“Bear right, Seymour,” Brainert directed. “This road will take you to the center campus.”
St. Francis was a crescent-shaped campus built around Merrick Pond, a small body of water that was there when the institution was founded by Franciscan monks in 1836. Most of the halls and dormitories were built on the rolling hills that circled the pond. The oldest structure on campus, a massive stone monastery now transformed into the main administrative building, occupied the highest point on the property.
We were on Lowry Road, which curved around the entire campus. Just past the 1960s-style circular dome called Kepler Auditorium, was Fenimore Hall, a massive four-story brick building where Brainert and Nelson Spinner taught classes and had their offices.
“Park over there,” Brainert said, pointing to a spot against the wall, right next to a bright orange Dumpster. Meanwhile, I called Brainert to the back compartment to help me adjust the pants. Even Seymour’s belt was too big!
“Here, use mine,” said Brainert, slipping it off. “I still have my thirty-six waist from college.”
“Braggart,” Seymour muttered.
“How do I look?” I asked, turning around like a cream pie on a pastry display.
“Absurd, but this shapeless coat should hide a multitude of sins.” Brainert tossed me the garment and I slipped it on, folded up the sleeves. He peered through the service window, at Fenimore Hall’s front entrance. “The guard is on duty. That means no one gets into the building without a valid student or faculty ID. Nobody, that is, except the mailman. Pen’s plan is wise, I have to admit. No one pays attention to the mailman. He’s invisible.”
“I resent that,” Seymour snapped.
Brainert Parker arched his visible eyebrow. “Tarnish, hasn’t it ever occurred to you that your extroverted behavior, your constant craving for attention, your anger and negativity, and that acerbic wit of yours, are merely desperate means of overcompensating for your meager station in life?”
“I’m not angry,” Seymour replied. “And I don’t have an acerbic wit. That’s all you, Parker—”
Their argument was interrupted by a student in a varsity jacket. He stood outside the truck, tapping on the service window with a coin. Seymour slid the pane open, glared at the shaggy-haired youth.
“What d’ya want?” Seymour demanded.
“I want some ice cream.”
“Ice cream!” Seymour cried. “What’s wrong with you, Joe College. It’s nine o’clock in the morning. You can’t have dessert until you’ve cleaned your plate, so scurry off and find a traditional breakfast. You don’t want to grow up looking like Oprah before the diet.”
Seymour slammed the window. “Stupid hair-head,” he muttered.
“Okaaay,” said Brainert, “here’s the plan. I’ll go up to my office on the fourth floor and wait for Pen. She will follow in two minutes. The mail drop is on the first floor, but Pen will tell the guard that she has a package for me that I need to sign for personally, and he’ll send you up.”
“But I don’t have a package,” I pointed out.
“Take this.” Seymour shoved a small box in my hand. The words FLAVO-RITE PLASTIC SPOONS were emblazoned on the side.
I stared at him. “I’m going into an institute for higher learning, not a food court.”
He rolled his eye. “Just cover the label with your arm.”
“When you get upstairs, a grad student may or may not be watching the door,” Brainert continued. “If one is on duty, give them the same story you gave the guard—that you have a package for me. Meanwhile, I shall determine if Spinner is in his office. It’s only two doors down the hall from mine so that will be easy.”
“What next?” Seymour asked.
“I’m going to keep watch while Pen breaks into Spinner’s office and searches for incriminating evidence. If she fails to find any, we’re going to break into his apartment next. Then we’ll move on to searching Claymore Chesley’s personal space.”
Brainert paused to catch our eye. “Before noon today, however, I insist we proceed to Newport, no matter how far along we are with the snooping—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Seymour interrupted, “so we can pick up this supposed ‘treasure.’”
Three minutes later I climbed the short flight of stairs to Fenimore Hall. The security guard faced me with a bored expression. “The mail drop’s just inside the door, to your left,” he said.
“I have a package for J. Brainert Parker. He has to sign for it.”
“Fourth floor. Elevator’s straight ahead,” the guard replied. He turned away to check a student’s ID and I was forgotten, just as Brainert predicted.
The hall was long and dark and smelled vaguely of floor polish. I went directly into the elevator, pressed four. At the third floor, a distinguished-looking man with curly gray hair and a tweed suit stepped into the car. He casually nodded to me as the elevator arrived on the top floor.
The security desk was deserted. Brainert was actually waiting for me in the corridor as the doors opened. His expression suddenly changed when he saw the other passenger.
“Dean Halsey! How nice to see you,” Brainert said, grinning broadly.
“Heavens, Parker. What happened to you?”
Brainert touched his face. “Had an accident…Antique hunting. A run-in with a Victorian mirror.”
I stepped out of the elevator, around the men.
“You’re just the fellow I was looking for, Parker,” said Dean Halsey. He put his arm on Brainert’s shoulder and steered him to the waiting elevator. “I hope you’re up for a walk across campus. We’ll have coffee in my office—”
“But I—” "No excuses. This is an emergency. I need someone who can organize next year’s faculty luncheon—”
Just before the elevator doors closed, Brainert shot me a helpless look that told me I was on my own.
No you’re not, babe. You’ve got me.
“Oh, Jack, thank goodness you’re here. I have to find Nelson Spinner’s office—and I’m really hoping he’s not in it.”
I needn’t have worried on that score. The fourth floor was completely deserted, the long corridor lined with locked doors. Clipboards hung on each, displaying the professor’s name and office hours. From the schedules I saw, no one showed up at this place before noon.
I found Brainert’s office—the door was ajar—and then I found Spinner’s. He had no office hours scheduled for today, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Spinner’s door was locked, of course. The lock itself was pretty flimsy, not like the one on Prospero House’s back door. This one was identical to the one on my bathroom door back home. I’d already figured out how to trigger a lock like that.
Back when Spencer was still inclined to dark moods, after his father’s suicide and our move to New England, he sometimes locked himself in the bathroom. He gave up when he figured out his mom wasn’t letting him get away with hiding in there.
Need advice on the lock, babe? You could maybe use that fire extinguisher on the wall over there to smash the knob. It will make a lot of noise but—
“That won’t be necessary,” I said with a bit of pride.
I didn’t have a credit card, but Seymour’s plastic Post Office ID badge served my purposes. I shoved the card between the door and the jam and wiggled the knob a few times. The lock sprang with a satisfying click, and I slipped inside the room.
Nice, baby. Quiet, too.
“Thanks.”
The office was stuffy, the morning sun streaming through the wood-framed window, heating the room unbearably, so I left the door slightly ajar. There was a pair of filing cabinets, a desk with a computer on it, books and papers piled up everywhere. There were no personal touches I could see, beyond diplomas hanging on the wall.
I noticed a lot of personal correspondence, all of it indiscreetly scattered about the desk. Letters and postcards from at least three women—or should I say girls. From the sorry tone of each missive, the women were lovesick and devastated, and likely spurned b
y Spinner.
I went through each drawer, came up with nothing. The bottom drawer was locked, however, and I immediately focused on it. I began working the old lock with a letter opener. It took only a minute to splinter the wood enough to yank the drawer open.
A student folder lay on top of a pile of stuff inside the drawer. Something about the name on that file—Tyler Scott—triggered my memory. When I saw that his home address was in Quindicott, I remembered when I’d heard the name. Tyler Scott was a quarterback on the Quindicott high school team. He was the boy who Chief Ciders told me had wrecked his car in the same manner and at the same spot where Rene Montour died.
I cracked the file and saw the papers Scott had written for Spinner’s class. All of them had failing grades, except the last. On that paper, Spinner had scrawled the word Plagiarism across the title page. A note attached read: SEE ME AFTER CLASS TODAY, MR. SCOTT. YOUR ATHLETIC SCHOLARSHIP AND YOUR FUTURE AT THIS SCHOOL ARE IN JEOPARDY. It was signed “DR. SPINNER.”
The note was dated Monday, and I found the timing interesting. It was the day after Peter Chesley died, the day before Rene Montour was killed, and two days before I was attacked.
“He could have blackmailed this boy into attacking me and stealing the Phelps editions from my store,” I said to Jack. “Possible?”
Possible. But like you told me in your dream, honey, you need proof. Keep looking.
I’d been digging down through the papers in the locked drawer, and the very next file made my heart stop—
“Oh, my God.”
The file contained the photocopies that my aunt had made for Brainert, and pages upon pages of notes that belonged to him—I knew because there were bloodstained fingerprints on several sheets of paper!
Baby, you struck the mother lode!
I continued rummaging through the pile—only to freeze when my fingers closed on a book. I pushed the pages aside and pulled out The Poetic Principle, volume twelve of the Eugene Phelps editions of Edgar Allan Poe. The book Sadie had sold to Rene Montour the day he was killed.
“Eureka,” I whispered. “It was Spinner who murdered Montour.”
“Well, aren’t you a resourceful woman?”
It wasn’t Jack’s voice. And it wasn’t in my head. Nelson Spinner was standing in his office doorway. He stepped inside, then closed the door behind him. Without wasting a second, he drew a handgun out of his charcoal-gray suit jacket and pointed it at my heart.
“Seems the state troopers are suspicious about Montour’s car accident. They questioned my landlady, but I slipped out the back, came here to destroy the evidence. It’s a good thing I did, wouldn’t you agree, Mrs. McClure?”
Steady, baby. He’s a paper pusher. I doubt he spends much time on the firing range, and I’m betting his aim ain’t true.
“Jack? What do I do?”
Guns recoil, he’s going to brace before he fires. Watch for it. Then take the chance you have to take.
“Why are the police looking for you?” I asked, stalling for time and praying Brainert would make it back to rescue me.
Spinner shrugged. “I suspect the state troopers traced the call I made to Mr. Montour at the inn on the night he died—an invitation to see a collection of rare books soon to be auctioned. He fell for it, naturally, and I laid my trap—”
“With the help of Tyler Scott, right? A poor kid you blackmailed to help you.” I waved his file.
“Yes, Tyler did prove helpful. Not with you, of course. I provided him with a universal key to break into your storeroom, but thanks to your theatrics, the dolt almost got caught. It made him all the more ruthless with Brainert, however, which did prove fruitful. As for Montour…after Tyler told me about his own mishap on Crowley Road, I simply helped re-create it.”
I was horrified and sickened, furious and scared, but I had to keep my head, I had to keep stalling.
Questions, baby. More questions. The man likes to brag, let him.
“You were working for Peter Chesley,” I told Spinner. “That’s how you found the volumes. But why did you have to kill him? Why?”
Nelson Spinner offered me that super-slick smile of his. I could see why teenaged girls melted—and why Sadie and I had too. We were all too dazzled by the bright surface to see the darkness underneath.
Don’t beat yourself up, honey. Jack whispered in my head. You were the one who never bought it completely. You were the one who kept digging until you unearthed the truth.
“I did try to convince the stubborn old compulsive to sell the books to me,” Spinner said. “Or at the very least let me investigate the riddle. But the fool rebuffed my offer—insisted any treasure would be found by his family, not me. Then he had the audacity to fire me. That’s when I made the decision to take it to the next level.”
“Mr. Chesley sensed you were coming for those books. I knew he was afraid. He even suspected you were lurking in the house the night he died.”
“Yes, when I came to take possession of those volumes, I found Chesley had company—you and your aunt. He never had guests before, so I was surprised. The old man never saw anyone but me. He was still marginally rich, but the fool didn’t even employ a butler. Claimed he was saving all the money for the next generation of Chesleys—to reunite the two long-estranged branches of the family, or so he said.”
Spinner shook his head. “I confronted Chesley after you left. He told me that he’d given the books to you to sell, that you’d be getting bids too high for me to ever come close to matching. He’d trumped me and he was smug about it, too. Made sure I could never solve the code and track down the treasure. I was so angry, that…well, you know what happened, unfortunate as it was.”
“What happened, Spinner, was murder.”
“Not according to the Newport police. They received a 911 call, if you remember. Old Chesley telling them he was in much distress. Fortunately for me, I worked with the man long enough to imitate his voice.”
“Nobody will believe you if you shoot me. Someone will hear the shot, for one thing.”
“Who, Mrs. McClure? This floor is empty. I’ll kill you now, dump your corpse in Quindicott Pond tonight—after I plant evidence to prove it was you who killed Montour and stole the book.”
He smiled. The man’s smugness was off the charts.
“You’re a genuine sociopath, aren’t you?”
“Diagnosed in my teens.” He smiled. “Doesn’t bother me.”
Then I saw it, the thing Jack said to watch for—
He’s bracing baby, he’s going to fire.
Suddenly, the entire building was rocked by a horrible, howling din. The fire alarm had gone off! The noise so startled Spinner that he looked away—
Now, baby! Take your chance!
That’s when I jumped him. My right hand managed to knock the gun aside just as he pulled the trigger. The bullet slammed into a diploma, shattering the frame. I hung on to his wrist like a bull terrier, knowing if I let go he could aim and fire again.
But Spinner was much stronger than I was, and I was still hurting from the accident. He soon had me at a disadvantage.
“I should have killed you on the road last night!”
Kick him, Penelope. Right in the—
I did. Spinner wheezed and stumbled backward. Unfortunately I lost my grip on his arm. He staggered against a filing cabinet and raised the gun. I tensed, poised to attack again, determined to go down fighting.
But just then the office door flew open. Seymour was standing there, legs braced, face flushed, his shirt torn. He saw me, saw Spinner, he even saw the gun as the man tried to shift his aim to the newcomer.
With a roar, Seymour slammed into Spinner like a fullback. The gun flew out of Spinner’s hand as he reeled backward—crashing right through the window.
I heard shattering glass, a horrified scream. Spinner took the plunge amid a shower of splinters and shards. Seymour rushed to the broken window, peered down.
“What a lucky bastard,” he said. “The trash
broke his fall.”
I went to the window to see what he meant. Nelson Spinner had fallen four floors, but he’d landed in a Dumpster, which seemed a fitting place for the likes of him.
“Hey, Pen, you think this is what my teachers meant when they told me, ‘garbage in, garbage out’?”
Just then, a security guard burst into the office with two campus policemen as backup.
“See,” Seymour cried to the uniformed men. He pointed to me then the gun on the floor. “I told you she was in danger. But, no, you wouldn’t believe me!” As the guards wrestled Seymour to the ground, he continued to rant.
“I knew I had to do something, Pen,” he cried. “I saw that geezer lead Brainert out the door. Then I saw Spinner coming in and knew you were in trouble. I tried to explain to these jokers, but they refused to believe me. So I tripped the fire alarm and ran for the stairwell. These goons tried to stop me, but I broke loose—”
“Don’t worry, Seymour,” I quickly assured him. “We have all the evidence we need right here in this office. I’ll get you out of this mess, I promise. I’ll tell everyone what really happened.”
“Tell them, Pen. Tell the world!” Seymour bellowed as the police dragged him down the empty college corridor. “The truth will set me free!”
EPILOGUE
Poe had tried to imagine how death might not exist, although it certainly did, and not only existed, but also made possible his art.
—Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe:
Mournful and Never-ending Rememberance, 1991
“HERE YOU GO, Pen. One chocolate sprinkle.”
I took the ice cream cone from Seymour and passed it to the next child in line, a freckle-faced little Keenan.
“Here you go, Danny.”
“Thanks, Mrs. McClure.”
It was one week after the St. Francis male drop, and things were getting back to normal. Sunset had barely descended and already a line had formed on Green Apple Road to get into the haunted house. Spiderweb-covered speakers were blaring spooky music and ghostly sounds, interspersed with seasonal classics like “The Monster Mash” and “Purple People Eater.” Dozens of flickering jack-o’-lanterns were scattered across a lawn decorated with scarecrows and ghosts made from old sheets, no doubt donated by mothers all over Quindicott.
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