“Do you want to give it back to him?” Rose Noir asked, reaching under her table and pulling out a large shopping bag.
“I wouldn’t want to deprive you of the pleasure,” I said.
I would defend Horace’s right to his inner simian self to the death if need be, but I’d rather not have the aunts who sided with Darlene think I was the one responsible for returning his suit.
I went off to find my car and continue the search for Professor Schmidt.
Chapter 28
I had to wait while Cousin Sidney towed the three SUVs and one pickup truck that blocked the entrance to our driveway and put down some orange cones to save my space.
With any luck, Professor Schmidt would be in his office, and if he wasn’t, I could cruise by Michael’s office, borrow his copy of the departmental faculty directory, and get Schmidt’s home address and phone number.
Caerphilly was quiet. Unusually quiet, even for a Sunday. Almost unnaturally quiet—probably because nearly everyone in town was out at our yard sale-turned-carnival. Normally I had to cruise for fifteen minutes to find a parking space within ten blocks of Dunsany Hall, where the English department had its offices, but today I had my choice of a dozen spaces by the front door.
I walked through the silent halls, sticking out my tongue and making faces at the closed doors of the Great Stone Faces, as Michael and I called the department chairman and all his stuffy cronies—all the diehards putting such intense pressure on Michael’s tenure committee to turn him out in the cold.
Not a very mature thing to do, of course, but it helped me stay polite when I had to encounter them in person. And probably a lot safer to do today than during the week. The assistant dean had once dashed into the hall when I was sticking out my tongue at his door, and as part of my effort to convince him that I was doing wrinklepreventing yoga facial exercises, I’d ended up standing on my head in the faculty lounge for nearly half an hour. One of those days when I went home wondering if perhaps the best thing I could do for Michael’s career was not to overcome my commitment phobia and make an honest man of him but to disappear completely from his life.
Though even my absence probably wouldn’t help him snag an office here in the oldest, most prestigious part of the building. Professor Schmidt, of course, had a prime space, only three doors down from the beastly department chairman.
“Professor Schmidt!” I called, and knocked loudly before turning the knob. Which didn’t budge. I frowned at the door for a few seconds, and then, as I turned to leave, my eye fell on a framed enlargement of a photo of Mrs. Pruitt that hung beside his door, as if to remind passersby of the importance of the poet on whom he was the world’s foremost expert.
Fashions in photography had certainly changed over the years. The picture was a full-length portrait of Mrs. Pruitt sitting in a chair, with an elaborately swagged drapery and a potted palm behind her. Although sitting wasn’t quite the word—she was perched rather precariously, as if she had only briefly alighted for the photographer’s benefit, and would be off on another flight of poetic fancy in a few seconds. I kept expecting the chair to fall or break. And she should have just looked at the camera, smiled or frowned, and have done with it. Let the viewer see what she looked like without hamming it up. Instead, she was holding a slim book in one hand while she gazed soulfully at the ceiling, her other hand raised to place a single finger to her lips in a gesture clearly designed to suggest deep thought while slightly obscuring several of her chins.
Perhaps in its time it was considered a splendid likeness, and inspired droves of people to buy her books, but now it just looked silly. I could see why Professor Schmidt had to keep busy erasing the mustaches and sarcastic comments that each succeeding class of English students felt inspired to draw on the glass covering the photo. I hadn’t bothered to study it before, and wouldn’t today if not for the possibility that there might be some tenuous connection between Mrs. Pruitt and Gordon’s murder.
But whatever the connection was, I wouldn’t learn it from Ginevra’s primly pursed lips, so I shrugged and moved on to the less exalted wing of the building where Michael had his office.
Also locked, though this was uncharacteristic. Of course, he’d probably started locking it since he’d begun keeping an ever-increasing amount of stuff in it, stuff that we’d moved out of our old basement apartment but couldn’t yet take to the house.
Help was at hand, though. I glanced down the hall and saw that Giles’s door was open. With any luck, he’d have a copy of the faculty directory.
When I reached his doorway, I saw Giles hard at work on a large stack of official Caerphilly College forms. I recognized the distinctive pale blue paper the administration liked to use—Michael swore it was so passing bureaucrats could tell at a glance if a faculty member was allowing the forms to pile up on his desk.