The Lesson of Her Death

Kresge’s slam. Instead, he closed it delicately and stomped off down the serpentine path to the driveway.
    Ebbans started laughing. Corde, his face red with anger, turned on him. “This isn’t goddamn funny.”
    “Sure it is.”
    “What’s with him? What did I do?”
    Ebbans said, “Don’t they teach community relations in these here parts?”
    “That’s not funny.” They heard a car squeal away from the curb outside. Corde said,
“Goddamn!
I don’t understand what I did.”
    Ebbans said, “He could be helpful. Why don’t you apologize?”
    “Apologize?” he roared. “For what?”
    “You weren’t taking him seriously.”
    “He’s a
security guard.”
    “You still weren’t taking him seriously.”
    Corde said, “I don’t care if he’s black. Where did he get that idea?”
    “Don’t get so riled.”
    “Son of a bitch.”
    Ebbans said, “He might sue you. Discrimination.”
    It took Corde a minute to realize that Ebbans was joking. “Go to hell.”
    “You take everything else seriously. Just not him.”
    Corde shook his head in anger then stood. He walked to the coffee vending machine and returned a minute later, sipping the burnt-tasting liquid. He grabbed the envelope Kresge had delivered. Without seeing them he looked at the half dozen résumés it contained for a few minutes then said, “I hope he does sue. I’d like the chance to say a few things to him in court.”
    Ebbans said, “Bill, simmer down.”
    Corde started reading the résumés. He looked up a moment later, was about to speak, then closed his mouth and went back to reading. A half hour later he’d calmed down. He asked Ebbans, “These things say CV on them. What does that mean?”
    “I don’t know. Where?”
    “At the top. Oh, wait, here’s one it’s spelled out.
Curriculum Vitae
. What’s that?”
    “Maybe it’s Greek for resume.”
    Corde said, “Professors …” And went back to reading.
    After he finished he read them again and then said to Ebbans, “May have something here. Interesting.”
    “What’s that?”
    Corde handed Ebbans a copy of Randolph Sayles’s CV. “What’s this tell you?”
    Ebbans read carefully. “Got me.”
    “He’s one of Jennie’s professors. Over the last twelve years he’s been a visiting professor at three other schools. Two of them were for one-year terms. But at that one, Loyola, in Ohio, he left after three months.”
    “So?”
    “After Loyola, it says, he spent the next nine months researching and writing a book before he came back to Auden. Nine months. That’s the rest of the one-year period, after you subtract the three.”
    Ebbans said, “Well, these professors travel around a lot, don’t they? Maybe he took time off.”
    “But he hasn’t published any books since he’s been back from Loyola. That was four years ago.”
    “Maybe it’s about to come out.”
    “Well, let’s speculate. Doesn’t it seem possible, let’s just say, he got dumped from Loyola and didn’t want to come back here right away. It would look strange. He’d have to explain why he got kicked out.”
    “That’s a reach, Bill.”
    Corde picked up the telephone. He dialed long-distance directory assistance, then the number he’d been given. As he did, Ebbans continued, “I don’t know. Getting fired’s pretty thin grounds to make him a suspect, isn’t it?”
    Not if he was fired because he slept with a student then assaulted her when she threatened to report it.
    The dean at Loyola College outside of Columbus,Ohio, took some convincing before he would tell Corde this and even then he did so only after he’d patched in the school’s lawyer, on an extension, to tell the dean what questions to answer, which turned out to be all of them.
    After he hung up Corde said to Ebbans, “The assault charges were dropped. Nothing ever came of them but Sayles agreed to resign. What do you think now?”
    “I think there’s something else.” Ebbans pointed at the résumé. “Randy Sayles is the associate dean in charge of financial aid.”
    “Rings a bell.”
    “Jennie Gebben worked for him.”
    They were outside in the yard, lapped by bands of cool air then hot. As Corde and Diane sat pressed together on the picnic blanket, he remembered this phenomenon from his teenage days. They called it
hotcolds
. Waves of warm breeze alternating with waves of cold, drifting through fields around the New Lebanon High School at dusk. A schoolmate had an explanation: when a man and a woman