Requiem for Ashes

by David Crossman

  Strickland ignored Lane. "It's a natural assumption, I suppose," he said, "your being friends. And they've got to look somewhere." He cocked his head at an inquiring angle and regarded Albert closely. "'Were you very close?" The eagerness in his eyes was contradicted by the moderation of his tone. "As friends?"

  Did he really want to know something? Or was he just curious, like Miss Moodie? She wanted to know everything. Albert blew another large, deliberate puff of smoke in his direction. He said nothing, this fanner of the air, this jogger, this . . . eater of rice cakes. He blotted the corner of his eyes with his napkin, and smiled. Conclusive proof.He wanted information, too. But why?

  Now it was Lane's turn to stick his oar in. "You'll be leaving soon, I expect? Back to Crete?"

  Strickland looked at Lane without moving his head. "Crete, yes. Knossos. In two weeks."

  "Two weeks," Lane echoed. "And now the dig will be under your supervision."

  Strickland pivoted his head to center his eyeballs. "Yes. As head of the department ."

  "Acting head," Lane corrected.

  Strickland smiled from the nose down. "Acting head . . . at least for the season."

  "So, Tewksbury's misfortunes haven't been tragic all 'round." Lane prodded at the insistence of some unspoken grudge.

  "I'm happy to be head of the department, Lane, if that's what you’re hinting at," Strickland said flatly. "But I'm no happier profiting from someone else's . . . bad luck . . . than you would be."

  Here was Albert's chance to swing the conversation back to Tewksbury, but he wasn't quick enough.

  "Still," Lane said. "Quite a promotion, leapfrogging from third to first like that."

  Albert didn't want to go to Crete again. "You both know Daphne Knowlton, don't you?"

  Lane reacted as if someone had dropped a basketball in his soup, though he recovered quickly. Albert was more interested in Strickland. He didn't flinch. Didn't blink, didn't miss a mouthful of cottage cheese, but the veins on his forehead stood out in exclamations. Daphne Knowlton was the flashpoint between these two.

  "Yes," said Strickland into his cottage cheese. "Of course I remember. She had a tough time here, as I recall. The academic life isn’t for everyone."

  "Academic life,” Lane huffed, his blood pressure rising audibly. “Her ‘tough time’, as you put it, was thanks to you and Glenly!" Albert had never sat on a geological fault at the very moment tectonic plates shifted, but thought this must be very much what it felt like. If only the situation could be contained long enough for some information to develop.

  "Me!" Strickland retorted. The exclamation was genuine. "What did I have to do with it?"

  Lane rose in accusation. "You took advantage of her!"

  Albert sipped at his coffee cup, though it was empty.

  "Sit down, Lane. You're making a fool of yourself. You seem to forget, I was the one who wrapped her up and took her home after."

  "And what happened when you got to her place!" bellowed Lane, who hadn't sat down.

  Strickland took a quick inventory of the room. Everyone had gone. There was no hiding the fact that he was caught completely off guard.

  "What are you implying, Lane?" he said, the soul of self-control no more.

  In the heat of his anger, Lane was saying more than he intended to. "She was half drunk, half naked, frightened, confused. She needed comfort."

  "If you're insinuating that I . . . that I . . . " Strickland was standing now, struggling to get control of himself. "I don't have to listen to this to this. You're acting like a spurned lover, Lane." His eyes lit with the fire of his indignation. "Is that it, Old Man? Maybe you were planning to take her home that night, eh? Maybe you wanted to do the honors. Is that it?"

  Lane lunged across the table with both arms outstretched.

  Strickland had read the attack in his adversary's eyes and stepped out of the way.

  To Albert, the action was as foreign as a cotillion. His jaw dropped open, his thick eyebrows catapulted into perfect arches of astonishment. The force of Lane's impact on the table sent a bowl of cold soup sliding into his lap. He blinked once. Twice. Three times. The scene didn't go away. And the soup soaked into his pants.

  Professor Walter Lane lay full-length across the table with his elbow in the residue of Strickland's cottage cheese and pineapple juice.

  For his part, Strickland had grabbed a napkin and daubed his tie and lapel as he left the room, yelling over his shoulder, "Seems I touched an open nerve, 'eh, Old Fella? What would your wife say about that? It's no secret, you know? No secret." He was gone.

  Lane's dignity was evenly dispersed in a radius of six or seven feet from the table. The kitchen staff stood frozen like very large, very surprised ice-cream toffees at the far end of the cafeteria. The air leaked out of Albert's eyebrows one at a time and they came to rest atop his horn-rimmed glasses.

  Lane stood up slowly, leftovers hanging from various parts of his suit. "I'll kill that son of a . . . " He was looking at the door through which Strickland had departed. "I swear, I'll kill him."

  Albert's gaze was riveted on Lane's eyes. If ever there was a man who could make good on such a threat . . . The timpani of Albert's heart beat strong, single strokes that telegraphed straight to his temples, making his glasses feel three sizes too small.

  Lane looked at Albert, whose lap was strewn with the non-absorbable elements of vegetable beef soup. The cigarette dangling from his mouth had been extinguished by the tsunami. "Sorry, Professor," he said. "That's been a long time coming."

  Not only was Albert speechless, he was almost motionless.

  Lane brushed himself off, then applied the soggy napkin to Albert's glasses.

  Finally Albert blinked again. "What happened?"

  "I guess you deserve an explanation. Let's go for walk."

  It was one of those rare, deceitful days misplaced from a previous spring that instantly takes root in the cabin-fevered brains of the populace, especially on a college campus. Everyone strips to the legal minimum and pretends it's not fifty-three degrees. The sun is out! The snow is melting! Every piece of litter is mistaken for a flower. It's spring delirium, mass hypnosis on a supernatural scale, a prodigious, almost spiritual turning of the other cheek . . . which is soon to be backhanded by the careless hand of winter. Albert loosened his tie.

  "That crack about my wife."

  "Please, don't," said Albert, hoping he wouldn't. He did.

  "We've had our ups and downs. We separated about a year ago."

  Albert had never walked for recreation that he recalled. He only walked to get somewhere. As a result, he had developed a brisk stride that had to be reined to keep in step with Lane who sauntered slowly. "Neither of us have had the heart to take it any further." He squinted into the distance, as if to bring something into focus. "All those years invested in each other. Hard to let go," he said. "Besides, I love her." He glanced abashedly at Albert. He hadn't meant to say that out loud.

  “Anyway, Daphne," sigh, "she was a fish out of water around here. Remarkable girl, though. What do you know about her?"

  "Nothing," said Albert.

  "Neither did I, until much later."

  "After?"

  Lane nodded. "She was kidnapped . . . when she was three years old."

  Albert stopped walking. The cold soup on his legs was nothing to the cold world suddenly seeping into his being. "Kidnapped?"

  "Mmm. She didn't tell me, I read it in old newspapers . . . I happened to come across. Extortion. The kidnappers wanted money. I don't remember how much. Not from the parents, you understand. They were poor as church mice, but the maternal grandmother . . . practically owned the town."

  "In New Hampshire?"

  Lane nodded. “Husband had owned the local factory, I guess. Something of the sort. He died left everything to her.” They resumed walking. "Apparently she’d taken a pretty dim view of her daughter’s marriage in the first place. She'd never even seen her granddaughter. She simply refused to pay.
Can you imagine that? Her own flesh and blood.”

  “Needless to say, Daphne's parents were frantic. They had nothing to lose by calling the police. I guess the kidnappers were frustrated, too. They kept extending the deadline, making threats. Terrible threats. Nothing moved the old lady. A couple of days went by, then the parents were tipped off by an anonymous phone call.

  “They found Daphne in a little pit under the floorboards of an old barn. She'd been there over a week. Not much to eat. Out in the middle of nowhere. Probably the kidnappers thought she'd just be there a few hours. Out in the middle of nowhere," he repeated. "No one could have heard her cries."

  There was a long silence, punctuated by the scuff of their shoes on the blacktopped path. Albert was struggling to keep the mental images of the story from etching themselves on his brain.

  His efforts were in vain.

  "They never found the kidnappers."

  "How did you learn all this?"

  Lane smiled and puffed a note of irony. "She talks in her sleep." Albert looked at him the way he knew he would. "That's what everyone else thought. It wasn't like that.

  "Daphne and I are just . . . close friends. That’s all. At first we both just needed someone to talk to. My marriage was falling apart, she was nervous about her first job. More than nervous, really; panicked. We were a mutual-aid society, I guess. Anyway, after the incident in the teacher's lounge, after that damned Glenly . . . she stayed with me for a few days, to pull herself together. I slept on the sofa . . . but that's when I heard her talking in her sleep. Night after night, the same thing. Just rambling and crying, mostly. Not much that was lucid, but there were clues that she was troubled by something in her past. One thing led to another, and I ended up getting the story from old newspapers."

  "I thought Strickland took her home that night."

  "He did, the son of a . . . and he took advantage of her, exactly as I said. That much she told me. Unfortunately she fell in love with him."

  "Does anyone else know all this, about her past, I mean?"

  "Not that I know of. She wouldn't even tell me, so I doubt she'd have told anyone else."

  A noodle fell from the folds of Albert's shirt.

  "Sorry about that," said Lane, who was. "It'll be all over campus by tomorrow." What would? The soup? "Not a smooth move, as the kids say."

  "She fell in love with him," said Albert rhetorically. Suddenly the most obvious question of all leapt into his brain with both feet. "Where is she now?"

  "Who knows?" said Lane. "She still has family in New Hampshire."

  "You think she's there?"

  Lane's stride had suddenly quickened. Albert tried to steal a glance at his eyes, but they were turned away. "Who knows?" Lane repeated into the wind.

  Precisely what Albert was trying to find out. He thought he might tell Lane about his encounter with Daphne Knowlton. Then he thought he wouldn't, so they parted company without either being any the wiser.

  Albert supposed he'd have to change his pants before the afternoon class.

  Chapter Fifteen

  That evening Albert went to visit Jeremy Ash. It began to rain just as he arrived at the hospital. He found the boy and Mrs. Gibson in a semi-darkened room, both transfixed like moths by the deathly blue light of the TV screen. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find Inspector Naples laid out in a third bed. Fortunately he wasn't. But where had they put him?

  The television was very loud, owing to Mrs. Gibson's hearing problem.

  "Professor!" Jeremy shouted as Albert entered the room.

  "Hey! Mrs. Gibson! It's the Professor!"

  Mrs. Gibson silenced Jeremy Ash with an empathic gesture.

  Albert waited in the door until the next commercial.

  "Turn it off, Jeremy," she said at last. "That's foolishness. You ain't interested in that trash, are you, Professor? You come sit down here." She patted the back of a chair between her and her roommate. Albert obeyed.

  "Who's taking care of you, Professor?"

  "Taking care of me?"

  "Who cooks, cleans house, does your laundry?"

  Albert looked from Jeremy Ash, who was smiling, to Mrs. Gibson, who was glowering. Was he supposed to have someone taking care of him? It would explain a lot. "No one," he said.

  "Well, I'm glad to hear it." said Mrs. Gibson. "Otherwise they'd have to be shot for committing crimes against humanity. Look at you. You’re nothing but a whisper with hair on. Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

  "No," said Albert, too quickly. He blushed. His whole face was a polygraph whose little red light was blinking:Lie! Lie! Lie!

  Mrs. Gibson made an intuitive, knowing, ironic noise which has no spelling. She knew what Albert had not yet admitted to himself.

  Jeremy Ash came once more to the rescue. "Mrs. Gibson!"

  "Eh? What?"

  "Me and the Professor want to talk private for a few minutes!"

  The volume at which the request was delivered notified everyone on the hall that the Professor and Jeremy wished to have a private talk.

  Mrs. Gibson looked from Jeremy Ash to Albert, to Jeremy Ash. She picked up a magazine and pretended to turn off her hearing aid. "Well, you don't need to hit me in the head with a blunt object."

  Albert was about to speak when Jeremy held up his hand.

  "You know what?" he said with a twinkle in his eyes. "Anytime you want everyone in the world to know something, just tell it to her and she'll have it all over the place before you close your mouth." He paused deliberately and, holding his fingers to his lips, gestured toward Mrs. Gibson.

  It was immediately apparent that Jeremy Ash's redoubtable roomie had heard every word. Her entire face was compressed in a pucker of strained disinterest as she forced herself to remain quiet. Her eyes bugged out as she flipped aggressively through the magazine; something had to give, and they had nowhere else to go.

  Jeremy Ash administered thecoup de grâce. "You should hear what the nurses said about her this morning."

  "What did they say!" Mrs. Gibson didn't say, or remark, or inquire. She exploded, plastering her better judgment to the walls. "That skinny nurse with the Betty Boop lips! I know it is! Well, I could tell you something about . . . "

  Jeremy Ash began to laugh. Albert tried not to. "Eavesdroppers never hear good about 'emselves," said Jeremy.

  Mrs. Gibson flung a samurai glance at Jeremy that would have disemboweled most people, but her pride was no match for the boy's knowing smile. She laughed. "How did you know?"

  "I'm not telling," said Jeremy. "I've gotta keep an eye on you."

  Mrs. Gibson dissolved in teary-eyed laughter and turned off her hearing aid.

  "It's all right now."

  Albert studied the woman under cover of his eyebrows and spoke into his hand. "How do you know?"

  "Hey, you ain't the only detective around here. See the volume knob on her hearing aid? It's got a little red dot on it. If that dot's up, she's tuned in. If it's down, she couldn’t hear Jimi Hendrix."

  They brought each other up to date on news of mutual interest.

  "Are you going to see Naples?"

  Albert's heart skipped a beat. "Inspector Naples?" His hand went automatically to his head. "I don't know. Is he conscious? I thought he was . . . "

  "Nah. He's conscious, at least sometimes. He ain't exactly Solomon, I hear. But there's cops comin' and going all the time. He's in Tewksbury's old room."

  Albert's heart almost skipped town. The images that came to mind were not comforting.

  "How'd it happen, Professor?"

  "What?" said Albert in every sense of the word. "Oh, a flowerpot."

  The Hounds of Reason in Albert's weary brain were tired of jumping off hedges only to bash their heads against brick walls.

  What had happened that night? Where did Daphne Knowlton come from? Where did she go? Who was following her? Strickland? Lane? Her imagination? Had anyone seen Tewksbury leave the apartment?

  "Who hit him?"

  Who i
ndeed. The question fit so integrally with Albert's train of thought, he didn't realize it came from outside himself until it was repeated.

  "Professor? Who hit him?" Jeremy's voice was low and conspiratorial.

  "It wasn't . . . I mean . . . you didn't, like . . . it wasn't you, was it?"

  "What?" said Albert. "Hit him?" The Hounds of Reason assembled in a line with their heads cocked waiting for a reply. "Of course not. I was in the phone booth." He suppressed an urge to add "Your Honor."

  "Then it must have been Tewksbury!"

  "No," Albert said quietly. Whatwasit about Tewksbury? "He was the one I was talking to."

  "Well, if it wasn't you, and it wasn't him, who was it?"

  The boy's words reminded Albert of something he'd read somewhere: "Once you've eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Where had he read that? A cereal box? On a men's-room wall?

  The first job was to eliminate the impossible. It wasn't Tewksbury. It wasn't Albert. It wasn't Jeremy Ash. It wasn't Inspector Naples. It wasn't Miss Bjork, because he'd spoken to her just minutes before. It wasn't Professor Glenly, he was dead. It wasn't Daphne Knowlton, he'd seen her leave . . . but she might have come back. Hold Daphne Knowlton. Who else was involved? Miss Moodie? Very unlikely. She hadn't the motive or the dexterity. Motive. Motive. Legal people place a lot of emphasis on motive. Well, then, who would want to hit Inspector Naples on the head besides Tewksbury? No. Complete the list first. Who else? Strickland? Hold Strickland on general principle, he smiled too much not to be guilty of something. Lane? Poor Lane. In the High School Yearbook of Life he’d be runner-up for Most Probably Guilty, after Tewksbury. The Alters? Joanne was in Vermont. Her father? Hold Professor Alter. That completed the list. But why would any of those people have been following Inspector Naples?

  Suddenly a quick brown fox jumped over the groggy Hounds of Reason and the chase was on.

  Who was it who had said they were being followed? Daphne Knowlton. And who would be following her? It had to be one of two from the list, Strickland or Lane. Whoever it was, they would have seen her enter Albert's building, but wouldn't have seen her leave. She went out the back way. Then? He would have seen Albert leave-meet Inspector Naples - who then went inside, where he would have found Daphne Knowlton, who had to be protected because, because . . . The Hounds of Reason returned, winded and weary, but exhilarated by the knowledge that at least there was a fox in the forest. All Albert needed was a little more information.