The Professor Page 2

  I took the long way across campus so that I could pass by my favorite building; the Waverly library was one of the original structures of the university. Its marble floors, hallowed hallways, and great stained-glass dome were home to thousands of books, and the library even had a special section, the Rapere Wing, dedicated to rare manuscripts and other invaluable acquisitions. The first time I set foot in the Waverly library, I was overwhelmed. Never had I cried at the mere sight of books, but I could’ve happily died at that very moment. If my soul decided it had seen its eternal resting place and soared up to settle itself amongst the ancient spines of those books, I would’ve yielded to its whim. And the smell—they couldn’t bottle the scent of those leathery bindings and yellowing pages no matter how hard they tried. It was like a fine cigar, and I took every possible opportunity to study in the library’s depths, if only to inhale the very essence of those dusty volumes.

  Not far from the library, the Arts and Humanities Building, to which I had apparently sold my soul, stood in all its daunting glory. It was a beautiful work of architecture as well, but I had spent far too much time stressing myself out within its many classrooms to associate positive connotations with it. Not to mention I’d had one too many arguments in the office of my thesis advisor, George O’Connor, here. I took one class with O’Connor during my first semester at Waverly and fell in love with his brusque style of teaching. The following semester, I signed on to be his teaching assistant. We had a love-hate relationship. He annoyed me and I annoyed him, mostly because we operated on the same level of sarcasm, but a grudging respect for each other had grown out of our mutual dedication to research and the stories of the past. I’d learned more in the past two years from bickering with O’Connor than from all of my other professors combined. However, in the past few months, O’Connor and I had both been a bit lax when it came to my education. Last semester, he drove me to drink when I couldn’t come up with a topic for my thesis paper. Lately, though, O’Connor had been more and more distracted. It had become a regular thing for him to skip classes, and I was forced to pick up teaching his courses where he had left off. His erratic behavior was a blessing and a curse. On one hand, I was grateful that he had ceased nagging me about my thesis. On the other, the end of the semester loomed closer, and it was starting to look like I’d have to postpone graduation until I got off my ass and found something to write about. Today was the day, though. I’d finally pinned O’Connor down for a face-to-face discussion, and if I didn’t leave this meeting with a solid idea, I was seriously considering throwing myself off the tallest building at Waverly.

  I trudged up the stairs of the Arts and Humanities building, dreading the conversation to come, but when I reached O’Connor’s office, I noticed that the door was already ajar. That was unusual. O’Connor almost always locked his office door, even if he was inside. He hated disturbances, but after several failed errands to fetch something from his office, I demanded a key of my own. To my shock, he’d obliged.

  I knocked lightly. “O’Connor?” I called, pushing open the door. The office was empty.

  I reached into my bag for my cell phone. O’Connor hadn’t been a stickler for punctuality lately, but he’d never flaked on our meetings before. I had a voicemail and a text message from him, but both were time-marked from last night. I checked the voicemail first.

  “Nicole, it’s O’Connor.”

  Behind O’Connor’s voice, I could hear the sound of a motor running and rain pelting down on a roof. Apparently, O’Connor had been out driving pretty late last night.

  “I know this is strange, but I need you to do something for me.” There was a pause, some static, and the screech of tires before O’Connor went on. “Nicole, I’m in some serious shit. I need help. In my office, there’s a—Christ!”

  There was a loud thump, as if the cell phone had gone flying out of O’Connor’s hand and hit the floor, then silence.

  “What the hell—?” I said. I hung up to check my text messages. O’Connor had typed a note to me, written in shorthand and abundant with typos.

  Nicole under my desk theres a safe youneed to open. you already have the code. inside there are sevral docs. take everyting home w/ you. cant give you anymore info. do not attempt to contact me. do what you can w/ evidence. stay safe.

  “What freaking evidence?” I muttered. It felt like a violation of privacy wandering over to the opposite side of O’Connor’s desk, but I did it anyway, wondering if this was all some sort of elaborate joke he had concocted to punish me for my lack of thesis work. But sure enough, a small security safe with a code pad and a key override was nestled beneath the weathered oak desk, and I gave an exhausted sigh of resignation before pushing aside O’Connor’s rolling chair to kneel down for a closer look.

  “You never gave me the code, you batshit old man,” I said, examining the code pad. For good measure, I typed in the year of O’Connor’s birthday on the off chance that he was that simple of a man. It was a no-go. The pad beeped angrily at me, flashing red. I glanced around the room, wondering if O’Connor had hidden a spare key somewhere. The filing cabinet caught my eye, and I rifled through its poorly organized drawers for several minutes before conceding defeat. I fought similar battles with O’Connor’s bookshelf, the cushions of his old leather sofa, and every other nook and cranny in the office that I could think of. Annoyed, sweaty, and slightly out of breath, I came up empty-handed. Furious, I stormed out of his office, only pausing to lock the office door behind me. If O’Connor returned and found it open, I’d be in serious shit.

  But as I reached forward to put the office key in the lock, I froze and raised the key closer to my face. A six-digit number had been etched into the head of the key. I’d always passed it off as some kind of manufacturing number, but now that I thought about it…

  I rushed back inside, slamming the office door behind me. Beneath O’Connor’s desk, I punched in the random six-digit number on the safe’s code pad, holding my breath as I hit the Enter key.

  The code pad turned green.

  I pulled open the door, and my jaw dropped. It turned out that O’Connor’s text message had been slightly deceiving. “Sevral docs” didn’t even begin to cover the contents of the safe. It was overflowing with papers and folders, jammed in so haphazardly that most of them were crumpled and damaged. I extracted a few from the top and shuffled through them. From what I could tell, they were mostly old newspaper articles, student files that O’Connor technically shouldn’t have had access to, and a few handwritten letters that I didn’t even bother to glance at. All in all, it looked like a bunch of trash.

  With increasing agitation, I rummaged through the rest of the safe. It was pages upon pages of the same crap. I was two seconds away from slamming the safe shut when my fingers found the sharp corner of something other than paper. I dug the object out of the rubble and sat back on my heels. It was a small wooden box, decorated with elaborate carvings. Near the fissure, where the top part of the box met the bottom, was what I could only describe as some sort of puzzle. The pieces of it spun individually like the code for a padlock, except this one was twelve spaces long and had letters instead of numbers. I fiddled with it for a minute, spinning each space while holding the box to my ear, as though I might be able to hear when the correct letter clicked into place. No such luck.

  “O’Connor, you prat,” I scolded, shoving the puzzle box back into the safe. I slammed the door shut and punched in the same code to lock it. The pad blinked at me again, and I pushed myself up from the floor of O’Connor’s office. I’d wasted enough time. If O’Connor really wasn’t messing with me and actually needed me to collect the junk from inside the safe, I was going to need clearer instructions. I vowed to give my advisor a piece of my mind. I didn’t care what kind of nighttime jaunt he had gone on or what kind of trouble he had gotten himself into. It was disrespectful and rude to keep your best student—debatable as that was—and only teaching assistant waiting.

  Now I was late for l
unch with Wes, and even worse, I still had no idea what the hell to write my thesis on.

  Thankfully, the local police station was only a few blocks away from Waverly. I headed in that direction, still mulling over O’Connor’s messages. The cold air helped to clear out the lingering aggravation of that morning’s events, and I listened to O’Connor’s voicemail message again, this time worried that I might’ve judged him a tad too early. From the sound of it, O’Connor might’ve been involved in a car accident. The time stamp on the text message was later than that of the voicemail, so I at least knew that he’d survived whatever incident had cut his voicemail short. When I called O’Connor’s cell phone, a prerecorded message told me that the number could no longer be reached. I resolved to ask Wes to check if any reports of car accidents had come into the station last night.

  I stopped by our favorite deli, Stefano’s, to pick up sandwiches for me and Wes. It was owned locally by a loud Italian man—Stefano Junior, of course—and his wife, who were somehow always in the middle of an argument every single time I walked in. As Stefano sliced prosciutto for Wes’s sandwich, his wife berated him for making a mess of the stockroom. I suppressed a giggle as Stefano hollered back. It took a good minute for the couple to wrap up our meals and ring me up, but Stefano’s Deli had the best cold cuts in town, and it was totally worth it. I left with our lunch in a paper bag and a smile on my face.

  As I approached the station, the front door swung open and Officer Wilson, one of Wes’s bosses, stepped out.

  “Hey, there, Nicole,” he said gruffly, holding the door open for me.

  I stepped across the threshold, nodding my thanks, and wiped my damp boots off on the mat inside. “Hi, Daryl. How are you?”

  “Cold,” he huffed, zipping up his jacket. “You got lunch plans with Wes?”

  “Sure do. Is he around?”

  “He’s desking today,” Officer Wilson said. He pulled on a pair of black gloves, eyeing the Stefano’s bag. “Wish my wife would bring me lunch. Lucky guy to have such a nice girl like you.”

  I grinned. “He sure is.”

  Wilson tipped his hat in farewell. “See you later, Nicole. Enjoy your lunch.”

  “Thanks.”

  He let the door close, and the warmth of the station fully engulfed me. I shook off my coat and hung it on the rack near the door, waved hello to some of the other officers, and set off toward Wes’s desk. He was bent over the keyboard of his computer, typing up some kind of report. I snuck up behind him and covered his eyes with my hands.

  “Hi, Nic,” he said without missing a beat. He spun around in his chair. “Ooh, Stefano’s.”

  “Daryl says you’re a lucky guy, by the way, for having such a splendid girlfriend,” I boasted, flipping my hair over my shoulder as I sat down on his desk.

  Wes ripped open the Stefano’s bag and reached in for his sandwich. “I find it odd that you’re on a first name basis with my boss. Listen, did you see O’Connor today?”

  I shook my head, taking my own sandwich from Wes. “He didn’t show.”

  Wes unwrapped his sub and bit off the end of the Italian roll. “His wife called this morning and filed a missing persons report.”

  I paused in the middle of freeing my meal from the wrapper. “Wait, what?”

  “Apparently, he never made it home last night.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean he’s missing,” I argued. I set down my sandwich on Wes’s desk, my appetite waning. “I mean, he’s a pretty simple old man. Isn’t it more likely that he went out to a bar and had too much to drink?”

  Wes shrugged, chewing thoughtfully. “His wife said he’s never not come home. Even when he’s away for work or whatever, he always calls her every night before she goes to bed. Last night, he didn’t call her.”

  “But he called me.”

  Wes stopped chewing. “He did? What for?”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” I said. I picked banana peppers off of my sandwich and tossed them onto Wes’s wrapper. For some reason, Stefano never failed to mix up our toppings. “He left me this bizarre voicemail. It kinda sounded like he might’ve crashed his car or something. Did you hear about any car accidents last night?”

  “A couple, but none of the reports included O’Connor. What’d he say?”

  “Not much,” I admitted. “He texted me too. I spent all morning going through the safe in his office.”

  “Uh, why?”

  “He asked me to. I didn’t find much. There was no money or anything in it. Just a bunch of papers and a little puzzle box. I thought he was messing with me or something.”

  Wes set down his sandwich and brushed off his hands. “Do you still have the text and the voicemail?”

  “Yeah.”

  I handed over my phone. After Wes read the text and listened to the voicemail, he said, “That’s pretty weird. I’m sure O’Connor’s fine. Most missing people turn up within the next day, but I’ll look into it just in case.”

  Despite Wes’s reassuring words, something felt off about the entire situation. Between O’Connor’s kooky messages and his mysterious disappearance, part of me wondered if there was more to the contents of O’Connor’s safe than I had originally realized. I continued my lunch with Wes, trying to concentrate on the idle conversation at hand, but I was too distracted. Eventually, I gave up on filling my stomach and handed the rest of my sandwich over to Wes for him to finish.

  “Do you have any of those cardboard storage boxes?” I asked as I collected our trash and threw it into the bin beneath Wes’s desk.

  “Yeah, there are a bunch in the back room,” he said, polishing off the rest of my food. “You want one?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Be right back.”

  In a minute or two, Wes returned with one of said boxes beneath his arm. He handed it over. “What do you need it for?”

  I took the box and popped off the lid to look inside. It looked big enough for everything I intended to shove into it. I glanced back at Wes and said, “I’m going to go clean out O’Connor’s safe.”

  3

  I ransacked O’Connor’s safe, emptying it by the armful and dumping every single piece of paper into the storage box, even the tiniest of newspaper clippings. There was even more stuff than I thought. The lid of the cardboard box refused to close completely, papers and file folders peeking out from beneath it. The small wooden puzzle box I tucked safely away in my messenger bag. When I first attempted to lift the box, my lower back protested at the weight. I shifted, bending at the knees instead, and tried again. O’Connor kept a small dolly cart to transport his classroom materials back and forth from his office, so I nabbed that, and soon enough, I was on my way back to the apartment, lugging the dolly and my haul along behind me.

  At home, I upended the entire box onto our modest dining room table. Franklin jingled in from the bedroom, curious, and put his nose to the floor to sniff at the files that had fallen off the mountainous pile on the table. When he attempted to make off with one of the outdated newspapers, I flicked his snout and confiscated his prize, glancing down at the headline: “Waverly Student Shines.” Beneath that, there was a picture of a young man in a graduation gown shaking hands with the dean of the university. The caption said, “Donovan Davenport, valedictorian, receives his diploma from Dean John Hastings.” The article itself went on to describe Davenport’s academic success. He’d been on the Dean’s List for all four years of his undergraduate career. I scoffed when I read that, though it was mostly out of jealousy. I’d heard of the Davenports before. They owned several of the banks in the area, which meant that Donovan probably never had to work a day in his life. I, on the other hand, worked part-time all throughout college, unable to afford the luxury of studying nonstop.

  O’Connor had gone to the lengths of highlighting certain parts of the article, including Donovan’s full name. The neon-yellow phrases popped out at me, things like “one of very few students to graduate summa cum laude”
and “awarded a prestigious internship with a top-tier company.” There was also a quote from Davenport’s father: “We always knew Donovan was going places, and the opportunities that Dean Hastings provides for Waverly students are endless.”

  In all my time at Waverly, Dean Hastings had never reached out to me with any kind of opportunity. Apparently, his attention was reserved for some of the wealthier students at Waverly. Donovan’s “prestigious internship” was for a conglomerate business, Lockwood Inc., in the downtown area, just a few blocks away from the police station. From what I could tell, it was a damn good position for a kid straight out of college. When I graduated from my state college, it was only ever a dream to skate right into a full-time, salaried position. Davenport had either worked his ass off in school or gotten lucky.

  I tossed the article back on the table and regarded the disorderly pile of crap on the table. Sighing, I sifted through the top layer, unsure of where to start. O’Connor’s misspelled instructions weren’t doing me any favors. I had no clue as to why he had collected such an assortment of information, but if he really was missing, it couldn’t hurt to figure out if his unwarranted interest in local news had anything to do with it. Without any other ideas or direction, I started separating the mess into four separate piles: newspaper clippings, students’ files, handwritten letters, and O’Connor’s own notes.

  Hours later, the sound of Wes’s key turning in the lock barely registered in my mind. I looked up as he walked in. A knot in my neck twinged; I’d been poring through O’Connor’s information for so long, hunched over the kitchen table like Quasimodo, that I hadn’t noticed the time. Wes stopped short when he saw me.