Simkins’s chair. To the right of the desk was the black file cabinet. Carly pulled open the top drawer.

  “Here it is,” she said, equal parts embarrassment and relief.

  I made myself comfortable in Simkins’s chair while Carly paged through the contents of the yellow folder. After a time, she sat on a stack of encyclopedias and tore the pages of her fictional life into two-inch pieces.

  I rested my elbows on the desk of the late dean. Unloved as he was, excepting the mixed memories of Delilah Bibb, Simkins’s legacy, other than the faint heartbeat of the school he had kept alive through artificial respiration, did not extend beyond the items on his desk. I held my magnifier against the coupon for a free small fry with the purchase of a large soft drink. It had expired a week before he had. I had been outside his office once when a concerned parent asked if Simkins had any family. “Every one of these students,” he had replied. The parent, who was there to protest her daughter’s grade, told him to go fuck himself.

  I lifted the lid of Simkins’s candy dish. I took two of his circus peanuts and replaced the lid. Carly stood above his trash can, watching the brief blizzard of her alter ego settle in the bottom. I gave Carly one of the peanuts, held mine aloft, and proposed a toast.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “They’re a little stale, but I think they come out of the bag that way.”

  Carly yanked my wrist before I could take a bite. “Don’t eat that!”

  I looked her in the black dots that passed for eyes in my blind spots. I brought the candy toward my nose. She shook my wrist until the peanut dropped onto the floor.

  The scent on my fingers was familiar, if not particularly strong. If I hadn’t smelled it recently, among the perfumes in Carly’s medicine cabinet, I might not have remembered it.

  Carly grabbed the candy dish and threw it hard into the plastic trash can. She looked at me, saying nothing. Finally, she collapsed into a hundred books that dominoed across the floor.

  So there it was, the answer to the one unanswered question: how Scoot Simkins, who so impressively stayed awake through most of his own meetings, managed to sleep through all those bullets hitting his file cabinet. He was already dead.

  “I went back to his office.” These were Carly’s half-formed words from the floor. “Two hours before the meeting, I went back. I hadn’t slept. I bought a bag of candy to replace these. That’s when I found him and called the police.”

  Her poisoned candy had scarcely preceded Tweel’s and Mollie’s gunfire, judging by the blood.

  “I didn’t even know he still ate them,” I said.

  “He ate several the last time I was in his office.” Carly took a long moment to compose herself. “That’s when he told me he had been looking over my CV.” Her voice crawled around the floor like a flightless bird.

  “Your Internet search for cremation. You worried there might be traces of the poison in the remains.”

  “I had to use your computer. I was being watched by that detective. I knew it was him in the black car, Tate. I remembered him from Monday morning.”

  “If only he had known you were on the same team.”

  “I’m not like them. I tried to take it back. You have to believe me.”

  “Why didn’t you just quit?”

  “I tried. I offered to leave right away or finish the semester, his choice. Simkins just stared at me across this desk with those sunken eyes. He told me I had committed the worst kind of fraud, the kind that compromises the foundation of the academy. He said it was a serious crime and said I had left him no choice but to turn me in. I was in tears. I told him I would do whatever it took. He pushed his chair away from his desk. He rolled around to the other side. He put his arm around me. That’s what I thought he was doing. Then I saw him unzipping his pants. I turned away. He chuckled and told me to take the weekend to think about it. The things I’d be doing in prison wouldn’t be half as pleasant, he told me. Now I wonder if what I did was even a crime.”

  “The fraud or the murder?” She didn’t answer.

  I stood up. Simkins’s chair didn’t seem like the place to be. I cleared a spot on the floor and sat beside Carly.

  “This doesn’t have to change anything between us, Tate.” She wiped her eyes one at a time. “You could just forget everything, couldn’t you?”

  I looked into her sad dark pupils. There was remorse in the infinite flecks of gold in her green irises, in the tiny creases around her mouth and eyes. I couldn’t see any of it, but most things you can hear in a voice. I
searched her face, my memory filling in what I couldn’t see. It’s a hell of a trade, memory for vision. Which side got the raw deal I was never sure. A hard, impersonal knock came on the front door. Another followed five seconds later.

  “Grayford P.D.”

  Carly looked into the hall and back at me. The door opened. Footsteps made their way into the living room.

  “Detective Thayer said you’d be expecting us.”

  Carly let out a breath. She balled her hands into little fists and held them between us, wrists together. I pushed them down and found the Post-it in the center of the desk on which Simkins had written “a Butter.” I tore it in half and tore it a second time. I tore it a third time and dropped the pieces onto the candy and broken glass.

  Chapter 41

  THE PHONE ON MY DESK RANG. I have two phones and two desks, but the one on the desk closest to the door isn’t plugged in. The second desk is never occupied, but people think more of a man who pays someone to answer his phone.

  “This is Cowlishaw.”

  “Tate, you have a customer coming. A woman in her fifties.” Jaysaree sounded giddy. She got excited when people came to see me, professionally or otherwise.

  “Client,” I corrected her. “Thank you.”

  Most people go first to the office in spite of the sign in the window of the room beside mine. Inside, the room looks a little more like a business. Sundeep put the bed and dresser in storage, and I got a great deal on two desks that had belonged to former faculty at Parshall College.

  My client knocked, as they tend to do. I got up to let her in. A large woman filled the doorway, blocking more of the July sun than the cheap curtains. She handed me a thin stack of mail.

  “The woman in the office asked me to bring this to you.”

  “Sorry. My secretary has been out all week with the flu.”

  “Yes, I hear that’s going around.”

  I led her to my desk and offered her the chair not occupied by Edward. She stood there, petting him for a while.

  “What’s your name? Hmmm? What’s your name?”

  I told her his name. Edward wasn’t going to.

  “You’re a handsome one, aren’t you? Yes, you are.” She went on talking to the cat, as women of a certain means will do when visiting a private investigator in the bad part of town.

  “Do you want to tell him your name?” I asked. She laughed nervously.

  I checked my watch. I started to repeat my question, but clients seemed to appreciate patience. Until I could afford advertising more effective than business cards and Internet classifieds, I had to rely on word of mouth.

  For nearly a minute, she stared at my painting of Grandfather Mountain. At last she swallowed a big woman’s breath and handed me a 9 x 12 envelope.

  I opened it and pretended to read the first page. I made a knowing sound. This is a good sound to make when the person across from you might pay you to know things.

  “You’ll see in those statements various charges to restaurants and hotels. Mitchell is my husband. Her name is in the e-mails.”

  “How long has the affair been going on?”

  “Two years. Maybe longer.”

  “What would you like me to do about it?”

  “Catch the bastard in the act.” Nerves finally gave way to the indignation that had brought her here.

  As far as the courts were concerned, she had already caught him, but it didn’t behoove me to question the value a job had to a client. It had value to me. I gave her an estimate of that value, and the woman wrote me a check.

  “Do you think you can help me?”

  “I see no reason why not.”

  This is what I always say. In many ways, detective work is a lot like teaching college. Sometimes the students got what they paid for, and sometimes they didn’t. The payment was the consistent part.

  Once she was gone, I held my magnifier over the box on the check where the dollar amount is written in numbers. They were the right numbers. I went through my mail Jaysaree made my client bring me. It was all junk except for a postcard of the Statue of Liberty. I turned it over. “Love, Carla” read the large letters that didn’t require my magnifier.

  We had tried to ignore what we both knew, look past it, look off to the side, but it was always there. Before leaving town, she promised to someday make us both forget, or find a way to make it not matter. I set the postcard on top of the others in my desk drawer, all of them containing the same two words.

  I checked my watch again and phoned the taxicab company that offered minivans. I groaned at the estimate, but had no choice. At least I had been where I was going enough times that when the driver asked if we were there I would know we were. I had him park by the entrance while I went inside.

  Dr. Parshall had on his bright blue academic regalia, segments of gold and white rope draped across his neck. Nurse Margaret wheeled him into the hall. He called her bad names while she straightened his mortarboard.

  “He’s all yours,” she said, unlocking my grandmother’s old room.

  “That won’t be necessary, Margaret,” Parshall said.

  “I thought you wanted to say a few words,” I said.

  “I’ll say them right here,” he said in a voice diminished by more than age. “I know there aren’t any assholes where you are, Katherine, because they’re all down here.”

  Greeting us in the parking lot behind the library, Londell extended his hand and introduced himself to his former employer. In a month, he would begin his new job in the history department at one of the state universities in Delaware. He had given me the news rather solemnly over beers at Oral Tradition’s, the tone of a man with inoperable tumors.

  “Londell Bakker.” Parshall said the name as though it were associated with unspeakable atrocities. “Who named you that?”

  “My mother did, sir.”

  Parshall grunted and shook his hand. Through gritted teeth, he said, “Thank you for your service to Parshall College.”

  From the echoes of chatter in the ceiling, the theater seemed about half full. Many students from out of town had decided not to return to Grayford in the middle of summer to receive their diplomas. Some parents, according to one of Hoopel’s stories in The Chanticleer, refused to honor their children’s achievements under these circumstances.

  Hoopel shook my hand in the lobby of the Boss Hog’s Rib Shack Theater. His girlfriend, the graduate assistant he had sweet-talked into giving him Stashauer’s résumé, took a picture of Dr. Parshall. Hoopel bent over the old man’s wheelchair.

  “Dr. Parshall, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  Dr. Parshall took Hoopel’s hand. “Thank you for your service to Parshall College.”

  I parked his chair between the stage and the first row. He wanted to be the first to congratulate each student after Dean Bibb handed them their diplomas. Seated in the aisle of the front row were Marianne Randallman and Mark Dudek, the individuals most responsible for the highest graduation rate in Parshall’s 130 years.

  Delilah’s PowerPoint presentation never found an audience in the accreditation board. Simkins’s annual payments, dating back eleven years, had only purchased probation in one-year increments. Actual accreditation required the approval of board members other than Jefferson Totten. “Unsalvageable” had been the board’s assessment of the state of Parshall’s academics. When students learned that their degrees, already of questionable worth, no longer awaited them at the end of their four-to-eleven-year journeys, they joined together in a class action lawsuit against the college.

  Theo Skipwith voted right away to settle out of court. Sara Freyman, upon learning her inheritance from the namesake she had never met held no monetary value—in fact, her stake in the school could cost her what property she owned—took the legal advice of her former boss and also cast her half-vote to settle. F. Randolph Parshall, knowing his beloved school would have to shutter its doors no matter what, agreed to sell the school if Randallman agreed not to come
after his ownership in Rosewall Glen. She agreed, seeing an outside chance to go after the nursing home when she sued the school for the wrongful death of Duncan Musgrove, whose suicide, Randallman had planned to argue, could have been prevented under better working conditions. Fortunately, at least for Dr. Parshall, Janice Musgrove passed away two months after her husband’s suicide. She died of a broken heart, according to her obituary. More likely her heart gave out after years of morbid obesity, but Hoopel was entitled to some creative license. It was his final obituary before his promotion to reporter.

  Proceeds from the sale of the school’s land, after legal fees, were distributed among the student body. All students with at least half the credit required for a bachelor’s degree would receive their diplomas. Students with less than half the requisite credits would receive a stipend for tuition not to exceed four years at one of the state universities. Only one student eligible to graduate, Islanda Purvis, turned down her diploma and opted for additional education. Everyone else accepted their parchment from Delilah Bibb in the final act of her tenure as dean. After shaking the hand of the lone trustee in attendance, Parshall’s final graduates paused by the front row to collect the additional cash settlement from their attorney, an amount equivalent to one semester of room and board.

  Delilah delivered the commencement address from the stage, having placed a plank of plywood over the steps to permit wheelchair access. She spoke with passion if not energy. Her speech included portions of screeds she had written for a blog lambasting the state of higher education, a joint venture of her and her daughter.

  “I’m doubtful that a single quote-unquote graduate who has walked across this stage today has any knowledge he or she will find useful in the real world. Tell me: What exactly are you prepared to do?”

  Half-hearted boos congregated in the cracked ceiling. “How dare she?” said a mother in the row behind me. I recognized the woman’s voice in the lobby after the ceremony, sharing her outrage with The Chanticleer’s newest reporter.

  “Dr. Cowlishaw! I did it!”

  Wade Biggins threw his arms around my waist, lifted me a foot off the ground, and spun me around in a carousel hug.