Red Solaris Mystery Series Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Bourne Morris

  “I think you should be here,” Edwin said and hung up.

  I stood, the phone still in my hand, stunned, envisioning what had happened. In my mind I saw a body falling down the stairs to the landing below. Was it Henry? Why? Had he fainted? Henry was sixty. He had a minor heart problem a few years ago but it had taught him fitness. Henry was in good shape. Like Edwin, he took the stairs every day.

  The phone rang again. The second caller identified himself as Detective Joe Morgan from the local police. The man I had met, the detective with green eyes.

  “Dr. Solaris, I’m sorry to tell you your dean has died from a fall down a flight of stairs. We need you to come to the journalism school right away.” That was all. No recognition we had met at his sister’s, no expression of sympathy. All business.

  The air in my hallway chilled. Even the phone in my hand felt cold.

  I put on a wool hat and coat and headed for the car. Soft snow had started falling outside. Night had arrived and I knew the roads would be icy. Mountain West University is only ten minutes from my house, but there are two hills to contend with on the way. On warm days the trees form a shimmering canopy over the road. But in winter, the road is gray, the sky is gray, and the trees are barren. At night in winter, the road is dangerous. Snow and black ice are problems on the streets of Landry, Nevada. A town of 150,000 can only afford so many plows for its main streets. It was Sunday night—those plows would not be out until the next morning.

  I felt as if I had swallowed broken glass. Henry Brooks had been my champion as well as my friend. I wanted to sit in the car and cry, but no tears came—just a deep throbbing inside me.

  I had expected something awful was going to happen. The faculty arguing had ramped up, people refused to greet each other in the hallways. “It’s a goddamned gang war,” Henry had told me. “Please don’t dignify it with terms like academic dispute.”

  The wool hat itched. I took it off. Then I took off the scarf I had thrown around my neck. My car smelled of the dog I had left at home.

  The campus was dark. Falling snow softened the outlines of the classic brick buildings. Most of the major colleges on the fifteen acre campus were constructed a century ago and clustered together in the center. As I rounded the curve on the campus road, I saw one of the smaller buildings—the journalism school—was lit up inside and out. Three police cars were pulled up to the front of the parking lot, doors open, roof lights revolving.

  I parked near the front door of the building. An officer appeared at my car window, asked for my identification and then offered to help me through the snow. He told me to go in and up to the second floor. I walked through the first floor lobby, a two-story room flanked on the right with a wall of graduation class pictures, and on the left with photographs of major donors to the school.

  A woman officer stood at the base of the steps leading to the second floor.

  “Sorry, you can’t go up there,” she said, adjusting the gun on her hip. She was pale and homely, hair pulled back in a tight bun, no make-up.

  “I’m the associate dean of the school. The police asked me to come.”

  “Name?”

  “Meredith Solaris.”

  The policewoman looked dubious, pulled out a piece of paper and a notepad, made a note on the paper, then shifted to one side so I could pass.

  Blood had dripped down from the second floor landing to the top steps of the flight of stairs down to the lobby. I stepped carefully up to the landing and saw the body. The head was turned away from me so I could not see the face, but the form was familiar, long legs, slim hands with delicate fingers, thinning gray hair. It was Henry. The smell in the stairwell was familiar too, sickly-sweet. It made me gag.

  “Thanks for coming. Sorry to call you out on a night like this.” Detective Joe Morgan stood two steps above where Henry’s feet splayed. He was writing in his notebook and didn’t look at me until I spoke. Another man knelt between the body and me.

  “How did this happen?” I sounded raspy.

  “We still aren’t sure,” Joe said. “I called you when I could only get voicemail for the provost and the president.”

  Joe Morgan was irritated, disheveled, not as sharply attractive as I’d found him when we first met. He looked down at the short, heavy man in a parka who was kneeling and examining the body.

  “This is Danny Ranko, our medical examiner. Danny, meet Dr. Meredith Solaris. She’s the associate dean of the school.”

  Ranko lifted his head and nodded at me, then returned to his work.

  Joe Morgan still did not look at me. A click and Ranko started dictating into a small recorder: “The victim appears to be a white male in his early sixties. From the position of the body it appears he fell, or was pushed, face-forward down the stairs, cracking his ribs, breaking his nose. The mouth and cheeks are covered with blood and broken bone. From the look of it I think he was dead before his forehead hit the landing. I’ll confirm that in the autopsy.” Ranko clicked off the recorder.

  I grasped the stair railing to steady myself. I wanted to cry out, but I couldn’t make a sound. Henry Brooks was dead, sprawled on a concrete stairway. I could not weep. I could not believe it. I had just seen Henry the Friday before. He was laughing at something as he listened on his phone, his mouth open, the lines around his eyes creased. My throat closed.

  “I’m going up to his office on the third floor,” Joe Morgan said. “Why don’t you go back down to the elevator and take it up? We’ll leave Ranko to finish up.”

  The nausea hit me when I entered the elevator. Christ. Don’t throw up in here. The minute the doors opened on the third floor, I raced for the women’s bathroom and vomited in the toilet. I heard a second flush from the men’s room next door. Joe emerged at the same time I did.

  We walked to Henry’s office and stood in the doorway. Nothing seemed out of order—no scattered papers, no lamps overturned. It was neat and tidy and cold.

  “Did the dean usually work on Sundays?” Joe asked.

  “Often. I suppose you’ve heard the faculty has been at odds this semester. Lots of arguing. No one volunteers for our school committees so the dean has had to do more work than usual.” I was babbling, nervous.

  “So I heard from my sister.” His expression was softer. “You okay to talk?”

  I nodded. “Did you know Henry?”

  We entered my third floor office. I closed the door, sat behind my desk, and looked out over the quad. Snow was falling, heavier than before.

  Joe Morgan took off his coat and draped it over the back of one of the chairs. I opened the small refrigerator next to my desk and offered him some bottled water.

  “Never met Henry Brooks, although my sister spoke highly of him,” said Joe, taking the water and sitting down. “I’m sorry to have to put you through this, but what can you tell me about him?”

  Even though my eyes were dry, Joe must have sensed my distress because his voice softened and his eyes looked more sympathetic. “I know this must be a shock, Dr. Solaris. Do you need to be alone for a bit?”

  “Please call me Red. You did at Elaine’s house when we met.”

  “Sorry. I wasn’t sure you’d remember me.”

  I smiled weakly, remembering my conversation with Sadie and sipped from my own bottle of water. I cleared my throat and leaned forward on my desk.

  Joe leaned forward as well. “I know this is hard. But the sooner I know as much as I can, the sooner I can figure out what happened.”

  He produced a notebook and I began to talk about Henry. I got through Henry’s background—a PhD from the top journalism school in the country, assistant professor at Illinois when he was hired by Mountain West. Winner of two national journalism awards, he was a tenured full professor when the old dean retired. At the urging of the faculty, Henry applied for the dean’s position and was successful in spite of several distinguished
competitors from other universities.

  “We usually like to hire deans from outside, but by then Henry was a nationally known scholar and so remarkable, so special...” finally the tears broke.

  Joe handed me a handkerchief but I pushed it back and reached for a box of tissues in my bottom drawer. Joe waited until I was more composed.

  “Your colleague, Edwin Cartwell, told me Henry was a widower and lived alone. There’s no girlfriend we should call?”

  I shook my head and blew my nose. Actually, there was someone to call but I was not about to tell Joe Morgan—or anyone else—that I suspected Dean Henry Brooks had been having an affair. And I was certainly not going to say I was fairly sure the woman Henry had had been sleeping with was Edwin Cartwell’s wife.

  Then I remembered Edwin had called me before Joe did.

  “Is Edwin Cartwell still here? He called me at my house. I should probably talk to him.”

  Joe got up and opened the door for me. “Cartwell should be in his office. He told me he needed some time to collect himself before I take him down to the station for his statement.”

  I walked down a long hall and around a corner. Faculty offices were all on the third floor. Most were small and windowless. But Edwin Cartwell was a tenured full professor; his office was large with windows facing a small garden.

  I could hear Edwin’s voice before I got to the door. He was talking on the phone.

  No, he was singing on the phone.

  “Ding, dong the wicked dean is dead,” Edwin sang.

  He repeated the phrase several times for the listener. I froze a foot away from his door and pressed against the wall. Who was he talking to? Was he actually happy about Henry?

  “No I didn’t kill him,” I heard Edwin say. “I found him.”

  I moved into the light coming from his doorway. As soon as he saw me, his tone changed. “Yes, terrible,” he said into the phone. “I’ll call you later. I promise.”

  “One of the faculty?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Just a friend.” His mouth curved into the suggestion of a smile. Smug bastard. Edwin is thin and wiry with a complexion so pallid it’s almost ivory. He rose and adjusted the visitor’s chair in front of his desk.

  “Tragic, Meredith. Absolutely tragic.”

  “Yes, Edwin. It’s a great loss for the school.”

  Edwin folded his hands neatly on his desk. His hands are always clean and manicured. He was wearing a dress shirt and a dull brown sweater vest. Formal, even on a Sunday. “I know you admired Dean Brooks a great deal. Please accept my deepest sympathies.”

  “And you mine,” I said. I was not about to let him know what I had overheard. “You knew him longer than I did.”

  “Ah, yes. Many years.” Edwin brought his hands up and patted what was left of his sandy hair. “And his children, too. Poor dears. Would you like me to call them?”

  Not you, Ding Dong.

  “No thanks. I’ll call them in a bit,” I said, watching Edwin try to compose a tragic expression on his sharp face. “Tell me, when did you find the body?”

  “Around five forty-five,” he said. “I called 911 and then I called you.”

  “Are you all right?” I asked—as if I cared. “Have you called your wife?”

  “I haven’t told Mary.” He fiddled with a pencil just long enough to seem reflective. “I’ll tell her when I get home from the police station. I have to give a statement, you know.” His thin lips pursed, prissy, self-satisfied. With what? The death of a colleague?

  “Yes, I know you have to go to the station,” I said. I stood up and turned to leave. His eyes followed me to the door.

  Great, I thought walking back to my office. Later tonight, Mary Cartwell will hear about the death of her perhaps-lover from her perhaps-deceived husband. How will she handle that? How long will she have to wait to get to the bathroom so she can throw up or break down?

  Joe Morgan was on his cellphone but ended the conversation the moment he saw me. He moved closer to the door of my office. Closer to me. His hair was combed and his face was no longer strained. He looked like the attractive man I had met at Elaine’s dinner party.

  “You need me to drive you home, Red?”

  “No. I’m all right. Snow is better than ice.”

  Too bad. It would have been nice to get a ride home with a good-looking cop, but I was too tired, too sad. I told myself I didn’t want to leave my car overnight in the parking lot.

  “I think Edwin Cartwell is ready to leave,” I said.

  “Okay. I’ll retrieve him,” said Joe. “But I do have a favor to ask you.”

  “A favor?”

  “I’d like to meet with you tomorrow morning. I need to know more about Henry Brooks and whatever you can tell me about the others here. Would eight be too early to come by your house?”

  “No, eight will be fine.”

  I left him and headed back to the elevator and then out to my car. Normally, I love the northern Nevada winters. Sun so bright you need sunglasses when snow is on the ground. Crisp, dry, high desert air so different from the wet, bitter Midwest chill I endured as a child. Normally, I loved the Mountain West campus, its graceful college buildings surrounded by wide lawns and gardens, all facing a quad that looked more like Virginia than Nevada. But that night I would have traded places with any professor at any other college to escape my sorrow, not to mention my dread of returning to the school without Henry Brooks to guide me.

  Chapter 3

  As I drove home, I found myself thinking as much about myself as I was about my lost friend. I didn’t know how the school would survive without Henry. On top of that, Joe Morgan’s request to see me the next morning kept intruding on my grief, and it worried me. I have a history of meeting the wrong guy at the wrong time. Ask me why I never married, why I left a good university offer in Ohio and, sooner or later, if I am being honest, I’ll stop talking about the career opportunities at Mountain West and start talking about the men in my life. I’ll talk about the men who disappointed me, both good guys and troubled guys. I might talk about the father who disappeared into grief for a wife who didn’t deserve him—and forgot about the daughter who did.

  And, if I’ve had a few too many, I may even talk about my mother. She was born in the west. I wasn’t, but it’s my blood. I am attracted to the west for more reasons than I fully understand. Big Sky country gets to me. Nevada is more home than Ohio ever was. The town of Landry is in northern Nevada nestled in a gentle valley with views of the Sierra Mountains to the west. From here you can drive to Reno in less than an hour and to San Francisco in an afternoon.

  My old Ohio friends used to call and tell me they were in Las Vegas and wondered if I could drive over for lunch. It delighted me to inform them that Landry is separated from Las Vegas by six hundred miles of desert and a nuclear dumpsite. “Oh,” they would say and return to the blackjack tables.

  What I didn’t tell them is that northern Nevada is nothing like the low desert of southern Nevada. The few times I had flown to Las Vegas, I had looked out of the plane window down at the huge desert landscape and wondered why the first fellow ever stopped there. Perhaps his horse died.

  In contrast, Landry is quiet and green, evergreen in winter and lush with deciduous trees and lawns in summer. Outside of town, the landscape is harsher but still beautiful. High desert shrubs and rugged mountains surround us. Not just big sky, it’s blue-sky country all year ’round where the sun shines almost every day and the air is always dry.

  By the time I got back to my house, the snow was two inches thick on the ground and I realized I had been too lost in sadness and thoughts of Henry to be frightened of black ice on the drive home. I needed a cup of coffee and some time to reflect on what had happened. The answering machine was blinking, but I ignored it and went into the kitchen. The dog must have sensed I was unhappy. Instead of
his usual excited greeting, he just ambled over and put his soft nose into the palm of my hand.

  I was the one who had to tell the faculty that the dean of our school was dead. Only some would seriously mourn Henry Brooks’ death. Nonetheless, every one of them would be in a state when they got the news, even those who hated him. A dead dean meant we’d have to search for a new dean and new leadership meant significant change. Academics don’t care much for change.

  We were already at swords’ points about our journalism curriculum. One group wanted to shift the school’s emphasis to new media, online journalism, computer assisted reporting, blogs. Their opponents wanted to stay with a traditional focus on reporting, basic print, and broadcast journalism. What should have been a lively academic debate had, over time, become a divisive name-calling fight, as painful as an outbreak of shingles.

  I ignored the blinking light on my phone, poured a second cup of coffee, and sat down at the kitchen table. I wanted to remember Henry, to honor him in some way. The last time I’d seen him in his office, I’d asked:

  “Do all faculty groups fight like ours?”

  “No,” he had said looking up from his computer and turning toward me. Henry was fine featured, elegant looking, and, I suspected, just a bit vain about his appearance. Always in cashmere and tweed jackets, Henry could have passed for a British aristocrat. His once blond hair was gray but his blue eyes were bright and his brow smooth. He had rubbed his temples and put his elbows on his desk.

  “Many faculty groups get along very well. We are just going through a very bad patch, Red. Sadly, it’s not unusual on a university campus.”

  “But why? Before I went into teaching, when I worked at the newspaper, we knew if you started any serious inter-office trouble, you could get canned. On the flip side, if you didn’t like it there, you could leave and get a job somewhere else.”