Chapter 35
Somehow Julian talks his way into open house. It’s an astonishing feat, particularly from this normally nervous, withdrawn version of the detective. He gets on the phone to Isabel Ortiz and wheedles his way to what he wants: still concerned about Lu, what if something goes wrong, good to have another set of eyes, good to have an outsider to vouch for the truth—but it matters less what he says than how he says it. He says it like he’s twelve years old and bursting with bright confidence and the knowledge that a television producer has already ensured his access. Two days ago Charles would have been dizzy with it, stars in his eyes, but everything has shifted and he can’t get his bearings. Whatever Julian is thinking or feeling about what happened between them the day before yesterday, he’s bottled it up so tightly Charles can’t even hazard a guess.
They slip as quietly as possible into the room where most of open house is happening. At the front of the room, several tables face the audience—current grad students, various professors, and a few people Charles doesn’t recognize. The new admits, presumably. They look fresh-faced and nervous; he wouldn’t be surprised if all of them were coming straight from undergrad.
“There’s Dean Hanley,” Julian whispers to Charles, nodding at the older man, who is sitting in the corner in the back of the room, eyes narrowed as he watches people sip coffee and talk quietly as Bianca, the department’s administrative coordinator, sets water bottles out on the tables where the presenters and panelists will be sitting. Piper has told them what Hanley is doing there—watching over the open house, ready to swoop in at the first sign of discord. Charles can almost taste the strain in the air as he notices the way most people are avoiding looking at the corner where Hanley is sitting. The room is divided, as usual, into presentists and historicists, but the split wouldn’t be obvious to an outsider; there are no empty chairs between Sarah Rasmussen and Arla Catlin, Katie Lin and Karen Gavras. But no one is talking to the admits, which seems odd; surely in this coffee-and-pastries time before the first panel starts, they ought to be making them feel welcome.
Charles slips a glance at Julian. The detective is unobtrusively surveying the room. As soon as he feels Charles’ gaze, he turns to look; Charles looks away before their eyes meet.
There’s a heavy mass of something thick and sludgy in his gut, has been since he and Julian put on their clothes again in that little locked room and Charles felt with a swoop of horrible certainty that something had gone wrong—had not been enough—and that it was all his fault. Julian isn’t talking about it, hasn’t said anything, isn’t even behaving differently, and Charles hasn’t actually got a clue how he’s feeling, but the worry gnaws at him. He fucked up. He’s sure he fucked up.
The door opens and Christopher Maynard walks in, closely followed by Todd Burns. Unlike the others, Maynard looks pleased as punch to see Dean Hanley. He greets him warmly, placing his bag next to him and then going to greet the new admits. They seem relieved to see him. Everybody else in the room tenses up. But they don’t do anything. It’s like the dean’s presence has glued them in place.
Bianca pulls up a PowerPoint presentation on the screen behind the front tables. SCHENLEY ENGLISH PH.D. PROGRAM 101. She gathers some notes as Isabel and Francis both rise from their seats, making their way to the front of the room.
The door opens again, right on the hour: Piper slips in, head down, eyes flicking around for a second before they take the seat next to Charles, all the way in the back row.
“Hey,” Charles whispers, surprised that Piper doesn’t join their friends and colleagues. Piper nods. They look unhappy and tired, with bags under their eyes. Charles’ own misery lifts for a moment as they are confronted with Piper’s. “Are you okay?”
Piper shrugs, and Bianca clears her throat.
“Hi everyone! Welcome to open house. I’m going to start us off with the basics—degree requirements, normative time—but first, Dr. Ortiz and Dr. Pace would like to welcome you to the department.”
Would an outsider be able to tell that they hate each other? Do the new admits know? Can they tell by the way the space between the two professors warps and wavers, the stumbling half-second pause as both of them open their mouths to speak at the same time, then fall silent, swallowing back bitter bile?
“Hi everyone,” Pace says. His smile is threadbare, stretched too wide. “Hello especially to our newest admits, Jessica, Hayes, Morris, and Dana. We’re so pleased to welcome you to Schenley. I’m Francis Pace, professor of nineteenth-century British and sexuality studies.” He leaves a little gap, not quite an invitation, and it takes a second, but Isabel fills it.
“I’m Isabel Ortiz. I’ve emailed with a couple of you and I’m looking forward to getting to know the rest of you over the next couple days. I work on queer theory and contemporary digital media and my current project is focused on cross-platform literacies in the twenty-first century. But you’re welcome to ask me about anything—any questions you have about the department, the program, your research interests.” Another slice of silence, and then, almost successful, an addition: “And I’m sure that’s true for Dr. Pace as well.”
“Indeed,” he says. “Any of us—faculty, staff, graduate students—are here to help you get a sense of the department while you’re here.”
And both of them—Francis and Isabel—look, almost compulsively, towards Dean Hanley. They smile, but their eyes are cold.
Charles doesn’t suppose the first presentation would be interesting to anyone but the new admits. It’s all administrative stuff, timelines and requirements and bureaucracy. He takes it as a chance to nurse the worry in his stomach, attending to its shifts and slides, and he tries to figure out through some intense use of his peripheral vision what Julian might be feeling about him. It is impossible: Julian’s blurred profile reveals no secrets. Piper is less perilous to look at straight on so Charles sneaks a few glances at them; they appear exhausted and a little dazed. On an impulse, Charles reaches out and gives their elbow a quick squeeze. Piper looks at him, startled.
“Do you need anything?” Charles whispers. “You want me to get you some coffee?”
He can feel Julian’s gaze shift to the two of them. Piper shakes their head, but they give Charles a half a smile. “Thanks, though.”
Charles nods and returns to the presentation. Bianca’s talking about enrollment procedures. Julian is scrolling surreptitiously through his phone. He’s not the only one. Barely anyone, professors or current graduate students, is paying attention. Fair enough, Charles thinks—he can’t see why they’d even need to be here for this—except they’re fidgeting, throwing glances at each other, shuffling through papers; he gets the sense that both groups are fumbling for some sort of last-minute strategy now that Hanley’s thrown a wrench in whatever they were going to do before. Piper said something about the presentists planning to sabotage some event of Pace’s, but that must be out the window now. Charles wonders how they’ll go about wooing the prospective students to their sides when they’re forced to pretend they’re one happy family.
Bianca is wrapping things up when Charles feels Julian stiffen suddenly. He looks over, forgetting momentarily that he’s trying not to look at Julian. The detective is staring at his phone, sitting bolt upright.
“We need to talk,” he mutters to Charles. Piper glances over, curious, and Julian lowers his voice even more. “Just us.”
Charles nods. Voices start up again, chairs scraping back as the first break of the day begins, and Julian leads Charles quickly out of the room and around a corner, into a dead-end hallway with an old-fashioned wall-mounted phone and a trash can at the end. He goes as far down it as he can, stopping just before the wooden cubicle that holds the phone.
“I’ve just heard back from a contact of mine, a friend who does technical stuff for me occasionally. She managed to trace the IP address of the fic that Lu posted on Friday. The one with the dancing men code.”
Adrenaline shoots through Charles, lighting him up so fast that the churning worry in his gut all but recedes. “What did she find out? Where was it posted?”
“Here,” Julian says, voice low. “The fic was posted from a computer on Schenley’s campus.”
For an absurd second, Charles has the impulse to look around, to call out: Lu! You can come out now! But then realization sinks in.
“The listening devices,” he says. “Do you think somehow someone could have gotten access to her account that way?”
Julian shrugs. “Maybe. It’s just as likely they found some way to bug her laptop, too. Maybe a software that records keystrokes.”
“So anyone here could have posted it, really,” he says. “They all know she writes fic. Maybe they even got ahold of one of hers.”
“And if that’s the case,” Julian says grimly, “they probably had a pretty good reason for posting it.”
“They wanted to give the impression that Lu was still okay. Still out there somewhere.”
“It’s possible.”
Charles leans back heavily against the wall. They’d known, of course, that it might not have been Lu who’d posted the fic. That was always a possibility. Maybe that person had even meant for them to crack the code: ‘I’m well. Still working.’ Meant them to think Lu was just in hiding, that she didn’t want to be found, so they would stop looking. But the last part of message—how did that fit in?
“Why ‘Be safe?’” he asked.
Julian shakes his head. “I’ve been asking myself that since we figured it out. If Lu wrote it, who was it for? If she didn’t…”
“For Piper?” Charles ventures. “Something else to throw them off the scent? To get them to back away?”
Julian exhales. “Yeah. Maybe.”
“If someone posted it as a diversion, then that means Lu is…” He falls silent. He doesn’t want to say it. Kidnapped. In trouble. Or worse.
“We need to…” Julian drums his fingers against the wall, forehead creasing with concentration. For a second Charles’ heart swoops again, thinking—those fingers—but he pushes the thought down, away, and Julian says, “We need to talk to everyone who might have…”
But a volley of footsteps echo through the adjacent hallway as everyone who might have posted the fic returns to the room for the next part of open house.
“At least they’re all in one place,” Julian says, launching himself off the wall and striding back down the hall. “Hard for them to do any more mischief when they’re all together.”
Charles doesn’t suppose Julian really thinks that being in the same room will prevent trouble from erupting. Certainly not after they return to the room and plunge right back into the fucked-up atmosphere of tension and hostility. He can’t imagine the new admits not feeling it: the way that the air crackles with unspoken anger, the way that silences stretch so thin and brittle they nearly break, the cold shoulders and lack of eye contact. A few of the current graduate students are talking with the prospectives, but the conversation is clearly stilted and full of awkward pauses while people who hate each other try not to show it, and only Todd Burns seems cheerful, smiling at them as he answers their questions about Schenley and living in Pittsburgh. Charles can’t help but think that the new admits will be more likely to defect to New Criticism next year if this is their experience of everybody else.
They sit through a panel on grad student research, which is the first thing that actually makes going to Schenley seem appealing. Katie Lin shows a video of the experimental dance piece she’s choreographing to accompany her dissertation on sound studies, performance, and contemporary dance; Karen Gavras talks about a recent research trip to London to see the early British geologist William Smith’s fossil collection and geological maps. Charles finds himself carried away by their obvious enthusiasm for their research, distracted momentarily from the hostile atmosphere and the recent revelation about Lu by the conjunction of sound and movement and the colorful striations of rocks in mines, marshes and fens. It all comes crashing down when the panel ends and somebody asks a question about how often people in the department focus on traditional literary texts versus performance and visual culture or scientific or legal or medical documents or the like. As far as Charles has been able to gather, neither the presentists nor the historicists adhere firmly to one thing or the other, but this is too close to questions of methodology and research philosophy for Katie and Karen not to stumble over themselves and each other in trying to answer diplomatically enough for Dean Hanley while still suggesting that their approach is best. Drs. Ortiz and Pace watch their students intently, leaning forward like they want to jump in; the new admit who asked the question, who had clearly expected a simple answer, looks taken aback. Charles imagines that over lunch, everyone will be scrambling for a way to regain what they see as lost ground.
First, though, there’s one more panel, this one on teaching. Bianca explains that she is there to offer practical information, while Antonio and Kevin can address any questions about being a teaching assistant or composition instructor, and the fourth panelist, Rachel Glass, is a senior English major who can speak to the relationship between undergraduates and grad students in the department. Charles recognizes Rachel as one of the students who found Jack’s body, the one who later had a panic attack in Piper’s office. She looks a bit pale now, but much more composed, her curly dark hair pulled back, her outfit that particular mix of professional and quirky that Charles recognizes from his own days as an English major: a collared shirt with tiny birds on it, silver earrings in the shape of quotation marks. She introduces herself as the head of the English Majors Organization—“but I promise we do more than sit around in the dark and wear black eyeliner, despite our acronym.”
Bianca explains how TAships are scheduled and Antonio explains what happens in his Introductory Composition class and Kevin talks about running discussion sections for a lit survey course. Rachel summarizes what the English Majors Organization does and talks about the mentorship they’ve received from grad students. She stumbles a bit over this last, but comes off as appreciative all the same, which Charles thinks is probably good given how not at all appreciative most people in the department seem of each other despite their attempts to appear collegial.
It’s during the Q&A, again, that things go poorly. Kevin and Antonio contradict each other on the subject of what sorts of texts undergraduates respond to best. Kevin visibly grimaces when Antonio talks about incorporating creative writing and performance into his composition classes. Charles glances at Hanley from time to time; he doesn’t look pleased.
“Can you talk a little about how the professors fit in to student relationships?” one of the new admits asks. “Like, do undergrads and grads get a chance to also interact with professors together, at departmental events or something? And I wondered if maybe Rachel, you could talk about how much undergrads are incorporated into departmental life and professors’ research? At my institution it’s been really useful to me as an undergrad to get to be part of all that so I wondered how it was here.”
Rachel nods, but she glances to the others uncertainly.
“I can talk about the grad student perspective on that first,” says Antonio. “I’ve got really strong relationships with faculty in the department. Everyone I work with is really good about giving feedback, sharing resources, introducing me to people at conferences—I feel like they really have my back. We’re a community. We really care about each other and about the work we’re each doing. Honestly, Schenley’s a decent-sized university but it doesn’t ever feel like that, as a grad student anyway. It’s just all super personal.”
Super personal is not inaccurate, Charles thinks, watching Kevin try to figure out how to navigate his own response. “Yeah,” he says finally. “I, uh—I also have a strong community of people who—who care about my work and who really guide me through the program and now the job market and…professors are—really personable, really approachable. For the most part.”
They look at Rachel. She’s gone paler, Charles thinks. Her eyes are flicking down at the table, at her hands, at the wall. She swallows. “Yeah, uh…I mean, as far as grad students go, like, when they’re teaching, they’re really accessible. And I’ve had—I’ve had some issues I’ve talked to a grad student—to grad students about, and—and they…” She licks her lips. “They’ve helped. With professors, uh…” She twists her fingers together. Charles sees, suddenly, that she’s trembling minutely. “I mean. They definitely know their material. And like, you know, they…they…” She falters. Charles takes a quick look around the room. Julian is watching her intently. Isabel and Pace both are, too, though their gazes seem to be attempting to transmit some message to Rachel as if they can beam it into her head. Shut up and toe the party line, probably.
“I mean,” says Rachel, her breath hitching, “you know, it’s not always…sometimes, they’re busy with their own work, or—or things get…things get a little—”
A noise—a motion. Heads whip around, searching. At the front of the room, something lands on the stone floor. A small dark ball. Then, suddenly, smoke: a black cloud puffs up from the ball, streaming into the room, floating over to the shocked panelists, fuzzing them out as exclamations and shrieks fill the room. Chairs tip over, tables wobble, people jump to their feet and several start a rush to the door; but then, as soon as it had begun, the smoke fizzles out. At the front of the room sits a burned-out shell of a cheap smoke bomb.
People are coughing and pinching their noses. In the back of the room, Charles only gets a whiff, but his pulse has spiked all the same, not so much because of the smoke bomb as because the moment it went off, Julian grabbed his arm and held on tight till the smoke cleared.
“What the fuck,” someone says loudly, and the new admits, eyes watering, look around bewildered.
“All right.” Dean Hanley stands, voice imperious. “Everyone, please leave the room. Now. We will return after lunch. My apologies; I can only assume this was some very ill advised joke. Whoever is responsible, I advise you to talk to me now. Our prospective students, please join Dr. Maynard here; he will take you to lunch. Again, I am sorry for the disturbance.” As everyone starts to murmur and pack up their things, Hanley says, not quite in an undertone, “Isabel, Francis, we need to talk right now.”
“What,” Julian mutters to Charles on their way out of the room, “was that about?”
“I don’t know,” Charles says, trying not to notice that, where Julian grabbed him, his arm is still tingling.