Chapter Eleven

All in one place

“Andy!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

He held his serious expression for another half second as he took me in, glanced to Jess, and saw that the projector was up and running. Then his face collapsed.

“Oh my god, Professor Thompson, I’m so so sorry! But I saw the lights on in here, and no one’s scheduled for this room, so I came on over to check and make sure you were authorized.”

“And who exactly gave you the authority to check our authorization?” Jess said.

Andy fumbled for his wallet. “Here, see?” he said, holding it up. “I’m a campus police intern. We do patrols sometimes, check on people in classrooms when they aren’t supposed to be there. I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t know that you were teachers until I got in here.”

“Okay, but who did you think we were?” I asked. “Do you usually find random intruders in English classrooms on Saturday mornings?”

“So wait, he’s actually with the program?” Jess said to me.

“Far as I know,” I replied. “He’s my student this semester, at the very least.”

“That’s a start,” she said. “Let me see that badge.”

Andy pulled a card from his wallet, handed it over, and then stood back on his heels, hands laced behind his back, in a strange amalgamation of parade rest and nervous teenager. Jess was remarkably good, I’d always thought, at projecting authority.

“Okay, this looks like what they usually hand out, and if it isn’t, Professor Thompson here knows where to find you. I’ve never heard of interns doing patrols over the weekend, though, so I don’t think you’re being completely honest with us. What’s going on, and why are you here?”

Andy bit his lip and winced. “You’re probably not going to believe me if I tell you,” he said, “so how about I’m really sorry, I won’t run any more weekend patrols, and you can get back to whatever it is you were doing? That work?”

I would have said yes. I’d been on a roll; I wanted to get back onto that roll. But Jess gave him her best Look of Authority and shook her head.

“No, I don’t think that will work. Have a seat and tell us everything. You might be surprised at what we’ll believe.” She plopped herself down in one of the chair-desks, and I, inwardly swearing at her, did the same.

Andy, tentatively, followed our lead, sitting just a little further away, at the point of a narrow triangle. I had a moment of whiplash going from interviewee to interviewer so quickly.

“Well,” he said, “it might be nothing.”

“We’ll be the judge of that,” I muttered, too low for anyone to hear, right as Jess said, “Let us be the judge of that.” I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.

“It started with the first professor. You know, the one at the end of last semester.”

“Professor Gerson,” Jess said.

“Right. Her. There was something that seemed off, and you know I thought so,” he said, turning to look at me. “I told you that right at the beginning of last week. There should have been CCTV footage from all times in the parking garage, and there wasn’t.”

“Should have been doesn’t always mean that it actually exists,” Jess said gently. “The problem with a college is the same problem with any large bureaucracy. Things that are broken can take a really long time to be fixed.”

Andy nodded. “I know, and so that wasn’t the weird thing by itself. Or it wasn’t enough of a weird thing by itself. But then Professor Vasquez got sick, and that was another weird thing. So I started really paying attention. She wasn’t an English professor, but she was in the English Department office, so I saw a connection.”

“Not to take away from your deductions,” I said, “but correlation doesn’t always equal causation.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that when two things happen close to each other, or near to the same time, that doesn’t mean that they’re related. They could just be two things happening, not one thing causing the other, or the same thing causing both.”

“Well put,” Jess said. “I can see why you have a job doing this.”

“And that’s kind of the thing,” Andy said, flushing a little bit. “It’s not just those two things, not after yesterday.”

“Ah,” Jess said. “The rumor mill is doing its job. What have you heard?”

“About Professor Fairfield.”

“Already,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. “How?”

“Through the department.”

“The campus police or the English Department?”

“Oh, police, of course.”

“And what have you heard?”

“Just that she…passed away,” he said, casting a quick glance in my direction. “And that Professor Thompson was there.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Are you implying something?”

He flushed redder, but he didn’t answer.

“Answer Professor Thompson,” Jess said. “Are you implying something?”

“It’s just…” he began, then stopped. “It’s just that they train us to look for coincidences like that. The same person in two or three places. And then to ask questions. It doesn’t mean I think you did anything.”

The room was suddenly about ten degrees colder. I hadn’t looked over at Jess, just kept my attention focused on Andy. He was just a kid, I knew. I couldn’t come down hard on him. But if he thought that, based on what information he had, who was to say someone else hadn’t thought that? Someone else who was far from a kid, someone else who was in a position of power, with the ability to make or break my application? Someone else who could call the police?

I knew I hadn’t done anything. What I didn’t know was how long it would take to establish that fact to someone else’s satisfaction. However long it was, it was time that I didn’t have to lose.

“Okay, we’re dealing with this right now,” Jess said, standing up from her desk chair with a loud scrape of the metal legs on the floor. “Katie, white board marker?”

“Probably still on the floor.”

She retrieved the marker, walked to the board, and began writing.

“Now, we have three people who have been impacted at this point,” she said, “and they are Magdalena Gerson, Aurelia Vasquez, and Sasha Fairfield.” She circled each name as she wrote it. “Now, Professor Gerson and Professor Fairfield are both in the English Department, so we’ll note that. And your Professor Thompson was in the department office, although not the same room, when Professor Vasquez collapsed, and she foundProfessor Fairfield’s body—which, by the way, you will share with no one who doesn’t already know this. So I can see how that looks like a link from where you’re standing, but she had nothing to do with what’s happened to her. She couldn’t have. She was on campus all day, and the medical evidence doesn’t allow for it.”

(This wasn’t actually true, at least not as far as Jess knew. Sasha’s body had been cold by the time I arrived, and granted, the police probably had record of that. But she couldn’t prove it, and Andy didn’t have to believe it. Fortunately, though, he was nodding along, and I was grateful.)

“What about Professor Gerson?” Andy asked.

“Ah, Professor Gerson. She was also an English professor, and if what you’re saying about the CCTV footage is correct, I guess we don’t have any physical evidence that Professor Thompson wasn’t there. We’ll deal with that.”

“Excuse me,” I said, and Jess held up a hand.

“Katie, trust me. Andy, I want to hear all of your suspicions and theories. Get them all out now.”

“Well,” he began, studiously keeping his eyes on the board, “Professor Vasquez isn’t an English professor, but she’s on the hiring committee for the open position, and Professor Thompson…” he paused to swallow hard, “Professor Thompson is an applicant. I’m sorry. I’m not supposed to share that, but you asked for everything.”

“How do you know that?” I said. Forget sharing—he wasn’t supposed to even knowthat. I didn’t even know the full list of prospective candidates, not even the internal ones. If people wanted to share about themselves, fine, but committees tended to take the confidentiality portion of their job fairly seriously in that arena.

“I’m the alternate student representative for the hiring committee.”

“Oh my god, of course you are,” I said, letting my head fall into my hands for a moment.

Andy nodded.

“The alternate, though,” Jess said. “Not the actual member who’s filling the role now.”

“The alternate. But I have to attend some of the meetings.”

“So you were there too when Aurelia collapsed?” I said.

“No, no. I wasn’t at that one. But my counterpart told me about it.”

“Of course they did,” I muttered, tasting salt on my lips from the sweat on my palms.

“Andy, listen,” Jess said. “If you’re on the committee, and you know Professor Thompson is in the running, you need to know a couple more things. First off, Maggie—Professor Gerson—was Professor Thompson’s mentor. Katie is the absolute last person who would want to see her dead, and the person with the most to lose from her absence. Professor Fairfield was Professor Gerson’s best friend and Professor Thompson’s backup mentor. If she really had something to do with this, then she is clinically insane, and you can help me drive her over to Stanford psych. No one takes out two of their own mentors during a hiring process. No one. She doesn’t have a motive. She has the exact opposite of that!”

“An anti-motive?” Andy said.

“You know, I like that. Yes. An anti-motive. So I’m not disagreeing with you that there’s something really strange going on around here right now. I’m not even disagreeing with you that it might be criminal and we could have a murderer on our hands. But what I am saying is that Professor Thompson is an excellent teacher, we’d be lucky to have her here full time, and she is the absolute last person I will be suspecting in all of this. Do you get it?”

“But what about Professor Vasquez? I don’t know what’s just rumor, but if you want to know everything—”

“Let me take this one,” I said, without bothering to stand. “We’ve had our conflicts, but they’ve been professional, and I respected her. I also have no desire for this process to take any longer than it needs to take, because I have classes to teach. And if I don’t get this job, I have a completely life to plan.”

The room was silent for a good thirty seconds.

“I think,” Andy finally said, “that that makes sense.”

“Hallelujah,” Jess said, throwing up her hands. “Now let me erase this before anyone else walks in and gets the wrong idea.”

She had finished erasing the board and was capping the pen when Andy spoke again. “So you really think there’s something strange going on?”

She raised an eyebrow at him.

“Good,” he said. “Me too.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” she said, “because maybe you can help me persuade Professor Thompson that she needs to pull her head out of the sand for at least half an hour to talk that over with us.”

“I don’t not believe you!” I said. “It’s a matter of time and energy and being really deliberate about what I’m doing with both.”

“Katie, I care just as much as you do about this hiring process, and you know I’m on your team. But we are past the point where we can politely ask whoever is behind this to please wait a few weeks before causing more chaos.”

I sighed. “I really wish I could argue with you.”

“I know you do,” she said. “I wish you could too. But since you can’t, I think we need to look into things seriously.”

“Um, Professor…”

“You can call me Ms. Torres.”

“Ms. Torres. Um. How exactly do you think we should look into things?”

“Well,” Jess said. “I think we should start with the parking garage.”

*

Andy talked to Jess the entire walk over. From what I could hear, he was giving her the entire rundown of how the internship program worked, his assigned patrols, and patrols he wasn’t assigned but that he thought still made sense for him to do. But I didn’t hear everything; I was dragging along several feet behind them, still stressing over my incomplete run-through. As soon as Jess and Andy had agreed that checking into the camera situation at the parking garage made sense, she’d instructed me to pack up my things so I could join them. I’d done it, but I hadn’t been thrilled.

A squirrel brayed from the tree above us as I caught up with them at the crosswalk just before the garage entrance. “So you both seem to know more than me,” I said. “Does that mean that maybe you know where we need to start looking? Or are we going to just check every camera in the place?”

I wasn’t actually sure what I wanted the answer to be. Part of me did not want to know where Maggie had fallen and died. The other part of me didn’t want to go looking for every single camera in the three-story garage.

Andy cleared his throat. “I know where we’re going.”

We paused for a moment, looking up at the structure.

“First floor, right?” Jess said. “Back corner?”

“About halfway down, street side. Follow me.”

We followed.

The garage was mostly empty, and our footsteps echoed as we made our way to the scene of, if not crime, then death; Jess’s heels sharp, my boots muffled, Andy’s sneakers soft and squeaky.

First floor made sense, I told myself, by way of distraction; all the faculty spots were there, and Maggie wouldn’t have had any reason to be any higher up, at least in the ordinary course of things. Did that count as a point towards accidental death? No one had lured her up to the more remote student spots, at any rate.

“Here. This is it,” Andy said, stopping at a very unremarkable place. “There are supposed to be cameras there,” he said, pointing to a far corner, “and there,” he continued, pointing up to a nook in the ceiling a bit closer to us. “But the far one was pointed the wrong way, and the closer one wasn’t working.”

“And it probably still isn’t,” Jess said. “It really hasn’t been very long.”

“How are we going to check whether it’s working now?” I asked, wrapping my arms around my body in an attempt to keep the damp cold from seeping past my jacket.

“Sometimes you can see a little red light,” Andy said, walking towards the mounted camera until he was almost directly underneath it.

“You really can’t,” Jess said. “Not for sure.”

I took a deep breath. It was meant to be calming, but all it did was emphasize the slight tremor that was taking root just below my heart. “Then why exactly are we here?”

Jess must have heard something in my voice; she held a quick finger to her mouth. Andy was still absorbed in trying to find a red light, his neck craned completely back. “This is one of those things that we’re going to have to check out on the other end. I can do it, but I’m going to need to know how many cameras are in this garage.”

Andy lowered his chin. “No offense, Ms. Torres, but who are you?” he asked. “Why can you find out so much?”

“Administration grants me great powers,” she said, with half a smile. “You’d be surprised how much I can find out when I really put my mind to it. Now, can you do me a favor?”

“Sure,” he said, posture straightening, halfway to attention.

“Take a quick jog up to the next couple floors and get us a camera count. My guess is that they’ll be in the same places up there as down here, but we need to be sure. And don’t forget to check the stairwells. Work top down, okay?”

“On it!” he said, and took off for the nearest set of stairs at a jog.

She waited until the sound of him climbing had faded to nearly nothing, then stepped closer to me, and, lowering her voice, said, “We need to talk about this later on. Let him count the cameras and feel useful, and then you and I need to leave.”

“But do you actually need to know how many cameras are in this place?” I asked.

She smirked. “Of course not. But you know how it is. People do better when they have a job.”

I was going to bring up my practice run just then, point out that I was also hoping to have a job one of these days, when my phone, deep in my bag, rang.

“Shit,” I said, scrambling to find where I’d put it. I pulled it out on the fourth ring and pressed accept. “Hello?”

“Katie, hi, this is Harvey Zeilig.” Harvey’s voice was its usual calm, but his delivery was quicker than normal, and that I didn’t like.   

“Oh, hi Harvey. Is everything okay?”

“I suppose things are mostly okay,” he said, chuckling. “The Browns aren’t winning, but I never actually expect that. But I didn’t want to just answer you over email though, on the weekend, and I really appreciate you reaching out so quickly.”

“Right, of course,” I said, remembering the notice of delay.

“There is no change to the schedule at all,” he said. “I have no idea who has been sending official looking correspondence on college letterhead with my name and signature, and I’m deeply concerned about it, but the most important thing is that you know that we are on for tomorrow as planned.” He hesitated for a moment, and when I didn’t say anything, added, “I realize that this all might be a lot in a very small space of time, I really do. I heard from the police this morning, and I’m so sorry that you were involved in any way. But this isn’t a process that we can pause, and unless you are unable to come in and officially request a delay…”

The words hung there, the second half of the sentence clear as day, though unspoken; a delay would be career suicide, and as long as I wasn’t collapsed in a closet, I needed to show up as planned.

“No, no,” I said. “I do best when I work through things. I’ll be there. Thank you so much for letting me know.”

“Thank you again, Katie, for reaching out. I don’t like this at all, but that’s another thing. I’ll see you tomorrow, as scheduled.”

“Right. See you then.”

I hung up and slid my phone back into my bag.

“So no delay?” Jess said.

“No delay,” I confirmed.

We looked at each other for a moment, and then the sound of Andy’s sneakers on the stairs returned.