The Professor Read online

  The Professor

  Alexandria Clarke

  Contents

  The Professor

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Prologue

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Present Day

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Present Day

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Prologue

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Ten Years Later

  About the Author

  The Professor

  Alexandria Clarke

  1

  George O’Connor could barely see through the windshield as a relentless rainstorm drummed a cadence on the hood of his small, gray sedan. The road was black, slick, and unforgiving. O’Connor had nearly slid out twice already, furiously pumping his brakes as his tires lost traction with the pavement. As the car hydroplaned through yet another invisible puddle, O’Connor cursed his terrible luck. The back roads of the midsized town twisted and turned through the darkest parts of the woods. There were no streetlamps here, no exit ramps or stoplights. No alarmingly bright car dealerships to mark the edge of the township. No other signs of human life at all.

  O’Connor flipped on his high beams, but the old, yellowing headlights no longer had enough power to penetrate the gray curtain of rain outside. As he coaxed the sedan up and over a massive hill, O’Connor glanced in his rearview mirror. At first, he only saw the darkness of the road behind him, the tall trees of the woods bending over the pavement like shadowy guardians of the underworld. Then, one after the other, three pairs of LED headlights crested the hill.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” he swore, pressing his foot farther down on the gas pedal. He rounded a bend at a breakneck pace. The mug in the cup holder of the center console gave way to gravity, tipping to one side, and cold coffee splashed over the edge of the cup, soaking O’Connor’s pant leg.

  The road forked ahead, beyond the bend, and O’Connor took it as a sign. He had a chance to lose the men in the expensive SUVs behind him, but only if he could outsmart them. Just in case… he fumbled for his phone, his fingers shaking as he extracted it from his jacket pocket. He spared a quick glance at its screen to locate the number he needed then refocused on the road as the phone dialed.

  “Pick up. Please, pick up,” he urged. Each additional ring on the other end of the line was a harsh reprimand to his ear. “Come on, pick up—”

  “Hey, you’ve reached Nicole Costello. Please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  “Damn it, Nicole!”

  The phone beeped a dulcet tone.

  “Nicole, it’s O’Connor,” he said, flooring it toward the fork in the road. Another glimpse at the rearview mirror. The parade of headlights was gaining on him. “I know this is strange, but I need you to do something for me.”

  As he approached the fork, O’Connor considered his options. He knew that the road to the left would circle back toward campus. With one twitch of the steering wheel, he could return to Waverly University, to the comfort of his office on the third floor of the Arts and Humanities Building. Unfortunately, the campus was no longer safe for O’Connor, and the men driving those SUVs would catch up to him far too easily there. The road to the right, on the other hand, led to the interstate and endless possible escape routes.

  In a reckless move, O’Connor switched his headlights off entirely. The road plunged into complete and utter darkness, and O’Connor slammed on his brakes to compensate for his lack of vision. As he guided the tired sedan to the right, his eyes straining to make out the yellow Bott’s dots along the side of the road, he remembered his phone call.

  “Nicole, I’m in some serious shit,” he continued, speeding up again as his pupils adjusted to the black night around him. Behind him, the oncoming headlights had slowed down. With any luck, they had lost sight of O’Connor’s sedan. “I need help. In my office, there’s a—Christ!”

  O’Connor jerked the steering wheel to the left, narrowly avoiding the small doe that had stepped out of the woods and into the road. As the doe bolted, the car spun, and O’Connor felt the familiar release of his tires unsticking from the pavement. He dropped his cell phone and wrenched the wheel in the opposite direction but to no avail. The sedan careened out of control, skating across the river that the road had become. O’Connor beat mercilessly on the brakes, blind to the trees that bordered the desolate highway. His stomach dropped as the car drifted off the pavement and slipped into a drainage ditch. With a jolt, the vehicle finally came to a halt, firmly situated in the mud and facing the wrong way.

  O’Connor, his heart pumping, peered through the glass of the front windshield.

  “Please,” he whispered under his breath. “Just go back to campus.”

  But a moment later, the headlights appeared again. O’Connor groaned, experimentally pressing on the gas pedal. The engine whined, and muck splattered the back windshield. The tires were stuck.

  “Fucking. Piece. Of. Shit. Car.” Every word was punctuated with a punch to the dashboard. He glanced up again. The headlights were too close. Even if he made a run for it, the degenerates driving those monstrous SUVs were sure to find him.

  He searched the footwell for his cell phone, capturing it and opening up a new text message. Hurriedly, he dashed off a short series of instructions, only half-focused on the small touchscreen. A squeal of tires and the hum of multiple V8 engines permeated the interior of the sedan. The aggressive headlights flooded the car cabin, and O’Connor’s eyes watered as he squinted to finish typing his text message. Heavy car doors opened and slammed shut. O’Connor pressed send then dunked the cell phone into the mug of coffee, which was still miraculously half-full.

  Not a second later, a hammer bashed in the driver’s side window of the sedan. Broken glass showered O’Connor, and he shielded his eyes with his hands as someone reached through the shattered window and unlocked his door. They wrenched open the door, seized O’Connor roughly, and dragged him from the car.

  “Easy, easy!” O’Connor held his hands up in a gesture of defeat as he plodded out into the muck. His shoes squelched through the mud, and rain splattered down upon the thin fabric of his sports jacket, chilling him in an instant. Six men, all sporting black ski masks, dragged O’Connor deeper into the woods, well away from the road. They were impeccably dressed in expensive suits, wool overcoats, and designer loafers. Apparently, none of them had anticipated a high-speed chase through the backwoods of upstate New York, let alone one that landed them in a soggy ditch on the side of the road.

  “Bacchus, move the cars and kill the lights,” one man ordered, tossing a set of keys to one of his comrades. “All we need is for some busybody to drive past and pull over. And get his crap pile out of the mud. We’ll have to get rid of it.”

  The other man—Bacchus, O’Connor could only assume—gave a little, two-fingered salute. “You got it, Pluto.”

  The instructions bit at O’Connor’s nervous system. His pulse raced, but he t
ried to keep his voice steady and indifferent as he addressed the men around him. “Why the masks? I already know who you are, despite the ridiculous nicknames.”

  “You know some of us,” the first man conceded with a nod. “You know me.” With a flourish, he removed his ski mask, shaking out his head of damp, freshly trimmed black hair. He grinned at O’Connor, displaying a perfectly maintained smile, and lowered himself into a mocking bow. “Pluto, ruler of the underworld, at your service.”

  O’Connor said nothing, but rather stared at Pluto and the other men with poorly concealed contempt.

  “Oh, come on, George,” said Pluto jovially. He patted the sopping shoulder of O’Connor’s sports coat. “You worked so hard to expose us. I was rather hoping our official introduction would merit a better reaction. I must say, I’m disappointed in you.”

  “Where’s your favorite friend?” asked O’Connor. “What do you call her again? The Morrigan, is it?”

  “She didn’t want to get her hands dirty,” Pluto answered. “Extended car chases and backwoods interrogations aren’t exactly in a lady’s pool of interests. Not usually, anyway.”

  The other men chuckled, but O’Connor wasn’t amused. “What do you want from me?”

  “Easy,” responded Pluto. “You. Silent.”

  O’Connor shook his head. “It’s not going to happen. The things you’ve done—it’s not right.”

  Pluto sighed, plucking his leather driving gloves from his hands one finger at a time. “Let me spell this out for you, George. You are a lowly history professor. I mean, what possibly possessed you to become a fucking teacher of all things? God, man, you’re not even tenured. We, in comparison, are a group of cultured, well-read individuals who contribute not only a wealth of knowledge to our little part of the world, but a wealth of, well, wealth to society. So tell me, why would anyone believe your poorly conceived accusations of us?”

  “I have proof.”

  “I’m sure you do, my good man,” said Pluto. He stepped forward so that he was nearly nose-to-nose with O’Connor. He lowered his voice. “But what makes you think you’ll be around long enough to present that proof to anyone of worth?”

  Without warning, Pluto plunged his fist into O’Connor’s midsection. O’Connor doubled over with a grunt, and Pluto’s sycophants closed in around him. Two held O’Connor upright while the others delivered blow after blow to whatever part of his body was available.

  “I can see the headlines of the student newspaper now,” Pluto called over the sound of the beating. “‘Beloved history professor George O’Connor mysteriously retires early.’” Pluto shook his head, laughing. “God, what a joke. You crack me up, George.”

  But O’Connor wasn’t listening. He had already blacked out.

  2

  On Monday morning, I decided that I had no original thought. Of course, if I had voiced this out loud, there were a handful of people who might’ve disagreed. Wes McAllen, my longtime boyfriend, would be the first one to pipe in with a list of things I had accomplished, but to be fair, he was kind of obligated to continue boosting my morale. No, it was best to keep my thoughts of inadequacy to myself and instead focus on staying afloat in a sea of pre-graduation anxiety as the semester wore on. Unfortunately, staying afloat meant finally coming up with some sort of idea for my thesis. At this point, most of my classmates were already well on their way to completing their degrees. On the other hand, it looked like the only master’s degree I was ever going to earn would be in the practiced art of procrastination.

  “Do it on the plague,” suggested Wes. He munched away at a piece of buttered toast, leaning over the kitchen sink in our small apartment to avoid getting crumbs on the front of his police uniform.

  “No can do,” I said, tipping a pan of scrambled eggs and sausage into a wheat wrap. I ducked around Wes to rinse the steaming pan in cold water, and he planted a buttery kiss on my temple.

  “Why not?” he asked. With his toast-free hand, he tried to wipe away the residue of his breakfast from my face but only succeeded in spreading bread crumbs through my hair. “Sorry.”

  I shook out the crumbs as best as I could. “Someone did theirs on the plague last year. O’Connor wants something original.”

  “You’re a history major,” Wes pointed out. “How are you supposed to come up with something original when every past event has already been picked apart by someone else?”

  I bundled up my eggs and sausage in the wrap like a burrito. “Now you understand my dilemma. Do we have any cheddar cheese left?”

  Wes polished off the last bite of toast, dusted his hands off over the sink, and opened the fridge. “Nope. Just the crappy cheese for the dog. What about the police?”

  “What about it?”

  “For your paper,” he clarified. “You could do a detailed history about the origins of policing in America. Did you know that most police departments started off as slave patrols?”

  “Yay, oppression,” I said dryly.

  He jettisoned an individually wrapped slice of American cheese at me. As I freed it from the plastic, Franklin, the scraggly pug-and-yellow-lab mix that had followed Wes and me home one day, trotted into the kitchen, collar jingling, and sat at my feet. I sniffed the cheese, wrinkled my nose, and tossed the entire slice to Franklin. He gobbled it down without chewing. Unlike me, Franklin didn’t discriminate against highly processed foods.

  “I’m just saying,” continued Wes. He knelt down to give Franklin a rub, who promptly rolled over to offer his belly up for a massage. “That would be so easy for you. You could even interview me.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.

  “Har, har,” I said, wrapping up my cheeseless burrito in aluminum foil so I could eat it on the go. I checked my watch. “I have to head out. O’Connor’s expecting me at ten thirty.”

  Much to Franklin’s dismay, Wes abandoned his role as doggie masseuse to collect my black peacoat from the hook near the door. As he helped me into it, he asked, “Are we still doing lunch today?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  He handed me my keys, draped my messenger bag over my shoulder, and took me by the waist. I reached up, standing on my toes to make up for our height difference, and interlaced my fingers behind his neck.

  “You’ll do great, Nicole,” he said, giving me a little squeeze. Then his mouth turned up in a mischievous smirk. “The ten-minute walk through campus is more than enough time to come up with an idea for an eighty-page paper that you were supposed to have finished last semester.”

  “Weston!” I smacked his shoulder and tried to squirm out of his grasp, but he laughed and pulled me closer.

  “I’m kidding, baby.”

  He bent down for a kiss. As I hugged him tightly, the stiff fabric of his collar poked me in the neck, but I still appreciated the warm press of his arms around me. Wes and I had met as undergraduates during an ill-fated freshman orientation that might’ve ended in tears had I not been susceptible to Wes’s goofy brand of humor. Even so, it wasn’t until I was zipping up my graduation gown and batting away Wes’s attempts to tickle my ears with the tassel of his mortarboard that I realized I wanted him in my life as more than just a best friend. After the ceremony, when I kissed him for the first time, diploma holders in hand, he only said, “Shit, finally.”

  In the years that followed, Wes and I made sure to factor each other into our plans for the future. Wes joined the police academy, which was what he had always wanted to do. With my nearly obsolete history degree, I didn’t have a whole lot of employment options. I bagged retail job after retail job until I realized doing inventory and pasting a benign, vacuous smile across my face to trick customers into thinking I cared about their dress sizes wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. Wes was the one who had encouraged me to go back to school. He even helped me sort through piles of brochures advertising prestigious universities and programs. When I got into Waverly’s postgraduate history program—quite the feat considering how long it had been since I’d complete
d my bachelor’s degree—Wes didn’t hesitate to ask for a transfer. We moved into Waverly’s on-campus graduate housing, Wes started working for the local police force, and I was free to actually pursue the education and researching career that I wanted.

  With one last kiss from Wes and an affectionate goodbye rub of Franklin’s chin, I left the apartment, jogged down the steps, and started off across campus toward the Arts and Humanities Building. Despite the fact that it was freezing, it was a gorgeous day, the first in a while in which blue sky was visible. An icy breeze played with my hair, whipping bright blond strands into my eyes. I unearthed a knit hat from the pocket of my coat to subdue my rowdy hair and wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck. Last night, a thunderous rainstorm had swept through the area, waking me up with its raucous clatter on the roof and scaring the literal shit out of Franklin. On the upside, the storm had cleared out the gray slush that had been lingering around campus since the last snowfall. It was mid-March, and I was ready for some sunshine. Even the pale, half-hearted glow of the sun that morning was enough to put a little bounce in the soles of my boots.

  Waverly University was all a woman like me needed in higher education. Established in the early 1700s, it was one of the oldest schools in the United States, lesser known than its other Ivy League counterparts but just as reputable. The grounds were vast, the buildings brick, and the students fashionable. I had been to Oxford once for a study-abroad trip, and as delighted as I was by Oxford’s extensive history, Waverly pursued me with a romanticism for education that I couldn’t help but fall in love with. As I crossed one of Waverly’s many lawns, I tipped my head back, inhaling the sharp scents of pine and wood smoke. There was no place I’d rather be.