The Black Hour (24 page)

I’ve witnessed them hustle when the fireworks go off.

McDaniel had been on the scene. He’d said as much. But if he’d seen university police racing across campus that day—if he’d actually seen the scurrying—that put him on campus prior to the alarm. Not back at his office listening to his scanner, not out roaming his Willetson beat.

Already on campus. Already a part of the story.

At the doors, I checked to see. He leaned against his Jeep, still watching.

Inside, Dale Hall glowed like a church. Somewhere down the corridor I could hear the quiet noises of someone giving the copy machine a lesson it wouldn’t soon forget.

I stood inside the door, watching for McDaniel to follow me. After a while I stepped back outside and searched the parking lot. He’d gone.

I didn’t want to be here, but I also didn’t want to go home. Take my pill, take my glass of wine. Home, which was a mess despite the cleaning lady and my own weak efforts. And in so many ways, far emptier than Dale Hall.

I let myself take the elevator—only the surveillance camera left to judge me—and pressed the button. In my pocket, I felt for my keys.

On the third floor, the elevator opened up to a foyer more like the one the second floor used to have. I paused, checking the darkest corners. Joss’s posh, senior faculty office and the trio of adjoining offices the nodding wise men kept were all deserted. Doyle’s door stood at the end near the stairs, tucked behind the landing and facing toward town and trees. He couldn’t see downtown Chicago or the lake, but in the winter, his office kept the heat.

I’d arrive at his doorway, wrapped in two sweaters and a scarf, still frozen through from my drafty space.

Come here
, he’d say. I loved him best when he didn’t ask, when he seemed absolutely sure of himself. He’d find a few spare minutes to wave me in, he’d close the door, and we’d sit together in the sagging chair in the corner.

I was cold now, too. I hadn’t used the key to his office since we’d broken up, hadn’t thought to use it. Maybe it was a security blanket. Maybe it was a souvenir. Maybe it was that I’d always assumed that some things hadn’t changed, some things couldn’t change. But he had, or I had. Or—I wasn’t sure.

There was nothing for me in here, and yet I wanted to open the door. Because I could.

Don’t hurt yourself trying to tell me. I know who you are.

But did she? I didn’t think so. Nancy knew the tiny pieces Doyle allowed her to know, and he only knew what I’d offered, and none of it was everything. I still had the key. I still had everything I came in with.

“Except my dignity,” I said to the door. Did I really look like I had to pee when I pretended he meant nothing to me? I turned the key.

The last time I’d been inside had been the week before the shooting. We’d called it quits the spring before, his things extricated from my place one afternoon while I taught. He hadn’t even left a book or a tie I could return later. To be able to see him, to make seeing him at school regular again, I’d had to walk in and ask him something that belonged here, to Rothbert and not to anywhere else. The memory of that conversation fled back out of reach. Maybe I’d asked him advice on a student issue or we’d talked about publishing or about my fall teaching load or an internal department grant to write another book. I would have kept to the subject. Standing in his doorway that day, I would have made myself clear.

And he would have listened and answered and done all the right things, because that’s how Doyle was. We had several more conversations here and in the hall before he came to see me in the hospital, but that first conversation, after the move, here, over his desk—that was the clinical end of our relationship. Surgical. I should have left the key, but I hadn’t.

So? It was a souvenir.

I went to his side of his desk and pulled back his chair. A manila folder sat in his seat. I moved it to his desktop and sat down. I didn’t know what I was doing, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to do it. Could sitting here allow me to see things as clearly from his point of view as easily as I’d seen them from Nancy’s, in the Wolitzers’ backyard?

Nothing came to me, except the obvious. Nicholas Doyle wanted to share his life, and I had refused him. More than once. I loved him best when he was sure of himself, but I made him unsure of himself.

My belly and hip throbbed. Standing on the president’s lawn, teaching, the extra trip up here. I’d pay for it tomorrow. Or pay with a hangover from the extra pain meds I’d take. I wanted to stay a little longer behind Doyle’s oversized desk, in the cup of his well-worn leather chair. Listening to the hum of the campus and the town beyond his windows felt like nostalgia, but nostalgia for a moment I’d never lived. A photo of his kids watched from a shelf.

I stood slowly, my hip giving a sharp reprimand.

And then I saw it.
Lehane
.

The manila folder I’d moved from Doyle’s chair wasn’t labeled, but a sheet of paper inside stuck out enough for the name to rise and strike me. I flicked open the folder to a sheaf of legalese. Near the back of the stack, I found the page that had drawn my attention.

Lehane, Richard and Pamela. Such throwaway names. I couldn’t imagine them. I could barely imagine their son a real person. His photo, often published near mine, had become an image out of history, a commemorative postage stamp.

The document read far over my head. It mentioned an address, a town in Illinois I’d never heard of. Doxley? My hands itched to take the document down to the photocopier for a quick duplicate. I would have done it if the copier hadn’t been two floors away, if the left half of my body hadn’t begun its drumbeat for the pill bottle.

In the end, I swiped a sticky note from Doyle’s notepad, hand-copied out the address, and folded it into my pants pocket. I shuffled the pages back together and left the folder where I’d found it. The key, after a hesitation, I dropped into his desk drawer. And then I limped to the door and out.

In the elevator, I began to wonder at myself. The boy shooter’s address in my pocket, as though I planned to do something with it. As though I had a plan at all.

The door opened to the second floor. I had meant to go straight to the lobby and home. Whatever impulse had brought me here was gone. Home, home, the edges of myself sanded off by a well-timed medical intervention. I hit the lobby button and the door-close. Rumor had it that the door-close buttons in elevators the world round were for sociological studies only. How often would the rat pound at the button to close the doors a second earlier?

Six times.

The doors started to close, but then—the barest flicker of light.

I threw myself between the doors and out into the renovated hallway.

There it was again, just a pinprick of light. This time I caught the movement, located it high on the wall opposite my office. The elevator doors closed behind me. I took a step, and the light danced.

Fire.

“Who’s there?” I called.

Dread settled like a stone in my stomach.

“Anyone?”

I found myself planning my counterattack. How high to lift my cane, the right angle to strike at a face or a groin. I would need momentum. I’d be nothing against a gun. If a gun rose from the dark—there was no dark, but I shook anyway. My hip pinched when I took a step.

Standing in the center of the hall, the light became clear. A reflection. The flame sputtered in the glass of the framed co-ed. I stumbled forward, at last released from my stupor. A
fire
?

A candle had been propped up on the lip of the bin outside my office door. It had tipped, the wick burning a spot into the wall and blistering the plastic panel above it. My name was singed and warped.

I blew out the flame and peered into the landing and down the stairs. “Hello?”

The shuffling sounds of someone else at work downstairs were gone. I heard a group of voices passing by outside. Students, loud, pleased to be where and who they were.

The thick, yellow candle smelled of a flower I couldn’t name. The wick was long, new. It hadn’t been burning for long. I peered again into the corners behind the stairs and down the way I’d come. Leo Lehane, once, had stood just here. I couldn’t keep from checking again.

The hallway smelled of bouquet and barbecue, of hot plastic.

I reached for the candle and recoiled. There was something tucked behind the candle at its base.

I knew at once: I had been waiting for this, whatever it was.

I checked the hall again, listened down the stairs, and reached again for the candle.

A piece of notepaper, folded into a tight accordion. Time had been taken to get the folds crisp. I pulled the paper open like a window shade.

What had I expected? That the note was for Corrine? That a mistake had been made? That someone had not deliberately left a fire to burn my name off the wall of Dale Hall while the pink-cheeked co-ed across the hall bore witness?

The note was not for me.

Leonard Lehane
, it said.
Rest in peace
.

OK. That was fine. Unattended fire was always a bad idea, but the message: indeed, Leonard. Rest up, buddy. I didn’t mean what I said about sending you to hell. My nameplate was ruined, but no real damage had been done.

But—somehow, I knew.

I swept my hand inside the bin, coming up with a crumpled piece of paper. So unlike the careful origami of the other message, but I knew this was the true quarry of the night. I smoothed the paper against the wall and considered it.

Professor
, it read.
It should have been you.

I panicked.

The candle and message to Leo Lehane I dropped into the garbage, and the secret note, into a pocket. I hopped down the stairs, clinging to the handrail and ignoring the pangs ringing up my leg and through my gut. Out of Dale Hall, down to the parking lot—my car the last one this time—and off campus. I surprised myself by passing my apartment and doing a loop around the small downtown, too fast.

Who had done this? Who would bother?

One circuit, two.

Lehane was dead, but whatever he’d started hadn’t burned out. He didn’t have friends, but had he not acted alone?

I forced myself to let up on the gas, to find the people in other cars and along the street, to find faces. Young people in clutches, laughing their way back toward campus. A family with a child asleep on his father’s shoulder.

I pulled up each person I knew in my mind, checking them against my fear. Woo? He disdained my education and probably didn’t like me personally. Doyle. He’d wanted more of me than I’d been able to offer. I ran out of candidates fast. I’d met people at conferences I didn’t like, certainly, but at what point of my life had I picked up an enemy?

Three circuits, four, until at last I nearly idled. A parking space opened in front of the Mill.

Inside, the weeknight clientele was sparse. Joe looked away from the TV, his face dropping the ten-minutes-’til-close scowl and contorting into something else I didn’t recognize.

“I could use one, if you’re still serving,” I said.

“If you can drink fast.” He pulled a beer from the cooler at his knees and waggled it at me. “Bad day, Teach?”

“Bad.” We met at the bar. I slid onto a stool and made short work of my promise. When I put the bottle down, it was half gone.

“That bad.” Joe hadn’t gone to college, and sometimes he didn’t seem to believe me about bad days. Had a keg blown up in the basement? No? Then I hadn’t had a bad day.

“Longest day of my life,” I said. “Second. No, third, but those have all been recent, you understand.”

“Heard you fell the other day. That sucks.”

“No argument here. My—” I’d been about to tell him Nath’s story, that my cane had gotten caught up, but why bring Joe’s notice to my third leg? My skin began to hum with the thought that the day might not be over. A long day might be turned around by a long night. Maybe I’d been coming here all along. “It was nothing.” I took up my beer again, glanced into the empty corners. “Lonely in here tonight. Surprised you’re not already locked.”