Tina Beyers and Madeline Kohl.
I stared at the two names Heidi had written on the paper, and wondered if they were the same names on Beth Richards’s list.
“You got these from Julie’s file?” I asked.
“From Suter’s.” She jingled a gold key on her chain. “My master key works on every door in the building, including Human Resources.”
According to Mark’s private employee file, he had been the subject of not one, but three claims of sexual misconduct over the past two years. The other two claims—submitted by Tina Beyers and Madeline Kohl—had later been withdrawn. Why they withdrew their complaints, I couldn’t say. But at least they’d tried. Like Julie Farris, they had done something noble, something brave, something I never did. Whether they had a full-fledged relationship with Mark, or were simply the object of his affections, they broke their silence about him.
Could I follow their lead?
“Both of them dropped out of Tarble,” Heidi went on. “You all have that in common. But none of you look alike. If Suter has a type, I’m not seeing it. Here, I’ll show you.” She moved to her computer screen at her desk.
I pulled a chair beside her. “You have student photos on your computer?”
“Tarble switched out hard copy files for electronic ones a few years ago,” Heidi explained. “Cool, huh?”
I nodded.
“Okay. Here’s Tina Beyers,” she said, clicking the mouse.
I studied the girl’s small, childlike features—thick brown bangs swept to the side revealing a short forehead—and found it hard to believe Mark had ever had a sexual relationship with Tina, or even hit on her. I wasn’t sure what his type was, considering I had auburn hair and Beth and Julie had blond, but regardless, Tina Beyers just didn’t seem to fit.
“Now check out this Madeline chick,” Heidi said, sensing I was ready to move on.
Once the photo loaded, my mouth hung open. Madeline. The girl’s black cropped hair was unforgettable. There was no doubt in my mind, she was the girl who’d sat crying in Mark’s office that afternoon, the day he and I had gone out for coffee, the day everything began between us. I recalled what transpired in his office, how Mark had told the girl to come back in an hour, and how later he’d blown her off to stay and chitchat with me.
She’d probably waited outside his office door all afternoon.
“I know her,” I said.
“Really? Who is she?”
I stared at the photo a moment longer. “The girl Mark dumped to be with me.”
Heidi let me use her office phone to make the call, and I pressed each number carefully, double checking each digit with what Heidi had written. I let the phone ring eight times before hanging up and dialing again, thinking that despite my focused precision, my nerves had caused me to press a wrong number. The phone rang ten more times, and I prepared to hang up. But just as I pulled the phone away from my ear, a woman answered.
“Is Madeline there?” I asked.
“Speaking,” she said, soft and hesitant.
“This is Ruby Rousseau,” I started. “You probably don’t remember me but—”
“I remember you.”
Her tone was so cold, I actually shivered. Madeline Kohl remembered me, but she didn’t do it fondly.
“We went to Tarble together,” I rambled. “I was a senior when you were a fresh—”
“I know who you are. What do you want?”
There was no roundabout way to get to the point, so I just got to it. Madeline’s reaction would speak volumes, I thought. “I want to talk to you about Mark,” I said.
Silence. And then, “What about him?”
“He was seeing you when he got involved with me.” It wasn’t so much a question as a statement she could either confirm or deny.
Madeline remained quiet on the other end.
“Hello?” I said, thinking she’d hung up.
“I’m here.” Her voice was airy and apprehensive. She sighed. “He told me he was getting back together with his wife. But I knew it was a lie. I knew about you. How could I not? How could I pretend I didn’t see how he looked at you when you came into his office that day, or how many times I saw you going into his office after? I was watching. I watched it all unfold. I watched it all crash down around me. Until I couldn’t take it anymore.”
I heard a vacancy in her voice, a hollow murmur that reminded me of my own. It was unfathomable that I’d played a part in hurting this girl without even knowing it. I wondered if I’d ever seen Madeline hanging outside Mark’s office door, or hiding behind a pillar in Langley Hall, watching us.
“Is that why you dropped out?” I asked.
“My doctor thought it was best.”
“Doctor?” My heart sank. “You mean, like a shrink?”
“I didn’t want to live anymore.”
“Did you . . . ?”
“No. I ran a knife against my wrist once,” she divulged. “But I didn’t have the guts to apply any pressure. I got help before I did anything stupid.”
Stupid, like what Julie and I did by overdosing. I shivered at how much the three of us had in common.
“I didn’t know about you, Madeline. Honest,” I said. “At least not then. But I want you to know, he gave me the same line he gave you, about working things out with Meryl. It was a lie. He just moved on to yet another girl.”
“Do you want my sympathy or something?” she snapped.
I couldn’t blame Madeline for her anger; it was the same fury I’d felt toward Beth when I’d found out she was the shapely figure I’d seen straddling Mark through the cabin window.
“Mark didn’t just do this to you and me,” I told her. “There are two others. Maybe even more. And if I could be as brave as all of you, if I could come forward to say what happened, well, there’s strength in numbers, isn’t there?”
“As brave as me?” Madeline balked. “What are you talking about? I didn’t do anything brave. I did the most cowardly thing of all. I ran away.”
“I’d hardly call filing a complaint an act of cowardice.”
“I didn’t file anything. What makes you think I did?”
I couldn’t mention Heidi or what she’d risked to help me, nosing in those private files. But I didn’t understand why I had to. The report was in Mark’s file. Why would Madeline lie about it now?
“So you didn’t say anything to the Tarble administration about what happened between you and Mark?” I clarified. “You didn’t charge him with sexual misconduct?”
“No. And I never told anyone either. Mark made me promise not to. He was worried he’d lose his job.”
“How did you do in his class?” I asked. “I mean, did he grade you fairly?”
“My essay on The Scarlet Letter,” she said. “That’s the paper we were talking about when you came into his office. I worked so hard on it too, to impress him, to show him I was smart and creative.” She paused. “He gave me a D.”
And Madeline made three.
I returned to Professor Barnard’s office armed with a copy of Julie Farris’s essay, and handed it to her proudly, like an eight-year-old showing off her first batch of brownies from an Easy-Bake oven. “I already read it,” I said. “And it’s good.”
She smiled but held the paper by her fingertips at first, as if it were tainted. “Ah, yes. Anne Bradstreet. The first American poet,” she said, scanning Julie’s essay with a keen eye. “I won’t ask how you got this.”
“Good, because I can’t tell you.” I paused. “But there’s more.”
When she raised her eyebrows in intrigue, I told her everything I’d learned while we were apart, about the other sexual misconduct claims in Mark’s Human Resources file and my subsequent conversation with Madeline Kohl about her essay on The Scarlet Letter.
“Even though these girls withdrew their claims, I can’t believe Suter still has his job.” Professor Barnard shook her head. “Three accusations are enough to raise eyebrows. The administration obviously dropped the ball here.”
“But that’s the strange part,” I added. “Madeline said she never filed a claim.”
“But she had to have, if it was in his file.” The professor crinkled her nose in confusion. “What did the other girl, this Tina Beyers, say when you talked to her?”
“I couldn’t get ahold of her, but I’ll keep trying.”
“Do you think there are more of you out there?”
I shrugged. “There were only four names on the list.”
“List?” She narrowed her eyes. “What list?”
I cringed when I realized my slip. I never intended to mention Beth’s relationship with Mark—not to Professor Barnard, not to Heidi, not to anyone. But it was too late. I considered lying, telling her I misspoke, but the professor seemed too smart for that. So I had no choice but to tell her the truth, how Beth was the reason Mark broke up with me, how she came to campus looking for Julie Farris with the list of names and the journal published by the Midwest Collegiate English Teachers Council.
“I have no idea what a professional teachers’ journal has to do with Mark,” I added.
The professor’s mouth popped open. “The new teacher orientation,” she blurted.
“The what?”
She stood then and began sifting through the contents of her magazine files on her bookshelf. “Back in August, at my orientation, I remember they gave accolades to certain professors for various achievements, and Mark Suter was one of them. He published a paper in a recent issue of the MCETC journal. I’m almost positive. It’s here. I know it’s here.”
After knocking a few books from the shelf, she pulled out several quarterly issues of the journal in question, and we began rummaging through them, flipping pages violently. We didn’t even bother to sit down. Instead we stood side by side, the journals open before us on top of the shelving unit. The professor spoke first.
“Here it is,” she said, before reading the title. “ ‘Feminine Depression and Literary Creativity: Revisiting the Works of Woolf, Plath, and Gilman,’ by Mark Suter, Associate Professor of English, Tarble College.”
My jaw dropped.
“He stole your work,” she said.
I fixed my eyes on the article again and started reading it, my finger gliding over the words, hoping to find word choices and syntax and phrasing different from my own. A word or two had been changed, a paragraph had been omitted, but the majority of it was mine. Word for word.
I hope you don’t mind, I remembered Mark saying in New Orleans, after the symposium, but I shared some of your ideas . . . I gave you credit, of course. Not by name. I just called you my star pupil.
What a liar, I thought. I didn’t lose my notes in New Orleans. He stole them.
The professor stabbed at the article with her index finger. “That’s why I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen your thesis before or heard something to the same effect,” she noted. “No wonder he gave you a D. He couldn’t have you thinking your paper had value.”
I swallowed a pool of saliva that had formed in my mouth from not breathing and looked again at the article, at Mark’s name in the byline. Heat flushed my cheeks.
“He was always talking about how many papers he had to publish to please the tenure committee, how he needed to look prolific,” I said. “So instead of doing the work himself, he took it from me.”
“Not only you. I’m willing to bet he stole work from Julie and Madeline too.” The professor returned to her desk to pick up Julie’s paper. “I bet Suter has this exact essay about Anne Bradstreet saved on his hard drive right now, only with his name at the top, ready to submit, another paper to add to his obnoxiously long CV.”
Mark’s computer, I thought. What would I find there, if I had a look? More papers he stole from his students? Evidence of his countless affairs? Love letters to Beth?
Certainly, Heidi’s master key would open his office door.
Heidi wanted to do more than give me her master key; she wanted to snoop in Mark’s office alongside me. But she’d already risked losing her job by prying into private files. I couldn’t let her become a full-fledged accomplice. Begrudgingly, she let me go alone. She wanted to wait for me in her office, but I told her to go run errands instead, and come back to campus in an hour. That way, if I got caught, she wouldn’t be on campus, and I could lie and say I stole her key.
The air inside Mark’s office was stale and musty, and I wondered if he’d been there since Meryl had trashed it the night before. Items—like the sofa cushions and paper piles—had been replaced but sloppily. Tissues, stained with Meryl’s blood, still sat in the wastebasket. Odds were, Mark wouldn’t return to his office until the next morning, but I moved swiftly and stealthily toward his desk, just in case.
I booted up Mark’s computer but paused when the security log-in page loaded. I forgot that it would be password protected, since he used it to access the college’s main computer system and enter grades. I nosed around his desk for the password, even looking under the keyboard, thinking maybe he’d written it down in case he forgot. He didn’t. So my only option was to guess his password accurately before too many invalid tries locked me out.
I looked around the room for clues. Was it something simple and straightforward, like his name? Or perhaps the name of an author? Was it an acronym of some sort? Or his birthday? My eyes soon went to the wastebasket, where Meryl had tossed the bloody tissues the day before. What had she called Beth? Mark’s one true love?
I typed the word Beth into the blank space and held my breath as I clicked enter. No luck. Invalid password popped up on the screen. Staring at those two red words, I realized the odds were against me. I knew I’d just end up trying two more times, unsuccessfully, and the system would lock me out. Ditching the mission, I turned the computer off and got halfway to the door when I stopped abruptly at a thought. I raced back to Mark’s computer for another try. This time, a successful one.
Beth was too short to be a password, I realized. But Elizabeth wasn’t.
Once I had access to Mark’s computer, I saw he kept his hard drive as messy as his desk. Files and icons covered the entire desktop. I read the titles of the file folders quickly, hoping he’d named them simply, hoping he’d unknowingly made this task easy for me. Skipping folders generically titled Assessments and Book List, I clicked on one marked curriculum vitae.
Mark’s professional résumé was, as Professor Barnard presumed, obnoxiously long. He’d included the standard credentials—his B.A. from Tulane and his M.F.A. from Northwestern—but also an exhaustive list of conferences he’d attended, as well as every paper he’d published professionally. His paper on Woolf, Plath, and Gilman—the one he stole from me—was his most recent publication credit, dated from that summer. But the entry listed just before it, titled Deconstructing Hester, also caught my eye. According to his CV, he’d published an essay on The Scarlet Letter just four months after his affair with Madeline Kohl ended, just four months after he’d slapped her essay on Hawthorne’s Puritan novel with a D. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
There were a number of blank files on the desktop with no actual content. A couple of files were story starts, snippets of novels or short stories he never finished. Despite a concerted effort, a thorough check of his documents, I found nothing on Anne Bradstreet, nothing to suggest he’d also stolen ideas from Julie Farris.
I found something more disturbing than that.
The document was titled Her Fractured Mind: Where Creativity and Insanity Collide and that alone piqued my interest because it related to my thesis topic. I assumed it was another reworked version of my ideas. But once I opened the document and saw the words SUBMISSION—PSYCHOLOGY NOW, DRAFT at the top of the page, I questioned that assumption.
What would Mark write for a psychology publication? I wondered.
The answer was there in the text:
Looking back, I’d liken her mind to my hometown public library, jam-packed with facts and stories and ideas. And like a precocious schoolboy, I wanted to read every book on her shelves. But I can’t sugarcoat the truth: she was delusional. She saw things that weren’t there.
How could a mind so beautiful, so imaginative, malfunction? Why did it drive her to the brink of suicide? Was her mind predisposed to breakdown, to self-destruct?
i.e. Was she destined to be crazy?
The words—delusional, malfunction, suicide, crazy—bombarded my eyes like flashes of light as I tried to make sense of Mark’s essay. Checking the document’s properties, I saw Mark had created the file in December of the year prior, right after my near suicide. And my cheeks grew hot, my throat tight. My fists clenched.
It’s me, I thought as I printed a copy of the document. I’m the delusional she.