Literally Dead

by Eryn Scott

  I held my hand out to shake hers. It was soft and delicate as if she had the bones of a robin. I pulled away after a soft squeeze and watched her hand flutter back by her side.

  “Right, right, step-daughter. Stephanie accompanied Dr. Campbell from Britain to consult with our biology department on a few plant-y things,” Fergie nodded toward Stephanie who appeared simultaneously unnerved at Dr. Ferguson’s wording and also as if a strong gust of wind might push her right over.

  “That’s great…” I didn’t know what else to say. “Too bad you’ll miss his lecture, though.”

  Stephanie shook her head. “He practices them with me. I’ve already heard it many times.” At this, a little emotion rang in her voice and it didn’t seem so monotone anymore.

  She was his travel buddy. I remember being Dad’s when he would go to guest lecture. He always said I was the best company, a good luck charm for a successful performance.

  “Oh, good. So you’re going to talk plants, then?” I asked because asking such an obvious question seemed like a better option than bursting into tears about my dead dad.

  “I’m a botanist and I’m always interested in meeting with my peers in other countries.”

  “Yes, yes. Simply the most interesting.” Fergie caught my arm in her long bony grasp and she widened her blue-eye-shadowed eyes in warning. We didn’t have time to stand around and chat, and I should’ve known better. “Would you be a dear and go check on our esteemed guest speaker? Make sure he’s ready,” she said, letting my arm go. Without even waiting for my answer, she patted my cheek. “I’m quite sure he’ll be in my office. Thanks.” Then she spun around and headed toward the front entrance, Stephanie trailing behind her. “You’re a doll, Pepper,” Fergie said loudly over her shoulder.

  I chuckled. Between her high operatic voice, the silky draped clothing she was always flipping this way and that, and her interesting pear shaped body, Fergie was a force of nature. She was closing in on seventy, yet still managed to teach four sections of beginning to high-level English as well as volunteering as a “stage hand” — which really just meant she spent her time bossing around the actual director — for the theater department’s production each semester.

  After this, her most recent dramatic retreat, I blinked, laughing again at the woman’s eccentric ways and turned toward the hall which would lead me to the lecture hall and her office. It was then excited butterflies began to flutter in my stomach.

  I was about to meet the famous Dr. Campbell.

  We’d been studying his latest paper on Hamlet, which outlined his somewhat controversial take on the true identity of the ghost — he argued the ghost was more of a projection of young Hamlet than his dead father come back to haunt him. While I found his logic sound and his argument interesting, the truth was I was mostly intrigued with him because of how highly Fergie spoke of him.

  I turned and walked down the hallway where many of the professors’ offices were located. There were four in a cluster here with a small kitchen and lounge area for them to relax between classes or to meet with students.

  Walking into the room, my eyes instinctively went to the door on the very right, Dad’s old office. Up until last fall, the first thing I would’ve done would’ve been to peek into the small side window and see if he was in. If he was, I would plop down into that mustard colored chair — the one that now sat in the corner of my small bedroom back in the apartment — and we would chat about our days or debate something one of my professors had said in class. If he wasn’t in, I would leave a quick note, sometimes borrowing a book to read even though my stack of things to get through for class was becoming more like a tower on my desk.

  My throat felt hot and dry as I stood there now, still somehow stunned at the fact he was gone. It helped that Dr. Ferguson’s office was in the same cluster. The months following Dad’s death, I had walked in there a few times, either because I’d forgotten he was really gone or because I needed to see something which reminded me of him.

  It was then Fergie and I had gotten so close. She would either come wrap her arm around me and usher me into her office for tea and conversation, or I would take a few steps left and knock on her door instead of his, making up some question I had about class. If the woman saw through my facade (which she probably did, she was as sharp as Katherine’s tongue in Taming of the Shrew), she never let on.

  Over the months, my feet had stopped taking me to his door, heading toward Fergie’s instead, which I did today, with only a slight sigh.

  The blinds were pulled closed in the little window to her office, so I couldn’t see inside. Dr. Campbell was a bit of a celebrity around here, if you were anyone but Evilsworth, so I’m sure she was trying to keep his location quiet to give him a little breathing room before the lecture.

  I knocked on the door and waited.

  Even leaning close so my ear was almost pressed up to the dark wooden door, I couldn’t hear a thing. Had Fergie told him not to answer if someone knocked?

  After a moment, I decided to go in anyway. I mean, she’d told me to go check on him. They couldn’t get mad at me when I had orders from a professor, right?

  I nodded in a hopeful answer to my question and clasped the door handle, pushing it down until it clicked open.

  “Hello,” I said in a sing song voice. As I pushed the door open even more, I caught sight of Dr. Campbell sitting behind Fergie’s desk. His back was to me, but I could tell he was slumped forward, head resting on his forearm looking away from me.

  I almost giggled, but caught myself, suddenly regretting my loud hello. The guy was fast asleep.

  Glancing at the clock on the wall, however, I couldn’t get past how close we were to his lecture time. He really needed to start getting prepped. I walked closer and gently patted his shoulder as I said, “Dr. Campbell, sir. It’s time to get up.”

  His body shook slightly with my touch, but he didn’t wake. I scooted behind him and walked around his other side, where I could get in his face like Dad always had to do when I wouldn’t wake up for junior high.

  “Dr. Campbell. It’s time to wake up for your lecture, I’m Pepper Brooks, Dr. Ferguson’s student and she sent me he—” My voice cut out as his face came into view and his open eyes made me jump in surprise, letting out a high pitched squeak.

  “Oh!” I giggled nervously. “Hahaha! Whew. You got me there! Very funny, pretending to be asleep.”

  My face was hot and I was wishing I hadn’t squeaked. I wasn’t one of those girls who couldn’t handle surprises; I was Nancy Drew’s long lost sister, tough and just the person you’d want by your side when you were solving a mystery. Definitely not a squeaker.

  But as I watched him, Dr. Campbell didn’t seem to be judging me for the squeak. Actually, he didn’t seem to be doing anything — not laughing, not sitting up, not blinking… not even breathing.

  Come to think of it, there was a ghostly pallor to his skin.

  Holy crap, holy crap. I backed away. I tried to swallow, but my throat was bone dry.

  No. This wasn’t happening. Dr. C was just one of those rare people who slept incredibly soundly… with their eyes open. Finally gathering enough saliva to swallow, I stepped forward once more, jostling his shoulder with more force.

  “Dr. Campbell. Wake up,” I almost yelled, adding a quiet, “dammit, man” to the end. A heat settled in my throat and my mouth tasted like pennies.

  More vigorous shaking did seem to elicit movement, but it was the heavy sliding of a lifeless heap. I leaned forward, putting two fingers against his wrist. There was no pulse. And then there was the open prescription bottle laying on its side next to his left hand, with a few little white pills spilling out onto the desk.

  The room tipped. I threw my hand out to help support myself as I swayed. In doing so, I accidentally knocked his hand aside, enough that I could see a piece of paper was trapped under his right hand, scrawled writing covering half of it.

  I had already moved him, so it wouldn’t
be a big deal if I scooted his hand a few inches to read what he had been writing, right?

  With my thumb and pointer finger, I delicately picked up the appendage and moved it to the side. His skin was not cold, necessarily, but definitely not the recommended ninety-eight point six degrees, causing a shiver to run down my spine. I tried to focus on the words on the page instead of that realization.

  Maybe it was because I’d been staring at those very words for the last week, trying my hand at memorizing the soliloquy, but they jumped out at me, making me lean in to make sure I was right.

  On the paper, he had written the first part of Hamlet’s soliloquy, the pen still stuck in his lifeless hand.

  To be, or not to be, that is the question:

  Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

  Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

  And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep

  No more; and by a sleep, to say we end

  the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

  that Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation

  devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,

  To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there’s the rub,

  for in that sleep of death, what dreams might come,

  when we have shuffled

  While the handwriting started out neat, it deteriorated decidedly as it went. By the last few lines, there was a rushed slant to it. The last line wasn’t even finished, but the rest of it, plus the next few lines, rattled off in my brain without effort.

  I blinked and backed away, heart hammering in my ears, the room tipping.

  I needed to get help. I needed to tell someone right away. I ran out into the cluster, but found it empty, so I kept going into the hall.

  “Help!” I yelled, seeing a group of people gathering by the lecture hall. “Help! Someone needs to call 911!” I ran toward them, all but forgetting my cellphone was sitting in my messenger bag which hung on my shoulder.

  I think I was starting to understand Bess a little better.

  3

  I stumbled upon a cluster of startled students first. Each of them held a phone, about to head into the lecture and catching up on social media before being forced to part from the device for the duration.

  Unfortunately, they held no better emergency instincts than I, and remained frozen for a moment as I tumbled into the wall and gasped for breath.

  “9… 1…1…” I panted, hoping the weird taste in my mouth was merely my body’s reaction to running for the first time in years and not a sign I was going to throw up.

  “What happened?” a girl with glasses asked.

  I physically felt my face drain of color like a cartoon character who’s just seen a ghost. It’s a thing, I know that now; I felt it happen, felt the heat leave my skin like the water level in a bathtub unplugged.

  “Campbell… he’s — ambulance.” The words tripped out of me, spilling and flopping end over end, in all the wrong order.

  The next few seconds felt like minutes, hours. They stretched in front of me like a slinky, tunneling and telescoping. I watched glasses girl poke the screen of her phone, then hold it up to her ear. I could hear the others ask me questions, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything but that phone.

  Then, the girl’s eyes met mine and it was like I could read her mind. What should I tell them? she thought at me.

  “I think he’s dead. He’s in Professor Ferguson’s office.” My words sent shivers down every surface of skin I possessed. Or maybe that was the effect of watching all four people in the group stiffen and blink unbelievingly at my statement.

  Once glasses girl hung up her phone, the building erupted into a cacophony of movement and noise.

  Despite my slight lapse in judgment, my Drew sisters instincts were coming back to me, and I headed back to the office, standing guard so no one would accidentally stumble onto the body or sneak inside for a peek and possibly tamper with evidence — er, well — more than I already had.

  When the paramedics arrived, I was pushed aside and everything whirled around me.

  “Pepper?” An EMT rushed toward me where I’d planted myself on one of the couches in the middle of the lounge.

  I looked up into the dark eyes of my high school friend, Fiona, who’d gone on to become an EMT.

  “Oh, hey Fi,” I mumbled.

  She set down her stuff and squatted in front of me, checking my eyes and holding my wrist while she eyed her watch.

  “Are you okay? You found the body?” Her face squinted in concern and I flinched as she said those two words, but nodded, nonetheless, hoping it would do to answer both of Fi’s questions.

  “How’s Pepper doing, Fiona?” I recognized the voice of our local fire chief. He poked his head out from the office and gave me a short wave and a sympathetic look before focusing back on Fi.

  “She’s okay. Slightly shaken, but okay.” Fiona called over her shoulder. “I got her.”

  Police showed up a few minutes later, sending their own waves and sympathetic looks toward me as they combed the place, asked a bunch of questions, and put up tape to keep people where they wanted them.

  Then Dr. Ferguson appeared at the doorway of the lounge, her face a mixture of ghostly white and flushed worry.

  “What in heaven’s name is going on here?”

  It felt like I was watching an operatic entrance, her voice getting louder and higher in tone as the question unfolded from her dramatic form.

  Pine Crest’s largest cop, Frank Fitz, intimidating despite his red bulbous nose and the few-too-many pounds he stored around his waist, stepped toward Fergie, his hand holding up in a “hold on, ma’am” kind of way. But she slapped it away and tried to side step past the big man. He was faster, though and moved to block her, grabbing her arms gently when she reached up to push him.

  “Davis? Oh, Davis!” She sobbed as her eyes landed on the body, visible from there through the open door to her office. Her body began to sag in Frank’s grip and finally crumpled to the floor.

  During her display of emotion, I was reminded she and Dr. Campbell had been old school mates and this wasn’t Fergie being dramatic; she had been close to the man. The sadness in her eyes made me look away and shuffle my feet on the gray carpet.

  Until I heard, “And Pepper!”

  I glanced up just in time to see a blur of flowy fabrics, red lips, and bright blue eye shadow headed in my direction. She enveloped me in a tight, sobbing hug.

  “I’m so sorry. Did you find him like this? You must be terrified, my poor girl.” Fergie squeezed me tight, but I got the feeling the hug was more for her than me, so I tightened my arms and patted her back, too.

  She finally pulled away, her face streaked with black mascara, red lipstick smeared slightly.

  I shook my head, feeling teary as I met her pained eyes. “I thought he was taking a nap, like some sort of before-lecture-ritual.” I swallowed, trying not to relive the whole thing. “What happened?”

  She sat up straight. “What did happen?” Her voice rose along with her body and by the end of the question, she was standing, looking around her with a pleading expression on her smeared face.

  A man stepped forward. He was not one of the policemen I knew or Pine Crest’s chief of police and head inspector, who I expected to be running the investigation. This man was around six feet tall and looked a lot like he’d stepped out of an old movie with his long, camel-colored duster, slicked-back dark hair, substantial eyebrows, and “frankly, darling, I don’t give a damn” expression.

  “Hi there, ma’am. I’m Detective Valdez.” He had a voice as smooth as a Italian-leather bound classic (only I think the hint of accent I heard was more Latin-American than Italian). The man held out a his tanned hand and Dr. Ferguson shook it suspiciously. “This is your office?” he asked, looking at Fergie. “And you found the body?” He turned his gaze toward me.

  I could see Fergie flinch
at the word “body,” but she and I began nodding at the same time in the same slow, this-is-surreal way.

  “I have a few more things to finish up, but then can I ask you some questions?”

  Since we were still nodding, we kept doing so until he left. Then Fergie grabbed hold of my hands and squeezed them tight as she met my eyes, hers full of questions.

  “His note,” I started, but stopped to swallow the metallic taste gathering in my mouth. “It was Hamlet’s soliloquy.”

  Her drawn-on eyebrows scrunched together. “To be, or not to be…” she whispered, the last be trailing off. She shook her head. “Oh, my dear Davis. What have you done?” The old woman’s eyes closed tightly and more mascara stained tears slid down her cheeks.

  I knew she was jumping to the same conclusion I’d come to after seeing the words of such a tortured character next to the slumped-over figure of Dr. Campbell.

  There’s been much debate throughout the years about the true meaning behind the “To be or not to be” soliloquy — I should know, I had to read close to a dozen different arguments for a paper last semester. Some scholars think that the character is simply wondering why any of us are here. What is life? Others believe Hamlet is considering taking revenge for the murder of his father and worries such a fight may lead to his death. But probably the most widely held belief is Hamlet is severely depressed because of his father’s death and his mother marrying his uncle (none other than the killer himself) and is considering suicide.

  To be, or not to be. To live or to take one’s life. Chilling a thought as it was, it would make sense for such a Shakespearian-focused mind to leave a soliloquy instead of the usual list of goodbyes tangled up with reasons. From what Dr. Ferguson told us in preparation for his visit, Dr. Campbell ate, drank, slept (and apparently, died) The Bard.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said to Fergie.

  She swiped at her teary face. “His wife, Stephanie’s mom, passed away this year and he was terribly sad, but I never thought…” she trailed off, shaking her head.