And it’s going to be me.
“Rafael and I would love to have you over for dinner next weekend,” Drew says. “He brought a truly obscene amount of wine back from our trip to Paris, and if you don’t help us, we’ll be forced to drink it all ourselves.”
I smile. “Can’t have that.”
Drew’s husband, Rafael, is as vivacious and outgoing as Drew is serious and scholarly. They seem like an odd match, but somehow it works; they’ve been married for more than twenty years now.
“If you want,” Drew says, “you could even bring—”
“Oh God, did you hear?” Our colleague Sandra Kepler slides into the seat next to Drew, her long silver earrings jangling like wind chimes. I lay my palm over my notebook page. Force of habit—I haven’t written anything yet besides today’s date.
Drew takes a sip of his coffee, shooting me a look. Sandra can be equally histrionic about topics ranging from devastating departmental funding cuts to copier paper jams. But I have a good guess about what might be upsetting her this morning.
“Hear what?” Drew says.
Sandra drops her voice even lower. “Tyler Elkin.”
I furrow my brow, like I’m trying to place the name. It would seem more suspicious if I recognized it right away—I only had Tyler for a single one-hundred-student lecture class, and I notoriously don’t follow Gorman sports.
“The football player?” Drew says. “What about him?”
“He was found this morning…”
Sandra leans toward us, so close I can smell the burnt faculty-lounge coffee on her breath.
“Dead,” she says. “At his fraternity house.”
That was fast—even in a town this size, where gossip travels at the speed of light, I thought it might take a few more hours for word to circulate.
I widen my eyes, holding my mouth in a little o of shock. “How did he—”
“I don’t know. The police are still there, I saw the cars on my way to campus.”
One of the downsides to committing murders outside the school grounds: the police are called in right away, while the evidence is still fresh, instead of campus security bumbling around the crime scene first. But I already weighed those risks when making my plans. Tyler would have been too difficult to get alone on campus; he always traveled with a pack of other football players and hangers-on.
The police don’t worry me much anyway. A few of the Gorman Township officers aren’t entirely inept, but they still have only rudimentary forensic training and laughably outdated laboratory equipment. And if a death is written off as a suicide, a random fall, a freak accident, they only look into it as much as they need to file their bureaucratic reports. Some days, I almost miss the challenge of evading the Chicago Police Department.
“Everyone’s talking about this Instagram post he made, though.” Sandra holds out her phone to show Drew and me the sunrise picture at the top of Tyler’s feed. It has a couple thousand comments already.
For the benefit of Sandra and Drew, and anyone else who might be paying attention, I press my mouth closed again and arrange my face in a studied mix of concern and consternation.
“How awful,” I say.
“I know.” Sandra shakes her head. “He was so young.”
“Even younger than that boy last year,” Drew says. “The anthropology major?”
Sandra presses her hand to her chest. “Such a shame.”
Twenty is young. But if Tyler was old enough to gang-rape a girl and try to get away with it, he was old enough to pay the price. And as for the boy last year, he got off easy, considering what he did to his poor girlfriend. He beat her bloody for months on end, but after I pushed him into the river from the county’s most popular suicide-jumping bridge, it took him mere minutes to drown.
I can feel hardness bleeding into my eyes again, so I look down at the table, hoping it appears that I’m overcome with emotion. Then our boss sweeps into the room in a cloud of English Leather cologne, and it’s time for a different sort of dissembling.
Dr. Kinnear is more than ten minutes late, even though he called the meeting. He always acts like he’s terribly busy, running from one important engagement to the next with hardly a chance to catch his breath. He probably just took too long to jerk off in the shower.
Kinnear takes up his position at the head of the conference table but doesn’t sit down yet, bracing his hands against the high back of the chair. He gives us all a weary smile, with a hint of sadness crinkling his eyes behind his tortoiseshell glasses. He must have practiced in the mirror.
“I’m sure you’ve all heard the tragic news by now,” he says.
Everyone nods somberly, myself included. The department’s youngest adjunct is actually crying, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with one of the brown paper towels from the bathroom. Kinnear takes a moment to give her a comforting squeeze on the shoulder. Rumor has it they slept together after the last faculty holiday party. At least she’s more than half his age, if only by a few years.
The young man seated next to her takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and offers it to her. Dr. Stright—he’s Kinnear’s favorite, because he’s basically a younger version of Kinnear. They even look alike: sandy hair, blue eyes, pretentious eyeglasses, and simpering everyone-please-like-me smiles. Now that Kinnear is well into his forties, Stright has the dubious distinction of being the sole good-looking young male professor in the department. He has all his students call him by his first name, like he’s one of them. A pathetic ploy, but the undergrads—especially the girls—seem to eat it up with a spoon.
“I don’t know any more than you do now, I’m afraid,” Kinnear continues, “but I’m sure more details will be made public as soon as the police feel comfortable sharing them.”
“So we don’t know yet?” Sandra asks. “How he was—”
“From all indications,” Kinnear says. “Mr. Elkin took his own life.”
Good. If they’re at all competent, the police should soon determine that the strychnine he drank came from the box of rat poison sitting right on top of the shelves that served as my hiding place this morning.
I didn’t even have to plant the poison. I found it during one of my preparatory stakeouts of the garage, probably left over from some rodent infestation years prior. I took what I needed to doctor Tyler’s drink and put the box right back where I found it. Perfect for my purposes: it supports the story that poor Tyler, wracked with guilt, decided to put himself out of his misery with the nearest thing at hand.
“Now,” Kinnear continues. “As devastated as I know we all are, we still have business to attend to. Classes will be commencing as scheduled on Tuesday.”
There’s a low murmur of assent around the table, and everyone less prepared than I am—which is, as usual, the vast majority of my colleagues—readies paper and laptops for the meeting.
Kinnear takes his seat, looking directly at me with a smile. “Scarlett?”
Not Dr. Clark. Never that. It was somewhat less infuriating when we were both just faculty. But then he glad-handed his way to the interim department chair position after Dr. McElhaney retired last year, and now he thinks he can treat me like his fucking secretary.