Chapter Seven

All in one place

The stillness in the office that had initially seemed restful now felt a touch eerie. Sasha’s theories, which I honestly hadn’t given even a moment of consideration before this, arose in my mind. If I were Charles, Maggie’s sudden death would be convenient. There was no other way to put it. It’d probably be even a little bit of a relief. The chances of this complaint dragging on, beyond even just the next step towards tenure, had gone up, significantly. Academic departments, working groups, offices, etc.—none of us were ever any good at talking to each other. It would slip through the cracks. This was, from where Charles stood, an indisputably good thing.

But was it enough to make someone commit a murder?

Just the thought of murder, so ridiculously extreme, made me laugh, and my laugh skittered awkwardly around the room, echoing off of the clutter. There was no way that Charles would murder anyone. Not even for tenure. He had morals! He had principles! He advised multiple student-led social justice groups!

But I didn’t really know him. Did I? And maybe nothing that happened happened on purpose. Maybe it was just a spur of the moment encounter, alone in a parking garage. How well do you have to know someone to know what they’d do in that precise situation?

I pulled out my phone and texted Jess, regretting, not for the first time, the pristine smartphone, with back and front facing cameras that could take snapshots of documents, that I’d destroyed on a rock.

            Do you know anything about disciplinary procedures?

I didn’t have to wait long; she must have been sitting by her phone, waiting on takeout.

            For students? Or staff?

            Staff. Professors.

          Sometimes. Depends on the department, the timing, etc. etc. Why do you ask?

            I found something strange.

            ??? Where are you?

            Charles’s office. He offered me the space. There’s a student complaint form on his desk. Signed by Maggie. He’s supposed to sign and return, but it’s still here.

The next text that came through was mostly boxes with x’s in them. Strangely enough, even without seeing the emojis that Jess chose, I basically got the message.

            Take pictures. Document. Don’t tell him you saw this. It could be nothing…

            I sighed. Can’t. Don’t have a camera on this phone.

            Fuck it, you don’t. Okay. I’ll see what I can figure out on my end then.

            Thanks.

            I have to run, but don’t do anything stupid. Don’t ask him questions about what you saw, just in case it’s something.

            Darn. There goes my plan of confronting him in the cafeteria tomorrow, in front of all the popular kids.

            Ha ha. Are you teaching tonight? Why are you still on campus?

            One more class.

            Okay, be careful. Call me when you’re walking to your car.

I hadn’t even thought about walking to my car, alone at night, until she brought it up. The instant wave of trepidation was tempered by a bit of relief. If someone tried to push me, Jess would hear it.

            Will do. Thanks.

I carefully, delicately, as though attempting to avoid leaving fingerprints (though the image of Charles whipping out a jar of fingerprint powder and an old fashioned brush nearly spun me into a fit of giggles there and then), replaced the note from Maggie. I don’t even know that I brushed off any additional dust. And then I gathered my things, locked the office door, climbed back up on the wobbly chair and did my level best to lean over as far as I could, replaced the key, and got the hell out of there. It was nearly time for class anyway.

Maggie’s hand-me-down class was our basic, introductory literature class, and she’d always taught it as Women’s Lit. She’d done this for years, but the course catalogue didn’t tend to list a special focus for courses at that level, so she’d get a combination of students who knew who she was and sought her out (mostly women) and students who’d snagged the evening space because it fit with their preexisting schedule (more than the handful of men that is typical for a Women’s Studies course). Some of them left upon receiving the syllabus, others stuck it out to get the course over with, and there were always a few, she’d told me more than once, who discovered that, surprise surprise, they actually liked women’s writing and the kinds of issues that it tended to tackle. (And that’s a very second-wave approach to it all, I realize—after all, women’s lit is really about anything and everything, much as is writing by men. But Maggie was a second-waver until death, and for an introductory course, it got the job done.)

I had decided, even before I received Harvey’s materials, to mostly proceed as Maggie had planned. After all, the course materials were already ordered and sitting, neatly shrink-wrapped, in the campus bookstore. There were a few things I wanted to change up, if I had the time and energy—whether it was still good pedagogy to compare rape scenes written by male writers and rape scenes written by female writers within the first two weeks was up for debate.

(Maggie never had been one to pull her punches, but then again, she’d been tenured for so long I think she’d ceased to actually understand how that impacted every decision she made. She enjoyed shaking things up, as she called it, for the sake of student investment. I, for reasons of sheer politic, couldn’t afford to be quite as provocative and risk student discomfort and complaint.)

Fortunately for me, despite any changes I may have to make, Maggie was true to form and had her first two weeks meticulously outlined. (Always the first two weeks, in great detail, and never more than that, is what she used to say. Anything less leaves you underprepared; anything more and you run the risk of losing your ability to respond to the classroom and students who are actually in front of you during any given semester.) This first class called for a student writing sample based on a passage of A Room of One’s Own, and I was grateful for the ease with which my students filed in, accepted the women’s lit premise with a minimum of potentially-disgruntled surprise and a maximum of mostly-contained-but-still-visible thrill, and got down to work.

Once I saw nothing more than the tops of heads as they either got down to writing or pretended like they had something to write, I opened my laptop and pulled up my teaching demonstration materials. They were still in a format that was probably sensible only to myself; my goal was to clean them up enough to send them along to Sasha by the end of the period, while I was still hanging out in the land of mostly-functional wifi.

And then I felt a tap on my shoulder.

It took me a moment to realize why the person standing by my desk was familiar. Then it clicked into place: it was Andy, the student from my composition class. This time, he was wearing what I took to be his student campus police uniform, a dark blue collared shirt with the logo on the breast, tucked into belted khaki pants.

“Professor Thompson!”

“Oh, Andy, right?” I glanced down at my roster. Sure enough, “Nguyen, Andrew” was listed.

“I didn’t know that you would be teaching this class.”

“Well, there have had to be some personnel changes this semester. The name printed in the syllabus isn’t always the instructor you’ll get.”

“Oh, I knew there would be a replacement last semester. They call in campus police pretty quickly if anyone is injured, and I happened to be on duty that night—”

“Stop,” I said, holding up a hand, so sharply I surprised myself. Andy raised his eyebrows, but, thank god, he did stop. “Sorry. It’s just,” I waved my hand out towards the room in what I hoped was a softer gesture. “They’re not all done yet. And I don’t want to keep conversations going if that’s going to throw anyone off.”

He closed his eyes briefly in understanding. “Ah, I see,” he whispered.

“Right,” I said, doing my best to look appreciative. Co-conspirators, I thought at him. We are co-conspirators, and you will not ask me any further questions.

He leaned in closer to the desk, and I’m fairly certain I held my breath as I waited to see whether he was going to pick up his story of Maggie’s death again, albeit at a quieter volume, but all he said, in a barely-audible whisper, was “If you need an escort out to your car after class is done, let me know. That’s part of my job, and that garage is dark. The last thing we need is another incident.”

And then he made his way back to his desk, back ramrod straight, and picked up his pen.

The rest of the period was quiet. Half an hour before the class was scheduled to end, I let those who were finished leave. About a third of the students stayed in their chair-desks, scratching away. Normally I would have considered this a good sign, an indication of engagement with a reading that could be fairly tough for students who hadn’t taken a lot of critical reading and writing classes, but that night, I was simply exhausted. I briefly considered closing my eyes, just for five minutes, just until the last student was done. Not a good idea, I chided myself. Too easy to slip away.

When only one student remained—Andy, naturally—diligently writing away with occasional pauses to flick his pen around in his fingers like a baton, I began to pack up my things. Sometimes that kind of instructor pressure could hurry things along, even though we weren’t yet at the session’s official end. I couldn’t actually tell him that this assignment really only needed to be half done, at best, that my goal was simply to get a feel for how he wrote and thought, not whether he could compose an entire, coherent essay in an hour and a half. Not that it was a bad thing if he could.

“I’m almost done, professor!” he said, as soon as I stood. “Just one more line…” he scribbled seriously for another three seconds “there!”

“No rush,” I said, and the only reason it didn’t sound like a lie was that the relief of seeing him finish made my voice that much relaxed.

“Nah, I’m good.” He stuck the paper on top of the pile. “I’m not a complicated guy. I say what I have to say, and then I’ve said it.”

“I appreciate that when it comes time for grading,” I said, then wondered whether I shouldn’t have. I do appreciate writers like that—it makes it far easier to help them figure out how to both critique what they’ve said and organize it—but a), I didn’t want word to get out that I had a favorite type of writer, and b) I was pretty sure he wasn’t that type in the first place.

“I can walk you out, if you’d like,” Andy said. “Safety first.”

I did almost say yes, but in that moment, I felt safer on the phone with Jess, someone I knew and trusted, than with a random student whom I still hadn’t had time to feel out. So I waved him off as I slid the pile of papers into my bag. “Nah, it’s fine. I have to run by my mailbox and grab a few things anyway. I’ll be okay.”

“See you next class, then,” he said, shrugging his backpack up a little higher.

I waited a few moments, just long enough to let him proceed down the path far enough to not see me not go to my mailbox, then slung my bag over my shoulder and headed for the door.

The campus was quiet, the rain gone for the time being, and everything was washed clean—or clean-ish—from the downpour, the grimy sidewalks shiny underneath the buttery glow of the lampposts, the struggling redwoods exhaling their bright, evergreen scent. A patch of forest in the middle of what was now a mostly-concrete valley. I usually liked walking back to my car alone on a night like this one, enjoyed the space for contemplation.

That evening, however, I called Jess as soon as I stepped over the threshold.

“Hey girl,” she said, picking up on the second ring. “Done for the night?”

“Done here at least. Finished a little early.”

“Everything go okay?”

“Sure,” I said, acutely aware of how much noise my heels made on the concrete path. “Maggie left detailed prep, so I don’t actually have all that much to do for a bit.”

“So I looked into that disciplinary thing you asked about.”

“That fast, huh?”

“Well, I can’t access everything from home, but I went back and looked at a few emails I skimmed the first time. It doesn’t look awful for him—I know this kid, by the way, even though I can’t legally tell you that, so let’s not mention his name—and I think it would have worked itself out eventually.”

“That’s good to hear,” I said, and it was. “I really didn’t like that train of thought.”

“What exactly do you mean, train of thought?” Jess said. “Because I’m definitely getting that you thought he’d be relieved at the personnel shift with Maggie no longer being on his committee, but beyond that?”

I sighed. “I don’t even know how to articulate it,” I began, and then paused, catching sight of the parking garage before me as I rounded a corner. The structure loomed up in front of me, three stories of concrete held together by steel, my car tucked away in the lower corner. I paused underneath a tree, and as the branches above me shuddered slightly in the breeze, shaking a spattering of water onto my head and shoulders, I had a momentary vision of myself as Frodo. The parking structure could be the Mordor of late-stage capitalism.

“Try it,” Jess said. “If you’re not worried about how he felt about Maggie’s death, you were worried about…?”

“It was something Sasha said. At first, I didn’t really think anything of it, but ever since I saw that form, I can’t shake it. She told me that she’d heard that someone called 911 and told them that an elderly woman had fallen and hit her head the night that Maggie died.”

“That’s…about what I’d expect?”

“Right, that was my reaction. Only she said that the person had called from a payphone and hadn’t given a name, and it made her wonder whether, you know.”

I couldn’t quite say it. Not out loud, while walking through campus on a quiet evening when anyone that I couldn’t see would still be able to hear every word I said.

“Ah. Got it. She wonders whether someone gave her a shove. Maybe not on purpose, but if someone had done that, even if it was a total accident, and they were a student, or even a tenure-track professor with something to lose…”

“They might not want to stick around to be tied to her death.”

“Honestly Katie,” Jess said, “whoever it was might not have even known that she died. As far as they could see, maybe she’d just passed out.”

“Huh,” I said, looking quickly both ways as I crossed the road between myself and the parking structure. “I hadn’t thought of that. Hang on, let me grab my keys. I’m about to walk into the garage.”

“Gonna lace them through your fingers?”

“Always,” I said.

“Good job. You parked on the ground floor, or did you have to drive all the way to the top?”

“Ground floor. Honestly, I can’t remember ever parking any higher.”

The concrete held all the chill and damp of the day, but the yellow safety lights burned banally away. There was nobody visible; just half-filled rows of cars as evidence of the final class sections that didn’t get out until ten. Mine was in the back corner, as per usual; I could see the very edge of the roof when I stood briefly on my tiptoes. I wove in and out around the cars, taking the shortest path to where mine stood.

“You know,” Jess said, as I walked. “the odds of this being something that actually involved foul play, as they put it in the mystery novels, are so low that I think we’ve got a better chance of winning the lottery. But if someone really did take out Maggie on purpose over tenure and you managed to find out about it, that would be your ticket to wealth and fame. Forget the tenured job. I cannot imagine a better premise for a dark comedy. Netflix would be all over that shit.”

“Maybe I’ll write it anyway,” I told her, taking the last fifty feet to my car at a near-jog.

“Give me cowriting credit and I’ll tell you all the really good admin stories. You know, for flavor.”

I stuck my key in the door and turned.

“I’m here!” I announced. “Thanks for walking me.”

“No problem,” she said. “Sure you don’t want me to stay on the line?”

“Nah, it’s okay. I don’t have a headset, this thing doesn’t connect to the car, and I need both hands to get my stuff packed in.”

“Okay. Call back whenever.”

“Thanks. Goodnight.”

I hit the hang up button, shoved the phone into the side pocket of my bag, and proceeded to pop my trunk and shift the contents to the side.

And then I heard footsteps.

I froze in place. The footsteps stopped.

Okay then. I was imagining things. Or someone really was in the garage, and they were walking to their car, probably equally thrilled to hear whatever terrifying noises I’d been making. I started moving things around again, hoisted up my bag and nestled it into its spot.

The footsteps returned, closer this time.

“Shit,” I whispered. I slammed the trunk down, scrambled for the driver’s side door, hurled myself inside, slammed it closed again as quickly as I could, and jammed the locks back down.

In the enveloping, rubber-sealed stuffy silence of my car, all I could hear was my own ragged breath. I glanced quickly in the mirrors. Nothing. Nobody. I checked the back seat. Empty, save for the box of books and papers that permanently resided there and was probably heavy enough to warrant its own seatbelt. I gingerly rolled the window down, just an inch, grateful for maybe the first time ever for my ancient manual windows.

I heard nothing. A little bit of the damp garage air wafted through the crack. And that was all.

I took a deep, shuddering breath and willed my heart to slow as I extracted myself from the strap of my shoulder bag and shoved it over onto the passenger seat. I shook my head and tried to laugh at my own insanity. There was probably just someone else passing through. Not every person who might be in the garage at night would be necessarily out to get me. I stuck the key in the ignition, reached for my seatbelt, and pressed my foot to the brake.

And then someone tapped on my window.

I screamed. I legitimately, stereotypical-teenage-girl in a haunted house screamed in a way that I know for a fact nobody has heard me do since sixth grade, and I cowered in my seat, cramming myself as low as I could possibly go, fumbling for the key to turn it so I could drive away. It was only when I had to stop to take a breath that I heard him calling my name.

“Professor Thompson! Professor Thompson! It’s okay! It’s just me!”

Standing outside the car, now several feet away, hands in the air and an incredibly worried expression creasing his face, was my student police intern, Andy.

“Oh god, I’m sorry,” I said, scrambling to lower the window all the way. “I’m so sorry to scream at you, I just thought I heard someone in here earlier when I was alone, and I guess it made me on edge…”

“Don’t worry about it. No problem. That’s why I’m here,” he said, giving me a tentative smile. “My patrol is the garage at night. Not much actually happens, but I totally understand why you freaked out. I guess I kind of snuck up on you.”

“You kind of did.” My cheeks were burning, and I found myself hoping fervently that he didn’t know any other student in the class so that he couldn’t ever tell anyone else what his teacher sounded like as she lost her mind. “I’m sorry I screamed at you. This is kind of embarrassing.”

“No worries. And next time, you’ll know it’s me.”

“Right. But let’s try to avoid a next time, if you don’t mind. It wouldn’t be good for your grade.”

He smiled at that. “Fair enough. And at least according to me, this never happened.”

“I appreciate that.” I started the car.

He stepped backwards, out of my way, and waved. “Have a good rest of your night!” he called, over the engine.

I tried to smile, nodded, and waved back before rolling the window up, backing out as slowly as my anxiety would allow, and driving to the exit like a sane person who hadn’t just been scared shitless by police intern.

I managed to keep it together for about a block past the campus exit. And then I had to pull over, into the bike lane without looking, hit the flashers, and sob, great heaving sobs, until I was spent.