Rhapsody in Red Read online

  “I need to depressurize,” I said, “and you look like you could use some of the same. There’s a former faculty member I need to catch up on all of this. He’s in an assisted-living facility across town. You’d enjoy meeting him.”

  She waited so long to answer that I thought she’d refuse. Truth to tell, I was wishing she would. Then she said, “All right. Frankly, I don’t want to be alone right now.”

  “Good,” I said, not meaning it. “We can catch a bite to eat on the way.”

  “I don’t feel like eating,” she said. Her words were straightforward enough, but her tone said, “I don’t want to be seen with you in public.” Her eyes became the embrasures of a fortress again, and I could almost hear her hoisting the drawbridge.

  “We’ll use my car,” she added. “It’s parked near your office.”

  “No use wasting your gas,” I said. “We can park your car at my house and take mine.”

  Her chin raised a fraction of an inch, as it had once before in my office. “I can spare the gas. We’ll take my car.”

  I should have known she wouldn’t want her car parked in front of my house at night.

  Walking back to her car, we briefed each other on our interrogations. Our stories matched, but my suspicious mind kept reexamining hers. Her account of her drive to the post office with Laila Sloan could surely be verified. But she said she’d spent the hour before she came to my office pacing her own office and wondering what to do. So, if I was right in thinking Laila was killed shortly before we found her, Professor Thorn had no alibi. Her iron grip and karate experience suggested she might have strength enough to commit the crime. She could have killed Laila and then come to me with a credible cover story. With Laila dead, she wouldn’t have to worry about getting caught in a lie.

  My historian’s instinct warned me that was the simplest explanation of Laila’s murder. Caution said I’d better be careful around Professor Thorn. I couldn’t teach much history if I got conked on the head and strangled.

  Her car turned out to be an experienced Ford Taurus at least fifteen years old. Its doors rattled, its engine ran loud, and the heater didn’t work. I had visions of frostbitten feet.

  We clattered down the steep hill from the university and across the flat, mile-wide plain of the Overton River valley, through the city proper, and up the hills on the other side.

  As we drove, I spoke of the man we would visit. “Lincoln Sheldon was the history department chair who hired me back in the eighties. He lost the use of his legs to a stroke a couple of years ago and had to move into assisted living. But he likes to keep up with what’s going on at the college.”

  “University,” she corrected. “I’ll be glad to meet him.”

  In the dayroom of the assisted-living center, elderly people looked up from board games as we passed. We found Dr. Sheldon in his room, sitting in his wheelchair and reading. No board games for him. The sight of his broad mouth and brow, together with his iron-gray hair, always made me think of the cliché “an old lion.” Certainly, his manner was leonine.

  “Hello, Press.” His deep voice echoed as he laid the book aside. His gaze moved to Professor Thorn. “Who is this young charmer?”

  Professor Thorn surprised me by not bristling.

  I introduced her as a specialist in comparative religions but didn’t mention that she was a Wiccan. He said something conventional about being glad to meet new faculty. Before we got too conventional, though, I asked how he was getting along.

  “Bored to death except when I find a good book,” he said, raising the one he’d been reading so I could see the title. It was David McCullough’s 1776.

  “That’s a good one,” I said.

  “It reminds us how close we came to remaining a British colony.” He made a face. “And these people want me to play board games. I’d be bored, all right.”

  Professor Thorn smiled. “Maybe you should offer the residents refresher classes in history.” Her defensiveness with me disappeared completely in Dr. Sheldon’s presence.

  His face lighted up. “That’s an idea.” He’d always loved to teach with that great voice of his.

  “We’ve brought bad news,” I said. “Somebody killed Laila Sloan on campus this afternoon.”

  His face fell. “She didn’t deserve that. Nobody does.” Then his historian’s curiosity took over. “Give me the details.”

  I told him what we knew, glossing over Professor Thorn’s problem with Laila as “personal differences.” His eyebrow flicked up at the euphemism, but he didn’t question it. When I finished, he looked from one of us to the other and stroked his chin while he digested the information.

  “This won’t be the end of it,” he said. “Both of you must be extra careful.”

  “We shouldn’t be in any danger,” Professor Thorn said. “Neither one of us had much of a connection with Laila.”

  She glanced at me for confirmation. I nodded.

  Dr. Sheldon leaned forward and pointed his finger. “But you may have knowledge that’s dangerous to the murderer. You won’t know if you do until you know who killed her and why.” He tapped the finger on his knee. “And the police will be on you like sand on the Sahara. According to what you told me, neither of you has an alibi for the hour or so before you found the body.”

  “I think you’re too pessimistic,” I said. I hoped I was right.

  Professor Thorn took the conversation in another direction. “Since you’ve taught here a long time, maybe you can tell me about this thing called ‘The Crisis.’ What was it, and why do people talk about it like it was an earthquake about to come back for an encore?”

  Dr. Sheldon blinked. “They hired you without telling you that? They ought to be horsewhipped.”

  He continued in full lecture mode. “Before The Crisis, Overton Grace College was an underendowed but respectable liberal arts institution with about eight hundred students. When enrollment suddenly fell below seven hundred, it caused a panic and a change of presidents. The new one brought in a high-paid consultant to lead us into the promised land.” Dr. Sheldon waved his hands like a magician. “Voilà! Instantly, we became a university with new and relevant programs designed to attract students in droves. Satellite campuses sprang up like mushrooms wherever money could be found, and some of them faded just as quickly. We invested in a high-profile athletic program to increase our public visibility. And somewhere in the rush, ‘Grace’ fell out of the college’s name and the crosses disappeared from the campus entryways because the consultant said those things were scaring students away.”

  Dr. Sheldon’s scowl left no doubt as to his opinion. “Secularization, renaming everything, and offering juicy new courses with catchy titles seems to have solved the enrollment problem. But I hear the new administration has a conniption fit every time a student gets unhappy.”

  “Thank you for telling me,” Professor Thorn said, and turned to me. “I think I’m depressurized enough now.”

  I stood and moved to the door. She followed.

  “Comparative religions, eh?” Dr. Sheldon said with a satirical wink. “Come back and tell me about pagan religions that have wild Bacchanalian rites.” Suddenly serious, he looked from one of us to the other and said, “Take care of yourselves. There’s a murderer loose out there somewhere.”

  In the hallway I said, “I apologize for some of his remarks.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, visibly tense again now that we were alone. “Shall I drop you by your place?”

  I glanced at my watch and grimaced. “Yes. There’s another visit I usually pay while I’m here, but it’s getting late.”

  “Someone I should know?”

  “Not really. It’s Gifford Jessel’s mother over on the full-care side of the nursing home. She doesn’t know much anymore. Half the time she thinks I’m her son. But she always enjoys being visited.”

  Professor Thorn made no reply. By then we’d arrived at her car, so we climbed in and renewed the process of freezing my feet.
We said nothing during most of the drive back across town. My internal music played something wistful on a marimba, and my mood grew pensive along with it.

  “Sad and strange,” I mused aloud. “Dr. Sheldon is dying from the feet upward, and Mrs. Jessel is doing it the other way around. I wonder which way we’ll go when it comes our turn.”

  “If we last that long.” Professor Thorn’s hands gripped the wheel. “Dr. Sheldon didn’t seem optimistic about us.”

  Her comment replaced my pensiveness with apprehension. An unknown killer was at large on campus or at least in town. And I wondered how deep a grudge Clyde Staggart still held. He’d directed his questioning more toward personal harassment than toward solving the crime. And I still held nagging doubts about Professor Thorn. She seemed innocent enough, but she’d had both opportunity and motive for the murder. There had to be a reason for her defensiveness.

  “I appreciate Dr. Sheldon’s concern about us,” I said, “but I don’t agree with him. The university administration will go bananas for a while, and we’ll have a two-day frenzy on campus. Then things will sink back to normal as if this had never happened.”

  And I won’t have to deal with this unpredictable woman.

  I should have known when I said it.

  I was wrong on both counts.

  CHAPTER 4

  But I was right about the frenzy. On Thursday morning, an army of grief counselors descended on the campus like the plague of gnats on Egypt. One met me at the door of my office with word that Dean-Dean had personally assigned her to me. I got rid of her by explaining that I’d had enough practice grieving so I could do it efficiently without assistance.

  I’d arrived that day determined to make routine prevail in spite of all obstacles. At times it looked like I was succeeding, but then my house of cards would get scattered by something I couldn’t control. Nor could I shake that feeling of unseen forces driving me toward places where I didn’t want to go.

  When I got rid of the grief counselor and opened my office, my computer was missing.

  I called Dean-Dean and reported the theft. “They left the printer, cables, and keyboard,” I said, “but the computer itself is gone.”

  “It wasn’t stolen,” Dean-Dean explained in his high-pitched voice. “Captain Staggart asked for the computers of all the suspects, and I told him to take what he needed.”

  “Why am I a suspect? All I did was find the body.”

  Dean-Dean grew impatient. “They took the computers of everyone who was in the building when the crime was committed. They searched the offices, too, with my permission. They’re getting a warrant to examine your home computer.”

  “I don’t own a computer,” I said. There was no use reminding him I wasn’t in the science center when the crime was committed.

  “No computer? When are you going to join the twenty-first century?” His voice squeaked, as it always does when he gets excited, and he skipped illogically to a new subject. “The president rushed back last night and has called a campus-wide meeting at eleven this morning. Be sure and make the announcement to your class in case anyone missed the e-mail. We’ll have a faculty meeting immediately afterward.”

  He hung up before I could respond. He was definitely running along the ship’s deck again. That was okay by me, but I got paid for teaching history—just teaching history. At least, I kept telling myself that. I glanced at the notes for my nine o’clock Western Civilization class while my personal musicians played a nice string quartet.

  Then the phone rang. It was my daughter, Cindy, calling from the state university where she was a junior. She’d read about Laila Sloan in the morning paper—Good for her! She’s reading the papers!—and she was concerned because I found the body.

  “Do you want me to come home, Daddy?”

  My soul melted, as it always does at her voice. It sounds so much like Faith’s, yet Cindy’s has its own special sweetness.

  “No, honey,” I said. “It’s not that bad. I didn’t know her well.”

  She sighed. “I do have a big exam in psych on Monday. . . .”

  I found myself smiling. “Then you’d better get psyched up for it.”

  She laughed and said she loved me.

  She would have rung off, but I asked, “How’s the car doing?”

  Cindy drives Faith’s seven-year-old Camry. My finances being what they are, we have to keep it running until she graduates. Meanwhile, I make do with my old stick-shift Honda Civic from the mid-eighties. For us, good maintenance is a must.

  “The car is fine, Daddy.” Cindy’s voice held that special tone children reserve for over-attentive parents. “It doesn’t need an oil change for another thousand miles. I have to go now. Bye.”

  Well, at least she knew when the next oil change was due.

  I made it to class with a minute to spare and opened with Dean-Dean’s announcement, naming him with due respect as “Dean Billig.” Then my mind clicked into place, and teaching brought me alive again. History is a marvelous tapestry woven from facts and aspirations and accomplishments, all intermingled with the tragedies of mistaken motives and forgotten truths. Introducing new generations to that grandeur is all I care about anymore. By the end of class I’d almost forgotten I was a murder suspect.

  The president’s convocation was held in the old auditorium, a place I usually avoid. Its familiar smells and the feel of hardwood benches bring bittersweet memories of my world that used to be. I particularly remember Faith’s last recital, the week before she began chemotherapy. She feared it would be her last, and she put every ounce of her being into it. After a varied program of Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Mussorgsky, and Prokofiev, she closed with Dohnanyi’s C-major Rhapsody, subtly inviting us to smile at the playful staccato passages but moving us deep, deep beyond words with the sweep of its impassioned melody.

  Since then, I only visit the auditorium when I can’t avoid it.

  Today’s convocation was so typical that I could almost believe routine would prevail. We opened with a nonsectarian prayer in which no specific deity was named. After all, we wouldn’t want to offend any Taoists or ancestor worshipers who might have wandered in.

  Routine again prevailed as our president spoke. I have to say that President J. Cleveland Cantwell is an impressive person. He’s about forty-five years old, tall and thin, with a long, serious face like John Carradine in the old movies.

  He came to us soon after The Crisis, chosen by the trustees to lead us out of financial bondage. At the time, he’d been working on a doctorate in elementary education at the state university. The uncompleted degree posed no problem, for our denomination’s sister institution in the next state awarded him an honorary doctorate, and he returned the favor by granting one to that institution’s un-degreed president the following year.

  In sonorous rhetoric, President Cantwell regretted the Terrible Tragedy that had Fallen Among Us. But with police on the job, he said, Our Beloved Campus would remain as safe as ever. Because The Administration was providing The Best Professional Grief Counseling, these Clouds of Tragedy would soon pass, and Life in These Hallowed Halls would return to normal.

  I wondered what he would have thought if he’d heard his speech as I did, counterpointed by my internal piccolo.

  The convocation had only one unusual feature: no one mentioned a next of kin for Laila Sloan.

  After students were dismissed, faculty were asked to remain. President Cantwell again regretted This Terrible Tragedy and exhorted us to Persevere, Go For The Gold, Run The Good Race, and continue The Pursuit of Excellence. After he left, Dean-Dean called the faculty to order, and the education department chair presented his department’s new mission statement for faculty approval. If it passed, certification of students for public-school teaching would require their signed pledge to promote social justice, work to stop global warming, and combat institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, and a number of other social ills.

  This was a typical Dean-Dean operation: to slip throu
gh a major policy change while the faculty’s minds were numb with something else. Fortunately, we mustered enough votes to postpone consideration so that everyone could study the proposal. Thus thwarted, Dean-Dean pronounced the meeting adjourned sine die until Tuesday at eleven.

  Dean-Dean has a problem with Latin. An intrepid member of the language faculty once explained to him that sine die (without day) means indefinitely, and that naming a specific time to reconvene created an oxymoron. Dean-Dean reportedly replied that the distinction didn’t matter because most of the faculty couldn’t understand Latin either.

  As I said, these things were so normal I could almost believe routine would prevail. The key word was almost, for I had the nagging sense that something else bad was about to happen.

  Still, it was normal for the faculty to leave the meeting with directly opposed opinions. One member praised President Cantwell for an excellent speech, while another complained that there were three clichés the president failed to use. As for me, I was grateful I’d been able to keep quiet. I don’t know what happened with Professor Thorn. I’d seen her earlier on the opposite side of the auditorium, a bit blinky-eyed but otherwise no worse for yesterday’s excitement. I did not see her leave, so I didn’t know how she received the convocation.

  After catching a grilled cheese sandwich in the campus grill, I returned to my office and found Sergeant Spencer waiting. This looked like the bad thing I’d expected to happen.

  Spencer greeted me with the same grin I remembered from his student days. “Professor Barclay, I thought you might want to know how the investigation is going.”

  “I’m always interested,” I said, inviting him in, “but don’t tell me anything you shouldn’t. The dean says I’m a suspect.”

  Spencer took the chair at the left of my desk, and I took the one on the right.

  “We worked all night on the crime scene,” he said. “The search of the victim’s office gave negative results, unless something shows up in the fingerprints.”