by Mike Markel
“Excuse me?” she said. Not hostile, just surprised.
I gave her a nonthreatening smile. “I’m sorry. Just looking at the books.”
“Have we met?”
“No, we haven’t,” I said. “My name is Karen Seagate. I’m a detective with the Rawlings Police Department.”
Her eyes got wide, then narrowed. “Why were you at my defense?”
“Take a seat, Melissa, would you?” She sat. “The man that was with me, he’s my partner, Ryan Miner. We were here to talk with your adviser. About a case we’re working on.”
Ryan walked in. “I can’t find—” When he saw her, he walked right over and turned it on. “Melissa, I’m Detective Ryan Miner.” He gave her a big smile. “I want to congratulate you on your defense.”
“Glad to meet you,” she said, standing up. She relaxed right away and returned his smile. “Thank you. I’m really glad it’s over.” She laughed awkwardly.
“Sit, please,” Ryan said, and the two of them sat down. “I studied The Awakening in college, but I didn’t realize it had been adapted so often. That must have been a lot of fun to study.”
She adjusted the chair so she could face him directly. “It was. It really was. I’m so glad you got something out of what I was … you know, the part of the defense you heard.”
“It was excellent.” He nodded. “I’m going to have to re-read it, now that I’ve got a better sense of what Chopin was doing.”
Melissa Harmon was wearing a grin as big as Ryan’s. She had cleaned up her smeared makeup, and she looked a lot more pulled together. She wasn’t a bad looking woman, but she was overweight and moved like a linebacker. And she hadn’t figured out what to do with her super curly red hair. You could tell she put a lot of effort into making it behave. But right now, basking in the attention of a handsome devil like Ryan—who said he liked her work on this writer—she was free of the self-consciousness that probably weighed her down like a backpack full of rocks. She looked happy—a lot happier than when she was wearing that frozen smile during the defense. And I was happy for her, even though I knew that Ryan was just working her.
Ryan glanced at me to see if I wanted to lead the interview. I raised my chin a little bit, telling him to keep going. We had never talked about it directly, but we’d gotten into the rhythm of letting him work the young women, particularly the vulnerable ones.
“Melissa, you must have been a little surprised when you saw me and Detective Seagate at your defense.”
She nodded her head and smiled. “If I’d known you were detectives, that really would’ve freaked me out.”
“Like we were going to arrest you if you made a mistake, right?” The two of them laughed. “Actually—” he said, putting on his detective face and turning to me, “did you get a chance to explain the case we’re working on?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
Ryan turned back to Melissa. “It’s an investigation—nothing to do with you—but Suzannah Montgomery’s name came up, and we were hoping you could give us a little information …”
She put her arms out. “If I can help.”
“Tell us about your relationship with Suzannah Montgomery.”
“Suzannah is terrific. I just love her. She’s so friendly and enthusiastic. I mean, you saw how happy she was for me when I defended? That was genuine. And she’s like that with all the students she directs. No, let me change that. She’s like that with all the students—period. I’ve taken, like, three or four seminars with her, and she’s always the same: she wants us all to succeed, to love literature—sure—but the most important thing for her—the thing that’s been most important in my personal development—is she wants us all to be happy.”
“How do you mean?”
“Not in a superficial, greeting-card sense. But in terms of how we approach life: our relationships, our careers, everything. How we live every moment of the day. She sees literature as a way to—this is a phrase she uses all the time—to open up our hearts, make us more receptive to the possibilities of love, to see those possibilities in other people, and ultimately to see it in ourselves.”
Ryan was nodding his head. “Is that why you wanted to work with her on your thesis?”
Melissa laughed. “No,” she said. “That was because Frances Hamblin wouldn’t take me.”
“Frances Hamblin?”
“She’s the queen of American literature here at CMSU. She’s a terrific scholar. All kinds of grants, books, conferences, you name it.”
“What do you mean she wouldn’t take you?” Ryan said.
“It was nothing personal,” Melissa said, but the way she shifted in the chair and put on her plastic smile told me it still hurt. “Because she’s so successful, every MA student wants to work with her—anyone who wants to go on and get a PhD in American, I mean. She takes four students at a time, and I didn’t make the cut.”
“There was some kind of competition?” Ryan said.
“Not officially,” Melissa said, pushing down on a red curl that had escaped from the tortoise-shell clip on the right side of her hair. Her hand trembled slightly. “But looking back on it now, now that I’m almost done, I can see there was a competition. It started when the faculty got us all together at a little party before our first semester began. They were asking us about why we wanted to study literature, what we wanted to do for a living, who our favorite authors were, that sort of thing. At the time, we all assumed it was chit-chat, but now I’m convinced it was the start of the audition. Then, in the classes, of course, she was evaluating each of us all the time. So when it came time for us to ask a professor to chair our committee, I think Professor Hamblin already knew who she was going to take.”
“So if she works with you, it’s easier to get into a PhD program?”
Melissa tried to smile. “She picks up the phone and makes a call.”
“But you’ve been happy working with Suzannah Montgomery?”
“Oh, absolutely,” she said. “She’s been so supportive. It’s not like Professor Hamblin won’t talk with me or anything like that. In fact, she gave me the topic for my thesis—the Chopin thing. That play I mentioned, in Minneapolis, based on The Awakening? She’d seen it when she was in Minneapolis one time at a conference and was telling Suzannah about it, and Suzannah passed it along to me. Professor Hamblin is very generous in that way.”
“How well do you know Austin Sulenka?” Ryan said.
The abrupt shift caught her by surprise. She paused a moment, then said, “Austin and I …” She paused a moment to think. “We’ve worked together on two or three projects.” She nodded. “He’s okay, I guess. He does his share of the work but nothing more. No, he’s good. No complaints. I really don’t know him that well.” But her expression said she had indeed given some thought to the topic of Austin Sulenka.
“I imagine you’ve been in a lot of courses with him, right?” Ryan said. “He’s in American, too, right?”
“That’s right. He’s doing something with Poe. Not sure exactly what. We don’t … we’re not close, socially.”
“And May Eberlein?”
“Yeah, those two. They’re in the same circle. But she’s in British. Don’t know what period or anything.”
“I don’t know how close all the English grad students are,” Ryan said, “but do you know if Austin and May are still a couple?”
“Brangelina? Yeah, I think they are. I don’t really know. There’s two groups in the department, basically. I mean the girls. Those that Austin hooks up with, and the rest.” She paused, a wistful look coming over her face. “I’ve been so busy, with my courses, and the thesis—I really don’t have the patience to keep track of who Austin’s sleeping with.” But it was clear from the way she said it—the way her eyes drifted off into the distance when she said sleeping with—if she didn’t want him to fuck her, she really wanted him to want to.
Ryan picked it up, too. He nodded, like a father telling his gawky fourteen-year-old
daughter she shouldn’t worry, that she’d find the right guy. “So,” he said with a little bump on it, to get her mind back on track, “what’s next for you, Melissa?”
She put her smile back on. “I’ll probably stay on here, at least for a while. Teach first-year. Maybe I’ll get an American survey.” She was nodding her head, telling us—trying to tell herself—it would be okay.
“No PhD program at the moment?”
“I don’t think so.” Her posture sagged a little. “Suzannah isn’t connected to the programs, you know, like Professor Hamblin is. I’m going to try to mine the thesis for a couple of articles. I’m sure I’ll be able to get something in one of the journals for grad students, or an online journal. But, to be honest, I’m not sure I have what it takes get a PhD. When I’ve got a topic, I can do okay with it, but … I just don’t have the kind of mind that comes up with ideas like that. Certainly not like Professor Hamblin. Not even like Suzannah.”
Ryan smiled. “I’ve got a sister, PhD in English. I’ve got to tell you: when you were doing the defense today, you reminded me a lot of her. Don’t sell yourself short. If you want a PhD, go after it.”
Melissa sat up taller in her chair and gave him a genuine smile. “That’s really nice of you to say.”
If Ryan had asked her to marry him, she’d have said, “Yes, please. Would this afternoon work for you?”
Ryan stood and picked up his cane off the conference table. I stood, too. “Can I help you get these books back to your office?”
“No, thanks, that’s fine,” she said. She scooped them all up. I counted twelve books. She was a big girl.
“Thanks for talking with us, Melissa.” Ryan slipped his card into the pages of one of the books, up near her chin. I got the door for her but stayed silent, not wanting to break the spell.
After she left the conference room, I turned back to Ryan. “You dawg.”
He gave me his innocent, confused-boy look. “Just interviewing the young lady to understand more about our murder victim.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Ryan.” I was smiling. “That girl’s down in her office right now, writing Melissa Miner in her notebook.”
“She’s a good kid. All she needs is a little attention. Then watch her blossom.”
“Okay, let’s do the counseling some other time. What did you get from your new girlfriend?”
He thought for a second. “Well, there seems to be a class system among the students. The really smart ones get to work with the active scholars, like Frances Hamblin. The others work with the ones who are really nice, like Suzannah Montgomery.”
“Which lines up with what Jonathan Van Vleet told us about Austin Sulenka,” I said. “He wasn’t a serious student, so he ended up with Suzannah.”
“And the active professors are the rainmakers. They give away topics for the kids to write about,” Ryan said. “And they help their students get into PhD programs.”
“And the Melissas end up—what’s the word for the contractors who teach for shitty pay?”
“Adjuncts,” Ryan said.
“So Austin was gonna end up an adjunct, teaching freshmen.”
Ryan shrugged. “We’ll never know.”
I looked at my watch: 3:45. A little more than an hour before most people would learn about Austin’s death. “Melissa said she got her thesis topic from Frances Hamblin. Wanna see if we can track her down?”
“Since Frances Hamblin knows Suzannah Montgomery, maybe she’ll tell us if Suzannah was one of his girlfriends.”
“Maybe she’ll tell us if she was one of his girlfriends.”
“Frances Hamblin?” Ryan laughed. “With all her books? The articles, the conferences? Why would she be interested in a mediocre grad student like Austin?”
“Oh, Ryan. Poor Ryan. So handsome, so buff, so dumb.”
Chapter 10
The secretary told us Frances Josephine Hamblin’s office number but said she wouldn’t be in because it isn’t Wednesday.
“She part-time?”
“Professor Hamblin teaches one course, Wednesday night, and she comes into the office late Wednesday afternoons.” The secretary didn’t say, “She makes five times what I make, and I have to haul my sorry ass in here by eight am, five days a week.” She didn’t have to. Her left eyebrow said it.
“One course. Really?” I put enough sauce on that last word to show her I was a working stiff myself. “Could you give us her address?”
She wrote it down on a slip of paper, along with a phone number. “She asks that you call first. She doesn’t just answer the door.”
“Want me to call her?” Ryan said as we headed down to the Charger.
“No,” I said. “I’d rather surprise her. If we lean on her doorbell, she’ll answer.”
We got in the car and Ryan looked up the address on Google. “It says 2914 Blue Stem,” he said. “That’s behind the gates, isn’t it? In Ravensmere?”
“No idea,” I said. “Just get me there.”
It took us less than ten minutes to make it through the patchy traffic and up to the gate, which I opened using the year-plus-pound password that was standard throughout the city. Blue Stem turned out to be one of the four streets that snaked around the tennis courts and the pool and bordered the Rawlings River and the Greenpath. Behind the gate, every one-acre lot had a two- or three-story mansion that went for a million or two. Each house had a theme. One looked like a ski lodge. Another was phony Tudor. The next had Greek columns over the two-story entryway. One looked like a giant bird, with two symmetrical wings that swept up and out, away from the main part of the house.
There were no fences between the lots. I remember reading about that when the development went up about fifteen years ago. All the owners had to grow the same kind of grass, so one lawn would flow into the next, like a fairway at a golf course. The kind of golf course that officially admits black people but for some reason never has admitted any. The whole place was truly puke-worthy.
We parked at the curb at 2914 Blue Stem and walked up the flagstone path toward the house. It was two stories, with a jagged roofline, which made the thing seem to go on and on, like a British manor house that was built in 1300 but expanded six times since. Stones the size of breadboxes stuck out of the stucco in a random pattern at the corners, for no apparent reason. The doorway was double-wide. On either side of the doors were thin frosted-glass panels with flower motifs and the initials RJH in the glass.
“Your father’s a professor, right?” I said as we waited.
“That’s right,” he said.
“You grow up in a place like this?”
He pointed at the garage with dormer windows above each of the four bays. “Closer to that.”
I waited about half a minute, then leaned on the bell again so it rang repeatedly.
Professor Frances Josephine Hamblin opened the door. She was wearing a nasty scowl. “I heard you the first time.”
“Professor Hamblin?” I said, giving her a smile that made it clear I wasn’t going to respond to her comment.
She was in her mid-sixties, a cappuccino-colored black woman with white hair, curly but not quite an Afro. She was tall and thin, but her posture was stooped, and she leaned on a shiny black wooden cane with a silver handle. She wore black wool slacks, pleated, and a black silk blouse than hung limp over her thin torso. No jewelry. “Who wants to know?”
“That would be me.” I fished my shield out of my bag and hung it around my neck. “Detective Karen Seagate. My partner, Detective Ryan Miner. Can we have ten minutes?”
“What about?”
“We’re working on a case. We thought you could help us with some information.”
“Show me an ID.”
Most people are good with the gold shield. I retrieved my wallet from my big shoulder bag, opened it to the picture ID, and handed it to her. She looked at it, then looked at me, sniffed dismissively, and handed it back to me.
“Would you like to see mine, too?” Ryan sai
d, with enough sarcasm for me to get it but not so much that Frances Hamblin would.
She looked at him, top to bottom, taking in his drugstore aluminum cane, and turned to me.
“Make it quick,” she said as she stepped back to permit us to enter her house. Invite wouldn’t be the word. “I’m very busy.”
“We appreciate that, Professor Hamblin,” I said. Of course you’re busy: you have your course to prepare for later this week. “We’ll be fast.” We stood on the black-veined marble tiles in the double-height foyer. Off to one side I could see some kind of sun room, dominated by a gleaming mahogany grand piano. Off to the other was a sitting room built around a huge fireplace with a marble mantelpiece and all kinds of nice chairs that I wouldn’t have minded trying out. She didn’t invite us into either of the rooms.
“We were talking with a graduate student, Melissa Harmon,” I said. “She just defended her thesis.” Professor Hamblin furrowed her brows, as if she was trying to place the student. Her eyes were ringed with raised black spots. I said, “Big-boned woman. Red hair.”
She waved her hand in a circle, telling me to get to the point. Now I understood the furrowed brows: she was trying to think of why she should give a shit.
“She mentioned that you came up with the idea for her master’s thesis.” Frances Hamblin just shrugged. “About a play. Something about Kate Chopin. You saw a play in Minneapolis.”
She nodded. “Yes, I remember the play. Don’t remember giving the idea to the student.”
“Melissa said you gave the idea to Suzannah Montgomery, who gave it to her.”
She stuck her chin out. “A pedestrian topic. Perfect for giving away.”
I looked over at Ryan, signaling him to jump in. “Why is that, Professor?” he said.
She looked at him, mildly annoyed at having to explain the obvious. “Because it doesn’t get us any closer to the text. How others have interpreted the book over the last century? Frankly, who cares?” I couldn’t place her accent. It reminded me a little of the Kennedy brothers.
“That’s interesting—” Ryan said.
