Sticks and Stones Page 3

  “Afraid not, but I wouldn’t mind.” He smiled a little more broadly, and I realized that Officer Steve was a very good-looking fellow. Well, they didn’t call them Edmonton’s finest for nothing. I guess I was staring, because he coughed politely, and I gave a start.

  “Uh, come in,” I spluttered, wondering if I should take him upstairs to my office or take him through to the kitchen. He decided for me.

  “Could we speak in your office? You do have an office here, don’t you?” He seemed to be just now taking in the fact that this had once been a rather splendid private house.

  “Sure, it’s upstairs. Uh, would you like a cup of coffee?”

  He thought that would be nice and took it black, which is something I have never been able to do, and I let him carry his own cup upstairs. It was hard enough walking upstairs in front of him. I hate having my back to anyone, especially at close quarters. Not that I’m particularly ashamed of my body, it’s just that bits of it seem to have a will of their own.

  We got upstairs. I cleared off the student chair for him, throwing my jacket into the closet behind my desk, and tried to look professional.

  “What can I do for you?” I was racking my brains to figure out what a policeman would want with me. Not that I’m ­perfect, but I am incredibly law-abiding. I don’t even jaywalk. I don’t own a car, and I wouldn’t dream of littering. My foibles, as far as I knew, were all legal, unless using too much hot water in the shower had recently been put on the books.

  Officer Steve took an appreciative swig of coffee and put on his official face. A very serious official face. I had a premonition that I wouldn’t like what I was about to hear.

  “You are the professor of English 101, Section C5?”

  “Sessional lecturer.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m not a professor, I’m a sessional lecturer. I have an eight-month contract to teach freshman English. But, yes, I teach Section C5.”

  Officer Steve noted down my distinction, although he ­didn’t seem to make much of it.

  “You have a student in Section C5 by the name of Gwen Devlin?”

  The penny dropped. This had something to do with the printing of Gwen's letter in the paper.

  “Yes, Gwen’s a student of mine. Is that why you’re here? Is she pressing charges against the Party Animals, or the newspaper?”

  “I gather you saw the letter to her reprinted in the Journal, Ms Craig.” Officer Steve’s voice seemed to drop an octave, but it might just have been the dark pressure behind my ears, which began to mount as I listened to his next words. “No, Ms Devlin is not pressing charges. I’m here because last night Ms Devlin was murdered. If you’ve read that letter, you will also know how she was killed.”

  7

  IF I COULD RELIVE MY LIFE, I THINK I WOULD choose not to throw up fifteen minutes after meeting the handsomest man I’d ever known, but you can’t have everything. At least I’d managed to get to the bathroom across the hall, and it was, for once, in working order. Police officers must be used to this sort of thing, because Officer Steve seemed unperturbed as he handed me wet paper towels, and was quite ­gentle leading me back to my office.

  I don’t think it was the knowledge that Gwen had been killed, so much as the vivid picture those horrific words in the letter had painted. It had hurt me to read them and to think of Gwen having read them; to know that she had been made to endure them was too much to assimilate.

  The closest I’d ever come before to reading anything even remotely pornographic had been Myra Breckinridge, and that had only been mildly revolting. The letter I’d read in the paper had been vile; the words had practically steamed off the page with their hatred. But who could have hated Gwen so much? Had those fellows writing that note even known her? They must have; the note had made reference to her kids and her job as hall monitor. Maybe she had busted up one of their parties, put someone’s nose out of joint. But, sheesh, it was only November; how could anyone work up that strong a hatred for anyone in two months?

  It seemed that Steve—he told me to call him that—was checking into Gwen’s life on campus, questioning her professors and the women living on her floor in residence. All together, it seemed that my class was the smallest in class size and the most concentrated in in-class and written assignments. Steve, I think, was hoping I could paint a clearer picture of Gwen Devlin than her other profs might. I doubted it, but I was willing to try. I told him the meager facts I knew. He pressed me for my impressions of her both as a student and a person. He cut in on me while I was describing her earrings.

  “I gather you liked her,” he said.

  “She was easy to like. She had standards and integrity. She had something to offer the class, and she absorbed what I said in class. That’s enough to make any lecturer love someone. But, yes, I think Gwen was a lovely person. Aside from leaving her children, which I must admit I have some problem with …”

  “Did she say anything to you about her ex-husband?”

  “No, I don’t think she even mentioned his name to me. Mind you, it’s not as if we had any real gossip sessions. We just talked about literature and essay construction.” I searched my brain for anything else I could think of, willing this gorgeous man to stay longer, then immediately felt awful when the full circumstances dawned again.

  Steve was getting up to go. Maybe it was my imagination, but he too seemed to want to linger a bit.

  “If you think of anything else, call me. Here’s my card. If I’m not there, a message will reach me.”

  “Are you in charge of Gwen’s murder?” I asked, out of curiosity. I’d always wondered how police investigations really worked. They couldn’t all be like Ed McBain novels.

  “There are several of us at work on it now, but it will likely fall to me if it isn’t sorted out immediately.”

  “Because you took the call?” I hazarded.

  Steve smiled at my attempt at Hill Street Blues vernacular.

  “No, I am usually assigned to crimes with a university ­connection. I’m thought to have an insider’s understanding of the campus, in that I have a Master’s in Sociology. Thank you for your time, Randy. I’ll be in touch.”

  Steve let himself out of the building, leaving me to who had murdered my star pupil. Mind you, he had cleared up one mystery for me.

  I now knew what you could do with a sociology degree.

  8

  D ENISE WAS AS SWACKED OUT BY THE NEWS of Gwen’s death as I had been, but she obviously had a stronger stomach. She didn’t seem as fascinated as I was about the police investigation, but then she hadn’t laid eyes on Officer Steve. Thank goodness. All I needed was for another man to go dancing attendance on Denise only to need patching up after a bout of her feminist put-downs. I think the only person who resented Denise’s good looks more than me was Denise herself. Not that she chose to dress dowdily to mask her attributes; she just seemed leery of male attention and forced them to respond intellectually before she would take them seriously.

  I, on the other hand, always knew men were talking to me rather than my cleavage. For one thing, I had no cleavage. This had depressed me in high school, but it made life easier on the whole. Aside from one Yeats scholar who had declared he would like to “skinny dip in my chestnut hair,” of which I have a lot, most of the time I felt undistracted communication was achieved with the opposite sex. Not that I am as plain as a hedge or anything. I’m probably quite attractive in an ordinary sort of way. I'm tall, slim enough to get good deals on clothes, with clear skin and hazel eyes. It’s just that I’m the sort of woman that people’s mothers love, and to me that reads as unexciting and unthreatening.

  My fleeting moment of jealousy alarmed me, but I put it down to having been solo for so long. Writing a thesis is an all-consuming passion, and I had needed no other at the time, but it had been a couple of years since my master’s defense, and I was starting to feel a bit itchy, if that's not too indecorous a way of putting it. I probably would have fan
cied Steve even if his eyes hadn’t been quite so green, his lashes so unfairly curly, and his muscles so pronounced under his shirt.

  I put my libido on hold to concentrate on what Denise was saying.

  “So it takes an actual murder to get anyone to do anything about the letters, does it? That’s bloody typical.”

  “But, Denise, do you think the letter had anything to do with it, really?”

  “Didn’t you say that’s what the policeman said? She’d been killed according to the tenets of the letter. That’s horrible to think about. I mean, did you read that letter?”

  “That’s what I mean. Think about it, Denise. Who didn’t read that letter?”

  Denise stared at me. “What are you saying? That the letter-writer made good on his promise, or that someone used the letter in the newspaper as a recipe?”

  “Which is worse?”

  Denise banged down her reusable thermal coffee cup. “You know, if the university had done something about those letters, this might never have happened. If those women had received some justice right away, the press wouldn't have got so eager, and …”

  “And Gwen might not have died,” I finished.

  “Yes,” said Denise.

  “Unless …”

  “Unless what?” demanded Denise.

  “Unless someone was planning to kill her anyway, and the letter business made a good cover for their actions.”

  Denise looked thoughtful. “Still, without those Party Animal jerks, and the complacent university administration, and the muck-raking press, she needn’t have died that way.”

  “How many people do you want to jail, Denise?”

  “All of them! Let’s start civilization over, and get it right this time.” She smiled with the weary grace of a professional pugilist. “But I’d settle for the bastard who did the deed.”

  So would I. The bigger ethical questions would have to wait. As usual.

  9

  E VERY ONCE IN A WHILE I AM LED TO A GREATER than usual belief in Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and synchronicity. It most often happens when I’m looking in the Yellow Pages for something. I’ll spy the name of a business like “Retreads,” one I’d never heard of, while searching for Chinese take-out menus. The next day I’ll spot the neon sign “Retreads” from the bus, then someone will recommend I take my skates there to get them sharpened for cheap. So maybe my putting Twelfth Night on my syllabus this year was some form of synchronicity.

  Or maybe the term I was searching for was serendipity, if you could call anything linked to murder and poison pen letters serendipitous. Whatever it was, my Tuesday afternoon class was one of those you dream about as a lecturer, where everyone has an opinion, and the material seems to be pertinent to world events and touches people where they live.

  I’m not so callous that I would have wished a student dead to get this sort of discussion going. In fact, it would have been a thousand times better if Gwen had been there to participate. Mind you, in an eerie way she was. Although the lecture ­theater was just three rows of tables rising one behind the other to the back wall, with no assigned desk space, the chair where Gwen had sat in the middle of the front row was empty. The rear line was just as cramped as ever. None of them had moved down to avail themselves of the newly open area. I wondered how long it would take the class to adjust to her absence.

  Last Thursday I hadn’t been able to get anyone talking about the trick played on Malvolio by Maria and Sir Toby. Today I couldn’t seem to stop them. One side, populated mainly by men, but with a couple of camp followers among the women, maintained that practical jokes are just that, and that people who don’t find them humorous are lacking in the funny bone department.

  The other faction, surprisingly led by a girl who until now had said little in class, maintained that the letter sent to Malvolio was malicious in intent.

  Sharon had the floor. “When you consider he was nearly committed to a mental institution, and you think of the condition of Bedlam and other institutions of Shakespeare’s time, the outcome of that letter could have been fatal.”

  There was an impenetrable silence following her last word. She looked the way one does when uttering an inanity like “Couldn’t you just die?” to the recently bereaved.

  “As it was,” she bravely filled the void, “it still ended unhappily for him.”

  “But he deserved it,” interjected Dennis, one of the first group.

  “How do you determine that?” I said, mainly to preserve the fiction that I was still in charge of the discussion.

  “He was asking for it, being all straitlaced and sober, cramping Sir Toby’s style,” Dennis continued.

  “But that was his job.” This was from Carmen, a solid B ­student, if mid-terms were anything to go by.

  “Yeah, but Shakespeare is trying to get everyone to have fun and be silly,” said Dawn. I was impressed with her interpretation. She had struck me till now as a line reader rather than an absorber. Her alliance with the guys wasn’t a shock, however. I’ll admit that I was judging book covers, but I’d have laid odds her designer dust jackets were aimed at snaring her M.R.S.

  “But is that really what he’s promoting? After all, the only ones who are having any fun are the drunks.” Myron was the other older student in this class. I had pegged him at about twenty-five. His written work struck me as thoughtful, and I had been wishing he’d speak out more. Some of the fellows of the pro-party party looked scandalized that Myron would take the “woman’s” position. An impassioned argument about the relative merits of Illyria followed.

  I was about to break in when Myron spoke again.

  “Not that I think it exonerates Maria and Sir Toby, but Malvolio was not obliged to act on the message.”

  Now we were getting somewhere, I thought. I gave Myron my “Yes, go on” look, honed from years of practise.

  “After all, the letter wasn’t addressed to Malvolio ­personally. He just leapt to the conclusion that it was for him from Olivia,” Myron continued, with a musing tone in his voice, as if he was just thinking through his thoughts as he heard them in the air before him.

  “Good point,” I said. “In other words, we as audience realize the culpability of the jokers, but Malvolio brings about his downfall by placing himself in a position of ridicule through his own hubris.”

  That last bit must have sounded like an exam question, because all heads bowed in unison to scribble in their binders. The bell rang, and I found myself wondering whether Gwen had somehow brought her fate upon her. Had she been a faceless victim, or was she an actual target?

  I had to find out more about Gwen’s situation. I didn’t think I was being ghoulish; the bottom line was that if Gwen had been the actual target, then that was that. If, however, she had merely been convenient, then maybe the danger was just beginning for all of us.

  I managed to shout out a reminder that papers were due in the next class. As the lecture hall emptied, I sighed. As much as I had enjoyed hearing their brains working, the impassioned discussion had put us a class behind on Twelfth Night, which meant I wouldn’t get started on poetry until next week. While I try to build some leeway into my syllabus for this sort of occasion, it would mean hurrying through Marvell. That was a shame, since “To His Coy Mistress” always seemed to energize them for the more modern stuff. I looked at my watch as I always do when I feel the pressure of time. If the papers were coming in Thursday, I’d have to get cracking on their journals. I’d just give them a cursory read-through to see how their thesis statement creation was progressing. I vowed to stay late and mark journals, and finish the rest throughout the day on Wednesday. Then I would have the weekend for the papers. Whoopee. Maybe I’d schedule a massage for Monday as a reward. Some reward. After eighty-odd journals and eighty odder papers, I would require a massage just to walk erect.

  10

  IT WAS WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON BEFORE I CAME TO Gwen’s journal in the box (which didn’t seem to get any emptier no matter how
long I drudged). I had tried to goose myself along by treating myself to a bowl of bibimbap at the Korean restaurant in HUB mall, but I’d been accosted by a student asking questions about thesis statements, which had me depressed. I wondered how many of them had even started their essays yet. After all, they had all of fourteen hours before it was time to hand it in, why rush greatness? I decided that being in HUB, which was part apartment residence and part food court, was a hazardous place to be. The acronym might be short for Housing Unit Building but it felt like the hub of the entire university.

  Soon I was back in my office, with some Java Jive coffee steaming out of the wee hole in the top of my covered mug, trying to slog my way through the final thirty journals. I must have been on autopilot, because I had the spiral-bound notebook open before I realized what I was about to read.

  You can’t study English literature for six years while harboring an aversion for dead people’s writing, but I wasn’t sure I was up to reading something so freshly posthumous. I felt morbid as I pulled the notebook toward me, tossing my red pen on my desk. There would, after all, be no point in ­correcting grammar or making comments in the margins of this journal.

  Gwen’s writing was like her, easy to read and distinctive without being flowery. It wasn’t as neat as that of some of my students—notably my Chinese students whose penmanship seemed like art—but it was head and shoulders over the rounded, childish writing or flattened, right-slanting scrawl of most Canadian-born eighteen-year-olds. Gwen’s writing was full of controlled little spikes upward and tight loops under the line. She rarely crossed anything out; she double-spaced throughout; and she delineated paragraph breaks with both an inch and a half indent and one extra line space. The presentation was determined. As I began to read, I realized the thoughts were also.