Academy Gothic Page 5

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” I said.

  A smile flashed on her face and disappeared. “Duncan,” she said. “He was the only one.”

  “Unless someone was behind door number one.” I gestured to Simkins’s office, the only closed door besides the restroom and a closet.

  “Delilah’s office is upstairs. Maybe she heard us.” Carly’s voice gathered some anger. “Has it occurred to you that she’s the only one benefiting from Simkins’s death?”

  “The thought crossed my mind. Then she said I could keep my job if I find out who murdered him.”

  Carly was on her way to Simkins’s door and spun around. “What? When was this?”

  “This morning. After she tried to fire me.”

  “Maybe, Tate, she’s staying one pace ahead of you.”

  Carly made sure no one was hiding in the unisex bathroom. I did the same with the closet used by janitors when the college still employed them. Together we checked the first floor and then the third. Delilah’s office was quiet. The lights were off. Carly tried the doorknob, but it didn’t turn.

  I placed my ear against the door, heard nothing. “She isn’t here.”

  Carly led the way down the stairs, stopping on the second floor. “I don’t even know why you’d want to keep working here. You should come with me to New York.”

  Nothing in her voice suggested she was kidding. “Why don’t you?” she asked when I hadn’t responded.

  I stood behind her by Simkins’s door. “I might wait until our second kiss before I commit to an out-of-state move.”

  She pushed me gently against the door. Her lips pushed a little less gently against mine. Our tongues finished the job. It was a long job, but I didn’t mind the work.

  “I’m probably being too forward,” she said.

  I tried to think of a clever line. It’s hard to do after you’ve been kissed. It’s even harder when the person who kissed you must have been crying during said kiss because you can taste a tear on your lip.

  She covered her eyes and turned her back to me. “I’m sorry, Tate. I just don’t know how to be around people anymore. With people.”

  “The kiss was a good start.”

  “You don’t understand. For years, I’ve focused on nothing, worried about nothing but my writing, and all this craziness with Simkins and that note, which I swear to God, Tate, I didn’t write.”

  She buried her face in her arm against the wall, in the same corner where Duncan Musgrove had wept the night before. After a handful of tears, Carly stepped back from the wall. She twisted the doorknob. The door opened. Her head turned in my direction. It stayed that way while she grabbed my hand and led us forward into the dean’s office.

  Moonlight from the window made it a little brighter than the hall. Carly turned the light on. I turned it off, but not before noticing something different about the room.

  “His file cabinet’s gone,” Carly said, sounding more surprised than I was to find the desk had been relieved of its contents. Carly pulled on the top drawer, unlocked and empty. She opened the other drawers. All of them opened with the speed of weightlessness.

  “Looking for something in particular?” I asked.

  “My file. Don’t you want to see yours?”

  I sat down in Simkins’s chair. “I can guess what it says. Does not volunteer for committee work. Does not volunteer for non-committee work. May or may not possess abilities to communicate with malicious spirits who may or may not be causing the rapid decline of the college. On the front page, if not on the folder itself, it likely says F. Randolph Parshall likes this guy.”

  Carly flung open one of the tall wooden cabinets, three of which comprised the entire wall to the left of the door. “I had a meeting with Simkins scheduled for yesterday morning. He wouldn’t tell me what it was about. ‘A very important matter’ was all he said.”

  “He’s dead and you’re going to New York. Whatever it was, I don’t think it matters now.”

  Unable to see the blood stain, I crouched on the floor. My hand couldn’t find it either. A square of carpet was gone. Somehow I doubted its new home was the forensics lab of the Grayford Police department.

  “Things can follow you, Tate, if people want them to. Do you know what Delilah asked me in my meeting this afternoon? ‘Ms. Worth,’ she said, ‘would you characterize yourself as a risk taker?’

  I said of course, that every writer has to take risks, and she replied in that contrived Victorian accent—you know she was born here in Grayford—that she wasn’t talking about writing. Then we just sat there for like two minutes, waiting for each other to say something. Finally, she started typing. Another minute went by and she looked over at me and said, ‘Parshall College won’t require your services next fall.’ I mean, to hell with this place. I wasn’t coming back anyway.”

  I opened the wooden cabinets she had already examined. The shelves contained boxes of broken chalk, five keyboards from old desktops, a hard drive without a monitor, stacks upon stacks of bubble sheets used to measure whether or not our students were achieving their learning objectives, sometimes whether or not the tests were measuring what they were intended to measure. The cabinets were a shrine to obsolescence, not unlike Simkins himself and the school he had so effectively steered into the ground.

  “What if Delilah did kill him, Tate. What do you—”

  Carly’s conjecture was interrupted by a loud bang. Our heads turned toward the office door, now closed. I turned the knob, but the door wouldn’t open. I knocked on the center of the door. The echo was much louder on the other side, the sound of a hammer against thick wood.

  Chapter 8

  I GRABBED CARLY’S WRIST. She had been knocking for over a minute. “Someone wants us in here, sweetheart. More noise isn’t going to change their mind.” She broke free of my grasp and returned to the door, slapping and pounding.

  “Let us out!”

  “So what’s it really about?”

  “What’s what about?”

  “This new novel of yours that isn’t about ghosts. That was

  only your excuse to make your way into Simkins’s office and retrieve your file.”

  Carly leaned toward me so gradually I didn’t notice until her breath warmed my lips. I held her at bay before she could warm them further.

  Her eyes closed. “Please don’t hate me.”

  “You’re not making the alternative very easy.”

  “I wasn’t sure I could trust you.” Her eyes were black smudges in the center of my blind spots. “Somebody’s been following me, Tate. Since yesterday afternoon. A black car was behind me on the way home. This morning it was waiting for me when I left my house.”

  It sounded outlandish, as most things do after someone has lied to you. It wasn’t the lie itself that concerned me, but my inability to catch it. In my experience, blind spots get bigger, not smaller.

  “Why would someone want to follow you?” I asked.

  “I’m the one who found the body. Maybe they think I saw something I shouldn’t have.”

  “Delilah said she found him.”

  “That’s interesting. I’m the one who called 911.”

  I recalled Delilah’s version in which the police arrived before she had the chance to call them. I wondered why I hadn’t been followed, finding what I had found. Then I glanced at the door. Maybe I had been. Whether or not Carly was supposed to be here I couldn’t say.

  Carly sat down against the door, hugged her knees, and began to sob.

  I said, “Delilah’s going to be the first one in tomorrow. I wouldn’t expect our presence here to enhance her opinion of us. Why don’t you calm down, get out that cell phone of yours, and call someone to let us out of here.”

  “I don’t have it. It’s in my car.”

  “So much for that idea.”

  I felt the Phillips head screws in the door’s hinges. The paper clips on the stacks of bubble sheets were no help. I double-checked the desk drawers for some kind
of makeshift tool. On the floor, I noticed that whoever took the computer had left the cords. I carried one of the old towers and a keyboard from the cabinet to the desk.

  “There’s no monitor,” Carly said.

  The tower booted up with a grand sigh. She stood behind me as I typed. There was nothing to watch, save the yellow light on the hard drive. It flashed whenever I hit Enter.

  “Tate, what are you doing?” “Sending an e-mail.”

  “How do you know what you’re typing?”

  “I try to press the right buttons.”

  People with limited vision remember how to get places we’ve been before without our eyes. On my own computer, the screen reader told me what I was looking at, but even without it, maybe because I didn’t trust what I was told, I knew how many taps of the TAB key got me from one part of the screen to another.

  “What now?” Carly asked after I hit what I hoped was the send button.

  “We wait.”

  She sat on the corner of the desk where Simkins had kept his coupons. She aimed her voice at the floor. “This is my fault. I never should have lied to you. I’m so sorry.”

  I remained skeptical of what she told me. She slid forward on the desk, pushing aside the keyboard. Her legs dangled on either side of my lap.

  “Werewolves,” she whispered in my ear. “That’s what my novel’s about.”

  I brought my lips to her ear, but not for whispering.

  I wasn’t sure how much time had gone by when the hard knock came. My hands had better things to feel than the face of my watch.

  “Tate, are you in there?” “We’re in here.”

  The doorknob rattled before hitting the floor, rolling to a stop in front of the desk. “The door has been nailed shut,” Sundeep said. I thought of Duncan Musgrove’s toolbox. “Stand away from the door,” Sundeep said.

  I pulled Carly down to the floor with me and gave Sundeep the go-ahead. She looked at me as I covered her ears. She started to say something when the first bullet hit the door, its echo circling the ceiling like a trapped bird. He fired four more and kicked open the door.

  “Carly, meet Sundeep Gogenini: the three-hundred-eighty-sixth best tennis player in the world circa 1997. Sundeep, meet Carly Worth, future bestselling author of spine-tingling tales of vampires and werewolves.”

  “Seventy-first in doubles,” Sundeep sheepishly added, extending his hand.

  “My book won’t be out for a while,” Carly said.

  I carried the computer back to the cabinet. Nothing could be done about the door. If anyone asked, I could accurately say we weren’t the only ones up here.

  “Now maybe you will get a cell phone,” Sundeep said as we descended the stairs.

  “Life seems so much simpler without one.”

  “Men who find dead bodies do not live simple lives.”

  My landlord unlocked the passenger side of his Civic. Carly unlocked the passenger door of the white sedan next to it.

  “I can drive Tate home,” she said.

  “But he lives where I live,” Sundeep said.

  Carly cleared her throat in that ineffably sexy way. “I meant my home.”

  I walked around Carly’s car to the passenger side. Sundeep laughed. “Nicely done, Tate Cowlishaw.”

  Carly checked for black cars at every turn and traffic light. I noticed no headlights in the rearview. It was just us when we pulled into the driveway of her rented bungalow in the gentrified neighborhood behind the old Civic Center. It was just us, fumbling with clothes and light switches in the cluttered living room, just us against the wall outside her bedroom.

  Chapter 9

  WHEN I OPENED MY EYES, Carly was putting on a white robe that covered nothing but the essentials. Outside, the birds were still clearing their throats. The sky behind her curtains was hardly blue, but there are worse things than being awakened before dawn by a beautiful woman offering to cook you eggs.

  I asked Carly if I could use her cell phone and tried to guess which buttons were which. On regular phones, there’s always a bump on the five. Cell phones didn’t even have buttons anymore. Carly saw my confusion and placed the call for me. They made cell phones for the visually impaired. My problem with most technology is philosophical. If change were the same thing as improvement, Randall “Scoot” Simkins and his penchant for “Innovation” might still be alive, chairing a presidential task force on higher education.

  I stepped onto the front porch and dialed my own number for messages. Still in my socks, I walked to the end of her driveway to check the color of two cars parked across the street: light blue and burgundy. They might have been silver and mahogany—colors aren’t my specialty—but I could tell they were not black.

  “First message: seven forty-two p.m. This is Hoopel at The Chanticleer. Randall Simkins’s obituary was e-mailed to us yesterday afternoon by someone in the Trustees’ Office. I’ve made the corrections you asked me to, but maybe you should talk to the trustees if you want to be mad at somebody.”

  As the message ended, a vehicle parked far enough down the street that I couldn’t see it. I waited for the engine to cut off, or the car to drive away. I stepped onto the driveway and kept waiting. The engine kept running.

  Carly opened the door to tell me breakfast was on the table.

  “That running car,” I said, pointing in its general direction.

  “What color is it?”

  Carly cinched her robe and stepped off the porch. “That’s it. Tate, that’s the car.” She climbed the porch steps too quickly. One of her house shoes flew into the front door. She was breathless. “Tate, what should we do?”

  “As long as he knows where we are, we know where he is.”

  “Or she.”

  We went inside. At the kitchen table, I searched furtively for a knife before realizing my toast was already buttered. Carly watched the car out the window above the sink.

  “Do you have one of those lists of supplemental faculty assignments?” I asked.

  “Somewhere. Why?”

  In recent years, Parshall’s administrative offices had been reduced to several cubicles in the swimming pool. Many were no longer occupied. Last year Simkins began delegating former staff duties to faculty. An adjunct with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology, for example, became director of counseling services.

  “I want to know who’s responsible for the Trustees’ Office.” I followed Carly into the living room. Every surface was covered with stacks of paper and magazines. She located the list on the seat of a wingback chair.

  “There is no Trustees’ Office. Maybe Simkins handled it.”

  “Not unless he wrote his own obituary.”

  We had our daily meeting at 7:30, meaning I didn’t have to ask Carly for a ride to campus. I don’t like asking for rides. She hung her robe on the back of her bedroom door, reminding me what she looked like without it on. I hadn’t forgotten, but I appreciated the reminder.

  While Carly showered, I splashed water on my face in the half-bath. A thin coat of dust covered the edge of the sink. Hard water had left a ring around the basin. Perfume bottles in various stages of empty comprised an entire shelf of her medicine cabinet. I recognized two of them from Carly’s neck. The clear contents of a plastic bottle had a vaguely bitter, almost salty odor I thought I recognized, but couldn’t say from where. It wasn’t the travel-size mouthwash I had hoped it might be. I made sure the tube of minty paste wasn’t liniment and used a finger to brush my teeth.

  I had a seat on the floral print sofa, shoving aside several books the size of Parshall student handbooks when they still printed them. I got out my magnifier. The titles could have been the names of rock formations or mythological beasts. They were literary journals, one of which I had seen, in a more orderly pile, on the nightstand of Mollie DuFrange. On the end table sat three bundles of paper-clipped pages, one of them titled “Elegy for Childhood Quilt.” I read a few sentences while Carly dried her hair. With twelve-point font, I’m good for about fort
y words per minute. I didn’t make it to the parts with vampires or werewolves.

  “The black car’s gone,” Carly said, grabbing her keys.

  She checked the rearview every few seconds, driving what felt like fifty through a twenty-five. She parked crookedly outside the former dorm turned sandwich shop turned space for lease. The sandwich shop had provided jobs for a lot of Parshall alumni. They sold a lot of sandwiches in the first year. The second-year people realized they were only sandwiches, and there was nothing special in the way our graduates made them.

  Carly stopped walking before we reached the library. She was looking at her phone. “Delilah says the meeting’s canceled.”

  Delilah Bibb, like her predecessor, enjoyed meetings the way most people enjoyed sunny, seventy-five-degree days. Her first as interim dean yesterday morning had seemed no different. “Does she say why?”

  “No.”

  We continued to the swimming pool. Dim, varicose light above our cubicles gave the impression of imminent rain on the sunniest days. The air was reminiscent of a basement that regularly flooded. Those who kept long office hours often complained of headaches, one of the many reasons why I limited my time here.

  Duncan Musgrove stood on the balls of his feet and blocked our path. “Do either of you motherfuckers know how to fix a paper jam?”

  “Ask Tweel,” I said. Our colleague’s scholarly interest in space travel had caused Simkins to appoint him the director and sole representative of the college’s tech support. His expertise, as far as I could tell, was limited to turning off a computer, waiting thirty seconds, and turning it back on.

  Duncan didn’t glance toward Tweel’s cubicle, from which were audible the voices of public radio, as clear as bottled water and about as compelling. Duncan said, “I’m asking you, Cowlishaw.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be working, does it?”

  Duncan squared his compact body in front of me. His fists might have been clenched. Carly squeezed between us. Duncan held his position, his coffee breath sailing toward me above Carly’s shoulder. The public radio hosts fawned over their guests, who had just yodeled.