Chapter 3

  

As I drove home, I found myself thinking as much about myself as I was about my lost friend. I didn’t know how the school would survive without Henry. On top of that, Joe Morgan’s request to see me the next morning kept intruding on my grief, and it worried me. I have a history of meeting the wrong guy at the wrong time. Ask me why I never married, why I left a good university offer in Ohio and, sooner or later, if I am being honest, I’ll stop talking about the career opportunities at Mountain West and start talking about the men in my life. I’ll talk about the men who disappointed me, both good guys and troubled guys. I might talk about the father who disappeared into grief for a wife who didn’t deserve him—and forgot about the daughter who did.

And, if I’ve had a few too many, I may even talk about my mother. She was born in the west. I wasn’t, but it’s my blood. I am attracted to the west for more reasons than I fully understand. Big Sky country gets to me. Nevada is more home than Ohio ever was. The town of Landry is in northern Nevada nestled in a gentle valley with views of the Sierra Mountains to the west. From here you can drive to Reno in less than an hour and to San Francisco in an afternoon.

My old Ohio friends used to call and tell me they were in Las Vegas and wondered if I could drive over for lunch. It delighted me to inform them that Landry is separated from Las Vegas by six hundred miles of desert and a nuclear dumpsite. “Oh,” they would say and return to the blackjack tables.

What I didn’t tell them is that northern Nevada is nothing like the low desert of southern Nevada. The few times I had flown to Las Vegas, I had looked out of the plane window down at the huge desert landscape and wondered why the first fellow ever stopped there. Perhaps his horse died.

In contrast, Landry is quiet and green, evergreen in winter and lush with deciduous trees and lawns in summer. Outside of town, the landscape is harsher but still beautiful. High desert shrubs and rugged mountains surround us. Not just big sky, it’s blue-sky country all year ’round where the sun shines almost every day and the air is always dry.

By the time I got back to my house, the snow was two inches thick on the ground and I realized I had been too lost in sadness and thoughts of Henry to be frightened of black ice on the drive home. I needed a cup of coffee and some time to reflect on what had happened. The answering machine was blinking, but I ignored it and went into the kitchen. The dog must have sensed I was unhappy. Instead of his usual excited greeting, he just ambled over and put his soft nose into the palm of my hand.

I was the one who had to tell the faculty that the dean of our school was dead. Only some would seriously mourn Henry Brooks’ death. Nonetheless, every one of them would be in a state when they got the news, even those who hated him. A dead dean meant we’d have to search for a new dean and new leadership meant significant change. Academics don’t care much for change.

We were already at swords’ points about our journalism curriculum. One group wanted to shift the school’s emphasis to new media, online journalism, computer assisted reporting, blogs. Their opponents wanted to stay with a traditional focus on reporting, basic print, and broadcast journalism. What should have been a lively academic debate had, over time, become a divisive name-calling fight, as painful as an outbreak of shingles.

I ignored the blinking light on my phone, poured a second cup of coffee, and sat down at the kitchen table. I wanted to remember Henry, to honor him in some way. The last time I’d seen him in his office, I’d asked:

“Do all faculty groups fight like ours?”

“No,” he had said looking up from his computer and turning toward me. Henry was fine featured, elegant looking, and, I suspected, just a bit vain about his appearance. Always in cashmere and tweed jackets, Henry could have passed for a British aristocrat. His once blond hair was gray but his blue eyes were bright and his brow smooth. He had rubbed his temples and put his elbows on his desk.

“Many faculty groups get along very well. We are just going through a very bad patch, Red. Sadly, it’s not unusual on a university campus.”

“But why? Before I went into teaching, when I worked at the newspaper, we knew if you started any serious inter-office trouble, you could get canned. On the flip side, if you didn’t like it there, you could leave and get a job somewhere else.”

“That’s the point Red. Once we are in place, leaving can be difficult. Most universities are located in small towns and the university is the only game in town. If you’re a newly minted PhD, and you’re married, you moved your spouse and kids to a new place where your employer is the only option. Your spouse finally finds a job, your kids make new friends at school. But then the worst can happen. If you get fired or fail to get tenure, you have to move again. Even if a move is good. Some years ago I was offered the dean’s position at a school twice as large as ours. My wife had a fit, my daughter burst into tears, and my son looked like he wanted to poison my food.”

“Okay, I get it. You get tenure, you keep your job, your family settles in and your reluctance to move becomes stronger. But why the anger?”

“Because, after a while, you dig in. You resist the challenge of ideas that threaten yours. And you indulge in games of passive aggression.”

“The aggression I saw in the faculty meeting yesterday was hardly passive. I was waiting for a fist fight or a riot to begin.”

Henry had sighed and folded his hands on his desk. “Things should get better. New course plans impinge on budgets and make faculty crazy sometimes. We just have to outlive the resentment for now. Meanwhile, please know how grateful I am for your help in all this. You’re the one I trust most. You keep me sane.”

That was the last time I had seen Henry Brooks alive.

God, I would miss him.

  

I was sitting lost in sadness when my phone rang again. A second cup of coffee in hand, I reluctantly answered on the fourth ring.

“Ah, Meredith. So good to get you directly,” said Philip Lewis, the university president. “My dear, I appreciate how difficult this must be for you. Difficult for all of us. I am so sorry.”

The president had seemed fond of Henry even though he once expressed dismay over the in-fighting in the school. “The students are aware of the faculty fights,” he had said to Henry. “That’s not good. You will have to find ways to ameliorate this situation.”

“We will miss Henry greatly,” Lewis said. “I hope you and your faculty will be able to rally to the needs of the school at this tragic time.”

“I hope so too,” I said.

“Have you talked to them yet?”

“Only to Edwin Cartwell who found the body and was at the school tonight. But my machine is blinking and I suspect the word is out.”

“You’ll have to call each one, you know,” Lewis said. “A hard task but your leadership is important now. Let me know if you think I should talk to any of them tonight. Otherwise, I’ll plan on coming over to the journalism school just before noon to meet with everyone. Of course, I’ll need to see you and the provost beforehand. Can you be in my office at ten o’clock?”

“I’ll see you at ten, President Lewis.”

“After your calls, I hope you’ll be able to get some rest. I know this is a particular blow for you, but we must remember, Henry Brooks did have that heart problem a while back, so perhaps his death was not totally unexpected. Good night.”

Not totally unexpected? For God’s sake, not expected either. Now what? What about the school, the faculty? What about me?

I started making calls to the faculty. My first was to Max Worthington, the easiest to talk to, and one of my confidants on the faculty. Max taught online journalism and became my first friend when I moved here. He and his wife Trudy invited me to dinner twice a week during my first semester. By the time I reached him, he had heard about Henry’s death from three other faculty members.

“I feel terrible,” he said. “How the hell did Henry fall down the stairs? He used those stairs every day.”

“I don’t know, Max. And the police seem uncertain. Tomorrow morning I’m seeing the detective who was at the building tonight. Maybe he’ll have more information from the medical examination.”

“How are you holding up, Red?”

“I’m exhausted, but I have to call the others so I’m drinking lots of coffee.”

“Henry was such a good guy. I don’t know how he put up with those clowns we work with. Terrorists, all three of them.” Max seemed seriously upset. I tried to comfort him.

“Maybe Henry’s death will make people start to behave,” I said. “Maybe we will all see we should be engaged in mourning not combat. Besides, Henry was usually their primary target, maybe with him gone...”

“Red, do you think his fall was an accident?”

The implication of his question hit hard.

“Jesus, Max, what else could it have been? President Lewis seems convinced Henry had a heart attack. Do you think it might not have been?”

“No, Red. It’s just that the last faculty meeting was so brutal on Henry, I wondered...”

“You see through a glass very darkly, Dr. Worthington.”

“It’s my nature. But listen, I’ll let you go. You have more people to call. You might want to forget the coffee and switch to Scotch.” Max’s voice softened. “Take care of yourself, hon. I know how rough this is on you and it’s going to be particularly hard for a while. Let me know what I can do to help.”

  

It was after midnight when I finished phoning and got to bed. I lay, curled in fetal position, trying not to think about how much I missed Henry and trying to erase the image of his broken body.

It was not the first time I had seen a body on a staircase. One afternoon when I was nine, my mother drank an entire bottle of gin, then got up and pitched forward down the wooden stairs leading to our basement. I heard the sound of her fall from my perch on the window seat in the living room where I’d gone to avoid her. I raced to the basement door. My mother lay on the dark stairs, feet facing me, one shoe off. Out cold. I ran for help. The neighbors came and telephoned my father, who raced home from his classroom. They carried her up the stairs and put her on the couch. She had vivid cuts and bruises on her face and forearms. Her hands were bloodied and full of splinters. When we opened her shirt, we found more bruises on her breasts and belly. My father broke into deep, heavy sobs. “Oh Emmy. Oh Emmy. What have you done to yourself?” He looked up at me. His eyes fixed on me as his sobs continued. The neighbors watched me—their stares sympathetic but clearly horrified. Was I supposed to have stopped her? Was I supposed to have prevented her fall? Even then, people expected too much of me.