Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(14)
At the southern end of the cranberry bog, Huston’s character came to a stream flowing south. The character stopped and waited while Huston regarded the stream. It was not Huston’s desire to have his character moving continually southward, but he knew that the stream presented a good opportunity to keep his trail undetectable, and even though the character’s feet were now throbbing and burning, Huston could not yet allow him the relief of dry ground.
Huston told his character to follow the stream and quicken his pace. The going was easier now, the water in the stream only a few inches deep, and there was enough exposed bedrock in the stream that the character could find solid footing without having to slow down. And the water seemed a few degrees warmer now. Maybe the character’s feet would not be damaged after all, would not be black with frostbite when he sat down to take his shoes off. Maybe they would, but maybe they wouldn’t. Huston would just have to wait and see how the story evolved and where the stream might take his character.
It’s a strange kind of story to be writing, Huston thought. He watched his character almost running now down the shallow stream, he heard the slap and splash of water. But he felt the sun on his character’s face now too, and he told himself what he always had to tell himself from time to time, every time he felt overwhelmed by a writing project, every time he felt himself about to surrender to frustration. Trust the process, Huston. Trust the story.
Ten
DeMarco could not remember ever having used the word pall in conversation except in the word pallbearer, but now, though he did not utter the word aloud, he felt its meaning as he walked from a campus parking lot to Campbell Hall some sixty or seventy yards away. He felt the pall that had descended over Shenango College as tangibly as he would feel a sudden drop in air pressure. The atmosphere felt sodden and heavy. The students crossing between buildings moved like prisoners trudging from their cells to the gas chamber. Even their laughter, which was in low abundance, rang sour and false.
He had been on the campus several times before, twice for blues concerts but usually to haul in a student on suspicion of selling drugs, for sexual assault, for abandoning his vehicle in a ditch somewhere outside the borough. On those occasions, no matter the season, the ambiance had seemed swollen with promise, almost festive, and buoyant with innocence. Now it felt like the air inside a punctured balloon.
The college administration preferred that any external law enforcement personnel visiting the campus be accompanied by someone from campus security. Normally, DeMarco would have honored that request. But today he did not feel like having an undertrained snot nose watching his every move, maybe making small talk all the while, trying to ingratiate himself, wheedling for an invitation to apply to the state police. Today, DeMarco was in no mood for camaraderie.
Yesterday, he had hiked through Maurice K. Goddard State Park until his legs ached. He had drunk too much burned coffee from too many foam cups, had suffered too many pairs of young eyes following him all day long as if he were the keeper of all secrets and might dribble one forth at any moment, might utter a few precious words of knowledge. Today, he felt depleted of anything valuable, as empty as a pocket turned inside out.
In Campbell Hall, he made his way to the English Department’s offices on the second floor. The hallway was empty but for one female student, pale and blond and waifish, sitting on the floor outside a closed door, a notebook open in her lap. DeMarco glanced at the door on his way past; below the nameplate of Dr. Robert Denton, a strip of paper had been taped, and on the paper, typed in bold black script, was part of a poem:
Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
Theodore Roethke
He recognized Denton’s name, the resident poet. The poets, it seemed, always had pretty, young things waiting outside their doors. DeMarco wondered, And why is that?
The answer was a simple one: Because poets and pretty, young things still believe in romance. They still believe that truth heals and beauty sutures. They still believe that love forestalls, deters, and turns away the tragedy that is life.
DeMarco thought again of his wife, Laraine. She had been a pretty, young thing once upon a time. She too had believed in romance for a while. Until she cradled her broken-necked baby in her arms.
Yellow police tape had been stretched across the doorway of room 214. DeMarco reached beneath the tape and tried the door, though he knew it would be locked. He then returned past the poet-adoring student to the department office by the stairwell. The secretary was a light-skinned black woman in her late twenties. Her posture was disciplined and straight, her chin held high as she sat at the computer, fingers long and slender and beautifully manicured as they rattled an elegant tattoo over the keyboard.
He approached her desk. “I’ll need the key for Professor Huston’s office, please.”
His voice startled her, but she jerked only a little, kept the look of surprise from her face as she turned to him. “They’ve already searched there,” she said. “In fact, they took the computer and a few other things.”
“Yes, we did,” he said and smiled. He pulled a leather case from his pocket, showed her his badge and ID card. “That doesn’t mean we’re finished in there.”
She nodded, pulled open a drawer, found the key, and handed it to him.
“I usually go to lunch at twelve thirty,” she told him.