“It’s not. That.” Perry was trying to think of a way to say what it was, without himself knowing.
She was so beautiful. He knew what any roomful of guys hearing this story would have called him.
But Nicole had been beautiful, too.
And it had been awful, being with Nicole.
Whereas with Mary—who was not, by any standard, beautiful like these girls—he had wanted her so badly for so long that he would have died for it. He’d woken up some nights groaning. Some days in the hallway at school, he would take circuitous routes to classes and the cafeteria in order to avoid her, because he couldn’t stand it, seeing her. Seeing her in whatever pretty blouse or silky skirt she was wearing would make him ache all day.
“Well, then, what is it?” Karess asked. “I’m not your type or something? You’re not gay, are you?”
“No,” Perry said. “You’re so beautiful, but I—”
“You have a girlfriend, don’t you?” Karess said. She sighed. “I wondered what the deal was. You never even look at girls except for Professor Polson. I thought you were either a virgin, or a Christian, or you were sleeping with our professor, but you have some girl up there in whatever that town is you’re from—Bad Ass?—waiting for you, wearing a yellow ribbon or something, don’t you?”
Perry hesitated at first, but Karess continued to stare at him, and not knowing what else to do, Perry nodded.
“Is that why that sorority bitch slapped you?”
“Well,” Perry said. “Not exactly. She—”
“Well, thanks for sparing me her fate, anyway. Now, would you get out of here, Mr. Bad Ass? I’ve had just about enough of you for one day.”
It was mostly a joke, but Karess turned away from Perry and went to the window and looked out, and she made a motion with her hand for him to go, and Perry cleared his throat, trying and failing to think of something to say before he unlocked her door and stepped out into the hall, and closed it quietly behind him.
Now Brett Barber was trotting beside her, all but wagging his tail, and whatever Karess was talking to him about, it seemed to require no response on his part. He wasn’t even nodding his head. Professor Polson was taking long strides, in knee-high, shiny black boots, across the parking lot, and the group continued to follow down through an alley, which grew narrower as they walked. Soon it was narrow enough that only one person could pass at a time, so they followed her in single file. A couple of people laughed nervously, looked at the people behind them, raised their eyebrows. “Where the hell are we going?” someone whispered.
It surprised Perry, too. He’d expected the morgue to be its own building, bright and goofy like Dientz Funeral Home back in Bad Axe. Every holiday they decorated the front lawn—ribbons, flowers, wreaths, Easter eggs, Valentine’s hearts—except for Halloween.
But the university’s hospital morgue seemed to be sequestered exactly where you’d expect a place where dead bodies were kept to be hidden away: in a dungeon. Out by the hospital Dumpsters. No sign out front welcoming them with a smiley face. No euphemistic directions to CARE CONCLUSION FACILITY, or MEDICAL OUTSTAY LABORATORY.
Professor Polson kept going, and they kept following, past Dumpsters and chain-link fencing and No Trespassing signs, and on to a point beyond which it seemed they would find no entrance to anything, and certainly past the point where anyone would wish to trespass, and then Professor Polson was descending a long flight of stairs to a dark alcove and a windowless brown fire door on which was stenciled, in large caution-yellow letters, MORGUE.
63
The dean of the music school was leaning back in his upholstered chair, twiddling his thumbs, when Shelly stepped in. He was the picture of calm self-possession, except that he was blushing. His secretary had announced Sherry’s arrival, and then Shelly had been left to sit in the hallway outside his office for fifteen minutes. He’d had ample time to compose this reclining, twiddling façade, but he couldn’t hide his heart rate, which had been raised either by fear of an impending conflict or by simple embarrassment.
“Ms. Lockes,” he said.
Shelly shook her head. She saw no reason to continue to play this game. “You can call me Shelly,” she said sadly, “as always, and if it’s okay, I’m going to keep calling you Alex. I’ve known you for twenty years, Alex. I’m not here to talk about my job.”
The dean’s cheeks flushed an even deeper shade of hot pink. He was a pale, porcine man. Not having met him earlier in his life, Shelly had always assumed he’d reached his portly state with middle age, but, for the first time, she found herself able to picture him as a rotund seventh-grader being hounded by lanky boys on a playground. Panting. Fighting back tears. His cheeks would have been exactly this color.
Alex sighed, and sat up and put his hands under his desk where she could no longer see them.
“I’m sorry, but I’m here to ask you a favor, Alex,” Shelly said. She could see his chin twitch then, nearly imperceptibly, and she raised her hand as if to ward off something he would never have been able to bring himself to say anyway. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Again, it’s not about the job, and I’m certainly not planning to ask you for a reference, or anything that would put you in any kind of an uncomfortable position, ever, Alex. This has to do with something else. University business, you might say. Do you remember the accident last spring? Nicole Werner? The student from Bad Axe. The freshman.”
The dean nodded slowly, without opening his mouth, eyebrows raised as if he feared it might be a trick question. Shelly waited, looking at him, until he finally said, “Yes. Of course.”
“I probably never had any reason to tell you about this. I don’t remember seeing you much last spring at all, and it didn’t concern you—and, despite my efforts, my involvement never even made the newspaper, so you’d have had no way of knowing, but I was the first one on the scene. I was driving home from the gym. I was the woman who called nine-one-one.”
“Oh,” he said, “my.” He seemed intrigued, but also as though he were trying to hide his interest, to make it clear that nothing Shelly said could draw him in, lest she be drawing him in to some legalistic or psychological or academic trap.
“The newspaper reported that I didn’t give directions to the scene, and that I left the scene, and a hundred other erroneous details about the accident—all bogus. Until now, I didn’t understand. I thought it was incompetence. I thought the local newspaper simply couldn’t get their facts straight, that they were such hick reporters and such a slipshod operation that I couldn’t even get a letter to the editor published. But now I understand that that was what they wanted me to believe. Now I know that it’s really quite the opposite. They’re a very well oiled machine, the slickest of the slick, and the university is controlling them. I don’t know how, or why, but—”
Shelly found herself momentarily stalled by the dean’s expression. It would have been an exaggeration to call it horror or repugnance, but the emotion it revealed sprang from the same source as those emotions:
He thought she was crazy.
He thought she was, perhaps, a paranoid schizophrenic.
He was going backward in his mind through all the years he’d known her, and what the early signs of this might have been. There must have been some: The insistence on the superiority of Handel to Mozart. Her lesbianism. The picture of the cat that she kept on her desk. He was no longer blushing. He no longer needed to feel embarrassed, she realized, because he no longer believed he was with a peer, a colleague, or even a former employee. He was in the presence of a lunatic.