them shouts and kicks something along the floor. It is an empty can of spray paint. Its content—red, again—is on the walls around Hornberger’s office door in the form of stenciled poems:
THE WHOLE MOON TURNED BLOOD RED,
AND THE STARS IN THE SKY FELL TO EARTH
AS FIGS DROP FROM A FIG TREE WHEN SHAKEN
BY A STRONG WIND.
“He’ll be writing a feckin’ novel next,” says Rich Westley, whose door is two along from Hornberger’s.
“Sir, did you hear nothing?” The security chief is torn between embarrassment at his team’s incompetence and impatience at Westley’s vagueness.
“Sorry, no—sleeping off the effect of too much lunch at the new Institute for Clap-and-Trap.”
I catch a strong whiff of his liquid lunch, but no other olfactory disturbances. Unless—
My office door is closed but unlocked; the bunch of keys lies on the desk. The drawer is hanging open, but since there was nothing in it, nothing is missing. I grab an ibuprofen, swallow it with one gulp from the water fountain, and send Tim a text.
Wanna see some more graffiti? E-1.
When I get downstairs again, Tim is already there, and he has brought Bernie Cogan.
“Hi, honey. We met at the Parade, and Tim thought since I’ll hear about it in the Hearing Panel anyway, I might as well see it, too. Never a dull moment, huh?”
“You can say that again.”
“And this happened just now?”
“Was discovered just now, anyway. What do you think?”
We survey the blocks of stenciled lines.
“What’s your first impression, both of you?” Bernie asks matter-of-factly, and this is a side I have not yet seen of him.
“Red,” Tim says.
“Love,” I say. “It’s a labor of love. Cutting out—oh, look, there it is!” One of the security men has found the stencil, an extra-large sheet of carton. “Look at those letters. This must have taken forever. This is different than the hate graffiti on the fourth floor.”
“Love and hatred require equal amounts of energy,” Bernie says. “What else?”
“It’s about sex,” I say slowly. “Upstairs was about hate and sex; this is about love and sex. It’s about a girl losing her virginity.”
Rich, Tim, Bernie, and two security men stare at me.
“Trust me, boys. I’m a girl, and I read poetry.”
“Who is your favorite?” Giles asks later that day when I find him in the statue garden, where he is apparently listening in on the concert in the nearby amphitheater. He has a glass of wine, a small bowl of cheese crackers, and an apple with him—“My supper!”—and I can’t believe that he is alone and that he seems pleased to see me.
“Hermes.” I don’t need to think about that answer. “I like that he is the god of travelers, thieves, liars, and poets. I also like that he isn’t quite as brawny as the other male gods.”
Giles turns his head to look at me and smiles.
I am very happy I found him.
“How did you like your first Ardrossan Homecoming?” he asks. “Did it have enough pomp and circumstance for your taste?”
I haven’t often seen him in a chatty mood, and as the muscles in my stomach relax, I wish I could just snuggle up to him and chat the evening away. It’s grown chilly and the sun is beginning to set.
“My taste doesn’t much run to pomp and circumstance. Mind you, Ardrossan’s foolish, fairy-tale Gothicism is a much less daunting backdrop to processions and trumpets and flags than the neo-classical grandeur of the Morningside Heights campus. That always gave me the creeps, to be honest.”
He gazes at me as if he wanted to comment on that, then he offers me a cheese cracker.
“Two different people, then,” he says when I have told him about the new graffiti. “Corvin, or maybe that Harrison girl, threw fish at your door, and someone else writes graffiti about Natalie Greco and Nick Hornberger.”
“But this is about first-time sex, don’t you agree?” I unfold the piece of paper on which I copied the verse.
“Without a doubt.”
“It isn’t really, of course. It’s from the Bible, like the other one. Revelation, this time. Don’t know whether that is significant. Anyway, so much for your theory that Natalie herself is the graffiti artist. She would hardly produce such a labor of love for a man she has reported for sexual assault, and apparently her mother and her step-brother testify to the fact that she was at home with them all day.”
“It was a good theory.” He shrugs and offers me another cracker.
“Thanks. By the way, I saw Natalie’s stepfather at the opening ceremony of the new