place still smelled faintly of smoke, and the pale yellow walls were the color of toasted marshmallow. In the near future I would have to hire someone to do a cleanup. Schulz got down on one knee to peer up the chimney.
“Any ideas? Did you ever hear anything out on the roof??
“No ideas, no weird sounds. My theory is that this is the same person who did the rock and the snake. I wish I knew who was so pissed off with me. Arbitration would be cheaper than making glass repairs and paying for professional cleaning.”
“Somebody strong, somebody athletic,” Schulz mused. “The only thing all these things have in common is a threat to Arch. Scare him while he’s home alone, put something in the locker, fill the house with smoke while he’s here with you and Julian… but that part wasn’t planned, was it?”
“Being home? No, he fell on the icy front steps, prelude to Marla. Maybe that one was meant for me,” I said wryly, remembering the spider-bite incident.
“Who’s mad at you? Or Arch?” His eyes probed mine and he gently took my hand, then reeled me in like a slow-motion jitterbug dancer.
“I don’t know,” I murmured into his chest. He was warm; the clean smell of aftershave clung to his skin. I pulled back. Around his dark pupils was only a ring of green luminosity.
“All this talk about starting fires…” I said with a small smile.
And up we tiptoed to the silent second story. The cognac, the desire, the comfort of Schulz, seeped through me like one of those unexpected warm currents you encounter in the ocean. In the dark of my room he stood beside me while we looked out at the glowing jack-o’-lanterns in the neighborhood. He rubbed my back, then kissed my ear. I set my alarm for four and then slipped out of my clothes. We both laughed as we dove for the bed. It was a good thing Schulz always used protection. Ever since we had started making love, I had forgotten the meaning of the word caution.
When he pulled me next to him between the cool sheets, his large, rough hands brought calm to nerves inside and out. When he kissed me, something in my brain loosened. Before long I had abandoned not only caution but all the other petty worries that had crowded into my brain.
After our lovemaking Schulz went downstairs. He came back up and said, “Twenty minutes,” then got dressed.
“Until what?”
“Until the first shift of your surveillance shows up.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, why? I mean, why now?”
He counted off on his fingers as he enumerated. “Two murders, broken glass, anonymous phone calls, a poisonous snake followed by a poisonous spider, booby-trapped steps, and a vandalized chimney, which I didn’t get to see until now. And a woman with two boys who won’t move out, despite the best advice of her local cop.”
“Arch will call his friends,” I retorted mildly, “focus on the squad car with his high-powered binoculars, and pretend we’re in the middle of a coup. Your cops will think we’re nuts.”
“You’d be surprised at how many loonies we get.”
?Actually,” I ventured, “why don’t you just do the surveillance?”
“I wish.?
I pulled on a bathrobe and stood by a bedroom window. Glowing pumpkin-candles illuminated the silky night air. Schulz went outside to his car. Five minutes later, an unmarked police car showed up. I watched Schulz leave, then I watched the jack-o’- lantern flames flicker and die. Eventually I slipped back into my empty bed that smelled of Tom Schulz. I slept deeply, dreamlessly, until the alarm surprised me.
Groaning, I slipped out of bed to start stretching in the dark. My yoga teacher had told me once that if you were just going through the motions, it wasn’t yoga. So I emptied my mind and my breath and started over, saluting to the east, where there was as yet no sun, then breathing and allowing my body to flow through the rest of the routine until I was revitalized and ready to meet the day, even if we were only four and a half hours into it.
Too bad they didn’t have a resident yogi at Elk Park Prep, I mused on my way downstairs. How could you have class rank with yoga? Its whole essence was noncompetitive, the striving with one’s own body rather than being obsessed with the accomplishments of others. Which is what education should be, I decided as a jet-black stream of espresso spurted into one of my white porcelain cups. Stretching oneself. But no one was asking me. My eyes fell on the folded papers still on my kitchen table ? the article printout from Keith’s computer disk. Correction: Schulz had asked me. I sat down with my coffee and started to read.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
? Anatomy of a Hoax As a senior at Elk Park Prep, this fall I have visited ten of the top colleges and universities in this country. The qualification “top” is commonly given by the media and, of course, by the colleges themselves. I went to these schools because this higher-education journey is one I will be taking soon. It’s a journey I’ve been looking forward to. Why? Because of what I thought I would find: 1) enthusiastic teachers, 2) a contagious love of learning, 3) academic peers with whom I would have mind-altering discussions, 4) the challenge of taking tests and writing papers that would give me 5) an introduction to new fields of learning so that I would have 6) the chance to develop my abilities.
I expected to find these things, but guess what? They weren’t there. My parents could have shelled out eighty-plus thousand dollars for a hoax!
The first place I visited I went for two days of classes. I never saw a full professor the entire time, although several Nobel prizewinners had prominent photographs in the college catalogue. I went to five classes. I wish I could tell you what they were about, but they were all taught by graduate students with foreign accents so thick I couldn’t tell what they were saying… .
I went to an all-boys school next. I never even saw humans teaching courses, only videotaped lectures. Over the weekend I wanted to have intellectual discussions. But all the guys had left to go to the campus of a girls’ school nearby.
The next place had real people teaching. So I went to a section meeting of the introduction to art history. It turned out the class was concentrating on thirteenth-century Dutch Books of Hours. The instructor said at one point that something was a prelude to Rembrandt, and one of the kids said, Who’s Rembrandt? After the class I asked why the instructor was teaching such an obscure topic, and one of the students said, Well, that was the subject of the instructor’s dissertation, and he was trying to do his research while teaching the class… .
I knew somebody from Elk Park Prep at the next place I visited. She graduated from our school five years ago and was now a graduate student. She needed to talk to her advisor about her dissertation, but he was doing research in Tokyo, and hadn’t been at the college for two years…
Finally I visited a school with a fantastic teacher! I went to his class on modern European drama. It was jammed with students. They were having a lively discussion of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and nobody was using Cliff’s Notes. The professor was storming back and forth, asking why did Hedda Gabler just keel over at the end. After all the disappointment at the other schools, I came out feeling great! But when the class was over, the other students were glum. When I asked why, they said that this fabulous assistant professor, who had just won the Excellence in Teaching award. had been denied tenure! He hadn’t published enough… .
Who is supporting this hoax in higher education? Certainly not yours truly. Do American students really want this false pedigree? Do we want good teaching, or an empty reputation? Do we want an educational process, or an impersonal stamp of approval? Students in the schools, unite… .
Well, well. He sounded like a valedictorian, all right. In a number of ways the article resembled Keith’s speech the night he died. But this essay was not an expose. There was really nothing in it anyone would kill to keep secret. Not that anyone else knew that, however.
Keith Andrews must have posed a threat to someone. Julian hadn’t liked him, and neither had a number of the other students. And in the last two weeks, somebody or bodies had been trying to hurt Arch and me. Why? What was the connection between the murder and the attempts on us? Was the murder of Kathy Andrews in Lakewood part of the killer’s scheme? How did the Neiman-Marcus credit card figure in what was going on? None of it added up.
Outside, the chilly Halloween night had given way to a snowy All Saints’ morning. Because the first Saturday in November is notorious for heavy snowfall, the College Board opted to give the SATs locally in the mountain area
