Academy Gothic Read online

  A plastic clip fell on the deck. I traced the sound, picked it up, and handed it to her. “She doesn’t seem to like flowers or plants.”

  “Did she seem tired to you?” Delilah spoke without looking at me, restoring the birdhouse to its former height.

  Juliet Bibb might have thrown like a girl, but not a tired one. “I thought she had spunk. Why?”

  “She is having what her doctors call a good day.” Delilah filled a birdhouse on the other side of the deck. “Some days she doesn’t get

  out of bed.”

  “I believe I’ve had that.”

  “Don’t be clever, Mr. Cowlishaw. My daughter is very ill. Last month she had to cut short her freshman year at the College of William and Mary. Her personality has changed. The language she uses…” Delilah trailed off, leaving the birdhouse at eye level.

  “Should I assume, since she’s having a good day, that Juliet is not the reason you canceled today’s meeting?”

  “Mind your own business, Mr. Cowlishaw.” Delilah aimed her chair at the house.

  I grabbed one of the handles on the back of her chair. “Londell said something had spooked you.”

  “Dr. Bakker thought wrong.” She pushed in vain against the wheels. “Let go of me!”

  “Making Londell do your work for you? That doesn’t sound like the Delilah Bibb I know.”

  Grunting, she gave the wheels another ineffective shove. “What are you so afraid of, Interim Dean Bibb?”

  “No. I will not. I refuse to cry.”

  For over a minute she shook her head. Her refusal was loud and wet. She wiped her face and pulled a pair of uneven breaths into her lungs. Whether it was guilt or fear I couldn’t tell, similar as they often sound.

  “This is all too much.” Her voice was high with fresh tears. She swallowed them and said, “I’ve had opportunities over the years. Several times I applied for positions at other schools. I turned down a couple of offers. Juliet was always my excuse, but there were other reasons. I have a confession, Mr. Cowlishaw.”

  A long pause allowed me to ponder the implications. A murder confession would negate our deal, but if Londell was next in line, I would probably keep my job.

  “I have never been,” she began and repeated the words twice more. “Much of a leader.”

  Behind us, a bird went into one of the houses, scattering seeds across the deck.

  “That’s disappointing to hear,” I said.

  Delilah sniffled. “No one is more disappointed than I.”

  That ghost she had seen sounded like the specter of self-doubt. Because my skills at giving pep talks were about as effective as colored sugar, I let go of her chair.

  “You know, I was hoping for a different confession.”

  She swiftly maneuvered her chair to face me. “Excuse me?”

  “Thus far, Delilah, you’re the only one who’s profited from Dean Simkins’s death.”

  “How dare you?”

  “It looks a little suspicious, taking a personal day hours before the memorial service.”

  “What memorial service?”

  “The one in the obituary. Didn’t you organize it?”

  Her metal foot rest touched my ankle. “No, I did not.”

  “There I go making assumptions again. Maybe it was the trustees,” I said, following her through the French door into the sun room. “I don’t know why they wouldn’t have informed you. I hope that doesn’t speak to a lack of confidence in you as Interim Dean.”

  “They can go to hell if they think I can’t do a better job than Scoot.”

  Anyone with a disability is familiar with self-doubt, but the doubts of others are a taste one never fully acquires. Delilah snagged a set of keys from a waist-high hook on the living room wall. Juliet Bibb emerged from the kitchen with plenty of energy.

  “I poured your boiling water down the sink, Mother. Maybe next time you want your cinnamon apple tea, you’ll take the fucking kettle off the fucking stove. It’s been making that piercing sound for like ten minutes, Mother.”

  “I need to go back to campus, sweetheart. Try not to watch any television.”

  “Who is this, Mother? Did you meet him on your online dating service? I know you’re on one. I think it’s disgusting.”

  “I’m just the plant delivery man,” I said. “I’ll bill you for damages to my delivery.”

  Juliet stepped between me and her mother’s chair. “I don’t like you. I think you’re snide.”

  “I think I’m charming. You’re not the first to disagree.”

  “I’m going with you, Mother. I don’t want to stay here.”

  Judging from the scream and where Juliet was standing, Delilah ran over her daughter’s toes. “Go get some rest. I have a memorial service to attend.”

  Juliet followed us into the garage. “Memorial service? For the dead dean?”

  There were two cars. Delilah made her way between them.

  “My mother killed him, you know. Snide man, did you hear me? She killed my father, too. She killed my grandparents and one of my teachers and two Guatemalans who were painting our house, and she made me dig the graves in our backyard.” Juliet’s voice got louder, competing with the opening garage door. “She killed my boyfriend because she’s an asexual freak who wants the rest of the world to be as miserable as she is.”

  Delilah unlocked the dark sedan. I opened the passenger side. The paint seemed fresher and a little darker on the door. I could feel the uneven patches where it began.

  “Don’t you dare take my car, Mother. I have plans.”

  “I heard you making them, sweetheart. That’s why I’m taking your car.”

  “I can’t drive yours with your fucking hand controls!”

  “I know.” Delilah leaned under the dashboard and attached something to the pedals.

  “Goddamn you!” Juliet shouted before slamming another door. I took my time getting in, continuing to study the paint job.

  “Nice car. What color would you call this?”

  Delilah backed out of the garage without turning her head.

  “You’re not good with colors, are you, Mr. Cowlishaw?”

  “Not all of them.”

  “I’d call it black,” she said.

  Chapter 12

  “IN LIGHT OF HER FORTHCOMING NOVEL,” I said, “I’m curious why Carly Worth’s contract isn’t being renewed for next year.”

  Delilah turned down the country song on the radio. I had figured her for classical or adult contemporary.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  I told her where.

  “I wasn’t aware the two of you were friendly. If I had known your objectivity was going to be compromised, I would not have agreed to our arrangement.”

  “She said you seemed suspicious of her. Should I be?”

  “It’s a personnel matter, Mr. Cowlishaw. Human resources would frown on my sharing confidential information.”

  “Human resources? You mean the tattooed fellow Simkins moved to the front cubicle because he scared away thieves? I believe he went back to bartending six months ago. At the very least it would be helpful to get a look at Simkins’s files.”

  “Yes, it would. I don’t have them. As I understand it, they were not in his office when the authorities found him.” Delilah pulled a lever for the brakes before an upcoming curve. She was not a woman who took risks, or so her driving seemed to suggest.

  “So you killed all those people,” I said.

  “My daughter’s condition,” Delilah began, pausing to let emotion subside, “has caused her to become very hurtful.”

  “Kids say the darnedest things.” I stared at her car stereo, watching her hands manipulate the gas and brakes, pushing for the former, pulling for the latter. “You’re very dexterous,” I said.

  “I can’t use my feet, so I’m good with my hands. I’m sure your ears and nose have compensated accordingly.”

  “How are you with a hammer?”

  “Excuse me?” />
  “Nothing.”

  At the entrance to the college, Delilah took the high speed bump one inch at a time, so slowly you could hardly feel it. She parked in the spot furthest from the one marked handicapped. She didn’t thank me for opening her door. She might have been insulted, as I was when someone placed my hand on something they wished to show me.

  I had scheduled the service inside the Boss Hog’s Rib Shack Theater, the only venue suitable for a large crowd, not that I expected one. Previously the theater had been known as the Simple Kneads Bakery Theater, and before that the Shane Schiffman’s Hyundai Theater. The wealthy donors of yesteryear who had paid to have buildings named in their honor were long gone, along with their original donations, and Simkins decided to sell new names to local businesses. Bids got lower each year. Boss Hog’s Rib Shack had closed a year and a half ago, but no other businesses had yet made an offer.

  The air in the lobby was dusty and stale. The building had, like all the buildings on Parshall’s campus, a funereal stillness even on days we weren’t memorializing late deans. The theater had three sections of floor seating and a balcony condemned by inspectors in the 1980s. Only during graduation, when the building filled to half its capacity of four hundred, was the theater anything but a muse for faculty who made up ghost stories. The lack of attendees in

  any of the rows I passed seemed fitting for a man without friends or family.

  Halfway down the center aisle, Delilah extended her hand to a mourner. “It’s so wonderful of you to pay your respects. What is your name, sweetheart?”

  The girl gasped, possibly upon contact with Delilah’s icy fingers.

  “We’ll have a portion in the service when you, or anyone else,” Delilah said, speaking to the empty seats around her, “can come onstage and share stories of how the dean impacted your life.”

  The girl zipped her backpack and moved toward the far aisle. “The power went off in the library. I just came here to finish

  my paper.”

  I sat down a few rows behind my fellow faculty. Chatter was minimal, but I heard the whispering voices of Mollie and her husband, and the heavy, tobacco-strained lungs of Duncan Musgrove. From a few rows away, I smelled the cheddar funk of the adjunct who never bathed, whom I had mistaken last night for a homeless man seated at our table. Someone whispered my name. I pretended not to hear it, my way of requesting another verbal flare in the darkness.

  “Over here,” Carly whispered.

  I followed the echo to the second row in which she sat alone. The walk permitted me a rough head count, a few more than the sum of faculty. Carly got close enough to kiss my cheek, but pulled away.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “A world-class kickboxer roughed me up over some information.”

  She put a hand to her mouth and lowered it slowly. “What kind of information?”

  I handed her the slips of paper from my pocket. I couldn’t help scrutinizing her reaction.

  “Who is Theodore Skipwith?”

  “Not sure. He might be a trustee. He might have written Simkins’s obituary, literally if not figuratively. By the way, I found a black car. I rode here in it. I don’t know if it’s the one you’ve been seeing, but the driver,” I said, nodding to Delilah as she rolled past us down the aisle, “doesn’t seem to like you.”

  Carly’s hand moved mouthward again.

  Delilah asked Londell to adjust the microphone. She had called from the car and asked him to hook up the sound equipment he kept in his trunk for occasional unpaid sets at the Irish pub.

  “Just talk to us like we’re human beings,” said Duncan Musgrove. “You don’t need a goddamn microphone to talk to fifteen people.”

  Londell returned to his seat. A few rows behind me, an unfamiliar throat of unknown gender politely cleared itself. The building yawned as old buildings do, our little breaths pushing rudely against the ceiling and walls.

  “Can we begin with a round of applause?” Delilah asked.

  We complied only gradually, our slow clap never reaching the crescendo of its cinematic counterpart.

  “Thank you,” Delilah said in the tone we used to thank students for the work they handed us. “And I’m going to thank you on behalf of our late dean, who never got the chance to thank you— thank us—as completely as he would have liked. Perhaps this is fitting since you certainly never thanked him for the life blood he poured, quite literally, into this institution.”

  The microphone split the last word of each sentence into myriad, shrinking versions of itself in the high ceiling. Eventually, they went away. Delilah didn’t. For thirteen minutes, my furtive thumb tracked the minute hand while she praised Caesar, cataloguing Dean Simkins’s contributions to the academy, the majority of which began, “He attended the conference of.”

  “Certainly he could be aloof.” She paused to let her word and all its clones complete their laps above our heads. “At times, yes, he could be a hard man to please.”

  Good as my hearing is, I couldn’t have been the only one who heard Duncan Musgrove’s competing eulogy one aisle over.

  “Sisyphus,” he seemed to say in a voice slightly lower than an airport announcement. “For twenty years that motherfucker strapped another boulder on my back. Pretests and posttests, committees and subcommittees, assessment of assessments, workshops and conferences and peer reviews, never passing up a chance to tell us our jobs were on the line, and what happens to the boulder when you get to the mountain top? It rolls down the other side.”

  Delilah paused. “I’m sorry, Dr. Musgrove. Did you have something you wanted to share?”

  “I’m not doing this.” Duncan was in the aisle, pushing his short arms through the sleeves of his ill-fitting sport coat. “The rest of you can sit here in Hell and pretend it’s getting a little toasty, but sooner or later,” he said, making his way to the exit, “you’re all going to burn to death.”

  The doors opened and closed. Delilah waited for the fresh air to dissipate.

  “Well,” said our interim dean with what sounded like a suppressed smile, “Dr. Musgrove will be sorry to have left us prematurely. My vision, many of you will find, is rather incompatible with our late dean’s.”

  “She’s so guilty,” Carly whispered.

  I didn’t disagree. At the same time, I didn’t understand why a guilty woman would let me investigate, going so far as to point a finger at Carly when she could more easily join the chorus of law enforcement calling the dean’s death a suicide.

  “Dean Simkins worked very hard for a very long time.” Delilah left that one in the air for a while, let it collect on our shoulders like falling ash. “As his former assistant, I will not dispute his efforts. As his successor, I cannot defend his results. Let us mourn the loss of the man, but we can best honor his memory by succeeding where he so consistently failed.”

  Delilah asked who wished to come forward and share a favorite memory of the dean. Her voice oscillated from one aisle to the other, her eyes, I imagined, doing the same. None of us moved.

  “Let’s hear from everyone,” she decided. “Ms. DuFrange, why don’t you begin? What will you miss most about our fallen leader?”

  We waited to hear if Mollie was going to take our answer. There weren’t many answers to go around.

  “What I’ll miss most about Dean Simkins,” she began and paused like a student who had not studied the material. “What I’ll miss most is how he thought poetry had a home in the academy. Just last month he encouraged me to develop a new poetry course for upperclassmen who—”

  “Thank you, Ms. DuFrange. Dr. Tweel, you may be seated. You may all remain seated. If no one has any objections, let us transition from the memorial service to more pressing matters.”

  Delilah was unsnapping her briefcase when a seat several rows behind me bounced a few times, returning to its upright position.

  “Interim Dean Bibb, if I might say a few words.” The man whose earlier cough I had not recognized stepped into the
aisle. He had a languid Southern accent, the kind very fond of vowels and indifferent to other people’s time.

  “Are you one of the trustees?” Delilah asked with equal parts hope and fear.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “In that case, as you must have heard, we’re about to move on, but I thank you, on behalf of the late dean, for coming to pay your respects.”

  The man took a step forward, bringing him even with the row where Carly and I were sitting. “If I might be so bold, Interim Dean Bibb, as to offer some advice to you and your faculty.” The man took his time with the word interim.

  “Should I know who you are?” asked Delilah.

  The man made his way forward five feet. Another five remained between him and the interim dean. He was tall and thin with unexpectedly broad shoulders. The entire body was unexpected. The voice didn’t match the frame. Some don’t. He extended his hand to Delilah Bibb and held it there as he came forward those final five feet.

  “I do apologize for the apparent confusion,” he said. “I spoke very briefly with Interim Associate Dean Bakker a little while ago, but you and I have not met. I’m Dr. Jefferson Totten. Jefferson suits me fine if you don’t mind dispensing with such formalities. I’m your liaison to the accreditation board.” He liked the taste of liaison as much as he did interim. “We aren’t scheduled to meet until tomorrow, but when I heard about your loss—our loss—and Dr. Bakker—Londell, right?—mentioned this service, I hopped right on the interstate. Interim Dean Bibb, you aren’t going to leave me hanging, as the kids say?”

  I aimed my gaze onstage, where an actor’s face might have been. Beneath my blind spot, Jefferson Totten moved his arm from side to side. He had an ornate, colorful laugh, a wide spray of flower petals falling slowly to the floor.

  “There you go. Now give it a good pump. That’s it. Now we’re friends.” He scattered some more petals on the floor. “May I borrow this for a moment?”

  Delilah rolled backward and sideways, positioning herself in the aisle just behind the first row. Jefferson Totten doubled over to reach the microphone. More petals. Londell got up to help.