Chapter 4

THREE AND A HALF HOURS WEST of the coast, two hours east of the mountains, Grayford, North Carolina, wasn’t a place people lived as much as waited for a reason to leave. For the textile industry, the reason came twenty years ago in the form of Chinese children with a tolerance for long hours and low wages. For the half-dozen call centers near the airport, the reason was the English-speaking population of South Asia with similar feelings to the Chinese about labor and pay. I had lived in Grayford for three years when the bank that had paid me to move here expressed their disapproval of how I gave away their money. I wasn’t giving enough of it to the poor and unemployed, who made no convincing arguments for how they might pay back their loans. My own argument for why I should keep my job—that it’s a slow, tedious, occasionally embarrassing process for a man with bad eyes to learn his way around a new town—didn’t strike my employer as persuasive. By then my grandmother had found a nursing home in Grayford to be near me. Six months later, she was dead and I was a college instructor.

The Gray Knight was the last motel in Grayford where you could get a room by the hour, night, or week. Some people are fond of houses and apartments. I’m fond of not purchasing furniture and towels. Downtown Grayford is the only part of town friendly to pedestrians, and a 15 x 18 motel room is the only real estate I can afford.

Edward jumped down from the window and led me to his dish.

He kept meowing while I filled it with food.

“You and me both, pal.”

I found a box of pizza in the mini-fridge. I had just taken my second bite when the phone rang. The answering machine did its job after the first ring. This meant there were messages. The current caller didn’t leave one. According to the machine, this was a pattern that began at 10:32 this morning. At 12:14, cutting through the dense fog of hang-ups, came a voice no one ever described as a beacon of light.

“Mr. Cowlishaw, this is Interim Dean Bibb. Please pick up the phone.” She had recovered nicely from her grief. “I know you’re there. Your phone has been busy all morning.” She paused again and gave a terse sigh. “I passed by your classroom and noticed you weren’t there. This kind of shirking cannot continue. I hope—”

I hit delete and listened to some more hang-ups. They ceased at 1:30, resuming around the time I was released from the Grayford jail. They make talking phones that read you the numbers of missed calls, but I try not to dwell on what I miss.

I pulled off my coffee-stained shirt and threw it in the pile for housekeeping. I waited for the shower to get warm. The phone rang. I turned off the water and listened. The machine waited four rings. The voice wasn’t one I had heard in my room in three years.

Mollie DuFrange said my name and paused. She told me once that poetry was the best words in the best order, but her silence seemed less a search for words than hesitation. “I noticed you weren’t in class and got worried. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” After another pause, she added, “Sorry about the hang-ups.”

I had no idea she still cared. I would remove that from the list of things I didn’t know. It was a long list. The other items wouldn’t get lonely.

Darkness had overtaken the shadows by the time I got to campus. Carly and I had agreed to meet at the fountain that had been drained for the winter sometime in the 90s and was never refilled. Carly’s blonde hair was visible from twenty feet away. For this reason, I preferred blondes in the moonlight, brunettes in the midday sun. She threw what sounded like a pocketful of coins into the marble basin.

“That’s a lot of wishes,” I said.

“I hope to sell a lot of books.” Her tight jeans were more flattering than the ankle-length skirts she wore inside the classroom. “What’s in the bag?”

I showed her the mortar and pestle, four sandwich bags of different-colored sugar, and what a used bookstore employee told me was a Russian thesaurus. They were meaningless props, but perhaps no less so than the papers my colleagues presented at out-of-town symposiums.

“What does that do?” she asked as I sprinkled blue sugar on the fire escape of Parshall’s only remaining dorm.

I wished for Carly’s novel more originality than I mustered for the story of Agnes Fairmont, a 1920s freshman who hanged herself after her boyfriend ended their passionate affair. “She gets out of sorts from time to time. It’s likely her appearances coincide with a current student going through a bad break-up.”

“Have you ever seen her?”

“I’ve sensed her,” I lied. “It’s a common misconception that you can see ghosts. Anyone who says they’ve seen a ghost hasn’t actually seen one.”

I led her up the crumbling steps to the former theater, made up a tale of twins who had hanged themselves above the proscenium arch before a play in which one was cast and the other was not. I scattered a few pinches of sugar by the entrance.

“I see you’re using red this time.”

I wasn’t used to questions. Dean Simkins had not requested any explanations the single time he accompanied me on my rounds.

This was four years ago, the first and last time I had been on my rounds. “Red helps when resentment was involved. Is any of this helpful?”

“I’m enjoying myself,” she said and started down the steps without me.

I followed her to the massive oak tree between the library and Furley Hall. Carly gazed at the second-floor window of our former dean. I stood in the spot from which Wade Biggins had delivered his thoughtful gift.

“What do you think happened to him, Tate?”

I considered the possibility, not for the first time, that Simkins had taken his own life. He was a miserable son of a bitch, though I never got the impression that he realized it. What I didn’t know about ballistics could have filled Simkins’s file cabinet, but common sense held that a man doesn’t get off three rounds in his own head, let alone in his crown.

“It doesn’t matter what I think.”

Carly looked at me. “Didn’t you see him? Isn’t that why they took you to the police station?”

“Let’s just say the cops and I didn’t see the same thing.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw a dead man who didn’t choose to be that way.”

Carly shivered in the low-cut camisole I noticed for the first time. Her shampoo smelled like an otherworldly peach. She tilted her head onto my shoulder, and I dropped my bag of nonsense in the high grass.

“How soon,” she asked, taking a few steps toward Furley Hall, “before a ghost haunts the building where it died?”

“Sometimes years,” I said, trying to change her mind as she reached for the door. “Some don’t return at all, especially if no hanging was involved.”

No lights were on. The windows were stingy with moonlight. Carly started up the stairs. We were on the landing between the first and second floor when a muffled banging began in the inner wall. Carly grabbed my arm. I directed her to the far left, where the creaks were less pronounced. The semester I taught on the third floor, I learned how to walk undetected past the office of my dean, who liked to ask about tasks I had not completed.

The banging had an irregular pattern, ruling out plumbing or the heat. The sound of metal seemed to rule out the animal kingdom. A scraping took over as we reached the second floor. I looked at Carly. She mouthed something I couldn’t understand.

I wasn’t sure how many murderers returned to the scene of the crime. Whoever was scraping and rattling in an empty building with the lights off might object to company. Heavy breathing followed the next round of banging. Then came the litany of expletives familiar to any student who’s taken a science course at Parshall College.

Carly flipped on the light switch. “Duncan? What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here? What the fuck are you doing here?” Duncan’s short arm reached past me and angrily returned the lights to their off position. Duncan did everything a little angrily.

“Did you kill Dean Simkins?” Carly’s tone was more complimentary than accusatory.

“I didn’t goddamn kill anybody.” Duncan assumed a threatening stance, the top of his head coming only to Carly’s shoulders. “Why are you two here? Maybe you offed him.”

“We heard scary noises,” I said. “Maybe you can protect us.” Duncan swung his paunch in my direction. He had the dusty breath of a man who hasn’t eaten since breakfast. “I’m not in the mood for your bullshit, Cowlishaw.”

In spite of his background in Biology, Duncan did not possess the cool, objective temperament of a scientist. He liked science, he once told me, because he liked being right and liked even more to prove it. He was a fireball of nerves, fueled by debt and the constant paranoia of losing his job. I had spent enough time with him, though, to see the man to whom five different women had vowed their eternal love. My first semester, in a bad thunderstorm, he saw me walking and stopped to offer a ride. When I waved him off, he pushed open the passenger door and said, “Get in the goddamn car, Cowlishaw. You’re going to catch pneumonia, and you don’t have health insurance.”

He went back to Simkins’s door and threw the tool he was using into a plastic toolbox. Instead of expletives, he made a clucking sound consistent with sobs. He fell back against the wall, sank to the floor, and hugged his knees.

“He was going to fire me,” Duncan said.

“So you did kill him?” I asked.

Duncan blew his nose and wiped his hand on the carpet. “I didn’t kill him, dammit. I don’t kill people. Neither do I fire people two years before they’re set to receive their pension just because they’re the only one who was hired when they still offered pension and health insurance and didn’t make you buy your own paper for the copy machine.”

“As a professor of scientific skills,” I said, “you’re probably aware that breaking into Simkins’s office isn’t the most empirical evidence of your innocence.”

“I just want my file, Cowlishaw. Whoever gets his job, whether it’s Bibb or somebody from the outside, doesn’t need to know about my pension. And yeah, okay, if there’s an investigation going on, maybe I’d rather nobody know I had a motive for killing the son of a bitch.”

His sobs resumed, and Carly knelt beside him. She petted his black-and-white hair. Duncan dyed it at the beginning of each semester, and over the next few months we watched him age in fast-forward as the gray returned.

“I don’t know about your pension,” Carly said, “but Tate says there isn’t going to be an investigation.”

“How the hell does he know?”

I offered Duncan my hand and struggled to pull him to his feet.

“That detective from our meeting,” I said, “seems to have his heart set on calling it a suicide.”

“Good. That’s one less thing to worry about,” Duncan said. “Unless whoever killed Simkins isn’t done killing people.”

“You just said he killed himself.”

“The detective says suicide. I saw the body, and it wasn’t suicide.”

Duncan grabbed my shirt collar and pulled me level with his eyes. “What the fuck do you know, Cowlishaw? You’re no detective. Let him do his job, and let me keep mine.”

Carly pinned some of her hair behind an ear. “Duncan’s probably right, Tate. Maybe you don’t know what you saw.”

“Yeah, Cowlishaw. How many fingers am I holding up?” “Am I the only one who sees that?” I asked, pointing to the wall. For the last few seconds, flashing blue lights from the classroom window did the Charleston above our heads. “My guess is the cops, but maybe you want to ask them what they think it is.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Duncan said. “I goddamn work here.”

Carly was already on the stairs. I struggled to catch up. Outside, I lost her footsteps under a siren and Duncan’s renewed banging. I said her name, listened for mine. I returned to the oak tree, finding nothing but the bag of props with which I had arrived.