by E M Kaplan
Well, why not play the part of a new admirer? It would give me an excuse for tailing him.
Her cell phone rang at that moment—and crap, it was the ringtone she’d assigned to Drew. She stopped to dig the phone out of her pocket while the professor charged ahead, quickly losing her in the streams of students flowing out of the red-bricked Humanities building with the silver lettering that said Goldsmith. Fumbling with her thin and slippery phone, she somehow pressed a side button, which shut off the ringer, silencing it—something she’d never be able to do again intentionally. She and technology were not BFFs.
With a grunt of frustration, she jammed it back into her jeans pocket and jogged, swimming upstream through the crowd of students to catch up with the professor, who had just gone into the building. She caught up to him just outside his office where a line of six or seven students had already formed.
“Hey, guys,” he told them as he juggled his shoulder bag and unlocked his door. “Reduced office hours today, if you saw my note.” He pointed to the paper on his door, which had been taped onto a print of that ubiquitous Escher drawing—the one with the hand drawing another hand, which was drawing the first hand. Josie remembered seeing them in her friends’ dorm rooms when she’d been through college the first time. That, and the melty-faced Edvard Munch “The Scream” painting, which she’d never liked. Abstract art sometimes gave her as much of a stomach ache as eating dairy. She had plenty of bad dreams of her own. She didn’t need to spend time staring at someone else’s.
Professor Sanborn was telling the students outside his office, “I have an appointment first. I’m not even sure I’ll be able to get to you.” Then he gestured to Josie to follow him inside, where he closed the door behind her—but not before some of the disgruntled comments aimed at her hit their mark. Way to let me work my way into their trust, mister.
Disappointed groans followed his announcement. “Who’s that? Some new grad student?” “Why does she get to go first?” Screw this. He’ll never get to the end of the line today. “When does he ever?” “Totally not fair when I have to come from the other side of campus. He should have a lottery.”
For office hours? That seemed excessive.
Josie’s eyebrows shot up at the possessiveness of their whining. They’d looked like regular, everyday students, but maybe one of them was the stalker. She eyed them, stepping around them on the shiny linoleum with a little more caution in case one of them got riled up enough to stab her in the back. Literally. No thank you. Been there, done that.
Inside the professor’s office, she eased down in the lumpy, plaid upholstered chair across from his desk—or what looked to be his desk. Buried under piles of loose papers and half-empty cups of coffee in quirky, handmade pottery cups, was a kidney-shaped coffee table on—she tilted her head to the side and looked underneath—cinder blocks. She sat up in time to catch a landslide of papers as he shifted his book bag across the top. No OCD tendencies with this guy.
“How can you find anything?” She didn’t have room to criticize—she was no neatnik. Not even close, though she was making more of an effort since Drew had moved into her apartment near Fenway Park.
“It may look like chaos, but I have a…system.” More papers slid to the floor, and she didn’t bother to reach for them. Wouldn’t want to mess up his system.
He shuffled around some more and resurfaced with a stack of envelopes, which he handed to her across his term-paper shantytown. The whole thing, if pushed into a barrel, would have made a terrific bonfire. Including the table.
Josie counted the letters slowly as she flipped through them. Five of them. Clean outsides. All the same brand, as far as she could tell, with adhesive-tape flaps that hadn’t been used—the backing tape paper was still on them.
“Before I get my fingerprints all over these, I want to know why you haven’t called the police.”
With an exasperated sigh, Professor Sanborn dropped into his chair, rolling back a foot or so on the castors until he dropped his loafered feet and scooted back toward the desk. “Well, there was this issue last year I had with a student.”
“A similar stalking issue?”
“What? Oh no. God, no. The thing I had with Alyssa last year was… Well, the way it came out was unfortunate. I made some…bad choices. Her parents got involved and threatened to take it to the press. And the university had to settle with her family. Privately.”
The blood pounded in Josie’s head as he avoided eye contact. “You slept with a student?” At least, she hoped that was the worst of it.
“I would call it more of a…an emotional attachment.” He busied his hands with some pens in a cup and looked everywhere but at her. Though Josie still thought his eyes were a startling color, they were quickly losing their power over her. Thank goodness.
She sighed. Clearly, she was going to have to do more prodding to get the whole story from Professor Avoids-The-Facts here. It’d be nice if people were more upfront about things from the get-go. But, she guessed if they were, she wouldn’t really be needed in this capacity—as a fly-the-seat-of-her-pants investigator—would she?
He interpreted her silence as disapproval, which it was, but for a different reason. “All right, yes, I had an affair with a student. Even if it was not the conventional affair that you think of—not physical in any way, despite what they accused me of—it was an affair of the heart. It’s why I’m living in shitty campus housing. My wife found out and she’s divorcing me. It’s not a comfortable situation, but I’ll get through it. You live and you learn.”
“Or you repeat the same mistakes over and over again until karma kicks your butt—or someone’s father comes after you with a shotgun. Equally affective.”
He plowed ahead, clearly not interested in her smart-aleck-ness. “So Alyssa transferred at the end of last year. We broke off our interaction. No harm, no foul.”
“Alyssa was a graduate student?” Josie withheld her cringe as she waited for the answer. More shuffling of papers before he tried to stall—his way of dodging the question.
“What? No. She was an undergraduate. She transferred to Mills College, which I find slightly ironic.” He gave a chuckle, which Josie found inappropriate. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? Mills College in Oakland, California, is a bastion of feminism. At least, it used to be. Who knows what their message is now. And the irony is that Alyssa wanted a daddy. She begged me to take care of her.”
“Is that right?” Josie couldn’t stop from grinding her teeth. Not that she sided with either party particularly in this situation. Unless… “And how old was she when you began having this affair with her?”
He paused and fixed his turquoise stare on her—his bright eyes quickly losing their magnetic effectiveness the more she learned about him. Which was a relief. Finding herself acting pleasant and friendly with someone was downright revolting, even if her behavior was involuntary. “She was a freshman. I assumed she was of age.”
Which did not answer Josie’s question. Whether or not he had actually slept with the girl, it sounded extremely inappropriate, whatever an “affair of the heart” meant exactly.
“And you know what happens when you assume something?” she asked. “You make an ass out of yourself.”
He waited for her to finish the cliché, but as far as she was concerned, he might as well be waiting for the Arizona desert to freeze over.
Chapter 6
“Look,” he said, rubbing his eyes with noticeably ink-stained fingers, “the truth is, I didn’t ask for help with this situation—and I don’t want it. Some higher up at the university clearly believes it needs to be wrapped up. They think it’s going to escalate or some such nonsense. If so, I would completely support their need for closure—and don’t get me wrong, I will cooperate with you. Whatever you need, you just let me know. But I really don’t think this situation calls for such drastic measures. Give it some time, it will blow over and resolve itself.”
Josie stared at
him. “You think I’m a drastic measure?” She hated to admit it, but the compliment stroked her ego a bit. She may have done a small, inner celebratory dance. Oh yeah, I don’t look as incompetent as I feel.
“Then I mentioned it to my brother, who apparently knows your employer. This whole thing has been blown out of proportion. I never should have mentioned it to Mickey in the first place, but he has this thing about him that just makes you want to confess everything. He’s been that way since we were kids.”
Imagine that. A priest as a child confessor. Josie pictured a ten-year-old with a tonsure and had to straighten in her chair to prevent an inappropriate smirk. She refocused on the professor.
Sitting behind his desk in his cliché argyle sweater, he looked like an aging character actor, one who was reading for the part of the beleaguered academic. The mad but adorable scientist—though, in this case, Sanborn’s science was religion and teaching his fanbase of smitten undergraduates replaced working out crazy formulas for an experiment.
What exactly did he have going for him other than some sparkly eyes and nice aftershave? What made him the pied piper of undergraduates?
“I’m going to need complete student rosters for your current classes,” she said.
“Sure, of course. I’ll let Jane know and you can pick them up from her later.”
“Forgive me for being blunt, but why aren’t you more upset about this?” Seriously. If he wasn’t concerned about the situation, why should she be?
If the gender roles had been reversed—if a female professor was being stalked by a male student—wouldn’t there be more fear? More of an atmosphere of menace? Professor Sanborn didn’t seem to be taking any of this very seriously. He didn’t seem the least bit intimidated, irritated, or even flattered, for that matter. Was it possible he knew who his stalker was? And if so, why would he keep that secret?
“Have dinner with me, Miss Tucker,” he said, apropos of nothing. No lead-up. No warning. Barely a pause to change the topic of conversation, for crying out loud. “I have lunch with Dean Handley again tomorrow afternoon. Some big donor is coming in for the Ida Mae thing. But then I’m free tomorrow night.”
She blinked while his invitation took a brief spin around her brain. “Are you getting fresh with me, Professor?” She’d never been great at detecting that kind of thing in the past, but her friends had been working hard to convince her that when she had the slightest inclination to think someone was hitting on her, that meant yes.
He did his own blink in reply. “What? No. Absolutely not. I was just going to boil a pot of pasta with some jarred sauce, which is pretty much the extent of my culinary prowess.”
Interesting. Josie had already identified his “What? No” automatic answer as his tell—the giveaway sign that he was lying and stalling for time. And yikes. Eat with him at his crappy apartment in graduate housing? Turquoise eyes or not, she had no desire to walk into his spider web and eat his roofie-spiked angel hair. Of course she didn’t have proof or, for that matter, reason to suspect he’d drug her and attack her, but paranoia was probably the best strategy here.
“I mean, there’s only so much cafeteria food a guy can take. And it would be totally safe. I’ll even leave the door open, though God knows who else might walk by.”
“Wait. What do you mean by that? Where exactly do you live?”
He gave her a puzzled look. “Didn’t you know? I’m in the basement of your building—in Mandel Hall. Directly below your room, actually.”
#
The “crappy student housing” that the professor had been complaining about was still about a thousand times better than Josie’s single, cinderblock room. He gave her a tour of his apartment after the two of them walked back together to the dorms.
“Kitchenette,” he said, doing a Vanna White flourish with his arm in front of the white and blonde-wood setup that was about three steps in length. Clean but worn white countertops and an older model fridge, which was making more noise than it should have, told the tale of many past residents.
“Sitting room,” he said, about three steps later, gesturing to a small area that held two stained, blue-upholstered couches—the exact same type of which Josie had seen in the common area on her floor upstairs. “These are the reject couches with shiver-inducing stains of unknown origin,” he said. “Destined for the dumpster, I assume. But they make a fine bed pushed together if you have a drunk colleague who doesn’t care stopping by.”
He gave a vague wave in the direction of a short hallway. “Microscopic bed and bathroom over there. I’ll keep that glory private, if you don’t mind.”
Josie was grateful for that. She liked to pride herself on being a decent judge of character and got zero vibes on the sexual predator scale from the professor. But because pride often came before the fall, she resolved to turn down any food or drink if he offered. No sense in being fool-hardy. With that in mind, she figured she should keep a clear path to the door in sight and focus on the yodeling coming from the hallway, which signified other human bodies—other witnesses—were present. Deep laughter of the newly adult male variety echoed down the corridor.
“Students live on this floor with you?” She couldn’t imagine inhabiting this moldy dungeon with no windows, never mind having fellow inmates who were just one rung up from apes. Right as the thought formed in her mind, the timely bark of teenage laughter made her rethink the hierarchy. Baboons were evolutionarily below gorillas, right?
“There’s one double-room at the end that’s occupied. But those fellows are here only because there was some problem with their room on the third floor. Something got screwed up with their heat, so they were moved down here with me. The guys are a bit noisy, and we’ve had some words. But as long as they keep their games down after eleven, I don’t mind.”
“Games?” Josie wondered what that meant. More footsteps thudded down the carpeted hallway. Arena football? She actually appreciated the noise—which would drown out whatever sounds the professor might hear coming from her room directly above his, including, oh…her hashing over the intimate details of his personal life.
“Console games. You know, the box they hook up to a TV with the controller that looks like a boomerang with buttons? They seem to have an entire stereo system…boombox…whatever they’re calling it these days. It’s hooked up to their game system so it sounds like a full-blown arcade. They play those cops and robbers shoot ‘em ups at top volume. I could have sworn a SWAT team was raiding this place the first time I heard it. I almost made water in my smallclothes.”
She choked on a laugh. That was a quote from something, but she wasn’t entirely sure what. Something literary that she probably should have known.
“So weird,” she said, one foot in his kitchen area and the other in the sitting room. “Does it bother you, living so close to your students?”
She heard hollering and heavy pounding of footsteps indicative of an indoor rugby match. Or a maybe a circus. With elephants. The apartment didn’t smell as if animals lived here, but it definitely had a dank, basement odor. When the old fashioned radiators were turned on in this building as it grew colder, the combo smell was probably going to smell like death. Well, not literally like death.
“It’s not so bad.” He shrugged, thumping his book bag down on the floor by the stained couch.
“No late-night troubles?”
“Not a one since that first night with the video games,” he said. “Though, I admit, I take a sleeping pill and pull a blanket over my head at night. Ever since my wife kicked me out, I haven’t been able to sleep without a pill. I know sleep aids are habit-forming—I’ve seen the commercials—but my habit is enjoying sleep, so I haven’t seen reason to stop using it.” He ran a hand through his hair. “So what about dinner?”
Did she want to eat food with him? Her stomach churned at the thought—not because she was afraid of him. At this point, he seemed about as dangerous as Fred MacMurray from The Absent-Minded Professor. Yet, her should
er tingled, the raised line of scar tissue reminding her of just how incautious she’d been in San Francisco just a few months ago.
His apathy about being stalked, however, was setting her teeth on edge. Why didn’t it concern him more?
“Raincheck on dinner,” she said.
If she ever agreed to meet him for dinner, it would have to be somewhere in public with plenty of witnesses.
Chapter 7
Back in her cinderblock dorm room, Josie slumped down on her narrow bed, the stack of unread stalker letters on the night table next to her. She’d finally shut her door on hormonal, t-shirt Tarzan, and now Drew’s low voice rumbled through the phone into her ear, asking where she was.
“I’m living in a room at Bader University—in the freshman dorm. I feel like the new room mother at kindergarten. Greta Williams enrolled me temporarily and moved me into the dorms. I’ve been matriculated.” Which was true—her freshly laminated student ID had a number on it, which she assumed was valid.
He was silent for a minute—a long minute—as that sank in, but he seemed to accept it. Or more likely, he was moving on to the more understandable points of their current problem. Living with her had seemed to make him somewhat immune to general craziness. So that meant she was good for him in a way, right? “You left in the middle of our discussion.”
“Actually, I think it was you who left.” Splitting hairs, she knew, but she didn’t want to be the only one feeling bad about it. Hello, misery really did love company.
