Simon Said (6 page)

 

"Then he shouldn't have signed up for the senior seminar," Vera said.

"I think," Simon said, "that Hinton expected that his writing facility would see him through. He expected a B just from participating in the seminar and completing a paper. But I gave Bs to others whose papers were much more thoughtful. If I'd given him a B, I would have had to raise three others to As, and they just weren't that quality."

"Listen, damn it," Andrus said. "I read his paper and I thought it was a B effort." "But you weren't teaching the course," Marcus Clegg said quietly. "Simon was. He gave the grades, not you. We must support his decisions."

 

"Not if he's incompetent, we shouldn't."

 

A stunned silence fell over the table. Jesus God, thought Simon, so this is what this is all about. He felt dampness begin to collect under his armpits and around his groin. Marcus exploded. "Of all the ignorant, insensitive things you have ever said and done, Alex, this is the worst. You—"

 

"Hold it!" Jones said. "Alex, you owe us an explanation. Right now."

 

"Ask Professor Shaw if he isn't taking medication for emotional problems," Andrus said.

 

"This is reprehensible," Marcus said.

 

"It's okay, Marcus," Simon said. Perspiration began to trickle down his back and sides, pooling in the crevices of his body. His head began to pound.

 

"It's true that I've been treated for clinical depression recently," Simon said. "You all know that my wife left me, and the last few months have been very difficult." "If I thought Simon couldn't do his job, I would have suggested that he take a leave of absence," Jones said.

"Most normal people, Alex, of which I am sure you are not one, have some down times in their lives when they aren't as productive as others," Marcus Clegg said. "If Simon had broken his leg, we would give him time to heal from that. Emotional illness is no different."

Let's just hang out a sign, Simon thought. Let's get the cable access channel for an hour. Maybe CNN would pick it up and tell the world, right between the invasion of the week and the disease of the month.

"If I thought I wasn't fit to teach, I wouldn't teach," Simon said. "Bobby Hinton's paper is a C paper."

"I think we should all read it and see if we agree," Andrus said.
"Out of the question," Vera Thayer said. "We don't check behind senior faculty."

"Goddamn it!" Andrus shouted. "Let's just all stand behind our famous Pulitzer Prize winner! Never mind that he can hardly make it into the office in the morning. Never mind that my protege's career is ruined!"

"You're excused, right now, Alex. Don't show your face in this building until you are prepared to apologize," Jones said.

 

"I'll appeal this to the dean. Don't think I won't!" Andrus said as he stalked out of the room.

 

"If you've ever needed a reason not to renew his contract, you've got it now," Marcus Clegg said to Jones. "The man has navel lint where his brain should be."

 

"I don't have cause to cancel his contract. You know that," Jones said. "Can't we squelch the appeal somehow?" asked Thayer. "This could be embarrassing to the whole department."

 

Simon knew now why Thayer had defended him. She was a tough grader, and she didn't want this case to set a precedent.

Everyone avoided looking at Simon, who was fighting to subject his nervous system to manual control. His clothing was damp, his stomach hurt, and a migraine aura appeared in the left corner of his field of vision. To his surprise, his voice sounded fairly normal when he spoke.

"If you want my resignation, you have it," Simon said. Hell, he'd always really wanted to teach high school. Maybe junior college. Anything would be better than having his personal problems spread all over the campus.

"If you resign, I'll resign, too," said Clegg.

"Don't you dare!" snapped Jones. "I'm not accepting any resignations from anybody. I refuse to lose my faculty to some stupid, jealous departmental bickering. Is that understood? We'll deal with this." He didn't leave any time for a response before he went on.

"We can't stop him from appealing to the dean if he really wants to," Jones said. "But I'll talk to Alex and do my best to convince him that he'll look like a fool. If he insists, it would probably be best to get the whole thing out in the open and let the dean put an end to it."

"Make sure that you mention to Alex when you have this little conversation that he isn't tenure material under any circumstances," Clegg said.

 

"For a psychologist, you're not much of a diplomat," Jones said. The chairman left the room, followed by Thayer.

 

"Shit," Simon said.

"Life sucks sometimes," Clegg said. "When my brother died in Vietnam, I felt like I was living outside my skin for three years. And I'm a psychologist. I'm supposed to understand this mental stuff."

"I was actually feeling pretty good, until about an hour ago."

 

"Alex is an ass. If he goes any further with this, he'll just look like an ass to more people. Forget about him. Come on, let's go get some bad food for lunch." "I'm not hungry, and I'd be terrible company."

 

"You call me anytime," Clegg said. "I'm a trained psychotherapist, you know. Electroshock is a hobby of mine."

 

"I wouldn't let you anywhere near my brain. God knows how you'd rewire it."

After Marcus left, Simon was alone in the lounge. He stood up and inspected his armpits. He felt soaked. He walked over to one of the huge windows and opened it, standing in the damp breeze so that he could cool off and be able to walk out of the department with dignity. Rain was falling in big, heavy drops, knocking aside leaves and twigs as it fell straight down from the sky.

Simon wondered if he shouldn't resign despite what Walker Jones had said. If Andrus appealed further, everyone on campus would know the details of his personal misfortune. But wouldn't that happen anyway if he resigned? Why did he have to lose everything? Surely this, and worse, had happened to other people. It would pass when something hotter got everyone's attention. He would just have to manage the embarrassment as best he could until then.

He spent the afternoon in his office grading papers so he could return them to his four o'clock class. Alex Andrus walked back into the department in time to teach at two, then walked back out again. He didn't speak to anyone, much less apologize.

Back home for dinner, Simon contemplated the contents of his refrigerator with revulsion. He knew he couldn't get rid of his headache, Coke and pills notwithstanding, unless he put something in his stomach. He decided that scrambled eggs and toast might be gentle enough, but beating the glutinous eggs almost made him throw up. Once they were cooked, he managed to eat them, buffered as they were by a lot of toast and peach jelly.

His doorbell rang. Standing there was the little boy from next door, dressed in regulation Little League from head to toe and wielding a catcher's mitt and the Louisville Slugger Simon had given him for Christmas. Oh no, Simon thought.

"I can't, Danny, not now," Simon said.
"Please, Simon, you haven't pitched for me in ages. Please."
"I know, but I just don't feel like it. I'm sorry. Some other time."

The boy was too polite to whine, but he continued to stand at the door, waiting for a break in Simon's resolve. Simon remembered how little the boy saw his father, and what his mother had said Simon's attention meant to him.

"Sometime soon, I promise," Simon said.
"Sure," the boy answered.

Simon watched the boy despondently walk down his steps and back to his house, dragging his bat behind him. Great, he thought. What a time he had been having. He had almost fainted at the sight of a corpse in front of the Raleigh police and his best friend, been accused of incompetence by a peer at an open faculty meeting, and disappointed a small boy. What a guy he was. And it was just seven o'clock in the evening.

What he really wanted to do was go to bed and to sleep, to obliterate his problems at least for a few hours. But if he went to sleep now, he would wake up at three o'clock in the morning with nothing to do but think about his life—which was to be avoided at all costs.

Then he remembered his promise to Julia McGloughlan. He was supposed to find information somewhere that the medical examiner could use to identify Anne Bloodworth's body positively.

He was saved from Friday night television.

Simon went upstairs to his library, where the index cards with notes for his book were stuffed into shoe boxes in the back of a closet. Unfortunately, the cards were no longer organized chronologically or by subject, but the way he had sorted them to write the book. He would have to go through them one by one to find what he was looking for. Simon sat cross-legged on the sofa and contemplated the four boxes.

Charles Bloodworth had left few papers that could have been called personal. The documents Simon had read were mostly business correspondence and a daily diary that listed his appointments along with a few personal comments. However, the disappearance of a daughter was obviously a momentous event, and Simon remembered several references to it in Bloodworth's diary and at least two letters on the subject, one of which was to Pinkerton's main office in Chicago. The problem was, he hadn't taken any notes on these. If he didn't want to reread Bloodworth' papers completely, he had to go through the cards and correlate what events he had documented with what transpired concerning Anne Bloodworth's disappearance. When he had located what he needed, he would have some dates and document numbers he could take over to Chapel Hill and the Southern Historical Collection. That way, he could quickly locate the files he needed. His hope was that somewhere in Bloodworth's business diary or in a letter, he had described his daughter in some way that would be helpful to the medical examiner.

Simon had used newspaper accounts to write the very brief section on her disappearance in the monograph on the house, and he had those references easily at hand. He could start rereading the newspaper files tomorrow.

Painstakingly, Simon went through every note card in every box. Three hours and a lot of CDs later, he had found several cards that he was sure would lead him in the right direction. He realized that he was starving, so he went downstairs and got a huge bowl of freezer-burned vanilla ice cream with some stringy, old chocolate sauce on it. It tasted wonderful. It was nearly eleven o'clock when Simon went to bed. He slept like a log for almost nine hours.

The next morning found Simon at the door of the Kenan library when it opened. It was crowded even on Saturday. Summer school was so compressed that students studied every free minute. A few faculty members were there, too, trying to stay one lecture ahead of their students.

Simon unlocked the door to his carrel. He hadn't been here in weeks. Books, papers, and file folders were strewn everywhere over the cheap wooden desk and bookshelf, but everything was coated in a thin layer of dust. Simon looked warily through the stack of stuff on his desk. He had a momentary fear that somewhere in this mess was a pile of student papers he hadn't graded and that neither he nor his students had missed. Apparently not. There was, however, a caustic note from the librarian that announced she had removed some long overdue materials and returned them to the stacks, and that he really should be more considerate. Simon hardly remembered what he had been working on when Tessa left. When he scanned the last few pages he had written, it seemed like someone else's work that had been accidentally left on his desk. This is one article that won't ever be finished, Simon thought. The hell with it. The world will hardly stop orbiting the sun. He dumped his briefcase on the chair, picked up a yellow pad and pen, locked the door behind him, and went to his favorite place, the microfiche reading room. Oddly, his heart was pounding.

He found the spool of microfiche labeled April-May 1926, unrolled it onto the spools on the reader, and flipped on the power. The process was so familiar and automatic that it had a tranquilizing effect on him. When he immersed himself in any kind of primary research, he tended to block out his own present and identify completely with his subjects. It was such an intense experience, he never discussed it with anyone, even other academics, because he worried that it was a little abnormal.

Anne Bloodworth's disappearance on April 9, 1926, had driven other stories about Byrd's expedition to the North Pole and the attempted assassination of Mussolini off the front page of the paper. In a tabloid style the National Enquirer would have been proud of, the paper dwelt on the mystery of Anne's disappearance, the bafflement of the police, the grief of her father, and the desperation of her fiance. Apparently, Anne Bloodworth and her father, Charles, had been alone in their house—the live-in help had gone to a movie. Her second cousin and fiance, Adam Bloodworth, was on a fishing trip. She went upstairs to bed to read; Charles worked in his study. Before Bloodworth went to bed, he knocked on his daughter’s door to say goodnight. When there was no answer, he assumed she was asleep. The next morning, the maid taking her tea upstairs found that her room was empty and that her bed had not been slept in.

All hell broke loose.

Motorcycle patrolman Peebles arrived at the Bloodworth home first. He described the scene as extremely confused—the wailing servants had the house in an uproar and "Captain Bloodworth" was prostrate. Dr. Zeb Caviness, who lived up the street, was plying him with sleeping salts to keep him coherent. Officer Peebles found, to his dismay, that Anne Bloodworth's room had been completely overturned by her father, who had been looking for some answer to the riddle of her disappearance. The back garden and orchard had been trampled by neighbors searching for her. This "well-meaning but unorganized search," said the reporter, "seems likely to have obscured important clues."

The entire Raleigh police force, on horseback and motorcycle, searched the city from top to bottom. The next day, Police Chief J. W. Bryan told readers that there was no trace of Miss Bloodworth anywhere in the city. They had even searched the saloons and whorehouses, he said, in case she had been abducted by white slavers. Telegrams had been sent to Charlotte, Charleston, and Richmond. She had not been seen at the train station, and she could have gotten no farther than Charlotte by motorcar. Bloodworth had hired the city's only detective, Robert L. Lumsden, of the Southern Detective Agency, to help search for her. The police of the time, Simon knew, were trained to keep law and order, not to detect.