Donna Andrews - Chesapeake Crimes - This Job Is Murder!

I was sitting in my van in a dark corner of faculty parking, looking up at his windows-the only lit windows in Edgar Allen Poe Hall, home to George Henry University’s English Department. The night was cold, and clear, and so far delightfully free of the usual roaming zombies.

“Tonight’s the night,” I whispered to the sole Nobel Laureate in Literature ever lured to GHU. Closing my eyes, I could see Kaplan Kossek, a Polish Jew exiled in this suburban Virginia gulag, sitting in his office. I imagined him composing his lyrical gory stories about life in Krakow the old-fashioned way, with fountain pen on vellum paper. Every so often he would glance out at the misty woods separating Poe Hall from the parking lot and know I was out here, waiting to shiver and thrill at his next book. I was his reader.

Not that he knew me, not personally. I wasn’t so presumptuous. Still Kappy was a great writer with a huge heart and could perhaps sense me out here. I was a homeless adjunct professor living in my van ever since I received my master’s of fine arts degree from GHU five years ago. I read Kappy’s wondrous works by flashlight, existing on a diet of microwave Ramen Noodles, clothing myself from the campus Lost and Found.

Of course, as an English adjunct, I accepted that I was the lowest form of life at GHU. This state university’s caste system was more severe than India’s. My fate was to teach three composition courses a semester so the Tenured Ones could kill more trees publishing their books at academic presses, books no one cared about, books no one would ever read. Books the Tenured Ones hoped would propel them not to fame or fortune, but to the next rung on GHU’s promotion ladder.

Not that I had a shot at fame or fortune. On the contrary, as an English adjunct, I was an anonymous cog in their education factory and had taken a vow of poverty as well. My GHU salary was so small I couldn’t afford an apartment. On the bright side, I made enough to pay for my campus parking space and a membership to the university gym, where I could clean up and shower. Still I didn’t look forward to another winter sleeping in my van. Yet I felt warm when I remembered I slept under Kaplan Kossek’s windows, his golden lights burning into the dawn, his work ethic and dedication to his art inspiring me to perhaps write a lyrical horror story of my own some day.

And tonight I would meet him at last, because I had something important to say to him, something I hoped would give him peace of mind.

Opening the van’s door, I stepped out and looked around campus, silent and deserted as usual. Acres of asphalt parking lots surrounded GHU, a commuter school, meaning everyone commuted the hell away as soon as classes ended. Neither students nor faculty could stand to be at GHU a moment longer than necessary. Maybe they sensed the campus was haunted. Yes, haunted, though only I and-perhaps Kappy-knew its haunting wasn’t so bad. In fact, once the students and faculty left, GHU turned magical, almost unicorn-leaping magical.

Pine needles crunched underfoot as I walked to Poe Hall, careful not to step too close to the burial mounds. GHU’s younger tenure-track faculty regularly killed tenured profs and buried them here. If they didn’t, the geezers would soldier on into eternity, shuffling to class on walkers, wearing their Depends, Fixodent oozing from their clattering dentures, since their egos wouldn’t allow them to retire. But the lazy junior faculty often buried them in graves too shallow. So shallow the oldies managed to claw their way up and out and go on to class, where they cut off their hearing aids and sawed on about Victorian vulgarities or postmodern feminist theory in literature of the Pacific Rim.

In U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings, GHU was known for having the largest percentage of zombie faculty, especially in our famous Economics Department, in which they were almost the majority. Many of the undead regularly appeared on CNN or Fox News, where they un-ironically advised that we must cut Medicaid, Medicare, cut everything except the Defense Department’s budget.

I started and whirled when I saw movement from the corner of my eye, but it was only Phoebe, my favorite ghost, emerging from the hillside’s rainy mist like a vision.

“Madam, where are you sallying out to this evening?” she called to me. Closing her yellow silk parasol, she drew closer.

As usual I marveled at her beauty, especially since she’d died in 1861 soon after the Battle of Bull Run. Her dewy skin was the color of coffee, and she possessed a grace unknown to women of my century. If not for her slight transparency, hardly noticeable in tonight’s dim light, you would never have guessed she was a ghost.

“That dress is stunning on you,” I said. “Did George give it to you?”

Phoebe had been a thirteen-year-old slave when George Henry took her as his mistress. While the great patriot Patrick Henry was famous for saying, “Give me liberty or give me death!” his younger brother George, also a patriot if a self-interested one, was remembered for saying, “Give me free markets unfettered by tariffs or regulation!” Hence he was not only the university’s namesake but also the capitalist saint of GHU’s Econ Department, where they had a life-size statue of him.

“Kindly refrain from addressing Mr. Henry by his given name,” Phoebe said and walked beside me, her petticoat rustling, her basket of herbs swinging from her wrist. The land on which GHU stood was once George Henry’s plantation, so Phoebe knew all the flora and fauna here and often gave me potions for my colds and flu. I couldn’t have survived winters in my van without her herbal medicine since the university provided no health insurance for adjuncts. If we fell ill in the hallways or classrooms, our bodies were tossed into Dumpsters and sent off to landfills in Lorton.

“I meant no disrespect, Phoebe. I assure you.” I took her arm. The nineteenth century was an era of formality and manners. Phoebe would brook no criticism of George Henry, who had given her a better education than any of the students here, undergraduates or grads, were likely to receive-better than I’d gotten with my MFA. Upon his death Master Henry had freed her, so she remained grateful even though I pointed out to her that today he would have been classified as a pedophile.

Phoebe and I had met the night a zombie econ professor reached out of his grave and latched onto her ankle. Phoebe was attempting to turn herself into mist and get away when I hacked off the zombie’s hand with the spine of my thick Pelican Shakespeare.

“I’m much obliged to you,” Phoebe had said with a curtsey. I’d helped pry his cold dead fingers from around her ankle, and we’d been close friends ever since.

We reached Poe Hall, where Phoebe stopped me. “Nora dear, it’s unseemly for a young lady to call on a gentleman.”

We often sparred about the manners and mores of our respective centuries. “Maybe if you’d called on your Robert, you wouldn’t have to haunt these woods for eternity searching for him,” I said.

She sighed and glanced down at the frilly gloves on her hands. “Perhaps so.” I knew she didn’t like to talk about the afterlife or the man she had loved and lost when good ol’ George Henry sold him down the river.

“Wish me luck,” I told her and stepped toward the dark doorway.

“Forget about that old writer and come ride the big dumbwaiter with me.”

She meant the elevator in Ayn Rand Hall, home of GHU’s hotshot Econ Department. The odd ten-story building sat on the hump of a hill, where its big glass elevator was connected to the structure’s only wing, one that went off to the right, the far right. In their lobby, beside George Henry’s statue, was a solid gold plaque on which their motto was engraved: Avaritia est bona. “Greed is good,” Phoebe had translated the first time we saw it.