Chapter 38

The police are back in the English department. They pace and hover, taking statements, collecting evidence. Charles and Julian gave them an abbreviated version of their story after they’d emerged cobwebbed and dusty from the tunnels; Julian will have to go into the station and lay it all out in detail later. When they talked to the police, the detective narrowed his eyes at Charles and told him that if he was going to be doing such hands-on work with Julian, he’d better get his own private detective’s license. The suggestion had bloomed into a big question mark, now hovering, waiting for its turn, at the back of Charles’ mind.

They congregate in Piper’s office: him, Julian, Piper, Lu. Lu, who came back from her turn with the police looking more drawn and shaken than before, is wrapped in a thin felt blanket patterned with dinosaurs that Piper had pulled out of the department’s lost-and-found. Piper is sitting close to her, shooting her worried, grateful, relief-drenched looks.

“You really don’t want some food?” they ask for the third time. “You look like you’ve barely eaten.”

“Granola bars and mac and cheese,” she says, shrugging. “It wasn’t so bad. I took the Velma cup from the grad lounge, so I had company.”

“What about the fic?” Julian asks. “Where did you post it from?”

“There’s a computer in the department library. I had the story on a Google doc, so I just had to plug in the code, and I didn’t want to use up my phone battery—no outlets where I was staying, I had to sneak out into the hallway if I wanted to plug it in. I posted the fic in the middle of the night. I was still terrified someone would see me, though. Especially after I found out about the bugs in the offices.”

Julian frowns. “How did you know about that? And us—you knew there was a private detective looking for you. Jack’s murder I understand, that was on the news, but the rest, unless you were close enough to listen in to people’s conversations…”

Lu glances at Piper, who squirms uncomfortably. “I…texted her.” They look a little embarrassed. “I didn’t have any idea if she was actually getting my texts. I just…I needed to tell someone what was going on, and I—I guess I thought maybe knowing would…I don’t know.” They look at their lap. “Make you want to come back, I guess.”

Lu squeezes their shoulder. “It did,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry I…” She sighs. “I’m sorry I never responded.”

Charles wonders how many hundreds of words Piper sent out into the void, how many dozens of texts, how many where are yous and I miss yous and please just tell me you’re okays. How Lu must have felt, looking at them quickly to save her phone battery, then the words lingering, bouncing off the insides of her head as she sat, stuck, waiting, in those dusty tunnels, for something that would make it safe for her to come out.                   “What was your plan?” Julian asks. “What were you going to do, when you first decided to hide there?”

Lu sighs. “Find proof.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. I thought I’d break into Maynard’s office, try to find something useful…Or I’d get access somehow to school records, see if there were ever any complaints filed against him that got dismissed. Find some way to spy on him, even, record a meeting in his office with someone who…” She rubs her forehead. “And then the murder happened. I knew it was dangerous already—that’s why I had to go missing—but after that…” She bites her lip, hard. “I thought Jack would get the warning. I didn’t know—I’d never have left him otherwise. I should never have pulled him into this in the first place.”

Piper wraps an arm around her. “You couldn’t have known,” they say firmly.

Lu shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Did Isabel really—” Piper bites off the question sharply, but it hangs in the air.

“She said what Maynard had been doing was horrible,” Lu says, voice brittle. “She said she had no idea it had been happening. She said she’d take it to the administration, talk to Rachel, help her file a complaint if she wanted to or find some other way if not—but. We…needed to wait a few more weeks. A month or two. Till after the new admits had accepted Schenley’s offer of admission, so that they wouldn’t back out when they found out there was a sexual harassment case happening in the department.”

She says this all very steadily, but Charles can see in her eyes that there’s a raw red gash of pain somewhere underneath, cutting, he thinks, very deep indeed. Piper’s unhappiness is closer to the surface; they look like they are still dazed, still swimming in the shock that will dissipate soon enough into grief.

“Were there others?” Julian asks quietly. “How long had this been going on?”

“Yes,” says Lu. “There were others.” She wraps the blanket around her a little tighter. “Rachel said…she said she doesn’t know how many. She said that for a long time she thought it was just her. Till she talked to someone who’d graduated a couple years before. And that person had talked to somebody else, who’d heard it had happened to somebody else…you know. Maynard…he’d pick the smart ones. One every couple years. Some bright, eager young woman who wanted guidance, mentorship—they’d talk in his office, about her work, and gradually…” Lu swallows. “A hand on the shoulder, the arm. Compliments, first about her writing, then about her in general, then…you know. Rachel said it was her junior year she started really feeling uncomfortable. But he wasn’t ever crass or super overt or…she thought maybe, if she’d responded differently—if she’d been flattered, you know, felt special, she thought he might have taken it further. Well. She knew he would have, I guess. Because it happened with the girl she talked to. Maynard slept with some of them, eventually, if they agreed to it. It’s that kind of thing—he wouldn’t have forced anyone physically. He just pressured them into it, pushed them closer to it bit by bit, and put them in a position where saying no meant they’d probably have trouble finishing their degree. It definitely contributed to the department’s attrition rate—some of the women he targeted just left. But the fact that the ones he slept with supposedly gave their consent would have given him a lot of protection. Especially back when he was younger, when what he was doing wasn’t even that uncommon.”

Charles feels queasy; feels guilty, too, for the fact that if he’d been there, if he’d been one of those grad students or one of Rachel’s classmates, he’d never have known, probably never even suspected.

“But it didn’t get that far with Rachel,” Julian says.

Lu bites her lip. “No. She stopped going to his office hours, tried not to be alone with him. She stopped taking classes with him, or tried to, except—” She squeezes her eyes shut. “Sometimes he was the only one teaching required classes for English majors.”

Piper lets out a noise. “Oh, god,” they say, sounding strangled. “He was. We all knew he was. The other professors, they don’t want to teach the more traditional classes very often—sometimes they have to do an intro course or a survey course but the program requirements haven’t been redone in ages and they complain about having to just go through the canon over and over again. So whenever they can they teach upper division or grad classes, specialized stuff. And leave the boring stuff to Maynard, who likes it anyway.”

“Which makes him the main professor the undergrads get to know in their first couple years,” Lu says. She kicks the toe of her sneaker against the floor. “The undergrads weren’t doing research, weren’t cutting edge, so they just got…neglected. And we were all too busy worrying about our own shit to notice—”

And there it was. All the infighting, the theoretical disagreements, the cold shoulders and filibusters and jockeying for position; all the battle lines and strategies; that high hum of urgency that zinged through the hallways. It had been so obvious that the English department was dysfunctional that the truth of it, the real trouble, had grown dark and spreading just out of sight. Not just, Piper thinks, because they were all too distracted to smell it rotting beneath the floorboards, but because they had all given it space to grow. In the corners they neglected, amongst the people who weren’t tactically useful or shining with possibility, they’d let something fester. And underneath all the flash and flare—though, Piper acknowledges, their own wounds were real enough—under all that, this had been happening. For years; for decades, maybe.

“Fuck,” says Piper. Their head has sunk into their hands. “Fuck. We…”

“Yeah,” says Lu. “We did.”

A silence. After a long moment, Lu lets out a sigh. “I am actually really hungry,” she says. “Would you mind, Piper?”

“Of course,” they say, jumping up. “Yeah. I’ll go get something. Be back in, like, fifteen.”

“Thank you.”

Lu watches them go. When their footsteps have disappeared down the hall, she says, “Were they really worried about me?”

Julian glances at Charles, hesitating.

“Yeah,” Charles replies. “They were.” Lu nods. “But they were sure you hadn’t left of your own accord, right from the start. They said you wouldn’t have gone without telling them.”

Something flits across Lu’s face he can’t quite catch. “They were right.”

“Why the note?” Julian asks suddenly. “That’s what clued them in. The Reichenbach reference. Holmes faking his own disappearance. Why leave it, if you wanted them to believe you’d really gone for good?”

Lu shakes her head. “Yeah. I…I don’t know. I don’t know! I planted that plane ticket to London on their laptop so they’d think I’d really left. I knew I couldn’t tell them what was going on or I’d put them in danger—after the warning note I got, I couldn’t drag them into it, but…” She looks at Julian, then Charles, sorting through the words in her head. “I guess…I guess even though I knew it would be better if I made a clean break, I couldn’t stand them thinking I’d left without saying goodbye.”

Charles nods. The admission warms him, fills him with something bright and bubbly, though Lu offers it reluctantly, like she’d messed things up by failing to totally cover her trail. It’s triumph he’s feeling, he realizes, quiet and shy but triumph all the same. Because Piper was right. That thing they have, that thing winding itself between them and Lu, the costumes, the furniture, the hours and minutes and years; it had held. When the rope between them had strained and pulled, one thread stayed fast, stayed tight. Holmes and Watson.

“Rachel,” Lu says. “Is she…has she been okay? While I was gone?”

Charles glances at Julian. “We didn’t see much of her during the investigation,” he says. “I think she’s been pretty stressed, though.” Lu nods. “You know she’s the one who figured out where you were?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s…she’s remarkable. I just wish…” She sighs. “I wish I’d been able to do something for her.”

“You did,” Charles says immediately. “You tried to help her. More than once, before you left. And then you didn’t really leave—you stayed here, and you made sure she knew it.”

“My secret code,” Lu says, nudging her sneaker toe against the floor again. “I guess. I’d meant to actually find some evidence of what Maynard had been doing, but instead I hid in the walls all week, terrified.”

“Someone had just been murdered.”

“I know.”

“And she’ll be all right now. Everyone knows what he did.”

Lu laughs humorlessly. “No. She won’t be all right. She’ll have to go through what happened, over and over again. The police will make her tell them about it because it’s relevant to Jack’s death. And the administration, if there’s some sort of disciplinary hearing—they’ll pick apart every aspect of her story. Look at her texts, her emails. Ask for dates and times and things he said to her. Every time he put a hand on her shoulder or her knee. They’ll dissect things he said that she knew, absolutely knew, were invitations, to tell if they fit their standards of unacceptable. At what point, if at any point, a line was crossed between her being oversensitive and him being inappropriate. I wanted…I wanted her to not have to do that. I wanted her to not even have to be named at all. Now, with the murder and the discovery that Maynard’s been sexually harassing his students for decades, I’d be surprised if the newspapers didn’t pick this story up.”

“They’ll have to believe her,” Charles says, needing badly for this to be true. “Sorry, I—I’m not being stupid, I know people often don’t believe women, it’s just—he held a knife to your throat. We saw it. And he killed a student.”

“He’s denying the sexual harassment, though,” Lu says. “He may even believe he didn’t do anything wrong.”

“He killed a student because that student knew what he’d done.”

“Or because he knew the student was going to accuse him of something that could ruin his career whether he did it or not,” Lu rebuts. “That’s what he’ll argue. And even if they do believe Rachel, even if other women come forward, that belief isn’t going to protect them. They’ll still have to go over it again and again and again. They’ll still have everything they did picked apart, dissected, evaluated. I wanted to make it so it could just…happen without them.” Her mouth twists as if with the taste of something bitter. “You know what? I’m almost glad he did something else. I’m almost glad he held a knife to my throat. At least that’s…” She shakes her head. “At least that’s a clean sort of violence. Something they can understand.”

“The murder charge will stick,” Julian says quietly. “I’m pretty sure. Now that they know what they’re looking for, they’ll find evidence.”

“Hooray,” she says hollowly. “Another bad guy off the streets.”

They sit in silence for a minute. Charles’ head is spinning. He still has so many questions, each one pressing against the whirl of feelings, an amorphous indecipherable mass of emotion, spinning in loops around his body. “Why did Maynard plant the listening devices?” he asks Julian. The question feels safe enough to voice aloud.

“I assume because he wanted to keep tabs on the departmental infighting,” Julian replies. “He said that by the end of this open house he’d have discredited his colleagues enough to regain some control in the department. And it was working—the dean was losing his patience.”

“I wonder if he was planning something. Some big mess at open house that he could blame on his colleagues.”

“Probably,” says Julian. “He had a smoke bomb ready to throw. Maybe he’d meant to save that for later, but when Rachel started talking about student-teacher relationships…”

Charles nods. “Oh,” he says, realizing. “And the book. Lu, your book contract. That’s how he knew about it. And he made sure Dean Hanley knew and was worried about the effects it might have on the school’s public image. He’s the one who sent Hanley those excerpts of your dissertation, not Pace.”

Lu nods. “Piper told me about that. Yeah. I…Pace…” Her voice is rueful, guilty. “Pace wouldn’t have done that. He’d never have mobilized administrative homophobia to get what he wanted. I used to work with him, you know. He wouldn’t have crossed that line.”

“Isabel thought he would.”

“Isabel was wrong. But if I hadn’t already known about Maynard…” She sighs. “I’d probably have believed it too. Not really, not deep down. But I’d have acted like I did.” She twists her hands in her lap. “Jack and I were going to tell Francis about Maynard. When Isabel didn’t respond well, I thought…I thought maybe he would. But I couldn’t just go to him myself. He’d have thought it was some sort of trick. Or, I don’t know—maybe he wouldn’t have. It just seemed safer with Jack on my side. And, well. Jack and I used to be friends, too.”

A spasm of grief crosses her face. Charles wants to tell her, again, it’s not your fault—she’s not the reason Jack is dead, not the reason Rachel has to deal with all this, not the reason Isabel let her down. But he can sense she won’t believe him, at least not all the way. She was part of all of this, all the conflict and clashing, for years: she’ll be feeling that weight of responsibility, he thinks, for the rest of her life. Whether that’s fair or not.

They sit again in silence, until Piper returns. They’re holding a foil-wrapped burrito in one hand and a couple packets of hot sauce in the other, but they seem to have forgotten this. Their face is all alarm and dismay.

“What’s happened?” Lu asks immediately.

“They…” Piper shakes their head. “I ran into Phoebe. She said that—she’s just heard. Maynard, he says he didn’t kill Jack.”

“Well, sure—” Lu begins, but Piper cuts her off.

“He’s saying Todd killed Jack.”

Lu stares at them.

“Todd Burns?” Julian’s face has gone sharp and focused. “Maynard’s graduate student?”

“Yes,” says Piper unhappily. “Yes. He says Todd found out Jack was going to accuse Maynard of sexual harassment and—and killed him. Without Maynard knowing anything about it.”

“And Todd?” Julian presses. “Is he denying it?”

Piper swallows. “No. Todd says it’s true. Todd says he planted the bugs, too. According to Todd, the only thing Maynard did was pull the knife on Lu. And that only because she was trying to attack him.”

“No,” says Lu immediately. “No.”

Charles glances at Julian, heart suddenly racing. “We can say otherwise,” he says. “About the knife. We heard you both talking, right before we came in. There was no sound of a struggle.”

“Okay,” says Piper, a little wildly, “okay, but the rest of it—”

“Fuck,” says Lu. She buries her face in her hands. “Oh, fuck. Piper.”

“What?” Piper sinks down next to her, setting the food on a nearby desk. “What?”

“He’d do it, you know.”

A silence. “Oh, fuck,” says Piper.

“What?” Julian asks. “Who?”

“Todd,” Lu says. She sounds weary, now. “Not without Maynard telling him to, that’s bullshit, but…he’d have done whatever Maynard wanted.”

“Including murder?” Julian asks doubtfully.

But Charles understands: he can see it happening, all of it. He doesn’t even know Todd Burns and he can tell it’s true. Because he knows Piper’s devotion to Isabel, the other students’ devotion to Francis Pace. His own devotion to Julian, even. That glittering promise Maynard must have offered to Todd, his single, sole acolyte; the promise of wisdom and care; the promise of a worthy cause. Not just a general, but a priest or an abbot: someone to give yourself over to until they give you back, transformed.

“He wouldn’t want to get his hands dirty,” Lu says. “So he told Todd to do it for him.”

An angry, helpless pause.

“Accessory to murder…” Charles begins, the phrase supplied promptly from his brain’s stores of years and years reading mystery novels; but he trails off. He is beginning to realize something that only the best of those books ever even glance at: that the law has nothing to do with the mystery. It is the deus ex machina that soars in at the end to make the killer disappear. He’s read that the villain being arrested offers mystery readers a kind of closure, a return to the normal world of law and order, but that’s only the lie that the genre tells to get itself off the hook. Only repetition, in book after book after TV series after TV series, is what gives that lie credence, hammers it home, makes it stick its landing. And the reason it’s a lie isn’t because the harm the villain perpetrated can’t be healed in a courtroom or a prison, or at least not only that. It’s a lie because there’s a slippage somewhere there, somewhere between the person’s guilt and the charges brought against them, because guilt doesn’t operate in the same system, or by the same mechanics, as crime and punishment. Maynard’s guilt can’t be separated cleanly from everybody else’s, not because theirs is equivalent but because it is all wrought from the same warped web, and they were all tugging on the strings in one way or another, sticky-fingered and desperate. Maynard deserves worse than the others do, but Charles is not sure that statement offers any real comfort. If Maynard is drawn and quartered or burned alive or mounted on a pike at the city gates, that guilt, that dark swirling mass of harm and hurt he cultivated like black mold in the halls and walls of Schenley University, will exit his body like an evil spirit after an exorcism and find its way, inevitably, unstoppably, to someone else.

“I’m sorry,” Julian says. He says it Lu, to Piper, maybe even to Charles. He looks at them helplessly, and says, “I don’t have much faith in detectives anymore.”

Lu goes home with Piper, back to their shared apartment.

“Oh,” she says, stopping in the doorway. “Oh my god.”

“The police,” says Piper. “They did a search. I haven’t cleaned it up yet.”

“You didn’t tell me about this.”

“No.” Piper gazes at the torn-open sofa, the scattered letters. “I didn’t want you to worry.”

They both sleep in Piper’s bed, tucked together, silent. The clothes Lu took with her when she left are still where she hid them, in one of the rooms in the walls of the English department. She sleeps in Piper’s pajamas, a soft grey extra-long T-shirt that nearly reaches her knees. Outside, a light rain taps against the window, all night long.

“We should talk about everything,” Lu says, after Piper makes coffee and toast that they eat at the chipped kitchen table, heavy socks protecting against the morning chill.

       “I know,” says Piper.

       Lu shifts in her chair. “There are some other people I need to talk to, too. I…have to go back to campus today.”

       Piper nods. “Do you want me to come with?”

       “Would you mind?”

       “No,” they say, finishing their coffee. They take her hand and, quickly but gently, kiss it. Then they get up from the table, putting their dishes in the sink. “I’ll come with you.”

Outside, the ground is damp with last night’s rain. They make it halfway around to the front of the house when Tyler Wakefield appears.

“Hey,” he says. He looks at Piper, then at Lu. “Hey. Lu. I—I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“Thanks, Tyler.” Lu glances at Piper, questioning.

“Can we talk?” Tyler asks them, fast. He looks oddly vulnerable, soft, less like the magazine-cover-to-be he usually looks like.

Piper nods. “Yeah. I just—” They glance at Lu. “We were just going to—”

“It’s okay,” Lu cuts in. She smiles at Piper reassuringly. “Go. Talk. Don’t worry about me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. It’s probably just as well I do this on my own anyway.”

Piper hesitates another moment, then gestures to Tyler to come inside. They leave Lu behind, looking after them.