Death in a Tenured Position

by REBEL GIRL
(with apologies to Amanda Cross, who would understand)

Chapter One: the Adventures of a Night Dean

Night was hitting the mat with a mighty thump, falling with a whine. Day doesn't give up easily in these, the last rounds of a brutal slugfest of one long hot Cali summer. The sun still flamed just beyond the rumble of the 405 freeway, where Mr. and Mrs. Sucker were driving home to their special place in hell. But nearby, the parking lots that ringed the local community college were full. The eucalyptus trees were turning into elegant blackened silhouettes, their long leaves like rags against the purpling blue sky.

A quick patrol of the hallways saw students slumped for the evening at their desks, instructors scribbling on the now ubiquitous white boards that had replaced the powdery chalkboards of the past. "Fallopian," wrote one teacher in green pen. "Capital," wrote another. "Writing has shape," declared the handwriting of a snowy-haired woman with steely eyes.

I should be in there, she thought. I am one of them.

But tonight she wasn't; tonight Kit Spark was Night Dean, with keys in her pocket, security numbers on a post-it note and nothing to do except keep the peace for three hours.

Could she do it? How hard could it be?

Brother, she was going to find out all too soon.

Meanwhile, she wondered: How many of those students remembered the orange groves where they now parked their cars? How many faculty remembered for that matter? Early on, still a fresh hire who knew only how to say yes, she once spent an afternoon in the groves with students, raising money by allowing people to pick their own oranges. The students didn't raise much money but they had fun. Late in the afternoon, a woman had driven up and asked if she could pick the orange blossoms. She'd be happy to pay she said. The fragrance reminded her of her childhood in Iran. She went off with armfuls and paid more money than the people who picked the fruit. That must have been ten years ago. Back then Kit looked like one of them – a young woman in blue jeans, squinting in the sunlight. Now, still in blue jeans, but wearing a black classic blazer, (she thought of the coat as her concession to meetings, as a kind of professional shield that she wielded.) Kit was who she was, no doubt about it. A middle-aged woman whose gray hair surprised her.

Kit exited one building and headed for another, the A-400 building where the bio teachers resided. She liked them. They were a resilient humorous bunch you could always depend on. Something about knowing how the body works gave them an edge up on everybody else. Besides, she liked the old stuff they kept around, the skeletons and bird nests, the fossils. She wished she had something like that in her classroom, but what would an English teacher do with old bones?

The quad was deserted except for some furtive smokers and equally furtive rabbits that hopped between the bushes and grass. The evening was warm. The students wore shorts, tank tops, sandals. September in Southern California. What was it her Midwestern aunt had called it? Indian summer.

Kit glanced up at the termite-ridden clock tower that loomed over the quad. It too would go the way of the orange groves soon, its square orange face, its blocky tinker toy design destined for the scrap heaps of the Inland Empire. Last year, the clock tower was the gathering place for dissent on the previously quiet campus as its platform faced the bare windows of office of the college president. But now the clock was doomed, festooned with plastic yellow tape that warned people away, and the nearby presidential windows were shrouded with drapery. Dissent had faded over time, over the summer.


Or had it?

Something caught her eye as Kit walked closer to the tower. A figure crouched in the shadows of the platform. She heard whispering, saw a beam of light flash on and off.

Just last Spring this section of campus had been cordoned off for hours when the college president found a suspicious package. The Bomb Squad was called. Students, staff and faculty were swept into the parking lot and kept there. A bomb-detecting robot seized the object and removed it to the special bomb-transportation truck. X-rays revealed no explosive device. The president's "bomb" was a sandbag, a leftover from a video production. Kit marveled at the man's suspicion, his paranoia. She thought his fear said more about him and his own predilection for violence then it did about his foes on the faculty and staff.

Kit glanced around for security, the friendly fellas packing heat who rode around the campus in a fleet of unlikely but swift golf carts, her backup. They were nowhere to be seen.

The night had officially fallen in the few minutes that had passed, a bit too quickly for the floodlights, still tuned to the length of a summer's day, to click on.

It was dark and Kit felt fear – not from the college president, a man she knew had driven home to his mansion in a gated community hours earlier, but an old fear, one that her Midwestern aunt, on the plains of Kansas, might have recognized.

(Be on the lookout for Chapter 2!)