Chapter 1

TWO YELLOW STREAMERS formed an equals sign in the dean’s door frame. No one told me it was his birthday. The news might have been in one of the e-mails I deleted without opening. With the constant threat of staff eliminations, it seemed like a good idea to check the door for a card and add my signature. I got a few inches from his door. My eyesight is bad. Legally blind is one way to put it. It’s not how I like to put it.

Beneath the name plate of Randall “Scoot” Simkins, PhD, there was only the homemade poster telling visitors, “This door is actually open (metaphorically)! Come back soon!” I didn’t like metaphors. I knocked twice above the top streamer.

“Dean Simkins? It’s Tate Cowlishaw. I came to wish you a happy birthday.”

The dean and my colleagues were upstairs at our daily meeting for which I was ten minutes late. I reached between the streamers, opening
the door in the literal sense. Campus theft and vandalism had been on the rise, and Simkins adjourned every meeting with a reminder to lock our office doors. Only two of us had office doors. The knob turned. That he treated his own words with the same indifference as his faculty made me a little sad.

I said his name again, waited three seconds, and limboed inside. The odor of rotten eggs overwhelmed the urine and black mold that were Parshall College’s unofficial scents. One time, a colleague brought me into her classroom to examine the sulfurous aroma, to determine if it was one of the ghosts some blamed for the school’s decline. The visually impaired have certain skills, like knowing when another person is in the room with us, that lend us a certain credibility in matters of the supernatural. I had placed an ear against two walls of the classroom and nodded ambiguously.

Three steps into Simkins’s office, something crunched under my shoe. The carpet held shards of plastic the size of fingernails. Some were wet. I sniffed my finger, found the source of the stench, and coughed my way to the window.

“Dr. Cowlishaw,” whispered someone on the ground outside the broken window.

I had an MBA, not a doctorate, but didn’t correct students who conferred on me the additional degree.

“There he is.” I recommend this greeting, even to the fully sighted, when you have no idea who you’re talking to. From where I stood, I made out a blue coat, one arm waving beneath the leafless tree. To be precise, I have central blind spots, leaving the rim of my peripheral vision my only useful eyesight.

“Why are you in Simkins’s office?” whispered the voice I now recognized as Wade Biggins. Wade’s time at Parshall more than doubled my own five years. His inane, mostly sincere questions derailed many a lecture and class discussion. Some students had come to regard him
with ironic reverence, the faculty with something between fear and existential heartburn.

“It’s the dean’s birthday, Wade. I’m decorating his office.” I leaned in close to the shattered pane and placed a finger across my lips. Fixing the broken windows, we had voted last year, would only encourage more vandalism.

“Make sure he gets my present,” Wade said. “Will do. What did you get him?”

“Stink bomb!” he shouted before running away.

Footsteps in the ceiling reminded me why I was here. Between the dean’s computer monitor and a chipped Parshall mug filled with pennies sat the memo holder on which Simkins impaled coupons for fast food. I freed the one on top and got out my magnifier, the 22X loupe that makes some reading possible. Free six-inch sub with the purchase of a six-inch sub. I slid it in my back pocket. They didn’t pay me much.

I lifted the lid of the glass candy dish he kept filled with circus peanuts. The smell was vaguely floral, vaguely astringent. I gave one a squeeze and put it back. Stiff as they were, they might have been the same ones Simkins offered me five years ago along with my job. A Post-it in the center of his desk read “a Butter.” The birthday card was nowhere to be found.

A heavier set of footsteps thudded overhead, possibly in the stairwell. Fearing they were those of my lumbering dean, I crouched behind the black file cabinet. My knees were exposed. I crawled under the desk, from which vantage it became clear the footsteps didn’t belong to Scoot Simkins. Scoot’s feet, along with the rest of him, lay on the floor behind his chair.

The footsteps faded. I said hello, a feeble uppercut at the overgrown silence. I knew what I’d find, or wouldn’t find, before I checked his cold wrist. Like I said, I know when I’m alone in a room.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

The dean’s flaccid body was firmer than it had any right to be. That Randall “Scoot” Simkins had left the world on the same date he entered it lent a degree of nobility to his life. He meant well, his faculty would say at his funeral. One of us might believe it. The dean had no wife or children, and I tried to think of anyone who might miss him. Most faculty, myself included, often joked of ways we might take revenge on the man who increased our work load at the same steady rate he cut our salaries. Just last week someone proposed training a fire hose on a certain orifice with which our dean shared so many characteristics.

Something glinted in the corner of my eye. Everything I see is in the corner of my eye. Simkins’s hand curled around an old-school, all-metal stapler. A shadow darker than most shadows ran from Simkins’s head to the wall. I touched it the way I do when things seem like an optical illusion. The shadow was sticky.

I brought my face a few inches from the dean’s. It was one of only a few good looks at him I’d ever had. A few looks are all you need. Most of the time voices tell you everything you need to know, but Simkins wasn’t saying much.

His hair smelled of women’s shampoo. He must have had a coupon. Scoot had the jowly face of an offensive lineman, the pretense of toughness undermined by features so soft they might have been drawn in crayon. A wattle the size of a generous meatball made its home beneath his stubbly chin. I pulled on it. Scoot’s head crackled a little as it left the carpet. If I weren’t looking for them I wouldn’t have seen the three spots on the top of his head, a little darker than the rest of his blood-dark hair. The spots were equal in size, slightly bigger than the tip of my smallest finger. I pushed down on the stapler in the dean’s hand, confirming staples were all it held. I would have been impressed if he had shot himself three times in the top
of the head. It would have been the first and last time he had ever impressed me.

I was a little dazed. I might have stood up too quickly. I might have had an aversion to dead bodies. I called off the search for the birthday card in light of what I had already found. More footsteps in the ceiling reminded me where I was supposed to be, where Dean Simkins was supposed to be. Slowly I opened the door, my hand brushing against the birthday streamers, which weren’t made of paper but tightly stretched plastic. Letter by letter I read the words, which did not spell happy birthday.

“POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.”