An Act of Murder Read online

  I made my way up the wide wooden staircase and turned the corner to room 205. All twenty-three students were in attendance, staring at me in complete silence until I opened my bag and smiled. Then their eyes immediately fell to their desks as I retrieved my copies. I passed out the neatly stapled syllabi and began going over class expectations line by line.

  “And that concludes the syllabus for Composition 101. You can see our Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule is attached, so do not lose it. Keeping up with the schedule is paramount to your success in this course.” I flipped the final page of the syllabus.

  “What if we do lose it?” said a well-dressed boy in the back row. His outfit probably cost more than my mortgage payment.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Any other questions?” I waited several moments. “Let’s continue then.”

  After class, a student came up to me as I was wiping off the chalkboard.

  “Professor Prather?”

  “Yes?” I said, turning around. The boy had a sand-colored crew cut, a deep tan, and small blue eyes that crinkled as he spoke. The long, muscular arms that stuck out of his checked shirt, however, belied his young face. He looked as though he worked outdoors.

  “It says on the syllabus that we have to recite a poem for the literary analysis unit. Does that mean in front of the class?”

  I assumed he was talking about page three of the schedule, but his own copy was rolled into a makeshift spyglass, which caused me no small amount of irritation. Still, I remained encouraging. “Yes, but it can be any poem you wish. It doesn’t have to be, say, Shakespeare. And it’s not due for a couple of weeks. We’ll have read lots of poems by then,” I assured him.

  He acted unperturbed, shoving the syllabus into the mesh pocket of his backpack, but I got the feeling he was carefully choosing his words.

  “Do all 101 classes make you do that?” he asked. “Recite poetry?”

  “Mine do,” I said, smiling pleasantly. “You could try another class, I suppose, if you’re really concerned about it. But you can’t graduate without taking a semester of composition.”

  “It’s just that I hate poetry,” he admitted hesitantly.

  “Is that all?” I said. Two thirds of the freshmen I knew hated poetry. It was nothing to drop a class over. “I’ll make you a deal. You’ll find one poem that you like in this unit, or I’ll dig until I find you one you do.”

  His shoulders relaxed a bit, and a small grin touched the corners of his lips. “I’ve never read a poem I liked yet.”

  “Trust me,” I said. “I know the right places to look. What are you into? Sports? Music? Girls?”

  He was intrigued. I could tell because the grin spread to the rest of his face. But I could also tell he wasn’t used to interacting this way with his teachers. He was newly graduated from high school and accustomed to following orders.

  “Or perhaps dirt bikes? Dirt roads? Landscape. Ooh … maybe Robert Frost.”

  Now he smiled. I would take it.

  “I’ll recite the poem. You don’t have to go to any trouble.”

  I could see that he didn’t want to make trouble; he wanted to fit in even if that meant reciting poetry. “It’s no trouble at all. It’s a promise—one I intend to keep.”

  He slung his backpack over his shoulder and turned to leave. Back at the chalkboard, I erased my name, “Emmeline Prather.”

  “I saw you, you know.”

  “Hmm?” I said, turning around.

  He was studying me from the doorway, his head cocked to one side. The grin was gone, and the tentativeness was back.

  “Oh, this morning, you mean?” I asked vaguely. My mind was already on my next class. “I know. I’m an absolute klutz.”

  He shook his head, but his grin returned. My self-depreciation seemed to put him at ease. “Forget it. See you Wednesday, Professor.”

  Forget it. Those were the same words the student in the parking lot had used last evening. Could this be the boy from the parking lot, the one who’d kept me tossing and turning all night? Was that where he had seen me? Did he wonder if I had seen him too?

  “Wait … what’s your name again?” I sputtered.

  “Austin Oliver,” he called over his shoulder.

  “See you Wednesday, Austin Oliver,” I said to an empty doorway.

  I finished erasing the board then gathered my books and extra syllabi. The room was still now, so it was easy to exaggerate the beauty of it: the long rectangular windows, the hazy sunshine streaming over several wooden desks, the dust particles settling upon the ancient podium. Although Stanton Hall was the oldest building on campus, it had been remodeled several years ago with the convenience of air conditioning, a luxury that was afforded fewer than half of the buildings on campus. Indeed, all my other classes were in buildings like Harriman Hall, which barely provided heating for the long months of the winter, let alone central cooling for the short months of summer.

  There was one more reason I enjoyed the building so much, I thought, as I walked down the open staircase to the second floor: André Duman. There he was, placed among the German and Spanish and Lakota teachers, who were much more in demand and better funded. The window to the Foreign Languages Department was small and beveled, and I nearly had to stand flush with the door to see in. There in the corner, his small desk directly behind the secretary’s, sat André, typing furiously at his laptop while stopping frequently to think and gesticulate with his hands. Once in a while, a dark lock escaped from his mop of hair and jerked to and fro to the beat of his fingertips. Mesmerized, I did not realize that the program assistant, a girl who lived near me, had returned from her errand and was attempting to get my attention. Our eyes met, and she waved.

  I grasped the door handle and walked in.

  “Good morning,” I said. “I was just—”

  “Hi, Em!”

  Her voice was cheery and her face round and bright. “How are you, Kristi? It shouldn’t be that we see each other only at school.”

  “I know. Crazy.” She shrugged her shoulders. “We’re like, what? Two doors down. Hey guess what? Danny and I are getting married!”

  She stretched out her left hand.

  “It’s beautiful. Congratulations,” I said, inspecting the diamond. “When is the wedding?”

  “This spring. Next spring! Oh, you know what I mean. March!” She laughed and turned pink in the face, her shiny dark hair swishing about her shoulders.

  “Oh how wonderful. Will you have it in Copper Bluff?”

  “Yep, at St. Agnes. You’ll come?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “I’ll mark my calendar.”

  “Tell me about the rest of your calendar, Em. Is March filling up already?” André said from his desk. His fingers kept pounding away at the keyboard, and his eyes never left the screen.

  “God no. I’ve got nothing except the occasional committee meeting and academic conference,” I replied.

  “And those can be easily skipped, no?” he asked.

  “I must admit, I’m not known for keeping every appointment, especially the small inconsequential ones the university would bog us down with if we would allow them …” I hesitated.

  He stopped typing momentarily and looked at me with his deep brown eyes, his shaggy brows lifted slightly. “Your annual review, was it not consequential?”

  “I didn’t miss that … I was late. My cat got sick. Remember?”

  Kristi nodded. “Yep, I do. You thought Mrs. Gunderson on the corner poisoned your cat because your cat bit her dog.”

  “Ah,” André said.

  “Mrs. Gunderson is a hostile woman and very territorial. It may sound improbable, but I know. I know.” I suddenly felt hot and agitated. The whole conversation brought back memories I would have rather forgotten.

  Now André leaned back in his chair. “Let us not think of that unpleasantness. Let us think of March … in Paris.” He closed his laptop with a click. “Over the summer, I applied for a grant to take our French st
udents to Paris over spring break. I, of course, will need one more French teacher, and that teacher will be you.”

  Paris. André. André and I in Paris. It hardly seemed possible. “What do you mean, ‘our French students’? What students?”

  “The sixteen students I have right here on my roster.” He held up a printout of his schedule. “And who knows? More might add this week,” he said.

  “Sixteen, well. Sixteen, that is wonderful.” I began to get excited. “How can you be sure they will want to go abroad?”

  “Especially after all the violence over there,” Kristi added, settling into her chair. “Parents might be too scared to let their kids go.”

  “It will be a concern, certainly, but now more than ever we must stand by our countrymen. We must not let terrorists dictate the future of the young minds. Don’t you agree, Emmeline?”

  I nodded. “Completely. If we can convince their parents, I will be the first one on the plane.”

  Visiting France was a lifelong dream of mine, students or no students. My great-great-grandma had been born in the small village of Saint Emilion, France; that was all I knew about her for certain. My mom claimed she was a poet; my dad insisted she was a potato farmer. Her history—albeit sketchy—spurred my love of France at a very young age. I imagined her life had been very different from mine, and at the age of ten, that was all it took to make it attractive.

  “When will you find out about the grant?” I asked.

  “Soon,” he said. “Two weeks, perhaps. Spring does not seem so very far away, no?”

  Spring, I silently repeated. Outside, the leaves were beginning to curl. Spring had never sounded so far away.

  Chapter Three

  I enjoyed September because students were at their most diligent. They attended lectures, they took notes, they called during office hours. The same could not be said for spring. The magic of fall had something to do with being gone and coming back. It affected the professors as well, including myself. Perhaps the students’ eagerness propelled my own, or perhaps the humid days of July had become monotonous without the wonder of new faces. Whatever it was, I felt consumed by the esprit of the moment: labeling folders, sharpening pencils, reworking lesson plans—all on Friday afternoon.

  I was posting my office hours, complete with a new motivational quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, on my door when I saw Lenny locking up for the day. His office was directly across from the office of Barb, the secretary.

  “Done for the day?” I called to Lenny.

  “Yeah,” he said, taking long strides toward my door, where he stopped to read my sign.

  “What’s this?” he asked. “Jeez. You don’t actually tell them when you’re going to be here, do you? Oh and Emerson. I should have known. I keep telling you you’re a transcendentalist at heart. You won’t listen. Still stuck on the French. What do they have for literature? The Hunchback of Notre Dame?”

  “The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Really, Lenny—”

  “Oh cool it. You know I’m just kidding you.”

  I knew he was, yet he still unnerved me every time with his uncanny ability.

  “This is smaller than I remember,” he said, walking into my office. “What did you do to get put in the closet anyway? You never told me.”

  I squeezed by him and sat down at my computer, closing my open program. “You’re just not used to spending any time in your office.”

  He picked up the soft-cover book lying on my chair and sat down. “Wuthering Heights?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I like something eerie in the fall.”

  He tossed it carelessly on the table. “What you need, then, is a little Washington Irving. ‘Sleepy Hollow.’ It’s a good fall read.”

  “How is it, Lenny, that you always presume to know what I need when, in all accounts, it is exactly the opposite?”

  When he didn’t answer, I pushed away from my desk. “Of course, a headless horseman always makes for a curious read and certainly falls into the eerie category.”

  He stopped looking at my bookshelves and smiled. “So what are we doing?”

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m finishing Monday’s lesson plan.”

  He laughed, a deep sound that simply bounded off my four small walls. “I’m saving that for Sunday night. Come out with Claudia and me. She’s reciting ‘The Wolf’ at Café Joe. Then some of us might meet up afterwards.”

  “Again, ‘The Wolf’? Why not something else?” The thinly veiled poem, which I had heard no less than five times, was about Gene—Claudia’s husband—and his wandering eye. The man was so dense that he had managed to sit through each reading and remark on the poem’s beauty and rhythm. He never once caught Claudia’s teeth gritting every time she said the word prey. The idea of hearing it again was as unpalatable as Barb and her Dixie cups.

  Lenny threw up his hands. “Who knows? Maybe it’s her favorite.”

  “I suppose,” I said. “But I just drank an espresso—”

  “You know, I think attendance is required? We actually got an email on it.”

  “Encouraged is not the same as required,” I said, recalling the email. “But I think you’re right. It’s part of the back-to-school poetry slam going on tonight and tomorrow. I forgot all about it.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Does that mean you’re in?”

  “Of course. I’ll meet you there in an hour.”

  Because the evening was mild and my inclination varied, I decided to walk to Café Joe. I stopped at my house only long enough to change into a pair of jeans and low-heeled boots. My purple short-sleeved shirt I kept on, tossing a jacket into my bag in case I stayed longer than I intended. It certainly was a possibility whenever Lenny was around.

  “I won’t be long,” I said to my cat, Dickinson, who lay sleeping in the large bow window in my dining room. She didn’t bother to open her eyes, but she did stretch her calico legs, knocking down a few journals I had stacked in the corner.

  “Don’t worry about those. I’ll get them later,” I told the cat, shutting the front door behind me.

  I could hear the strains of a saxophone coming from the musical shrine on campus that housed several instruments considered relics. On Friday evenings, the shrine offered campus musicians opportunities to play near the fountain in front of the building; many of the compositions were classical, but a few were alternative or jazz.

  A high-pitched bark interrupted the mellow little rift, and I didn’t need to look to know where it came from. It was Mrs. Gunderson’s Darling, a small white mutt she walked up and down the street three times a day.

  “Hello, Emmeline,” Mrs. Gunderson said as Darling stopped to pee next to my pine tree.

  I walked down my steps. “Hello.”

  “Nice out tonight,” she said.

  “Yes, it is.” I kept my answers short, a lesson I’d learned the hard way when I’d found myself in the middle of an argument between her and Mrs. Walker, another neighbor.

  “Are you going out this evening?” She raised her wrinkled blue eyelids as I walked toward her. Her mass of gray hair was meticulously curled and her pink lipstick neatly applied. She looked grandmotherly and kind, but after the incident with Dickinson, I knew she was capable of much darker deeds than making cookies.

  “Yes, for a while. Goodnight, Mrs. Gunderson.”

  “Have fun, dear,” she called behind me.

  All the streets around campus were named for famous universities that little resembled our own. I lived on Oxford Street, exactly four blocks long. But those four blocks were populated with a multitude of personalities: there were the old ladies, conversant in all things holy; the students, willing to share anything from their views on politics to their beer bongs; and the teachers, who were happy to discuss all topics remotely related to their fields of expertise.

  The husband and wife psychologists next to me were the most fascinating people on the block, at least to me. They were true artists, and never did I leave their presence
without letting something slip that I wished I hadn’t. They added these little tokens to my file, I felt, and each month it grew and grew until one day I was certain they would call a meeting to reveal exactly how much I had bungled my life.

  I walked faster now, putting some distance between me and Mrs. Gunderson while still enjoying the assortment our street had to offer. All of the houses were old, but otherwise dissimilar. The students’ houses were distinctively shabbier, their porches crooked with wood rot and dotted with threadbare sofas. Laughter and music and smoke tumbled from the houses, and it was no surprise to be awoken at two or three o’clock in the morning by a car horn or radio. Still, the noise was never angry; it was always playful and kind and easy to dismiss. Thus, it never became a problem, even for the elderly, who themselves kept odd schedules.

  I reached the intersection of Main Street and Oxford, which didn’t require a stoplight, and followed Main Street downtown. Copper Bluff was a pretty little town, built upon an orange-colored ridge for which it was named. Originally, the town had been located next to the reddish-colored river below the bluff, but after it flooded, the residents decided to pick up and rebuild it atop the bluff. The story of the town impressed upon me the meaning of pioneer spirit, for it embodied all that I knew about the place and the people. They persevered without complaint or question. It was never a matter of if something could be done but how.

  Several of the old buildings had been preserved, several not. The downtown was a combination of the old, the renovated, and the happenstance. Café Joe was in a prime corner location, with large windows on both sides of the façade. Little bistro tables with padded chairs dotted the front of the coffee house while a few larger booths took up the space near the cash register. Besides hosting poetry readings, Café Joe also sold pottery and paintings, coffee beans and tea leaves, and chapbooks and CDs produced by local artists. It was considered a general meeting place for anything going on outside the campus that didn’t include beer. What I liked about Café Joe was that it didn’t have the pungent aroma of the chain-variety coffee shops; instead, it smelled of old books, damp rugs, and strong coffee.