Chapter 24

THE TANG OF DRIED URINE GREETED ME on the first floor of Suddreth Hall. Far as I was from the men’s room, the odor might have originated from the unkempt adjunct, who was playing his class an acoustic ballad. I stood in the back of Room 106 and waited for Mollie to reach the end of the poem she was reading her class. An obese boy in the last row was snoring. When the poem was over, I clapped my hands a few inches from the boy’s ear. He joined me briefly in applause before returning his head to the crook of his arm.

“Excuse me, class.” Mollie led me into the hall with her cold
hand. The building was rather warm. “Have you seen Duncan?”
she whispered.

“I saw him yesterday. So did you.”

“He hasn’t shown up for class today. His eight or his nine-thirty.”

“His speech at the memorial service,” I said, “seemed valedictory in nature.”

“His car is in the parking lot, Tate. I called his house. Janice said he never came home.”

“Has she called the police?”

“She’s scared to. She thinks Duncan might be involved in something he shouldn’t be.”

“Why don’t you call the police?”

Mollie looked left and right. “I don’t trust them, okay? I think you know why.” She eyed the envelope in my hand. “What’s in that?”

“Formative assessments.” I shifted it to my other hand. “Since when do you care about Duncan Musgrove?”

“He’s one of us, Tate. Like it or not, so was Simkins. There aren’t that many of us left to . . . choose from.” She snatched the envelope from my other hand. She used it to fan her face. “Maybe Janice knows something and doesn’t realize it. Maybe you know where Duncan is. Didn’t the two of you used to go out for beers?”

“What makes you think I can find a missing person? Not so long ago, you wouldn’t let me go to the grocery store, lest I bring back the wrong brand of chickpeas.”

“In my defense,” Mollie began and swallowed the old arguments before they came up, “you seem much more . . . independent now.”

It was a compliment on par with “literate” or “well behaved.” Mollie gave me back the envelope. She looked both ways and gave me a long kiss. A shy, teenage smile flickered beneath her perfect triangle of a nose. A round of applause erupted inside the classroom, accompanied by cat calls. The boy in the back kept his head down.

“Don’t worry,” Mollie whispered. “I’ll tell them it’s going to be on the test, and they won’t remember a thing.”

She went back inside, quieting her students with a request to take out a pen and a piece of paper. The instructor across the hall stepped outside to close the door to the commotion.

“I guess you found what you were looking for,” Carly said, slamming her classroom door. It echoed like gunfire through the first floor.