by Eva Gates
A group of young women passed us, all swinging hair, high-pitched voices, laughing faces, short skirts, and long tanned legs. I felt about a hundred years old. We crossed the quad, heading for the liberal arts building. I ducked to avoid a flying football. The sun had fulfilled its promise of the morning, and the day was heating up. Students kicked around a ball, sat on benches reading, or lay under the trees, doing nothing much at all.
Maybe it was exactly like a university, after all.
Some of the windows facing the quad had Halloween decorations in them: spiders and cobwebs, and witches on brooms. A pumpkin adorned the head of a gentleman seated on a bench in a corner of the lawn. He made no move to remove it, which might have been because he and his bench were made out of bronze.
“What’s the plan of attack?” I asked Bertie.
“You are assuming we have a plan,” she replied. “That would be a misassumption. Last night I found out that this college is struggling. It’s in no worse financial shape than many others of its size, but no better either. There’s an intense battle going on between one faction, which wants to expand the sports stadium and hire top-ranked coaches to whip the football team into shape, and another that wants improved facilities for the faculty of ancient languages.”
“No guesses which side I’m on,” I, the non–football fan, said. “What about the North Carolina History Department?”
“That’s where things get interesting. The faculty of history is thin. This is very much a school for languages—foreign, dead—and English literature. Most students take history as a general elective or as their minor, if at all. Students majoring in Latin or ancient Greek or medieval English are far more likely to be interested in ancient history than that of North Carolina.”
“Meaning the professors of North Carolina history are on thin ice if the college needs to cut back. That’s worth knowing, but I doubt anyone is going to air the university’s dirty laundry in front of a couple of casual visitors, even if we ask nicely.”
“I happen to be acquainted with one of the senior professors here. I didn’t call ahead to make an appointment, but I checked his office hours when I was online, and he should be in this morning. In fact, I’m counting on it.”
We climbed the steps and shoved open the front door.
A long, dark corridor stretched before us. Doors to either side were closed. A faint buzz came from the room to our left: the monotone murmur of a lecturer in full-on boring mode.
Bertie studied the list of names and office numbers posted on the wall to our right. She found what she was looking for and marched firmly down the hall toward a wide central staircase. I trotted along behind as we climbed to the second floor, where we emerged into another long corridor. So far we hadn’t seen a single soul. Bertie found the door she wanted and pushed it open. We walked into a small, dark, crowded room, with one desk, one visitor’s chair, and rows of overstuffed filing cabinets topped by dusty, dying plants. A fold-up table in the corner held a kettle and an assortment of stained mugs, most of which had some pithy comment printed on them. Four closed doors ran off the central room.
A woman sat behind the desk, presumably guarding the inner sanctums. She looked up from her computer and peered over the frames of her horn-rimmed glasses at us. “Can I help you?” she asked in a tone indicating that she had absolutely no intention of doing that.
“I’m here to see Professor McClanahan,” Bertie said.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but I expect he’ll see me. Tell him B. James is here.”
B.?
The receptionist suppressed a yawn and reached for the phone on her desk. She needn’t have bothered. One of the inner doors flew open with such force it hit the wall with a loud crack before bouncing back. The depth of the dent in the drywall showed that this wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. A man stood framed in the entrance. He was in his late fifties, with a shock of curly white hair, a huge salt and pepper mustache, and rimless glasses. He was about six feet tall and as thin as the skeleton of the fish lying on my plate last night after I’d finished dinner.
“B!” he cried.
“Eddie,” my boss replied. Her voice was cool and composed, but something beneath it cracked.
“Come in, come in!” he shouted. “Judy, cancel all my appointments for the rest of the day.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Bertie said. “We won’t take up much of your time.”
“Tea! We’ll have tea!” he cried.
He gestured Bertie into his office, and I followed. The professor made space for her to sit by simply lifting up a chair, turning it over, and dumping the contents onto the floor, where it joined the other debris. Papers spilled out of open cabinets and were piled on side tables nearing collapse. I assumed the professor had a desk. Something had to support the computer as well as the stack of books and tumbling towers of student essays. A plant, sadly neglected, sat on the windowsill.
“B!” he said. “After all these years.” He made a buzzing sound and poked Bertie in the arm with his index finger.
His nickname for her was “Bee,” not “B.”
“As beautiful as ever!” he said. “No, I take that back. You’re even more beautiful than I remember. I am so delighted to see you.”
She gave him a smile. “You haven’t changed one bit, Eddie.”
“Which is why you’ve finally agreed to marry me. Fortunately, I recently separated from my third wife. Or was she my fourth? Never mind. I am available once again.”
I tripped over a copy of Winston Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume I.
Professor McClanahan noticed me for the first tame, “Careful there, young lady.”
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t damage my book. It’s signed.”
“By Winston Churchill?”
He didn’t bother to answer me, but turned back to Bertie. He took both her hands in his, and his eyes studied every detail of her face. “How have you been, my dear?”
Her smile grew. “Well, Eddie. Very well. Healthy and happy.”
“I’ll get Judy to make a reservation for lunch. Something special, I think. Your daughter can amuse herself on campus while we catch up.”
“I’m not here for old-time’s sake, Eddie. And Lucy isn’t my daughter. She works with me.”
“A librarian then?”
“Yes.”
Bertie removed her hands from his and settled herself in the recently emptied chair.
The professor sighed and took a seat behind the desk. He peered at us over the top of a stack of magazines. I couldn’t read the writing on the top one, but I guessed it was Greek. “Very well, if you have not come to fulfill my fondest dreams and run away with me at long last, how can I help you?”
I leaned up against a bookshelf. It shifted beneath my weight, and I quickly moved away. A swift scan of the books in the room and the framed diplomas on the walls told me that Edward James McClanahan was a professor of Latin. I wondered if Bertie spoke Latin. She’d shown no sign of it. He was around her age, a year or two older perhaps. If he’d been married three—or four—times since knowing her, it was likely they’d been at college together.
“I’ll come straight to the point, Eddie,” Bertie said.
“I have no expectation that you would do otherwise, Bee.”
“Tell me about the history department at this university.”
“Not my field, as you know, but we’re a small school, so I have contact with most of the faculty, whether I want to or not. The head of the modern history department is Professor Elizabeth McArthur. A competent woman, although rather too serious for my liking. She has not the slightest sense of humor. Makes it dreadfully easy to bait her, of course. Her and her equally dour henchman, Professor Norman Hoskins. They loathe being called Norm and Lizzie, by the way. Keep that in mind if you are speaking to them, and remember to use it constantly.” His light blue eyes twinkled.
“What’s the
state of the modern history department itself?”
The twinkle faded away. “Why are you asking, Bee?”
“I’ve had contact with them lately. I like to know who I’m dealing with.”
He leaned back in his chair. “You are the director of the Bodie Island Lighthouse Library.”
“You’ve been keeping tabs on me.”
“Not at all. I simply put two and two together. The late Jay Ruddle has a collection of North Carolina historical documents. A valuable collection, I understand, which he was in the process of granting to a recognized institution when he suddenly passed away. The reason I know this is because, prior to his death, Lizzie spoke before the budget committee, which I am on, and told us that we, meaning the college, had only one competitor for obtaining the Ruddle collection: the Bodie Island Lighthouse Library. Lizzie was, I have to point out, highly dismissive of your chances, Bee. Sneering is the word that comes to mind.”
“Why would she bring this to the budget committee,” I asked. “if the bequest wasn’t finalized yet?”
He looked at me. “A good question.” Back to Bertie: “Because the budget committee was voting that very day on a recommendation that the entire North Carolina History Department be shut down. I myself was planning to vote yea. There are other institutions that do a far better job of teaching and researching our state history than us. Let them do what they do, and we will do what we do so well. Ne in vobis?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Bertie answered, “if I agree or not. Would the bequest save their department?”
“It would. We would get not only the collection, Lizzie told us, but funds to properly house it and to hire staff to maintain it. And, we were given to believe, a tidy bit extra for the college as well.”
“The head of any department will fight for their department,” Bertie said, “or they shouldn’t be in the job. Beyond that, did you get the feeling there was anything, say, personal about Professors Hoskins and McArthur’s discussion with the budget committee?”
“If they leave this institution,” he said, “both Norm and Lizzie would be lucky to get jobs teaching history at a technical college.”
“Is that your professional opinion, Eddie? Or personal?”
“Both. That’s always convenient, isn’t it? Norm is Blacklock alma mater. His parents were major donors to the university. Ergo, he kept his job when anyone else as inept as he would have been told to move on. His mother died about two years ago, his father before her, and it turned out there wasn’t much of an estate left, so those funds dried up. Elizabeth has a good head on her shoulders. She might have made something of herself in her chosen field, but she got comfortable here at Blacklock. Too comfortable. That and her abrasive personality ensured that she doesn’t have the type of friends who might be able to help her if she needs to make a professional move.”
“Are they lovers?” Bertie asked.
He shook his great mop of hair. “That has never so much as been rumored. I don’t think they like each other much, but they do have something in common.”
“The need to keep the North Carolina History Department alive,” Bertie said.
“And that means get the Ruddle papers,” I said.
Professor McClanahan nodded. “I assume your library is still in the running for the collection?”
“The race ended without a winner,” Bertie said. “Mr. Ruddle had not publicly announced a decision, so it’s up to his heirs to decide what to do next. That could take years.”
“You’re investigating as to who killed Mr. Ruddle.”
Bertie’s voice stayed calm. “What makes you think that?”
“If the race has been called, there’s no need to investigate your opponent’s weaknesses. The man died in your library, and I know you well enough, even after all these years, to know that you intend to find out why. Why and who. The question, my dear Bee, you are asking is, Cui bono?”
Even I knew what that meant: “Who benefits?”
“Perhaps,” he said, “Lizzy and Norm weren’t aware the race was ending.”
“It had ended, Eddie; only the prize ceremony was cancelled. They hadn’t been informed, but shortly before he died, Mr. Ruddle had made up his mind to give his collection to our library, simply because we were the best choice. It’s possible his granddaughter will want to keep it in the family.”
She got to her feet. “Thanks for this, Eddie.”
He leaned back in his chair and made a steeple of his fingers. He peered at Bertie over them. “Now that you’ve tracked me down, Bee, keep in touch.”
She gave him a smile. “I think I will.”
We left.
Bertie thanked Judy for her time. There were no signs that the receptionist had done anything toward making tea as the professor had ordered.
Classes were breaking up as we left the office, and we fought our way through surging crowds of undergraduates. We stepped out of the dark building into the sunlight of the quad, and I pulled my sunglasses out of my bag. “Okay, talk.”
“As I suspected, Elizabeth and—”
“I don’t care about them. At least not at the moment. Tell me about you and the professor.”
Bertie sighed. “We did our postgraduate degrees together at the University of Virginia. Him in Latin and Greek, me in library science. We dated for a long time. We were in love. That is, I was in love with him. Eddie? I was never entirely sure.”
“He had other girlfriends?”
“No. But he had other loves: Latin, Herodotus, Winston Churchill, reading Homer in the original. Everything in his studies excited Eddie.”
“Sounds like a virtue, not a fault,” I said.
“Any virtue carried to an extreme becomes a fault,” she said. Her voice was wistful, and I sensed she was looking back through the years. “Dates were forgotten because he’d found a new interpretation of the Aeneid he had to start reading that night. My big news about what my doctoral supervisor had to say was shoved aside in favor of a treatise on a fresh biography of Winston Churchill. Our relationship ended the night he failed to get to the bus station for a trip to visit my parents. It would have been his first time meeting them. I left the station and ran back to town, worried he’d been in an accident. I found him at home, watching a program on PBS about Pompeii. He was sitting on the floor directly in front of the TV, trying to read the writing on buildings or documents in the background. He hadn’t caught the bus, he said, because he wanted to watch the show. He’d forgotten to tell me his plans had changed, and brushed that off as a triviality.
This was in the days of VCRs. I told him he could have taped the show to watch another time, and he said he was afraid he’d make a mistake and set the timer wrong. I stormed out, spent the night in an uncomfortable chair at the bus station, and caught the morning bus. He continued watching the destruction of Pompeii.”
“And that was it,” I said.
“It was. I’d moved out of my apartment, as it was the start of summer break, and I was going home. I hadn’t given Eddie the phone number at my family’s house, assuming we were going there together.”
“Ah, yes, the glorious days before cell phones and constant communication.”
“It had its benefits. He could have tracked me down, but he was accompanying his professor to do research in Italy over the summer, and they were scheduled to leave in a few days. No contest as to which task was the more important to Eddie. When we returned to school in the fall, he wanted to pick up where we’d left off, but I told him I’d found someone else, although that wasn’t true.”
“He’s carried a torch for you ever since.”
She sniffed. “He’s been married four times.”
“Maybe three. And that proves my point. He never found true love again.”
She smiled at me. “You’re such a romantic, Lucy. If we’d married, I would have been but wife number one. The charm of the brilliant but scatter-brained intellectual soon wears off when there are groceries to buy and meals to coo
k or children to pick up from day care. If he’d missed his TV program to catch that bus, he wouldn’t have been the dazzling Edward McClanahan. Give me a second, will you? I have a stone in my shoe.”
Bertie dropped onto a bench and pulled off her right shoe. I stood beside her, glancing around. On the third floor of the liberal arts building, a curtain moved. A shape stood in the window, looking down onto the quad.
“We passed a coffee shop on the way into town.” Bertie got to her feet. “Let’s grab something for the road.”
When I looked back at the building, the person watching us had disappeared.
Chapter Fifteen
We picked up our coffees and then drove back to the library in silence. Bertie kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead, and when I peeked at her out of the corner of my own eye, she appeared to be wrapped in thought. Whether she was remembering her long-lost youth and a tempestuous but ill-fated relationship with a single-minded Latin student, or thinking about what certain members of the Blacklock History Department might have to gain from the death of Jay Ruddle, I couldn’t tell.
I sat back in my own seat, sipped my latte, and stared out the window.
What we’d learned from Professor McClanahan had put Professors Elizabeth McArthur and Norman Hoskins at the top of my mental suspect list. College teachers were supposed to be mild-mannered people, wrapped in the clouds on top of their ivory tower. I’d worked in the libraries at Harvard, and I knew that stereotype was nowhere near the reality. No one would fight harder over a slight, imagined or otherwise, to their field than a university professor.
Under threat of the closure of their entire department, essentially negating their life’s work, I had no doubt academics could resort to extreme measures.
How extreme was the question.
Elizabeth and Norman (I must remember to refer to them as Lizzie and Norm) had been at the library for Louise Jane’s lecture. Did one, or both, of them come into the lighthouse unobserved? Did he or she silently climb the back stairs and confront Jay? Demand he award them the collection?
