by Kluge, P. F.
What next? The star of the show had spoken but the audience was still restless. I saw Dean Sullivan lean over to consult with Niles. If he answered at all, it must have been no more than a word. All I could see was a shrug. He checked on Sherwood Graves who shook his head, no, and so it happened that the only person who hadn’t spoken was propelled towards the microphone.
“We’ll take questions now,” Caroline said. “And we’ll be as helpful as we can. Questions?”
If you attend lectures and readings at a small liberal arts college, you’re familiar with what usually happens after lectures, a mixed and delicate silence in which the audience’s desire to show polite interest contends with a collective urge to hit the streets. Only now, things were reversed. The speakers were the ones who wanted closure, the crowd wanted more.
“Any questions?” Caroline repeated, scanning the hall, hoping it was over already. She was like an auctioneer: going, going, gone. Then the hands started going up and she was dead meat.
“Yes?” Caroline said, pointing to a woman I knew from the library, Miranda Simmons. A poet and a sort of friend. We’d agreed that we’d never attend each others’ campus readings. As a result, we got along nicely.
“This is for Mr...is it...Grave?”
“Graves,” he said. “Plural.”
“Well, that’s my question. We’ve had three deaths. So tell me, are we talking about one murderer? Or two? Or three?”
Graves shook his head, as if this were a question he knew was coming. He thought it over for a little while. A little too long for Miranda.
“Sir,” she resumed. “It’s not like I’m asking you to answer if you don’t know. But if you do...”
Graves nodded. “I understand your question. And your concern...”
“Then answer it!” someone shouted from the back and now it was clear that everything that happened so far hadn’t worked, Warren’s speech included.
“Here’s your answer,” Graves said. “Ballistic tests on the bullets we recovered today...and we recovered them both...are preliminary. I have to be cautious. I’ll just say that unless things change...and I doubt they will...” He paused. Now he’d committed himself. He glanced out at the audience, sensing he was one second away from changing the way people looked at themselves and this place forever. “...there’s nothing inconsistent with the conclusion that the bullets were fired from the same weapon.” He stopped and let it sink in: I could picture car doors being locked all over town, houses bolted, people looking over their shoulders. “The same weapon,” he repeated.
“Are you saying...are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Miranda pressed.
“Yes.”
“Then why don’t you say it?”
“A serial killer. Alright? The same shooter...for Martha Yeats as well as the two students we lost today.”
You could feel the shock pass across the room. Serial. Serial killer. Serial code. Movie serial: Perils of Pauline. Daytime serial: Days of Our Lives. Serial killer: Boston Strangler. Ted Bundy. Here.
“I’m Hartley Fuller,” the history chair announced. “I’ve been teaching here for fifteen years. I appreciate President Niles’ concern that the college go about its business as usual. But isn’t there a point at which caring for an institution has to be matched by consideration for individual lives? You can hire more security officers and install phones and patrol the streets. But how long can a college go on that way?”
“I’ll second that,” someone shouted, not waiting to be recognized. “My name’s Howard Parrish. I’ve got two daughters at this college. I’m paying $50,000 a year to send them here and, let me be clear, so far I’ve been well satisfied. So much so I serve on the Parents’ Advisory Council. I’ve sponsored college get-togethers back in Lake Bluff. You know me, President Niles.”
Warren waved from his chair, nodding regards. Or forgiveness.
“You know I love this place,” Parrish said. “And I know you’ve got a problem. But so do I. I can’t gamble my kids’ lives, keeping them here while you catch the maniac responsible. I’m sorry if I’m letting you down. But I came here to pick them up and bring them home. Alive.”
“Is there a question? Caroline asked. She was trying to control the meeting. But she miscalculated.
“All sorts of questions,” Parrish fired back. He’d been forbearing with Warren, tiptoeing around someone in obvious pain. But My Wife, My Provost elicited no such sympathies. “And yes, Mrs. Provost, I know there are things you can’t talk about. I hope there are. But here’s an easy one. Do you have kids?”
“No,” Caroline responded, flushing lightly, and I’ll bet she contemplated saying that the students were her children.
“So make it a hypothetical question. If you had kids in college here...would you let them stay?”
“I’d have to think about it,” Caroline said.
“Well, thanks, but I’ve thought about it,” Parrish responded and sat back down. Now there was real applause. It had hung in the balance for a while but the verdict was coming in. I could feel the college just draining away.
“Thank you,” Caroline said. She pointed to another hand which belonged to a student I didn’t know. I could see she was a mess.
“My name is Kim Hetherington and I’m Amy Plimpton’s roommate,” she said. “I spent this afternoon packing her clothing and her CDs and stuff in boxes. Just sort of stripping her half of the room down to like bare bed and bare walls. Hopefully, you’ll catch somebody. But what I’m wondering is...does anybody know...why us? Why here? Why now? I mean, I know this stuff happens but it’s in big places isn’t it, like at state universities or in cities? Not here...” She’d held on so far but now she was crying. On stage, no one wanted to speak. It was break down, vapor lock, their sitting in silence while Amy’s roommate stood there. All I could hear, all around the room, was crying.
“If I may,” someone said from down in front.
“Yes,” Caroline said. “Professor Wright.”
“Thank you,” the old man said as he moved—with the aid of a cane—to the edge of the stage, turning away from the college administration, facing the audience. I’d seen Wright around, without knowing who he was, but now that the legend had been identified, I took him in: the ancient pinstripe suit, the suspenders, the unexpected checked flannel shirt open at the collar to expose one of those old-fashioned undershirts, with buttons at the neck. They’d brought him out of retirement—it looked like hibernation—to fill in for Martha Yeats.
“Some of you know me, some of you don’t,” he began. “I am Hiram Wright. Say it quickly and the name becomes a slogan. Hire-em-right. Known to my enemies as Hire-em-wrong. I’ve listened carefully and I appreciate that the worthy people on stage are having a difficult time.” He had the excuse of his cane for not turning towards the administration, but there was something extra nonchalant in the way he gestured their way over his shoulder, acknowledgment and dismissal combining in one move. So much for them.
“And if I appreciate their dilemma, I also—more deeply—apprehend what the people in front of me are going through. These deaths are obscene. They are also—I suspect—gratuitous. Those two students were not killed because of who they were or anything they’d done. Nor—I suspect—was Martha Yeats singled out because of her positions or her politics. I may be wrong. I’m ready to be corrected. Are there any hands behind me? Any stirrings on stage...”
Wright asked his question without turning to check. “No, no,” the audience told him. “They’re clueless!”
“Well, then, I suspect these people did nothing to earn their deaths. Except for one thing which connects me and you and them. That is...this college, this place. To which we make our way to teach and learn for four years or...in my case...forty...forty years.”
He had the audience now. The lights were hot, so he pulled a motley-colored handkerchief out of his pocket to mop his brow and no one stirred.
“Who gets to play him in the movie?” my neighbor aske
d. I didn’t answer but I couldn’t help casting the part, thinking about smart, strong fat men, bodies like monuments, tongues like snakes, eyes like hawks. Burl Ives, Jackie Gleason, Orson Welles. All dead. We don’t grow them like that anymore. Belushi, Candy, Chris Farley—we lose our fat men early. And we don’t teach rhetoric anymore either, those cadences and rhythms, shifting modulations, careful, balanced sentences.
“These three deaths are frightening and tragic. The death of a college is worse. And, when this is over—and it will end, and soon—I predict that we’ll find someone hated...all of us. Someone wants to shut the college down. Someone who hates us. Or who loves us. Do you follow me, Miss Hetherington?”
The tear-stained roommate glanced at the professor with the kind of urgent regard you hope students will give you in class. You rarely see looks like that, outside of admissions videos.
“Do you follow me?” Wright asked again.
“I’m trying.”
“A college like ours generates strong feelings. Like a parent. Love and hate, you think of them as extremes. Opposites. Way apart. But they’re connected, they truly are. They need each other, I sometimes think. They’re both a kind of caring. Someone wants to hurt this college. I can’t say who or why, whether it will turn out to be something we did that was right or wrong, whether it was by design or accident. I ask myself, could it have been something I did—or failed to do—that inspired this madness? A bad grade I gave someone? Or—just as likely, just as pernicious—a grade too generous? Did I make too much of someone? Or too little?” He took a deep breath. He kept the audience waiting. “But I will not abandon this place. I will remain. I will teach classes on schedule, day and night, for nothing, if need be, to an audience of one. I will keep office hours. Daily, I will proceed from my home on River Road to campus. If the killer wants me, I will be at work or home, on my porch. An easy enough target. Meanwhile, I see some of my students here tonight. I remind those in American History that they have papers due tomorrow. Thank you.”
What a gambit, I thought, watching Wright take his time—maybe a little more than usual—to get back to his seat. The applause started slowly, a clap here and there, then it caught and swelled and people were on their feet, a standing ovation for the living legend. The administrators looked at each other. Do what now? Say what? Huh? Then they rose as well, sensing a chance to close the meeting, all of them but Sherwood Graves, who left the stage immediately.
“Thank you for coming,” Caroline said, before the audience could sit back down and ask more questions. I didn’t want to chat with the guy at my side, so I exited down the aisle away from him, not looking back, and I rushed out through the rear of the building, where a backstage door opened out onto the old college cemetery. There I decided to kill a few minutes on a bench, waiting for the crowd to thin.
Old Wright had his moment, I thought: the grand old man meeting a crisis head on. Good footage. Wright as an I’ll-take-my-stand professor, a rare talent, a curmudgeonly breed, a hybrid of local character and national reputation. His kind was rare these days, when a lot of faculty divided between stayers-on who were pumped-up prep school teachers and passers-through who were waiting for that call from Duke.
In evening light, the cemetery looked like the cover illustration of a copy of Spoon River Anthology I owned. Row on row of graves, high and low, some mossy and hard-to-read, some newly cut. Settling in a college like this put you in a collective frame of mind. Like it or not, you became part of something, something larger than you were and yet, small enough to know. You thought of Our Town, of Winesburg, Ohio, of people anchored in—and consumed by—obscure places. I bet Hiram Wright had his place reserved at this cemetery. It was only a question of time, and not much of that. You had to wonder what it felt like, to come to a place and say, this is it, here’s where I’ll have my career, this is my home forever, there are other places out there, maybe better, but this one is mine. Was it wisdom or cowardice? Copped-out complacency or serene contentment? No more resumé-publishing, no more networking. I was a mover, at least I had been until now, and Caroline was definitely upward and outward bound. So there was always this false suspense—which we called adventure—about where next, and when. Not for Hiram Wright. He’d be here, in among these tombs and markers and one lonely mausoleum, these trees and shadows, with the sun going down across the river.
I thought the pizza place would be empty, students disinclined to double cheese and pitchers of beer on such a night. But they were there, with parents who’d raced to campus. They sat in quiet groups, out of practice in family dynamics. Visiting parents made college students younger: it tamed them for a while. I chose the bar, a lair of locals, working guys I usually avoided because, when they found out you were a professor, they struck up a conversation, testing whether you were a snob or a regular guy. I took a stool at the end of the bar, ordered a beer, and feigned interest in the telecast of a high school football game between Zanesville and Danville, stubby, scrubby kids on a half-lit field. I had the set to myself, until the news-at-ten.
“An Ohio college adds murder to its list of electives,” the announcer said. “Coming up next.”
“Hi, Professor May.” It was the guy I’d sat next to at the meeting.
“Have we met before?” I asked.
“Duncan Kerstetter,” he said, offering his hand and sitting down beside me. “I guess we’ll be getting to know each other. One on one.”
“Is that so?”
“That’s still the style here, isn’t it? Get to know your professors in and out of class? Rake leaves, take walks, maybe get invited to supper?”
“What?”
“Well, sherry and cheese at least.”
“Are you a student?”
“Your student. Didn’t they tell you?”
“Who the hell is Duncan Kerstetter?” I asked as soon as I came into the house and before I noticed that Caroline was on the phone. She gave me what amounted to a busy signal: a raised hand that said, back off.
“Shit!” I said, loud enough for whoever was on the other end to hear it. I stalked to the refrigerator for a beer I didn’t want, I scraped some skin off my finger before remembering Sam Adams didn’t use twist-off caps. I rattled noisily around in a drawer before finding a bottle opener, enough to get a do-you-mind? from my wife. I stepped outside, using one hand to pour beer into my mouth and another to unzip and pull out and piss on the lawn. I knew what was going on inside. I’d seen it before, back east, when this college and Caroline were courting. There were phone calls she couldn’t take at the office, messages on our answering machine to call “her friend in Ohio.”
“Are you drunk?” she asked, when she was done.
“Not drunk,” I said. “Pissed. As in pissed off.”
“Listen. I’m sorry I forgot to tell you about Duncan Kerstetter.” Then she briefed me on this crazy mortician millionaire who had a score to settle with Harry Stribling. He wanted a grade changed. Caroline’s bright idea had been to offer Kerstetter an independent study. Stribling’s grade wouldn’t change but now Kerstetter would finally have a chance to get an A in English. From me. A grateful student would remember the college and a grateful administration would remember me.
“You promised him an A up front? Just for showing up?”
“Of course not. I suggest you start him off with a C plus. Then you can bring him up to an A. A-minus anyway. Happy ending all around.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said. I thought I’d learned to live with a wife who had more power and money than I did. But this ratcheted things up a notch. Turn your poet trick, Mark. Easier if it had been a B. B’s are nothing. But damn it, maybe because all other grades are basically gas-station give-aways, we’re kind of fussy with our A’s. We might be prostitutes but, when it came to A’s, we were prostitutes with principles: you can do what you want down below, honey, but just don’t kiss me on the lips.
“Why didn’t you offer him an independent study with Hiram Wright? He and Striblin
g were Butch and Sundance, right?”
“Hiram wouldn’t do it.”
“Did you ask him?”
“He wouldn’t do it. We didn’t have to ask.”
“And I would. You didn’t have to ask.”
“It’s up to you,” she said, in a way that suggested it didn’t matter what I thought, the deal was done. “Was there anything else you wanted?”
Chapter VIII
BILLY HOOVER
“Okay,” Sherwood Graves said, looking around the Security Office, the afternoon of the double murders. “Who’d want to kill a college?”
The Security Office was jammed, like the first day of a popular class, people sizing each other up, sizing up the teacher too, all these cops and sheriffs, uniforms and suits, wondering what they could get away with, how weird it was going to get. From where I sat, near the back, next to a window, it was plenty weird already. Half an hour after watching Lisa Garner drive out of the trailer court, I drove up the hill and into the middle of craziness. Sunday of homecoming weekend and the highway was blocked, right at the gates of the college. I saw ambulances and sheriff cars and state cruisers and a mobile crime lab and I knew right away there’d been another murder. While Lisa Garner had been visiting me, a killer visited the campus. And now, Sherwood Graves was the man of the hour.
“Who’d want to kill a college?” Graves repeated. Sure, he admitted, it sounded like an odd question. Colleges weren’t people, they were institutions, like a church. They went on forever, they were bigger than the people who ran or attended them, they were where past, present, future came together. No one would want to kill a college. So I thought. Then I saw what Graves had been doing, while I was mooning about the G-Man. He’d been preparing for this day. His list of suspects was endless. Check that. The lists. He had lists of every employee who’d been let go or left under a cloud, a secretary messing with petty cash, a maintenance man asleep on a leaf mulcher, a business manager who tangled up accounts. A few years before, there’d been an effort to unionize some of the guys in maintenance. The skilled trades. There’d been pickets out and a lot of e-mail. He had a faculty list. People who’d been let go. That didn’t mean fired. That almost never happened. But there was still a chain of hurt alright, visiting professors who had been denied tenure and tenured professors who vapor-locked at associate professor level and never made full professor.
