True Grey (25 page)

‘
Melinda Harquist to receive Dashwood Prize,
' she read. The link was to the
Ellery Teller
, student newspaper for Ellery College. Dulcie vaguely recalled hearing about it – small and artsy, with a make-your-own curriculum program that supposedly allowed ‘brilliant minds to flower'. According to the paper, this prestigious award, which Dulcie had never heard of, honored an undergraduate's library collection.

‘What a strange prize,' Dulcie said to herself. ‘All that means is that you have money to buy books.' A strange feeling, like the faintest puff of air, brushed her forearms. ‘Or she could have inherited a collection.'

She scrolled down, and felt her heart begin to race. This was silly, she told herself. She was worrying about nothing, about a possible hint that a vague and unformed fantasy would prove to be invalid. Still, she couldn't help thinking about it: Melinda had information about the author of
The Ravages
. She had some kind of noteworthy private library. Could she have inherited something important? Could she even have inherited something from the author herself?

Dulcie read further. No, the Dashwood Prize referred specifically to bound books, not manuscripts. Still, it left her wanting to know more, and so she typed in a few more words: family, background. Home. While she was waiting, she did some quick calculations. Two hundred years would be ten generations, more or less. A rare book could have been passed along over that span. Of course, that would mean that her author had married. Several of her colleagues, even Thorpe himself, had suggested that her periods of silence could be explained away by family issues, including childbirth or rearing a family. But Dulcie had read her radical essays, comparing the institution of marriage to – what was it? – ‘
Slavery that enchain'd not only limbs but mind, taking o'er the last free exercise of the Female spirit.
' No, despite her own fantasies that she, somehow, was descended from her nameless heroine, Dulcie couldn't see how she fit any kind of domesticity, happy or not, in with the composition of such fiery words.

‘
Harquist, Melinda.
' Dulcie clicked on the link, expecting another item from the Ellery website. Perhaps an early article on the author of
The Ravages
, or on some other ‘She-Author'. Instead, this seemed to be a who's-who type entry. Yes, she scrolled up, and saw ‘Who's Who of Women in Academics'. Dulcie itched to go to the main directory. Was she listed?

Fighting off the urge, she scrolled back down and read. ‘
As the sole child of a single mother, I have always felt supported . . .
' Well, that explained it, Dulcie thought. This was some kind of vanity press that solicited entries from its ‘honorees'. At a price, no doubt. ‘
Nor have I felt the pressing need for male approval of those raised with an overwhelming male presence.
' Dulcie could have laughed at that one. Tell that to Rafe – and to all the others she charmed. ‘
Indeed, never knowing my father has made my life singularly free to pursue academic excellence uninhibited by any male dominion.
'

That was sad. Dulcie sat for a moment. Her own father, Lucy's one-time ‘soul mate', had been present for Dulcie's early life. He still wrote to her when his busy schedule of meditating or whatever allowed. At least, Dulcie thought with a sigh, she knew who he was.

Something tickled her memory. Her name – that was it. Hadn't someone said that Melinda had added the ‘Sloane' because it was a family name? Maybe she found her father; Dulcie found the thought surprisingly heartening. But, no: ‘
As I proceed with my career, I have chosen to honor the mother who raised me and her mother before her, taking my maternal grandmother's maiden name as part of my own.
'

That didn't mean she hadn't found him, Dulcie told herself. She might have had time. But, no, she saw, the entry had been updated only the month before. Well, maybe that meant one less parent to mourn her, Dulcie told herself. Somehow, though, that just made it all worse.

S
ubsequent searches proved fruitless. No articles, no early hints of that thesis topic. Nothing that could have warned Dulcie that her own work was about to be derailed, and Dulcie realized she was in no mood to dissect the life of the late woman. She was so disheartened that she was ready to call it a day and close up early when her phone rang.

‘Chris!' In her joy, she didn't even want to let him speak. ‘Honey, I want to apologize. I know I get upset, but I was out of line.'

‘No, Dulcie, please,' he cut her off, and she waited, sure that his apologies would follow. ‘I know this has been a really difficult time. Believe me, I know.'

That wasn't really what Dulcie had been hoping for, but in her current conciliatory mood, she was willing to let it go.

‘I shouldn't take these things out on you, though.' There, she'd wanted to get that out. ‘It's just, well, finding one of my colleagues dead and then being hauled before the dean . . .'

She let her voice trail off, waiting for her boyfriend to rush in with sympathetic support.

‘So, she's your colleague now?' He chuckled, and Dulcie felt her stomach clench up. ‘No, I know, it was pretty horrible. And I'm sorry, too, Dulce.' That was better, but before Dulcie could make her next move – offer to pick up dumplings – Chris continued. ‘I know I've not been myself lately and, frankly, I know things have to change.'

‘Change?' She was having an out-of-body experience. She had to be. ‘Chris?'

‘Yeah.' He drew the word out, his voice sounding tired. ‘I was thinking—'

‘Ms Schwartz?' Dulcie looked up. Thalia, her English 10 student, was in the open doorway. ‘Are you free? Oh, sorry.' She backed into the hall.

‘Thalia, give me a minute?' Dulcie put her hand over the receiver, but Chris must have heard.

‘Dulce, it sounds like you're busy,' her boyfriend said. ‘Look, I have some ideas. We'll talk later.'

‘Chris, wait!' She couldn't let him go like this. Not with the dreaded ‘we'll talk' hanging between them. ‘Chris!' Clearly, however, he didn't want to linger. The line was dead.

‘Ms Schwartz?' Thalia stuck her head in, her pale face lined with concern. ‘Is everything OK?'

‘What? Oh, yes, it's fine.' To give herself a moment, Dulcie grabbed a bunch of the many papers piled on her desk and started to shuffle them into shape, sending others flying. ‘Come in.' Her head was spinning. She knew that with everything that had happened she wasn't being entirely rational. Still, she worried. She'd been difficult lately, maybe too difficult. Would Chris be having second thoughts about them living together? He wouldn't be breaking up with her, would he?

‘Ms Schwartz?' Dulcie looked up – and then down again. Thalia was kneeling by the side of the desk. ‘I think you dropped this.'

Dulcie took the sheet of paper her student had retrieved. At its top, like some offbeat letterhead, she saw the semi-circular ring of a coffee cup stain and felt herself blush. It didn't do for students to see how little respect she might have for their work. She glanced down at the type below the dark brown brand. ‘
Clearly, those who read “The Ravages of Umbria”
would have little idea of the rationally radical ideas enthusiastically espoused by its anonymous author . . .
'

‘Ms Schwartz?'

‘Hang on, Thalia.' Dulcie stared at the paper in her hand. It couldn't be student work. This semester, she wasn't teaching anything remotely related to the Gothics, nothing in which one of her students would be writing about
The Ravages of Umbria
.

‘
In fine, if occasionally flailing, fictional format, we find a surprising syncretism of ideas, a coming-together of truly first-wave feminism and the new naturalism of the true Gothic, as embodied in the florid phrasing, “Much like her terror, like the screams frozen in her throat.”
'

It had to be hers. But, no, she would never have written that. Dulcie would never have assumed anything about the contemporary readership of the Gothic. After all, the author had been espousing total equality, and she didn't exist in a vacuum. That had been the point of her paper; that her author was a freethinker, an advanced thinker, but that she was speaking to a like-minded audience of newly educated, newly emancipated women.
Readers
.

‘Should I . . .?'

‘Just a moment.' Dulcie raised her hand as if to hold Thalia still.

Besides, Dulcie shook her head as she reread the sentence, she would never overuse alliteration like this.
Rationally radical? Fictional flailing?
And what was that about the scream? Wasn't that from the manuscript page? Then it hit her: this was another of Melinda's pages.

She shoved the page roughly into a desk drawer and tried to compose her features. ‘So,' she said, finally. ‘How may I help you this afternoon?'

‘I, well, it's personal.' The thin girl in front of her colored, a dark flush reaching up to her large glasses. ‘It's about one of my section mates.'

‘Is there a problem?' Dulcie tried to remember the cursory training they'd all received. If someone had been harassing this girl, or worse, she needed to get ahead of it. ‘You can talk to me, Thalia. Everything you say here will be kept confidential, but if someone is being unfair to you or pressuring you in any way, you have to tell me. We have to deal with it.'

Even before she'd finished her little speech, Thalia had begun shaking her head. ‘No, no. I'm sorry, Ms Schwartz, I didn't mean to alarm you. It's nothing like that.'

Her focus now firmly on the student before her, Dulcie waited.

‘It's, well, it's just kind of awkward.' A quick glance up showed large dark eyes behind those frames. ‘I've been tutoring him, you see. Only, it's become something more.'

Dulcie smiled. This was an old story of a different, happier kind. ‘And that's a bad thing?' she asked, keeping her voice soft.

A vehement nod. ‘Yes, I think so.' The girl sounded determined, and drew a breath, obviously searching for the right words.

While she rallied, Dulcie readied a little speech, something about how a peer tutor is not in a position of authority. There was nothing unequal about their status, hence, there were no ethical issues involved.

‘You see, I think he's doing wrong,' the dark-haired girl finally said. ‘Something immoral, maybe even illegal, I don't know. And I don't want to report him. I . . . I like him too much. But I want to get him to stop before he gets into trouble. I mean, he could get me into trouble, too. You know?'

I
t had taken Dulcie a good half-hour to come up with an answer for Thalia. The girl refused to give any details about what was happening, and although Dulcie suspected who the girl was talking about – she had seen her with Andrew, after all – she couldn't do anything without confirmation. Or the girl's consent. And Thalia was adamant about wanting to handle this herself. Not even Dulcie's direst warnings about getting herself in too deep seemed to have an effect.

‘I need to talk with him, that's all.' She kept coming back to that. ‘If he thinks I've broken his confidence, he'll withdraw, and then he'll never get himself out of it.'

Ultimately, Dulcie had fallen back on the student handbook, referring her student to every section on ethics that she could find. Without specifics, it was the best she could do, and Thalia seemed a little more at ease by the time she left. For Dulcie, the entire interaction was frustrating.

At least, Dulcie thought, as she watched her student head down the hall, the student had been a distraction. Her watch showed that office hours were a few minutes to their close, and so she grabbed her bag, carefully locking the office door behind her as she left.

Climbing the stairs, she considered her student's issue. Andrew – it had to be Andrew – was doing something that wasn't quite on the level. Dulcie thought back to her interactions with the young man. He'd seemed above board, and Dulcie didn't want to believe that was an act – or that she was so susceptible to male beauty. However, she had to admit that looking more like a SoCal surfer than the usual pale Yard scholar might make short cuts easier for him. As she walked across the Yard, she tried to conjure up the possibilities. Had he charmed some teaching assistant out of a copy of a test? Had he smiled that killer smile when caught cheating?

It was probably nothing, Dulcie thought. Maybe he was pushing Thalia a bit, trying to get her to ‘edit' his papers. She didn't want to think the handsome undergrad had courted the skinny girl just for her brains. There was no denying that she was a better student than he was, though, and such a suspicion would go far to explain Thalia's reticence.

As she strode toward the Mildon, Dulcie tried to put these issues aside. She'd done all she could for the girl. Now she needed to focus on Griddlehaus. He'd found something, he'd said, and Dulcie needed to put all her energies into her work.

She would not, she thought as she walked by the university administration building, allow herself to be dragged down by the dean. The words ‘disciplinary probation' rose before her, and she ducked her head, eager to put the stone building behind her. He was wrong. His sources were bad. She would be cleared by whomever he assigned to investigate her case. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the big doors open and she glanced up. Maybe she'd already been cleared. Maybe the dean was sending a messenger to find her now.

Something about the figure was familiar – the build, the way the tall youth loped down the stairs and took off. Dulcie spun around and watched as he disappeared around the corner of the building. It was Chris, she realized, and he was hurrying away from her.