The sudden change in topic was disorienting. It took Shelby a moment to realize what her grandmother was actually saying. Then her stomach began to roil. She’d taken the picture of her father a few months ago, with every intention of returning it, after making a copy. But it was still in her glove compartment. She could almost feel him watching her from the car, shaking his head in mild disappointment. If he’d ever felt that. She had no idea. She knew practically nothing about him, except that he was skinny, and that he was a terrible bowler.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was stupid. I meant to return it, but—I don’t know—in the end, I just couldn’t.”
“Come sit next to me.”
Her grandmother’s voice was soft, but also slightly imperious. There was no chance of disobeying. Shelby sat down at the kitchen table.
“It isn’t just a long story. It’s a shared one. Your mother, your father, and me—we’ve all got our own piece of it. And I know it’s unfair to keep you in the dark, but there are things that only your mother knows, and questions that only he can answer. My piece is the smallest.”
Shelby nodded. She was out of breath. The conversation about Ingrid felt like something that had happened ages ago. She thought about the photo, safe within the darkness of the glove compartment. The only thing she’d ever stolen.
“They loved each other. And they loved you. I remember him just staring at you, wonder in his eyes, like you were a constellation that he’d pulled from the sky. When you cried, he drove you in circles for hours, until you finally drifted off. Sometimes the only thing that’d put you to sleep was the sound of the vacuum cleaner, and he’d clean every inch of the house. Those carpets never looked better.”
“Why’d he leave, then?” Shelby tried to keep the anger out of her voice, but she could feel it bubbling up.
“That’s his piece of the story. I can’t tell it for him.”
She shook her head. “That’s it? I get to hear about the vacuum, and nothing else? How’s that supposed to help?”
Her grandmother started to say something sharp. Then her expression softened. She took Shelby’s hand. “Darling, all I know is that he had to go. It wasn’t because of any bad blood, and it certainly wasn’t because of you. He had no choice.”
“People ditch all the time. I’m sure they tell themselves that they have no choice, but it’s a pretty weak argument.”
Her grandmother stood up and touched her hair lightly. “Keep the photo. Your mom will never realize it’s gone.”
“Because she doesn’t want to see him?”
“No. Because that kind of pain never goes away.” She walked over to the cupboard. “Want some cheese and crackers?”
Shelby stared at the unfinished beadwork. It was a hummingbird.
“Sure,” she replied. “I’ll get the cutting board.”
“I expect you to bring that girl around for dinner.”
“She has a kid.” Shelby blurted it out. Best to go all in.
Her grandmother was silent for a moment. Then she asked: “Is he a picky eater?”
She felt a strange fluttering. Had she mentioned Neil in front of her grandmother? If so, she didn’t remember it. But the woman’s prescience almost never surprised her. For all she knew, nokohm and Neil talked in dreams all the time, swapping stories with whispering death and his winged crew.
“He seems to like eggs,” Shelby replied lamely.
“Good to know.”
“Are you going to tell Mom?”
Her grandmother didn’t turn from the cupboard, but Shelby could feel her smiling. “Let’s surprise her, shall we? It’s more fun that way.”
4
The bus rocked like a toy on a track as it made its way down Albert Street. Through the window, Shelby could see a layer of ominous clouds. They were still making up their mind, but she was glad that she’d brought her umbrella. She sat in the last row of seats, where she could hear the engine growling. It was somehow comforting, like a giant cat snoring behind her. The seats were just high enough that her feet dangled an inch or two above the ground. She resisted the urge to swing them back and forth. Above her, a gently racist advertisement offered sweet deals on smartphone plans, featuring a tiny wrestler as its mascot. She tried to remember a time before commercials had invaded every surface, but they seemed to have always been there. She was just annoyed because her browser kept linking her to strange weight-loss remedies. They were beginning to sound like the manuscripts that she read. Secret cordial cures all! It was only a matter of time until doctors began prescribing mercury pills again.
She’d forgotten to put gas in the truck, and it cost too much anyway. This was her epic narrative. Our heroine moves slowly toward her purpose, on public transit, with just enough change to buy a veggie plate from the canteen. A part of her found it oddly satisfying. The universe got what it paid for. Employing grad students as heroes was sketchy at best, and if she was going to shoulder the responsibility, then fate would just have to pause a moment while the bus driver left for a smoke.
Shelby felt like a detective with no case files. Not a smooth rhetorician, like the Mentalist, but more of a second-rate sleuth who’d been put on warning. Even if she’d reduced their current conflict to a spreadsheet with dates and times, it still wouldn’t make much sense. Latona was trying to raise an army of lares. She’d nearly succeeded, until Andrew had swapped out her mythic horn for a generic piano key. Now he was squarely in the middle of her plan, but Shelby couldn’t figure out why the basilissa was moving so slowly. If she wanted the horn back, she could just torture him until he admitted where it was. Or she could tear up every piano and harpsichord at Plains University and bring back their mutilated keys. Instead, she was grooming Andrew for something. Letting him get close. Somehow, he’d become the Mary Sue. Was he sending out some kind of mating call that only dark monarchs could hear?
The bus pulled up near the university, which had recently invested in a giant chrome sign that was supposed to last for the next hundred years. Shelby checked her to-do list:
Discover if supervisor is monster.
Check for student tax credit.
Investigate army of elemental spirits.
Pay half one third of library fines.
Prepare for dinner with family and girlfriend that will bring relationship to screeching halt.
Divine reason for park’s existence and our place in it.
If she hurried, she could cross out two items and still get stamps.
The Department of Literature and Cultural Studies was familiar and smelled of old coffee. The beige carpet reminded her of a movie theater floor, and she half-expected to see a strand of lights guiding her toward the exit. She saw Ingrid in the Writing Centre, marking up an essay in red pen. A student sat next to her, continuing to text. She’d forgotten that they were pulling grad students from different departments in order to keep the center open. Shelby wanted to talk to her, but the visit to Egressus weighed heavily on her conscience. First, she’d need to spin that.
She hurried down the hallway until Ingrid’s profile was out of sight.
An idea occurred to her. It wasn’t a very good one, but at the moment, it was all she had. She ducked into the general office. Tom, the departmental advisor, was gone for lunch, but he’d left the door open. She saw a paused episode of Teen Mom on his computer screen. He’d be back soon. Shelby walked behind the desk, where stacks of colored forms had been organized with loving care.
She pulled open a drawer and was met with the face of Garfield. More accurately, it was a stuffed Garfield keychain affixed to an office key. Tom called it the key of shame, because professors who’d forgotten their keys were forced to carry Garfield down the hallway, proclaiming their absentmindedness to everyone. She’d used it once to unlock the TA office after leaving her purse in the truck by accident. Now it felt heavy in her hand. A skeleton k
ey that could open any office on the floor.
Shelby tried to stuff the key in her pocket, but Garfield’s head wouldn’t fit. This must be what it felt like to carry a dirty magazine home from the store, back when people still did that sort of thing. The hall was empty, but she was still convinced that everyone could see her, teetering on the brink of moral relativism. She stopped outside Dr. Marsden’s office door. A pane of frosted glass obscured the inside. Various advertisements for conferences and calls for papers had been affixed to the door, as well as an image of Sarah Fielding.
She slipped into the office and shut the door as silently as possible. Light filtered in from the narrow window. Shelby touched the Victorian writing desk lightly. It may have just been her imagination, but the wood felt slightly warm. The desk was covered by stacks of books and articles, leaning into each other, like exhausted arches. A fountain pen lay next to a porcelain inkpot, positioned where you might normally expect to find a printer. The computer was old and practically nonfunctioning. Shelby had begged Trish to let her install a few updates, but her supervisor would merely look at the machine with disdain. Let it die in peace, she’d say. It had already become little more than a paperweight. Trish had a small laptop, but most of the time, she recorded her lecture notes in longhand. There was something magical about her cursive. Those graceful loops and twined letters reminded her of alchemical formulae. The occasional ink blotch was like a delicate cough, a hint of bodily presence.
She scanned the bookshelves, looking for anything out of the ordinary. One whole shelf was given over to Broadview editions of eighteenth-century texts. The weight of Samuel Johnson’s biography had caused the shelf to bow slightly. There was Peakman’s five-volume set of prostitute narratives, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters from Turkey, in which she expressed her own curiosity at watching Turkish women bathe in public. Montagu herself had been scarred by smallpox and endured the taunts of male poets with an inexhaustible supply of wit. The built-in shelves were resplendent with hardcovers, and for a moment, Shelby wanted to grab each of them, as if they were low-hanging fruit. She imagined Trish discovering her a few hours later, fingers black from old type, contented as a cat in a sunbeam. She had to focus.
After a moment of hesitation, she examined the drawers. Now she was committed. Mostly, they were filled with yellowing exams, old essays, and colorful handouts that had ceased to be relevant. Advertisements for courses and workshops that had come and gone. Some of them were at least five years old. There was a drawer that seemed to hold nothing but change, though all of it was meticulously counted and separated into piles. Another was full of books, which made Shelby grin. She’d run out of wall space and was using the drawers for excess book storage. She glanced at her phone. Tom would be back in a few moments. If she was going to find something, it would have to drop from the sky in the next sixty seconds.
She opened the filing cabinet. The first two drawers were filled with student reports and old correspondence. She was tempted to search for her own records but thought the better of it. Even if her supervisor’s notes were complimentary, they’d only serve to give her anxiety nightmares for the rest of the year. Best to live in mystery. The top drawer was locked.
Now we’re getting somewhere. If somewhere means I have no idea where I am.
She checked the top of the filing cabinet for the key, but there was nothing there. Trish probably had it with her. Shelby tried not to think about the ticking clock. Focus. A key like that was frustratingly small. The sort of thing that might slip off an ordinary key ring. Better to leave it in the office. She returned to the first set of drawers. They were clogged with papers and ephemera. That left the change drawer. She got down on her knees and reached into the depths of the coin vault. There was a sliding metal tray on the top of the drawer, which held pens and highlighters. She slid it forward and discovered a smaller tray that held a set of keys. The deduction may have been slightly obvious, but it still gave her a flush of confidence. Eat your heart out, Mentalist. She grabbed the keys and unlocked the top drawer.
The contents were unremarkable. More student records, along with some receipts from the British Library, and a leather agenda. Shelby felt as if she were rapidly approaching the conclusion to a poorly written essay. There was no way to tie her argument together, because it had never existed in the first place. What was she doing here? A clue might make sense in context, but she didn’t even have a blurry outline of the larger puzzle. Would Trish casually discard evidence in her office? With nothing left to lose, Shelby opened the agenda. It was current and filled with neatly written notes about upcoming department meetings. She flipped through the pages, hoping to find anything mysterious. The thought reminded her that she knew nothing about this woman, her mentor. Aside from a few familiar names and dates, the agenda couldn’t fail to be anything less than cryptic. The footnotes to another person’s life. She was about to put it away when a folded piece of paper fluttered to the ground.
Shelby retrieved the paper, thinking that it was another receipt. But when she unfolded it, her breath caught. It was a prescription for anti-anxiety medication. She wondered if it had something to do with the hit-and-run. That would make sense. Shelby squinted, trying to read the small print. The prescription, she realized, was renewable. It had originally been issued two years ago, endorsed by a psychiatrist whose signature she couldn’t make out. Shelby stared at the form. Trish had always been her rock. She could be severe at times, but Shelby had never seen her crack under pressure. Why would she be on anti-anxiety drugs? She supposed that it wasn’t entirely uncommon. Academics could be fragile. Rumors were always circulating about faculty members who drank too much or relied on a heady cocktail of painkillers to numb their social phobias. But Trish had never struck her as that sort.
Shelby locked the drawer and replaced the keys. She was just about to leave when she heard footsteps in the hall. She froze. It might have been a student, looking for her supervisor. Then she heard the tinkling of keys. Her stomach did a flip. There was nowhere to hide. She could make up a story, but Trish would see right through it. For a moment, she thought about raising her hands, as if she’d just been arrested. Then she remembered the narrow balcony that ran the length of the third floor. It wasn’t exactly scenic. Mostly, grad students used it to smoke and recharge their neurotic batteries. If Trish decided to glance out the window, she’d be discovered for sure. But the only other option was hiding behind the door, which hardly seemed viable, given the clutter. Shelby squeezed through the window and climbed onto the balcony. Too late, she realized that it was impossible to lock the window behind her.
Shelby heard the key in the office door. She shut the window as tightly as possible from the outside, then stepped away, just as the office door opened. The balcony was covered in gravel and old cigarette butts. A few rusty folding chairs had been positioned along its length, naked to the elements. The sky was the color of sleet. She knew that if she moved even an inch, the crunch of gravel would betray her. Inside the office, she could hear Trish set down her leather satchel on the desk. There was a brief silence. Was she staring at the window? Shelby had tried to close it tightly, but it remained ajar. The slightest breeze would blow it open again. She looked at the rain clouds.
Don’t screw me, she thought. Just this once. I know that you exist. I’ve seen you, lares of smoke and thunder. Caela. Just keep a lid on it, and I promise that when I get back to Anfractus, I’ll give you a whole loaf of bread and a jug of oil. I’ll trim the lamps on your shrine for a whole year.
The clouds seemed to tremble for a moment, but the air remained still. Shelby tried to quiet her heartbeat, so that she could hear what was going on behind the window. She imagined Trish standing there, trying to figure out if she’d forgotten to lock it, or if some maintenance worker had left it open.
Both plausible solutions. Far more likely than the fact that your seditious graduate student might have broken into your
office.
A phone rang. For a moment, Shelby thought it was her own. Her hands started to shake uncontrollably. This was it. Destroyed by her own carelessness. The only solution was to jump off the balcony. Perhaps then, in the general tumult, everyone would fail to realize that she was a petty criminal. She’d break something for sure, but there’d also be morphine.
Shelby put a hand to her mouth, to keep from giggling like a mad person.
Really, Carl? Now you call? You’re going to get me kicked out of the program, and all because you couldn’t decide on what flavor of dip to buy! It’s always the seven-layer! I shouldn’t have to keep telling you!
It took her a second to realize that her phone was silent. The ring tone sounded like Baroque chamber music and was coming from inside the office.
“Yes?” It was her supervisor’s voice. “What do you mean, tonight? That’s not what we agreed upon. No. This is moving too quickly.”
Shelby frowned. Was she talking about the departmental colloquium? That was supposed to be tonight, but she couldn’t imagine why Trish would be so hesitant about it. The program had been published weeks ago.
Dr. Marsden lowered her voice. “That was supposed to be tied up on the fifth floor. The provost made his position perfectly clear, and there was no way that—” She paused. “No. That’s not what I’m saying. Don’t put me in this position.” She was silent for some time. Then she said: “Not all sacrifices are equal. Don’t question my loyalty again. I’ll be there.”
Shelby heard some rustling of papers. Then another silence. She closed her eyes. All Trish had to do was open the window a crack. But she didn’t. The office door closed, and she heard the key turn in the lock. She exhaled. Her mind was spinning. What was happening on the fifth floor? What was Trish involved in?
Prize of Night Page 6
