The Lesson of Her Death

riding herd over a bunch of brilliant feisty generals—that is, students—who drank too much, whored too much (or who railed loud against drinking and whoring), while he somehow managed to fight a war. And like Grant, Sayles had happened to rise to this position at the most difficult time in the history of his institution.
    “… But it wasn’t until after the Dynamic Duo of Defeat—Gettysburg and Vicksburg—that the Southern troops embraced fundamentalist revivalism with a gusto …”
    A warm spring breeze eased through the auditorium’s huge windows, so high they could be locked and unlocked only with a twelve-foot-long pole. The class was half empty. Sayles considered the reason why attendancewas poor and his eyes fell on a particular empty seat, surrounded by a blossom of other vacancies.
    Ah, yes, the memorial service.
    He had not had the strength to attend. The only place he could possibly be was here.
    The bell—not an electronic wail but an old-fashioned clapper on steel—rang and Sayles dismissed the class. He stood at the lectern while the class departed then he reread the dean’s note. He too left the room and walked along a broad sidewalk, campus buildings on one side, the five-acre quadrangle on the other, to the university’s administration building.
    On the second floor he entered a large anteroom. He walked past the room’s only occupant, a secretary with whom he had long ago had an affair, a mousy woman with a bony face. He vaguely remembered breasts like fat pancakes.
    “Oh, did you hear? Professor? A student was—”
    Without answering he nodded and walked past her into the large inner office. He closed the door and sat in one of the oxblood leather chairs across from the dean’s desk.
    “Randy,” she said, “we have a real problem.”
    He noticed her hand was resting on that morning’s
Register
. The article about the murder was circled and above the headline was written:
Dean Larraby. FYI.
He looked at Bill Corde’s picture then back to the dean. Sayles said, “She was in my class.”
    Dean Larraby nodded without expecting any further response. She closed whatever massive work she had been reading—it appeared more legal than scholarly—and pushed it to the corner of her desk. Her fingers caressed the edges of the purple stone on her left hand.
    Sayles said, “Have you talked to the police?”
    “What?”
    “The police?”
    She responded querulously, “Yes, there was a detective here. This man, in fact.” She nodded at the paper. “He wanted to know all about the Gebben girl.”
    The Gebben girl
.
    Sayles, whose brilliance like that of many professors was in large part memory, recollected perfectly how the dean had greeted him a few moments ago and asked, “What kind of problem? What else did the police say?”
    The Gebben girl. Student number 144691
.
    “The police? That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said. “This is
serious
. I’ve finished meeting with the Price Waterhouse people. There are no funds to move into the loans accounts.”
    “What do you mean?” Shock pummeled Sayles. The image of Jennie Gebben fell from his thoughts.
    “None.”
    “But there was going to be an operating surplus this term,” he whispered. “I thought we’d worked that out.”
    “Well,” she said testily, “there isn’t.”
    Oh, how he hated her. She’d told him, she’d
promised
him, there would be money. The shock yielded to a maelstrom of anger. He swallowed and looked out the window at the grassy quad whose sidewalks he had crossed perhaps ten thousand times.
    “The fact is the money isn’t there.”
    “What are we going to do?” His voice rose with panic. “Can we cover it up?”
    “Cover it up? We’re long past that point.” She smiled but cruelly and he thought her face looked like a malicious tortoise’s. “Randy, without that money, the school is going to close.”
    “What
happened
to it? We were supposed to have two and a half million.”
    She tossed her head at a question he himself knew the answer to. Why does a college lose money? Auden University had been skimming the surface of insolvency for ten years. Competition from cheaper state and trade schools, decreasing college-age population, escalating salary demands and costs …
    “This murder, it’s going to focus a lot of attention on the school and its problems. That’s the last thing we need. Not now. We can’t afford people pulling their childrenout. And for God’s sake we