by Frankie Bow
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE FOLLOWING MORNING found me perusing the online job announcements. I wasn’t really planning to launch another full job search. It was a distraction, something to keep me from thinking about Donnie.
The ads looked less promising than I had ever seen them. Few teaching positions were listed, and fewer still were full time. For every faculty job I counted at least ten administrative positions. Not that Vice-Deans of Campus Engagement and Associate Directors of Service Learning weren’t important in their own way, but it would have been encouraging to see universities hiring a few professors as well.
Then a phrase jumped out at me: Mahina State University. Where Your Future Begins Tomorrow. Mahina State was advertising a full-time position in the English department. It was the job Melanie had been angling for. And it was exactly the kind of position I imagined I would get when I earned my Ph.D. from a top-ten literature and creative writing program. Mahina State wasn’t exactly the kind of place I’d hoped to end up. It wasn’t in the Top Ten of anything. But English professor was the job I had trained for; it was where I belonged. I got dressed quickly, completing my ablutions in under an hour, and drove in to campus to do some reconnaissance.
I let myself into my office and started to make myself a cup of coffee, but found my coffee drawer empty. Pat and Emma had consumed the last of my coffee when I wasn’t there. They would deny it, of course, so it wasn’t even worth accusing them.
The silver lining to my unexpected coffee stockout was I now had a good excuse to walk over to the building where the old beverage vending machine was, and where the English department also happened to be.
The old vending machine looked like it had been installed sometime before Hawai`i had been admitted to statehood. A handwritten Out of Order sign had been taped to its faded wood-grain face, but it was plugged in and humming. In return for my four quarters it dispensed a cup of tan liquid so hot I was amazed it didn’t melt the Styrofoam. I made my careful way down the hallway, blowing furiously over the top of the coffee to try to cool it down. A few of the English professors’ offices were closed for the summer, but most had the doors propped open, the occupants busy at their computers. I knocked on Pat’s door but there was no answer.
Across the hall, the door of the adjuncts’ office was ajar. Pat had his own office, but the newer part-timers were forced to cram into a single space. Pat had actually offered to share his office, pink hairdryer chairs and all, but so far there had been no takers.
Nicole Nixon was the only one in the adjuncts’ office today. She looked up from her computer, glad for the interruption. I set the hot coffee down (carefully) on one of the unoccupied desks. We hadn’t spoken since the day of Melanie’s death. Nicole had heard of my legal troubles (just about everyone had by now), so she said some supportive things about how she was sure the situation would be cleared up quickly, and wasn’t it all just awful. Then, to lighten the mood, we went on to chat about our respective gardens.
Finally, I decided to broach the topic of the open position. Although Nicole Nixon was an adjunct, her husband Scott was chair of the English department. She might have heard something about the search that wasn’t printed in the position announcement.
“Hey,” I said, as if I had just thought of it. “I saw your department is hiring—”
Without warning, Nicole Nixon burst into tears.
I quietly closed the office door, pulled a tissue out of my purse, and handed it to her.
“I’m sorry,” she sniffed.
“Do want to talk about it?” I pulled over a chair from a vacant desk and sat down.
“It’s my last chance.” Her voice cracked.
“Your last chance?”
“This job. Scotty told me he made sure it was written so I fit all the MQs and DQs. And it’s on a really short timeline, too. The candidate has to be ready to start on the first of August. It seemed perfect.”
“So you’re applying for the job. I see. It starts August first? That should narrow down the applicant pool. It would be hard for someone on the mainland to make the move in time.”
“Right? But we’ve already had three hundred fifty eight complete applications, a lot of them are from top programs, and some of these people have amazing recommendations and unreal pubs. How am I supposed to keep up when I’m teaching five sections of comp?”
“When is the closing date?” I asked.
“Not till the end of the month. So we’re going to get a lot more.”
“Well.” I tried to force an encouraging smile. “It sure won’t hurt to have the chair of the department on your side. And you meet the MQs and DQs? That’s amazing. You hardly ever see a candidate who has all the desirable qualifications.”
“I should be grateful for the opportunity,” she sniffled. “And I am, I really am. But I kind of feel like Scotty was just trying to ease his guilty conscience. I think this time he’s really gone and... sorry. Never mind. I’ve just been under a lot of stress.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, Nicole.” I was unable to suppress the petty thought that getting arrested for murder was at least as stressful as whatever Nicole Nixon was going through.
“You’re so lucky, Molly.”
“I am?”
“You’re on the tenure track. Do you know only a third of faculty members are tenure track now?”
“At Mahina State?” I asked.
“In the United States. You don’t know what it feels like to be a second-class citizen, Molly. You know what your classes are going to be more than two days in advance. You have a steady paycheck. You’re allowed to go to the Campus Christmas party.”
She began to sob again. I handed her a fresh tissue.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“I THINK I MIGHT HAVE a chance this time.” Nicole dabbed her eyes with the soggy tissue. “I have one book published from my dissertation, and my second one’s already under contract.”
“You have two books?”
I didn’t have any books. Since I had started at the College of Commerce I had been publishing in journals and presenting at conferences. Refereed journal articles were required to attain tenure in the College of Commerce. But books were the coin of the realm in most English departments. I couldn’t believe I had forgotten something so basic.
“At least, I hope I have a chance,” she faltered. “Some of the other applications are unreal. Top schools, amazing rec letters, awards.”
“But Nicole, you have an impressive record too. And you’re a great teacher. The students really like you.” I had no idea how the students felt about Nicole Nixon, but I figured there was no harm in trying to be encouraging.
“And I’m stuck in Mahina. I can’t just pick up and move somewhere else. Scotty’s doing so well here.”
I nodded sympathetically and marveled at how much Nicole knew about the applicant pool. Only the search committee was supposed to see applicants’ materials, and as an adjunct, Nicole was not allowed to serve on a search committee. Scott had certainly defied the confidentiality rules and told his wife everything.
I couldn’t imagine Donnie doing anything like that for me. Donnie was such a stickler for rules and discretion. It did mean he was trustworthy, but on the other hand, I could never squeeze any worthwhile workplace gossip out of him. Well, Donnie wasn’t my problem anymore, was he? The realization filled me with gloom. I’d have to get used to it.
“Are you drinking coffee from the vending machine?” Nicole asked. “You’re the first person I’ve ever seen who actually bought something from there.”
I gingerly touched the Styrofoam cup and decided it had cooled down enough to take a sip. It was tepid now, and oddly flavored with hints of chicken soup and chocolate.
“Yeah, I don’t recommend it.”
“So what brings you over here? Were you looking for Pat?”
“No, I actually came for the coffee. My personal supply ran out. But I’m glad you were in today.”
I certainly wasn’t going to tell Nic
ole the real reason I had stopped by: I was tired of explaining what my literature degree and I were doing in the College of Commerce. I wanted to be able to tell people I was an English professor.
The other students in my graduate program used to sneer at the business school. Most of them didn’t think such a thing even belonged in a university. When I’d informed my dissertation advisor that after a year of job-hunting, I had finally found a position in the Mahina State College of Commerce, he did not congratulate me. But according to him, “trying to teach a room full of slack-jawed baseball caps how to pad their resumes” would be a grievous waste of my “fine critical mind.”
Melanie’s needling, on top of everything else, hadn’t helped either. I’d been feeling like a failure and a sellout. And here Nicole Nixon from the English department thought I was the lucky one.
And she was right. Except for the part about losing my fiancé and getting arrested for murder, I was lucky. Poor Nicole. If anyone deserved this job, she did. All I wanted to do now was extricate myself from this conversation, scurry back to the safety of my office, and kick myself smartly for not thinking this through.
I returned to my office to find Pat and Emma sitting there and drinking coffee.
“Where did you get coffee?” I asked.
“Hello to you too,” Pat said.
“Hi, Pat. Hi, Emma. Where did you get coffee?”
“You ran out,” Emma said, “so we bought you some more. Hey, how come you never told us you got arrested for Melanie’s murder? You thought you’d just let us read it in the County Courier?”
“Yeah, I thought I’d be able to keep it a secret. Actually, I did try to tell you.”
“Oh yeah? When?”
“When you were busy talking about other things. Thanks for the coffee, by the way. I was just over in your building, Pat. I got some coffee from your machine.”
He laughed. “You drank our Cold War coffee? What about the new place up in the quad?”
“I don’t know their summer hours, and even if they’re open, I don’t want to spend five bucks for a cup of coffee. Anyway, the machine worked for me.”
“Really? What did it taste like?”
“Horrible. Anyway, I saw an announcement for an opening in the English department, but I decided not to apply.”
“You were thinking of applying for the English department?” Emma said. “How come? Think you’re gonna get smarter students?”
“It was just an impulse. I thought better of it.”
“I think Nicole’s going to apply,” Pat said. “So you made the right decision. You don’t want the department chair’s wife to be your lifelong enemy.”
“No, I know. It was a dumb idea. Hey, I managed to get into Melanie’s campus email, though.”
“Excellent,” Emma exclaimed. “Anything juicy?”
“Unfortunately, no. Nothing at all.”
“Well, we found something.”
“We’ve been struggling through Melanie’s manuscript,” Pat said.
“Good. Tell me what it says so I don’t have to read it.”
“Pat’s been reading Melanie’s stuff to avoid working on his career book,” Emma said.
“Sorry, Pat, I completely forgot about your career book. How’s it going?”
“No progress at all. Oh hey, Molly, give me a good College of Commerce career tip.”
“Let’s see. What did they tell us at the Student Retention Office retreat? It takes fewer muscles to smile than it does to frown. How about that?”
Pat considered this.
“And fewer still to delegate your work to someone else. Good. Thank you.” He pulled out a spiral notebook from his shirt pocket and wrote it down.
“Glad I could help. So what’s new with the Melanie Manuscript?”
“I think we found the part that got you in trouble,” Emma said.
“Oh yeah.” Pat dropped the little notebook back into his shirt pocket and pulled something up on his tablet.
“Let me read it to her.” Emma grabbed the tablet from Pat before he could object. “Maybe you should sit down for this, Molly.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“I PROBABLY SHOULD SIT down if I’m going to sit through more of Melanie Polewski’s prose stylings,” I said. “Where?”
“Oh yeah.” Emma got up from my yoga ball. Then Pat vacated the visitor chair and perched on the desk. Emma moved into the visitor chair. I went behind the desk and took my rightful position on the yoga ball.
“Ready?” Without waiting for an answer, Emma began to read aloud.
“Melody realized at last that Dolly was trying to kill her. Nothing was beyond her. Why was Melody too trusting, like a child with it’s favorite toy? How she regretted it! Dolly had snuck that poison into Melanie, and now she was going to die a terrible death in agony. Dolly cackled her evil laughter. The betrayal hung thickly in the air like fog in a witch’s enchanted valley.”
“Great. That must be where they got the idea I poisoned her with my shoes. Thanks a lot, Melanie.”
“Yeah, I bet that’s how come they arrested you,” Emma said.
“That, plus the police know that you knew about her allergies,” Pat added.
“I do not cackle,” I insisted. “And she should have written the betrayal hung in the air like smog in the San Fernando Valley or something. At least smog in the air would’ve lent a little Chandlereque flavor to it. Okay, I’m going to email Honey and tell her about this. She might have already seen it, but just to be on the safe side. So after ‘Melody’ gets poisoned by the treacherous ‘Dolly’, does she manage to survive?”
“Of course,” Pat said. “She’s saved at the last minute by—”
“Oh, wait, let me guess. Knowing Melanie, I’d bet some thinly-disguised version of Donnie Gonsalves comes to save her and confesses it’s Melody he’s been in love with all along, right?”
“Amazing,” Pat chuckled. “Are you sure you haven’t seen the movie? Or are you just psychic?”
“That’s nothing.” Emma set her coffee cup down. “The story doesn’t end there. You should see what ‘Melody’ does afterwards. Or, should I say, who ‘Melody’ does.”
“Whom,” I corrected her. “So you think the prosecutor is really taking all of this at face value? Don't they realize it’s all complete fantasy? I mean, come on.”
“I never knew Melanie played for both teams,” Pat said. “I guess she really liked people.”
“I think she didn’t like anyone but herself. She loved to go around saying she was about the Inner Person, and she was above mundane details like sex and gender, but the thing she was really attracted to was the image of herself as irresistible. She liked to think of herself as this pulsing lodestar of sexual magnetism at the center the universe.”
“Pulsing lodestar of sexual magnetism. Nice.”
“It’s not nice, Pat. Don’t encourage her. When she says stuff like that she just sounds some alien with a giant head.”
“And you know what a giant-headed alien sounds like because..?”
A rap on the door frame interrupted us. The man standing in my doorway had an indoorsy pallor and scruffy auburn stubble. He was kind of nice-looking in a nerdy way.
“Amalia Barda?” he asked.
“Right here.”
“Hi. I’m from the IT department. I need to talk to you about some unusual activity in a flagged user account.”
Pat and Emma cleared out so fast they practically left their coffee cups hovering in midair. The man watched them leave and then turned back to me.
“May I come in?” he asked.
“Of course. Yes. Please sit down.”
He pulled out the visitor chair and sat down across from me and I braced myself for a scolding.
“My name’s Atticus Marx.” He held up his ID badge for confirmation and blinked, probably adjusting to the dim light in my office. My two remaining fluorescent tubes had started to buzz and flicker, so I usually kept them switched off, relying o
n whatever illumination might filter through the window. Today the weather was overcast and drizzly, which gave my little office the ambience of a spider hole.
Then a broad grin lit up his face. It was the kind of smile you would give an old friend, which was odd. I was sure I had never met him before.
“So what is this about?” I tried not to sound not defensive, and above all not guilty.
He leaned back in my visitor chair, beaming. “Someone’s been in Melanie Polewski’s user account. I think it was you.”
He certainly didn’t seem too bothered about my breaking into Melanie’s email.
“Melanie Polewski,” I said solemnly. “That was a terrible tragedy.”
“You were arrested for her murder,” he said cheerfully.
I couldn’t think of an appropriate response, so I pasted on a weak smile, hoping it didn’t make me look like a psychopath.
“Hey, arrested isn’t the same as convicted. You’re innocent until proven guilty.”
“It’s true. I was arrested. But they released me on my own recognizance. I’m a low flight risk, apparently. Also, since you brought it up, I didn’t actually commit the murder.”
He didn’t reply, apparently content to sit and beam at me. While in theory it might have been pleasant to have a nice-looking man gazing at me, under these circumstances it was a little unnerving. I pulled open my coffee drawer and saw Emma and Pat had indeed restocked my supply.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” I asked.
“Amalia, if I were in your situation, I would do exactly what you did.”
Atticus Marx really was quite good-looking, I realized. Or perhaps I was simply dazzled by his correct use of the subjunctive.
“You would do what I did? What did I do, exactly?”
He laughed. “I would look through the victim’s email to see what I could find. It was clever of you to ask for the directory updates. If you’d just asked for her information it would’ve seemed suspicious.”
“Not clever enough, obviously. So...am I in trouble?”
“No. I mean technically I guess you broke some rules, but like I said, I would’ve done the same thing. I’d try to find out what else had been going on in the victim’s life. So what’d you find? What do you think happened to her?”
