Chapter 14

14

If the office of Beckford College president, Martin Cushing, looked like one of those elegant moneyed chambers that most people might only see featured in the glossy pages of Architectural Digest , it was because it actually had been in AD 's September edition a year before in an article entitled, "Mixing Modern and Classic Styles."

With a floor-to-ceiling bay window that overlooked the campus's beautifully cultivated grounds, it had a varnished behemoth of an antique burled walnut desk, an Industry West sofa and love seat, a Henn&Hart coffee table. The table rode atop a Persian rug on the polished oak floor and along the fine wood recessed paneling was a copper sideboard by Arhaus.

Above the sideboard was Cushing's favorite piece in the room, an oil painting from the college's vast art collection, a Brevoort seascape of an inlet framed by a rocky cliff. As Cushing had told the magazine people, he loved Hudson River School seascapes not just for their Sturm und Drang drama but because they always reminded him of the beach beside his family's ancestral place in Martha's Vineyard.

Referred in the AD piece as "dapper and energetic," President Cushing liked to think that he himself was a stylish mix of the modern and classic as well. That was why to keep up appearances this morning, he was wearing a beautifully tailored seasonally appropriate midweight gray wool suit that hung from his frame with a drape that was almost arrogant in its meticulous exactitude.

At a little before ten that morning, Cushing was center stage of his magnificent office sitting on his eight-thousand-dollar sofa. There was a yellow legal tablet in his lap and a MacBook Air laptop on the plush cushion beside him. A board of trustees meeting was upcoming and he was doing some last-minute polishing of his quarterly report.

President Cushing, Marty to his friends, was a big man. Six foot two, 275 pounds, most of it soft. Though with good tailoring, and he had that, it was well hidden. And with his nice blue eyes and razor part in his graying executive hair and his pleasantly bemused, slightly haughty standing expression, he looked solid and aristocratic like an expensive college president should.

What was the word his obnoxious, Wall Street trading, college buddy Frank used to describe him last time they played golf?

Prosperous.

The bastard , Cushing thought. Frank had the gall to keep telling him how prosperous he looked now. Once with a double pat to his midsection after he missed a putt!

But he was prosperous, wasn't he? Cushing thought as he paused looking over his office.

Frank had been right on the money about that.

He was a millionaire now. An actual millionaire and it wasn't like he even had to spend any of it with the way things were set up. The house was free, his meals, even his first-class vacations, granted he attached some silly college business to them.

Not bad for a boy from the badlands , he thought as he leaned back and grinned. Not bad at all .

The badlands in his case were Fort Mohave, Arizona, and they were bad all right. Dad was a copper miner, mother was a night cleaner at a hospital, the house a double wide that was once part of some kind of hippie commune oasis resort off Route 66. It was a shack really. It didn't even have an indoor bathroom.

Fortunately for him, what this incredibly embarrassing home did contain was three doting older sisters and a mother who was the black sheep hippie daughter of a distinguished family back East. Mother had homeschooled young Martin like a little prince, hadn't she? Taught him how to speak properly, how to always be neat and mannerly. She and his sisters showered constant attention on him and when his hillbilly dad's height and good looks kicked in around age fourteen, he became pretty much the mayor of the little desert town especially when he went out for football.

But Mother had even bigger plans for him than small-town hero. She had squirreled away money to send him back East to school at the University of Virginia where one of her brothers had gone.

There at UVA, well-groomed and with a line of malarkey as slick as buttered sausage, as his father used to say, he had hit the ground running on a quest in one direction. Upward.

If there had been one roadblock in this quest, it was that Cushing was no scholar. He had struggled through as a C student even after conning several female classmates to do most of his work. Fortunately, what he was good at, with his shoeshine and a smile, was student government. He was even vice president one year, which made him enough connections to squeak into UVA's famous law school despite his grades.

That's where he had met his roommate Frank Stone, another working-class fish out of water looking to put some polish on his blue-collar ambition at the upper crust UVA.

Almost a decade after law school graduation, Cushing was married and still scrambling, working at a no-name Maryland insurance company when his old roommate Frank had called.

Frank, unlike himself, had taken off like a rocket into Wall Street success at some hedge fund. They'd kept in touch, Cushing had made sure of that, and when Frank had called, it was with an opportunity that he thought Cushing would be just perfect for.

Frank, newly on the board of an expensive minor Ivy League college in Connecticut, said they needed a new president and would Cushing be interested.

"You're the greatest bullshitter I know, Marty," Frank had said. "You already look the part. Just do the Southern-loving voice you used to get us laid and these New England Yankees up here will be eating out of your hand."

Cushing couldn't believe it. Finally, some luck.

Now a decade since that phone call, he had gone from faking it to actually making it, hadn't he? He was rich now. And not just rich. He had power. The basketball program gave him national recognition and the entire campus was more like his kingdom than a school. He even had knights, in the form of the campus police.

Cushing smiled as Puccini's Suor Angelica started up from the iPhone Bluetooth speaker on his desk. He loved all of Puccini, of course, but something about Suor Angelica pierced his soul. As the de capo aria shifted into the B-episode key, Cushing laid the legal pad down, a smile playing on his lips.

He knew all about expensive cultured things now. Fine wine, opera, art. He'd actually seen the opera in person performed at the Teatro Real in Madrid two Christmases ago headlined by the incomparable soprano, Ermonela Jaho.

Lost in this reverie, his half-lidded eyes drifted to the wall beside the seascape where his favorite quote hung in a gilt frame.

"A man should

hear a little music,

read a little poetry,

and see a fine picture

every day of his life,

in order that

worldly cares may not obliterate

the sense of the beautiful

which God has implanted

in the human soul."

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

His old fellow defensive linemen back at Fort Mohave were doing what around now? he wondered. Backing an 18-wheeler into a loading dock? Meth? Five to ten?

Cushing laughed.

"Suckers," he said.

He was still sitting there transfixed when from his half-open office door came a soft tap. Opening his eyes, Cushing turned to see the frizzy-haired Dean Darwell staring in at him.

Well, that kills it , Cushing thought as he thumbed off the music.

What now? he thought, reluctantly waving her in. It was nothing good. Poker-faced, Elizabeth was not, and there was a look on her face that was uncharacteristically ill at ease.

Worldly cares, here I come , he thought.

"President Cushing," she said as she slipped in and closed the door behind her.

"Yes, Elizabeth?" he said.

Out with it. What is it? he thought.

"I think we have a problem," she said.