The Professor

by Alexandria Clarke

  “She sounds like a bitch,” he commented when I told him about my meeting with Flynn. He popped the lid off a jar of tomato sauce and started spooning it over the chicken. “This Jo girl, though. How sure are you that she isn’t actually suffering from paranoia?”

  I shook my head as I sliced fresh mozzarella. “It makes sense. Davenport never would’ve been valedictorian with his grades. Don’t you think it’s weird? Jo’s at the top of her class, everything’s perfect, and then all of a sudden, she’s flunking out and labeled as a nut job. It doesn’t add up.”

  “If that’s the case, it makes me wonder what else the university is covering up,” said Wes. We finished preparing the chicken, and Wes slid the pan into the oven.

  A possibility crossed my mind. “How curious are you about that?” I asked him.

  Wes leaned against the kitchen counter, crossing his arms. “You’ve got that look, Nic.”

  “What look?”

  “The one you get every time you try to coerce me into doing something I don’t want to do. Just tell me.”

  I circled around the counter to where Wes’s laptop was charging and tapped my fingers on its keyboard. “You have access to the police database, right? Could you do a search for cases involving Waverly students?”

  “I could.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Okay, but would you?”

  “Nicole, come on.”

  “What? It’s all right there!” I unplugged the laptop from its charger and carried it over to Wes. He remained firmly planted against the counter, so I gave him my best doe eyes. “Please?”

  “Put my laptop back before you accidentally drop it in the sink or something,” Wes ordered. I stayed put, pouting, but Wes was adamant. “I have to draw the line somewhere, Nicole,” he said. “I can’t risk my job like that.”

  My shoulders dropped. Most days, the presence of a morally sound boyfriend worked to my advantage, but when I needed him to bend the rules a tiny bit, he was as stiff as a slab of concrete. I recognized a lost battle. “I understand,” I said, abandoning the laptop. “I’m going to go change.”

  “Thank you. I’ll make some veggies.”

  I ambled into the bedroom, stripping off my sweater and undershirt, and opened the closet door to find something more comfortable to wear. As I rifled through my wardrobe, searching for a particular pair of ratty sweatpants with the Waverly University crest emblazoned on the thigh, the sight of Wes’s desktop computer, the one he used to work from home, caught my eye in the mirror. Half-dressed, I wandered over to Wes’s desk and typed his password in. The screensaver vanished to reveal the main page of the police database already pulled up on the desktop. All I had to do was log in with Wes’s information. I glanced over my shoulder toward the kitchen, where the steady sizzle of oil in a pan and the clink of silverware told me that Wes was still blissfully unaware of my actions in the bedroom. My fingers lingered over the keyboard. I knew Wes’s username and password for his work account, but betraying Wes’s trust was a high price to pay for the slim chance of obtaining potential information. I was tiptoeing over the line he had spoken about earlier. Before integrity could get the best of me, I tapped in Wes’s information and hit Enter.

  The database itself was easy enough to search through, and I found a list of cases involving Waverly students in a few brief seconds. As I scrolled through, keeping my eyes peeled for familiar names or peculiarities, Wes called down the hall from the kitchen.

  “Babe, dinner’s ready!”

  “One minute, I can’t find my sweatpants!” I called back, scrolling faster now. Several Waverly students had had encounters with the local force for petty crimes, but vandalism, disorderly conduct, and shoplifting were all run-of-the-mill experiences for the average college student. Nothing out of the ordinary revealed itself right away until one name, Spencer Schwartz, caused me to pause in my swift search. Schwartz was yet another one of the families that O’Connor had been following. I clicked on Spencer’s name, expanding the case file. It was a citation for aggravated DWI from the previous year, but for some inexplicable reason, Spencer hadn’t faced any kind of consequences for her actions. No fine, no jail time, no revocation of her license. She’d gotten off scot-free.

  I took a picture of the screen with my phone then noticed that Spencer’s case had been copied and stored in another folder as well. I clicked the folder, revealing its contents, and a groan of incredulity found its way out of my mouth. The folder was full of cases similar to Schwartz’s, students from Waverly’s blue-blooded families that had committed crimes of varying severity, but every single one of them had been dismissed without reason.

  “Nicole!”

  Engrossed in these new revelations, I’d forgotten that I was supposed to be on a stealth mission. Wes stood in the doorway, one hand still grasping the pair of oily tongs from the kitchen as he stared open-mouthed at the sight of me leaning over his work computer.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said, tactfully maneuvering through the files and papers of O’Connor’s research that I had left on the floor to join me at his desk. He caught a glimpse of the pages that I was looking it. “Oh, God. Nicole, you didn’t.”

  “Wes, I’m really sorry, but look at this—”

  “No!” Wes spun me around so that I no longer faced his desktop. “I understand that you’re immersed in this. I get that you want to figure it out, but you are now officially dragging me into some really illegal shit, and I didn’t ask for that, Nicole.”

  “I know.”

  “I told you. I won’t stop you from doing your own thing. Go through O’Connor’s shit. Fine. But this is a whole new level.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you want me to lose my job?” he went on, moving around me to click out of the folders that I had singled out from the database. I failed to mention that I’d already taken screenshots of the cases that had piqued my interest.

  “Of course not.”

  “Good.” He took a deep breath. Now that he’d logged himself out of his work account, and its contents were no longer visible to me, he deflated a little bit. He sat down in his desk chair, reaching out for one of my hands. As he played with my fingers, he said, “Look, you can’t do this to me, okay? I have always had complete and utter trust in you. Please don’t make me start to question that.”

  “If it makes you feel any better,” I mumbled, “I feel like an asshole for doing it.”

  A hint of a smile touched his lips.

  “But—” I continued.

  “Oh, there’s a ‘but.’”

  “Wes, I found a bunch of cases that involved Waverly students,” I said, rushing through the words before he could stop me. “Some of them were pretty serious. For instance, Robert Buchanan—he’s a freshman—was just cleared of a reckless driving charge, but he put the other driver in the hospital for months. Anastasia St. Claire—she’s Stella St. Claire’s daughter. You know the professor who teaches next door?—she just got out of a one thousand dollar charge for hazing.”

  “Nicole—”

  “And Donovan Davenport keeps popping up too,” I interrupted. “He got busted for possession. He was pulled over for speeding and had a couple grams of weed on him. And guess who he was with when it happened? Lauren Lockwood.”

  Wes rubbed his temples with the tips of his fingers. “What’s your point, Nicole?”

  “My point is, why are these particular students being given special treatment?” I said, kneeling down to collect a stack of papers from the floor. The top page was a letter of recommendation for Robert Buchanan from Dean Hastings. “The same names keep popping up. Davenport and Lockwood, for instance. Donovan told me that he didn’t have any connections to the Lockwoods, but according to police records, he’s rolling doobies with this Lauren girl.”

  “Please don’t ever say doobies again.”

  “Stop joking around. I’m serious, Wes.”

  “I know,” he said with a tremendous sigh. He brandished
the kitchen tongs at me. “That’s what scares me.”

  “Look, I know you don’t want any part of it,” I said. “But is there any way you could just, I don’t know, nonchalantly ask Daryl why those cases were thrown out?”

  He regarded me for a moment. The last bit of evening light filtered in through the blinds on the window, bringing out the flecks of gold and green in his eyes. I waited, though I hoped his answer would come soon. The acrid scent of burning oil wafted into the bedroom from down the hall, and I feared for the state of our dinner.

  “I suppose,” said Wes after what felt like eons, “that if I have the opportunity, I could mention it to Daryl.”

  “That’s all I’m asking.”

  “Don’t expect much,” he warned, and once again, the tongs came dangerously close to breaching my personal space. “I’m not promising anything.”

  “Okay.”

  Wes stood up, his desk chair creaking, and started to head back toward the kitchen. “I’m going to see what I can salvage of dinner,” he announced. “Put a shirt on, woman. You’ll freeze to death.”

  As he retreated down the hallway, I unearthed one of his old state college sweatshirts and drew it on over my head, smiling as I listened to Wes mumble about a perfectly good chicken parmesan gone to shit.

  After a decent night’s sleep, I decided to take Flynn’s advice, as rudely delivered as it was, and headed to the library to put some work in on my thesis. I set up shop at a secluded table near the Rapere Wing then browsed through the section of the library that was dedicated to the university itself. Ensconced between the shelves, it was easy to get lost in the numerous volumes outlining Waverly’s history. I selected three or four that caught my eye, but as I knelt down to reach for a fat, faded maroon book with the title Legacies of Waverly University stamped on its spine in gold lettering, I noticed a neat stack of yellowing newspapers at the end of the lowest shelf. Shuffling over, I reached for the topmost edition.

  It was an issue of The Daily Bird, dated 1898, and from what I could tell, it was Waverly’s old student newspaper. I’d never heard of it before. Our current student paper was called the Waverly Daily, and if I wasn’t mistaken, it hadn’t been established until the 1930s. I appreciated how well preserved The Daily Bird was, turning its crispy pages with a delicate hand, but when my eyes landed on a note from the editor, I clicked my tongue in recognition. Theodore Lockwood, senior editor, had been a student staffer for four years. His note thanked his readers and announced his retirement. The new editor in chief, I was less than surprised to note, was to be Everett Davenport.

  With a few issues of The Daily Bird tucked under my arm, I returned to my quiet table, typed in the password for my laptop, and opened up a Web browser. A cursory search for Waverly’s forgotten daily turned up no significant results, so I accessed Waverly’s own scholastic database and brushed up on my Boolean abilities. This heeded more success. Still, only two articles within the database mentioned The Daily Bird. The first was entitled “America’s Oldest College Newspaper.”

  For several years, it has been debated as to which of America’s universities boasts the oldest student-run paper. Yale, Princeton, and Harvard have all attempted to claim the title, but a recent revelation came to light with the discovery of an issue of The Daily Bird, Waverly University’s original student paper. The issue was dated 1789, decades before the other Ivies rolled the dice in the game of collegiate journalism. Unfortunately, Waverly can’t claim the ultimate prize of Longest Running College Daily as the publication of The Daily Bird came to a mysterious halt in 1910, and the university’s current paper wasn’t instituted until 1934. So the question remains: what happened to The Daily Bird?

  For whatever reason, The Daily Bird had dropped off the map of college papers. I skimmed the rest of the article, but whoever wrote it hadn’t discovered any further information on the Bird’s disappearance. The second article, “Waverly Brothership Continues On,” was from a few years back and wasn’t about the Bird at all. Instead, it detailed the “long-standing partnership” between two of Waverly’s finest families and their continual success beyond education. Before I even read on, instinct told me which two families the article undoubtedly referred to. Sure enough: “The Lockwoods and the Davenports have worked side by side ever since the two families first arrived at Waverly. Orson’s and William’s great-great-grandfathers ran Waverly’s original student paper, The Daily Bird, together.”

  As I continued to read the article, a crease of confusion etched itself into the skin between my brows. The Lockwoods and the Davenports went back as far as the school itself. Why Donovan would deny that relationship was beyond me, especially when the evidence was so easily accessible.

  A murmur of conversation and the soft fall of footsteps on the library carpet permeated the fortress of books that I had constructed atop my table. I ignored it at first, too absorbed in the baffling existence of The Daily Bird, but the tail end of one sentence caused my head to snap up at attention.

  “—asked me to schedule a meeting with the Morrigan.”

  Another voice responded. “Good. It’s about time we straightened this disaster out. Pluto won’t admit it, but he’s definitely worried. I think there’s something going on that he isn’t telling the rest of us.”

  The library swallowed the voices as the footfalls faded from my little corner of the building. I hesitated, but after a split second of decision making, I tucked away the old issues of the Bird and shot to my feet. Hurrying between the shelves, I followed the voices, but as I approached the entrance to the Rapere Wing, the conversation abruptly cut off. I peeked around my side of the shelf and let out a groan. Between the pillars that flanked the adjacent wing of the library, there was no one in sight.

  Dejected, I returned to my table and reopened my laptop. I searched “Pluto” and “Waverly University” with no luck. The only information on Pluto that I could find referred to either the dubiously classified planet, Mickey’s pet dog, or the alternate name for Hades. The Morrigan I was even less familiar with, but with the help of a few informative Web pages, I began to understand the reference. The Morrigan was a character from Irish mythology, a “phantom queen” that took the shape of a crow and decided who lived and died on the battlefield. Like the origin of Pluto’s name, this meant little to me, and I slammed the laptop shut, ready to give up on the nicknames and return to my poorly attended thesis research, before an image popped into my mind: that of a black crow sculpture sitting on Catherine Flynn’s office bookshelf.

  5

  For the first time in a while, Wes beat me home that night. The front door banged against the wall behind it as I powered through, dumping my bag and shedding my jacket in record time. Franklin rushed over, tail wagging, and I said hello to him via a distracted pat to the top of his head. In the kitchen, Wes was busy adding noodles to a stir fry. The apartment smelled delicious, but as I slid onto one of the barstools and took out my laptop to continue my research, the scent of soy sauce and ginger faded from my focus.

  “Wow,” Wes commented, turning the stir fry with a wooden spoon. “Not even a hello kiss. Must have been an interesting day.”

  I leaned over the counter to press my lips briefly to Wes’s. “I have news,” I announced.

  “So do I.”

  That was a surprise. Wes almost always let me blather on about my day before filling me in on his. “You first.”

  He lowered the heat on the stove and left the food to simmer. “I asked Officer Wilson about those cases you found.”

  A rush of love for Wes pulsed through me. In all honesty, I hadn’t expected Wes to actually ask about the cases. The fact that he did was a small reminder of how much he cared for me. “You did?”

  “Yup. And guess what? He hemmed and hawed. Wouldn’t give me a straight answer.”

  “No way.”

  “Yup.” He nodded grimly. “So I asked Brad instead—you know Brad. He’s not quite as bright—and he let slip that cases involving hi
gh-profile students are thrown out at the request of university officials.”

  “Who exactly qualifies as a high-profile student?”

  “My guess is any one of them whose family is invited to those annual donation balls that Waverly holds,” said Wes, returning to the stove to move the wok off of the burner. He pulled two plates from the cabinet. “It’s not surprising really. All of those cases you found—Schwartz, Buchanan, St. Claire—those families go way back in Waverly history.”

  I scooched closer to the bar top as Wes filled a plate with stir fry and slid it across the counter. “I kind of already knew that.”

  “Of course you did,” said Wes, making a plate for himself. “High-end universities like Waverly are notorious for that kind of shit. It’s just business, really. You said you had news as well?”

  “Oh, right. I’m going to break in to Catherine Flynn’s office. Want to help?”

  “Nicole!” Wes dropped his fork in shock.

  “I’m kidding,” I said. Unable to leave my mysteries alone for long, I picked up my meal and carried it over to the coffee table near the couch, both of which were still laden with some of O’Connor’s research, despite Wes’s protests. The wooden puzzle box from O’Connor’s safe had become our new centerpiece. I dragged it toward me, fiddling with the spinning pieces on the front as I shoveled noodles into my mouth with the fork in my other hand. “You don’t have to help.”

  “What a relief,” Wes quipped. “Is there any point in trying to persuade you not to go through with this?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Hm. And why, may I ask, do you feel the need to break in to your thesis advisor’s office?”

  I shook the puzzle box, listening for any clue as to what it might contain. “I think she’s involved in all this crap.”

  “Just because she’s a hard-ass doesn’t mean she’s plotting some kind of Waverly takeover. Also, for future reference, you probably shouldn’t inform your cop boyfriend about your plans to break and enter.”