Nani gave me a hug and headed back to her apartment. Alika walked to his car, tossing me a wave before opening the door. As he drove away, I thought about my decision to skirt the criminal angle of this particular story for the follow-up articles, focusing instead on an ignored deadly threat.
My interest in pursuing a career as a freelance reporter hadn’t wavered. One day, I would get the coveted byline. But the job offered endless possibilities. This latest project would take me on a path less traveled, expanding my horizons. And might even give me a glimpse of the green flash.
Gail M. Baugniet
Gail M. Baugniet is the author of the Pepper Bibeau mystery series. After working as a police officer on the mainland and a dispatcher on O‘ahu, she now writes full time at her home in Honolulu. Gail is an active member of several writers groups and current president of Sisters in Crime/Hawai‘i. She spends most of her time in writing related activities. With year-round warm weather, her lānai makes an excellent writing studio, where she is currently at work on her next novel.
Find me on the web at gail-baugniet.blogspot.com and follow me on Facebook.
Trust Fall
Frankie Bow
A hard nudge in the ribs jolted me awake.
“Molly,” Emma hissed. “C’mon, stand up.”
I had dozed off in one of the comfortable new chairs in Administrative Complex Conference Room 5B, my head resting on the shoulder of my best friend and fellow sufferer, Emma Leilani Kano‘opomaika‘i Nakamura.
“What?” I rubbed my eyes.
“Are you sleeping?”
“Well I was. Why do we have to stand up?”
“We’re doing the trust fall thing now. Eh, don’t let Jake see you making that face or he’s gonna give us another lecture about our attitude.”
“What? I’m not making a face. This is my face.”
Jake Ahu, Director of Faculty Development, glared around the room, and tightened his grip on his clipboard.
“This is a trust fall, people. Come on, everyone out of your seats. We are cultivating a culture of trust here on our campus.”
Jake’s unenviable task was to wrangle us through a full workday of “team building”: making orange, gold, green, and blue hats out of construction paper, building towers with marshmallows and dry spaghetti, and falling backwards off of chairs. Jake was maybe in his late thirties, but looked prematurely haggard. His black hair was shot through with gray, and his bright aloha shirt fit a little too loosely around the neck.
“Fine,” he said. “If no one’s going to come forward, we’ll do it by department.”
At least he wasn’t insufferably chipper. I’ll give him that.
Jake tapped his clipboard with his pen.
“Anthropology? Anthropology isn’t here. Art, also not here. Biology, Emma Nakamura, there you are. You’re going first. Come on. Everyone. Up to the front of the room. Molly Barda, College of Commerce, you’re next after Emma. Kyle Stockhausen, Digital Humanities, you’re after Molly.”
I’m Molly. Molly Barda, Ph.D. I earned my doctorate at one of the top ten literature and creative writing programs in the country, and this is not where I expected to end up. By “this,” I mean an eight-hour team-building retreat in the Administrative Complex at remote Mahina State University, in Mahina, Hawai’i where, according to our radio spots, “Your Future Begins Tomorrow.” In the entire history of business and enterprise, has there been any practice less humane, less conducive to employee solidarity, and more likely to tip the garden-variety introvert into full-blown misanthropy, than the team-building retreat?
“I’m in the management department,” I said to Jake. “That starts with an M.”
“Well I’m still after you,” said the chair of the philosophy department.
“You’re both in front of me,” said a man behind me. I turned to see Scott Nixon, Kyle Stockhausen’s main competitor for the title of Hipster Humanities Heartthrob. Unlike the earnest Stockhausen, Nixon affected an air of bemused detachment (which the undergraduates in his Jane Austen elective reportedly found irresistible). Stockhausen was blond, and wore whimsical t-shirts to display his indifference to status; Nixon had dark hair, and bolstered his bad-boy persona by wearing a black leather jacket, which must have been torture in Mahina’s sultry climate. Both men sported black-framed glasses and a fashionable sprinkling of stubble.
“Scott,” I said, “in what alphabet does English come after management and philosophy?”
“I teach writing.”
“Hey,” someone said. “What about ag? Where’s the person from ag?”
“He’s coming in later,” Jake said. “They have to testify at the GMO hearings.”
I eyed the exit door, wondering if I could slip out unseen and get to grading the stack of papers waiting for me back in my office. Getting my students’ assignments returned seemed like a better use of my time than standing on chairs.
All of the conference rooms in the new Administrative Complex had back exit doors. They allowed escape in case a mad gunman burst into the room. The classrooms didn’t have this safeguard. In fact, the new administration building boasted several features our classrooms lacked, like recessed lighting, polished marble floors, and functional air conditioning.
“I’ll go first.”
Kyle Stockhausen, assistant professor of digital humanities, strode up to the Trust Fall Chair. The Trust Fall Chair wasn’t one of the red, gold, or green conference room chairs (the new school colors, as decided by student referendum). Those chairs all had wheels, and anyway, I’m sure the administration didn’t want us stepping all over the seat cushions with our dirty shoes. No, the Trust Fall Chair was plain, straight-backed, and made of wood. It had probably been ordered online and shipped from the mainland, just for this event.
“Thank you for volunteering, Professor Stockhausen,” Jake nodded at him.
“Please Call me Kaila.”
I heard Emma snort. Emma, who grew up just a few miles down the road from Mahina State University, had definite opinions about “white people who move here from Nebraska and give themselves Hawaiian names.”
“Mahalo nui loa, brother,” said Kyle/Kaila Stockhausen as Jake helped him up onto the wooden seat. He slowly stood, his spiky blonde hair almost brushing the ceiling.
“Come on, everyone move in closer.” Jake motioned us forward. “You’re all going to have to come together to catch him when he falls. Kyle, sorry, Kaila, turn around and put your arms out.”
He did, displaying the black courier lettering on the back of his pale yellow t-shirt: Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. –Albert Einstein
“Einstein never said that,” Emma muttered.
“Now the rest of you, move in. Closer, you have to be right underneath so you can catch him.”
“I have to apologize for my colleagues,” Stockhausen said over his shoulder. “They don’t yet realize what a privilege this is. I appreciate the value of these high-touch team-building activities. In fact, I use many of these exercises in my own classes.”
This was the limit for Emma.
“Give it a rest, Stockholm-syndrome,” she shouted. “You teach all your classes online.”
Before anyone could react to Emma’s outburst, the exit door at the far end of the room flew open. Everyone turned toward the welcome distraction. A man wearing shorts and a t-shirt stood silhouetted in the doorway.
“Am I late?” the newcomer asked.
“Here’s our Ag person,” Jake said. “Come in, come in. You’re just in time for the—”
Jake’s sentence was cut short by the scrape of wood on marble, and an ugly thud. We all pushed forward to get a look.
Kyle Stockhausen lay face up on the polished marble floor, blood spreading behind his head
like a crimson halo.
Kyle “Kaila” Stockhausen’s reputation improved markedly after his demise. In death, his virtues were magnified, while his lapses faded from memory. His self-righteous lecturing of fellow faculty, who didn’t “get it” or were “doing it wrong,” his refusal to impose even minimal standards in his classes, even the rumors of Stockhausen’s fraternizing with students were viewed with revised tolerance. After all, Quentin Virtanen, chair of the philosophy department, was happily married to the pretty young Ife, and hadn’t she been his student years ago? Because Stockhausen had been considerate enough to expire during the summer term, the administration thought kindly of him, too, as they had plenty of time to hire a replacement lecturer to take over his fall classes.
Stockhausen’s death had appeared to be a straightforward accident, so neither an autopsy nor a police investigation was deemed necessary. This, however, didn’t keep Emma from being found guilty in the court of campus opinion. Everyone knew Emma had tried to pick a fight with him during his last moments on earth. Some went so far as to claim Emma’s harsh words had physically knocked Stockhausen off the chair.
A week after the incident, Emma and I were down at the Maritime Club, observing our customary Monday happy hour. Our reasoning was everyone is already in a good mood most Friday afternoons. Monday is when happy hour is really needed. The Maritime Club isn’t terribly fancy, but nothing in Mahina is fancy. The weather-beaten little clubhouse is perpetually in need of a new paint job. The bill of fare probably hasn’t been updated since 1952, good news for fans of split pea soup and baked Alaska. The Maritime Club’s outstanding feature is its magnificent oceanfront location. At low tide, you can walk a few steps down the grassy bank to the tide pools and watch damselfish and little snowflake eel darting among the spiny urchins and lobe coral.
Emma and I chose a table on the outdoor lānai. Waves sparkled in the afternoon sun, breaking on the black lava rock and misting us with salt spray. I ordered a house cabernet, Emma got a Mehana Volcano Red Ale, and we settled in to wait for our drinks and ponder the curved blue horizon.
“This Stockhausen thing is out of control,” Emma said. “I’m thinking I might have to start looking for another job.”
“I thought you didn’t care what people think,” I said. “Is it that bad?”
“It’s bad.” Emma nodded. “I can deal with a few people not talking to me, not making eye contact, whatever. But this morning, I went to the financial aid office to drop off a recommendation letter, and the student worker, this little girl, just bust out crying, screaming how could I do it, didn’t I know what he meant to her. Crazy.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Nothing. Financial aid is across from the counseling office, so before I could tell her to snap out of it and get a grip, all these people came running and calmed her down. This isn’t the only time, Molly, but it’s just the worst one so far. This keeps up I’m never gonna get tenure.”
“You think this is going to torpedo your tenure? I hadn’t even thought of that. Emma, how awful.”
“Yeah, I don’t wanna talk about it. Speaking of hellish things, how’s your summer class going? Any more trouble from your students?”
“It’s okay.” I shrugged. “Mostly. You know Virtanen’s wife is enrolled. Ife Virtanen.”
“Oh, little Ife? What’s she doing taking Biz Com?”
“She’s in the pre-nursing program,” I said. “I just graded the latest batch of essays, and wow.”
“What’s wow?” Emma asked.
“Well, I asked them to do a one-pager telling me what they’ve learned in this class that they think they’ll be able to use later. And Ife’s paper—Okay, I’m sharing this with you as a fellow educator, right?”
“I see no FERPA violation here,” Emma assured me.
“Good. So Ife—now bear in mind we work with her husband, right?—wrote about how important it was for her to go back to school and finish getting her degree, and what a mistake it had been to put her plans on hold to marry her philosophy professor.”
“Ew, awkward.” Emma wrinkled her nose.
“And it gets worse. For some reason, she feels like she has to explain why she married Virtanen in the first place.”
“No way,” Emma said. “And then?”
“Oh good. Our drinks.”
I waited as the server, a cheerful young woman in black trousers and a white blouse, set out the cabernet, the ale, and a bowl of peanuts.
“Anyway,” I said. “It was along the lines of, the professor seems so unattainable, all these hundreds of other students are hanging on his every word, but I know I’m the one he’s paying attention to, and the feeling is irresistible.”
“Gross.” Emma picked up her beer and took a healthy gulp.
“I think it’s sad. Poor little thing is so starved for validation. I thought one of the advantages of teaching business would be not getting these bleeding-all-over-the-page essays like the ones you get in comp classes. Anyway, she went on to describe how things go south once you get what you think you wanted and you’ve been in the relationship for a while. Apparently Quentin Virtanen, renowned professor of philosophy, is no longer unattainable, because after all, she attained him. And now, he’s being a little too helpful to his young female students. She made him her whole world, and now she realizes that she's just a small part of his world.”
“Yeah, that’s depressing. Hey, wait a minute. Remember the rumor about Kyle Stockhausen fooling around with a professor’s wife?”
“I do remember. It was before he was posthumously promoted from irritant to saint. You think he was involved with Ife Virtanen?”
“Quentin was at the team building thing with us when it happened, remember. Ife’s unhappy in her marriage. She turns to Kyle Stockhausen for comfort. Her husband finds out. Maybe it was a crime of passion.”
“Emma, Quentin Virtanen is a tiny little man, no offense.”
“What do you mean ‘no offense’?”
I kept forgetting how sensitive Emma was about her height.
“I’m just saying Stockhausen was much taller and fitter than Quentin Virtanen If anyone could push Stockhausen off a chair, it would have to be someone like—”
“Scott Nixon,” Emma exclaimed. “Maybe Stockhausen was fooling around with Leather Jacket’s wife. What’s her name?”
“Nicole. Nicole Nixon. It’s a possibility.”
I took a sip of wine and tried to imagine how either Scott Nixon or Quentin Virtanen—or both—might have shoved Kyle Stockhausen off the Trust Fall Chair without being noticed.
“Actually, Molly.” Emma frowned. “I don’t think anyone pushed Kyle off the chair.”
“Why not?”
“Cause Stockhausen woulda made some noise. Like when we’re paddling and we huli the boat? Everyone’s yelling and swearing and stuff. Stockhausen wouldn’t have just gone down quietly if someone pushed him.”
“You’re right.” I considered what she’d said. “It’s as if he just lost consciousness, or—”
“Oh, I know,” Emma interrupted. “Someone hit ’im with a poison dart. From a blowgun.”
“What?”
“Well they never did an autopsy, yah? So it’s possible.”
“I guess anything’s possible.”
Emma set down her beer and leaned forward.
“We should call the police, Molly.”
“Or maybe we should check with someone on campus first. Before we start getting law enforcement involved.”
“Fine,” Emma said. “What about Jake Ahu? He was at the session. I’ll call him. I need another beer.” She pulled out her phone as she signaled for another round.
Judging from Emma’s side of the conversation, our Director of Faculty Development was not receptive to the idea of digging into the Kyle Stockhausen situation.
Emma mashed the hangup button.
“Typical administrator CYA.”
“I’m surprised Jake was still at the office at this hour. I wouldn’t want his job.”
“I wouldn’t mind his salary. Eh, forget our gutless administrators. I’m calling the actual police.”
“Emma, don’t call 911. They hate it when people call 911 and it’s not an emergency.”
“Molly, what kind of a schmendrick do you think I am? I’m just gonna call the tip line.”
“Did you say schmendrick?”
“I went to grad school in New York.” Emma dialed. “Maybe you forgot.”
“How could I possibly forget you went to Cornell when you take every opportunity to remind—”
“Shh.” Emma waved at me to be quiet. She stated her case to the tip line operator as well as anyone could have.
“We don’t believe Kyle Stockhausen died in an accident. Yes, we suspect foul play might have been involved. And, yes, we think an autopsy should be performed. Can you check for any substances that might make someone lose balance or consciousness?”
Emma hung up.
“So what’s going to happen?” I asked.
“She heard me out, but she didn’t sound too impressed. I don’t think they’re gonna do anything.”
“Well, now what?”
“I guess I gotta look for another job,” Emma said.
“Emma, you grew up here. This is the only place you’ve ever wanted to work. And you’re on the tenure track. Don’t give up.”
“I dunno, Molly.” Emma grabbed a handful of peanuts from the bowl and stuffed them into her mouth. “What else can I do?”
We sat and stared at the darkening ocean. A chill breeze whipped through my blouse.
“We need someone who can help us figure this out.” I hugged myself and rubbed my upper arms for warmth.
“We don’t have a Department of Bizarre Death Studies,” Emma said.
“We have Pat Flanagan. Let’s see if he wants to get lunch tomorrow.”
Paradise, Passion, Murder Page 11
