IMAN SHOWED UP to her office at quarter after nine, her ceramic travel mug exuding its pleasant warmth into the palm of her hand. Green tea, brewed strong and flecked with leafy sediment, sloshed in its belly. She tried the door and was surprised to find it locked. For the last two weeks, Professor Motes had been arriving before she got in and staying after she left, typing and clicking maniacally at his office computer. His constant presence had grown increasingly stifling, especially since she’d come across those deleted emails.
She booted up her computer. The sound of students playing Frisbee on the quad leaked intermittently through the office windows, cheers and groans and laughed exchanges filtered to a hissing white noise by the double-pane glass. Sipping her tea, she opened the Toronto Star website to trawl for a bit of light reading to ease her into the workday. A jolt rattled through her as she read the homepage headline: Seven Niagara Falls Residents Killed in Brutal Slaying.
Repulsed yet inexorably curious, Iman read the article with one hand pressed to her stomach, which twitched at each fleck of gore hinted at by the article’s breathless author. Seven people dead. A chorus of screams. A mysterious assailant of superlative ferocity. Intimations of a serial killer, a pack of feral dogs, an escaped exotic pet.
An email notification interrupted her reading. She checked her inbox, an unconscious reflex she barely registered. There was nothing in hers, so she switched to Motes’, where a fresh message from blytzkreegbop123@hotmail.com struck her in the belly like a dagger of ice. Moving of its own volition, her hand positioned the mouse over the email and double-clicked.
hey motes. how u feelin? have a good night? ;) i did (read the papers? lol). This is just a warm-up. see u soon. L
Iman read the message a dozen times, parsing it with greater fervor than she would a line by Ezra Pound. Read the papers? Which ones? A warm-up for what? How soon? She looked from the email to the article in the Star, still open on her desktop. Ridiculous. You’re grasping at straws.
The office door opened with a click. Professor Motes leaned on the doorframe, an overcoat hanging loosely from his shoulders down to his knees. Its baggy cut served only to emphasise his recent weight loss. He looked like a tall, gangly child playing dress-up with his father’s wardrobe. A frizz of stubble masked the lower half of his face, its grey-black hairs appearing sooty and ungroomed. Some tufts were longer than others, and a corona of crumbs clung to the whiskers around his lips. He blew his nose into a tattered Kleenex and staggered to his office, slipping his coat from his shoulders and tossing it onto the coat rack as he went. At no point did he so much as acknowledge Iman’s presence with a word or glance.
Bracing her elbow on the armrest to stop her hands trembling, Iman quickly closed the email and marked it as unread. She breathed a sigh of relief as the text reverted from plain to bold. Motes was no computer whiz, but even he knew the difference between a new and a read email.
Motes’ coat, hung in haste, slipped its hook and landed in a heap on the floor. Iman hung it back up for him, wrinkling her nose at its sour-sweet odour of stale rainwater and old sweat mixed with something dank and earthy, the smell of winter vegetables left too long in a root cellar. Her fingers brushed the cuff of one sleeve and felt something tacky and damp. A trace of sticky red liquid clung to her fingertips. She sniffed the substance seemingly against her own volition, part of her wanting nothing more than to lop her fingers off at the second knuckle lest the fluid taint the rest of her.
Blood.
Gagging, Iman encased her fingers in a wad of Kleenex and wiped off the worst of it. Her knuckles cracked from the force. She swished her fingers in her tea, wincing at its residual heat, and used the water to scrub them clean. After thirty seconds or so her fingertips grew chafed, the stain reduced to a reddish tinge in the whorls of her fingerprints. She upended the tea in a potted plant and sat down at her desk, her eyes locked on the screen but registering nothing.
“Okay,” she said aloud, repeating the word like a mantra. “Okay. Okay.” The sound of it calmed her. There was no need to jump to conclusions. The . . . stuff she’d touched could’ve been all sorts of things. Maybe Motes got a bit of food on his sleeve when preparing lunch. Or maybe he brushed up against something freshly painted, smeared a bit of red pigment on his cuff. It could be anything, even transmission fluid. Iman seized on this idea with particular excitement. Transmission fluid had a rusty red colour and was thick enough to leave a tacky residue on a piece of clothing. Maybe he was having car trouble and had taken a look under his hood.
A single phrase strutted through the back of her mind, gleefully kicking the legs out from this comforting premise: no bodies this time, so no worries.
Ludicrous, Iman thought. You’re being paranoid.
“God fucking damn it!” Something heavy and breakable hit the floor with a brittle crack. Motes, a spectre of free-form colour behind frosted glass, delivered a savage kick to whatever he’d thrown. The object let out a fatal crunch, synchronized with a grunt of pain from Motes. He threw open the door. For an instant his face looked twisted and vulpine, his upper lip drawn back to reveal an arsenal of teeth buried in white and spotty gums. The rage tumbled from his face and lay in pieces on the floor. Beneath its shell hunched a look of bewilderment and raccoon-eyed exhaustion. His cheeks were as cracked and worn as the heel of an old catcher’s mitt. He wiped his nose with his sleeve, dragging a runner of snot from elbow to wrist.
“We’re . . . out of coffee,” Motes explained, studying the carpet. He drew pictures in its grain with the toe of his leather shoe. “Would you mind running out and getting me one? From the place I like downtown.”
“Y-yeah. Um, sure, professor. No problem at all.” She sidestepped away from the coat, aware as she was moving of how transparent a gesture it was. Luckily Motes was too shaken to notice.
“Great,” he said, rummaging through his pockets. “I’d like a couple of scones, too. One vanilla and one cheddar. Lots of butter on them. And, uh, something for yourself, too, if you’d like. You can take my car.” He passed her his keys and a ten-dollar bill. She took them both, taking inadvertent care not to touch his hand in the transaction.
“Okay, sure. Will do.”
With mumbled thanks, Motes retreated into his office, closing the door with pointed softness behind him. Iman let out her breath in a long, steady stream. She wrapped her hand around the keys until their saw-toothed edges bit her palm.