Jeff Blackhawk lingered in Mira’s office, touching a few of the little things she kept on her bookshelf, turning them over in his hands—a paperweight that had been a gift from a student (velvety red rose petal floating, without weight or age, inside a glass globe), a Petoskey stone Mira had picked up on the beach during a trip to Lake Michigan the year before, a couple of paperclips. A few minutes earlier he’d stood up as if he were leaving, so Mira had stood as well, but now he seemed reluctant to go, and genuinely charged up about their conversation, which seemed like a strange and not unpleasant turn of events, as Mira couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a conversation about anything other than the weather with any of her colleagues.
She’d always thought that becoming an academic (especially if she was lucky enough to land a place, as she had, at a major research university, and then in a niche noted for its encouragement of free intellectual exploration like Godwin Honors College) would mean endless conversations in hallways, in offices. Graduate school had been rich with such talk among students, and although Mira had to admit now that she couldn’t remember, looking back, ever having actually seen two or more professors speaking to each other about anything more interesting than whether or not the copier was out of paper—still, somehow, she’d expected that when she became a professor herself she would find herself engaged in passionate daily debates in the lunchroom over the finer points of the most obscure topics.
But she could not have been more wrong.
Nightshift factory workers probably spent more time philosophizing with one another than she did with her colleagues at Godwin Honors Hall. In three years, the most passionate discussions she’d had in the lunch room pertained to the best temperature at which to keep the minifridge and who kept stealing the secretary’s Diet Cokes.
But today Jeff Blackhawk had stopped by to speak with Mira specifically about her new research. Dean Fleming had mentioned it to him in passing one afternoon, and it seemed to have genuinely seized Jeff’s interest.
Last fall, he’d had Nicole Werner in his first-year seminar, and although he claimed not to have gotten to know her very well, he had clearly been affected by her death. Like everyone else, he blamed the boyfriend. He said, “The guy used to wait for her outside our classroom, like he thought maybe she’d run off with somebody else if he didn’t walk her to and from class.”
Given Jeff’s reputation for romancing the most beautiful of his undergraduates, Mira ungenerously considered that he might have resented Craig Clements-Rabbitt’s hanging around because that would have made it hard for him to snag Nicole Werner alone. Still, Mira was flattered by his interest in her research. He had a variety of suggestions for her, and although Mira had been trained to pay the least amount of attention to the creative writers in any department (their educations were always lacking), she thought that his ideas were genuinely good ones, his anecdotes interesting.
Did she know, for instance, that for many years, until the administrators managed to squelch it, there’d been a kind of hysteria in Godwin Honors Hall among groups of students who thought it was haunted?
“There was an article in the student newspaper. You could look it up. All these reports that a girl was coming around to the rooms, looking for somebody. I mean, the story changes with the teller, but it was more or less reported that this girl was frantic, and half-dressed, and looked like she was from another era, and when they asked her who she was, she’d tell them she was Alice Meyers.”
He emphasized the name, and paused afterward, as if Mira should recognize it.
She didn’t.
“You know. The study room? In the south end of the basement?”
Mira’d had no idea that there was a study room in the south end of the basement. Despite teaching a fair number of her classes in basement classrooms (an honor given mostly to assistant professors), she’d been on the south side, where there were no classrooms, only once, in search of a student she’d been told was in the ceramics workshop and who’d left her backpack in Mira’s classroom. That side of the basement of Godwin Hall seemed to be just arts and crafts workshops, knocking pipes, and laundry facilities, although there was, she knew, a little student hangout over there somewhere called the Half-Ass, where they sometimes held poetry readings and bad student rock band concerts.
“Yeah. There’s a study room down there. They’ve quit using it, I think. It was paid for by the parents of Alice Meyers. She was a Godwin Honors College student who disappeared in 1968. She posted her name on a board at the Union for a ride home to some small town in Ohio. The last anyone saw of her she was walking around the Union, looking for her ride.”
“Jesus,” Mira said. She was used to such stories, but they still gave her goose bumps.
“Well. Anyway. There’s that. And, you know, the brass isn’t letting it out, but there was another death on campus recently. A girl over in Bryson. A freshman. They just found her dead after somebody noticed the stench outside her room. I think they can’t say for sure it was a suicide, so they’re not saying much at all. This was three weeks ago, and it hasn’t even made the papers. Luckily, I guess, her parents are nobodies from some rural town pretty far from here.”
Mira nodded. She hadn’t heard about it, but it didn’t surprise her. There was always a student who killed herself, or himself, every year in a single, in a dorm. (An excellent argument for doubles.) Always a stench. Always the possibility left open that it had been an undetected heart defect or an accidental overdose, not a suicide or, God forbid, a murder, so the university could pretend it wasn’t neglecting its young people—their mental health, their safety—although everyone knew that there wasn’t the slightest bit of attention paid in a place this big to any individual’s mental health or safety. The only people on campus with any responsibility for that at all were kids like Lucas, resident advisors, who got free room and board to pretend to be taking responsibility.
Jeff Blackhawk picked up a paperclip Mira had on the bookshelf and put it in his mouth. He held it for a second, first, between his front teeth, but then it disappeared. Being the mother of two toddlers, Mira had to check her alarm—her first instinct being to pry Jeff’s mouth open and fish it out. But Jeff managed to keep talking with the paperclip in there.
“And you know there’s that other girl from Nicole Werner’s sorority.”
“What?”
“Yeah. See?” He gestured at Mira as if he’d already proven his point. “Nobody’s getting this information. State secrets. Cover-ups all over the place. This place is full of ’em.”
“What happened? Who?”
“Denise Something. They’re trying to pass it off as a runaway situation. Supposedly she was dating some older guy, and her parents disapproved, so she disappeared off the face of the earth. It was right around the time Nicole got killed, and her sorority sisters are all saying the last time they saw Denise What’s-Her-Name was at that ghastly cherry tree thing, and then she got in a car with some guy, took her stuff with her, and that was that. The parents can’t even get the cops in this town to investigate—which of course gives the brass around here a great excuse to just toss up their hands and say, ‘Sorry your kid got lost! Not our problem! Even the cops can’t help you!’ ”
“What year was she?”
“Sophomore, I think. Music school. She lived in the OTT house, but the year before, she lived in Fairwell—ironically enough.”
He opened his mouth to laugh, and Mira was relieved to see the paperclip still on his tongue.
Fairwell was an all-girls dorm, and the campus folklore was that the girls who lived there as freshmen never got to be sophomores, that they all flunked out. Statistically, it wasn’t true. Fairwell girls were no more likely than any other group of freshmen to fail their first years. But it was still a struggle to fill the beds in that dorm. The university allowed students to rank their top choices, and because Fairwell was so unpopular, the dorm was mostly filled with foreign students or girls from such small towns they’d never met anyone from the university to tell them this story. (Of course, with the Internet, it was getting harder and harder to capture the ignorant.) Mira had asked the dean once, at a stiff cocktail party for junior faculty, why they didn’t just change the dorm’s name. Wouldn’t that solve the problem? Clearly, she pointed out, the rumor had started because the dorm’s name, Fairwell, was Farewell.
“Never thought of that,” he’d said. “But, nope. Marjorie Fairwell was the wife of the university’s first major donor. She’s got scads of descendants still pouring money into the place. They’d rather let it sit empty than change the name. Eventually they’ll make it a charity dorm, I suppose. All the girls there will be on financial aid or academic probation, and just grateful to have a place to sleep, period.”
Jeff leaned against her office wall, looking down at Mira’s legs. He always got there eventually, it seemed to Mira. She was surprised it had taken him so long. It must have been an indication of his sincere interest in the topic they were discussing. She asked him, “How do you know about it, this runaway, if it’s been kept so quiet?”
“A friend of mine works in the provost’s office,” Jeff said. “She’s sworn to secrecy about everything that goes on there, but a couple glasses of wine and she’s all tongue.”
Mira tried not to picture the scene inspired by the choice of words, his female friend’s tongue. Jeff was, himself, an exceptionally sexy man—tall, olive green eyes, a head of shaggy brown hair. But Mira found him as attractive as a catalog model of men’s underwear. Sure, you looked twice, but there was that problem of you existing in the three-dimensional world, and his being just a flat, glossy surface. Plus, there was Jeff’s absolute lack of discernment, it seemed. (“If she’s breathing, he’ll sleep with it,” one of the part-time language teachers had told Mira once in passing. “It’s pretty sad, really. If he were a woman, we’d all feel sorry for him and be worried about his self-esteem.”)
Mira looked at her watch (where was Clark? she needed to call) and thanked Jeff, who took the paperclip out of his mouth before he said good-bye, and put it back on her bookshelf.