Dying for an Education

by Stacey Alabaster

  Oh, what did he know?

  “Aren’t we going to go out for dinner?” I asked, confused when I saw him settling down with a book and grabbing his reading glasses out of his trunk. The accommodation arrangements were a little on the awkward side, to be honest, as we were sharing a room and I wasn’t even sure that we were dating. Not technically, anyway. But we had two separate beds on opposite sides of the room. Anyway, I supposed it would be a good opportunity to see how we actually got along in tight quarters in a living situation.

  So far, not that well apparently.

  He was still grumpy and barely looked up from Ice Cream Girls. I could see the Fabled Books sticker in the corner, so clearly he had bought it off Claire.

  “Well, maybe I will go out on my own then,” I said. It called his bluff, because he set the book down and told me he was coming, but only if we could get steak. “No vegetarian hippie places please,” was how he put it.

  Well, that was fine. I’d already gotten the lowdown on the best places to eat off-campus and one of them sold very large porterhouse for a cheap price. The name of the place was “Banjos,” and it was close to our motel.

  There was an eerie feel to the restaurant when we walked in to find it completely empty besides the two of us. “Strange, Belle told me that all the students came here on Tuesday nights because the beers were two-for-one,” I said, slowly spinning around as I took my jacket off and found a seat. Plenty to choose from. The waitress didn’t seem to know what was going on either, because when I asked her why it was so quiet, she just shrugged and told me that it was usually packed.

  “Maybe there is some sort of demonstration happening on campus,” she said. “Or maybe some kind of party.”

  If there was, I was a little offended at not being invited. Now I knew how Troy felt—old and left out of all the fun.

  I mean, of course Troy shouldn’t have been invited to any on-campus party. That didn’t make any sense. But I shouldn’t have been left out of all the fun. I’d thought that Belle and I had really hit it off, and I was sure that if there had been a party she was going to, she would have invited me. Oh well. I opened the menu and saw what looked good. At least we wouldn’t have long to wait for our meals.

  I glanced out the large front window and saw someone sobbing on the pavement. Head bowed over. Almost kneeling on the ground.

  Pale blonde hair.

  “Oh my goodness, that looks like my friend Belle,” I said, pushing my chair back like I was about to jump up.

  Troy looked at me in annoyance. “You’ve only been on campus for six hours—how much of a friend can she be? Sit down and decide on your meal, Alyson.”

  I wondered if he was right. Surely Belle had loads of friends on campus and didn’t need me to come to her rescue. Anyway, she hadn’t invited me to this on-campus event—that may or may not have happened, to be fair.

  So I tried to turn my focus back to the menu as the bored waitress hovered nearby, keen for something to actually do.

  But she was doubled over now, her knees actually on the ground, full on sobbing, and no one seemed to be coming to her rescue. So I didn’t care what Troy said, I was going. “Order me the carbonara,” I said, throwing my napkin down.

  Because at that point, I did not realize that my appetite would soon be depleted and I would not be eating anything that night.

  “Belle?” I whispered, then stepped back in horror when I realized her hands were covered in blood.

  She was still sobbing, but my presence seemed to have shocked her back into the real world a little, and she looked up at me, her sobbing slowing.

  But I was scared. “Belle… What’s happened?” All I could see was the blood.

  “Oh, Alyson. Rick Niemer is dead.”

  4

  Claire

  The keys jangled in my hand and it took me several attempts to actually get the lock open while the cats inside the store waited expectantly. I took a deep, shaky breath and opened the door, hurrying inside as if that might protect me from anything spooky. Like I could outrun the presence.

  But the problem was that I was running toward it, when I actually wanted to be running away.

  I didn’t want to be there at all. I had actually considered just closing the shop down for a few days, packing my bags and heading toward the mountains to tag along with Alyson.

  Except that I didn’t want to admit that this strange thing had defeated me, and I certainly didn’t want to admit the crazy things that were running through my head. Alyson was the wacky one—the one who believed in ghosts and spirits and karma and a universe that exacted revenge on people when they did right or wrong.

  Not me. I believed in things that I could see and touch and affect myself. Nothing ghostly or other.

  But now I was convinced that there was a ghostly presence haunting the shop. How else could I explain the stool moving all on its own when no one had even been up there?

  It was crazy.

  It was creepy.

  And it was as baffling to me as any murder mystery that Alyson and I had solved.

  I wanted to call Alyson to ask for her opinion on it, she would probably have some kind of idea about how to get rid of the spirit, but I also didn’t want her to know that I was even entertaining these ideas. She’d be far too thrilled. And so I tried to stay calm. Tried to think of some other explanation for the moving stool.

  I glanced up for the first time all morning.

  Oh! Maybe there was a slant upstairs! Oh, yes, I thought, almost jumping up and down with glee at the idea that this could be the simple, non-ghostly solution. Just a sloping floor! But then I realized how heavy the stool was. It would have been pretty difficult for the stool to move in that exact direction, then just completely stop. If there was a slope, wouldn’t it have kept going? Not stopped a foot before the edge? And wouldn’t it have happened before yesterday?

  I pulled my eyes away and decided that I was not going to focus on that for the day. Instead, I came up with a fun new promotion to get people through the door. I’d read on social media that it was International Turtle Day that day and we recently had a kid’s book in stock about a turtle who flew to the moon, so I figured I could get kids and parents through the door by offering to give ten percent of proceeds to turtle conservation.

  I figured Alyson would be thrilled that I was focusing on animal conservation, so I texted her to tell her the good news of that at least.

  All she sent back was: “Oh cool.”

  Hmm. Alyson was not one to be rude—abrupt, yes, but not completely dismissive, especially when it was something she was interested in—so I could tell that something was bothering her. I sent her another text back asking how her stay on campus was going—was she liking the classes she was trying? But all she sent back was, “Yeah, all good.”

  Hmm. Very cool. Thanks for the great catchup, Alyson. Well, if she was going to be like that about it, then I would stop asking her questions. I put my phone away and concentrated on making the posters for the window and turned the radio up to make it seem a little livelier and less creepy in there.

  But there was some kind of glitch for a few seconds and the radio went completely silent.

  I stopped and held my breath when I thought I heard a footstep up on the second floor.

  It was just Mr. Ferdinand. I exhaled. He popped his ginger head through the bars of the second floor and I called him down to come and get his food. “And don’t you go back up there!” I scolded him, although I knew he wouldn’t listen because he was a cat, and even if they can understand what you are saying, they do not care about obeying it.

  I put some food in his bowl. There it was. A banging from upstairs. A creaking of the floorboards.

  And both the cats were still on the bottom floor with me.

  5

  Alyson

  We were in the little visitors’ lounge that the motel had just behind the reception desk. I wasn’t quite ready to go to the room, wasn’t ready to go to bed, a
nd I knew that I would probably find it impossible to sleep that night. I was wired. Troy had fetched me a bag of chips from the vending machine so that I at least had a little something in my stomach and I was trying to snack on them. He was even trying to distract me with talk about the crazy weather and the fact that there was actual snow a bit further up the mountain, but all I could think about was Rick Niemer. Pushed to his death from the ninth floor of the student accommodation. Belle said she had seen the fall, but not who pushed him.

  I glumly sat forward and placed my chin in my hands. “That was the only class I was excited about taking,” I said with a pout. “I thought that Belle and I were going to be study besties and that it was going to be an amazing semester.”

  Troy was a little more practical about the whole thing. “I am sure they will find a replacement professor for the class.”

  I gave a long, loud sigh and pushed my potato chips away. Maybe. But it would not be the same. Rick Niemer literally wrote the book on the subject—no, really, the textbook we needed to buy for the following semester was his book.

  My mind was already racing. Why was Rick up there in the first place? Who on earth could have wanted him dead? I needed to come up with a list of suspects and start investigating immediately.

  But Troy had the complete opposite idea. It was like he didn’t even know me at all. “I think we need to get out of here immediately. Head back to Eden Bay.” He stood up and dusted off his hands. “As you would say, Alyson, there are bad vibes around here. And I don’t say that lightly.”

  No, he didn’t. Definitely not the sort of lingo he usually used. And I got what he was saying. He wanted us—me—out of harm’s way.

  Maybe he was right. There was a killer going around campus. All of us could be in danger. And yet there I was, not wanting to leave. I reached out and grabbed a handful of chips and shoved them in my mouth.

  “I want to stay.”

  “Surely all classes will be canceled now,” Troy said.

  I shook my head. “Nope. The university wanted to keep things as normal as possible to reassure all the students that everything is fine.”

  He stared at me in disbelief. “You can’t seriously want to keep sitting in on classes after what has happened.”

  “I do,” I said firmly, finishing off the rest of my chips.

  But overnight, I started to wonder if maybe he had a point. Was I putting us in danger just by being stubborn?

  I stared out into the hail and wind in the morning and looked at the smartly-dressed kids marching toward campus. Matching tartan outfits. Expensive notebooks in their hands. Oh, who was I kidding? University wasn’t for me anyway. It was too cold, too scholarly here.

  Troy had already said he was leaving whether I came with him or not. Right then, I wasn’t that keen on being left in Ferguson all on my own, so I reluctantly started to pack my bags. But Troy got an important business call at the last moment and had to stop packing and asked if I could help him out by taking care of a few things while he finished up with his call.

  I could drive—a little, but I had never had much practice—so Troy decided it would be up to me to go and put the petrol into the engine while he checked us out of the motel.

  My hands were sweating a little as I got behind the wheel of the BMW, but I made it to the gas station on the corner, only stalling a few times. There was a bit of a crunching sound. I hoped that it was just the hail. I looked at the different signs and prices of the different gases and petrols. Now, look. I don’t know if this was a subconscious or a conscious decision, but even though I knew it was a diesel engine, I pulled up next to one of the petrol pumps and popped the nozzle in, filling the engine of the car with a liquid that it was just not compatible with. I must have known what I was doing. By the time I pulled back into the parking lot of the motel, the engine was croaking like it was on life support.

  And this time, I knew the hail had nothing to do with it. The roads were complete dry.

  Troy couldn’t get it to start no matter how many times he twisted the key in the ignition.

  “Uh oh,” I said, my eyes going wide and innocent. “I don’t know what’s happened.”

  Troy was starting to get beads of sweat on his brow. “What did you put in the car, Alyson? This could complete destroy the engine.”

  Eek. Only I did know what had happened. The thing was, I knew that it might make the engine stall and not start for a while, but I had no idea that it might actually cause permanent damage, so I twisted guiltily in my seat and tried to pretend I had no idea what had gone down at the gas station.

  “I just asked the attendant to do it for me, I had no idea he would screw it up.” The lie had escaped from my mouth before I could think about it, before I could stop it.

  Troy hit lightly at the steering wheel and groaned a bit. He hopped out of the car and said, “That’s just great. I suppose we’re stuck here for a little while.”

  “There’s always the train?” I said as though I was offering a real solution when I knew there was no way that Troy would leave his BMW behind in Ferguson, and there was also no way he was going to take a bus AND a train with the plebs.

  We wandered back to the motel room, and I shrugged as though the idea had only just occurred to me and I was just making the most of a bad situation. “I suppose I may as well go to the next class on my list?” I said, taking the class list out of my backpack. “It’s a poetry elective…” One that I was only checking out because Claire had said it looked interesting and she wanted me to report back on it. I didn’t think there was much chance of me actually taking it if I enrolled for real. I only had to take one English class. I’d been hoping it would be Rick’s, but that dream was quite literally dead.

  Sam was waiting on the steps of the Wooley Building outside the lecture theater I would soon be going into. I was a little surprised—disappointed as well—to see him there. He looked as though he had been up all night crying. The bottom rims of his eyes were red and his whole face was puffy.

  I think he loved Rick as much as any of the ladies in class. Definitely some sort of little man crush going on there.

  He looked up at me glumly like he barely had the energy to lift his head.

  “It’s all over,” he said, hanging his head again. “I suppose everyone will be happy to hear that.”

  Well, I didn’t know why he was feeling so very, very sorry for himself. Wasn’t Rick Niemer the one who had died?

  I took a seat beside him on the cool stone steps. There was still around fifteen minutes before the class began and the lecture theater was still full with the class that came before us. “What will they be happy to hear?” I asked gently. He may have been my enemy the day before, but he was clearly suffering and I wanted to be kind to him.

  “They will be happy to hear that I have failed… I won’t be able to do my honors next semester now that Rick is dead. And believe me, people are always willing for me to fail.” He shot me a grim look. “Don’t think I don’t know what the other people in class really think of me.”

  I remained tightlipped at that one. Wasn’t my place to go telling—or assuming—what everyone thought of Sam Clapton.

  “Maybe you can find another supervisor,” I said, but it was a platitude. I knew that no one could replace Rick, and Sam knew that as well.

  “Who would do this?” he asked in a low, dark tone as he stared down into the gravel. “Everyone loved Rick. This doesn’t make any sense.”

  So far, it didn’t look to be an accident. There were witnesses that had seen someone follow Rick up the tower the night before, and they had also heard Rick scream. Not something he would have been likely to do if he had jumped of his own volition.

  “Do you know if anyone maybe DIDN’T love Rick?” I asked Sam.

  He gulped and had to think about it for a moment, but he eventually nodded and pointed toward the very lecture hall we were about to enter now that the previous class of students were spilling out of it. There was a new
lecturer standing by the door with a large stack of books under his arm and a grumpy look on his downturned face.

  His name was Adrian Malone, according to Sam, and as far as Sam knew, he was the one member of the English and Literature Department who did not get along with Rick. “They were pretty much both up for the same position—senior lecturer,” Sam told me quietly as we watched Adrian try to push his way through the doors.

  Adrian Malone must have been at least forty-five, possibly pushing fifty, but he was still trying to look young, with long, stringy hair full of gray streaks and slightly greasy that day. And he wore a jumper that was too tight for his bulging belly and a leather jacket over that. He was quite literally sweating.

  “He’s our poetry lecturer,” Sam said, nodding toward the door.

  Well, well, well. It seemed as though my investigation was about to start right there and then.

  6

  Claire

  Matt was trying not to laugh.

  I crossed my arms. “All right then. You tell me how the stool is moving around on its own.”

  He was still biting his tongue. He stopped and surveyed the shop and finally came up with a serious suggestion. Kind of. “Are the cats moving it?”

  I’d already considered that, so I shook my head. “It’s too heavy, even if they had managed to coordinate their efforts and push it together.” Which was very unlikely. In fact, the idea of that creeped me out even more than there being a ghost upstairs. I think I would rather live with a ghost than two cats who could communicate and be cunning enough to be able to play around with my emotions and torment me.

  Matt looked determined as he headed toward the loft. “I’m going upstairs to take a look.”

  I pulled on his arm and told him not to. “Stop. It’s too dangerous. I think the best thing to do is to just rope off the area and put a sign up telling people not go up until I’ve fixed…”