Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  This didn’t seem so bad.

  “It’s almost polite,” I ventured.

  “Polite? It’s a fucking warning.”

  I sat in a small black club chair. “Right. Sorry. Good point.” God, I was as fumbling as Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral after he proposed to Andie McDowell.

  “How did it come?”

  She handed me the standard business-size envelope with a Michiganapolis postmark and, of course, no return address.

  The date stamp was two days old.

  “Did you call Detective Valley?”

  “Why? What’s he going to tell me?”

  “It’s not what he’s going to tell you—it’s what he can do. They can test this, trace it, track down the freak who’s hassling you.”

  “Oh, Nick, everyone knows about fingerprints and DNA, even crazy people. Especially crazy people. Nobody’s bloody stupid enough to spend the time on this letter and give himself away.”

  “Himself?”

  She shrugged. “Force of habit. It could be a woman,

  why not?”

  “Somebody really wants you gone. But why? Is it the

  race for EAR chair? That seems so—”

  She narrowed her eyes at me as if aiming. I’d been going to say “petty,” but she and Serena both were passionate power seekers, that was clear. Neither thought the job was petty in the slightest.

  “Why does it say ‘we’?”

  She shrugged, looking as dispirited as I’d seen her

  recently. “I wish I’d bought two dozen doughnuts.”

  “Well, you know what Molière said, don’t you? ‘When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.’”

  She begrudged me a smile. “I’m sure the original

  alexandrine was a bit more stately.”

  “I gave it just a workmanlike translation,” I nodded, wondering if I should ask why she called me to her office.

  “But seriously, don’t you think you should talk to Valley? This is under his purview, since it’s happened on campus.”

  “He’s a scumbag, and he’s going to think that I sent the note to myself,” Juno said darkly, as if already planning her retort should the accusation get made.

  Stefan would probably have made the same assumption,

  and I caught myself thinking, What if Juno was crying wolf for some reason as strange as whatever had made her flirt with me in the pool at the Club?

  “Even you,” she muttered.

  “God—am I transparent?”

  “You’re not opaque, that’s for sure.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “We have to investigate.”

  “Okay. If you mean that, get your coat. We’re going to the Campus Center, unless you have a class to meet— No?

  Then come on.”

  Juno didn’t ask why, which impressed me. She dressed

  and locked up her office, and we headed down the hall to the stairs but were waylaid by the Kinderhoeks, who started chattering antiphonally about the riot with as much noise as a flock of grubby pigeons.

  “Shocking.”

  “Disgraceful.”

  “No respect.”

  “Outrageous.”

  And so on. Juno and I nodded and escaped. “There’s

  something freakish about them,” she snarled as we stomped down the stairs. “As if they’ve been locked up in a cellar by their saner relatives and just escaped, and all they’ve been doing is talking to each other for the last hundred years. Shall we walk? I could use the fresh air.”

  Stefan loathed them, too, because they didn’t treat

  students well and by avoiding teaching over the past few years as much as they could, eviscerated EAR’s writing program, which had to rely on temporaries.

  The Kinderhoeks didn’t seem quite so awful to me. In

  fact, they were rather typical SUM professors, with the almost lubricious avidity for disaster that the university seemed to breed as successfully as some of its genetically engineered crops, which were earning it huge sums in patent rights. Sometimes I thought SUM could stand for

  Schadenfreude University of Michigan as well as anything else. If you had it bad in your department, then there was always someone who had it worse in another, or some

  university scandal or idiocy to revel in. The administration made a big deal about customer satisfaction when it came to students, but if it ever opened a complaints hotline for the faculty (without caller ID, of course), it would have to be available 24/7.

  In our own way, we were as balkanized and disputatious as the students, whose acrid calls for diversity over the years had led to Babel. Korean business students, for instance, had their own group totally separate from Japanese business students, and even the gay business students couldn’t get it together: their graduates and undergraduates had different organizations that seldom met and always disagreed. The competition for attention and funding was intense.

  Pushing through the streams of students, Juno and I

  headed along a series of brick paths past old and peeling buildings and enormous cottonwood trees that in the late spring would litter the grass underneath them and seem to be snowing when the wind was up. Off to our right, the traffic on Michigan Avenue sounded farther away than it was, thanks to the dense shrubs and walls of trees that dulled the noise somewhat, even without their leaves.

  “This is a beautiful campus,” I said, thinking about its glories in spring; the acres of forsythia and lilacs, the cherry trees and redbuds, and the masses of tulips—all of it lovingly tended to by a small army of groundskeepers and students.

  “It can be.”

  “No, it is. It’s always beautiful. Any season. It’s the people who spoil it.”

  “There’s a lot to be said for the neutron bomb,” Juno observed without irony.

  When we reached the Campus Center, both of us slowed

  down, and I almost expected Juno to turn back, though she couldn’t have known what my mission was. She was

  hesitating, and so was I. After all, I’d seen a dead body here a few years back, and now a riot. If I stepped inside, would the ceiling collapse? Would there be a fire? And she had been attacked there—it couldn’t be easy to reenter the scene.

  But as if signaled, we both moved on. Just inside the glass doors was a sign listing the various conference rooms on the first floor. “Do you remember which rooms we were in yesterday?”

  “Huron, and Erie. I think. Or Superior? Two of the Great Lakes, anyway.”

  Around us everyone seemed to know exactly where they

  were going, which made the next minute or so a bit unreal, especially since most of them were students and twenty years younger than we were. Their quiet confidence made me feel suddenly superannuated.

  Remembering how confusing the path had been to the

  reception, and the blur of leaving in the midst of chaos, I was determined not to get lost, so I slowly followed the series of white arrows as one corridor fed into another. Sooner than I thought it would happen, we were standing outside the scene of the reception whose failure had probably made the

  university glad it had waited five years to hold one. I doubted there would ever be another like it, given the bad publicity.

  SUM’s students had rioted after winning games and losing them, but the faculty had always been docile up to now.

  “It’s different,” Juno said in the quiet hallway, which looked like a dead end, as we stood at the doorway, looking in.

  The two rooms that had been joined were separate again, but the difference was also the strange quiet in this part of the Campus Center, where the granite tiles on the bottom half of the walls and the pale gray paint above them gleamed as if brand-new.

  “Shall we?” Juno said, and we entered. Juno flicked on the neon lights, which made the quiet seem more unnerving.

  The chairs were folded up and stacked against the back wall, there were no tables, and the heavy curtains were draw
n against the sunshine. Juno stood smack in the middle of the empty room, gazing around.

  “What did you bring me here for?” she asked almost

  seductively. “Are we communing with spirits? Tapping into the energy that hasn’t been dispersed? Dowsing?”

  “Show me where you were sitting.”

  Juno dutifully turned to the back of the room as if

  picturing the tables that had held the chintzy refreshments and estimating how far forward the rows of chairs were from that spot. She paced over to the far side of the room. “I was in the back row—enjoying the bedlam.”

  “Show me.”

  Juno strode over for one of the chairs, dragged it over to a spot a few feet out from the curtained windows, opened the chair, and sat. “Right about here.”

  “Don’t move.”

  I wandered around her, not sure what I was hunting for, but making myself look as intensely as if I’d been blind all my life and an operation had just given me sight. I tried drinking everything in as I walked in slow, widening circles around Juno.

  “Are we going to play musical chairs? Musical chair?”

  “Quiet.”

  “Don’t you want me to try reconstructing what

  happened before I was attacked? It might be easier in situ.”

  As I neared the window, I brushed against the curtains, and my hand seemed to catch in something. I pulled the heavy, ugly fabric closer.

  “What?” Juno asked sharply.

  “It looks like a bullet hole.”

  “Is that why we’re here?” Juno jumped up to inspect the cloth I held out to her. “Nonsense—it’s a moth hole.”

  I thought of Whoopi Goldberg saying in Jumpin’ Jack Flash that she had moths—giant, junkie, mutant moths.

  “It can’t be. It’s too even, too regular. Moths don’t use circular saws.” I found the seam where the curtains met, and slipped behind them. The stale air was dusty and hot. I examined the wall below the window where I estimated the “moth hole” lined up.

  “Juno—look at this.”

  She rushed behind the curtains to join me, and stared where I was pointing.

  Juno and I looked at the cinder-block wall. There was a hole in it. It looked like a bullet hole.

  6

  I couldn’t breathe back there and slipped out, but Juno stayed behind the curtain for a moment longer. When she emerged, dust motes glinting around her, she had drawn a pen from her coat pocket. She crouched in front of the curtain and poked the pen through. It made a scratching noise on the cinder block. Then she stood and vigorously yanked the curtains back with the ratty cord that had been hanging there almost invisibly.

  “See?” she said with triumph.

  Her pen had left a mark quite a few feet to the left of the bullet hole.

  “Give me the pen.” I took it from her. Finding the hole in the curtain, I made my own test, sticking the pen through, and there was a little give. I yanked the curtain away from the wall and did my own bit of crowing: “Take a look! The curtains were open yesterday.”

  The holes had lined up—there was an ink mark clearly

  visible inside the one in the wall.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Juno breathed, walking back to the lone chair and sitting down, though her eyes were fixed on the cinder block.

  “Somebody took a shot at me,” she said, softly outraged.

  “You were right.”

  I nodded. “That’s more than phone calls or a threatening note. That could have been lethal.”

  “Which means we’ve been tampering with a crime

  scene,” Juno observed tartly. “Wait! If that’s an actual bullet hole—where’s the fucking bullet?”

  And now I felt as creeped out as if someone were

  listening in on us, or watching us. Because it seemed obvious that the bullet had been dug out. And it couldn’t have been Detective Valley or any other campus cop, since he claimed there hadn’t been a gun fired. I bent over to inspect the hole, and it did seem scored by something sharp like a knife. I turned back to Juno, who looked pale, but supernally alert.

  “Whoever shot at you must have come back when there

  wasn’t anything in the paper about a gun and removed the evidence.”

  “But how could I have missed it?” Juno wondered.

  Now I was quoting her: “The noise—the confusion—”

  “—the excitement.” She grinned evilly. “What a fucking zoo it was.”

  Yes, indeed. It had been a dirty little thrill to see the provost brought low, if only rhetorically. She had so much power over all our lives and was so totally removed from oversight and accountability, whereas we professors were always on the spot, it seemed, though of course no one monitored us systematically. You could almost say we were totally unsupervised, since we were on campus only a small part of every week meeting classes and seeing students during office hours. Yet we felt as spied upon and harassed as employees whose firms monitor every keystroke they take and every phone call.

  I pulled over a chair, opened it, and sat by Juno, thinking we had come a very long way from when we had dined à deux at her house. We had crossed another border, together.

  “How could it miss me,” Juno went on thoughtfully, “is the other question. Unless it wasn’t meant to kill me or hurt me, just to scare me off.”

  “From what? Running for chair? That’s nuts. Serena

  wouldn’t do it or set someone else up to do it for her.”

  “Why not? Since she’s become acting chair, she’s been a horror. And I say that as someone who used to be her friend.”

  I couldn’t disagree. Serena’s formerly wacky charm had been eclipsed, or maybe mummified was a better term. She was now aloof and distant, as if acting remotely human would soil her in some way, and in fact had come to resemble Coral Greathouse, the former chair, in manner if not in style—Coral had dressed and acted like an ex-nun, while Serena still wore flashy retro clothes that made you expect her to burst into a Cole Porter song in the hallway, or jump on a desk and jitterbug at a meeting.

  Serena had been helpful to me before in a rallying,

  sarcastic kind of way, but I had no idea anymore if she was a friend or an enemy. She had been the former chair of Rhetoric before that department had been disbanded and combined with the Department of English and American Studies, and she often complained about second-class status in EAR. Yet here she was, meting out the same kind of mistreatment. Clearly her years of oppression had not filled her with magnanimity.

  She was bent on revenge.

  And perhaps she feared that Juno might stand in her

  way.

  “Would Serena be that desperate to scare you off?” I

  asked.

  Juno nodded fiercely. “She’s crazy—she’s been deprived of power for ten years, more. Isn’t that right? And now’s her chance. It doesn’t have to be her, anyway. It could be one of her adherents.”

  “But people hate her.” Because Serena was tainted by

  having been the chair of a department even less respected by SUM than the one she had joined.

  “That would make her even more hateful herself.”

  People in EAR also hated Juno for being so outrageous.

  Though you could say, like caged and abused animals, they hated in general, out of boredom, and were always ready to lash out.

  “But is that definitely a bullet hole?” Juno said, frowning.

  “How can we tell for sure? And more to the point, how do we know it’s recent?”

  “It looks recent. You think this room is a firing range?”

  Juno’s eyes were scorching. “How many bullet holes

  have you seen in your life? I’m not talking about Law and Order. I mean close up. We could be totally fucking wrong, and the wall and the curtain were damaged years ago, and no one noticed.”

  “No, that’s not possible; they’ve renovated this building extensively since some pipes burst a few years ago.”


  She glanced around the room and shuddered. “This

  shithole has been renovated?”

  “Trust me, it looked worse.” Though no one had been

  murdered there before.

  We had been alone with our speculations for so long that when my cell phone rang, it was as if someone I didn’t know was in the room and had tapped me on the shoulder. I

  dropped the phone digging it out of my pocket.

  “Nerves of steel,” Juno noted dryly as I took the call. It was Stefan.

  “Nick—I tried you at home—”

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “At Parker. There’s an emergency departmental meeting called for four. I tried you at home but you didn’t pick up.

  Where are you?”

  “I’m in the middle of something—I’ll call you back

  later,” I said, and hung up before he could ask me anything more. I didn’t want to explain what I’d been doing with Juno, certainly not on the phone.

  “Hubby checking up on you?” she asked coyly. “Doesn’t trust you alone?”

  I told Juno about the emergency meeting.

  She leaped to her feet. “Good Christ, another fucking meeting? That’s all anyone does around here is hold meetings, plan meetings, talk about meetings, analyze meetings. And breakfast meetings! Is there anything more obscene! As if I want to face any of those turds over greasy bacon and cardboardy scrambled eggs.”

  I put my chair back against the wall, but Juno looked like she was just gearing up for a rant, so I took her chair, too, folded it up, and stacked it against the others. That seemed to get her attention, or at least refocus her attention away from her gripes.

  “If you beat Serena in the election,” I said, “you’ll have constant meetings with the department cochairs, committees, subcommittees, upper administrators, the dean, even students.

  You can’t just issue pronunciamentos and hope everyone obeys.”

  “No? Maybe it’s time someone tried.” But the bravado

  seemed unconvincing even to Juno herself.

  We headed out, and the return trip to Parker seemed

  much longer, not just because the air was chillier or because we faced some kind of departmental crisis—again. I think Juno was as weighed down by what we’d discovered as I was. Well, more, of course; after all, the bullet had been aimed at her in one way or another, to warn her or hurt her.