The campus was empty. The sidewalks were slippery, lonely. The sun had come up on the horizon and turned the untrodden snow—the great mounds and blankets of it—into a blinding moonscape. Now, this was a perfect campus for ghosts, Mira thought. For the invisible. The gone. No one would be able to see them strolling along through this snow. There was no one to see them. The students were all in their beds, asleep. She thought of Perry, dreaming. She imagined his eyes moving rapidly behind his lids—that frantic dancing that was actually complete peace.
It was hard to walk through this much snow, and Mira tried to think but could remember no November snowfall like it in all the years she’d lived in this town. Luckily she’d worn flat leather boots. Although they were cold, with a bad tread, she could march through the snow on the sidewalks, trudge through the slush in the streets. It seemed that a few trucks and cars must have passed already through town, because she could see the tracks of their tires, but she didn’t see any vehicles now. At the corner she didn’t bother to stop for the Don’t Walk sign.
“Professor Polson,” the man said, standing as she stepped into Dean Fleming’s office. She had never seen him in person before, but she knew who he was from the photo on the university website, the photo that came up right next to the gold seal bearing the university’s dates and the Latin motto under its name (Utraque Unum: “Both and One”) every time she double-clicked on Home.
“President Yancey,” Mira said.
The dean was standing in the corner, as if he’d been banished to it. He didn’t meet Mira’s eyes.
“Sit down, Professor Polson,” the president said, gesturing to the seat across from him. He held a piece of paper in his hand. “This is very serious. Very serious indeed. Serious complaints have been filed against you by your students—” She sank into the chair across from him. He handed her the piece of paper he’d been holding, which she could only glance at before feeling as if she might faint, recognizing a few names and signatures beside them:
Karess Flanagan. Brett Barber. Michael Curley. Jim Bouwers.
“But the real news of the day,” President Yancey said—and there was no mistaking the hysterical little laugh in the way he said it—“is that one of your students has been killed. Shot. After a B-and-E at the OTT house—”
Mira was swimming through the initials, and found herself moving her arms at the same time that she stood up. “Who?” she said.
“Sit down,” the president said, pointing at the chair she’d just stood up from. “Sit down, now, Professor. I have no doubt you’ll be hearing from the police soon enough, but in the meantime you’re to clean out your office. In the meantime, you’re to tell me in all the detail you can come up with why it is that this student of yours, this Perry Edwards, this student with whom you were working closely, might have broken into a sorority at three o’clock in the morning and managed to walk straight into a terrified young lady with a weapon, and gotten himself shot.”
“Oh, my God,” Mira said, and fell back into her chair.
“Oh, my God is fucking right,” President Yancey said. “Do you have any fucking idea what this will mean, Professor Polson, for this fucking university?”