by Paul Dueweke
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Bad News
After Sherwood’s visit, the remainder of Guinda’s morning seemed as muddled as the whirls and shadows of blue-gray smoke through which Sherwood had launched his monologue. The smoke captivated that memory nearly as much as the face and the words. When she closed her eyes, though, the smoke would dissipate so the whole experience could recur. As she replayed vignettes of Sherwood’s monologue in her mind, her confusion would swell, then ebb, then swell again.
She recalled lying on the grass in her back yard on a summer evening with her best friend, Geena. They mingled their thoughts, fears, and fantasies in the darkness as adolescents had for a million dreams. The chilled northern sky would capture first their eyes, then their minds, and finally their hopes. They would imagine themselves standing on some distant heavenly body, looking down on the earth, and understanding life in a way denied to those cloaked in its folds. Such insight was granted to only the select, and Guinda and Geena vowed that this night would forever bind them. Then a billowy castle cloud would sail between them and that sphere of mystery below, and the revealed secrets of life would be replaced once more with new twists of old riddles. Their séance would carry them far into the night, ending in layers of silence.
The revelations Sherwood made about the Media Summit and its role in the rebirth of America were new concepts, disturbing concepts. She had studied political science for years at the university and had never encountered these facts, if they were facts. The modern form of the political process had been taught as a natural evolution, driven by technology and voter maturation. Never before had she encountered a culpable media, and he used a word foreign to her lexicon—infotainment. Was this a new riddle or an answer to an old one?
She thought back to her master’s thesis, “Dynamic Functional Initiatives and their Effect on Voter Base Preferences Resulting from Parallel Incremental Contingencies.” She had spent countless hours researching the most obscure records and scouring the literature. But here was a new wave history, an unauthorized view of political evolution. Her thoughts wandered about that period of her life. Her attention quickly focused on the central figure of her graduate-school experience.
Guinda’s thesis advisor had been there every time she needed help interpreting some obscure bit of information or making sense of conflicting statistics. The word anarchist never even appeared in her thesis, and anarchy was not an issue in any of her courses. Yet, in the world she now found herself, there seemed to be some unmatched struggle going on between the establishment and the anarchists.
The time seemed right to lean on her ex-professor to help understand this new phenomenon. Since they had stayed in occasional contact over the few years since Guinda left, it was perfectly natural for Guinda to ask her mentor’s advice about this.
The professor’s phone rang twice and was answered, “Good morning, political science.”
“Good morning, may I speak to Professor Halvorsen, please?”
“I’m sorry, but Professor Halvorsen is no longer with the University. Is there someone else in the department who can help you?” the voice responded.
“Terry, is that you?” Guinda asked.
“Yes.”
“This is Guin Burns.”
“Guin, how are you? We miss you around here.”
“I’m just fine. How’s everything around poli-sci?”
Terry answered, “I guess you haven’t heard about Terra.”
“No, and I’m really surprised she left. Where did she go?”
“She didn’t go anywhere. She’s dead.”
Guinda stopped cold, unable to respond. “She died a few days ago. I’m just in the process of putting together a little memorial newsletter. You’ll probably receive yours soon.”
“What happened, Terry?”
“We aren’t quite sure, but it looks like murder. She was killed by a lethal injection, and the FBI has taken over the investigation. They won’t let the local police get involved. They say it had something to do with some kind of international espionage.”
“What!” Guinda said. “That’s absolutely ridiculous!”
“I know, Guin. I think so too. We were all so stunned by it. You just can’t imagine how it has upset some of the people around here.”
Guinda composed herself and asked, “Have they caught whoever did it?”
“That’s one of the strange parts. The FBI just said that there were no DNA prints of any kind left behind, and then they said, ‘No more comment’. Whoever or whatever did it was extremely professional and seems to have vanished without a clue. It seems really odd to us that there could be no trail, but that’s what the investigation shows so far.”
“How is TJ taking it?” Guinda asked.
“I saw him at her memorial service, but I didn’t talk to him. Did you know their relationship was off? That happened several months ago. Terra seemed isolated lately.”
“I knew there was some tension between Terra and some upper levels of the University,” Guinda said. “She seemed highly thought of, but I never knew for sure what was going on.”
“There were some at the University who claimed she was jeopardizing a lot of research funds with her investigations of some of the candidates. The story I heard was that she found out some things that were a little strange, and the Dean of Liberal Arts Research suggested she find more-useful ways to spend her time. Terra, of course, was very stubborn about it, and wasn’t about to be intimidated by the head shed and their funding problems. This is all just scuttlebutt. I don’t think anything ever went onto paper. But there were some bad feelings.”
“Did Terra ever document any of her findings?” Guinda asked.
“I don’t think so. I cruised through her files after she died to make sure the Department had a copy of anything important. I didn’t find anything about any candidates.”
“Do you know if anyone ever called her an anarchist?”
Terry thought for a minute and then said, “No, I can’t recall anything like that?”
A few more minutes of memorial exchange transpired before the conversation ended.
Guinda walked around her office, first to the window, then to her desk, then back to the window. Her mind was filled with conjecture. She finally sat on the edge of her desk and considered all the puzzle pieces before her. Not even one edge was completed; but if she once finished all four edges, she knew she would be drawn into the center. The size and complexity of the puzzle intrigued her. She couldn’t resist holding each piece in her hand, rotating it, measuring its fit. And there were all those pieces in the box, a box tightly covered by an unprinted lid. Dare she remove the lid?
