How much more pleasant it is, despite the frustration, to wonder about Giles and Amanda Cleveland, if the depressing reality is a blood-drenched hanky in my Dumpster and the janitor’s muttered suspicion that the recent mishaps on E-4 have one common denominator: the location of my office.
That’s got to be nonsense.
As usual, my bunch of keys is hiding at the very bottom of my purse, and when I’ve found it and grab the door handle, my hand slips off and I smash bodily against the door.
“What the—”
The handle—and now also the palm of my hand—is covered in a thick, oily substance. Viscous, oily, and evil, smelling of rotten fruit and airports. Engine oil? Lamp oil? Maybe Larry did something to the door hinges while he was up here, and a little got spilled? But there is no oil on any of the metal parts of my door.
Slowly it drips onto the floor in front of my Mary Poppins boots.
No. I will not lower myself into the bog of paranoia.
It must be Corvin. I would totally believe that Corvin has complained to Dancey about the noise my heels make. But would a seventy-five-year-old emeritus professor, no matter how aggressively senile, smear lamp oil onto the handle of colleague’s office door? And what’s with the broken window panes?
There are two rivaling theories about the windows, Martha Borlind informs me when I invite her, a little disingenuously, for a coffee in the Eatery. One, favored by Martha herself, is that this was the act of vandals, the same individuals who last semester smashed some glass cases with libri rari in the library and sprayed graffiti on the front façade of Rossan House. The second—and Larry vowed to make enquiries—is that a party at Modern Languages yesterday evening got out of hand.
I don’t tell Martha about the oil on my door handle, or about the bloody Kleenex. When I come back from the restroom along the corridor into Modern Languages, it is still sitting there, underneath the plastic folders, possibly the corpus delicti in this case. Without really bothering to examine my motives, I slip it into a clean plastic bag and lock it into the drawer of my desk.
Thursday after class I do what I consider to be the main part of my job: I spend an hour in the library and then work at my desk till my eyes cross with exhaustion. I may not be able to sleep eight hours at a stretch, but I can and do fall asleep anywhere. My three chairs pushed alongside each other make an adequate cot, and I’m dead to the world seconds after lying down. When I wake up, with a crick in my back and swollen eyes, it is almost eleven o’clock. The view from my window is a panorama lit by moonlight, sparsely dotted with the light from other offices, other night owls, and I can see the straight line of Victorian-style street lamps that illuminate the river promenade. I’ve never been in the Observatory so late in the evening. The hallway looks picturesquely dark except for the dim light from the windows, and it is exciting to feel that I have the building to myself. A little eerie, too. When mid-term grading is upon us, I’ll be surprised if by midnight this place is empty. We will be keeping ourselves awake with green tea and gymnastics in the corridor. Two essays, one jog up and down the staircase, another two essays; that would be a good routine, guaranteed to—
Oh, snap! There is someone upstairs in the dome!
I’m as scared as I would be if I saw two thugs walking toward me in a deserted alleyway. This huge old building sitting on a hill, with its dome designed to look out into the night sky, empty except for some light and some voices at the very top, under the roof, one of the highest points on campus. The immediate associations from films we have seen are inevitable. A chair rocking gently, the creaky voice of an old woman talking to her son.
Every step I take will go clackety-clack on those stone tiles. I take my shoes off and creep up the first couple of steps of the spiral staircase, my shoes in one hand. A male voice and a female voice. It may simply be some students who’ve picked the lock and think it cool to have midnight sit-ins under the dome. Who else could it be, really?