Chapter 18

18

Andrew lowered himself into the same cracked vinyl chair in front of Troth’s desk from his last visit. The professor had left a note on the tiny square whiteboard hanging on her door: Be back shortly! As he waited, implications spooled out inside his head one after another, unforgiving like a corpse under hospital lighting, like how he’d seen Eddie in the identification photographs. Men who had violent squabbles over cocaine shot each other; someone desperate to cover up an overdose would pose a body, maybe. In neither of those scenarios would the perpetrator tie someone up, slit their wrists, and drive their corpse to a scenic location for a dog-walker to find. Nothing qualified him to investigate an actual murder, but if he took his handful of suspicions and bad dreams to a cop they’d pity-laugh him out of the room.

Something drastic was missing—maybe in the field notes, maybe in the phone. He didn’t know what it would mean if Troth had the notes—it might mean nothing at all. But without access to the fieldwork he’d have to retrace Eddie’s steps himself, and she could help with that better than anyone.

From the foyer Dr. Troth said, “Andrew, I’m glad you could make it.”

“I’m sorry it’s taken a while,” he said as she entered the office.

He crossed one ankle over the other, attempting to loosen his posture to an approximation of normal. Professor Troth lowered herself into her utilitarian chair. She rested her wrists on the edge of the desk, fine-boned fingers interlocked, to regard him. Overhead vents kicked on with a muffled roar, and a burst of chilly air rattled the papers scattered over her blotter.

Andrew said, “Thanks for returning the ring.”

“I couldn’t have kept it, but you’re welcome regardless,” she said.

Here goes nothing,he thought, then said, “I read through some of Eddie’s notes and stuff he left around the house, and you’re right—it was, uh, interesting. How’d he present it to you?”

“Well, his general focus as I understood it was on folklore unique to the region: urban legends, ghost stories, that sort of thing. His study was comparative, and focused on placing local traditions within the broader context of Appalachian-South cultural studies.”

While she spoke, she reached into the purse on the far corner of the desk. The same sort of brass keys he had on his belt loop cluttered her key ring. She thumbed one loop out of the clump and unlocked her top desk drawer. It slid free with a quiet hiss and she lifted a hook-ended manila folder from the hanging rack. The plastic tab at the top said Fulton in blue spidery script. She laid it flat and pushed it toward him. Andrew flipped the folder open, glancing at the tidy stack of printed pages.

She continued, “First is the mentoring file I’d been keeping, followed by Edward’s own notes, in particular the sketches he’d been constructing of early Fulton history. I had intended to assist him with archival research from my own family library, before he passed.”

“And you said you were hoping I’d take it up?” Andrew prompted.

Troth nodded, tucking her hair behind her ears studiously. “The project is unique, truly. Edward was able to speak with a … type of person whom I don’t have access to or rapport with. But I encouraged him to pursue his unorthodox avenues of investigation—his reach revealed fresh information on stories I thought I’d known inside and out. I suppose old money talking to and about itself isn’t nearly as interesting; significant facts are easily missed that way. I’d almost abandoned hope on continuing to pursue the avenues he opened up—until your arrival.”

Andrew said, “I thought you said he mentioned I’d be coming here?”

“He had, but after his passing, you didn’t reach out to confirm your enrollment with the department, or answer our correspondence. So your arrival came as a surprise,” she admitted. “My husband also found Edward’s methodology fascinating, but aside from difficulties accessing Edward’s sources, it felt disrespectful for us to pursue further without him. And then, as I said, you arrived—which refreshed my interest.”

“Opened the door again, huh. Can I look?” he asked with a gesture to the folder.

“Be my guest,” she said.

Andrew slid the file onto his lap and read through the first few pages of her notes: Edward has laid out a frame that balances academic inquiry into folklore with field research to trace the origins of stories, both familial and commonplace, that will allow him a unique ethnographic perspective on his subject. Several pages further in, she continued: the first set of interviews conducted in the field were inconclusive, but Edward seems nonplussed, eager to continue, and perhaps enamored with the process itself.

“The material will certainly be publishable,” she continued. “And more importantly, the original contribution to the field would have quite an impact. I act as advisor for several students in every cohort, but I don’t often see work that catches my interest so thoroughly. Assisting your efforts, if you choose to pick up his project midstream, is a personal priority for me. Your first publication could come as a co-authored piece, with my assistance on the material.”

Her motives slid into place, filling the logistical gap he’d been struggling with. It made no sense for something high-concept like loyalty to the Fulton legacy to drive her persistence when she’d known Eddie for less than six months. The opportunity to co-opt a student’s labor to boost her own profile did—how neatly and smoothly she’d proposed he do the work and she take the credit. He gnawed his lip for a moment, glanced up at her from the notes, and prodded to confirm, “Not an entirely altruistic motive, then, bringing me on board?”

Her gallant smile had a playful edge, conspiratorial. She leaned onto her elbows and said, “No, you’re right, my interest comes as much from personal desire as altruism alone. I hope that doesn’t come across as ghoulish? Believe me, I was fond of Edward, and I truly do think that his work is worth the effort of preservation. I wasn’t expecting to get a second opportunity.”

“Publish or perish, huh,” he said.

“Exactly that. I’m willing to admit, between the two of us here, that Edward’s passing left me stuck on a professional level as well as a personal one,” she said. “I wasn’t able to fruitfully pick up where he left off, but he’d mentioned your interest and qualifications. And you also have access to his estate, correct?”

“Yeah,” he agreed, distracted as he thumbed through the notes in the folder.

The pages were in Eddie’s handwriting on loose-leaf paper with neat marginal annotations in her script. The first sheet read, James Fulton settled the land that would become the estate in 1806 without incident or conflict. Found a family Bible that cuts out around 1910 when people stopped recording names in it, but the lineage is clear from the first guy to the last (aka, me). Eddie’s small aside was jarring, as if he were performing for the reader. Andrew frowned and shuffled through the pages—there were only around twenty-five.

“Do you have more than this, somewhere else in your files?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” she responded.

The notes she’d handed him were spartan, bland compared to the personal journals. Andrew sat the folder on the desk. Troth’s interest might be ghoulish, but her angle on the whole mess was academic, oblique to his ultimate goal. It was an angle to exploit nonetheless.

“The field notes for his interviews are missing,” Andrew said.

Troth tilted her head and said, “I don’t have those, unfortunately. He provided me summaries where appropriate, not his originals or transcriptions.”

“No, I mean they’re just gone. I’ve dug through everything at home, in his car, and in his carrel. Everyone has mentioned them, but they’re nowhere to be found.”

After two beats of strained silence, with her blank stare pinning him to his stiff seat, Troth crossed the office to close the door. The air conditioner cut off. Andrew drummed his fingertips on the chair arm, watching her as she paused. Her grip rested loose on the door handle, and she cocked her head at him with a considering flat frown.

“And you’ve looked everywhere, you’re sure?” she repeated.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“He did a full semester’s worth of interviews; there should be at minimum one full notebook. We discussed the interviews in a general sense, and he referenced from them in our meetings, but the originals and the audio recordings should be with his other materials.”

Andrew spread his hands in a gesture of supplication and said, “I was assuming, or maybe hoping, you’d have them.”

The fine wrinkles at the corner of Troth’s mouth lent a severity to her expression. He wouldn’t have wanted that intensity turned on him in a course; he doubted she ever had trouble with boisterous underclassmen. All his leads pointed in the direction of those field excursions, alongside Sam or otherwise; the absent phone with its likely collection of audio recordings and the written notes both were too closely joined to the hallucinatory vision of the corpse posed under the oak tree. Troth clicked across the tile floor in her sensible heels to pull the second guest chair over to his elbow and sit.

“Here.” She flipped the folder open once again between the two of them. Andrew shifted in his seat to face her. “While I don’t have the interviews themselves, my notes reference a handful of them in greater detail.”

She split the stack in half and handed him a pad of ruled Post-Its. The frown was ever-present as she skimmed through the first few pages. Andrew ran his thumb across his own page, unfocused, seeking names or locations instead of her long-form analysis of Eddie’s writing style. At his side, her pen scratched on the Post-Its. He forced himself not to look.

Four pages in he happened upon a paragraph: Rob and Lisa McCormick are an elderly couple who are located close to the boundaries of the Fulton estate and Edward expressed excitement at their agreement to speak with him soon. The majority of his subjects have been in their mid-thirties and are transplants to the area; the McCormicks are older, from a family long established in the region, and are familiar in passing with the Fulton line. He snagged the pen and wrote their names under Troth’s brief notation of Eric Middleton, a name snagged from her own stack of papers.

She checked his note and murmured, “I’m not certain he managed to arrange that meeting, with the couple. You might have better luck.”

Each of them wrote two additional names, six total, before Troth flipped her final page facedown. Light slanted lower through the casement-style windows. Andrew cracked his knuckles. Troth returned to her chair, where she sat heavily and propped her chin on one hand. It was a less manicured gesture than he was growing used to from her. His phone kicked up an incessant vibration in his pocket, ringing, but he ignored it. He stuck the Post-It note to the outside of the file folder.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re sure the notes weren’t in his carrel?” she asked.

“Positive.”

“Those locks aren’t particularly secure. I can’t imagine someone breaking in to steal from him, though,” she said.

Andrew balanced the file on one knee. “You said his research was good. And he’d have been talking about it to everyone, probably.”

“An opportunistic researcher…” Her thumb pressed to her thin lips in thought.

Like you, he thought to himself.

“It must be frustrating, and insulting, to be forced to retrace his steps,” she said. “I apologize. I’m hoping there’s an explanation that doesn’t implicate one of our students stooping to theft.”

Troth didn’t rise from behind the desk as Andrew stood. She continued absently tapping her thumbnail on the seam of her frown. He and Troth were both, he justified to himself, using each other for different ends.

“If I’m continuing the work, I’m going to have to piece it together to catch up to where he left things,” he said, aware of the doubling of his words, the implications hiding underneath.

“Indeed you will, or so it seems.” Troth glanced over at him, straightening her posture. “Edward started with a broad approach to local folklore, but he had begun to focus more on stories surrounding the Fultons before our meetings paused for the summer. The last time we spoke was at the dinner party, the day he left his ring behind. I remember his excitement about some recent discovery he’d made, but I never had a chance to find out what that entailed.”

“Maybe I’ll be able to unearth that, whatever it was,” Andrew said.

“One hopes,” she said. “Please come to me, as you continue. I’d like to avoid unduly influencing the dissertation you’d create, but I’m familiar with Edward’s intentions and approach.”

“And you’d like to guide us toward something usable,” he acknowledged. For your own sake went unsaid.

The ghost of a smile returned to her mouth. A dramatic flick of the wrist that seemed to encompass yes and don’t mention it was all he received in response. Instead, she said, “This land and the stories people tell about it are fascinating. Hauntings, massacres, dark magic—all that bloody business lingers underneath the surface of respectability. It’s a grim, delicious contradiction. I appreciate those contradictions and what they reveal about us as humans.”

Andrew hated that whole business, but he offered her the only agreement he could: “Eddie appreciated it, too.”

“I know,” she said. “He was an interesting young man.”

Andrew let himself out and closed the door behind him, his nerves doing uncomfortable flips. He checked his phone. Two missed calls and a text, all from Riley. The text just said call me asap.

He headed for the parking garage absorbed in his thoughts, cognizant of the tightrope he had put his feet on. Eddie must’ve found something, stumbled on it like the eager stupid boy he was, but Andrew had no idea what that thing could even be. He was one step ahead of Troth at least, in knowing that Eddie wasn’t so much interested in folklore as in explaining his own secrets to himself.

He texted Sam, if I had a list of names could you tell me if they’re people you know

No response.

The lights were on at Capitol. He parked on the street in front and took the porch steps two at a time, Troth’s folder pinched shut in his grip to keep the papers in. Holding it had started to make his palm twinge. He jiggled the knob to unlatch the door and shouldered his way inside. Riley jolted an inch in his seat on the couch, slopping water from a pint glass over his lap.

“Andrew,” said Del from the other sofa.

“I’m going to go,” his roommate said as he stood.

Del had her hair knotted up in a loose bun, like the one girl he’d seen at Sam’s party. She held a full glass of water in both hands, elbows on her bare knees. Riley grabbed his shoes from next to the door, made frantic eyes at Andrew, and slipped outside. The soft click of the latch shut him in with her. He slapped the folder onto the side table and shrugged his bag off. She took a sip from the glass, staring at a point past his left ear.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I needed to see for myself—this place, how you were living. If you were all right,” she said.

Crossing the room to sit on the other couch was like swimming through syrup. Andrew picked up Riley’s glass for a fortifying swallow of tepid water. The tendon that ran from Del’s shoulder into her neck was taut as a whipcord. He stretched his legs, knees apart, and dropped his head back. The chastised feeling didn’t dissipate as he waited in silence for her to speak.

“Remember why we broke up?” she asked.

“Because of the tattoo,” he said.

She snorted and set the glass down with a click. He glanced at her as she rubbed her arms, then her legs, her familiar nervous tic. “No, that wasn’t the reason. It was a symbol of the reason. The reason was Eddie and you, you and Eddie. And here we are with that again.”

His thumb pressed to the ink on his wrist bone. Del flicked his hand and he let go. She took his wrist in her fingers, long and thin, to trace the band of faded dots. The touch was clinical. She edged closer and sighed a stranger’s sigh, the briefest exhalation. The lamplight on her face cast her cheekbones in hard relief. In high school, people had treated her as one of the guys because of her butch face, because of her preferred companions, because of her oft-contested spot on the baseball team, a hundred other petty reasons. He’d been one of those people, and so had Eddie, until the three of them figured out another, more intimate option.

“The funny thing is I haven’t missed you since you left, and I’m sad as fuck he’s dead, but until then I hadn’t missed him either,” she said.

She dropped his wrist and he crossed his arms over his lap.

“Then why come?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Because I already lost you to him once, when it might have mattered more,” she said. “And I guess because I needed closure. This time I’m here for me, not for either of you.”

Andrew’s phone buzzed in his pocket, twice. His hand twitched to check if Sam had responded before he made himself relax, forced himself to keep considering her face. The separation had made them alien to one another, or maybe that had been happening for years and he’d ignored it. He’d kissed that mouth more times than he could count. He’d watched Eddie do the same.

“I wasn’t the one who ended things,” he said.

“I saw those fucking tattoos and all I could think was that he’d marked you. The three of us were supposed to be … working on something together, but neither of you would’ve ever thought to give me a goddamn tattoo. Neither of you really gave a shit about me except as a conduit for the feelings you weren’t going to talk about.” She heaved a breath and let it out. “You still don’t, Andrew. So I guess I came to say goodbye.”