Chapter 2

  

The telephone call that changed everything came three days after that faculty meeting. I had been drinking with Sadie in my living room, on a cold Sunday afternoon when the Nevada wind was up, promising snow all night and a black sky without clouds.

Sadie sipped a glass of dry sherry, her thin features softened by the light from the fireplace, and tugged at a strand of silver hair that had escaped from the bun at the nape of her neck. Sadie was the retired Dean of Liberal Arts at Mountain West University and my best friend.

“I know I encouraged you to take that job as associate dean, but don’t keep it too long,” she said. “Too much paper pushing and budgeting and personnel squabbles. It eats the time you need for scholarship and teaching.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “I haven’t touched my research for two months and I don’t even want to think about my student evaluations this semester. I’m spending way too much time trying to help my dean cope with faculty disputes.”

“I saw Henry last week,” Sadie said. “He told me the quarreling was even more hellish now than last semester.”

“I wish I could be of more help to him. He probably told you about our three senior professors who tear him up every chance they get. We get nothing accomplished at faculty meetings. These guys always blow up the agenda.”

“That’s the way of faculty fights.” Sadie sipped on her sherry. “I’ve seen some dreadful power struggles disguised as debates about curriculum or budgets. Noses get out of joint, especially senior, tenured noses.”

I knew Sadie was right but it didn’t help. “What gets me is the fierceness. This quarrel has gotten so much worse and it brings out the schoolyard bully in each of them. They hurt each other—they curse, they pound the table, they humiliate anyone who disagrees with them. And it happens at every meeting. I keep waiting for someone to throw a punch.”

“Don’t be surprised if someone does.”

“But these are grown men with advanced degrees and distinguished reputations. They should know better.”

Sadie looked weary of the topic. “I think I’ll have a little more sherry before I head home,” she said, rising from her chair and walking over to the small table I use as a bar. She poured herself half a small glass and returned to the fireplace.

I lived in a two-story brick house I bought with money I earned from a book I wrote about the newspaper business. My house was small but enough for a single professor—well-designed kitchen, a living room with a fireplace, one large bedroom upstairs and a smaller one downstairs that served as my office and guest room. My primary indulgence was a stereo system that played in every room so Mozart or Grace Slick could accompany me through my chores.

Sadie picked up a framed picture from the mantle over the fireplace. In her firm pay-attention-I’m-changing-the-subject-voice, she said, “Beautiful” to the photograph of a slender woman with pale skin and dark red hair. My mother.

“A beautiful drunk,” I said.

“So you’ve told me. But you do look very much like her.”

“I try not to act like her. I only keep her picture to remind me not to behave as badly as she did.”

“I know. But I’ve heard you say that often enough to think you loved her anyway.” Sadie smiled and eased back into the armchair nearest the fireplace.

My golden retriever roused himself from a nap and walked over to Sadie. He put his head under her hand. “Have you named this splendid dog yet?”

“Not yet. I just call him ‘dog’ and he comes.” On cue, the retriever left Sadie, came over to me and put his head on my lap.

Sadie leaned forward. “Your life is on hold, you know. You’re a beautiful woman with glorious red hair, who lives alone with her dog and goes to movies with an old lady twice her age.”

“Sadie, I love going to movies with you. Movies and booze make you so insightful.”

“You’re past thirty. You should be crazy about some man and yearning to have his child.” Sadie tucked another loose strand back behind her ear. “You haven’t had a serious man for ages, and you are overdue.” Sadie has an irritating grasp of my vulnerabilities.

“I date sometimes.” I focused on the dog’s ears and avoided Sadie’s eyes.

“What about the biology professor with the shining white teeth—what happened to him?”

“The third date happened,” I said.

“No good in bed?”

“It didn’t get that far.”

Sadie leaned further forward, elbows on knees, and gave me her impatient glare. “My dear, you have to try.”

I matched her with my elbows on my knees. “Sadie. At that point sex with him would have just been...obligatory.”

Sadie sat back. “Obligatory sex, ugh. That’s the worst kind.’”

We both laughed and then our laughs fell into sighs as we stared into the fire.

“I met an attractive guy a couple of weeks ago at one of Elaine’s dinner parties. Elaine’s brother,” I said. Elaine Morgan Witter was an adjunct professor at the journalism school and the editor of our local paper.

“Elaine’s brother? What’s his name?”

“Josiah. But he’s called Joe. Joe Morgan.”

Sadie’s eyes lit up. She loves to tease. “Joe Morgan is a baseball player. Is Elaine’s brother a baseball player?”

“No more sherry for you, my friend. The man’s a police detective.”

“A detective. Is he attractive?” Sadie sat up straight, reinvigorated.

I flushed remembering how I’d stared at Joe Morgan during dinner. “He’s good looking in a roughhewn sort of way. Strong face, tall, good build, the same green eyes that his sister has.”

“A tall, green-eyed detective.” Sadie polished off the last of her sherry. “Alas, in the literature, detectives usually fall for nurses or lawyers rather than college professors. But who knows? He sounds promising.”

Sadie rose and headed for the coat rack by the front door. I got up to help her with her coat. Sadie is so thin I always worry I’ll crack one of her bones when I hug her.

“I look forward to our next lunch,” she said, as she opened the door and turned toward the darkness outside. “Thanks for the sherry. It warmed me up.”

I stood on my front steps, shivering as she made her way to her Jeep parked at the end of my driveway. When I heard her engine start, I waved her goodbye and turned back into the house.

The phone was ringing. I picked it up and said hello. A few seconds later my heart almost stopped beating.

It was Edwin Cartwell, one of the bellicose professors I had just described to Sadie. He was calling, he said, because there had been an accident at the journalism school. A man had died after falling down the concrete stairs from the third floor to the landing of the second floor.

“It might be Henry Brooks,” he said.

I didn’t believe him at first. I knew Edwin to exaggerate and dissemble. But when I asked him to repeat himself, his tone was calm, appropriate.

“It might be Henry Brooks,” Edwin said again, without emotion.

Might be my boss, my dean? How he had fallen Edwin didn’t know. He hadn’t seen it happen. Edwin told me he took the stairs, as always, and found Henry’s body face down on the landing. He had edged down the steps, careful not to touch the sprawled legs, the one arm flung across the last step. When he had reached the landing, he had placed his fingers on the side of the man’s neck, avoiding the blood and bone chips. The man was dead. He had checked the pulse, called 911, and then called me.

“I think you should be here,” Edwin said and hung up.

I stood, the phone still in my hand, stunned, envisioning what had happened. In my mind I saw a body falling down the stairs to the landing below. Was it Henry? Why? Had he fainted? Henry was sixty. He had a minor heart problem a few years ago but it had taught him fitness. Henry was in good shape. Like Edwin, he took the stairs every day.

The phone rang again. The second caller identified himself as Detective Joe Morgan from the local police. The man I had met, the detective with green eyes.

“Dr. Solaris, I’m sorry to tell you your dean has died from a fall down a flight of stairs. We need you to come to the journalism school right away.” That was all. No recognition we had met at his sister’s, no expression of sympathy. All business.

The air in my hallway chilled. Even the phone in my hand felt cold.

I put on a wool hat and coat and headed for the car. Soft snow had started falling outside. Night had arrived and I knew the roads would be icy. Mountain West University is only ten minutes from my house, but there are two hills to contend with on the way. On warm days the trees form a shimmering canopy over the road. But in winter, the road is gray, the sky is gray, and the trees are barren. At night in winter, the road is dangerous. Snow and black ice are problems on the streets of Landry, Nevada. A town of 150,000 can only afford so many plows for its main streets. It was Sunday night—those plows would not be out until the next morning.

I felt as if I had swallowed broken glass. Henry Brooks had been my champion as well as my friend. I wanted to sit in the car and cry, but no tears came—just a deep throbbing inside me.

I had expected something awful was going to happen. The faculty arguing had ramped up, people refused to greet each other in the hallways. “It’s a goddamned gang war,” Henry had told me. “Please don’t dignify it with terms like academic dispute.”

The wool hat itched. I took it off. Then I took off the scarf I had thrown around my neck. My car smelled of the dog I had left at home.

The campus was dark. Falling snow softened the outlines of the classic brick buildings. Most of the major colleges on the fifteen acre campus were constructed a century ago and clustered together in the center. As I rounded the curve on the campus road, I saw one of the smaller buildings—the journalism school—was lit up inside and out. Three police cars were pulled up to the front of the parking lot, doors open, roof lights revolving.

I parked near the front door of the building. An officer appeared at my car window, asked for my identification and then offered to help me through the snow. He told me to go in and up to the second floor. I walked through the first floor lobby, a two-story room flanked on the right with a wall of graduation class pictures, and on the left with photographs of major donors to the school.

A woman officer stood at the base of the steps leading to the second floor.

“Sorry, you can’t go up there,” she said, adjusting the gun on her hip. She was pale and homely, hair pulled back in a tight bun, no make-up.

“I’m the associate dean of the school. The police asked me to come.”

“Name?”

“Meredith Solaris.”

The policewoman looked dubious, pulled out a piece of paper and a notepad, made a note on the paper, then shifted to one side so I could pass.

Blood had dripped down from the second floor landing to the top steps of the flight of stairs down to the lobby. I stepped carefully up to the landing and saw the body. The head was turned away from me so I could not see the face, but the form was familiar, long legs, slim hands with delicate fingers, thinning gray hair. It was Henry. The smell in the stairwell was familiar too, sickly-sweet. It made me gag.

“Thanks for coming. Sorry to call you out on a night like this.” Detective Joe Morgan stood two steps above where Henry’s feet splayed. He was writing in his notebook and didn’t look at me until I spoke. Another man knelt between the body and me.

“How did this happen?” I sounded raspy.

“We still aren’t sure,” Joe said. “I called you when I could only get voicemail for the provost and the president.”

Joe Morgan was irritated, disheveled, not as sharply attractive as I’d found him when we first met. He looked down at the short, heavy man in a parka who was kneeling and examining the body.

“This is Danny Ranko, our medical examiner. Danny, meet Dr. Meredith Solaris. She’s the associate dean of the school.”

Ranko lifted his head and nodded at me, then returned to his work.

Joe Morgan still did not look at me. A click and Ranko started dictating into a small recorder: “The victim appears to be a white male in his early sixties. From the position of the body it appears he fell, or was pushed, face-forward down the stairs, cracking his ribs, breaking his nose. The mouth and cheeks are covered with blood and broken bone. From the look of it I think he was dead before his forehead hit the landing. I’ll confirm that in the autopsy.” Ranko clicked off the recorder.

I grasped the stair railing to steady myself. I wanted to cry out, but I couldn’t make a sound. Henry Brooks was dead, sprawled on a concrete stairway. I could not weep. I could not believe it. I had just seen Henry the Friday before. He was laughing at something as he listened on his phone, his mouth open, the lines around his eyes creased. My throat closed.

“I’m going up to his office on the third floor,” Joe Morgan said. “Why don’t you go back down to the elevator and take it up? We’ll leave Ranko to finish up.”

The nausea hit me when I entered the elevator. Christ. Don’t throw up in here. The minute the doors opened on the third floor, I raced for the women’s bathroom and vomited in the toilet. I heard a second flush from the men’s room next door. Joe emerged at the same time I did.

We walked to Henry’s office and stood in the doorway. Nothing seemed out of order—no scattered papers, no lamps overturned. It was neat and tidy and cold.

“Did the dean usually work on Sundays?” Joe asked.

“Often. I suppose you’ve heard the faculty has been at odds this semester. Lots of arguing. No one volunteers for our school committees so the dean has had to do more work than usual.” I was babbling, nervous.

“So I heard from my sister.” His expression was softer. “You okay to talk?”

I nodded. “Did you know Henry?”

We entered my third floor office. I closed the door, sat behind my desk, and looked out over the quad. Snow was falling, heavier than before.

Joe Morgan took off his coat and draped it over the back of one of the chairs. I opened the small refrigerator next to my desk and offered him some bottled water.

“Never met Henry Brooks, although my sister spoke highly of him,” said Joe, taking the water and sitting down. “I’m sorry to have to put you through this, but what can you tell me about him?”

Even though my eyes were dry, Joe must have sensed my distress because his voice softened and his eyes looked more sympathetic. “I know this must be a shock, Dr. Solaris. Do you need to be alone for a bit?”

“Please call me Red. You did at Elaine’s house when we met.”

“Sorry. I wasn’t sure you’d remember me.”

I smiled weakly, remembering my conversation with Sadie and sipped from my own bottle of water. I cleared my throat and leaned forward on my desk.

Joe leaned forward as well. “I know this is hard. But the sooner I know as much as I can, the sooner I can figure out what happened.”

He produced a notebook and I began to talk about Henry. I got through Henry’s background—a PhD from the top journalism school in the country, assistant professor at Illinois when he was hired by Mountain West. Winner of two national journalism awards, he was a tenured full professor when the old dean retired. At the urging of the faculty, Henry applied for the dean’s position and was successful in spite of several distinguished competitors from other universities.

“We usually like to hire deans from outside, but by then Henry was a nationally known scholar and so remarkable, so special...” finally the tears broke.

Joe handed me a handkerchief but I pushed it back and reached for a box of tissues in my bottom drawer. Joe waited until I was more composed.

“Your colleague, Edwin Cartwell, told me Henry was a widower and lived alone. There’s no girlfriend we should call?”

I shook my head and blew my nose. Actually, there was someone to call but I was not about to tell Joe Morgan—or anyone else—that I suspected Dean Henry Brooks had been having an affair. And I was certainly not going to say I was fairly sure the woman Henry had had been sleeping with was Edwin Cartwell’s wife.

Then I remembered Edwin had called me before Joe did.

“Is Edwin Cartwell still here? He called me at my house. I should probably talk to him.”

Joe got up and opened the door for me. “Cartwell should be in his office. He told me he needed some time to collect himself before I take him down to the station for his statement.”

I walked down a long hall and around a corner. Faculty offices were all on the third floor. Most were small and windowless. But Edwin Cartwell was a tenured full professor; his office was large with windows facing a small garden.

I could hear Edwin’s voice before I got to the door. He was talking on the phone.

No, he was singing on the phone.

“Ding, dong the wicked dean is dead,” Edwin sang.

He repeated the phrase several times for the listener. I froze a foot away from his door and pressed against the wall. Who was he talking to? Was he actually happy about Henry?

“No I didn’t kill him,” I heard Edwin say. “I found him.”

I moved into the light coming from his doorway. As soon as he saw me, his tone changed. “Yes, terrible,” he said into the phone. “I’ll call you later. I promise.”

“One of the faculty?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Just a friend.” His mouth curved into the suggestion of a smile. Smug bastard. Edwin is thin and wiry with a complexion so pallid it’s almost ivory. He rose and adjusted the visitor’s chair in front of his desk.

“Tragic, Meredith. Absolutely tragic.”

“Yes, Edwin. It’s a great loss for the school.”

Edwin folded his hands neatly on his desk. His hands are always clean and manicured. He was wearing a dress shirt and a dull brown sweater vest. Formal, even on a Sunday. “I know you admired Dean Brooks a great deal. Please accept my deepest sympathies.”

“And you mine,” I said. I was not about to let him know what I had overheard. “You knew him longer than I did.”

“Ah, yes. Many years.” Edwin brought his hands up and patted what was left of his sandy hair. “And his children, too. Poor dears. Would you like me to call them?”

Not you, Ding Dong.

“No thanks. I’ll call them in a bit,” I said, watching Edwin try to compose a tragic expression on his sharp face. “Tell me, when did you find the body?”

“Around five forty-five,” he said. “I called 911 and then I called you.”

“Are you all right?” I asked—as if I cared. “Have you called your wife?”

“I haven’t told Mary.” He fiddled with a pencil just long enough to seem reflective. “I’ll tell her when I get home from the police station. I have to give a statement, you know.” His thin lips pursed, prissy, self-satisfied. With what? The death of a colleague?

“Yes, I know you have to go to the station,” I said. I stood up and turned to leave. His eyes followed me to the door.

Great, I thought walking back to my office. Later tonight, Mary Cartwell will hear about the death of her perhaps-lover from her perhaps-deceived husband. How will she handle that? How long will she have to wait to get to the bathroom so she can throw up or break down?

  

Joe Morgan was on his cellphone but ended the conversation the moment he saw me. He moved closer to the door of my office. Closer to me. His hair was combed and his face was no longer strained. He looked like the attractive man I had met at Elaine’s dinner party.

“You need me to drive you home, Red?”

“No. I’m all right. Snow is better than ice.”

Too bad. It would have been nice to get a ride home with a good-looking cop, but I was too tired, too sad. I told myself I didn’t want to leave my car overnight in the parking lot.

“I think Edwin Cartwell is ready to leave,” I said.

“Okay. I’ll retrieve him,” said Joe. “But I do have a favor to ask you.”

“A favor?”

“I’d like to meet with you tomorrow morning. I need to know more about Henry Brooks and whatever you can tell me about the others here. Would eight be too early to come by your house?”

“No, eight will be fine.”

I left him and headed back to the elevator and then out to my car. Normally, I love the northern Nevada winters. Sun so bright you need sunglasses when snow is on the ground. Crisp, dry, high desert air so different from the wet, bitter Midwest chill I endured as a child. Normally, I loved the Mountain West campus, its graceful college buildings surrounded by wide lawns and gardens, all facing a quad that looked more like Virginia than Nevada. But that night I would have traded places with any professor at any other college to escape my sorrow, not to mention my dread of returning to the school without Henry Brooks to guide me.