Campus Bones (Dead Remaining)

by Vivian Barz

  Eventually, the media circus died down, but the resentment the faculty held for Eric remained. Students on campus who believed they were being sneaky when they snapped unsolicited photos of him were equally insufferable. While the college never officially terminated Eric’s position, the powers that be had dropped more than a few glaring hints that his talents might be better utilized elsewhere. He’d been questioning what he was going to do for money when along came Lamount University with their offer. Although he’d mildly fussed over the changing of his curriculum, he was hardly in a position to tell them no, which he suspected they might have known.

  Still, he had his pride, and he managed to make a couple demands after a board member let it slip that the disbursal of the benefactor’s funds was contingent upon him accepting their offer. There was that, plus the revelation that more than a few board members were happy—thrilled, even—to have him join them at the university. The first demand was that he be allowed to dictate his lesson plans without any university interference. He’d made the request for the simple reason that he loathed bureaucracy and being micromanaged to any degree. Dean of Students Alan Williams, who hardly went out of his way to disguise his mortification over having to bring a “fortune-teller” (actual term used in an email chain Eric had mistakenly been copied on) into an institution as respected as Lamount University–San Francisco, was willing to accommodate the request. The further he distanced himself from the professor and all his “mythical woo-woo” (again, actual term), the better.

  The second request took a little more finagling. Jake Bergman, Eric’s friend and former star pupil—a “mature” student at age thirty—would need to be allowed to enroll at the university without having to go through the lengthy application process. He would also need to be permitted to serve as Eric’s teacher’s assistant, a position usually reserved for grad students. This Eric did not view as nepotism, as Jake was qualified for the transfer, having fulfilled the lower-level class requirements with near perfect scores at Perrick Community College; it was also something Jake had been planning to do before the deaths of his two close friends derailed him. Eric was hoping that making the transition easier would get his friend back on track and help ease the depression he’d been trying so hard to mask. Naturally, Alan Williams had taken umbrage at the stipulations. However, LU higher-ups ultimately yielded to what they considered audacious demands for a nontenured professor. Tolerating a little bit of insolence was worth the hefty payout, it seemed.

  Eric and Jake sat in his office now, reviewing the essays some of the students had opted to submit in lieu of an exam. (They’d been given the option of one or the other.) Eric had elected to name his class Nontraditional Crimes and Investigative Procedures in the hope of giving it more academic legitimacy than Jake’s proposed title: Psychics Are as Real as the Crimes They Solve. Not that the professor would ever label himself a psychic, although he supposed by definition he might be just that, despite having fought against the notion tooth and nail when his visions first began to manifest. Resist as he’d tried, over time he’d realized that, whatever problem it was that he had—and having individuals who’d been dead for weeks or even decades reach out to him from beyond the grave was certainly a problem—it wasn’t one that he could ignore in the hopes that it would go away.

  Eric had eventually come to grips with reality: he saw and sensed things “regular” individuals didn’t, which occasionally helped him solve crimes. While he had no true explanation for it, he figured the ability (or disability, depending on how you looked at it) was a by-product of the schizophrenia he’d been living with since the age of nineteen. With medication, he had the disease under control, though the rare episode occasionally plagued him. Still, because his brain was wired differently from the standard model, he could access information the average person couldn’t—while he had no way to prove this theory, it was the best explanation he could come up with.

  “They’ve got imagination; I’ll give them that,” Jake said, sorting through the heavy stack of papers they had spread out before them on Eric’s gargantuan metal tanker desk, which had to be at least fifty years old. An enterprising soul might tout the furniture as “vintage,” but Eric recognized it for the paradox it was: a silent yet screaming loud statement on how the university viewed the hired help. While the state-of-the-art classrooms and campus grounds were so impeccable that they could have been plucked straight from a wholesome propaganda film relaying the benefits of staying in school, the faculty offices were contrastingly bleak: small windows (if any), worn carpet, creaky old furniture, faded paint a shade Eric thought of as “prison cell gray.” He probably could have insisted on a nicer office with his list of demands, but he’d figured that he’d pushed them enough and he, being the new guy, hadn’t wanted to alienate himself from other professors in the department by rubbing their noses in a flashy office.

  Jake had once joked that, at Lamount, they were like commoners shoveling coal down below on the Titanic while the wealthy reaped all the benefits at the top. A British professor in Eric’s department had also provided a cheeky idiom on the topic, stating that the private university was all fur coat and no knickers. Met with confusion from Eric, he went on to explain that LU took great pains to remind attendees (their parents, more pointedly) and patrons of its greatness while the many unsavory occurrences on campus that might have contradicted the sentiment—violent outbursts in the classroom, illicit student-teacher affairs, athlete doping—had been quickly swept under the rug. Case in point: Eric had absolutely no formal credentials that qualified him to teach the subject his employment was centered on, yet there he was, the university’s so-called celebrity expert on crime. Though Eric had no business thinking this way—he was a knowledgeable and widely liked professor—some days he believed himself a fraud, and he frequently felt guilty knowing that his students (or their parents) had paid good money to hear him lecture despite him having nary a single law- or criminal-justice-related certification to his name.

  Lamount had reached its heyday in the nineties, when it had given nearby Stanford and prestigious Ivy League universities on the opposite side of the country like Harvard, Columbia, and Yale a run for their money. While the LU campus was undoubtedly lovely and the professors perfectly competent, what had catapulted the university into overnight popularity was that it had been used as the setting for Away, a popular dramatic television show about a group of beautiful young people leaving home for the first time to attend college. Though the dialogue of the cast and the situations they found themselves in were impossibly sophisticated and had obviously been dreamed up by middle-aged screenwriters, teenagers and twentysomethings—and many aged beyond that—couldn’t get enough of the show. Lamount soon became The Place where the who’s who of West Coast status and wealth sent their children. Politicians, tech millionaires, movie stars, and vintners alike fought tooth and nail to get their offspring admitted to the once-obscure Bay Area institution.

  But nothing good lasts forever, as the saying goes, and the cast of Away grew too old to pose as college students, which was probably for the best, as the show had become trite and excruciatingly formulaic. Enrollment numbers swiftly fell at Lamount once the show went off the air. The university would receive a bump in applications every so often when a cable network ran a marathon of reruns, but it had been some time since that had happened. Though higher-ups would vehemently deny it if ever pressed, and though they’d done an excellent job hiding the fact, the university couldn’t afford any further decreases in attendance. They were desperate to be placed back in the limelight.

  Enter one Professor Eric Evans.

  The particular class he and Jake were discussing now had an enrollment of about two hundred, though Eric taught three separate courses per week, all on the same subject. In total, he had about six hundred students. It was a lot, more than he’d thought he’d ever be able to handle, but the university had furnished him with three other assistants in addition to Jake. And, of course,
his shabby office notwithstanding, he was being paid handsomely. He had very little cause to complain.

  The essay prompt for his class had been to find unusual crimes that had taken place throughout history and then delve into the methods law enforcement had used to investigate or solve the case. Students were encouraged to give the paper a persuasive slant—to argue why or why not they believed the actions the authorities had taken were effective. They were also to state whether they believed the crime had occurred as it was reported in the media and, if they didn’t, to expand on what they thought had really happened. The assignment was straightforward enough, yet there was always a student or two who missed the mark.

  As if on cue, Jake plucked an essay from the pile and said, “Look, here’s one on alien abduction.”

  Eric couldn’t help but laugh. He ran a hand through the cropped, thick brown hair that he’d worn chin length and floppy not so long ago, before he’d separated from his girlfriend, Susan. Upset by the breakup, he’d had it chopped off on impulse. He couldn’t say why he’d done it, but what he did know was that he didn’t miss having strands of wild, curly hair tickling his face constantly.

  Not like how he missed Susan, which he did every day.

  He said, “Not exactly the sort of nontraditional crime I had in mind.” Fraudulence aside, it surprised him how much he’d been enjoying teaching the course, which he’d been doing for the better part of eight months, for two separate semesters. “Though, I guess it does technically fulfill the prompt, so I’ll let it fly.”

  “At the very least, you’ll get a different perspective . . .” Jake’s words trailed off as a student came barging into the office.

  The kid hadn’t knocked and had flung the door open so roughly that it hit the wall with a bang and then bounced off his backpack as it juddered forward. He wore sunglasses, a light-blue hoodie pulled up around his skull, and the lower half of his face hinted at the whisper of an incoming beard. Eric recalled the sketch he’d seen many years ago during the manhunt for Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, thinking that the two bore a striking resemblance.

  “Um, can I help you?” he asked, more amused by the kid’s gall than angry. He wouldn’t have had the nerve to do the same when he was his age. He probably wouldn’t have the nerve to do such a thing even now.

  The kid took off his sunglasses and pulled down his hood. “I need your help.”

  “Okay,” Eric said slowly. “But, as you can see, we’re right in the middle of somethi—”

  “Er-ic,” Jake sang, giving him an urgent look. He seemed distressed by the intrusion.

  “No, it needs to be now,” the kid said. With his eyes pinned on the two men, he quickly shut the door and then reached around his back and locked it. He had the textbook wild-eyed, disheveled-haired appearance of a human on the brink of a nervous breakdown. This did not cause Eric alarm, as it was nothing extraordinary. Most undergrads looked that way around exam time.

  Eric, who had so many students in his class that he had trouble even remembering them by appearance (and forget about names), didn’t recognize the kid. The classroom he taught in was massive to boot, with movie theater–style seating that sloped downward. He couldn’t always get a clear view of the students who sat at the far end of the room. As he’d discovered in his years of teaching, there was a direct correlation between grade average and where a student positioned themselves in class: those who sat in the first two rows typically scored As and high Bs. As the rows descended, so did the student’s grade. He’d also learned that those who started the semester in the back of the room rarely took it upon themselves to move forward. Therefore, if he had no idea who the pushy kid was, it was probably because he hid out in the last rows and never raised his hand.

  Which meant that he was probably looking to argue his way out of a bad grade.

  Eric sighed. “If this is about your essay, we haven’t finished grading them yet.”

  The kid frowned, shook his head. “Essay? What . . . no.”

  “He’s not in your class,” Jake commented in a voice that was full of meaning. “This is Bryan Mc—”

  “Don’t even think about it,” Bryan told Jake, who’d been slowly easing his cell phone out of his pocket.

  Finally, Eric was understanding what was happening. However, had he still been lost, Bryan offered plenty of clarification via the gun he brought out from the waistband of his jeans. He aimed it in the general direction of the two men. “Hand me your phone,” he said to Jake, who immediately complied. “Where’s yours?”

  Eric brought his hands up, using his index finger to point at his desk. “In the top drawer. Look, there’s no need for this. If you want, we can go to the police together.”

  Bryan shook his head. “No police.”

  Jake, hands also raised, said in a reasonable voice, “Come on, man—you murdered your ex. They’re going to find you no matter where—”

  “I didn’t do it,” Bryan told the two men as he broke down in sobs. “I swear I didn’t murder Samantha. I loved her.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Though it seemed that the authorities had been trying to keep the story quiet, news of Samantha’s murder had spread over campus like wildfire in the two days since it had taken place. The name Bryan McDougal was on everyone’s lips, including Jake’s and Eric’s. Before turning their attention to the student papers, they’d been discussing how gossip was painting him as guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. While Eric didn’t endorse the way his students were so quick to condemn—he’d reminded them in class that even murder suspects deserved the right to a fair trial—Bryan wasn’t instilling a lot of confidence in him now by sticking a gun in their faces.

  “I can try to help, but I don’t understand what it is that you want from me, or why you feel it necessary to point a gun at us,” Eric explained to Bryan in a voice he hoped was disarming. This wasn’t the first time his life had been threatened, but the situation with the gun-toting kid was entirely different from in the past, when he’d genuinely believed that he was in real danger of being shot. While he didn’t relish having a firearm brandished in his office, instinct told him that the kid had no real intention of using it. That was the thing about the desperate and the unstable: sometimes they just wanted to be heard out.

  Bryan had made Eric move from behind his desk so that he was sitting next to Jake. He positioned himself above the two men, giving himself a physical advantage. He said, “The police are convinced I murdered Samantha.”

  “It’s all people are talking about on campus,” Jake interjected. “And social media. Your photo is everywhere.”

  Eric gave Jake a hard look: You’re not helping.

  “Is that true?” Bryan asked, looking about as panicked as a person on the lam could be. He began to pace in front of the door like a caged animal.

  Eric nodded, figuring that there was no need to lie. Still, he didn’t want to cause further unrest, because chaos tended to incite unnecessary violence. “I don’t know about the social media stuff, since I deleted all my accounts some time ago. But, yes, word has been put out all over campus, which is why I didn’t recognize you initially—I know you only by name. The police are actively searching for you, Bryan. That’s why it would be better if you turned yourself in. It’s going to be far worse for you in the long run if they have to continue using manpower. Sometimes, showing an act of good faith goes a long way in the eyes of the police and the public.”

  “Plus, hiding out makes you look guilty,” Jake added.

  Bryan shook his head. His gaze was bloodshot and exhausted. “But I’m not guilty! That’s why I came to you, Professor Evans.”

  “I’m not trained as a lawyer, if you’re looking for representation—”

  “No. Nothing like that.” The kid was shifting the gun from hand to hand as he spoke, making Eric anxious. Jake didn’t seem too happy about it either. “I want you to do your thing.”

  Eric was getting a fair idea where the conversation was going. “My thing?”
he asked nevertheless, as if he didn’t know.

  “Yah, I want you to read my mind or whatever you’ve done to solve crimes. Then you’ll know I’m telling you the truth. Maybe you could, uh, talk to Sam’s spirit—she can tell you who killed her? You’re a famous person, so if you say that I’m innocent, the police’ll have to believe me.”

  Eric didn’t want to set Bryan off by denying the impossible request, so he deflected. “How about you start by telling me the story from the beginning, from your side of things?”

  Bryan shrugged and, thankfully, stopped pacing. Eric had started to get nervous. “There’s not much to tell. The police came to my apartment yesterday morning to talk to me about Sam’s . . . you know.” He broke off, cleared his throat. “I wasn’t home—”

  “Where were you?” Jake asked.

  “I was on my morning run—well, morning for me; it was a little past ten. If I don’t do it first thing, then it never gets done,” Bryan explained. “Anyway, I was about a mile in when my roommate called me on my cell and said that the police were there to take me in for questioning. Sam had been found dead in her condo by her cleaning lady. She’d . . .”

  Bryan, on the verge of breaking into sobs again, stopped to collect himself. He was either genuinely upset or one hell of an actor. He made a fist with his free hand, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath.

  Eyebrows raised and head tilted, Jake glanced at Eric meaningfully, as if to ask if they should try to rush their captor. Standing four foot three, Jake was a dwarf, but Eric had no doubt that he could hold his own in a scuffle. He was fierce that way. Still, no need to escalate things and make the situation turn ugly. Besides, despite the gun, Bryan didn’t seem to pose a threat.

  Eric slowly shook his head, mouthing to Jake to relax. He let his breath out when he was sure his friend was going to stay put in his chair. His eyes drifted to the wall clock above the door. His office was located off one of the quieter hallways in the Social Sciences faculty buildings, so it could be well over an hour before another student or professor came knocking. He wondered if any visitor would manage to overhear what was happening and then sneak away and get help, or if they’d be taken hostage as well. He said, “It’s okay, Bryan. Continue when you’re ready.”