Academy Gothic Read online

  “Good. That’s one less thing to worry about,” Duncan said. “Unless whoever killed Simkins isn’t done killing people.”

  “You just said he killed himself.”

  “The detective says suicide. I saw the body, and it wasn’t suicide.”

  Duncan grabbed my shirt collar and pulled me level with his eyes. “What the fuck do you know, Cowlishaw? You’re no detective. Let him do his job, and let me keep mine.”

  Carly pinned some of her hair behind an ear. “Duncan’s probably right, Tate. Maybe you don’t know what you saw.”

  “Yeah, Cowlishaw. How many fingers am I holding up?” “Am I the only one who sees that?” I asked, pointing to the wall. For the last few seconds, flashing blue lights from the classroom window did the Charleston above our heads. “My guess is the cops, but maybe you want to ask them what they think it is.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Duncan said. “I goddamn work here.”

  Carly was already on the stairs. I struggled to catch up. Outside, I lost her footsteps under a siren and Duncan’s renewed banging. I said her name, listened for mine. I returned to the oak tree, finding nothing but the bag of props with which I had arrived.

  Chapter 5

  EVEN AT ITS PEAK ENROLLMENT in the 1960s, when Parshall College conferred degrees on four hundred students per year, the school had a reputation as a “pay your fees, get your Cs” diploma mill for the upper class. Annually ranked atop the category of Worst Value by U.S. News and World Report, Parshall’s enrollment decreased for thirty-eight consecutive years as most applicants who were accepted found plenty of reasons to attend more affordable schools. Nevertheless, the number of applications increased each year as a college degree became the inalienable right and requirement of every American. Enter an enterprising administrator named Randall “Scoot” Simkins, who relaxed admission standards to accommodate the needs of the modern student. As it turned out, these needs were right in line with the financial needs of the school’s trustees.

  For a few years, Simkins’s lower admission requirements helped to slow the bleeding. Tourniquets, of course, cause their own problems. Students got less and less bright. Admissions still threw a few scholarships to high achievers to keep up appearances, the hundred-dollar bill wrapped around a roll of singles. Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled minds, and maybe our graduates couldn’t get or keep jobs for which they had no business applying. The checks of Mr. and Mrs. Biggins still cleared the bursar’s office.

  It was Delilah Bibb who had spearheaded Simkins’s newest initiative, an interdisciplinary curriculum designed in opposition to the traditional liberal arts model. A lifelong educator whose own discipline was education itself, Delilah had merely found a more palatable name for the shit burger Simkins had served the student body by eliminating majors four years earlier. Instead of a degree in Nursing or Business Administration, graduates now received degrees in Collegiate Studies. The move inspired some students. They purchased cans of spray paint by the gross. Rocks flew through windows. Feces made regular appearances outside of bathrooms. None of the students transferred to other schools. If they had anywhere else to go, they wouldn’t be at Parshall.

  “The problem is not our students,” Delilah Bibb told us in an emergency meeting twenty-four hours after our dean went on eternal sabbatical. “If you want to honor our late dean, give these students the hard work and innovation they deserve.”

  Delilah sat up tall in her wheelchair, her orange hair a bit higher than usual against the yellow wall. I added a few inches to her height, which I had always estimated at five-nine.

  “If your students are not winning Nobels and Pulitzers and serving on the bench of the Supreme Court, perhaps it’s time for you, the faculty, to look in the mirror.”

  Duncan Musgrove, who had apparently avoided jail time, took care to ensure the word “cunt” went no further than a one-desk radius. Behind him sat Mollie DuFrange, who had greeted me without mentioning her message on my answering machine. Carly Worth came in late and didn’t greet anyone.

  “Soft skills,” Delilah intoned as she wrote on the lower portion of the chalkboard. “Reading comprehension, critical thinking, written and oral communication. These are the skills our students need to succeed, skills that translate across disciplines. You each have your specialties.” She said this word with a European accent and a chuckle. “Everyone needs hobbies, of course, but what good do your particular academic interests do our students?”

  “No disrespect, Delilah,” said Londell Bakker, “but isn’t this—”

  “Dean Bibb.”

  Londell sniffed the new title, deciding whether or not he wanted to taste it. “Okay, Dean Bibb. Isn’t this what we’ve been doing?”

  “Thank you.” This was Benjamin Tweel, whose academic specialty was the study of space tourism, a burgeoning industry, as he liked to refer to it.

  I moved my pen whenever my colleagues spoke, a substitute

  for active participation in our meetings. Any transcription of actual words was strictly coincidental. Benjamin Tweel craned his neck to see what I was writing. I covered my paper. “No cheating,” I said. “No disrespect to our late dean . . .” Delilah paused to compose herself. “What we were doing was unfocused and disorganized. Our students have no use for seventeenth-century poetry or the digestive system of a katydid any more than we want to know which songs make them want to get up and shake their groove things. I will meet with all of you individually, starting today, to discuss how you can adapt your current syllabi and lesson plans. Until then, why don’t we break into pods and brainstorm formative assessments for the upcoming symposium in Duluth. Think, pair, share.”

  No one moved. Delilah clapped her hands two times, and we slowly turned our desks to face each other.

  “Incidentally,” Delilah added, “I have received the police report, and they have ruled Dean Simkins’s death a suicide. With regard to our personal safety, there is no cause for concern.”

  After the ceiling collapsed in Ragsdale Hall, lecturers and adjuncts relocated to cubicles in the campus’s retired swimming pool. Blue and white tiles remained on the walls. The heating system ran like a freight train in the ceiling. No heat came out. The scent of ant spray, a headache-inducing blend of citrus and glue, lingered in the air. The ants lingered in the bathroom and along the walls.

  At my desk, I reached around the framed photo of an attractive couple I had never met and turned on the outdated desktop no one bothered to steal. In my first year, stopping by my office to introduce himself, Duncan Musgrove asked why I didn’t have any pictures of family. In truth, I had little use for pictures, but I told him the other truth, that my parents had died in a plane crash when I was two.

  “A goddamn orphan,” Duncan said. “Now if you’d just tell people you were blind, they might actually like you.”

  The next day he gave me the 5 x 7 wedding photo of the couple

  in their late twenties. “If anyone asks, Cowlishaw, tell people these

  are your parents. When you have a family, people think twice about firing you.”

  Between the photo and the computer mouse I never used, I noticed a handwritten note large enough to read without my magnifier. “Sorry you went home alone,” it read. “Meet me outside Simkins’s office tonight at ten? Carly.”

  It was my first clue, other than her head on my shoulder under the oak tree, that she had been interested in more than ghosts. I donned my earphones and opened my e-mail. Special software reads me what is on the screen. I sent a note to Carly proposing a few venues more romantic than the second floor of Furley Hall.

  Of the seventeen unread messages in my inbox, sixteen were from students wanting to know if class had been canceled. Most were from yesterday. The other was from Delilah Bibb, the schedule of individual conference times. Mine was to begin five minutes ago.

  I climbed the stairs to the third floor of Furley, where the meeting had adjourned half an hour ago. Delilah was too prideful, too
nonchalant about her disability, ever to take an office on the first floor. The scent of pumpkin pie mingled with the aroma of water damage. Delilah’s scented candles didn’t so much freshen the air as trick you into taking a deep breath.

  “Tate Cowlishaw. Late as always.”

  I sat in the chair beside her desk, situated against the wall. She clicked her mouse and then her tongue. “One of the matters on which Dean Simkins and I disagreed very strongly was that of your qualifications to be working here.”

  I tried to hold eye contact, but her eyes were small, and there was a glare from the window.

  “You’re not a scholar, you’re not much of a teacher, and let’s be frank, Mr. Cowlishaw, the whole ghost thing never struck me as a viable method of revitalizing the college. In his most honest moments, I’m certain Dean Simkins would have acknowledged the absurdity of supernatural possibilities.”

  “Many scholars of the paranormal would say honest moments are those in which we are the most open-minded.”

  Delilah sighed through her nose. “I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean. Let’s save some time, shall we, and skip to the part where I say your contract will not be renewed for next year.”

  I crossed my legs at the ankles. “As you may or may not be aware,” I said, “I was hired on the high recommendation of F. Randolph Parshall.”

  Delilah brushed something from the arm of her pale blouse. “According to the faculty handbook, which I’d wager you have not read, the dean has complete discretion on matters of personnel.” Her cold fingers rested on the back of my hand. “All due respect, Mr. Cowlishaw, I’ve observed you in the classroom. I don’t think teaching is your calling.”

  It wasn’t the teaching but the paychecks, paltry as they were, of which I had grown so fond. Incessant meetings notwithstanding, teaching provided a good bit of down time in which to wonder what else people might pay me to do.

  “Did you see it coming?” I asked.

  She had just blown out the pumpkin pie candle, the smoke drifting my way. “Excuse me?”

  “You knew Scoot better than we did. You must have recognized some of the troubles he referenced in his suicide note.”

  Delilah’s hand was on the folded wheelchair behind her. She let

  go of it. In a quieter voice, she said, “There was no note, according to

  the report.”

  “I suppose when the depression is that profound, they don’t bother.”

  Delilah swiveled her chair toward the window. “He wasn’t depressed. He had just called me that evening. He had questions about PowerPoint. He was terrible with the simplest things.”

  “But deep down, you must have sensed a sadness in his confusion.”

  “NO, dammit. He was giddy. He had this stupid idea for a presentation based on that game show with all the briefcases.” Delilah wept into her hand.

  “I should tell you that I saw the body,” I said.

  Delilah plucked a tissue from her window sill. She tried to say something and had to try a second time. “So did I.”

  “Really? What did you see?”

  She pulled in a series of jagged breaths before her voice caught. “I saw the sleeve of the oxford shirt I gave him for his birthday.

  It had mint stripes. I was bringing him a scone. I assumed he was asleep on the floor. He slept in his office sometimes. I yelled at him to wake up. I laughed at him. He didn’t move. Then my heart dropped into my stomach. Maybe I should have gone to him. I know CPR. I just sat there, frozen in the hallway. I don’t know when I would have moved if the policeman hadn’t arrived.”

  “After you called them,” I said.

  I thought she shook her head. Non-verbal responders don’t know how rude they are to the visually impaired.

  “I assume you didn’t get a look at the bullet wounds on Scoot’s head. CPR doesn’t help those much.” I let the wick on that one burn for a little while. Then I told her what I had seen.

  Delilah shuffled through papers. “The police report doesn’t mention a gun.”

  “Maybe they didn’t find one. Maybe they didn’t look. I looked. I found a stapler in his hand and three bullet wounds in the top of his head. Seemed like an odd place to shoot oneself, but Scoot never liked to do things the easy way, did he?”

  Delilah left that one alone.

  “Are ghosts going to keep kids from coming to Parshall,

  Dean Bibb? I doubt it. Is a new curriculum going to attract more applicants? Probably not. But one thing you can be sure about:

  schools where people get away with murdering deans don’t show up in the Princeton Guide.”

  “What are you saying, Mr. Cowlishaw?”

  “I’m offering to find out who murdered Dean Simkins.”

  She handed me what must have been the police report. I didn’t take it. “If the police think he killed himself, Mr. Cowlishaw—”

  “What do you think?”

  She said nothing. I smiled and got up to leave. I was halfway to the stairs when she told me to come back.

  “Suppose you find something. What do you get out of it?”

  “My contract is renewed.”

  Delilah overdid it with her laugh. “Why not? I’ll renew your contract for next year.”

  “Indefinitely,” I said.

  Delilah took a deep breath, which didn’t become another laugh. “I want updates,” she said.

  Chapter 6

  SOMEONE IN DARK CLOTHING waited outside my eleven o’clock class. I got close enough to discern a trench coat and shorts, the flasher look Wade Biggins sported on warmer days. He sucked a loud, snotty breath through his nose. “It was just a stink bomb, Dr. Cowlishaw. The guy at the store yesterday laughed when I asked if they could kill people.”

  “I was in his office, Wade. I’m not dead.”

  Wade Biggins covered his eyes. “Maybe Dean Simkins was allergic.”

  “Dean Simkins was allergic to a lot of things, Wade. At the top of the list was exercise, generosity, table manners, and respect for other people’s time. But I’m certain that stink bombs were not on the list.”

  “Really? Do you promise?” The thirty-year-old’s delivery evoked a little boy asking dad to check under the bed for monsters.

  “I promise, Wade, as sincerely as my promise that if you keep attending all your classes and hand in some pages with your name on them from time to time, you’ll have your diploma before you know it.”

  Wade stood up straight, his guilty conviction overturned, his unfulfilled dreams ready once more to be extinguished in the natural way. His thick, bare legs carried him across the hall to Londell’s classroom.

  My own class was empty but for one dark-haired student in the second desk of the third aisle. Students who arrive on time always sit in the same seat, but it had been a few years since I had bothered to learn who sat where.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked.

  “People thought you were in jail,” said Islanda Purvis, one of the last recipients of the Parshall Presidential Scholarship. In recent years, the college had not attracted many applicants who met the minimum test scores or grade point average to qualify.

  I wrote “class canceled” on the chalkboard in my customary large letters.

  “We wouldn’t want your classmates to get behind,” I said.

  Islanda Purvis unzipped a large backpack, slid the textbook I had not yet used inside it, and said good-bye to me as harshly as any woman whose lipstick I had not tasted. She was a quiet student who had not missed a question on any of my quizzes or exams. This was Financial Basics, hardly a difficult course, and the question she asked me when she turned in her exams, “Is this all?” managed to communicate her disappointment with her choice of college and her college’s choice of me.

  “I could assign you a paper,” I said. “Do you want to write a paper?”

  “Are you going to read it?”

  My usual method of grading the pair of one-page papers I assigned each term was to put a check ma
rk beside the student’s name and either a plus or a minus, depending on how far from the bottom the last line ended. “I always do.”

  Islanda sat back down.

  “In one page,” I wrote, “discuss how you would fix a failing business.”

  Islanda asked what kind of business.

  “Be creative,” I said, an answer which usually prevented further questions.

  “I knew you didn’t kill him,” said Islanda on her way to the door.

  I held her gaze, or pretended to.

  “Where I’m from, Mr. Cowlishaw, when people shoot people, it’s either because they’re mad or they want something. I’ve never seen you get mad, and you don’t seem like you want anything bad enough to shoot somebody for it.”

  “Thank you, I think.” She was already in the hall when I asked, “Who told you he was shot?”

  “I heard it. I’m an R.A. in the dorm. I was on my last rounds

  a little after two in the morning. I could have stayed in Baltimore

  if I wanted to be around this mess. This school is nothing like

  I thought it would be. The brochures showed these rolling hills and this student throwing a Frisbee to his professor. They ought to show a toilet with the last three years of my life floating in the bowl.”

  “Those brochures,” I said, “might be a little outdated.”

  I sat in the empty room, thinking of mad people and those who wanted something. Duncan Musgrove fit the former, Delilah Bibb the latter. Duncan’s anger seemed to have escalated in the days since Simkins’s demise. Delilah’s inherited promotion didn’t seem like a prize, but tedium is in the eye of the beholder. What most people wanted badly enough to kill for, according to movies and old mysteries, was money, presumably more than Simkins had in his wallet. Simkins never struck me as a man in debt to the leg breakers, or a man involved in nefarious business, but I couldn’t rule it out. Stashauer certainly fit the profile of a cop on the take.

  By 9:18, no other students had arrived. I erased the paper assignment and wrote “Mr. Cowlishaw’s” above “class canceled.” Halfway to the door, I went back to pluralize class.