Paradise, Passion, Murder

by Terry Ambrose

  Patrick Flanagan was waiting for us in front of the cafeteria, his shaved head gleaming in the sunlight. He wore his usual ensemble, a flannel shirt, beat-up jeans, and big black work boots. Pat used to be a crime reporter at The County Courier before the layoffs. Now he teaches composition part-time, mostly for the library privileges, as part-time teaching pays nearly nothing. He also runs Mahina’s most popular news outlet, Island Confidential.

  “Fabulous shoes.” He indicated my aqua Fluevog sling-backs with the five parallel buckle straps and the sassy Cuban heel.

  “You didn’t teach today?” Emma scowled at my shoes.

  “I did,” I answered a little defensively.

  “The shoes are cool,” Emma said. “But I dunno. Maybe you could get away with them in black.”

  “Why can’t Molly teach in those shoes?” Pat examined my feet. “I think they look great.”

  “They don’t look serious,” Emma said.

  “Emma’s right.” I sighed. “I’m probably undermining my authority in the classroom wearing these. It’s safer to stick with dark colors when you teach. Dark colors signal dominance.”

  “Yeah, Pat,” Emma said, “that’s how come your leather guys don’t wear baby blue chaps.”

  “What do you mean Pat’s leather guys?” I asked. “Emma, what are you talking about?”

  “Come on, let’s go.” Emma led the way into the cafeteria, which was up and running during the summer, but just barely. I had trouble finding anything I wanted to eat. The premade sandwiches were stuffed with something pale and gooey. It might have been either tuna salad or chicken salad. There was a coffee urn, but I didn’t see any cream or milk, only flat white packets labeled, “For Your Coffee.” I wondered if the unidentifiable sandwich filling had been scooped from white five-gallon pails labeled, “For Your Sandwich.”

  “Where’d you get the thing about wearing dark colors?” Pat asked as we made our way through the cafeteria checkout line.

  “We’re going to be covering it in Biz Com class,” I said. “All the different factors that affect person-perception. Something else kind of interesting is height. There’s a lot of research on that, actually. People don’t see a short person as being in charge. It’s why we’ve never elected a short president.”

  Emma turned around and glared at me.

  “Now you gonna say, ‘Oh, no offense Emma’?”

  “Me? No, why would I say that?”

  “So what? I gotta wear high heels now?”

  “No, don’t wear high heels,” I said. “High heels can read as sexy.”

  “Ew.” Emma wrinkled her nose.

  “Hey Molly, what about platform shoes? Like what Boris Karloff wore in Frankenstein? I’m already tall, so according to your theory, if I put on platform shoes, my students would see me as some kind of demigod.”

  “You literally would look like Frankenstein,” Emma said.

  “Frankenstein’s monster,” I corrected her. “Frankenstein was the name of the scientist.”

  I grabbed a package of macadamia nuts from the impulse-buy rack next to the cashier’s station. We ate quickly and then went across the main plaza to the library.

  Emma stepped on the rubber mat first, triggering the glass door to wheeze open. Pat and I followed. I didn’t see Emma stop in front of me, so I bumped into her, and then Pat bumped into me and we all said sorry to each other and waited for our eyes to adjust.

  “Not the library, too,” Emma said.

  “Man, I can’t see a thing,” Pat said.

  Our administration had been saving money by removing light tubes from the fixtures on campus. First the faculty offices, then the classrooms, and finally the library, which now looked like the set of a low-budget horror movie. The administration buildings, with their recessed lighting, were of course exempt from this effort. At least it was easy to spot the terminals.

  “So what’s this exciting conspiracy you two are going to uncover?” Pat asked as we picked our way around the carrels toward the row of glowing computer monitors. Two of the terminals, we discovered, were out of order. Only one connected to the library databases.

  Emma told Pat the whole story.

  Even in the semidarkness, I could see Pat slump with disappointment.

  “You’re talking about the Stockhausen thing? It’s a freak accident, maybe worth a mention in wacky news or something. I mean, you were both there. Did you see anyone push him?”

  “Well no,” I said, “but—”

  “Was he behaving strangely?”

  “He was behaving like a self-righteous idiot,” Emma said.

  “There’s no story there,” Pat said. We were already set up at the terminal, though, so we had Pat pull up the pharmaceutical database. It wasn’t very instructive. It turns out just about any substance, including placebos, can cause dizziness and loss of balance.

  “What am I gonna do?” Emma wailed.

  “It’s bad, Pat,” I said. “People think Emma’s responsible. She had a student worker freak out and start crying.”

  “No one said anything when we came into the library,” Pat said.

  “No one else is in the library, genius,” Emma said. “Look around. They cut the librarians’ hours, remember?”

  “You should tell people to stop being so superstitious,” Pat said.

  “Yeah, that would probably work really well. With rational people. Who, by definition, aren’t superstitious. So you see my problem.”

  “Pat, he must have been impaired in some way. Emma and I were talking it over, and neither of us remembered him making any sound. He just fell, as if he had passed out.”

  “So, you know who you should probably talk to?” Pat stood up. “Someone in the nursing program.”

  “What about looking into Scott Nixon?” I asked.

  “You want me to go up to Nicole Nixon and ask her whether she was having an affair with Kyle Stockhausen, and if so, does she think her husband Scott killed him? Or maybe I should just ask Scott directly, ‘Oh, hey, by the way, did you kill Stockhausen?’ ”

  “Eh,” Emma said. “You’re the reporter.”

  We left Pat in the library and started down to the lower end of campus. The nursing program is one of the most popular and prestigious offerings at Mahina State University. But thanks to some long-ago political misstep, it had been banished to a cluster of decaying portables on the swampy end of the university.

  Zora Winfield, the nursing program director, was kind enough to give us a few minutes. Her desk was cluttered with framed photographs, stacks of forms, and a row of plants in tiny pots, each one fastened to a popsicle stick with a little bow of yarn. On the wall hung a framed print of “The Florence Nightingale Pledge.” I read it as Zora finished and sent the email she’d been working on when we barged in to her office.

  “...devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care. That’s nice. Kind of what we do as teachers, too. Don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, whatever.” Emma’s biology 101 is the weed-out class for pre-nursing majors and premeds, so she sees her role as pruning rather than nurturing.

  Zora had heard about the Stockhausen incident, and probably that everyone was blaming Emma for it, although she was too tactful to mention it. She listened to us politely but clearly found our line of questioning farfetched.

  “You didn’t smell alcohol?” Zora tapped her long, French-manicured nails on her desk.

  Emma and I shook our heads.

  “And he wasn’t acting out of character?”

  “Unfortunately not,” Emma said.

  “I suppose there are several possibilities.” She set down the pen and gazed up at the ceiling as if it held the answers. “Prescription drugs, panic attack, idiopathic vertigo. Without a medical examination, though, it’s just speculation. Personally? I think it was just a terrible acc
ident. You’d be surprised at the different ways people manage to die. Up at the hospital last week, we lost a patient en route to the ER. She’d fallen on a wineglass.”

  “That’s how Molly’s going out,” Emma said.

  “Thank you, Emma.” I glared at her. “Just out of curiosity, Zora, not to do with this particular incident, but in general. Is there some prescription or recreational drug you know of that could make someone lose their balance suddenly?”

  “Oh, any number of things. We have a very good pharmaceutical database. Faculty can access it through the main library site. It’s a little hard to find. I can write it down for you.”

  She took a lined sticky pad and wrote out the directions for us. We didn’t want to tell her we’d just checked the database and found it completely unhelpful.

  “I’ll be right there.” Emma and I turned to see a young woman hovering in the doorway, staring open-mouthed at Emma. We took the database information, thanked Zora, and hurried out.

  “Now what?” I said. We took a diagonal shortcut back up toward the College of Commerce, across the ragged lawn.

  “I dunno.” Emma sighed. “I guess I wait until I get run outta town.”

  “Hey, is this an African tulip tree? I never saw it before. I guess I don’t come down to this part of campus much.”

  “Ucch, it is an African tulip. Someone needs to cut it down.”

  The tree loomed over the squat earth sciences building, its flame-colored petals littering the red metal roof.

  “The last time I was at Safari Park in San Diego, they made a huge deal over their African tulip trees. Why would you want to cut it down? It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s a freaking weed, that’s why. They need to bring out the chainsaws.”

  “You don’t realize how lucky you are here,” I said. “Back home, getting anything to grow was cause for celebration. Here, you turn your back and ravening jungle plants devour your house.”

  My attempt to distract Emma wasn’t working.

  “Look, Emma,” I said. “People live things down. I mean, look at Rodge Cowper, right? He—”

  “Oh, do not talk to me about Rodge Cowper, that self-centered schmuck. He’s dead to me.”

  “Okay, I know you don’t care for Rodge, but this is my point. He’s still here after all these years, and he even has his own HR directive named after him.”

  “Oh yeah. The Rodge Cowper rule.”

  “Exactly. The one that says when a student’s in your office you have to keep your door open.”

  “Well number one, Rodge totally brought it on himself. Me, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  We walked in silence for a few moments.

  “You said number one,” I said. “What’s number two?”

  “Number two, how dare you compare me to Rodge Cowper? It’s not the same thing at all. The Rodge Cowper rule is his own stupid fault.”

  “That’s the same thing you said for number one.”

  “Shut up,” Emma suggested. “Eh, you gonna be on campus tomorrow?”

  “All day. Why don’t you stop by before I have to go teach my class?”

  The next morning Emma came to see me in my office. We usually meet in my office, not hers, since I have a chair for visitors, and Emma does not. I had scrounged my visitor chair from the last remodel of one of the auxiliary lounges of the Student Retention Office. It was old but serviceable, with orange upholstery and a squared-off wooden frame. Mahina State eliminated the furniture budget for faculty, and Emma refused to buy work furniture with her own money, so anyone who visited her office had to stand and look at that brain in a jar she kept on top of her file cabinet.

  “How are things?” I asked.

  Emma plopped down with an “oof” sound.

  “I think I saw the janitor crossing himself when I walked by.”

  “Is that coffee?”

  She proffered the Styrofoam cup. “Want some?”

  I turned the cup around to the side that she hadn’t been drinking from, and took a sip. It tasted horrible.

  “What is this? It tastes like chocolate and chicken soup.”

  “It’s from the old vending machine in the humanities building,” she said. “The sign says out of order, but it still works.”

  My office phone rang. I picked it up.

  “Ixnay on Nicole Nixon and Kyle Stockhausen.”

  “Pat?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah, it’s me, sorry.”

  “Okay. Why not Nicole Nixon and Kyle Stockhausen?”

  “Nicole has a Ph.D.,” Pat said. “Stockhausen only had an MFA. Stockhausen wouldn’t get involved with someone who has a more advanced degree than he does. He had to be in the teacher role.”

  “Wow,” I said. “How did you manage to snoop around without attracting suspicion?”

  Emma bounced in her seat, impatient for news.

  “I teach a class in the English department,” Pat said. “I’m supposed to be here.”

  I rang off and was about to tell Emma what Pat had just told me, when a knock on the door made us both turn.

  Ife Virtanen stood in the doorway.

  “Oh, hi,” she said. “Do you have a minute?”

  The wife of the chair of the philosophy department looked young for her thirty years: pale, round face, rosy cheeks, black curly hair at chin-length. She held a binder in front of her protectively, the way you might imagine a high school girl would.

  “I’m gonna get going,” Emma said. “Lunch?”

  “Sure.”

  Ife came in and hovered next to the visitor chair.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” I said.

  “Did you grade our assignments yet?” she asked.

  “I did.”

  I pulled down the stack of papers that I was planning to hand back in class, and found hers.

  “Your essay was very well-written.” I added, “And candid.”

  She hunched her shoulders, a gesture of shame or shyness. I couldn’t tell which.

  “Could we close the door?” She moved to close it without waiting for my approval.

  “We’re not really supposed to—well, I guess it’s probably okay. Just for a couple of minutes.”

  Ife took a seat, and I skimmed over her paper again.

  He’s unattainable. Infallible. Hundreds of students watch, listen, drink in his every word. They are under his spell. But he is under mine. I’m his favorite. They would do anything for him, and he can only see me.

  Hundreds of students.

  Ife’s husband, Professor Quentin Virtanen, taught a philosophy seminar that struggled to break double digits. I could only think of one person who taught hundreds of students in his massive online course.

  I glanced up at Ife. She was watching me read.

  But lately, he’s been so very helpful to his students. His young female students. He makes time for them. He meets them in his office. Or at the coffee shop. He makes me feel stupid and petty for asking. ‘This is me’, he says. ‘It’s who I am.’

  “This isn’t about Quentin,” I blurted. “This is about Kyle Stockhausen.”

  Ife stared at me. “I heard you went to see Zora.”

  I was behind my desk. Ife was between me and the closed office door. My heart pounded. Ife had killed Kyle Stockhausen. I knew it. I didn’t know how she had done it, but it was pretty clear why.

  “Ife, you don’t have to worry. I won’t tell Quentin. I won’t tell anyone.”

  Her cherubic face blazed with fury, and she lunged at me. I dove under my desk. I heard bumping overhead as she climbed over the desk, and then she was grabbing at me. I didn’t know what she planned to do, but she clearly wasn’t devoting herself to my welfare as Florence Nightingale advised. I braced myself and kicked outward. It seemed to be working until I fel
t a burning in my ankle and then everything went gray...

  I woke up to a metallic tang in my sinuses and on the roof of my mouth. My heart was pounding, and I was soaked with sweat.

  “Sour,” I said, batting at my face.

  “It’s oxygen.” I heard Emma’s voice as if from a distance. It dawned on me, very gradually, that I was lying out in the hallway, on a blanket, staring straight up at the half-gutted fluorescent ceiling fixtures. Young men wearing dark blue shirts and latex gloves hovered around me.

  “She attacked me,” I said. “She—ow. My leg.”

  “Nah, nah, nah, don’t move,” said one of the young men. “Eh, lucky you. Your friend was looking out for you.”

  “Emma?”

  “Rodge Cowper rule,” Emma said. “I was walking away, and I heard your door close. I knew something was off. I came back and listened. I heard you scream, and I ran and got the secretary to open the door.”

  “Did you call the police?” I asked.

  “Already come and gone,” Emma said. “When you feel better, they said come by the station so they can take a statement. But I think they got what they needed. She was holding a syringe. Talk about getting caught red handed.”

  “Wow, what happened to ‘I will not knowingly administer any harmful drug?’ ”

  “What?”

  “It’s in ‘The Florence Nightingale Pledge.’ ”

  “Yeah, she’s not getting into the nursing program,” Emma said.

  Turns out, Ife hadn’t meant to kill Kyle “Kaila” Stockhausen. To use an unscientific term, she’d slipped him a love potion. The side effects happened to include drowsiness and loss of balance—not particularly deadly, unless you happened to be standing on a chair.

  For me, Ife had chosen something less fanciful: a common, untraceable heart stimulant. Very similar to something a notorious “angel of death” nurse had used to speed her charges off this mortal coil. If Emma hadn’t called for help right away—well, I’d rather not think about what might have happened.

  As soon as I was up and about, I went down to the police station, made my statement, and indicated I was willing to press charges, but as the wheels of the legal system were turning, Quentin Virtanen cashed out his retirement. He and young Ife disappeared, reportedly to a country without an extradition treaty with the United States.