Grey Matters (2 page)

‘I was wondering if we could talk about my latest research?’ Clearing her throat, Dulcie found the courage to speak up. For several months now, she’d been honing an idea – a new reading of a lesser known Gothic novel.
The Ravages of Umbria
only survived in two fragments, and most scholars dismissed its beleaguered heroine and lurking ghosts as so much two-hundred-year-old trash. But Dulcie had fallen for the spunky Hermetria and, more importantly, had a theory about the resolution of the heroine’s dilemma that no other scholar had yet suggested. According to Dulcie, the orphaned heroine hadn’t been undone by a nasty ghoul or some fortune-hunting suitor, as would have been common for a book of its time. Instead, Dulcie believed, the heroine’s supposedly faithful attendant Demetria had betrayed her – and the author had hidden the clues to this surprise resolution in the attendant’s overwrought speeches. The interpretation was totally Dulcie’s – and something of a breakthrough – and she had spent the last few months compiling evidence from the text to support her idea. At one point, only a few months ago, Professor Bullock had been encouraging. Had even thought her thesis would be publishable. Recently, however, he had seemed to lose interest. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I’ve made a bunch of notes.’

Angling one of two desk lamps to see better, she pulled a bunch of papers out of her bag, determined to take the lead. To actually get some substantial feedback from the tenured scholar after weeks of dithering. Dulcie knew that her thesis was undoubtedly secondary in the professor’s life to his own great work, but, well . . . ‘Faint heart never fair doctorate won,’ she murmured to herself, as she placed a heavy book next to the papers. ‘There’s a phrase here that I’m curious about,’ she added in a more audible voice. ‘I seem to recall reading it elsewhere, and it’s kind of unusual.’ She thumbed through the book. ‘Here it is, “Cool as emeralds.” It’s really quite a striking image. Original, I think, but it made me wonder about precedent, and I was considering if I should do some biographical research. There’s an interesting essay here, in the Gunning text—’

‘Gunning? Bah. A hack. He’s just a condenser, a collector, a . . . oh hell, what do you call it?’

‘An aggregator? A collator?’ Dulcie jumped in before the professor could get more upset. ‘Well, yes, he does collect previously published material, but—’

‘Compiler. A damned anthologizer. Bah!’ Bullock broke in before she could finish and began shuffling the papers on his desk. Dulcie fished her own pages out and placed them on top. They were virtually the same notes she’d dropped off the week before; she’d never heard back from him about them. But if he really wanted to see what progress she was making, she’d load him up with copies till his desk collapsed. ‘Where’s my damned pen?’

‘Here, sir.’ Dulcie automatically handed him her own: a refillable fountain pen. Her favorite.

Bullock grabbed it, gave it a cursory glance and tossed it down. ‘That’s not a real pen, and it certainly isn’t mine. And why are you bothering with biography, anyway?’

It wasn’t really a question, but she wanted to make her case. ‘Well, so little is known about the author of
The Ravages of Umbria
,’ she began, retrieving her pen. It was tricky, sometimes, filling in her adviser while they both pretended he had read her work, and his little fit of pique hadn’t made her any more relaxed. ‘After all, only some of the text remains, and we don’t know if the author wrote anything else.’ Dulcie’s area of expertise, the Gothic novels of the eighteenth century, was peopled by an odd set of characters – impoverished noblewomen, mad monks, the occasional ghost – but none of the heroines she read about ever had to deal with the self-satisfied academic. ‘And there’s one theory, put forth in Chapter Five here—’

No use. Bullock was waving his pipe and had scooped up her papers with a loud grumble. ‘Nonsense! Context is simply an excuse. Coward’s way out.’ He rumpled up the papers and leaned back in his chair, before tossing them back down again. ‘It’s all in the text – or it’s nowhere.’

Dulcie sighed and sat back in her own chair. Bullock was on a roll. Famous for the book he’d written more than twenty years before, the white-haired professor started on about syntax and rhythm. Which was all well and good, but Dulcie had heard him give this lecture before. At least three times in this office, as well as once a semester when he kicked off ‘The Great Novel,’ the survey course almost every undergrad ended up taking. Plus, she knew that if she opened up the copy of his masterwork,
Unlocking the Great Books
, that sat prominently displayed, cover out, on the shelf behind his desk, she could read the same speech, word for word.

She knew she shouldn’t complain. The course based on ‘Great Books’ – ‘Doorstoppers,’ as some university wag had dubbed it – had largely paid for her graduate education; the class always needed section leaders. But she was working on her doctoral thesis now. She’d been hoping for something a little more in-depth.

‘And so, young lady, the best advice I can give you is to scrap your research.’ Bullock tapped his pipe to empty it, getting as much ash on the desk – and Dulcie’s notes – as in the ashtray. ‘And that hack Gunning. Forget the facts . . .’ Dulcie could have finished the sentence with him: ‘and open your ears.’

Did he even realize how repetitive he had become? As Dulcie took the proffered pages – unread, but well wrinkled – she examined the equally creased face of her mentor. He’d been brilliant once. She’d read his book as an undergrad. They all had. And when he’d singled her out for attention as a grad student, she’d been flattered beyond belief. He certainly looked the part, with the beard and the tweed, his hair just long enough to evoke his early days as a sexy semiotics crossover, back when the boundaries between linguistics and literature were still fluid. Rumor was that the aging institution was working on a great new idea. A new book that would break the field wide open again. Dulcie was no longer sure she believed in it – or in him. Just looking around his cluttered office provided ample evidence. The man was comfortable. Dug in. He had no reason to start anything new.

But Dulcie had work to do. She had settled on her thesis topic only that summer after uncovering what she believed was the hidden subtext in its flowery prose, and she was desperate to get her ideas on paper. Even without Bullock’s ‘status report’ deadline, she wanted to get started before another scholar stumbled over what she considered her breakthrough.

But before she could air her own theories, Dulcie had to be able to base her thesis in good, solid scholarship. She’d been making notes for months now, jotting down the linguistic discrepancies between the heroine and her sidekick. She’d even gone back to a bunch of the book’s contemporaries, trying to find out what the author might have been reading and what might have influenced her. This was important, even if it wasn’t progress of the sort that Professor Bullock wanted. No matter what her mentor said, she needed to find out more about the author of
The Ravages
if she was going to write her own work with any kind of authority.

Maybe the key was, like those other clues, in the text? That emerald reference seemed to echo in her mind. Perhaps there were other phrases like that one, other images that would lead a careful reader back to the truth. She’d been so focused on the new kitten lately; maybe she’d missed something. And so, without waiting for the professor or his aging waif of an assistant to show her out, she shoved her papers back into the bag, along with the three books she’d been hoping to discuss and the laptop with all her notes. Hefting it all on to her shoulder, she let herself out the heavy front door. Had Hermetria felt like this, when she left the castle keep up on that Umbrian mountain? Had she breathed the free air with relief, before descending the romantically rocky equivalent of the professor’s slate stoop?

She must have, Dulcie thought. Because Hermetria was really just like her. A woman against the odds, destined to triumph. And with that happy thought, she nearly skipped down the tall, dirty stairs, and right into the corpse that lay across the path.

TWO

T
he deceased was Cameron Dessay, one-time Anglo-French wunderkind of Comparative Lit and relative newcomer to the English Department. Known simply as ‘De-sigh’ among a sizable proportion of the female student body, Cameron had been not only a brilliant researcher, but charming – in multiple languages. However, the pale, fine-featured face that had inspired so many hopeless aspirations now lay unnaturally still, the glossy black locks matted with blood that had flowed from a small but distinct wound in the bare, white throat.

Unable to speak as she was ushered back into the house, Dulcie slipped from shock into a dank, wet pool of guilt. She had not been one of Cameron’s admirers. Besides her basic distrust of Cameron’s playboy reputation, there was the class issue. Cameron had come into the department last year, but everyone knew his heart was in English-French comparative literature, just as everyone knew that Comp Lit looked down on the English Department as simplistic. Archaic. And possibly stupid. The straight English Lit types had rallied back, pooh-poohing the Comp Lit types as dilettantes, with Cameron as their poster boy. A lightweight who drove around in a fancy car and dressed better than any grad student had a right to. A hedonist. A cold, dead . . . No, no matter what she had thought of her dashing colleague, this was not how she wanted to remember him. But when she closed her eyes to block out the image, it only grew stronger in her mind. The cut looked so small and strange, so wrong in that smooth white skin. His green eyes frozen, like glass.

‘Miss? Are you okay?’ The uniform who had walked her back into Professor Bullock’s house looked worried. Dulcie nodded and tried to smile. ‘It’s only that you’re awfully pale.’

‘I always am.’ Dulcie tried to reassure the young cop. Still, she took his advice and put her head down between her knees. Spots appeared – the same shape as that wound – and she blinked them away, staring at the book bag that she’d dropped as he led her to a seat. Was that . . .? Yes, she reached beneath the bag’s closing flap and pulled out a single white whisker. The kitten must have gotten into the bag overnight. Dulcie twirled the stiff strand as her breathing became easier. During their few months together, that kitten had already managed to get into everything, she thought, smiling to herself. The whisker – or thoughts of the inquisitive young cat – had banished the spots, but Dulcie kept playing with the long white hair, her head down over the bag. That young cop had his pad out. He was going to start asking questions, and right now she was happy just to breathe.

‘Excuse me.’ She heard the uniform stand up and step away. Good. There wasn’t much she could tell him, anyway. Cameron had just been . . . there. She closed her eyes. ‘Ma’am?’

Dulcie looked up, but the cop wasn’t talking to her. Out in the hallway, some murmuring was met by a shriek and a thud. Conquering her own queasiness, Dulcie ran to look.

‘No! Professor!’ Three uniformed cops gathered around a slumped form, surrounded by books. Of course Polly Heinhold, perpetual grad student and Bullock’s part-time housekeeper, would be a fainter. Skin so pale she was almost translucent, colorless eyes always rimmed in red, Polly looked like one of the ghostly spirits from Dulcie’s novels. Dulcie might be fair-skinned, more prone to freckle than to tan, but Polly was spectral, with white-blonde hair that hung as lank as seaweed. The older woman served as a cautionary tale, too. Rumor had it that Polly had been in the graduate program for at least seven years, which meant that any academic status she’d once had was now iffy, if it existed at all. Instead, somewhere along the line, all those endless meetings had morphed into her doing errands – and then laundry. Departmental rumor had it that she rented a tiny garret over in Davis Square, one of the few neighborhoods grad students could still afford alone. But for all intents and purposes, her life was here, in Professor Bullock’s house, and had been for the greater part of a decade. And while nobody dared to ask, there had been no hint of a thesis in that life – or in the works – for many of those years.
There but for the grace of God go I
, thought Dulcie, and went to help the poor woman.

‘Polly? Are you okay?’ Pushing her way between the uniforms, Dulcie reached the seated woman and helped her up. ‘Let’s go sit someplace more comfortable, shall we?’ Although the older student – if student she still was – stood a good three inches taller than Dulcie, she felt light as a feather. Or maybe, Dulcie thought, feeling the pale woman’s arm, a bat’s wing. ‘When did you last eat, Polly?’

‘The book . . .’ A limp hand reached out for a volume that lay face up, its pages slowly turning.

‘We can pick those up later.’ Dulcie closed the offending volume and helped the other woman over to the sitting room.

‘The professor! The professor!’ Sinking down into a moth-eaten settee, Polly looked around frantically.

‘He’s fine, Polly. He’s in the back.’ Actually, Dulcie didn’t know where the police had taken the professor. He’d shown up not when she first screamed, but after she had scrambled back up the steps, ringing the bell and pounding on the tall wooden doors furiously; then he’d gone to call 911. Still, since the cop had seated her in the front room, his office seemed like a good bet.

‘Miss, do you mind?’ Dulcie looked down to a hand on her upper arm. Her cop – the young one – was pulling at her gently. ‘If you’re up for some questions?’ She looked back at Polly, who seemed able to sit and willing to stop shrieking. An older cop stood waiting for her.

‘Sure.’ Dulcie let herself be led into the kitchen, which someone – undoubtedly Polly – had kept reasonably clean. ‘May I have some water?’

The officer jumped to fill a glass for her, and then refill it. Dulcie hadn’t realized how thirsty she was. But the drink, and the distraction of Polly, had her feeling a bit more like herself. It didn’t help the young cop, though.

‘All I can tell you is it – he – wasn’t there when I came in.’ She’d said this a dozen times already. ‘And the professor was alone, I think. I mean, he let me in and I didn’t hear anyone else in the house. Yes, we were in his office.’ She paused for a moment to consider the impact of her words. ‘The office is in the back, under the stairs. So I guess I would have heard if someone had come down them. We talked for about an hour, and then, well, then I found him.’