The Professor

by Alexandria Clarke

  “Precisely,” agreed Donovan, still leisurely pacing around Wes. “I’ll ignore the jibe about normal people for now, and I can assure you that I’m perfectly sane. My father paid off my childhood psychologist to prove it.” He bared his teeth in a wicked grin. “But back to the knowledge you share with your cherished mavourneen. I assume you know what happened to Nicole’s parents?”

  “What do Nicole’s parents have to do with anything?”

  Donovan paused in front of Wes, planting his hands on either armrest of the chair, and lowered himself to Wes’s eye level.

  “Everything, Officer McAllen. Everything.”

  13

  I left Jo at the storage facility with the recommendation that she should stay out of the Raptors’ business, get out of town, and never look back. There wasn’t much of a chance she would take my advice—Jo had been screwed over by the Black Raptor Society more times than I could count—but the last thing I needed was for someone else to get hurt, kidnapped, or killed because I had decided to give the Raptors a run for their money. I had enough on my plate to feel guilty about already. Jo was young, roughly the same age as Lauren, and it wasn’t fair that either one of them had to deal with things that no one should ever have to deal with. Like murder. Jo deserved a normal life, and she couldn’t have one if she kept wrapping herself up with the Raptors.

  As I idled in Lauren’s car, waiting for the engine to warm up, the burner phone rang again. I had three missed calls from Lauren’s alter ego, Salander.

  “Yeah,” I answered, pinching the phone to my cheek with my shoulder in order to keep both of my hands rotating in front of the heater vents.

  “What the hell just happened?” demanded Lauren. “One minute, I see you creeping along, and the next, both you and your stalker have disappeared.”

  “It was Jo Mitchell,” I explained. I put the car in reverse, backing away from Lockwood Inc.’s facility. I would be glad to see it disappear in the rearview mirror. “She’s been tracking the Raptors. We found O’Connor’s car.”

  “Oh. Did you find anything else?”

  “Nope. No sign of Wes or O’Connor’s body. I did find O’Connor’s cell phone though,” I added. “From the looks of it, he tried to ditch it before BRS could find it, which makes me think he might’ve been storing additional information on it. It’s wrecked. Water damaged. What are the chances you could still access the contents?”

  “Slim, if the phone’s been fried. Where are you?”

  “I just pulled out of the storage facility,” I said, guiding the vehicle back out onto the access road. “Can we meet up somewhere?”

  “Way ahead of you,” said Lauren. “I’m sending you an address. It’s for a bookstore called Floorboard Lit. Park around back, come inside, and ask Ben—he’s usually behind the cafe counter—if they have an autographed first edition of Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre.”

  “Lauren, no offense, but I’m not exactly in the market for overpriced existentialist literature,” I said.

  “It’s the code phrase, smart-ass. The bookstore has a basement, and Ben is the only person who can let you in.”

  “What is with the Raptors’ obsession with underground hideaways?” I grumbled. The burner phone beeped, and I switched on the speakerphone so I could look at the screen. The address for Floorboard Lit had come through, so I programmed it into the navigation.

  “It was either this or a portable toilet behind the construction site on campus,” deadpanned Lauren. “Just get here as quickly as possible. We need to keep this investigation moving.”

  Floorboard Lit was just far enough off the beaten path that the area of town was a little less taken care of than that of the Waverly campus. Bits of trash decorated the streets, asphalt crumbled beneath the wheels of Lauren’s car, and the cloak of clouds above muted everything to a fixed, ever-present gray. As I pulled into the parking lot, I took in the sights. The bookstore was actually a renovated house with wide, curtained front windows, weathered porch steps, and a welcoming but worn sign in the yard advertising fresh drip coffee. I parked and headed up the stairs, listening to the porch creak beneath my footsteps. A bell jangled overhead as I pushed the door open. Inside was warm and softly lit, and it smelled deliciously of hazelnut coffee and cinnamon. Books were stacked haphazardly on every surface, but their delicately placed price tags indicated some order to the chaotic system. Trusting my nose, I followed the comforting scent down the hallway past the stairs that led to the second floor of the house. In the back room, a small cafe, complete with counter service and tiny two-top tables, had been erected. A few students from Waverly milled about, sipping lattes and bent over textbooks, and behind the counter, a middle-aged man with a shock of auburn hair steamed milk at a cappuccino machine.

  I approached the counter and cleared my throat.

  “We’re out of the house roast,” said the man without taking his eyes off of the milk. “Be happy to make you just about anything else.”

  “I’m fine, thanks. Are you Ben?”

  The loud hum of the cappuccino machine ceased, and the man turned to face me. With an expert whirl of his wrist, he tipped the milk into a small cup of espresso and handed the cappuccino off to a patient patron.

  “That I am,” he said, wiping his hands on a damp dish towel. “What can I help you with?”

  “Er, my friend sent me to ask if you have an autographed first edition of Sartre’s Nausea.”

  There was no obvious beat of hesitation before Ben ducked under the countertop to join me on its other side. He flipped the towel over his shoulder and beckoned me toward the adjoining room. “Let’s have a look. I keep the more expensive literature in here. Humidity controls help preserve them.”

  We slipped into the other room, and Ben closed the door behind us. It was an intimate space—I stood uncomfortably close to Ben—and the neatly stacked books made the room seem even smaller.

  “’Scuse me,” said Ben, and I shifted forward to allow him access to a short chain that hung from a lightbulb on the ceiling, but to my surprise, when Ben gave it a quick yank, it wasn’t the bulb that responded. Instead, the floorboards in the far corner of the room shifted to reveal a small opening and a steep set of stairs.

  “I get the name of this place now,” I muttered, peering down.

  Ben chuckled warmly. “They used to hide booze down here during Prohibition. Sartre waits for no one. Off you go.”

  Cautiously, I stepped below the first level. As I descended, the floorboards above me closed up again, but a series of modest electric candles guided me farther downward. The basement of Floorboard Lit was no less cozy than the main house. Handwoven carpets cushioned the floor, and across from the stairs, a soft leather couch, draped with several fluffy afghans, begged me to take a nap on it. On the opposite side of the room, sitting at a gorgeous antique writing desk, was Lauren.

  “Good, you found it okay,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at me as I padded across the basement toward her. She was working at her personal laptop, the screen of which was filled with rows upon rows of computer code.

  “Yeah.” I leaned over the desk, but I had no hope of making sense of Lauren’s work. “Um, how exactly do you know this Ben?”

  “He’s my uncle.”

  “He is?”

  “Half uncle, to be precise,” she added, clicking out of her confusing windows of code. “On my mother’s side. Don’t worry, though. He doesn’t know anything about BRS.”

  “What does he think we’re doing down here then?”

  “Running a drug front.”

  “God, please tell me you’re kidding.”

  “Of course I am. Ben doesn’t ask questions, okay? He trusts me.”

  “That’s not shady at all,” I said with a roll of my eyes.

  “Whatever,” said Lauren, spinning in her chair to face me. “At least we’re safe, right? Do you have O’Connor’s phone?”

  I swung the black backpack off my shoulders and set it on the desk, digging O�
�Connor’s ruined phone out of the front pocket.

  “Wow, what a hunk of junk,” she said, experimentally tapping the power button. “This thing is ancient. Why couldn’t O’Connor just have an iPhone like everyone else?”

  I took the digital camera out, switched it on, and scrolled through the pictures of O’Connor’s car. “Look at these.”

  “Not very comforting,” she commented, observing the photos with a frown. She plugged O’Connor’s phone into her laptop and clicked around. Nothing happened. “This doesn't bode well.”

  “No luck?”

  “Usually, you can rescue data from a damaged phone using some kind of recovery program, but I think O’Connor’s phone is way past its expiration date,” said Lauren. She turned over the phone in her hand. “It’s old for one, and what guy O’Connor’s age updates his phone software regularly? We might be out of luck on this one.”

  I tipped my head back in frustration. “What if he backed it up?”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. On his personal computer or something.”

  “Do you have access to his personal computer?” asked Lauren, her brow raised quizzically.

  “No.”

  “Then there goes that plan.”

  “But I know his wife.”

  “O’Connor’s wife?”

  I nodded, a plan forming in my head. “I met her several times at events for Waverly when I was O’Connor’s teaching assistant. Her name is Eileen. O’Connor had to have used a computer at home, right?”

  Lauren bit her lip, thinking. “Are you sure you want to involve another innocent person in this garbage?”

  “I don’t think we have much of a choice.”

  “That won’t be an easy visit.”

  It certainly wouldn’t. The general public had never been updated on O’Connor’s actual condition, which meant that O’Connor’s wife was probably still holding out hope that he would return home any day now.

  “I’ll figure it out,” I muttered, though doubt whispered conspiratorially at the back of my mind. “In the meantime, we need to keep looking for Wes. Where else do you think they could’ve taken him?”

  Lauren spun around again, opening up a fresh window on her computer monitor. “Lucky for you, I’ve already made some headway on that front. As you know, my father’s company owns a ton of different businesses and properties.”

  She scrolled through what appeared to be a never-ending list of titles owned by the Lockwood parent company. I recognized several well-established brands that I’d never known Lockwood Inc. had been a part of. “Okay. So?”

  “This is how my dad operates,” explained Lauren, still scrolling. “All of his assets are spread out so any illegal BRS business is hidden beneath layers and layers of legal activity, but obviously, he can’t hide everything. I tapped into my father’s computer.”

  “You did?” I sank into a nearby armchair to watch Lauren work. “Did you find anything?”

  “It took a while, but I managed to hone in on a series of emails that kept referencing this location. The emails were coded, but between my inside knowledge of BRS and my general level of genius—”

  “Modest, aren’t you?”

  “—it was easy enough to decode them.” She clicked on one of the businesses, bringing up the home page for the local branch of a company called Paulson Media. The office was located in the downtown area, across town from Lockwood Inc.’s main office building. “The first email is dated around the same time O’Connor went missing, and there have been three more new emails since his body was moved from BRS headquarters.”

  “So you think the Raptors marched into a local business with a body and hid it in the CEO’s office or something?” I asked, skeptical.

  Lauren shrugged. “By now, I wonder how you can question the possibility of any scheme that the Raptors might concoct. They make shit happen. It’s why the society has been so successful for so long. Besides, it’s the only lead we have.”

  I blew out a sigh. “Fine. We’ll check it out. But I’m going to O’Connor’s first. Maybe his wife can shed some light on the situation.”

  Lauren waved me off. “That works for me. It gives me time to write your résumé.”

  “My—what?”

  “You can’t just go marching into one of my father’s offices and demand to know if they have a dead body hidden somewhere,” said Lauren in a flat voice. “You need a cover story. I can hack into their system to get you an interview. You go in disguised as a happy-go-lucky intern waiting to speak with the hiring manager, make some excuse, and search the building.”

  “Wow, that sounds foolproof,” I deadpanned.

  “You underestimate me,” said Lauren, rolling her eyes. “Go check on O’Connor’s wife. By the time you get back, I’ll have the next part of the plan underway.”

  Groaning, I pushed myself up from the armchair, wishing I could stay in the safe, comfy basement forever. “It’s going to be a long day.”

  O’Connor lived in one of the neighboring suburbs around the Waverly campus. I’d been to his house more than a few times, usually to pick up a stack of student papers or because he’d forgotten to bring the answer key to a history exam with him to work. As his teaching assistant, I’d gotten used to running errands for him. His wife, Eileen, was one of the sweetest people I’d ever had the pleasure of interacting with. Together, O’Connor and Eileen’s relationship was one that I aspired to emulate with Wes. They were polar opposites. O’Connor was brusque, taciturn, and a hard guy to get to know. Eileen was warm and welcoming and offered me a cup of tea any time I turned up at her house on an errand for her husband. They balanced each other out, and in my opinion, they needed one another to do so.

  A pang of guilt radiated through me as I drove along the familiar route to O’Connor’s two-story home. Since my history professor had disappeared, I hadn’t bothered to check in on his wife. The mystery and intrigue of the Black Raptor Society had pervaded my mind; I’d all but forgotten about Eileen. Now I realized how callous and cruel it was not to have considered her in all of the chaos. Her life partner was gone, missing, and she had no idea of the permanence of the situation.

  I bounced into O’Connor’s driveway, pulling up behind Eileen’s outdated minivan, and peered up at the familiar outline of the house. It spoke to Eileen’s spirit. The crisp yard was free of dead leaves, the flower beds were well-tended despite the absence of blooms, the clean white shutters had been repainted recently, and the swinging bench that sat on the front porch swayed back and forth in a romantic waltz. It was clear that Eileen had not used O’Connor’s disappearance as an excuse to neglect her home. The outside of the house was just as immaculate as I always remembered.

  As I walked up to the front door, I took a deep steadying breath and wiped my palms on the front of my jeans. My hands were cold and clammy, and my chest felt tight, but there was no option to delay this meeting. If Eileen was in possession of any additional information on the Black Raptor Society, it was imperative for me to obtain it, no matter the toll it took on my emotions. I lifted the door knocker, rapping three times.

  A few seconds passed by before anyone responded. O’Connor’s orange tabby cat hopped up into the window next to the door, and a moment later, Eileen herself pushed aside the curtain to determine who her visitor was. I gave a little wave of my fingers, to which Eileen responded with a small smile of recognition. She stepped back to open the door.

  “You look positively freezing!” said Eileen, beckoning me inside before I even had a chance to greet her. “Come in, come in.”

  I stomped the extra snow off my boots before stepping over the threshold and into Eileen’s warm house. As Eileen relieved me of my coat and hung it by the door, I glanced around. The inside of O’Connor’s home looked the same as it had on my previous visits. There were no visible signs that Eileen was suffering from the loss of her husband. Everything was clean and tidy, and the smell of chicken in a slow cooker wafted into the front e
ntryway from the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t stop by sooner,” I said, stooping down to pat the tabby cat. He wound himself around my ankles, purring merrily, and I felt relieved that, at the very least, Eileen had a friendly pet to keep her company. “How are you?”

  “Oh, I’m fine,” she said, ushering me into the living room. “Just fine. Have a seat, dear. Would you like a cup of tea? Hot cocoa? Coffee? Biscuits? I have blueberry muffins and vanilla scones.”

  I sank into a cushiony armchair. As per usual, Eileen skipped the pleasantries and sprinted straight into hospitality. I knew she worked part time as a nurse for a nearby doctor’s office. Her instinct to take care of anyone who walked through her house must have been rooted in her profession. At first, I shook my head. What with the time limit on Wes’s survival, I had to make the most of every minute. Then I changed my mind. If there was any one person who deserved an extra moment with me, it was Eileen O’Connor.

  “Actually, coffee sounds great.”

  Eileen’s expression brightened. “Cream and sugar?”

  “Just cream.”

  “And a scone too?”

  “Sure.”

  The tabby cat jumped up into my lap, warming my knees, as Eileen disappeared into the kitchen. Absentmindedly, I ran my fingers over the patterns of his orange fur. The purring intensified, the vibrations of which were oddly comforting. It was easy to feel safe in Eileen’s home. If only I had better news to deliver to her.

  “Coffee and a scone for you,” said Eileen, appearing with a steaming mug and a small plate. She set both on the TV table next to me then offered a small treat to the tabby. “And a tasty morsel for you.”

  I smiled as the cat accepted his reward and hopped off my lap to eat it elsewhere undisturbed, then picked up the fresh mug of coffee to blow cool air across the surface. Eileen settled down on the couch, turning to face me.

  “Now, Nicole. What can I help you with?”