Chapter One
A hard nudge in the ribs jolted me awake.
“Molly,” Emma hissed. “C’mon, stand up.”
I had dozed off in one of the comfortable new chairs in Administrative Complex Conference Room 5B, my head resting on the shoulder of my best friend and fellow sufferer, Emma Leilani Kano’opomaika’i Nakamura.
“What?” I rubbed my eyes.
“Are you sleeping?”
“Well I was. Why do we have to stand up?”
“We’re doing the trust fall thing now. Eh, don’t let Jake see you making that face or he’s gonna give us another lecture about our attitude.”
“What? I’m not making a face. This is my face.”
Jake Ahu, Director of Faculty Development, glared around the room, and tightened his grip on his clipboard.
“This is a trust fall, people. Come on, everyone out of your seats. We are cultivating a culture of trust here on our campus.”
Jake’s unenviable task was to wrangle us through a full workday of “team building”: making orange, gold, green, and blue hats out of construction paper, building towers with marshmallows and dry spaghetti, and falling backwards off of chairs. Jake was maybe in his late thirties, but looked prematurely haggard. His black hair was shot through with gray, and his bright aloha shirt fit a little too loosely around the neck.
“Fine,” he said. “If no one’s going to come forward, we’ll do it by department.”
At least he wasn’t insufferably chipper. I’ll give him that.
Jake tapped his clipboard with his pen.
“Anthropology? Anthropology isn’t here. Art, also not here. Biology, Emma Nakamura, there you are. You’re going first. Come on. Everyone. Up to the front of the room. Molly Barda, College of Commerce, you’re next after Emma. Kyle Stockhausen, Digital Humanities, you’re after Molly.”
I’m Molly. Molly Barda, Ph.D. I earned my doctorate at one of the top ten literature and creative writing programs in the country, and this is not where I expected to end up. By “this,” I mean an eight-hour team-building retreat in the Administrative Complex at remote Mahina State University, in Mahina, Hawaii where, according to our radio spots, “Your Future Begins Tomorrow.” In the entire history of business and enterprise, has there been any practice less humane, less conducive to employee solidarity, and more likely to tip the garden-variety introvert into full-blown misanthropy, than the team-building retreat?
“I’m in the management department,” I said to Jake. “That starts with an M.”
“Well I’m still after you,” said the chair of the philosophy department.
“You’re both in front of me,” said a man behind me. I turned to see Scott Nixon, Kyle Stockhausen’s main competitor for the title of Hipster Humanities Heartthrob. Unlike the earnest Stockhausen, Nixon affected an air of bemused detachment (which the undergraduates in his Jane Austen elective reportedly found irresistible). Stockhausen was blond, and wore whimsical t-shirts to display his indifference to status; Nixon had dark hair, and bolstered his bad-boy persona by wearing a black leather jacket, which must have been torture in Mahina’s sultry climate. Both men sported black-framed glasses and a fashionable sprinkling of stubble.
“Scott,” I said, “in what alphabet does English come after management and philosophy?”
“I teach writing.”
“Hey,” someone said. “What about ag? Where’s the person from ag?”
“He’s coming in later,” Jake said. “They have to testify at the GMO hearings.”
I eyed the exit door, wondering whether I could slip out unseen and get to grading the stack of papers waiting for me back in my office. Getting my students’ assignments returned seemed like a better use of my time than standing on chairs.
All of the conference rooms in the new Administrative Complex had back exit doors. They allowed escape in case a mad gunman burst into the room. The classrooms didn’t have this safeguard. In fact, the new administration building boasted several features our classrooms lacked, like recessed lighting, polished marble floors, and functional air conditioning.
“I’ll go first.”
Kyle Stockhausen, assistant professor of digital humanities, strode up to the Trust Fall Chair. The Trust Fall Chair wasn’t one of the red, gold, or green conference room chairs (the new school colors, as decided by student referendum). Those chairs all had wheels, and anyway, I’m sure the administration didn’t want us stepping all over the seat cushions with our dirty shoes. No, the Trust Fall Chair was plain, straight-backed, and made of wood. It had probably been ordered online and shipped from the mainland, just for this event.
“Thank you for volunteering, Professor Stockhausen,” Jake nodded at him.
“Please. Call me Kaila.”
I heard Emma snort. Emma, who grew up just a few miles down the road from Mahina State University, had definite opinions about “white people who move here from Nebraska and give themselves Hawaiian names.”
“Mahalo nui loa, brother,” said Kyle/Kaila Stockhausen as Jake helped him up onto the wooden seat. He slowly stood, his spiky blonde hair almost brushing the ceiling.
“Come on, everyone move in closer.” Jake motioned us forward. “You’re all going to have to come together to catch him when he falls. Kyle, sorry, Kaila, turn around and put your arms out.”
He did, displaying the black courier lettering on the back of his pale yellow t-shirt: Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. –Albert Einstein
“Einstein never said that,” Emma muttered.
“Now the rest of you, move in. Closer, you have to be right underneath so you can catch him.”
“I have to apologize for my colleagues,” Stockhausen said over his shoulder. “They don’t yet realize what a privilege this is. I appreciate the value of these high-touch team-building activities. In fact, I use many of these exercises in my own classes.”
This was the limit for Emma.
“Give it a rest, Stockholm-syndrome,” she shouted. “You teach all your classes online.”
Before anyone could react to Emma’s outburst, the exit door at the far end of the room flew open. Everyone turned toward the welcome distraction. A man wearing shorts and a t-shirt stood silhouetted in the doorway.
“Am I late?” the newcomer asked.
“Here’s our ag person,” Jake said. “Come in, come in. You’re just in time for the—”
Jake’s sentence was cut short by the scrape of wood on marble, and an ugly thud. We all pushed forward to get a look.
Kyle Stockhausen lay face up on the polished marble floor, blood spreading behind his head like a crimson halo.
Chapter Two
Kyle “Kaila” Stockhausen’s reputation improved markedly after his demise. In death, his virtues were magnified, while his lapses faded from memory. His self-righteous lecturing of fellow faculty, who didn’t “get it” or were “doing it wrong,” his refusal to impose even minimal standards in his classes, even the rumors of Stockhausen’s fraternizing with students were viewed with revised tolerance. After all, Quentin Virtanen, chair of the philosophy department, was happily married to the pretty young Ife, and hadn’t she been his student years ago? Because Stockhausen had been considerate enough to expire during the summer term, the administration thought kindly of him, too, as they had plenty of time to hire a replacement lecturer to take over his fall classes.
Stockhausen’s death had appeared to be a straightforward accident, so neither an autopsy nor a police investigation was deemed necessary. This, however, didn’t keep Emma from being found guilty in the court of campus opinion. Everyone knew Emma had tried to pick a fight with him during his last moments on earth. Some went so far as to claim Emma’s harsh words had physically knocked Stockhausen off the chair.
Chapter Three
A week after the incident, Emma and I were down at the Maritime Club, observing our customary Monday happy hour. Our reasoning was everyone is already in a good mood most Friday afternoons. Monday is when happy hour is really needed. The Maritime Club isn’t terribly fancy, but nothing in Mahina is fancy. The weather-beaten little clubhouse is perpetually in need of a new paint job. The bill of fare probably hasn’t been updated since 1952, good news for fans of split pea soup and baked Alaska. The Maritime Club’s outstanding feature is its magnificent oceanfront location. At low tide, you can walk a few steps down the grassy bank to the tide pools and watch damselfish and little snowflake eel darting among the spiny urchins and lobe coral.
Emma and I chose a table on the outdoor lanai. Waves sparkled in the afternoon sun, breaking on the black lava rock and misting us with salt spray. I ordered a house cabernet, Emma got a Mehana Volcano Red Ale, and we settled in to wait for our drinks and ponder the curved blue horizon.
“This Stockhausen thing is out of control,” Emma said. “I’m thinking I might have to start looking for another job.”
“I thought you didn’t care what people think,” I said. “Is it that bad?”
“It’s bad.” Emma nodded. “I can deal with a few people not talking to me, not making eye contact, whatever. But this morning, I went to the financial aid office to drop off a recommendation letter, and the student worker, this little girl, just bust out crying, screaming how could I do it, didn’t I know what he meant to her. Crazy.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Nothing. Financial aid is across from the counseling office, so before I could tell her to snap out of it and get a grip, all these people came running and calmed her down. This isn’t the only time, Molly, but it’s just the worst one so far. This keeps up I’m never gonna get tenure.”
“You think this is going to torpedo your tenure? I hadn’t even thought of that. Emma, how awful.”
“Yeah, I don’t wanna talk about it. Speaking of hellish things, how’s your summer class going? Any more trouble from your students?”
“It’s okay.” I shrugged. “Mostly. You know Virtanen’s wife is enrolled. Ife Virtanen.”
“Oh, little Ife? What’s she doing taking Biz Com?”
“She’s in the pre-nursing program,” I said. “I just graded the latest batch of essays, and wow.”
“What’s wow?” Emma asked.
“Well, I asked them to do a one-pager telling me what they’ve learned in this class that they think they’ll be able to use later. And Ife’s paper—Okay, I’m sharing this with you as a fellow educator, right?”
“I see no FERPA violation here,” Emma assured me.
“Good. So Ife—now bear in mind we work with her husband, right?—wrote about how important it was for her to go back to school and finish getting her degree, and what a mistake it had been to put her plans on hold to marry her philosophy professor.”
“Ew, awkward.” Emma wrinkled her nose.
“And it gets worse. For some reason, she feels like she has to explain why she married Virtanen in the first place.”
“No way,” Emma said. “And then?”
“Oh good. Our drinks.”
I waited as the server, a cheerful young woman in black trousers and a white blouse, set out the cabernet, the ale, and a bowl of peanuts.
“Anyway,” I said. “It was along the lines of, the professor seems so unattainable, all these hundreds of other students are hanging on his every word, but I know I’m the one he’s paying attention to, and the feeling is irresistible.”
“Gross.” Emma picked up her beer and took a healthy gulp.
“I think it’s sad. Poor little thing is so starved for validation. I thought one of the advantages of teaching business would be not getting these bleeding-all-over-the-page essays like the ones you get in comp classes. Anyway, she went on to describe how things go south once you get what you think you wanted and you’ve been in the relationship for a while. Apparently Quentin Virtanen, renowned professor of philosophy, is no longer unattainable, because after all, she attained him. And now, he’s being a little too helpful to his young female students. She made him her whole world, and now she realizes that she’s just a small part of his world.”
“Yeah, that’s depressing. Hey, wait a minute. Remember the rumor about Kyle Stockhausen fooling around with a professor’s wife?”
“I do remember. It was before he was posthumously promoted from irritant to saint. You think he was involved with Ife Virtanen?”
“Quentin was at the team building thing with us when it happened, remember. Ife’s unhappy in her marriage. She turns to Kyle Stockhausen for comfort. Her husband finds out. Maybe it was a crime of passion.”
“Emma, Quentin Virtanen is a tiny little man, no offense.”
“What do you mean ‘no offense’?”
I kept forgetting how sensitive Emma was about her height.
“I’m just saying Stockhausen was much taller and fitter than Quentin Virtanen. If anyone could push Stockhausen off a chair, it would have to be someone like—”
“Scott Nixon,” Emma exclaimed. “Maybe Stockhausen was fooling around with Leather Jacket’s wife. What’s her name?”
“Nicole. Nicole Nixon. It’s a possibility.”
I took a sip of wine and tried to imagine how either Scott Nixon or Quentin Virtanen—or both—might have shoved Kyle Stockhausen off the Trust Fall Chair without being noticed.
“Actually, Molly.” Emma frowned. “I don’t think anyone pushed Kyle off the chair.”
“Why not?”
“Cause Stockhausen woulda made some noise. Like when we’re paddling and we huli the boat? Everyone’s yelling and swearing and stuff. Stockhausen wouldn’t have just gone down quietly if someone pushed him.”
“You’re right.” I considered what she’d said. “It’s as if he just lost consciousness, or—”
“Oh, I know,” Emma interrupted. “Someone hit ’em with a poison dart. From a blowgun.”
“What?”
“Well they never did an autopsy, yeah? So it’s possible.”
“I guess anything’s possible.”
Emma set down her beer and leaned forward.
“We should call the police, Molly.”
“Or maybe we should check with someone on campus first. Before we start getting law enforcement involved.”
“Fine,” Emma said. “What about Jake Ahu? He was at the session. I’ll call him. I need another beer.” She pulled out her phone as she signaled for another round.
Judging from Emma’s side of the conversation, our Director of Faculty Development was not receptive to the idea of digging into the Kyle Stockhausen situation.
Emma mashed the hang-up button.
“Typical administrator CYA.”
“I’m surprised Jake was still at the office at this hour. I wouldn’t want his job.”
“I wouldn’t mind his salary. Eh, forget our gutless administrators. I’m calling the actual police.”
“Emma, don’t call 911. They hate it when people call 911 and it’s not an emergency.”
“Molly, what kind of a schmendrick do you think I am? I’m just gonna call the tip line.”
“Did you say schmendrick?”
“I went to grad school in New York.” Emma dialed. “Maybe you forgot.”
“How could I possibly forget you went to Cornell when you take every opportunity to remind—”
“Shh.” Emma waved at me to be quiet. She stated her case to the tip line operator as well as anyone could have.
“We don’t believe Kyle Stockhausen died in an accident. Yes, we suspect foul play might have been involved. And, yes, we think an autopsy should be performed. Can you check for any substances, which might make someone lose balance or consciousness?”
Emma hung up.
“So what’s going to happen?” I asked.
“She heard me out, but she didn’t sound too impressed. I don’t think they’re gonna do anything.”
“Well, now what?”
“I guess I gotta look for another job,” Emma said.
“Emma, you grew up here. This is the only place you’ve ever wanted to work. And you’re on the tenure track. Don’t give up.”
“I dunno, Molly.” Emma grabbed a handful of peanuts from the bowl and stuffed them into her mouth. “What else can I do?”
We sat and stared at the darkening ocean. A chill breeze whipped through my blouse.
“We need someone who can help us figure this out.” I hugged myself and rubbed my upper arms for warmth.
“We don’t have a department of bizarre death studies,” Emma said.
“We have Pat Flanagan. Let’s see if he wants to get lunch tomorrow.”
Chapter Four
Patrick Flanagan was waiting for us in front of the cafeteria, his shaved head gleaming in the sunlight. He wore his usual ensemble: a flannel shirt, beat-up jeans, and big black work boots. Pat used to be a crime reporter at The County Courier before the layoffs. Now he teaches composition part-time, mostly for the library privileges, as part-time teaching pays nearly nothing. He also runs Mahina’s most popular news outlet, Island Confidential.
“Fabulous shoes.” He indicated my aqua Fluevog slingbacks with the five parallel buckle straps and the sassy Cuban heel.
“You didn’t teach today?” Emma scowled at my shoes.
“I did,” I answered a little defensively.
“The shoes are cool,” Emma said. “But I dunno. Maybe you could get away with them in black.”
“Why can’t Molly teach in those shoes?” Pat examined my feet. “I think they look great.”
“They don’t look serious,” Emma said.
“Emma’s right.” I sighed. “I’m probably undermining my authority in the classroom wearing these. It’s safer to stick with dark colors when you teach. Dark colors signal dominance.”
“Yeah, Pat,” Emma said, “that’s how come your leather guys don’t wear baby blue chaps.”
“What do you mean Pat’s leather guys?” I asked. “Emma, what are you talking about?”
“Come on, let’s go.” Emma led the way into the cafeteria, which was up and running during the summer, but just barely. I had trouble finding anything I wanted to eat. The premade sandwiches were stuffed with something pale and gooey. It might have been either tuna salad or chicken salad. There was a coffee urn, but I didn’t see any cream or milk, only flat white packets labeled, “For Your Coffee.” I wondered whether the unidentifiable sandwich filling had been scooped from white five-gallon pails labeled, “For Your Sandwich.”
“Where’d you get the thing about wearing dark colors?” Pat asked as we made our way through the cafeteria checkout line.
“We’re going to be covering it in Biz Com class,” I said. “All the different factors that affect person-perception. Something else kind of interesting is height. There’s a lot of research on that, actually. People don’t see a short person as being in charge. It’s why we’ve never elected a short president.”
Emma turned around and glared at me.
“Now you gonna say, ‘Oh, no offense Emma’?”
“Me? No, why would I say that?”
“So what? I gotta wear high heels now?”
“No, don’t wear high heels,” I said. “High heels can read as sexy.”
“Ew.” Emma wrinkled her nose.
“Hey Molly, what about platform shoes? Like what Boris Karloff wore in Frankenstein? I’m already tall, so according to your theory, if I put on platform shoes, my students would see me as some kind of demigod.”
“You literally would look like Frankenstein,” Emma said.
“Frankenstein’s monster,” I corrected her. “Frankenstein was the name of the scientist.”
I grabbed a package of macadamia nuts from the impulse-buy rack next to the cashier’s station. We ate quickly and then went across the main plaza to the library.
Emma stepped on the rubber mat first, triggering the glass door to wheeze open. Pat and I followed. I didn’t see Emma stop in front of me, so I bumped into her, and then Pat bumped into me and we all said sorry to each other and waited for our eyes to adjust.
“Not the library, too,” Emma said.
“Man, I can’t see a thing,” Pat said.
Our administration had been saving money by removing light tubes from the fixtures on campus. First the faculty offices, then the classrooms, and finally the library, which now looked like the set of a low-budget horror movie. The administration buildings, with their recessed lighting, were of course exempt from this effort. At least it was easy to spot the terminals.
“So what’s this exciting conspiracy you two are going to uncover?” Pat asked as we picked our way around the carrels toward the row of glowing computer monitors. Two of the terminals, we discovered, were out of order. Only one connected to the library databases.
Emma told Pat the whole story.
Even in the semidarkness, I could see Pat slump with disappointment.
“You’re talking about the Stockhausen thing? It’s a freak accident, maybe worth a mention in wacky news or something. I mean, you were both there. Did you see anyone push him?”
“Well no,” I said, “but—”
“Was he behaving strangely?”
“He was behaving like a self-righteous idiot,” Emma said.
“There’s no story there,” Pat said. We were already set up at the terminal, though, so we had Pat pull up the pharmaceutical database. It wasn’t very instructive. It turns out just about any substance, including placebos, can cause dizziness and loss of balance.
“What am I gonna do?” Emma wailed.
“It’s bad, Pat,” I said. “People think Emma’s responsible. She had a student worker freak out and start crying.”
“No one said anything when we came into the library,” Pat said.
“No one else is in the library, genius,” Emma said. “Look around. They cut the librarians’ hours, remember?”
“You should tell people to stop being so superstitious,” Pat said.
“Yeah, that would probably work really well. With rational people. Who, by definition, aren’t superstitious. So you see my problem.”
“Pat, he must have been impaired in some way. Emma and I were talking it over, and neither of us remembered him making any sound. He just fell, as if he had passed out.”
“So, you know who you should probably talk to?” Pat stood up. “Someone in the nursing program.”
“What about looking into Scott Nixon?” I asked.
“You want me to go up to Nicole Nixon and ask her whether she was having an affair with Kyle Stockhausen, and if so, does she think her husband Scott killed him? Or maybe I should just ask Scott directly, ‘Oh, hey, by the way, did you kill Stockhausen?’ ”
“Eh,” Emma said. “You’re the reporter.”
Chapter Five
We left Pat in the library and started down to the lower end of campus. The nursing program is one of the most popular and prestigious offerings at Mahina State University. But thanks to some long-ago political misstep, it had been banished to a cluster of decaying portables on the swampy end of the university.
Zora Winfield, the nursing program director, was kind enough to give us a few minutes. Her desk was cluttered with framed photographs, stacks of forms, and a row of plants in tiny pots, each one fastened to a popsicle stick with a little bow of yarn. On the wall hung a framed print of “The Florence Nightingale Pledge.” I read it as Zora finished and sent the email she’d been working on when we barged in to her office.
“…devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care. That’s nice. Kind of what we do as teachers, too. Don’t you think?”
“Yeah, whatever.” Emma’s biology 101 is the weed-out class for pre-nursing majors and premeds, so she sees her role as pruning rather than nurturing.
Zora had heard about the Stockhausen incident, and probably that everyone was blaming Emma for it, although she was too tactful to mention it. She listened to us politely but clearly found our line of questioning farfetched.
“You didn’t smell alcohol?” Zora tapped her long, French-manicured nails on her desk.
Emma and I shook our heads.
“And he wasn’t acting out of character?”
“Unfortunately not,” Emma said.
“I suppose there are several possibilities.” She set down the pen and gazed up at the ceiling as if it held the answers. “Prescription drugs, panic attack, idiopathic vertigo. Without a medical examination, though, it’s just speculation. Personally? I think it was just a terrible accident. You’d be surprised at the different ways people manage to die. Up at the hospital last week, we lost a patient en route to the ER. She’d fallen on a wineglass.”
“That’s how Molly’s going out,” Emma said.
“Thank you, Emma.” I glared at her. “Just out of curiosity, Zora, not to do with this particular incident, but in general. Is there some prescription or recreational drug you know of that could make someone lose their balance suddenly?”
“Oh, any number of things. We have a very good pharmaceutical database. Faculty can access it through the main library site. It’s a little hard to find. I can write it down for you.”
She took a lined sticky pad and wrote out the directions for us. We didn’t want to tell her we’d just checked the database and found it completely unhelpful.
“I’ll be right there.” Emma and I turned to see a young woman hovering in the doorway, staring openmouthed at Emma. We took the database information, thanked Zora, and hurried out.
“Now what?” I said. We took a diagonal shortcut back up toward the College of Commerce, across the ragged lawn.
“I dunno.” Emma sighed. “I guess I wait until I get run outta town.”
“Hey, is this an African tulip tree? I never saw it before. I guess I don’t come down to this part of campus much.”
“Ucch, it is an African tulip. Someone needs to cut it down.”
The tree loomed over the squat earth sciences building, its flame-colored petals littering the red metal roof.
“The last time I was at Safari Park in San Diego, they made a huge deal over their African tulip trees. Why would you want to cut it down? It’s beautiful.”
“It’s a freaking weed, that’s why. They need to bring out the chainsaws.”
“You don’t realize how lucky you are here,” I said. “Back home, getting anything to grow was cause for celebration. Here, you turn your back and ravening jungle plants devour your house.”
My attempt to distract Emma wasn’t working.
“Look, Emma,” I said. “People live things down. I mean, look at Rodge Cowper, right? He—”
“Oh, do not talk to me about Rodge Cowper, that self-centered schmuck. He’s dead to me.”
“Okay, I know you don’t care for Rodge, but this is my point. He’s still here after all these years, and he even has his own HR directive named after him.”
“Oh yeah. The Rodge Cowper rule.”
“Exactly. The one that says when a student’s in your office you have to keep your door open.”
“Well number one, Rodge totally brought it on himself. Me, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
We walked in silence for a few moments.
“You said number one,” I said. “What’s number two?”
“Number two, how dare you compare me to Rodge Cowper? It’s not the same thing at all. The Rodge Cowper rule is his own stupid fault.”
“That’s the same thing you said for number one.”
“Shut up,” Emma suggested. “Eh, you gonna be on campus tomorrow?”
“All day. Why don’t you stop by before I have to go teach my class?”
Chapter Six
The next morning Emma came to see me in my office. We usually meet in my office, not hers, since I have a chair for visitors, and Emma does not. I had scrounged my visitor chair from the last remodel of one of the auxiliary lounges of the Student Retention Office. It was old but serviceable, with orange upholstery and a squared-off wooden frame. Mahina State eliminated the furniture budget for faculty, and Emma refuses to buy work furniture with her own money, so anyone who visits her office has to stand and look at that brain in a jar she keeps on top of her file cabinet.
“How are things?” I asked.
Emma plopped down with an “oof” sound.
“I think I saw the janitor crossing himself when I walked by.”
“Is that coffee?” I asked.
She handed me the Styrofoam cup. “Want some?”
I turned the cup around to the side that she hadn’t been drinking from, and took a sip. It tasted horrible.
“What is this? It tastes like chocolate and chicken soup.”
“It’s from the old vending machine in the humanities building,” she said. “The sign says out of order, but it still works.”
My office phone rang. I picked it up.
“Ixnay on Nicole Nixon and Kyle Stockhausen.”
“Pat?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, it’s me, sorry.”
“Okay. Why not Nicole Nixon and Kyle Stockhausen?”
“Nicole has a Ph.D.,” Pat said. “Stockhausen only had an MFA. Stockhausen wouldn’t get involved with someone who has a more advanced degree than he does. He had to be in the teacher role.”
“Wow,” I said. “How did you manage to snoop around without attracting suspicion?”
Emma bounced in her seat, impatient for news.
“I teach a class in the English department,” Pat said. “I’m supposed to be here.”
I rang off and was about to tell Emma what Pat had just told me, when a knock on the door made us both turn.
Ife Virtanen stood in the doorway.
“Oh, hi,” she said. “Do you have a minute?”
The wife of the chair of the philosophy department looked young for her thirty years: pale, round face, rosy cheeks, black curly hair at chin-length. She held a binder in front of her protectively, the way you might imagine a high school girl would.
“I’m gonna get going,” Emma said. “Lunch?”
“Sure.”
Ife came in and hovered next to the visitor chair.
“Why don’t you sit down?” I said.
“Did you grade our assignments yet?” she asked.
“I did.”
I pulled out the stack of papers that I was planning to hand back in class and found hers.
“Your essay was very well-written. And candid.”
She hunched her shoulders, a gesture of shame or shyness. I couldn’t tell which.
“Could we close the door?”
She went to close it without waiting for my approval.
“We’re not really supposed to—well, I guess it’s probably okay. Just for a couple of minutes.”
Ife took a seat, and I skimmed over her paper again.
He’s unattainable. Infallible. Hundreds of students watch, listen, drink in his every word. They are under his spell. But he is under mine. I’m his favorite. They would do anything for him, and he can only see me.
Hundreds of students.
That was odd.
Ife’s husband, Professor Quentin Virtanen, taught a philosophy seminar that struggled to break double digits. I could think of only one person who taught hundreds of students in his massive online course.
I glanced up at Ife. She was watching me read.
But lately, he’s been so very helpful to his students. His young female students. He makes time for them. He meets them in his office. Or at the coffee shop. He makes me feel stupid and petty for asking. This is me, he says. It’s who I am.
“This isn’t about Quentin,” I blurted out.
Ife stared at me. “I heard you went to see Zora.”
I was behind my desk. Ife was between me and the closed office door. My heart pounded. Ife had killed Kyle Stockhausen. I knew it. I didn’t know how she had done it, but it was pretty clear why.
“Ife, you don’t have to worry. I won’t tell Quentin. I won’t tell anyone.”
Her cherubic face blazed with fury, and she lunged at me. I dove under my desk. I heard bumping overhead as she climbed over the desk, and then she was grabbing at me. I didn’t know what she planned to do, but she clearly wasn’t devoting herself to my welfare as Florence Nightingale advised. I braced myself and kicked outward. It seemed to be working until I felt a burning in my ankle and then everything went gray…
Chapter Seven
I woke up to a metallic tang in my sinuses and on the roof of my mouth. My heart was pounding, and I was soaked with sweat.
“Sour,” I said, batting at my face.
“It’s oxygen.” I heard Emma’s voice as if from a distance. It dawned on me, very gradually, that I was lying out in the hallway, on a blanket, staring straight up at the half-gutted fluorescent ceiling fixtures. Young men wearing dark blue shirts and latex gloves hovered around me.
“She attacked me,” I said. “She—ow. My leg.”
“Nah, nah, nah, don’t move,” said one of the young men. “Eh, lucky you. Your friend was looking out for you.”
“Emma?”
“Rodge Cowper rule,” Emma said. “I was walking away, and I heard your door close. I knew something was off. I came back and listened. I heard you scream, and I ran and got the secretary to open the door.”
“Did you call the police?” I asked.
“Already come and gone,” Emma said. “When you feel better, they said come by the station so they can take a statement. But I think they got what they needed. She was holding a syringe. Talk about getting caught red handed.”
“Wow, what happened to ‘I will not knowingly administer any harmful drug?’ ”
“What?”
“It’s in ‘The Florence Nightingale Pledge.’ ”
“Yeah, she’s not getting into the nursing program,” Emma said.
Turns out, Ife hadn’t meant to kill Kyle “Kaila” Stockhausen. To use an unscientific term, she’d slipped him a love potion. The side effects happened to include drowsiness and loss of balance—not particularly deadly, unless you happened to be standing on a chair.
For me, Ife had chosen something less fanciful: a common, untraceable heart stimulant. Very similar to something a notorious “angel of death” nurse had used to speed her charges off this mortal coil. If Emma hadn’t called for help right away—well, I’d rather not think about what might have happened.
As soon as I was up and about, I went down to the police station, made my statement, and indicated I was willing to press charges, but as the wheels of the legal system were turning, Quentin Virtanen cashed out his retirement. He and young Ife disappeared, reportedly to a country without an extradition treaty with the United States.
Last Monday, Emma and I were at the Maritime Club. We invited Pat Flanagan along this time. Emma ordered a pale ale, I got the cabernet, and Pat opted for coffee. We waited quietly for our drinks and watched the waves break on the black lava rock next to the lanai.
Pat finally broke the silence. “So what did you learn from all this?”
Emma and I looked at each other.
“Learn?” I asked.
“You must’ve learned something,” Pat said. “You go through a horrible experience like this, there should be a lesson.”
“Keep your door open when you have a student in your office,” I said.
“You mean the Rodge Cowper rule?” Pat asked.
“Don’t trust anyone,” Emma said.
“Really?” Pat said. “That’s what you got out of this? Don’t trust anyone?”
“I know,” I said. “Don’t stand on chairs.”
“Yeah, I agree,” Emma said. “Don’t stand on chairs. It’s dangerous, and you could fall off. Next time someone tries to get me to do one of those trust falls, I’m gonna tell ’em no way.”
“Me too.” I took a satisfied sip of cabernet.
“I don’t think you two have to worry,” Pat said. “The university lawyers are never gonna allow a workshop like that on campus again.”
“Well there’s a silver lining,” I said.
“Shoots.” Emma high-fived me. “Where’s the food menu? I wanna get something to eat.”
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