Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 06 - Death without Tenure

by Joanne Dobson

  I erased the blackboard, packed up my briefcase and headed toward the door. When I’d left my mother in the English office with Monica, they’d been talking about Sex and the City.

  My mother? Sex and the City!

  ***

  The spacious hallway was oak-paneled to shoulder height and the dark wood floors worn into parallel paths by generations of student feet. Everything shone with polish and, this early in the morning, the smell of cleaning fluid from the overnight janitorial administrations still tinged the air. As I left the classroom a strong hand grabbed my upper arm. Startled, I let my book-bag slip. The heavy bag fell to the floor with a thud, landing on a well-polished brown oxford.

  “Ouch!” Neil Boylan yelled, releasing me. He stood on one foot and flexed the other experimentally.

  “You scared the hell out of me, Boylan!”

  He stepped tentatively on the injured foot, then put his entire weight on it and took a step or two. Evidently I hadn’t crippled him for life. “If you’d been watching where you were going—”

  I could think of no reason for the lieutenant to be lurking outside my classroom that augured anything but trouble. He was alone this time, no sign of Trooper Lombardi—or any other officer, plain-clothes or uniformed. “What’s with that girl?” he asked, nodding toward the robe-clad, head-covered Ayesha, who had just come out of the ladies room. “I saw you talking to her in the classroom. Looked pretty intense.” His eyes slitted as he watched her begin to descend the stairs.

  His cold scrutiny of my student gave me a little chill. “Nothing’s wrong with her,” I said. “She’s Muslim. That’s all.” The response was louder than I’d intended—and sharper. A dark-haired student clutching a sweating Diet Coke gave us a wide berth. “What do you want?”

  “I have to ask you about something.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go to your office.”

  “No. I have someone waiting for me.” I didn’t want him anywhere near my mother. My mother! What was I going to do with her? I couldn’t impose on Monica more than once.

  “Let’s talk here,” I said.

  “Well,” he shrugged, “if you want to be seen in public being grilled by a homicide cop.”

  Boylan was right: I didn’t want to be seen on campus with him. We descended the eroded stone steps to the first floor, and then I led him out of the building through a side door. Once we were outside, he gave me a sideways glance. “I’ve been talking to your colleagues.”

  “Yeah?” Wanting to get at least a couple of blocks away, I turned toward a street that headed out of town. I walked fast through this old light-industrial area with its remaining red-brick factories and mid-twentieth-century car showrooms with grimy plate-glass windows. Boylan kept step with me. A cold, damp wind cut through my wool coat. I tucked the knitted scarf tighter around my neck. The smell of Mexican food wafted from a small restaurant, and I realized I’d had no breakfast.

  “Yeah. And I heard about your altercation.” He was going to make me work. I’d seen Charlie use the same technique, edging toward the question, putting the interviewee off balance. I could play the game, too.

  “What altercation?” But of course it could only be the one, and my breath grew shallow.

  “Oh, a little squabble in Dickinson Hall. About ten days ago?” He wore a sleek yellow cold-weather hiking jacket. Now he stopped and zipped it up. “You know that stuff I said out by Lone Wolf’s apartment the other day?” Then he stood still, not quite meeting my eyes. “Well, then I was just jerking your chain. Just for fun.”

  “Ha, ha.” Jerk was the right word. But could this possibly be an apology?

  “Even yesterday, hearing about how you both wanted that job, I thought, jeez, give the girl a break. But now, what people are telling me—I’ve gotta take it seriously.” He snapped his jacket shut at the collar. “No matter what Piotrowski says.” He pulled on a pair of fur-lined gloves. He hadn’t been looking at me, but now he turned his head and gave me a long stare. “Or does.”

  I could feel my face freeze into a mask. “Is that so?” What was it between Charlie and Boylan? I wished I could ask Charlie, but, since that brief moment in my office, he hadn’t called, and he hadn’t answered my e-mail, either. I was beginning to worry about him even more than usual. What was it he’d said last time we’d spoken at length? That he’d be out of touch for a while? That they were going “out into the provinces”? I sure as hell didn’t like the sound of that.

  Boylan and I walked past a long-abandoned gas station, its pumps forever frozen at $1.19 a gallon. I tripped over a sidewalk crack raised a couple of inches by an errant tree root and caught myself before I fell.

  “Yes, that’s so,” he blurted. “As you damn well know. Competition for the same big-time job? A nasty public argument with the victim? Workplace conflict—it’s a motive as old as the hills.” He tipped his head toward me. “That fight between you and Lone Wolf? What was that all about?”

  I sighed, huffing out like a race horse. “It wasn’t a fight. It was simply a disagreement.”

  “Over what?” His expression would have frozen steam.

  Oh, God—I didn’t want to bring Ayesha into this, but I was certain that Ned Hilton would have already told the investigator about her. “I didn’t like the way he was treating one of my students—the one you just saw on the stairs.” I stopped walking and lowered my heavy book bag down on a low cement wall outside an auto-parts store; he might as well hear my version of that ugly scene.

  ***

  “Sorry, Monica, I got delayed.” My mother was sitting in a corner of the English office with a large bone crochet hook and a ball of bulky cerise yarn. “Hi, Mom. Looks like you’ve been busy.”

  She looked up and frowned. “I’m not ready to go yet.” A nearly completed winter scarf was spiraling from her ball of yarn.

  “Adele told me she likes to crochet,” Monica said. Adele? So she and Mom were on first-name terms already. “We took an early coffee break and went over to the Hook Nook. And, see, she’s only been on this for—what?—an hour? and she’s got a whole scarf almost done.” She smiled at my mother, who tucked her head modestly.

  I took the soft rosy scarf in my hand. It was beautiful, crocheted in an intricate openwork pattern. “Mom, that’s lovely—”

  “What’s going on here?” Ned’s voice came from behind me. Had he been lurking there, waiting for me?

  “Shit,” Monica hissed.

  “We’re just—”

  “Never mind, Karen. I have to talk to you.” Why was Ned assuming such a tone of authority? Hadn’t Miles resumed the English Chair?

  “Okay. I’m listening.”

  “In my office. Monica, no calls.”

  As I followed Ned into the chairman’s inner office, I glanced back with a puzzled look. Monica rolled her eyes.

  Ned sat well back into the window alcove behind his desk as I took the facing chair. “I’ll make it brief,” he said. “You must know that it was my duty to inform that police detective about your…your contretemps…with Joe Lone Wolf.”

  “I do know that.”

  “You do?” He gazed at me assessingly. “Oh, yes. You have connections within the state police, don’t you? But do you know that, here on campus, there are rumors that you killed Joe?” Light coming through the mullioned windows behind Ned momentarily bestowed upon him an aura of sanctity.

  “What?” Gripping the arms of the leather chair, I tried to conceal my astonishment. My colleagues thought I was a killer? Boylan hadn’t said anything about that. “That’s nonsense!” I bit off the words. The image of Earlene pleading prudence steadied me; I would not lose my cool.

  “Is it?” Ned’s expression approximated one of sage authority. “In any case, you should know that I felt it necessary just now, when I saw that police detective—what’s s his name? Boyle? Well, when I saw him entering the Administration Building, I thought I should pass that campus speculation on to him.”

  Sudde
n sheer hatred for my colleague shot through me. My first year at Enfield had been Ned’s tenure year. I thought back to those months when his tenure had been under consideration—the way he’d skulked around campus toadying up to senior faculty. I’d vowed then, that if Ned’s slavish servility was what academic life required of its denizens, I’d join my sister at WalMart. And since his tenure, Ned’s secure position in the academy had not liberated his spirit; rather it seemed to have narrowed both his mind and his character. A life lived exclusively in the intellect can do that to you; I’d seen it before.

  Ned pursed his thin lips. “I thought it was my obligation to let you know.”

  So that’s why, when we were walking, Boylan hadn’t brought up any campus gossip about my possible guilt; he’d only heard it after we’d parted in front of Emerson Hall. Yet another nail in my coffin.

  But Ned was continuing, “And certainly because such…er…suspicion…will factor into any…hmm…any personnel deliberations.”

  Such as my tenure decision.

  “Forewarned is forearmed,” Ned continued.

  I stood up and left his office without the words of humble gratitude he obviously expected.

  “Prick,” I muttered under my breath, once I’d gotten into the secretary’s office.

  “Watch your mouth!” my mother admonished.

  “Mom,” I said, “and Monica, how’d you like to go out for an early lunch? My treat. We’ll go to Rocco’s and get some of those great meatball wedges. Or maybe we’ll have a late breakfast at the Dolphin. Waffles and whipped cream. If I don’t get off this campus, I’m going to…to…well, let’s just say, I’ve got to get off this campus for an hour or two.”

  “No shit!” Monica said. The door to the inner office had been open the whole time Ned was “forewarning” me. She turned to my mom. “Adele, how about it. Want some lunch?”

  ***

  The ginger-haired American hulking over the petite African girl by the main campus gate could not be mistaken for anything other than a cop. When I saw them, I gasped, and Mom said, “What’s wrong, Karen?”

  In her delicate traditional garb, my student looked extremely fragile next to Boylan’s overbearing presence. I was too far away to hear what he was saying, but she almost seemed to be cowering under the onslaught of his words.

  “What the hell, Boylan,” I yelled, and took off at a run, leaving Mom and Monica behind.

  Boylan glanced around and saw me, said something curt to Ayesha, spun on his heel and stalked away through the crowds of between-classes students.

  “Ayesha,” I called. She hesitated, then she too turned her back on me. Even in her long green robe, she took off at a pace I couldn’t hope to follow.

  Chapter 14

  Friday afternoon

  Mom was with Earlene, until I finished teaching Joe Lone Wolf’s American literary Outsiders seminar. My only preparation was to stop by Monica’s desk and ask for copies of Joe’s syllabus and class roster, and the cookie key so I could get into his office. The syllabus and roster were for classroom use, the key for a look through the office, where I hoped to find something pedagogically useful—detailed class notes would be nice.

  Although Joe and I had been hired the same year, I’d never been invited into his office. I don’t think any of his colleagues had. He’d been a real loner. Now, standing in the hallway in front of his door with the cookie key in my hand, I felt as if I were committing a violation—trespassing on the dead.

  Nonsense. The man might be dead, but his classes still had to be taught. I was here legitimately, looking for a course plan and a grade book.

  I inserted the key in the lock and turned it. The slatted window blinds were closed, letting in mere slits of light. Already the air was filled with motes of dust. With some dim notion of Native beliefs gleaned from reading Tony Hillerman’s mystery novels, I wondered whether Joe’s death spirit was hovering here. Whether those dust motes were…I shuddered. And what was that smell? Very faint…It smelled like…like the past. Like my wilder days, tame as they had been. Like weed. Like Mary Jane. Like pot.

  Surely Joe hadn’t smoked marijuana right here on campus?

  But I was here for a purpose, not for lurid speculation. I focused on Joe’s desk. It was heaped from edge to edge with papers stacked to various heights. I groaned. No way was I about to find class notes, or even a grade book—not in that landfill. Taking a quick survey of the dim room, I saw that teetering piles of books and even more stacks of papers cluttered the floor, which was navigable only by paths leading to the desk, to a student chair, to the bookcases, to a little table by the window. Whew!

  By contrast, the bookshelves that covered three walls were as carefully arranged as if in a museum, filled with Native Indian crafts, artifacts, and weapons. A bright woven rug hung on one side of the window, with a large hunting bow mounted vertically on the other side. A notched tomahawk with silver bands on the handle hung over the window-seat, and another, smaller war axe stood close at hand on a shelf by the door. But in that first glance I truly paid attention to only one thing, the fierce eagle-feather war bonnet, ermine skins dangling down each side, which crowned the coat rack. I stood in the doorway, staring at it: surely this was the headdress Joe had been wearing in that huge portrait on the easel that Ned had now positioned in the hallway by the department office.

  It looked like a hopeless mission to find anything that would help with teaching. In the few minutes I had before class began at four, I’d be better off getting a cup of coffee than burrowing through the mess of books and papers. Sighing, I closed the door, turned the knob to check that it was locked, and headed to Emerson Hall to meet Joe’s seminar. I’d have to wing it.

  As I approached the seminar room, I could hear a hubbub of nervous chatter that died as I walked in. From a dozen matching green-leather upholstered chairs set around the square cherrywood table, the students eyed me warily. Their real professor had been murdered; who was this imposter? And what fresh hell was she about to unleash on them?

  I wished I knew the proper protocol for taking over a murdered colleague’s class, but I must have missed that session in graduate school. So I just sat there for a moment, looking around the table from face to face, attempting to get some sense of the classroom atmosphere. Wary, as I’d noted from the start. Quite wary. But why?

  Ethnically it was a more diverse class than any I’d taught at Enfield: young people of Asian, Caucasian, African, and Native descent, two or three of them gloriously multiracial, looking to me like the American future. Of the dozen students on the roster, three had the surname Lee. I took attendance; one Lee was a Caucasian with a Southern accent, who looked as if she’d descended from a Virginia plantation family, the other two were Chinese. Hank Brody was in this class, along with Cat Andrews and Ayesha Ahmed, the latter still dressed in her long pale-green robes. At least I had a friendly student base I could call on to help me out—if I needed to.

  “So here we are,” I said, “after the tragedy of Professor Lone Wolf’s death, you with a new professor and me serving as a stop-gap teacher until the department can find someone permanent to continue the course. I’d like to make the best use of our time today. Tell me—how far have you gotten in the syllabus?”

  “Oh,” said a girl with a ski-slope nose and a waterspout of chestnut hair jutting from the top of her head, “we haven’t been using the syllabus. Joe said he just put that together to satisfy departmental requirements.” She looked smug, as if she were operating on a higher plane of sophistication than I was. “Anyhow,” she summed up, “literature is passé.”

  “It is?” I glanced at the syllabus Monica had given me. It looked like literature to me, beginning with native oral literature, moving through slave narratives, ending with current Latino fiction and Asian-American poetry. Pretty standard multicultural American lit course: I’d taught all of these texts myself at one time or another. I raised my eyes to the class again, and then it hit me: yes, I had taught all of thes
e texts, and had taught them all at the same time, in the same exact order and from the identical anthology, two or three years ago in a course called multicultural American literature.

  This was my syllabus, and Joe Lone Wolf had copied it word for word, substituting only his name and a new course title! My hands tightened on the stapled-together paper sheets and I took a moment to steady myself. Which was more appalling? That Joe had stolen my syllabus? Or that literature, to which I had devoted my entire adult life, and in which I had a hard-won Ph.D., was now…what had the girl with the hair said?…passé?

  “So,” I continued, sitting back in the comfortable chair, my tented fingers at my lips, “literature is…obsolete, is it?”

  “Yeah, so over.” She looked a bit like a Dr. Suess character. “Along with print and with writing itself—so twentieth-century. Joe said that this syllabus represented the ossified concept of the Outsider mandated by the Western literary tradition from which we would depart.” She sounded for all the world like a well-schooled parrot. I waited for the concluding squawk, and it came. “That, of course, is a concept ordered by outmoded terms such as ‘truth,’ beauty,’ ‘content,’ ‘quality’.”

  Oh, no, don’t tell me—Truth and Beauty are also passé.

  Hank Brody broke in. He was very earnest. “You see, Professor, we’ve been attempting to transcend the constraints of established categories.” Hank looked better today. He’d traded in his baggy shorts and his battered sandals for more seasonable attire: a gray Enfield sweatshirt, new jeans, and sturdy low-cut brown boots. A navy winter jacket hung on the back of his chair. I felt warmer just looking at him.

  And I knew that he only had these comfortable clothes because Earlene, having found him freezing in the police car, had bought them for him. That was how destitute the poor kid was.

  He continued, “We were moving beyond even the more recent but nonetheless irrelevant categories of class, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.