Academy Gothic Read online

  “Can you have company? I mean, do the ghosts mind?”

  “I’ll introduce you. Wear something low-cut,” I said. “They like that.”

  Carly had a laugh that made me want to cancel class. Many things had this effect on me. She said she’d call me and disappeared inside her classroom.

  “Does this count for a grade, Dr. Cowlishaw?” one of the Ashleys wanted to know.

  I was passing out the exams and bubble sheets Simkins had placed in our boxes the week before. Nearly half of all instructional time consisted of tests to obtain data, longitudinal studies Simkins used to measure the efficacy of whatever we were or weren’t doing.

  “I took this in another class,” said one of the Brittanys.

  “Just do the best you can,” I said in response to both questions. Ten minutes had gone by when someone knocked on the classroom door. I carried one of the tests to the door. The individual made no efforts to come in. He was the size and shape of a twelve-year-old boy. He gave the exam a once-over and handed it to the much taller figure to his right.

  “Are you Cowlishaw?” asked the short one.

  “I am. Who are you looking for?” I stepped aside to invite them in.

  “Can we have a word with you in the hallway?” asked the taller one, whose voice I recognized as Detective Stashauer. He placed the exam in what sounded like a Ziploc bag.

  I left open the door of my classroom. Detective Stashauer closed it. He asked, “What were you doing in the dean’s office this morning?”

  I turned the truth over in my mind. I didn’t like how it felt. Before I could think of an alternative, I felt the taller detective’s hands around my arms. He spun me around, held my cheek against the wall. His partner, I presumed, in a gentler but no less decisive manner, fitted my wrists with cold metal.

  Chapter 3

  DETECTIVE STASHAUER DRANK SODA from a can. The interrogation room was quiet enough to hear the bubbles pop. “I hear you like ghosts,” he said, his tone suggesting he was not a fan, possibly of ghosts, possibly of me. I sipped coffee that tasted like a charred potato. A fragrant box of donuts was open on the table. No one had offered me one. I fixed my gaze on the wall just below the ceiling. “No, it’s okay. They know I didn’t kill you. Absolutely. Students first,” I said.

  “What are you looking at?” Stashauer asked. “Who are you talking to?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Dean Simkins’s ghost is with us. Would you like to ask him anything?”

  Stashauer got up from the table and leaned over me. “Fuck you and your ghost.”

  “He isn’t my ghost,” I said.

  Stashauer’s partner, the very short man, scribbled everything I said on a yellow legal pad.

  “They ought to get you a tape recorder,” I said.

  The very short officer, whose name had not come up, asked about the coupon they had removed from my back pocket. He had the high, pubescent voice particular to adults shorter than four feet.

  “I stole it from the dean’s desk,” I said. “Around seven-thirty, not long after you were there. My fingerprints, which I’m assuming you matched to those on file as part of the myriad burglary investigations—you haven’t made any headway on those, I take it—can also be found on the police tape on Simkins’s doorway. From the hardness of his body, I’d say the time of death was well before seven-thirty, but you probably don’t need me to tell you that.”

  “I like the way you talk,” said the short detective. He wrote something on a second legal pad.

  “Does that mean I can leave?”

  Detective Stashauer picked up the coffee I had touched only once. He held the cup under my chin, lifted it to eye-level and a little higher. I felt, saw, smelled, and tasted it in that order. The shorter detective called Stashauer by his first name, if his first name was Rick. The two left the small room in order of height, tallest first.

  Five minutes went by. I pulled the box of donuts toward me and surveyed the contents: three iced, two glazed, two powdered and filled. I stuck my finger in one of the filled and came away with apple. I tried the other.

  “If you’re done finger-banging my donuts,” said Stashauer from the doorway, “Officer Delafield is going to escort you to a holding cell.”

  Delafield was not his partner, but a black officer wearing Aqua Velva and a tan uniform two sizes too big for his stocky frame. “What’s that on your finger?” asked Delafield.

  I tasted it. “Swiss chocolate.” My second guesses were always better than my first.

  For a moment, I felt dangerous and vaguely important in my tiny cell, nothing but a sink and a toilet with no seat. Then I felt nostalgic for the thin white room with the donuts and terrible coffee.

  I considered shouting my innocence, but outrage didn’t come naturally to me. “Aren’t you an impervious one,” Mollie DuFrange liked to tell me, in the days when she liked to tell me things. She wanted me to talk about my eyes. When I did, she was disappointed that they didn’t fill with tears. In my experience, things are what they are, good or bad, regardless of how you feel about them.

  I got used to the concrete floor. After a few hours, the strobe effect of the buzzing light no longer nauseated me. I imagined getting used to a trial and the bad breath of a nervous, court-appointed attorney. Before I could convict myself, a set of footsteps too soft to be Delafield’s approached the cell. Keys jangled in the hand of Stashauer’s partner. The lock was level with his forehead.

  “I take it my story checked out.”

  “Our bad,” he said.

  The short detective led me down the hall past the interrogation room. The hall opened into the larger room with desks and ringing phones. I could have found my way to the front door and told him so. New places are sometimes difficult, but I’m an excellent retracer of steps. Stashauer joined us by the door, offering me a ride home with all the cheer of a man who has lost a bet.

  The motel where I lived was less than a mile away. “I’ll walk,” I said.

  Stashauer put a hand on my shoulder. “Stand outside with me for a moment.”

  I looked behind me. “Where did your partner go? I like you better when he’s here.”

  Stashauer chewed a mouthful of gum. He handed me a stick, the kind wrapped in foil that loses its flavor in a hurry. I put on my sunglasses for a more discreet look at the detective. It’s a shame only blind people get to wear sunglasses indoors.

  Stashauer had curly hair that evoked adult films of another era. “Let me offer my condolences for the loss of your dean,” he said. “Happens to a lot of cops. Stress of the job and whatnot. It’s not my bag, but I don’t begrudge a man for shooting himself in the head.”

  Stashauer waited for me to say something. I chewed the spearmint gum. I was a peppermint guy.

  “They tell me you don’t see very well,” he said.

  “When I see three bullet wounds, I don’t think suicide.”

  “If you saw what you think you saw, you’d be our prime suspect. Do you want to be a suspect, Professor?”

  I was not a professor, but what they called a lecturer. I didn’t correct him. He seemed to like his own conclusions, and because I had no attachment to my own, I shook the detective’s hand and started walking.

  On the corner of Market and Gray, a black man waiting for the bus said, “It’s a nice evening, isn’t it?”

  I spat my gum into a trash can. “A little too nice.”

  Chapter 4

  THREE AND A HALF HOURS WEST of the coast, two hours east of the mountains, Grayford, North Carolina, wasn’t a place people lived as much as waited for a reason to leave. For the textile industry, the reason came twenty years ago in the form of Chinese children with a tolerance for long hours and low wages. For the half-dozen call centers near the airport, the reason was the English-speaking population of South Asia with similar feelings to the Chinese about labor and pay. I had lived in Grayford for three years when the bank that had paid me to move here expressed their disapproval of how I gave away their mo
ney. I wasn’t giving enough of it to the poor and unemployed, who made no convincing arguments for how they might pay back their loans. My own argument for why I should keep my job—that it’s a slow, tedious, occasionally embarrassing process for a man with bad eyes to learn his way around a new town—didn’t strike my employer as persuasive. By then my grandmother had found a nursing home in Grayford to be near me. Six months later, she was dead and I was a college instructor.

  The Gray Knight was the last motel in Grayford where you could get a room by the hour, night, or week. Some people are fond of houses and apartments. I’m fond of not purchasing furniture and towels. Downtown Grayford is the only part of town friendly to pedestrians, and a 15 x 18 motel room is the only real estate I can afford.

  Edward jumped down from the window and led me to his dish.

  He kept meowing while I filled it with food.

  “You and me both, pal.”

  I found a box of pizza in the mini-fridge. I had just taken my second bite when the phone rang. The answering machine did its job after the first ring. This meant there were messages. The current caller didn’t leave one. According to the machine, this was a pattern that began at 10:32 this morning. At 12:14, cutting through the dense fog of hang-ups, came a voice no one ever described as a beacon of light.

  “Mr. Cowlishaw, this is Interim Dean Bibb. Please pick up the phone.” She had recovered nicely from her grief. “I know you’re there. Your phone has been busy all morning.” She paused again and gave a terse sigh. “I passed by your classroom and noticed you weren’t there. This kind of shirking cannot continue. I hope—”

  I hit delete and listened to some more hang-ups. They ceased at 1:30, resuming around the time I was released from the Grayford jail. They make talking phones that read you the numbers of missed calls, but I try not to dwell on what I miss.

  I pulled off my coffee-stained shirt and threw it in the pile for housekeeping. I waited for the shower to get warm. The phone rang. I turned off the water and listened. The machine waited four rings. The voice wasn’t one I had heard in my room in three years.

  Mollie DuFrange said my name and paused. She told me once that poetry was the best words in the best order, but her silence seemed less a search for words than hesitation. “I noticed you weren’t in class and got worried. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” After another pause, she added, “Sorry about the hang-ups.”

  I had no idea she still cared. I would remove that from the list of things I didn’t know. It was a long list. The other items wouldn’t get lonely.

  Darkness had overtaken the shadows by the time I got to campus. Carly and I had agreed to meet at the fountain that had been drained for the winter sometime in the 90s and was never refilled. Carly’s blonde hair was visible from twenty feet away. For this reason, I preferred blondes in the moonlight, brunettes in the midday sun. She threw what sounded like a pocketful of coins into the marble basin.

  “That’s a lot of wishes,” I said.

  “I hope to sell a lot of books.” Her tight jeans were more flattering than the ankle-length skirts she wore inside the classroom. “What’s in the bag?”

  I showed her the mortar and pestle, four sandwich bags of different-colored sugar, and what a used bookstore employee told me was a Russian thesaurus. They were meaningless props, but perhaps no less so than the papers my colleagues presented at out-of-town symposiums.

  “What does that do?” she asked as I sprinkled blue sugar on the fire escape of Parshall’s only remaining dorm.

  I wished for Carly’s novel more originality than I mustered for the story of Agnes Fairmont, a 1920s freshman who hanged herself after her boyfriend ended their passionate affair. “She gets out of sorts from time to time. It’s likely her appearances coincide with a current student going through a bad break-up.”

  “Have you ever seen her?”

  “I’ve sensed her,” I lied. “It’s a common misconception that you can see ghosts. Anyone who says they’ve seen a ghost hasn’t actually seen one.”

  I led her up the crumbling steps to the former theater, made up a tale of twins who had hanged themselves above the proscenium arch before a play in which one was cast and the other was not. I scattered a few pinches of sugar by the entrance.

  “I see you’re using red this time.”

  I wasn’t used to questions. Dean Simkins had not requested any explanations the single time he accompanied me on my rounds.

  This was four years ago, the first and last time I had been on my rounds. “Red helps when resentment was involved. Is any of this helpful?”

  “I’m enjoying myself,” she said and started down the steps without me.

  I followed her to the massive oak tree between the library and Furley Hall. Carly gazed at the second-floor window of our former dean. I stood in the spot from which Wade Biggins had delivered his thoughtful gift.

  “What do you think happened to him, Tate?”

  I considered the possibility, not for the first time, that Simkins had taken his own life. He was a miserable son of a bitch, though I never got the impression that he realized it. What I didn’t know about ballistics could have filled Simkins’s file cabinet, but common sense held that a man doesn’t get off three rounds in his own head, let alone in his crown.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  Carly looked at me. “Didn’t you see him? Isn’t that why they took you to the police station?”

  “Let’s just say the cops and I didn’t see the same thing.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw a dead man who didn’t choose to be that way.”

  Carly shivered in the low-cut camisole I noticed for the first time. Her shampoo smelled like an otherworldly peach. She tilted her head onto my shoulder, and I dropped my bag of nonsense in the high grass.

  “How soon,” she asked, taking a few steps toward Furley Hall, “before a ghost haunts the building where it died?”

  “Sometimes years,” I said, trying to change her mind as she reached for the door. “Some don’t return at all, especially if no hanging was involved.”

  No lights were on. The windows were stingy with moonlight. Carly started up the stairs. We were on the landing between the first and second floor when a muffled banging began in the inner wall. Carly grabbed my arm. I directed her to the far left, where the creaks were less pronounced. The semester I taught on the third floor, I learned how to walk undetected past the office of my dean, who liked to ask about tasks I had not completed.

  The banging had an irregular pattern, ruling out plumbing or the heat. The sound of metal seemed to rule out the animal kingdom. A scraping took over as we reached the second floor. I looked at Carly. She mouthed something I couldn’t understand.

  I wasn’t sure how many murderers returned to the scene of the crime. Whoever was scraping and rattling in an empty building with the lights off might object to company. Heavy breathing followed the next round of banging. Then came the litany of expletives familiar to any student who’s taken a science course at Parshall College.

  Carly flipped on the light switch. “Duncan? What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here? What the fuck are you doing here?” Duncan’s short arm reached past me and angrily returned the lights to their off position. Duncan did everything a little angrily.

  “Did you kill Dean Simkins?” Carly’s tone was more complimentary than accusatory.

  “I didn’t goddamn kill anybody.” Duncan assumed a threatening stance, the top of his head coming only to Carly’s shoulders. “Why are you two here? Maybe you offed him.”

  “We heard scary noises,” I said. “Maybe you can protect us.” Duncan swung his paunch in my direction. He had the dusty breath of a man who hasn’t eaten since breakfast. “I’m not in the mood for your bullshit, Cowlishaw.”

  In spite of his background in Biology, Duncan did not possess the cool, objective temperament of a scientist. He liked science, he once told me, beca
use he liked being right and liked even more to prove it. He was a fireball of nerves, fueled by debt and the constant paranoia of losing his job. I had spent enough time with him, though, to see the man to whom five different women had vowed their eternal love. My first semester, in a bad thunderstorm, he saw me walking and stopped to offer a ride. When I waved him off, he pushed open the passenger door and said, “Get in the goddamn car, Cowlishaw. You’re going to catch pneumonia, and you don’t have health insurance.”

  He went back to Simkins’s door and threw the tool he was using into a plastic toolbox. Instead of expletives, he made a clucking sound consistent with sobs. He fell back against the wall, sank to the floor, and hugged his knees.

  “He was going to fire me,” Duncan said.

  “So you did kill him?” I asked.

  Duncan blew his nose and wiped his hand on the carpet. “I didn’t kill him, dammit. I don’t kill people. Neither do I fire people two years before they’re set to receive their pension just because they’re the only one who was hired when they still offered pension and health insurance and didn’t make you buy your own paper for the copy machine.”

  “As a professor of scientific skills,” I said, “you’re probably aware that breaking into Simkins’s office isn’t the most empirical evidence of your innocence.”

  “I just want my file, Cowlishaw. Whoever gets his job, whether it’s Bibb or somebody from the outside, doesn’t need to know about my pension. And yeah, okay, if there’s an investigation going on, maybe I’d rather nobody know I had a motive for killing the son of a bitch.”

  His sobs resumed, and Carly knelt beside him. She petted his black-and-white hair. Duncan dyed it at the beginning of each semester, and over the next few months we watched him age in fast-forward as the gray returned.

  “I don’t know about your pension,” Carly said, “but Tate says there isn’t going to be an investigation.”

  “How the hell does he know?”

  I offered Duncan my hand and struggled to pull him to his feet.

  “That detective from our meeting,” I said, “seems to have his heart set on calling it a suicide.”