“He looked within his very soul,
Its hidden chamber saw,
Inscribed with records dark and deep
Of many a broken law.”
—ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH
MOM?” I WALKED INTO A house made cheerful by Amanda’s presence, a fire flickering in the stove, Willie Nelson singing “Silent Night,” the cinnamon smell of snickerdoodles baking in the oven, and a small, multicolored mountain of brightly wrapped Christmas gifts heaped on the coffee table. “Mom, I’m a little nervous,” my daughter said. “Have you been getting weird calls lately? The phone rang three times in the last hour, but when I answered, the caller always hung up.”
“Probably a student.” I dropped my briefcase on the floor, shrugged out of my coat and hung it on the rack by the door. “Grades are due Friday, and the barbarians have been pounding on the gates to find out how they did.”
She laughed. “Sometimes you talk about students as if they were some kind of hostile aliens.”
“Toward the end of the semester it begins to feel that way. Oh, Professor, I know you assigned the paper six weeks ago, but I re-e-e-ally need an extension. Oh, Professor, I know the exam was only this morning, but have you got it graded yet? Oh, Professor—”
She punched me lightly on the arm. “Don’t forget I’m one of those alien creatures.”
I grabbed her in an affectionate headlock. “Yeah, but you, you’re perfect. You’re my kid.”
The next morning I graded papers and exams in my office, and left the door ajar on the off-chance that someone might want to chat with me about Emmeline Foster’s journal. The deadline for submitting grades wasn’t until the next day at five P.M., but I was determined to get my grades in to the Registrar today. Christmas was just a week away and I hadn’t even begun to think about it yet, let alone done any actual, down-and-dirty shopping. The weather was ominous, murky and cold, but not cold enough to snow. Most students had already departed for the holidays, and Dickinson Hall was hushed. My phone rang only once, and that was a hang-up. I sipped cold coffee from the Bread and Roses environmentally-sensitive recycled-paper cup and checked my bluebook piles: The stack I’d already graded was beginning to gain on the yet-to-be-looked-at stack. Good. Then I heard a rustling noise at my partially open door, and something came slithering across the floor. I peered at the object from my vantage point at the desk: another paper. Must be from one of the students to whom I’d given an extension. But why hadn’t the kid simply knocked on the door and come in with the paper? Odd. But, then, everyone was a little bit squirrelly this time of semester.
Squirrelly: That was a word I’d picked up from Lieutenant Piotrowski. Hanging around with cops tends to add some kick to the academic’s vocabulary.
I let the paper lie where it had slid to a halt—I’d retrieve the essay when I went out for lunch.
At 12:09, when I rose from my desk and stretched, only five papers remained to be graded—two hours’ work. Then: final grade compilation. Then: dropping the grade sheets off at the Registrar. Then … freedom. I felt pretty smug: For once, I’d get my grades in early. I slipped into my jacket and scooped up the paper from the floor: Make that six papers remaining to be graded. Tugging at the industrial-strength zipper on my puffy new storm jacket, I glanced down at the paper in my hand. Across the top of the typed first page was scrawled in black ink: Michael Vitale. Final Exam, Freshman Humanities. PLEASE ACCEPT IT, PROFESSOR PELLETIER. PLEASE!!!
I had to clutch at the essay to keep from dropping it: Mike Vitale! Mike had been outside my office door? If I’d gotten up right away to retrieve the paper, I might have been able to waylay him in the hall! I yanked the door open, as if I expected Mike to be lurking there still. No one was in the hall but Monica and Amber. The secretary was just emerging from the main office with a file folder in her hand, and the adjunct professor stood at the photocopier with a stack of books, their colorful spines neatly aligned. I shut the door, unzipped my jacket, lowered myself into the green chair, and stared at the paper. Mike Vitale’s final exam! I grabbed the Enfield College directory from the shelf behind my desk; if Mike was back on campus, maybe I could catch him in his room. The phone rang fifteen times in the empty dorm before I hung up and went back to my chair.
Turning back to the essay’s scrawled-over first page, I read: My father died this month.
Oh, Mike, I thought. The poor kid! He’d lost his father. That’s why he’d been so upset when he visited my office that last time. But why hadn’t he told me? And why hadn’t he informed the Dean of Students’ Office? I shook my head, and lowered my gaze back to the paper.
His name was Elliot Corbin …
“Whaaa!” It came out as a squeak. My head shot up. Elliot Corbin was Mike’s father? Oh, my God! I read on at warp speed.
… and I have no memory of him. I grew up with my mother and stepfather and four younger siblings. It was okay, I guess. It’s just that people always did a double take; I don’t look like anyone else in my family.
My mother was Elliot Corbin’s student at City College. He got her pregnant when she was eighteen—my age! I was born five months after their wedding. I haven’t seen him since I was two years old—except from a distance since I’ve been on campus, but he’s the reason I’m here at Enfield. As the child of a faculty member, I’m eligible for a tuition waiver. My father traded that waiver for all the child support the cheapskate never sent my mother anyhow. He was a jerk. I hated him. I shouldn’t even be thinking about him. But since his horrible death—I can’t help it. I never knew my father, but suddenly I’m obsessed with him. I can’t study; I can’t write; I can’t even take exams. (This last phrase was underlined twice, once on the computer, once in black ink.) I think I’m going out of my mind. Elliot Corbin’s face is in my head from the minute I wake up till the minute my brain finally clicks off at night. I can’t forget it: His face is my face. Sometimes I’m afraid I’m becoming Elliot Corbin! The personal preface ended there with an emphatic series of exclamation points. Following was an essay on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Reaching over to the shelf again, I pulled out the freshman “face book,” found Mike’s picture, and studied his image on the page. Elliot’s cutting-edge, intellectualmale beard had obscured the resemblance, but with Mike’s crisp curls pulled back in a ponytail, his sharply angled jawline, and close-set ears, he looked so much like Elliot, I was amazed I hadn’t pinpointed the likeness immediately. Then I flashed on a memory of my student standing by my classroom desk with an essay draft in his hand, imploring me to go over it then and there because he didn’t want to come to Dickinson Hall. So that’s why Mike wouldn’t consult with me in my office: He was terrified of bumping into his estranged father!
Earlene wasn’t in, and wouldn’t be back until morning, the perky work-study student who answered her phone informed me. Did I wish to speak to Dean Johnson’s Administrative Assistant? No, I didn’t. I wished to speak to Dean Johnson. Now. I called Earlene at home and left a message on the machine. Then I dialed Mike’s dorm number again. No answer. I sat there with my hand on the phone, letting my distracted mind float over the myriad possibilities. What if?… His face is my face.… What if?… Sometimes I’m afraid I’m becoming Elliot Corbin.… Here I began to think like a literary critic: What was it I always taught my students about Gothic literary conventions when we studied Poe’s tales? The Doppelganger—that was it! The eerie mythic creature who assumed the shape and likeness of his doomed victim. His face is my face.… What if?… And the convention of the decrepit Gothic mansion, fated to destroy and be destroyed. What if?… I stared at the silent phone for hours and hours—maybe two minutes in all. Then I picked up the college directory and riffled slowly through its pages till I found Elliot Corbin’s home phone number. Pelletier, you have flipped for sure, I admonished myself. Calling a dead man on the telephone! The phone rang and rang in Elliot’s abandoned house. And then, on the twentieth ring, Mike Vitale answered.
Mike peered around the back door of his father’s house as I entered—almost as if he feared he was under some kind of surveillance. Then he pushed the door shut, and it closed with a resounding slam. He winced. “It does that all the time,” he said.
In the days since I’d last seen him, Mike had gotten perceptibly thinner, and—obviously attempting to emulate Elliot’s trendy beard—he’d grown a scraggly goatee that barely extended beyond the cleft that defined his chin. A haphazard tower of beer cans on the kitchen counter probably accounted for his bloodshot eyes and pale, shaky appearance.
I stamped my feet on the green-and-yellow daisy-print mat inside the kitchen door. My boots had accumulated a thick coating of muddy slush during the trek from the ramshackle wooden garage behind the house where Mike had insisted I hide my car. “Mike, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Did you bring sandwiches?” If he wasn’t such a well-brought-up kid, Mike would have snatched the plastic deli bag from my hand. When I’d informed him on the phone that I was coming right over, his only words were, “Bring something to eat—I’m starving.”
I handed my student the bulging bag, and he ripped open the paper wrapping on the ham-and-cheese closest to the top. I remembered from Amanda just how much teenagers eat: I’d picked up four sandwiches and a six-pack of Coke.
Wholly involved in scarfing down the sandwich, Mike didn’t immediately answer my question. I sat with him at the kitchen table and unwrapped my turkey on rye. The caraway-studded bread was so dry it curled at the edges, but the smoked turkey was edible. I tore the meat into long strips, picked up a strip with my fingers, and looked around me. Except for the accumulation of beer cans, nothing had changed in Elliot Corbin’s kitchen since I’d been there with the police two weeks earlier. The appliances were still avocado green, the light fixture was still brass and frosted glass, the cluttered, cat-shaped bulletin board still guarded the phone, the light from the windows over the sink was as storm-bleak as ever.
Maybe a skilled psychotherapist could have told me what Mike was doing here, soused, in the home of the man who had fathered, then abandoned, him, but Mike himself didn’t seem to have a clue.
As he finished the first sandwich, he gestured around at the outdated room. “This is my legacy.”
“Really?” I responded, giving the pile of beer cans a deliberate glare. “You plan on being wasted for the rest of your life?”
He winced. “I stopped drinking two days ago. I wanted to write the paper for you.”
“Mike,” I said. “Oh, Mi-i-i-ke.” Thank God I’d never had an alcohol problem with Amanda.
“Yeah, I know—it was dumb. We had a keg in the dorm, and it felt so good to stop thinking about … him … for a few hours, so I thought I’d just come here and keep on going. Then I really got polluted.” His expression grew reminiscent. “God, do I hate barfing.”
Thanks for sharing, I thought. Aloud, I tsk-tsked like a Victorian maiden-aunt.
“It’s over, all right? It’s over! I don’t know how I could have been so stupid! I spent one entire night hugging the porcelain babe.”
It took half a minute, but I got the metaphor. “Yuck!”
“Yeah. But—when I said that about my legacy, I didn’t mean the booze. I meant the house.”
He shrugged. “I think so. My mother didn’t talk much about him … my father … Corbin, the jerk, I mean. But when she heard he was dead, she said I was the only one left. He didn’t have other children—or any living relatives. So—I figure it’s all mine, right? That’s why I came here.” He paused, then announced, mock-melodramatically, “to claim my heritage.” The pickle slice dangling from his thumb and forefinger vanished in one crunchy chomp. He retrieved the second ham-and-cheese and popped the top on another can of soda.
I glanced around, taking in the dingy harvest-gold fiberglass curtains and the worn linoleum floor. Some heritage. “How’d you get in?”
“The window locks suck.”
“Mike, don’t you realize how worried people have been about you?”
“Really?” He regarded me blankly. “Why?”
“Why? What do you mean, why?” The flimsy deli napkin disintegrated under the touch of my moist fingertips. Could this otherwise intelligent young man be as oblivious to the consequences of his disappearance as he seemed? “Nobody knew where you were!”
“I’m an adult now. It’s nobody’s business where I go.” His response was as close to sullen as this nice boy could get.
I bit back my impulsive first comment: Adult? You kidding? “Mike …,” I said—I really couldn’t seem to shake off the maiden-aunt role—“adults let their friends and family know where they are. That’s basic adult consideration.”
“I tried to call you a few times—about the exam—but someone else kept answering your phone.”
“My daughter,” I replied. “And you scared the heck out of her when you kept hanging up.”
“Sorry.” His pout made him look like a preschooler.
“And your mother is worried sick,” I added.
“My mother?” The resentment at being scolded vanished from his eyes. “Someone called my mother?”
“Of course. You’ve been gone over a week. What do you think? The college is going to let you disappear without any inquiry?”
“Ohmigod!” he exclaimed. “I gotta call home. My poor mom’ll be out of her tree!”
While Mike was upstairs on the phone, I wandered around the house. The blue recycling bin in the butler’s pantry between the kitchen and dining room contained more beer cans, plus a goodly number of red-and-white cans of Campbell’s soup. No wonder the poor kid was famished: He’d been living on watered-down soup.
Aside from the kitchen, the house was exactly as Elliot—and the police—had left it, dingy, dusty, and outdated, and no one had turned off the electricity, water, or phone. Who would take care of that, I wondered, if there was no surviving family? A lawyer, perhaps? Maybe the housekeeper? Was Monica still responsible for this house? I remembered Piotrowski saying Monica didn’t work for Elliot anymore. But did someone else clean the house once in a while? Elliot wasn’t the type to do it himself. Did someone else have a key?
“I think this house is haunted.”
I jumped a good three inches as Mike came up behind me in the shadow-filled entry hall. “Haunted? Oh, come on, Mike!” But I immediately switched on the light; the few bulbs still working in the ornate chandelier overhead chased the ghostly murk to the corners of the room.
Mike pulled on his purple-and-white Enfield football jacket and hefted his backpack. He must have decided to come back to campus with me; he’d gathered up his things in a hurry. From a half-zipped backpack pocket dangled a pair of jockey shorts imprinted with fat pink pigs. “I mean it,” he said. “I’ve never believed in ghosts, but I’ve been staying here, what?—a week now? ten days?—and there’ve been … noises. It freaked me out.” He paused, then snickered self-consciously. “Of course, I was pretty wasted at the time.”
“I bet.” But given the circumstances—that a man had been murdered here—I couldn’t completely discount Mike’s story. “You really heard noises?”
“Yeah. Creakings. Rustlings. In the night. It gave me the cold creepies. And a couple of times I came downstairs in the morning and found … and found things that had … had been … interfered with during the night!”
“Interfered with? How?” Now my skin crawled with the cold creepies.
“Come here,” he commanded, and led me into Elliot’s study. “You see … that … thing … on the desk?” He pointed, grimacing. “You see it? With the dark stain on the edges?”
Reluctantly I looked. The blood-soaked blotter that Sergeant Schultz had removed from Elliot’s desk at my request had been returned, but the topmost layer of thick green paper had been ripped off, and the remaining sheets were pulled awry. “Yeah? I see it.”
“Well, that stain? I figured it was … his … you know … his blood. And when I heard the noise in the night, I was … scared to come down. In the morning this is how it was. I figured he’d come back—”
“Come back?”
“Yeah, you know, to haunt his house.” Mike looked drawn, his young face tight and pale. “You know … his restless spirit, searching for revenge. Maybe,” he whispered, “maybe trying to get his blood back.”
“Jeez, Mike,” I blurted. “Didn’t you say you’d quit the booze?”
“Yeah, but I read a lot of vampire novels.” He grinned at me, that sudden, irrepressible and utterly contagious young-kid grin.
I laughed. “Let’s get out of here,” I said, and led him back through the entry hall into the dining room. Suddenly, from the kitchen came the resounding slam of the back door.
Mike opened his eyes even wider than I did. The whites were bloodshot clear to the rims.
“Mike,” I murmured, “you shut that door behind me, didn’t you?”
“Shut it and locked it,” he replied, sotto voce. We stared at each other, then turned simultaneously toward the kitchen door, as heavy footsteps traversed the floor.
“Who’s there?” I called, shakily, motioning to Mike to get behind the heavy butler’s-pantry door. He glared at me, his young masculinity offended. “Do it,” I hissed. I was still the teacher, and he scampered behind the door.
Monica Cassale burst into the room, a Louisville Slugger baseball bat clutched menacingly in one hand. She stopped dead when she saw me.
“Karen Pelletier!” she exclaimed. “What the fuck’re you doing here?”