Flowering Judas(39)

Since it was seven o’clock, it was all right for her to park at school. She drove in and put her car in the second best space in the Frasier Hall faculty lot. It was always empty when she got there in the mornings. Nobody ever got there earlier.

She got out and carried her tote bag up to the third floor to wash. The building was as close to empty as it ever got. It was more empty than it was at night. At night, it was full of cleaning crews.

She got undressed and washed everything and then washed her hair. It was hard to do with the faucet being this far down over the sink. She got the soap rinsed out only by turning her neck back and forth in a way that made her think she was going to break it. She got clean clothes out of the tote bag and put the dirty ones in the plastic bag she’d been given at the grocery store. She’d have to hit the laundromat this weekend, just to make sure. It was important to keep everything about herself as clean and neat as possible. It was too easy to let everything go, and then what would happen to her?

She left the third-floor bathroom, went down another floor and crossed the enclosed bridge to the Students Building. She had no idea why this was called the Students Building and nothing else was. Wasn’t every building at a college a “students” building? Or most of them? She hadn’t had enough sleep. She was making no sense, even to herself.

The Students Building had a cafeteria in it, right on the other side of the bridge. The cafeteria was subsidized by the state. That meant she could get a pretty decent breakfast for about three dollars. That was more than she would have had to pay for it if she’d had a kitchen to cook for herself, but she didn’t have a kitchen, and under the present circumstances, three dollars was doing very well.

She got to the cafeteria to find that she was just a hair early enough to get breakfast at all. It was nearly nine-thirty. She must have taken forever to do what she was doing this morning. It hadn’t felt like forever. She put a hand up to her hair and felt that it was still heavily wet. She didn’t understand that, either.

She got waffles, sausage, syrup, orange juice, coffee, plastic utensils, and a big wad of paper napkins; paid out at the cashier’s desk; and then found an empty table along the wall of windows between the two main eating rooms. She didn’t like to be out in the middle of those rooms. It made her feel too exposed.

She put her tray down on the table and her tote bag on the chair closest to the wall. She sat down and rummaged through the tote bag for her correcting: folders full of student papers; grade book; red pen. She laid all these out next to her breakfast and got her good glasses so that she could see. She was starving. If there was one good thing about this living in the car business, it was definitely that it was helping her lose some weight.

She opened the plastic syrup pack and put the syrup all over her waffles. She mentally kicked herself for forgetting to get butter. Then she opened the first of the folders and looked down at the latest paper from Haydee Michaelman. It was a good three times as long as it was supposed to be, and it would be a chaotic mess of incoherent thoughts and angry declarations—but it would be readable, and one of the best in the class, and Penny was looking forward to it.

She sensed someone standing next to her and looked up. It was Gwendolyn Baird, holding a cop of coffee the size of a small inflatable pool and looking down at the waffles like they were diseased. Penny almost said something, but there was no point. Gwendolyn was twenty years younger than she was, and head of the Writing Program.

“God,” Gwendolyn said. “I don’t understand how you can eat that stuff.”

“I fell asleep last night before dinner,” Penny said mildly. It was a lie, but she lied a lot to Gwendolyn.

Gwendolyn put her cup on the table. “I thought you taught night courses this term,” she said. “In fact, I’m sure you teach night courses this term.”

“I teach late, yes,” Penny said. “Is there something? I mean—”

“Oh,” Gwendolyn sat. She sat down across the table. “There is. It’s about Chester Morton. Do you remember Chester Morton?”

“Of course I do,” Penny said. “It’s not like it happens every day, one of your students going missing in the middle of a term. At the beginning of one. You know what I mean. And I’d probably have remembered him anyway. You don’t get that many of them tattooed up like that, and, you know, the hair.”

“Yes, well,” Gwen said. “What we hear is this—the police are going to want to talk to all of his teachers from the term he disappeared. To see if they know anything. They say that that man they called in, that consultant? They say he says that Chester could not have committed suicide.”