Donna Andrews - Chesapeake Crimes - This Job Is Murder!

Smoothing my jeans, I said, “I have to meet Kaplan Kossek tonight.” I’d worked up my courage and had to go through with it. “I have something important to tell him.”

She shook her head, opened her parasol, and vanished into the starless night. She could appear and disappear at will, an advantage the dead have over the rest of us.

I entered Poe Hall, a mere four stories tall, with nary a working elevator or grandiose motto in sight. English majors needed to be a hardy lot. My life could attest to this. I trudged up the stairs to the top floor.

Kappy always worked late at night. I knew he did this to avoid contact with GHU students. From old photos I’d seen of him in Poets & Writers , he was always surrounded by students at Warsaw University. In Europe, students actually read books and treated great writers like rock stars, following them around, wanting to discuss literature and life with them, hanging on their every word.

I came to Kappy tonight to apologize for the fact that this was not the case here in the United States. A recent campus survey showed that ninety-nine percent of GHU students thought Kaplan Kossek was a preparatory course for medieval history. Not that Kappy should be insulted by this-a similar percentage had never heard of William Shakespeare or that the Earth was round.

GHU students were extremely focused. They cared only about their grade-point averages. All of them had double majors in badgering and harassing. Like predators, they could smell adjunct faculty across campus. They made sure to sign up for courses we adjuncts taught, knowing we weren’t paid well enough to fight off their badgering and harassing over grades. Perhaps it was just as well that Kappy wasn’t expected to teach any classes, only give the occasional guest lecture or reading.

I pushed through the doors of the English Department, everything dark around me, except for the honeyed beam of light coming from Kappy’s office.

Following his light, I went down a long hallway past the offices of the Tenured Ones. Even though they were seldom on campus, the Tenured Ones got rooms with windows, the only windows in Poe Hall. Classrooms were pushed to the building’s dark interior, where plastic moveable curtains served as walls. While classrooms in Ayn Rand Hall were outfitted with individual computers and overhead projectors, the English Department made do with dusty blackboards and stubby bits of yellow chalk.

When I saw the name, Kaplan Kossek, on his door, my heart began to drum. I knocked softly. Through the door’s frosted glass pane, I could sort of see him from the back sitting just as I had imagined, slumped at his desk, hard at work.

When he didn’t answer, I knocked harder, my knocks mirroring the pounding in my chest. “Mr. Kossek,” I called but still no answer.

Maybe he had fallen asleep. I paused, wondering if I ought to wake him. He was in his eighties and not in good health. During the year and a half he’d been at GHU, he was forced to cancel all his lectures and readings due to illness. And the publication date of this latest book had been postponed twice. No one seemed to care about his health or these cancelations, except for me.

What if he had gotten sick tonight? What if he needed CPR or to be taken to the hospital? I had to get in there and check on him. But when I tried the knob, the door was locked.

Rushing to the English Department’s central office, I slipped behind the high counter where the clerks sat, a place lowly adjuncts were forbidden to go. But I knew their secrets. From a hidden place beneath the head flunky’s desk, I took the master key and ran back to Kappy’s door.

Unlocking it, I hurried in. “Mr. Kossek, are you all right?”

At last I came face-to-face with him. It took a moment to register what I saw.

“Ahhhhhh!” I screamed a scream so loud it almost lifted Poe’s roof. I ran out of the office and down four flights of stairs, not stopping until I reached the dark woods, where Phoebe caught me in her arms.

She held me until I calmed enough to say, “He’s dead. Completely dead. He’s nothing but a skeleton in a custom-made suit.”

“Why does that frighten you so?” Phoebe asked. “Surely one with your experience with ghosts and zombies…”

“I’m not frightened-I’m grief stricken!” I replied. “And furious. Couldn’t the Tenured Ones have made Kaplan Kossek into a zombie like so many of them? Then we’d still have his genius!”

She patted my hair. “The gentleman was dead when the Tenured Ones brought him to GHU from Poland. They compensated his family for his bones. You know how they revere bones. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you.”

To zombies, bones were special. A zombie’s flesh got eaten away, the reason many favored the bandage or mummy look. But their bones never changed. Zombie honor, however dubious, allowed them to say Kaplan Kossek resided on campus because his bones were here.

I nodded at Phoebe’s words. She often haunted the faculty dining hall and eavesdropped on the Tenured Ones. She knew more about what was going on here than I did. And I should have realized that her propriety would never have permitted me to go unchaperoned for a tête-a-tête with Kappy if he were still alive. She was solicitous of me like that.

“But why would they want to bring him to campus dead?” Then a light went on for me. “This reminds me of Kappy’s novel about an elderly villager who wins the national lottery and promptly dies of delight. The other villagers put forth an imposter to claim the winnings, which they intend on dividing among themselves. But in the end the villagers murder each other to increase their shares.”

Nodding, Phoebe said, “The Tenured Ones are dividing Kaplan Kossek’s substantial salary as the Edgar Allen Poe scholar.” She smiled her devilish dimpled smile.

“ Avaritia est bona ,” we said in unison. It was our private joke.

But later that night I wasn’t feeling so jolly. I had always been suspicious about why the English Department brought Kappy to GHU in the first place. The Tenured Ones looked down on genre fiction-mystery, romance, anything people actually read, especially horror fiction. No lyrical gory stories for them. But none for me either now that I knew Kappy was dead. I’d wanted him to inspire me to write. How would I write the great American zombie novel without Kaplan Kossek?

I couldn’t stand to remain beneath his windows, so I moved my van to the Economic Department’s faculty parking.

Before I went to sleep, I sneaked into Ayn Rand Hall and emailed the chair of the English Department, an androgynous person named Rutledge Browne, Rutty to his/her posse. (The English Department Tenured Ones were so politically correct they refused to gender identify themselves or others, so everyone was a s/he.)

Normally Rutty would never read a lowly adjunct’s email much less answer it. To get his/her attention, I wrote in the subject line: KAPLAN KOSSEK IS DEAD! In the body of my email I let him/her know I intended to alert the Washington Post about their fraud .

Along with their scheme’s dishonesty, what they were doing would surely harm Kaplan Kossek’s literary legacy and thus had to be unmasked. Who better to blow the whistle on them than Kappy’s greatest fan?

The next morning as soon as I stepped out of my eight a.m. class, my cell phone vibrated. “Nora, dear, Rutty here. Don’t be hasty. I’m sure we can come to some arrangement. How would you like a term appointment?”

At those words-term appointment-hope flooded me. This was what I always wanted. A term appointment meant I would have a full-time job for a year, which was good. It also meant I would be required to teach four comp classes a semester, not so good. But I would be paid almost a living wage, just enough to rent an efficiency apartment and get out of the cold.