25

These were the free days Wendolyn had hoped for, and yet he did not fill them as he’d planned. His typewriter stood uncovered, sheets of bond scattered beside and atop it. Sheets upon which he had lately written. Sheets he had no desire to read.

Oh, he tried to work. But when he approached his typewriter, or indeed, his desk, he felt faintly dizzy. Like a Victorian maiden in a swoon. So he chided himself. But the self-deprecation did not break the heady spell.

What disease could he have? Hypoglycemia? Cancer? Flu? Perhaps some debilitating gas was seeping into parts of his house? Yes. Near his desk. And upstairs.

For when he went to his bedroom, he was overcome by the same faintness. This was accompanied by a cloying odor which awakened him whenever sleep did come. He sniffed at his pillow in the darkness.

And thought, inexplicably, of a former student. Christine something. Christine … Christine Rivers.

It seemed he had dreampt of her. She’d made an appearance on his doorstep, diamonds in her hair, and then she’d come inside. And then … his mental screen went blank and the dizziness came again. He strained to remember the dream. Diamonds. No, rubies. Blood-red rubies spilling from her hair onto her face. His penis lifted, as if pleased with the memory. But he felt fainter than he’d ever felt, and beads of sweat burned cold on his forehead.

Malaria. Tuberculosis.

He wiped his brow and considered the way his fingers ached. He added this symptom to the dizziness. What might it be? Tetanus. Polio. And was it somehow related to the pages that cluttered his once-tidy desk downstairs? Was it somehow related to his inability to work?

Dementia praecox. Hell, the vapors.

For the first time in his life, Ronald Wendolyn was glad when classes resumed at the college.

“Is your name Riley?”

“No,” Wendolyn said, eyeing with distaste the vinyl jacket that the speaker wore. He let his eyes fall, noting that the man’s trousers were two inches shorter than they ought to have been. “Two doors down,” he told the man, turning away.

A few moments later he walked past Riley’s office. Riley’s whimper curled into the hallway, like a bad odor. “My wife doesn’t have to know about this, does she? You can say you’re questioning everyone, can’t you?”

Wendolyn fancied poking his head inside Riley’s door. “Relax, dreg of dregs,” he would say. “If the man is questioning you, clearly he is questioning everyone.” But such a gesture might be read as banter. And banter might imply camaraderie. And camaraderie with the likes of Riley … Wendolyn shivered and continued down the hall.

He had not thought to wonder about the question that Riley was being asked. But too soon he knew. The question was everywhere. In the hallways, in all of his classes. In the men’s room, the dining hall, the smoker.

And the question was: Who killed Christine Rivers?

The murder of the President of the United States had been murder removed. No one, that is, had walked in its aftermath fearing a sniper’s bullet.

The murder of Christine Rivers, though it got far less air time, had higher ratings. In addition to the Who-Was-He? was the Would-He-Strike-Again? But the Who-Was-He? would have served.

Who-Was-He? enabled coeds to squeal like camp fire girls after lights-out, the freshmen women saying that it just might be the killer who had asked to study with them for exams, the sophomores speculating that they had lately struggled with him in the back seat of a Ford. Several junior girls wondered if he was the father of the fetus they yet housed. The seniors, of course, had diaphragms.

Who-Was-He? conferred upon many a faculty marriage the solidity that only a wife’s absolution can, for the interrogation—like the lust of Christine Rivers—ranged the campus. One by one the women squared their shoulders and talked to the police: “The girl encouraged him and, after all, he’s only human. And besides, he was with me every night last week, I swear.”

Wendolyn, certainly, was never a suspect. Even when there was no one left to question, they had not come to him. A man who harbors murder is a changed man, aloof. But in his case, no one noticed.

Nonetheless, Ronald Wendolyn sat with sheets of manuscript balanced on knees that quaked. He had worked on both scenes that very night, striking an adjective here, substituting one verb for another. And now he read, yet again, the detailed account of the girl’s death, and of her resurrection.

In which had he been a participant? In which a maker of fiction? He imagined a policeman straddling the doorway. “Did you, Ronald Wendolyn, kill Christine Rivers?”

“I don’t know, officer,” he would say. “Let me check my notes.”

And, in truth, he didn’t know. Both accounts rang true.

To the scene in which she reappeared, he had added a coda wherein she had babbled, as he drove through the snowswept night, on and on about how someone would fix her ass and his ass too. And in that scene as it now stood, Christine Rivers had skipped from the car, lithe and live, saying what Iago said when Othello stabbed him: “I bleed, sir, but not killed.”

But that, perhaps, was only what he yearned for. That, perhaps, was illusion.

For hadn’t the murder scene more than witty chatter in its favor? Hadn’t it her corpse, battered as he’d said it would be battered, laid where he’d said it would be laid?

Wendolyn trembled, remembering. He heard again the slap of his flesh on hers. He heard again her struggle, the sound of blood already thickening in her throat. And how he’d kept on luffing over her, even when the sounds had stopped. God, yes. The murder scene had a gaudy realism that could not but be truth.

Wendolyn walked to the fireplace and knelt before it, the pages dealing with her death in his hand. He tried to bend his fingers and winced, held them rigid again. More proof?

Even so, he couldn’t cast the murder scene away. It was polished, precise. He would keep the pages intact and pray that no one ask, if ever his book was done, “Is it autobiographical?”