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.
Shelly sighed, fighting back tears. She swallowed, and said, “You don’t believe me. But I’m not even asking you to believe me. I’ve been in your employ for a long time, and I’m asking something very simple from you, and it’s something only you can do: I need, very much, for you to ask for an inquiry into the disappearance of a young woman from the university here. She was a student in the music school. A violinist. A member of the Omega Theta Tau sorority. She’s been missing since last winter, and as far as I can tell, from what I’ve read on the Internet, there has been no investigation by either the local police or by the university.
“Surely, as dean of the music school, you must want to know what happened to this girl? We can’t have sophomores from the music school simply disappearing, can we?”
From the look on his face, Shelly could tell that he’d never even heard about the missing violinist, and he didn’t want to be hearing about her now. Still, he’d moved beyond his concerns regarding Shelly’s sanity to far greater concerns regarding his accountability, his reputation, his exposure. He was, to Shelly’s relief, taking a pen out of his pocket, pulling a legal pad from the corner of his desk to the center of it, nodding for her to go on.
“What’s your concern about this girl? And how do you know about it?”
“She was a sorority sister of Nicole Werner’s, and also of Josie Reilly’s, and it just seems too much, to me—just so many coincidences. Where is this girl, and why hasn’t anyone come forward with any information about her?”
“So,” he put down the pen. “You don’t even know if she’s still missing. She might be back in school for all you know, or back home with her folks?”
Shelly nodded. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll look into it, but who knows. I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”
“Thank you. I’m just asking you to look into it. And, can I ask you”—she started before she realized she’d been planning, all along, to ask the question—“how was it that Josie Reilly was sent to me for the work-study position? She wasn’t a financial aid student, was she? Those positions are for students in need.”
The dean closed his eyes and cleared his throat. He winced then, as if something he’d seen with his closed eyes had given him physical pain. When he opened his eyes again, he sighed and said, “Well, that in itself, Shelly, is part of the whole unfortunate situation. The student wasn’t even being paid. She simply wanted the experience, and was willing to work for free because she knew she couldn’t get the job without the work-study scholarship. So, I saw to it that she was sent your way. First of all, because she was such a lovely, fine student, and also because her mother and my wife are friends from their own college days. Sorority sisters, as it happens.”