Chapter II

 

BILLY HOOVER

 

We found the first body near the mud wrestling pit, out behind the Psi U Lodge...

That’s how I’d begin all this. But I guess I should set it up some, I should say what was going on in my mind and how I felt that night and how those feelings changed—before, during and after. That’s what writers do, I hear. Tell a story and pretend like you’re telling it to someone who’s never heard of you or this place. Tell it to a total stranger so what happened to you, happens to them. Back years ago, they paid writers by the word or by the line. My deal is better: I get paid by the hour, and I can take all the time I want. No rush, no outside work, no heavy lifting: a desk in the back office at College Security, the same office that was crowded with cops back when we were trying to understand what was happening to us. Now it’s just me filling up the lines of a spiral notebook while other guys worry about locked-out professors and false fire alarms and illegal beer kegs, all the things I used to do, knowing it was bullshit and I was bullshit, a campus cop is a Keystone Kop only not so funny, but now I miss that whole normal world and I wish I could shag a call or two, a noise complaint at night, a turd in the library stacks, an undergraduate ankle snapped in beer slides, but I’ve got this story to tell that I’m telling by the hour and it takes more hours than you might think to get past that first sentence. We found the first body near the mud wrestling pit, out behind the Psi U lodge. Lots of hours going into just that line. But who’s complaining? I’m just a campus cop and my time comes cheap.

So okay, there’s this small expensive college on an Ohio hilltop that it shares with a small village and when people see it for the first time, especially in springtime, all three days of it, and autumn, which can stretch out for months, like a long, lazy yawn, they walk around with this goofy tourist grin on their faces, like they’ve walked into a Universal Studios set called “College Life,” where violets dot the grass in springtime, maple leaves cover the lawns in fall, dormitories look something like castles, dining halls are lined with paintings of rich and famous men. A mile-long gravel path runs through the college and the village, which is just a one-block collection of grocery, bookstore, bank, post office and restaurant. It’s a college that’s like a summer camp or a country club, some folks say, but to me, it’s beautiful. It’s hard not to drive up the hill and think that you’ve come to a place that’s good.

Anyway, it’s late August and I’m on duty, I’m cruising Kokosing Drive and there’s a dog off the leash in the middle of the road—or to get it right—a dog trailing a leash, one of those fishing rod type leashes that reels in and out, as if the owner went surf casting in a pet shop. But the owner isn’t around and the dog is running around in circles, yelping. The first time I see him I drive right on by. This college town loves dogs. There’s lots of professors’ pets wandering freely and shitting at will, with no guff about pooper scoopers. And, when school’s in session, dogs migrate here from the surrounding country, begging for scraps outside dining commons, foraging in dormitory dumpsters—rough dogs, part-time coon hunters, part-time college students. So I drive past the dog, ten miles an hour, the first of four patrols between ten p.m. and dawn. After the fraternity lodges, the street is all residential, 1950s split-level stuff. Ten p.m. and not a light in any of the windows. That’s the way it is around here: dishes dried and put away by seven. People leave their garage doors open all night long, and keys in the ignitions of their sensible shit-box cars.

Well, pain in the ass. The dog’s still there at the edge of the road when I drive back and now I better get out and see who it belongs to. The yelping starts as soon as I step out, a shrill high sound, like a spoiled kid. “Hey you,” I say, hunkering down a few feet away, not wanting to alarm the animal. “What’s your story?” The dog quiets down some, perks up its ears, studies me. It’s a small kind of a dog, a terrier, a schnauzer. Soon as I move closer the yelping starts again. I reach out, hoping to grab the leash, but the dog takes right off, dodging onto the Psi U lawn where it sits, waiting for me to follow. Are we having fun yet? My next approach sends the dog back into the road. Now anything that happens, it’s my fault if this little puppy never knows the taste of Cycle Four. And just then, I see some headlights passing the Delt lodge, heading my way—make that our way, moving fast. “Shit, shit, shit,” I say.

I rush into my Cherokee, turn on the roof lights, the parking lights, like I’m setting the stage for an accident that hasn’t happened yet. I grab a flashlight and point it down the road, into the windshield of a jeep with Connecticut plates.

“How you doing, officer?” comes the familiar upper-class voice. I spot a t-shirt, a baseball hat turned backward, a girl in the passenger seat, three others in back. Those open cans of Old Milwaukee twinkle in my flashlight beam.

“What might this be about?” I realize it’s been months since I’ve heard that insincere politeness.

“Might be about speeding,” I reply. “Might be about open containers.”

“Is this a multiple choice?” someone else asks. A round of laughs from passengers in back. The customer is always right and around here, the students are the customers. $100,000 for four years and going up all the time. I’m not a cop. Cops enforce law. I mind manners. Sometimes theirs, mostly my own.

“I’ll tell you what,” I say. “You turn around and park in the student lot. I’ll come by and check, maybe ten minutes from now. Your vehicle isn’t there, I file a report. It’s there, no problem.”

“Oooh...he’ll file a...report.” That voice again. This time my flashlight finds her, a woman, caught like a deer in the headlights. Same baseball cap, same t-shirt as the boys. A minute away from saying “boy does this suck.” I turn back to the driver. “Well?”

“You’re on,” he says. The jeep turns towards campus. He leans out the window. “Officer?”

“Yes?” Whenever they say officer, you know that something smart-ass is on the way.

“There’s a dog in the road.”

“I know.” The dog sits calmly, on its best behavior.

“It could get hit, officer.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Good. I’m sure you can handle it.” Long pause. “Officer.” Then they drive off, speeding up as soon as they turn the curve. I can hear them laughing, replaying the clever things they said. I stand there, wondering if there’s any way a guy like me can win, talking to the likes of them. I wonder about this all the time. I keep the student directory at home by the toilet and...add it all up...I spend hours just flipping through, seeing where they come from, towns like Shaker Heights and Lake Forest, Darien and Wilmette, all those Allisons and Megans and Ryans and Joshes who live on lanes and courts and drives, which are nothing like the roads I know. I study that directory like it’s a textbook in a course I’m close to flunking. I know that flunking feeling. I was a student here myself once, a scholarship student sort of. That’s only because college employees get a huge discount on tuition and since my father worked here, they cut me a deal. My going to college was a dream come true; my father’s dream that he never lived to see. It’s just as well. I lasted a few weeks into the last semester and then it was done. I went to class pretty regularly, at least at the start, and did my work on time. I got encouraged and counseled plenty but, though the college was a mile from my farm, I never felt like I belonged. I felt slow and tongue-tied and second rate and after a while I slipped away so quietly that nobody missed me, not then, not ever. Now I’m back, another dumb goober playing cop and nobody knows I was a student here. That’s okay. I take enough shit as it is.

The dog sits motionless, just like the dog on the old records, listening for his master’s voice. But as soon as I move, the game is on again. The dog runs circles around me. Again, I wonder about driving away. But the students saw me. If that schnauzer winds up pavement pizza, they’d love reporting me, they’d be checking my tires for fur in no time. Alright. One on one, even up, level playing field, the dog could dodge me all night. But the leash makes a difference. I fake for the dog, step on the leash and watch the little bastard do a back flip onto the pavement. Then I reel the sucker in. The dog freezes and digs in, legs locked, so it’s like pulling a statue of a dog, something with no moving parts. At my touch, it trembles. Holding the flashlight with one hand, I turn the collar with the other, until some metal comes around, but I can’t read it because when I wipe at the surface my hand comes back, covered in blood. Now I see there’s blood all around the dog’s mouth and neck.

“Holy shit,” I say. I wrap the leash around a fence post that marks the edge of the fraternity property, then step over to the jeep and radio my office. I call my uncle and ask him to get over here fast. Tom’s an old hand in security. Mr. Popularity with the students. They come to him when they need a break, a case of vandalism that doesn’t need writing up, if repairs are quickly made, eight kegs of beer at a party where four are permitted, well, anybody can make a mistake. Anyway, Tom is a piece of work. He got me this job, after I finished with the Army. I got married, he was my best man. I got separated, he let me live in his trailer. I cry uncle and there he is, stepping out of a college station wagon.

“Hey, Billy,” he asks. “What’s with this dog?”

“He was running around the road,” I answered. “Barking like crazy, going around in circles.”

“Looks like he’s calmed down now,” he says.

“Not really. You step close, you touch him. He shakes all over...”

“Jesus, he’s got the shakes alright,” Tom says, hunkering down.

“I told you. And...”

“What the hell...” Tom withdraws his hand, rubs his fingers together. “This is blood.”

“It’s blood. But he’s not bleeding. There aren’t any wounds.”

“Tag?”

“I didn’t get around to it...I just called...”

“Well, shit,” Tom says. He yanks the dog forward, grabbing the collar, wiping some blood and dirt away. And coming up empty. “Just an inoculation ID. The vet’s name and number. This won’t do us any good tonight.”

“It’s not the dog I’m worried about,” I say. “There was someone holding this leash when they started out together tonight.”

I see Tom think it over. He glances toward the fraternity lodge, a handsome stone building that no one would mind calling home, if fraternities ever took the hint and went the way of the polo team, the flying club, compulsory chapel and the rest of it.

“You drive up and down the road?” he asks.

“Yeah. No one out walking. And from the looks of things, everybody’s all tucked in. There’s no parties in progress. No visiting cars or nothing...”

“Well,” Tom reaches in for a ring of keys that hung from his belt, then nods towards the Psi U lodge. “Let’s just check.”

“You don’t think...” I say. The lodge is dark, shutters down, door padlocked. It’s been that way all summer.

“Listen,” Tom says. “Maybe not. But it’s a fraternity lodge. And fraternities are a womb of weirdness. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say.

“What would they say if we didn’t check?” Tom asks. “They’d say, dumb hicks. Tie up the damn dog, Billy. Could be... could be a raid from another fraternity,” Tom says. “A prank, like.”

It takes him a while to open the door. I point the flashlight, while Tom tests one key after another. It feels like we’re wasting our time. But Tom has a point. We have to check the lodge. Now we step through the door, into a foyer. Tom feels along the wall, finds a light switch, flips it back and forth.

“Power’s off,” I say.

“You picked up on that, huh?” Tom reaches for his flashlight and now there are two beams of light. We step inside toward the main room. The place is eerie. It’s like one of those movies, a cop investigating a crime scene where the killer might, just might, still be around. Martin Balsam walking up those steps at the Bates Motel. Only he had a gun. College Security has flashlights, which now light up the main parlor. I see wood floor, wood beams overhead. A fireplace. Benches and chairs along the wall. Must and mold and stale air.

“Ever been in here?” Tom asks.

“No. Just outside. Checking IDs and stamping hands.”

“In your student days, I mean,” Tom says. “Such as they were.”

“They invited me...” I say.

“But you didn’t go,” Tom answers for me. “Withdrew incomplete. They put it on your transcript. You’re not careful, they’ll put it on your gravestone.”

I stay quiet. Every now and then Tom turns on me. He says hard things, gets this look in his eyes, this dead look that makes me think I don’t count for much. This only happens once in a while and only when it’s just the two of us. It’s not the real Tom, though. It’s not the best of him, not the most of him. It’s just another side. And it scares me.

“Christmas party is something else,” Tom says. “Wassail. This big old bowl of wine and vodka and cinnamon and pine cones and I don’t know what. Kind of stuff, girls drink it. ‘Oh, wow, it’s like Kool Aid only warmer, can I have some more?’ Next thing, they’re swinging from the chandeliers, they’re projectile vomiting across the room. That’s after the faculty leave. Some damn scene. Next day—next week—they decide they got raped.”

While he talks, Tom shines the flashlight around the room, covering every surface, painting the place with light. We’re both relaxing, knowing the place is empty. But the dog still sits outside. The bloody dog. Tom locks the door. The lodge is behind us and that’s a relief. “I’m going to walk up and down the street,” he announces.

“I’ve been up and down,” I remind him.

“I’ll walk it,” Tom counters. “You see more when you walk.” He means, he sees more than I do. “Just check around the lodge until I get back. Then we’ll call the sheriff and leave a message for the morning shift. Over and out.”

“What about the dog?”

“Take it in to the office, I guess. The morning guys can drop it off at the pound.”

“Let’s you and me go for a walk,” I tell the dog after Tom leaves. I worry about the pound: a long-odds lottery with a death sentence at the end. My trailer’s right next door almost, I see what goes in and what comes out. I can count. Leash in one hand, flashlight in the other, I head around the side of the building. Four steps along, a dark shape slumped against the wall turns into a garbage bag full of beer cans, Old Milwaukee and Old Style, cheap beer that the students call Old Mill and Old Swill. We move around the back of the building, into a parking area at the end of the driveway. And then—suddenly—the dog is straining at the leash, pulling like a husky—yelping, tugging me off the bench towards the edge of the driveway where I see something that isn’t going to be another garbage bag. It’s someone sitting against a tree, like those college students in brochures, reading books in nice weather. Only tonight is dark and the dog is straining, yelping, and I follow along, and find a woman seated against the tree—a woman who has graying hair pulled back into a bun, who wears wrinkled slacks and polo shirt—a woman covered with blood that comes out of a hole torn in her throat that I can’t look at, that hurts me to see. It’s like another mouth that vomited blood.

“Don’t touch anyfuckingthing,” Tom says from behind me. I hadn’t even seen him come.

“I should check to see if there’s a pulse,” I say.

“She’s dead. Trust me on this one, Billy.” Tom steps around to the back and calmly points his flashlight. “Shot in the back of the head, looks like. Came out the throat. Came out big time.”

“You know her?”

“Seen her. Academic processions.”

“She’s...faculty?” I ask. I’m ashamed of the way it sounds, hushed and reverent, as if a dead professor is more important than a dead, say, hairdresser. Then again, this is a college not a beauty salon. I can imagine a beautician getting killed: bad debts, angry boyfriend, crime of passion, all the stuff you hear about in country songs. Who’d want to kill a professor?

“Just go to the jeep and call the office. Tell them to get the sheriff here. And an ambulance. Tell them to tell the ambulance no sirens. No rush. This is over.”

Tom is digging around in a blue canvas tote that’s all covered with buttons and slogans like GO VEGAN and WIMMYNS POWER and there’s one he laughs and holds up, so I can share the joke. The button had a picture of our college president, Dr. Warren Niles, with BIG PRICK, TINY DICK printed across it. That about takes my breath away, disrespecting the president like that.

“Wonder how she found out?” Tom says. Now he’s rustling around inside the bag. He pulls out a book—one of those pocket-sized calorie-counting guides.

“I guess she was trying to lose weight,” I say. It comes out dumb but it’s sad, seeing someone who was trying to make herself better getting interrupted, just like that, when she’s trying to get in shape. All those skipped meals wasted.

“Yeah, well,” Tom says, giving me this look. “She’ll be down to skin and bones in no time now.” He opens a wallet that we found inside her tote bag, finds a driver’s license.

“Martha Yeats,” he says.         

 

The next day, Tom drags me to a meeting in a conference room on the second floor of Stribling Hall, where President Niles and Provost Ives have their offices. I know Hartley Fuller from History, at least I recognize him, and Ave Hayes, the trustee who lives on a gentleman’s farm outside of town. He’s dropped in on me more than once, asking do I want to sell my land. I can understand why they’re here. And Willard Thrush is no surprise: he’s a shoot-from-the-hip kind of smartass who heads up the development office, which is about raising money. The question is, why did Tom wake me up and bring me along? I’ve got no business here. I found the body, is all.

“A bad time for Martha to get herself killed,” Thrush says. “Right before college, right on campus.”

“Excuse me?” It’s Hartley Fuller. “You’re suggesting she should have picked a better time and place?”

“Well...”

“She was murdered!” Fuller looks like he’s about to jump out of his chair. Tom glances at me as if to say, see, I promised you an interesting day. In the nick of time, Sheriff Don Lingenfelter comes through the door, escorting this tall grim-faced guy who looks like a coroner. But it turns out his name is Sherwood Graves and he’s a detective with the State of Ohio.

“How’s life in Security, Tom?” Ave asks, calming things down. He’s that kind of guy. “President Niles just invited me to look in on things,” he says. Informal as hell. But the man’s got deep pockets and deeper pedigree. Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th president of the United States, was a graduate of this place and Ave is his great-great-something or other. “I’ve been looking for a little part-time work,” Ave goes on. “You get to go to all those parties.”

“Forget it,” Tom says. “They don’t get going until after midnight. And they’re a hell of a lot noisier than they used to be.”

“Oh...”

“You want the same experience, just go down your cellar, turn off the lights, turn up the radio and drink beer until you’re sick.”

The door opens again and I’m expecting Warren Niles, our president. He knows my name. It’s always, “Hi, Billy,” and he’s proud of it, on a first name basis with the hired hand. But it’s not Warren. It’s Caroline Ives, the provost. She doesn’t know me from Adam.

“Maybe we should get started,” she says, the way those spokesperson women do at the start of press conferences, coming on like one of the boys but not much liking the boys she’s with. “The President has asked me to convey our commitment to cooperate in every way with this investigation. He wanted me to make that clear from the very start.”

“Uh...” said the sheriff, pulling up his sock and rubbing his neck, all at once. “Where is he?”

“President Niles thought it would be appropriate for me to represent the college,” she says and now I’m pretty sure she’s not happy being here. I see Willard Thrush rub a hand over his face, like he’s scratching an itch. My guess is, he’s hiding a smile.

Next thing, the provost lady goes around the room and everyone introduces themselves and says where are they from. It comes my turn, I say “Security.” It sounds flat. “I found the body,” I add. Provost Ives gives me this funny look, like was I here to claim a reward? Then she invites the sheriff to brief us.

“I’ll tell you what we know,” the sheriff begins. “No surprises. Professor Martha Yeats lived alone in a bungalow a half mile from where we found her. She walked her dog a couple times a day and where she died was on one of her routes. Folks there were used to seeing her. But no one saw her last night. No mess, nothing unusual, at her place. Salad on the counter and some wheat crackers. Table set for one. No guests staying, no company expected...”

Now Lingenfelter pauses and reaches into his shirt pocket for the kind of scuffed, spiral-bound notebook people use to record gas mileage on long car trips.

“This is a summary of what the medical examiner gave me over the phone. Professor Yeats was shot at close range—a yard, say—from behind. Death was immediate. No signs of a struggle, no other wounds. We don’t have a weapon—a handgun, for sure. But we have the bullet that killed her.”

“What caliber?” Thrush asked.

“If you don’t mind,” Graves said, “We don’t think you need to know that right now.”

“Okay,” Thrush conceded, “I guess not.”

“So anyway,” the sheriff resumed, “there’s a chance she got killed nearby. Her shoes—it’s not for sure—suggest maybe she got dragged. And there are some parallel tracks in the gravel leading to where we found her. Coming in off the road...”

He flips through a few more pages, then looks back up at us. “That’ll do her.”

“How...” the provost lady scans the faces across the table, our two officers, the sheriff, the state investigator. “How can we help you?”

Again, the sheriff looks at the investigator. Sherwood Graves. Like the name of a cemetery. And it fits. The man is tall, gangly, bony, ugly. If he were a U.S. president, he’d be Lincoln. Failing that, he’s just plain odd. His face has been scarred by some youthful condition, acne probably. Once more, Graves nods to the sheriff, who continues.

“We get two, three murders a year in this county and they’re not exactly head scratchers. Half the time the killer turns himself in, even waits for us at the scene, phones us up and gives us directions. Drug stuff, alcohol, domestic...”

Lingenfelter’s voice trails off, as if he’s picturing memories he decides not to share. But I can picture them. Trailer courts with torn above-ground swimming pools. Tired clapboard shacks where white-painted truck tires border dead gardens. Down at the heels garden apartments with video dishes searching heaven for excitement. Parking lots where pickup trucks outnumber cars and country western music feels like truth.

“These things are ugly,” the sheriff says. “They surely are that. But they’re not real hard for us. Now what happened with your Professor Yeats is different... This killer didn’t stick around. He did the job and left. And maybe he moved the body. Only he didn’t move the body to hide it. The purpose was to...I wouldn’t know what to call it...”

“Display it,” Sherwood Graves says. He leans forward from his side of the table, planting bony elbows that could put a hole in a tablecloth. “Display it,” he repeats. “You might want to think about that.”

“We could get lucky,” Lingenfelter says. “It happens. We connect a bullet to a weapon. We find the weapon and we connect it to someone’s hand. Sooner or later someone talks. The killer, the killer’s boyfriend or girlfriend or ex-partner or cell mate. And it gets back to us. It’s not like we solve the case. We just stick around and wait for people to be their shitty selves.”

“This is Martha Yeats!” Hartley Fuller bursts out. “I hired her. I mentored her. I mourn her. This whole college is in mourning, sheriff. When something like this happens, it doesn’t just destroy an individual life or a single career...a very promising one at that. It challenges our whole enterprise. What we do and what we are. And, perhaps most of all, where we are. It violates...”

“Oh, give me a break,” Willard Thrush interrupts. “Martha was a loud-mouth and a flake. She got out of bed in the morning and she went to bed at night planning how to piss people off. I’m sorry she’s dead but I’ll bet it has nothing to do with the college. And everything to do with her sorry, kinky self. So I think the sheriff has a point. I don’t see any reason we should turn ourselves inside out.”

“If I may.” Now it was Averill Hayes’ turn. “I’d suggest you do what you can. But do it carefully.”

That’s when I notice the way Sherwood Graves is leaning forward, almost out of his chair, staring at Hayes. Hayes is a chummy, clubby kind of guy, a jolly good fellow. And Graves is the opposite, all angles and edges.

“Do what you can and do it carefully,” says Graves. “That’s our mandate?”

“We’re all together on this,” the provost adds. She senses an ending, I guess. Tired of the bunch of us. She’d make Warren pay for his absence, I bet. She was that kind. On the best day you ever had, moonlight and roses, she’d have this list of all the little ways you let her down. A list that only got longer.

“Fine, then,” Graves says. He gets up, as if to leave, turns away, heads towards the door, where he retrieves a leather satchel he deposited at the foot of a coat rack.

“Shall we begin?” he asks the provost. He sees her surprise. “Cooperation, right? That’s what you promised. You and your president.”

“That’s correct,” she says, glancing at her watch, the way people only do in movies, signaling how busy they are. Graves doesn’t go for it.

“Well then...” He gestures for her to sit down. “Let’s get started.” Then, as if to demonstrate his control, he sifts through the files in front of him, while everybody waits, empty-handed.

“You hired Martha Yeats for a tenure-track position in the Department of History a dozen years ago,” he says without looking up. “That was before your time, am I right?”

“This is just my second year,” she responds, as if she’s still angling for permission to leave. No such luck.

“You weren’t around then,” he confirms. “And you, Professor Fuller?”

“I wasn’t chair then,” Hartley says. “The chair rotates among tenured members of the department.” It makes a funny picture: one chair, a half dozen professors’ asses. “But I was on the search committee.”

“A national search?” asks Graves. “You advertised the position, people applied, you interviewed them at a professional convention, you brought two or three candidates to campus where they taught a sample class and gave a lecture, met the provost and the president and the honors majors, was it like that?”

“Yes,” Hartley replies. He seems surprised by Graves’ knowledge of college hiring. “All our searches are national. She replaced a professor who was about to retire. Was that your next question?”

“You guessed right, professor. Who’d she replace?”

“Hiram Wright.”

“One of our great faculty names,” the provost says. “Right up there with Harry Stribling. Wright lives just outside town, to this day. He’s a nationally known historian.”

“Nationally known. Did Professor Wright retire willingly?”

“We’ve never had a mandatory retirement age,” the Provost says.

“Okay. You had a national search to replace a nationally-known professor. How many applications were there?”

“Oh, at least two hundred.”

“We keep applications a year or two,” the Provost volunteers, “on the chance that we may go back into the same pool. After that...”

“Sure. You chuck them.”

“We advertise for a dozen positions of one kind or another every year,” she says. “We can’t save them, we have as many or more applications from prospective faculty as from prospective students, any given year.”

“Is that good news or bad news?’ Graves asks her.

“Well...”

“Never mind,” he says. He walks Fuller through an account of how Martha got hired. There were no local candidates, visitors or spouses that year. No suspects there. Then he goes over Martha’s job reviews, which were in her second year, her fourth, her sixth, when she got “appointment without limit.” Tenure. Tom Hoover calls it “lifetime employment.” Short of rape or arson, you can’t get shitcanned.

While they talk, I half listen. I picture Martha Yeats. They knew her while she lived. A fighter, a noisemaker, a pain in the ass. I only knew her as I found her, sitting in front of a tree, a bib-sized splash of blood coming out of her throat. Sherwood Graves wants to know about students who dropped or flunked her course or petitioned to withdraw and two or three she’d accused of plagiarism. And some professors who questioned her classes, “feminazi rally,” “caterwauling 1-2,” who belittled her research, the clothes she wore, the weeds in her yard, the rust on her car, the bumper stickers, the dog she allowed under seminar tables. These are things that might lead to jokes, gibes, snubs. But not murder.

When Graves starts in on Martha’s scholarship, I’m back in grade school, watching the clock on the wall, waiting for the bell that doesn’t ring. I even catch the provost looking at me and we trade smiles. She knows a lot—too much, maybe—and I know nothing but together we make the most bored couple on the planet. I’m picturing what she’d be like if we were stranded someplace together. And you know what? She might be wondering the same thing. That’s how bad it is. Anyway. “Women and Power,” that was Martha’s theme, comparing early female leaders—Imelda Marcos, Mme. Chiang Kai-shek—to honest-to-God feminists like Benazir Bhutto and Winnie Mandela. It turns out, once Martha had featured them in this article or that colloquium, they got indicted, assassinated, otherwise driven from office. It got to be a joke, Willard says: recognition from Martha Yeats was an instant jinx. The bottom line—which it takes two hours to get to—is that Martha Yeats had answered a casting call, that was all. A certain kind of part was open, a character in a long-running series called small college. She played the part: woman crusader. The lesbian thing was a throw-in. Hell, she’d arrived with a husband, a visiting professor who left after a couple of years. No one’s mentioned him, I suddenly realize. So does the provost lady.

“Excuse me,” the Provost says. “Hartley? What was the name of Martha’s husband? I was just wondering.”

“Husband?” Graves asks, his head popping up from below the table top. “She decided she was a lesbian after she got here?”

“It’s not a decision,” Hartley promptly corrects. “It’s a discovery. And her husband’s name was Robert Rickey.”

“Is he around? Robert Rickey?”

Now it’s my turn. I get this look from Tom, this nod that it’s okay for me to speak.

“Excuse me,” I say. Suddenly, everybody’s looking at me. He walks, he talks. Surprise!

“Yes?” says Graves.

“Robert Rickey? He’s around.”

“Can you find him?”

“I suppose,” I said. Maybe I should have left it at that. “He’s living on my farm.” I stop again. And start. In for a penny, in for a pound. “With my wife.”

“Well then...” Graves says. He stops a minute and then I hear the kind of stirring you get at the end of college ceremonies, where the audience sniffs an ending. A long meeting would have gone longer, if my wife hadn’t left me for Martha Yeats’ ex. I even get a grateful nod from the provost as she rises, like she owes me one. “Thank you.” She just mouths the words.

“Oh,” says Graves. “I’ll need a driver.”

“Oh?”

“I could get someone up from Columbus but it would be better if it was a local. How about him?”

He was gesturing at me.

“He’s plenty local, alright,” Tom says.

“Don’t go finding no more bodies, Billy” the sheriff says.

 

“You’re early,” Sherwood Graves said, the next morning. He came to the door of the Motel Eight with a towel wrapped around his middle, soap in his ears and dripping wet.

“I’ll just wait outside here,” I said. He nodded okay and closed the door. I didn’t get more than a sneak peek but when you work around a college you learn how to eyeball a room in a second and that’s what Graves’ place reminded me of, a dorm room: papers spread over the bed, clothes on the floor, styrofoam cups and plastic plates from fast food places across the road. The room was hot, the air was sour, the curtains were drawn.

I waited in the parking lot and checked out Route 36. The first bunch of shopping centers got built along here, the ones that emptied out the downtown. They were growing old now too, losing out to newer places up the road. People said a mall was coming.

“Alright, Billy,” Graves said, closing the door behind him. “First stop is Hiram Wright. He lives on...let me see...Lower Gambier Road.”

“River Road, sir,” I said. “That’s what us locals call it.” River Road is a spooky kind of place. As a kid, I was scared shitless of River Road. It had some of the roughest white people I’d ever seen and their dogs were the meanest anywhere. It was a strange place for a professor to retire, but near the end of the road, just about where you caught your first glimpse of the college hill, there was a sturdy looking red-clapboard house sitting on a narrow pie-shaped piece of land that was five feet from the road, five feet above the river. Someone was on the porch in a rocker, watching us approach. Maybe he knew we were coming. Maybe he sat there all the time.

“Good morning,” Graves said, in this way cops have of staying polite without getting friendly. “Are you Professor Wright?”

“Yes.” So we’d found him. The college legend, him and Harry Stribling, Butch and Sundance. They put the little jerkwater college on the map, so I’d heard. Stribling had been dead for years. He was just a name to me, a name on a grave in the college cemetery that visitors photographed, on books filled with poems that don’t have rhyme—or, Tom says—reason, on the building where old Warren Niles has his office. His name was on something else, too. Harry Stribling left the college a ton of money that went into buying land around the college, so the place would stay country-like forever. The thing was, when the Stribling Tract bought the land, the farmer stayed put, nothing changed and that was the whole point. The farmer died or moved to Florida, the Stribling Tract found a new farmer or just closed the property off and that’s when you’d see “no trespassing” signs in hunting season, with Stribling’s name on them. And that was only some of what they owned. No one knew how much. People were always guessing. The other thing was that the college didn’t control the Stribling Tract: it was some lawyer in Columbus. Old Harry loved the college but not so much that he trusted it not to screw things up. All of this meant that old Harry Stribling gave folks something to talk about, even if they never read a line of poetry: the Stribling Tract. Where it began, where it ended, nobody was sure. Tom says it wasn’t the poems made him rich. It was family money. Poems don’t earn squat, Tom says.

Hiram Wright was something else again. I’d seen him around, not knowing he was special. He was the kind of guy you noticed, with a body that reminded me of Orson Welles on The Tonight Show, and a goatee that was like Colonel Sanders. But he dressed River Road: work boots, wrinkled chinos, old-fashioned undershirt, the kind with long sleeves and buttons in the front you see in pictures of old-time mining camps out west.

“I’m Sherwood Graves,” my partner said. “I’m with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation. I’m looking into the death of...”

“Martha Yeats,” Wright said, jumping in. But while he was talking to Graves he was staring at me. It was the oddest damn thing. Then, his hands came out from behind him. One of them was holding a cane, which he planted in front of him. He stood up, leaning forward on it, that much closer, staring at me.

“I know you,” he said. “You’re a Hoover.” He came closer to me, moving slowly behind the cane. It wasn’t for show. He needed it. He put his hand under my chin, ran it around my face, studying me, like I was something interesting he hadn’t expected to find. It gave me the willies getting looked at that way.

“You’re Earl’s boy,” he said.

“I’m Billy.” I just barely managed to get it out. Earl Hoover had been dead for going onto twenty years but now this old guy said I’m Earl’s boy, it took me back. I was a kid. I was my father’s son, that’s me. “How’d you know my dad?”

“Your father and I went hunting together three or four times a year, for a dozen years in a row. Out towards Newcastle, in the flood plains along the Walhonding. Up in the Killbuck Valley, on the way to Millersburg. Down to the covered bridges in Licking County. You must have seen us come and go. I saw you...it must have been you.”

“My God...” Now I had it. Someone who’d drive out to our farm on a cold pink-sky November dawn, in a jeep with his dogs, joined by our dogs and my father. What I saw of him, I saw through sleepy eyes, my forehead against a chilly pane, I saw a flash of headlights, the dogs stirring. I smelled coffee, I heard the stamp of boots on the doorstep. The professor had come, my father’s friend from the college, the professor.

“You’re the professor.”

“That’s right, Billy.”

“My father said you were the smartest man for miles around.”

“He was one of the best men I’ve ever known,” Wright said. He stopped and studied me some more. “Do you miss him?” he asked. I stood there, words caught somewhere between my stomach and my throat. “I know you do,” Wright says. “It’s written all over you.” He stops but he’s still looking at me. Then, as an afterthought, he glanced at Sherwood Graves. “I know you too.”

“I guessed you would,” Graves answered.

“Well, come in,” he said. Then he couldn’t resist turning back to me. “I must have walked a thousand miles with your father, over the years,” he said.

I expected something low ceilinged and choppy, with lots of little rooms, which is the way all the old houses are around here. But, except for a kitchen and bathroom towards the back, Professor Wright’s place was one big room where furniture—a bed, a rough wooden table, an easy chair with a reading lamp, a television—made islands in a sea of books. I spotted a murderer’s row of liquor bottles in the corner and classy glasses that might be crystal. No applejack and Mason jars for Professor Wright. And there were serious copper pots and pans hanging on the wall and an oversize gas stove and strings of peppers and garlic hanging from the beams, all of it looking like a set for one of those cooking shows on cable television.

“So,” Professor Wright said. “The subject is Martha Yeats.” He aimed his words at Graves but he was still taking me in, maybe thinking of all those miles with my father. Maybe they were friends, just like he said they were, but it was hard to believe.

“There must have been some tension between you and Professor Yeats,” Graves prompted.

“That’s what they told you? Who told you that? Hartley Fuller?”

“Yes. The history chair.”

“That’s not a chair, son. That’s a stool.” He enjoyed his moment of anger, then got back to us. “Maybe it doesn’t matter. History gets written by the winners, no? Bad history. And Hartley is surely a bad historian. And...in a way...a winner.” He fell silent for a moment and Graves knew better than to throw in another question. “The fact is, Martha and I overlapped for a few years. So we lived across the hall from each other. A duet. My swan song and her...I wouldn’t know what to call it...” His voice trailed off. “So what kind of wisdom are you looking for?” Wright finally asked. “I didn’t kill her.”

“But somebody did,” Graves said. “It wasn’t a robbery. It wasn’t a rape. It was an execution. Maybe some maniac drove through town. That happens. But chances are, it was someone who knew her, who found her while she was out walking her dog, who got close enough to join her, to drop back a step and fire a bullet into the base of her skull. Don’t tell me who killed her, Professor Wright. Just tell me why someone would want to kill a professor at this college. Kill her and display her body outside a fraternity lodge.”

“God, what a question,” Wright sat quiet. “Let the old professor ramble. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“You’re the man they call the legend. You and Harry Stribling. And Stribling’s rambling days are over.”

Wright laughed at that and sat some more. I guess when you’re talking to someone old you take your chances. It’s a grab bag. You make room for memories. “Stribling’s been dead fifteen years this December,” Wright said. “Amazing. And he wasn’t up to much for years before that. His best work was done in the thirties, most of it before he even came here. Country Vespers, Things I Wish I’d Known. A small shelf. Reputations are peculiar things. As you know, Mr. Graves.”

Graves nodded his head. There was something they knew that I didn’t. They were signaling to each other in a code I couldn’t break. I wish they’d let me in on their little secret.

“Harry Stribling died in doubt. Did you know that? He thought of himself as a failure. I know they’ve named a building after him. He left some land behind. The Stribling Tract. They use him in brochures. He’d be amused. What he accomplished didn’t measure up against what he aimed to do. I’m dying a slower death. Or living a longer life. It’s the same thing, I suppose. I’ll die and they will mourn me and raise funds in my name. In the meantime...so much for legends. Harry Stribling was a fine writer of the second rank. I have a name as an American historian. Harry and I were enough to give this college a reputation. And now...so what?”

He pulled himself out of his chair and went over to the long table with the bottles, poured himself a glass of something brown and sat back down. Then he reminded himself we were there, gestured an offer, got turned down.

“You’d be amazed at the number of institutions that perk along from year to year and never get closer to acclaim than a professor who appeared on ‘Jeopardy.’ Those colleges you see in the sports pages in columns of tiny type, places that I can’t associate with anything, not with a colleague, a book, a single living idea. What are these places that make no claim on the world’s attention, on the world’s mind? What goes on there? Does anybody know? Is anybody checking?”

He stopped there and collected himself, staring out the window now. I was amazed at Graves’ patience with this guy. It was like Martha Yeats’ murder was just an excuse to get together and talk about the college.

“Martha Yeats,” Graves reminded him. The gentlest possible nudge.

“You called her my replacement? Yes and no. She wasn’t another me. She wasn’t supposed to be. She was part of a larger change. Bear with me now...” Graves nodded. “In the thirties, this college was like the others I’ve mentioned, just a name on a list. Relaxed. Obscure. Upperclass. There was a flying club. They played polo. They visited brothels in Mansfield. Then there came a new president—Chambers—an imperious, driven fellow who determined to make this place...” He stopped in mid-sentence, as if he were searching for the right word, but I’d bet the money in my wallet he had it already. “...great. But he didn’t have the money. He couldn’t go at it top to bottom. He couldn’t build new buildings, he couldn’t even maintain the ones we already had. So he hired a handful of professors who might make a mark. He brought Harry Stribling up from Tennessee. He found me at Rutgers. He got some brilliant refugees right off the boat. Philosophers, scientists out of Berlin and Warsaw. He found, he recruited, he seduced talent and he brought it here—here!—to this improbable place. It wasn’t a wholesale transformation. Likeable, mediocre faculty outnumbered—and sometimes resented—the newcomers. Resented the president as well. As for the students...well...a mixed bag. Still our little college had some magic. It wasn’t always wonderful, Graves. But we rarely doubted that we were where we ought to be.”

“What happened?”

“What always happens. Change. The president died. The college grew. The village got pretty. Styles changed, not styles in clothing, but styles in people. Not just here, of course. Very little that happens, happens here first. Things took their time coming. But, in the end, they found us. Even here...”

“What arrived?” Graves asked.

“Mr. Graves, it would take forever.”

“Just a few words.”

“A loss of focus, a restlessness arrived. Ambitions that couldn’t be realized here. A loss of integrity. A loss of identity, almost. An odd combination of complacency and discontent. A pandering to students. Customer is always right or, if wrong, forgiven. The devolution of an educational institution into a faculty-centric user-friendly therapeutic kibbutz. The end of almost all requirements, assembly, attendance, chapel attendance, class attendance. Dress codes, Saturday classes, you name it. An embrace of diversity which, while it enriched, also diluted and divided. What did it come to? In the head a loss of edge, in the heart, a loss of love. That’s what arrived, Mr. Graves. Am I vague? I’ll be more specific. Martha Yeats arrived. Martha Yeats. Are you sure I’m not a suspect?”

“Yes.” Graves said.

“Would you tell me if I were?”

“No.”

“Well, the fact is, I liked Martha Yeats.”

“You’re joking, aren’t you?”

“Not at all. If you’d been a part of a college all your life, wouldn’t you be curious about what followed you? Wouldn’t you love to take a peek into the future? That’s what I was granted. Hartley Fuller thought it was time for a change. I was out of touch with recent developments in what he loves to call ‘the profession.’ My teaching style didn’t appeal to ‘today’s students.’ Warren Niles agreed it was time for me to go and Martha Yeats was the beginning of the end for me. My class sizes had dwindled, I admit, and there had been complaints. I was harsh, I was sarcastic, I wasn’t sufficiently interested in students’ opinions. I’d become an acquired taste. Hard grading, heavy reading. Oh my. Well, alright, but I got Warren to give me a couple years more. It wasn’t the money. It was pure curiosity. I wanted to be a guest at my own funeral. Now, as it happens, I’ll be attending Martha’s. Well, I was a specimen to her, she to me. There was no contest between us. The issue had been decided, the future was all hers. Time turned me into a local character. Also—in her eyes—an elitist, hegemonic, hierarchical patriarch, way past ripe, outward bound, the bell tolls for thee, old fart, fossil, fogey! But published. More books than the rest of the department combined. There was that. Well, from where I sat the view was delicious. My courses were titled American History 1600 to 1800, 1800 to 1900 and 1900 to present. Martha’s courses were calls to arms, credo, invitations to therapy, things like Bitches, Witches, Snitches: Women in the Middle Ages. I walked into a classroom in a suit, stood behind a lectern, addressed students as mister and miss. Martha was on a first-name basis from day one, teacher and students all in a circle, campfire style. And her office hours! The halls lined with students waiting for an audience, waiting to talk not just about their papers, their unwritten or half-written papers, which she criticized, edited, rewrote, and, I suspect, finished in their presence. No, more than that. She was a mother, a sister, a friend. Every student, I soon learned, began her class with an A. It was theirs to lose. Grades were demeaning, she told them. So, too, it turned out were fraternities, athletic contests, our choice of guest lecturers, the Christian symbols in the college flag, the college songs, our policy on day care, the arrangement of tables in the dining hall, the honorary degrees we awarded. It was around this time that, having become aware of William Butler Yeats’ ‘Leda and the Swan,’ a poem which had escaped her notice until then, Martha decided to differentiate herself from an author who celebrated rape, wings flapping, loins shuddering, all that. So Yeats, rhyming with gates became Yeats, rhyming with beets. The world was alerted to this re-naming, via an all-student, all-employee e-mail. Oh, life was lively with Martha Yeats. And what paradoxes! Committed to the students yet endlessly combative towards the school, indifferent when not hostile to its character, its tradition. An odd position for an historian, no, acting as if the history of the school began on the day of her arrival? As for me, I was her daily reminder of all that was wrong with the place. In my office across from hers... well, it was as if a leper had been wheeled into a maternity ward. And it was that. There were infants a-plenty and many childhood diseases. The homesick and lovesick and lonely and not sure of gender, the about to withdraw, transfer, flunk out, harm themselves, harm others, they all sought her out, all the birds with one wing. I grew accustomed to hearing people crying across the hall. And then, late in her second year, it was Martha crying.

“I was in my office after a seminar on history-as-literature, three hours in the daunting company of Francis Parkman. Seminars are exhausting. I’d venture a true full three hour seminar is beyond the abilities of half the current faculty. I sat in my office tired, mute, replaying what I’d said and forgotten to say, the inevitable highs and lows, feuds and alliances. I reached into my drawer for a bottle of brandy, poured some into a coffee cup. Across the hall, I heard someone crying. It was April, I recall, because the wet, earthy breeze came into my office—what a relief from the stuffy, caged-in seminar room. It was April because that’s when students cry the most and Martha had been doing land-office business lately. Abuse and molestation are terrible things. But—forgive me—one notices how those memories tend to surface in April, close to exam time. I heard a tap on my door and Martha was standing there. Tissue in hand, red-eyed, she made no effort to disguise that she was the one who’d been crying.

 

“‘How do you do it, Wright?’ she asked. ‘Or rather, how did you do it?’” She nodded towards my shelf of books. Not conference papers, not journal articles, not book reviews. Books. The very books which she’d referred to as ‘out of touch, out of date, and, alas, not out of print.’ This from the same woman who called Harry Stribling, our dear gentle miniaturist, a ‘dingleberry from the fetid asshole of the Old South.’ That was in a faculty meeting. And no one corrected her. It was amazing how quickly the old guard caved in, how the faculty who made a religion of civility swallowed their tongues when Martha spoke. And now she’d come to call. I wondered why.

“I invited her into my office and, when she sat, I gestured towards my brandy. She nodded gamely back, returned to my office with a clean cup. This time she closed the door. I poured, she drank. She’d just re-read her thesis, she said. Cunts and Counts: Courtesans and Power in Eighteenth Century France. Oxford University Press—‘isn’t that the same place that published your stuff a million years ago?’—had expressed an interest. They’d wanted some revision of course, an opening and closing which would appeal to a broader audience. And they were more than willing to wait. Then the second year rolls around and there it sits because Martha’s on nine committees. She has advisees, she’s writing letters of recommendation, she’s liaising with student groups, the women’s caucus, the gay-lesbian forum, anti-fraternity task force, eating disorders council, multi-cultural steering committee, alternative lectureships program. Out of breath, she peered up at me and asked why I wasn’t laughing at her. Because it wasn’t funny, I said.

“It got worse. Her original editor at Oxford had moved on and the successor, while professing enthusiasm, didn’t seem as committed to the project. Then again, Martha reasoned, urgent interest would have been as disturbing as a nonchalant ‘whatever.’ How she looked forward to the summers! How quickly they slipped by, no longer than a three day weekend, and no more productive. Just enough time to recognize the saddest truth of all. She wasn’t the same person she was when she started writing. She’d changed. ‘I let this place take me over,’ she said. Teaching, grading, comments on papers, committees. Students in her classroom, in her office, in her house. Students waiting for her, even now, to review what happened on the Take Back the Night March...”

Wright interrupted his story, poured himself another drink which he lifted, maybe a toast to Martha. He let us wait a little longer. He knew he was a storyteller alright. And “the smartest man for miles around.” But I couldn’t help wondering what all this had to do with nailing the killer. Graves wasn’t rushing the old man, that was for sure. It’s not like a guilty person was making a getaway and every second counted. Then the intermission was over and Wright began again.

“I realized that Martha Yeats hadn’t come to me for advice. She’d come to me for punishment. Punishment was sitting in front of me, confiding failure. So it didn’t matter what I said. Therefore, I said what I wanted. I told her that the most important books, more important than the books that I had written, maybe even more important than the ones that she aspired to write, had been written under far worse conditions than obtained at this college now. I told her that when people came to me and said they’d always wanted to write, I said, if that were true, they would have written. Somehow. She didn’t like what she was hearing. Punishment she meted out to herself was one thing. Correction from me was quite another. She was getting out of her chair, out of my life, but I kept talking, knowing we would never talk again. I told her she was talented but that talent was promiscuous. There was always lots of talent around and...and then she was gone.”

Wright sat back in his chair. “That was all. We never talked like that again. But, from what I saw, my fears came true. She had a look in her eyes. Two strikes against you before you spoke. I didn’t speak. And I don’t know who killed her. I couldn’t begin to guess. Are you sure that it wasn’t...random...an accidental crossing of paths?”

“I doubt it.”

“Well, do you think we’ll ever know? I’m an historian, not a detective. But I know there are questions that are never answered. Could this be one of those?”

“I hope not.”

Wright followed us to the door, out onto the lawn and slowly walked us over to where we were parked. The morning was pretty much shot. I wondered what Hiram Wright did with himself, how he got through the days and nights. All the things he did, he did alone—cooking, eating, reading and writing. I was by myself but at least I had a job. I dodged loneliness. I worked nights.

“I forgot to mention something,” Wright said. Graves and I were both inside the Cherokee. “I’ve benefited from Martha’s death. Maybe it’s a benefit. We’ll see. Warren Niles stopped by this morning, before you came.”

“He visited here?” Graves asked.

“Don’t be surprised,” Wright said. “People find me here. All kinds of people. Warren comes by every few weeks. There’s a bottle of cognac on my shelf that has his name on it. We talk. Anyway, I’m back in the line-up. Martha’s classes. It was too late to run a search. I’m teaching Monday.”

“Bitches, Witches, Snitches?” Graves asked.

“American History, 1800-1900. American History 1900 to Present. Quaint, isn’t it? Like Amelia Earhart radioing the Honolulu Airport for permission to land. It should be something.” He tapped my shoulder. “Stop in, Billy. Take the class if you like.”

“I don’t think I can,” I said.

“Just do it. Do it for your father’s sake. I was after him for years to take my class. I had no doubts about his intelligence. Only his confidence. Sooner or later, he’d be sitting in my classroom. Then...he died. Now, I’m retired. Now it’s a second chance. Take it, Billy. For my sake too.”

“That might not be such a good idea,” I said. I wondered about telling him that I flunked out once already.

“He’s going to be busy,” Graves warned. It came as a relief.

“Well,” Wright said, “drop by when you can. Alright?”

I nodded. “When I can.”         

“Excellent,” Wright said. “It’s amazing,” Wright said. “I taught for thirty years. I’ve been retired for ten. But I’m nervous. It’s in my legs, my stomach, the palms of my hands. I’m rejuvenated. I feel wonderful, knowing there’s a group of lives that are going to intersect with mine. I can’t tell you how it feels. I’m a professor. I profess history and literature. I’m young again. I can’t wait. If I could only click my heels...” He laughed and shook his head, amazed at how good he was feeling. “I have Martha Yeats to thank. Or her killer.”      

 

“Next stop?” I ask.

“We’re looking for Robert Rickey.”

“Okay,” I say, heading towards my property, just a mile from Wright’s place. I glance at Graves to see whether he wants to talk. You know how some people, when they want to turn you off, pick up a book or newspaper to hide behind? Graves does the same thing, only without the book. He closes his eyes and folds his hands. So I drive home along the river, checking like I always do to see that the old railroad trestle is still in place. They’re mostly gone now, just like the trains, and I guess I’m one of the last bunch of kids who ever heard the sound of a train at night, that whistle you can hear a hundred miles. When they stopped trains, it’s like an animal we know got hunted out of the world.

Linda Thorne was a college kid, the same way there are army brats. Her father was a money-raiser, moving from place to place until he landed here and pretty much put up his feet. Linda and I went to school together, kindergarten through high school. The summer of my senior year, as a service to the community and a favor to a friend, she took my virginity. I’ll never forget how it was, late that Sunday morning, grass smelling sweet, a picnic planned at the old canal locks at Black Hand Gorge. Her house was completely empty, her parents in Columbus, and it seemed against her nature, letting a morning like that, a house like that, a Billy like that, all go to waste. She stepped away from the sink, where she’d been making a salad, she walked over, dried her wet hands on the front of the t-shirt I was wearing. “I’d like to fuck you,” she said, leaning into me. “I didn’t know a woman could fuck a man,” I said, honestly puzzled. “Thought it was the other way around.” “I’ll show you,” she said. So she did, a few more times before she left for college. And lots of times after I came back from the army. Now I know. A woman can fuck a man. I know that for sure.

We park by the barn and Linda comes out the porch door, smiling at me, this sad, pitying smile of hers. Robert Rickey is making arrangements for his ex-wife’s memorial service, she says, but he ought to be home soon. We sit at a picnic table while Graves chats with her. I check out the place, the overgrown kitchen garden, the barn that’s got my father’s truck—the one he died in—parked outside. It’s rusted now, sunflower stalks coming out the windshield, plants living where my dad died.

“He’s coming,” Graves says, watching a car bump down the driveway.

Robert Rickey is a peppery, sharp-tongued kind of guy who would last about twenty minutes in a local bar. I guess he spotted our College Security vehicle driving in and that gave him time to prepare.

“Hi, Billy,” Robert says. We’ve worked out this no-hard-feelings thing. I started it, Robert picked up the cue. “How’s it?”

“Busy,” I answer. “You know that.”

“Guess I do.” He nods at Graves, doesn’t introduce himself or offer his hand. “Alright. We were married and we were divorced. If you need the dates I can look them up. I don’t celebrate them. On the night she died I was with this lady here. We drove to Columbus at four p.m., arriving at the Stone Ridge Shopping Center sixteen-plex in time for a 5 p.m. showing of Jackie Brown, which we saw in the company of Howard Stein, who’s current writer-in-residence at the Thurber House. After the movie we kept an eight o’clock reservation at Lindey’s Restaurant on Beck Street in German Village. I had a mussels appetizer, the half rack of lamb with garlic mashed potatoes and more than my share of nice merlot, followed by a double espresso with crème brulée. Honey, what did you have?” Linda doesn’t reply. She just smiles. She once told me she liked men because of shoulders or butts, eyes or hair or skin. Even astrological signs; one year she screwed her way around the zodiac, sign by sign. But Robert Rickey drew her because he was so bristling smart, so quick on the draw. “I think you had portobello mushrooms on some kind of pasta. I paid by credit card and I kept the receipt which shows we left the restaurant at 10:32 p.m. Was Martha still alive then?”

He reaches in his wallet and pulls out the receipt, offering it to Graves who hesitates before taking it. Robert is messing with him and Graves doesn’t like it.

“I saved the receipt because Howard and I were discussing his agent’s taking over a manuscript I’m finishing up and, God willing, this qualified as a business dinner. I thought the receipt would help me with the IRS. If you take it, I’d like to make a copy.”

Graves returns it to him, without a word.

“We drove back here via routes 62 and 661, arriving here just after midnight. We shared a cognac in the living room and went upstairs, will you back me up on that one darling?”

Linda smiles again. Robert is always taking chances, smart-ass chances, but he’s lively, I’ll give him that.

“We’ll take silence for assent,” Robert says. “And now let’s all ask ourselves why I’m talking like an upperclass twit on Columbo? Could it be because I’ve just done funeral planning for my wife and come back to find cops waiting? Could it be I don’t know how I should feel right now or what I should say? Let’s say I’m looking for my voice.” Now he offers Graves his hand. “Who are you, mister? What about you?”

“Sherwood Graves.”

“Well, was there something more?”

“Yes, Mr. Rickey. Let’s sit down.” Linda goes back in the house to bring coffee for Robert and Graves starts asking about Martha Yeats. Nothing like death to flush out interest in a person, nothing like murder to make someone more than what they were. She’s a hot topic: become a corpse and you’re the talk of the town. Graves takes Robert through the story. They met at graduate school in Michigan. He was in English, she was in history. They hook up, live together, get married, go on the job market. Rob’s transcript matches Martha’s, basically straight A’s, but Martha’s a woman in a hot field, gender and history. Publishers are interested in her thesis. No way Rob could compete with that. Then it kind of falls apart.

“No fights, no broken dishes, no lipstick on the collar,” Robert tells Graves. “Nothing even close to that. No melodrama.”

He takes a deep breath and for just a minute, he’s out of words, the ones he prepared ahead of time.

“I’m sorry she’s dead,” he says. “We were finished a long time ago but it bothers me that she won’t be around doing Martha-type things...”

“Could anything she did have...” Graves didn’t have a chance to finish.

“I don’t know why anyone would want to kill her. Don’t waste your time on the faculty. Faculty don’t kill. Their main hobby is feeling badly treated. I’d put my money on a stranger.”

“Until last night, I’d have agreed with you, Mr. Rickey,” Graves says. He stops, enjoying the moment. Robert has been in control until now. But Graves has something. He knows it. He leans across the picnic table. “I checked Martha Yeats’ hiring. The search. Nothing unusual. Nothing irregular. The circumstances at the time of her death, the scene of her death, her colleagues, her students. Nothing. I checked her love life...after you. Nothing.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Robert agrees. “Just this morning, I find that kind of sad.”           

“In the files, though, there was a name that Provost Ives didn’t mention. A candidate in a search that occurred before she became provost. Gerald Kurt Garner.”

“Oh my God!” That’s Linda bursting out and regretting it right away, when we all turn towards her. “The G-Man,” she adds weakly, like a little girl, which it turns out she was, when she knew him.

“Please...” Graves says. He’s surprised to hear from her but he recovers fast. “This isn’t...a trial.” Yeah sure, and he wasn’t a cop investigating a murder. He was just a connoisseur of people. “If there’s something...”

“Puppy love,” she says after a while. Trying to sound light-hearted. “Big man on a small campus. He came from the south of the state, one of those Ohio River towns that are famous for football players. Full scholarship. He was something. He was blonde, and broad-shouldered and smart and not crazy and a smile that...” She stops. She can’t help picturing him. It takes her breath away. “He wore chinos and t-shirts and sneakers, same junk they wear today but then it was a sign of innocence, not indifference. A crewcut, would you believe, and oh what a smile. The world by the balls, without half trying, and my just-barely teenage heart in his hands.”

She stops and she’s shaking, right on the edge of losing it and I’m standing there watching. Crying is something I’ve never seen her do.

“I have no idea where he is or what he’s doing,” she says to Graves. “Excuse me. I feel like shit.”

She walks away and the walk turns into a little bit of a run up the sidewalk, through the porch, the screen door slamming behind her.

“Alright,” Graves says. “Mr. Rickey? Anything from Martha Yeats about Gerald Kurt Garner?”

“No,” Rob says. “But I heard that Wright’s picked boy applied for a tenure-track position and Martha spiked it. Carried the whole department with her by sheer force of will.”

“Do you think it’s possible?”

“She fucked Wright’s wunderkind over, that’s for sure. Maybe you should go talk to Wright about it. It was all about him anyways. The kid got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Was Mr. Garner angry? Did you hear anything? Threats?”

“I never met the man. But let me speak for all the trailing, adjunct, part-time this or thats of the academic world. If I came out of the boondocks like some barefoot Buckeye Lincoln, if I got a scholarship to a college which not only educated me but persuaded me that I was the American-dream-come-true, if they were proud of me and I made them prouder by winning a Rhodes and if I packed off to England for three years and worked just like I did here and then I topped things off at graduate school and applied for a job at the very school that made me what I am, thank you very much, and my whole plan was to serve where I once had been served, to take the baton from Hiram Wright’s trembling liver-spotted hands, if I returned to the place that mattered most to me, if I came back home and found myself facing Martha Yeats, and if it all fell apart because of her, would I be pissed off? Hell, yeah, I’d be pissed off. But I don’t know about killing her. It’s been a while.”

“So it has,” Graves agreed. “We’ll go now.”

“Uh...could you give me a minute?” I asked, motioning towards the house. Linda was in there and I had to check on her before we went. Graves was annoyed, but he nodded yes. Then it came to me, I should ask Robert Rickey’s permission. “Okay if I go in for a minute?”

“Hey, be my guest,” he said. “It’s your house.” There was another line hanging in the air between us. She’s your wife.

Linda was at the sink, splashing water over her face, her eyes.

“Don’t rub. They’ll turn red.”

“Oh, hell, Billy,” she said.

“He must have been quite a guy.” Meaning: you never cried for me. I never made you feel like shit. All of which she ignored. It wasn’t about me. It was this thing from years ago.

“I was the kid behind the goal post, catching the extra points,” she said. “He was a quarterback, a fraternity president, valedictorian. He had it all down, that small college thing. He was the Sangy Man besides.”

“The what?”

“Sandwiches. Ham and cheese, bologna and lettuce. We made them in his room and then we drove around the dorms at night. ‘Sangy Man, Sangy Man,’ I’d shout, running up and down the halls and the students would come out of the rooms, like prisoners coming out of a row of cells. He was Sangy Man, I was Sangy Girl. Sometimes he took me into town for chili afterward. I had a crush on him and nothing happened...”

She stopped and just sat there, not knowing how to end the sentence. I backed away, said I’d be checking on her. I guessed she heard me.

“What do you think of the G-Man?” Graves asked, on the way home.

“I don’t know who did it,” I said. “But I hope he didn’t.”

“For your ex-wife’s sake?”

“Everybody’s sake,” I said. “But what the hell do I know?”

“You know something, Billy? You belong in the  Guinness Book of Records for self deprecation. Putting yourself down.”

“Well thanks a lot,” I said. “I had a lot of help along the way. It was a team effort. I’d like to thank my ex-wife, my uncle, my employer and the State Police of Ohio.”

Graves didn’t respond to that. All he said was that he didn’t need me the next day. So I dropped him off at his motel and drove away wondering how a man who didn’t drive would spend his time, what he’d do in that motel room, where he’d find his meals, whether the fast food places up and down the road would be open on Labor Day. I thought about asking him to come with me, but there was no way he’d fit, where I was going.

 

Next morning out in Millwood, six miles from campus, I turned off the main road onto a dirt track that took me past a row of mobile homes that weren’t so mobile and trailers that had come to the end of the trail and funky tar-paper-shingled cabins along a river which wasn’t what it used to be, especially at the end of summer when the current’s so slow, it could take years for a beer can to float down to New Orleans. Tom and Marsha’s place was at the end of the road. Even before I saw the people I knew who was there by their trucks. Almost all of them college employees, one way or another. There’d be Harry Burmeister who worked on buildings and grounds and Bev Sanders who answered phones in maintenance and Woody Thomas who used to be a janitor until he retired but he still drove for the college, chauffeuring the president and visiting big shots and trustees between the college and the airport at Columbus. There was Eddie Duncan who worked for the food service, got laid off every summer and went on unemployment until they hired him again in the fall. These were the folks who watched me grow up, who’d help raise me. And this Labor Day picnic was a ceremony that went back forever.

“Look, it’s the law,” someone said as I came walking around the back of the shack. “I Fought the Law and the Law Won,” someone else sang out. I’d been through it all, the lines and jokes. “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling” and “Go ahead, make my day.” Old stuff, all of it.

I took some macaroni salad, a corn dog and a handful of potato chips, filled a plastic glass full of no-name cola out of a jumbo sized plastic bottle the size of a gasoline can. Then, like I always did, I sat at the edge of the crowd and let the talk wash over me.

Come-and-get-it-day was the topic. Come-and-get-it-day happened every May. The thing is, the students empty out the freshman dorms one weekend and the next weekend they’ve got families of graduating seniors staying in those same rooms, which have got to be cleaned in the meantime. Did I say cleaned? I meant scrubbed, deodorized, disinfected, damn near sandblasted. So Tom’s wife, Marsha and some other local women would go walking into the valley of death with mops and buckets and toxic chemicals, working their way up the corridors room by room. And loving it. Incredible, the stuff those students left behind. Money, first. All the women carried purses for the change they found, dusty coins on bookshelves, under beds, at the back of closets, not just pennies and nickels either, all this money the students didn’t bother picking up, and enough pens and papers to write a book, t-shirts and sweatshirts and socks, unwashed or washed the wrong way, bleached and shrunk and wasted. It’s like a movie where a sudden plague kills off everyone, maybe a neutron bomb, and a handful of survivors, hicks who live in the woods, come into town and pick through what got left behind. Marsha’s got Alzheimer’s now. She’s in a care center. Tom goes every day to feed her, even though she doesn’t know him. “Like putting a coin in a vending machine and getting nothing back,” he says. “No change, no coke.”

Across all this talk about what they’d come across—shirts never worn, running shoes lightly used, a lifetime supply of tennis balls, an abandoned $300 mountain bike—I see Tom looking at me, looking hard. He points his finger at the inside of the trailer. He gets up and I follow. By the time I come through the door, he’s stretched out in his Lazy Boy. I sit in a chair that’s so old, I can remember picking loose change out from under the seat cushion when I was a kid.

“Look at them,” Tom says, pointing through the screen door. Where we sit is dark, and out there, the picnic is in bright summer light, a little sad and smoky from the barbecue, so it’s like I’m looking at my old friends from a distance, through wisps of clouds that smell like hot dogs. They’re growing old, that’s what I think. The picnic stays the same but folks drop off, down to Florida or the old folks places. Or they die.

“They’re like house servants on some old plantation,” Tom says. “We lock the doors and mow the grass. We pick up the bloody knife, the broken glass, the dirty laundry and act like Christmas when they let our women clean out the dorms.”

“I guess,” I say. “But they look happy to me.”

“Happiness isn’t everything,” Tom says. He groans and gets out of the Lazy-Boy, which groans along with him. He walks over to a table with some shelves above it and turns on a lamp that’s no brighter than a candle. None of what I see was here last year. It’s a shrine to his son, Tony. I barely remember the guy. When I picture him I’m not sure if what I’m seeing is something I saw myself or part of a picture, like the ones in front of me now: Tony on the football field, Tony in cap and gown, Tony in uniform. He was a super kid, they say, the best pure athlete they’ve ever had around here. But it was Vietnam and Tony joined the Marines and you know how the story ends. The flag that draped his coffin is pinned to the wall behind the pictures. Like I say, I hardly remember him. But that doesn’t stop me from wondering what all he would have amounted to, whether he would have gone from failing farm to shutting down factory to working for the college just like me. I spot a photo of Tony out on the railroad trestle next to our place, pointing a gun at the sky. Same trestle, same river, I could even recognize some of the trees, a shoal of sand and logs that’s still there in the middle of the river. Everything still there but his son is gone forever. And his wife’s as good as gone, too. All he’s got to look at is me and himself in the mirror. And I don’t think he cares much for what he sees. 

“Know something?” Tom says behind me. “Time doesn’t heal jack. You stop crying. You can’t cry every day. But inside, you’re screaming. And this...”

He gestures at the shrine he made, then sits back down. “It’s bullshit! I know it. I thought I was keeping him alive. But he’s always the same in the photos. And the photos get old...”

“Come on, Tom,” I say. It’s hard for me, putting a hand on his shoulder. Usually it’s the other way around. He shrugged me right off.

“And when I’m gone somebody’ll come into this place and ask who’s the kid in all these pictures? And then, it’ll be who was that kid, who’s old stuff was that? And it’ll go from someone knowing to sort of knowing, to not knowing and not giving a shit. Get it?”

I nod. I wonder the same thing some time, what it would take to make people remember, not someone famous, but one of us. What was a true memorial for the likes of us?

“So how’s it going?” Tom asks.

“I got a question for you.”

“Well...shoot.”

“Why’d you take me to that meeting? The one with the cops and the big shots? They didn’t need me to be there.”

“Right. They didn’t need you to be there. You needed to be there.”

“I did?”

“For your own good. Teach you a lesson. I want you to see that college from the inside. Not keep walking around the place like a servant.”

“But that’s what we are.”

“That’s what you are,” he fired back.

“Driving Sherwood Graves around is going to change that? Shutting up while I’m behind the wheel, so he can get a chance to think?”

“Maybe it’ll rub off. Let’s try. What do you think?”

“Of Graves?”

“Yeah. Your new boss.”

“I think...” I sit there, forced to put it together, things that came to me here and there. “I think we’re learning about the college and how it works and all. And we’re learning about Martha Yeats. But we don’t know anything about who killed her.”

Tom nods. Maybe I said the right thing after all. “Anything else?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I don’t know what we’re looking for. Or how. What Graves’ game is. He gives out information on a need-to-know basis and I don’t need to know nothing, it seems like. And...” This next wouldn’t have come back to me if Tom hadn’t pressed me, made me think. “We were out at Hiram Wright’s place...”

“‘The smartest man for miles around,’” he says, remembering my father’s phrase.

“Yeah. And Wright made a fuss about meeting me. About Dad. And then Wright looks at Graves and says ‘I know you too.’ What was that about? Is Graves that famous?”

“Well,” Tom says. “You learned a lot.” He got quiet, the way he did when he was about to teach me something. It’s like he enjoyed the fact that what came next, what I learned from him, was going to change me. “Graves is the son of Rudolph Graves. That name doesn’t mean a thing these days. Rudolph was a professor here, back in the fifties. Philosophy or some such. He was kind of outspoken. A red, they said...a communist. They ran him out of here. You should ask Ave Hayes about it. He was around back then...”

“Was he guilty?”

“Shit. No revolutions around this part of Ohio. If I wanted to make a revolution, I wouldn’t come here to start one and I sure as hell wouldn’t start at this particular college. But if I wanted a good living talking about it, that’s different. He ran his mouth like they all do.”

“Where’d he go?”

“Rudolph the Red. He stayed around, believe it or not. Took an apartment in town, on the square. Drank. Became a local character. Died a few years later. Don’t suppose he knew his son too well. His ex-wife was raising him someplace else, I remember. Bottom line is, his son is back. What do you think of that?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“You think before you’re sure. That’s what thinking does. It makes you sure. So think about this. He’s coming back to the college where his father got destroyed. I think it’s his dream come true. He doesn’t look it, but the man is loving every minute. You wonder that he’s taking his time? No particular target? No special rush?”

“I hope you’re wrong,” I say, but know it doesn’t matter, what I hope. He gets up and we walk outside and before long Tom’s joking about the time he took Warren Niles to the annual raccoon dinner in Danville, back in the early years, before Warren gave up on being a regular guy. When I leave, the men are playing horseshoes. I look back and maybe it’s just the mood I’m in, but it feels like they’re all part of a photograph that’s twenty years old, Tom and his dead son Tony, me and my parents, those horseshoe-playing men, those women who warn you to leave room for pie, slipping away from me. That’s what I’m thinking, something like that, and wondering what Tom was wondering, what it would take for the likes of us to be remembered. I get home and the phone’s ringing inside my trailer. “Buy an answering machine,” Sherwood Graves says. “Happy Labor Day,” I respond. Then he tells me to come pick him up right away. He wants us to find a professor named Mark May.