“You don’t know who that is?” Tom looks scandalized. “That’s Reverend Mark Halstead. He’s the new interdenominational campus youth minister.”
I stare at Reverend Mark. He has the bland good looks of a sports announcer. He’s wearing carefully faded jeans with a sports coat and tie. He sitting on one of the arms of the love seat Muffy Fowler is sharing with Gillian Kilgore. Muffy is leaning forward in her seat with both her elbows on her knees and staring up at Dr. Jessup with her lips slightly parted.
I can’t help noticing that she’s recently reapplied her lip gloss.
And that Reverend Mark has a bird’s-eye view right down the front of Muffy’s frilly white blouse.
“We wanted to bring you all together this afternoon,” Dr. Jessup is saying, “to assure you that the police are doing everything they can to get to the bottom of this tragic crime—”
Solemnly, Tom makes another hatch mark in his Day Runner.
“—and that this appears, by all indications, to be a random, isolated incident of senseless violence. In no way are any other members of this staff in jeopardy. Yes, Simon?”
Simon Hague, the director of Wasser Hall, Fischer Hall’s bitterest rival (in my mind), due to its having its own pool in the basement (and also to its not bearing the unfortunate nickname of Death Dorm), lowers his hand and says, in his usual insufferable (to me, anyway) whine, “Um, fine, right. You say that. That no other members of the staff are in jeopardy. But what is anyone doing to ensure that? I mean, how do we know that none of us is next? How do we know other members of the staff aren’t being targeted?”
Several other hall directors nod their heads. Tom draws a small doodle of a man who looks a lot like Simon. Then he draws his head exploding.
“So,” he whispers conversationally. “How’s the man?”
I blink at him. “You mean Tad?”
He rolls his eyes. “No. I mean the one you actually like. Cooper. How’s he doing? I haven’t seen him in ages.”
“He’s fine,” I reply… a little bleakly, I’ll admit.
And, okay, I know we were at a meeting about my boss, whom I’d found dead a few hours earlier, and it was tragic (as we knew all too well), a man killed for no reason, and in his prime, and all of that.
But I need some dating advice. And who better to ask than a gay man?
“Tad asked me this morning if I could take time off this summer, then told me he has something he wants to ask me, when the time is right,” I whisper. “And I don’t think he’s talking about a share on the Jersey shore.”
Tom looks appropriately horrified.
“What?Are you serious? You’ve only been dating him, what, a month?”
“Try three,” I whisper back. “And you’re one to talk. Or are you not basically living with the New York College basketball coach?”
“That’s different.” Tom is indignant now. “We can’t get married. His parents don’t know he’s gay.”
“Now, Detective Canavan, from the Sixth Precinct, assures me,” Dr. Jessup says, looking a little bit shiny along the hairline beneath the fluorescent lights (the library’s original chandeliers were removed, along with its asbestos ductwork, and replaced with a dropped ceiling back in the seventies), “that he and his people are doing everything they can to find a quick resolution to this tragedy”—Tom waffles over whether or not to add a hatch mark, but then finally does so—“but he seems quite certain that no one is targeting members of the—”
“Why doesn’t someone just come out and say it?” The hall director of a building down on Wall Street, which the college had to purchase because there was no more room left on campus, stands up and glares at everyone else accusingly. “We all know who did this. And why! It was the GSC! Sebastian Blumenthal has to have been behind it! Let’s not kid ourselves!”
Bedlam ensues. Most people seem to be of the opinion that Sebastian had to have done it. This belief seems to be based solely on the fact that Sebastian has long hair and appears to bathe irregularly.
This causes Reverend Mark to observe that a certain savior could also be described this way, but that he never killed anyone.
This remark so delights Tom that he looks up toward the dropped ceiling and mouths,Thank you, God. Then he shouts, to no one in particular, “But what about his murse?”
Dr. Jessup wanders around the room, trying to get everyone to calm down by insisting that in this country, citizens—even long-haired, unwashed graduate students—are innocent until proven guilty, but to no avail. Several of the male assistant hall directors offer to go out and find Sebastian and beat him to a pulp (they, like me, are working on attaining their bachelor’s degrees, in criminal justice, hospitality management, and physical training, respectively). Finally Drs. Kilgore and Flynn attempt to achieve order by standing on their love seats and clapping their hands and shouting, “People, people! Please! People! We are professionals in higher education, not common street thugs!”
Of course this has no effect at all.
But Tom grabbing the fire extinguisher off the wall and setting off a burst of CO2 in the middle of the room certainly does. Since this is how he routinely busts up parties over at the frat building, where he lives and works, he does so with an almost comically bored expression on his face.
“Everybody,” he says, in a monotone. “Sit.”