Shortlisted for the Crime Writer’s Association Emerging Dagger Prize

FUNERAL GAMES

A Novel

By Shannon Chamberlain

"All the woodcutters carried logs themselves; such was the order of Meriones, the henchman of courtly Idomeneus. These then threw down their burdens in order along the beach, where Achilleus had chosen a place for a huge grave mound, for himself and Patroklos."

--Homer, Iliad, Book XXIII

Prologue

The last days of April always reserved one final glancing blow for the mountains and the national forest above Abadia del Rey. Everyone knew this. And yet, there was always one unfortunate and unprepared soul caught out on the mountain when the snow shrieked its fury. Everyone knew this, too. The small college that sat on the edge of the national forest may have looked like an enchanted castle suited only for princesses dancing holes through their slippers, but it fielded one of the best and fiercest mountain rescue teams in the country, in fact its sole intercollegiate team sport. Just last year, after a long pandemic hiatus, the team had roared back to defeat the much larger and better funded crew out of the University of Colorado-Boulder in several categories, including nocturnal navigation, alpine spelunking, downhill skiing, and ice axing. When asked by a reporter about their victory, the team captain modestly said, "It's not like we have much else to do. Have you ever been to Abadia del Rey?"

Tonight all 26 members of the team are out on the mountain in their highly visible red jackets, fire ants swarming the nest. Their flashlight beams stab the darkness and turn the trunks of the shivering aspens into bleached white bones. The beams catch the eyes of small things, which run, and large things, which calculate and think better of it. Spring will come. But it isn't here yet. The storm lasted throughout the day and into the hour known at the big resorts just up the mountain as "apres-ski." There was some doubt that the team should go out at all.

And after it's all over, there are some annoying voices in the town that will complain that the College’s team wouldn't have gone out at all if our lost soul wasn't one of their own. It's been eight hours since someone found the old Jeep, nosing the side of a tree at the bottom of Route 14. "No one'll last long in this," predicted the old rancher when he called it in, in the disturbingly frank way of people who know the mountain and raise animals to kill.

But eight hours and thirty-two minutes later, they are still crying a name into the wind as they fumble to change out the batteries in their handwarmers, still thinking back to all of the lessons that you learn about the cold. Especially the mountain cold, which has its own unique ways of killing. One is common to all kinds of cold: overconfidence. But the other way, the mountain way, is sneakier. You walk up a ridge with 30 lbs. of gear swinging off your person, and your core temperature jumps. You sweat profusely. As soon as you stop at the top of the ridge, however, the tiny capillaries at the surface of your skin, dilated with your exertions now, start carrying all of that new heat to the surface. Your sweat-soaked clothes evaporate it into the air. You are colder than when you started, and there is no choice but to force your tired muscles back into the same cycle of shivering, heating, and cooling, over and over again, until you collapse.

The members of the alpine rescue team don't know it yet--they are on the wrong ridge--but the person they are looking for has reached the point of collapse. She is huddled under a tree, sitting in a small ring of open earth that isn't covered as deeply in snow, and mild hypothermia has already set in. It comes with shivers, involuntary contractions of the muscles as they try to retain their heat through motion. At 93 degrees, amnesia sets in. Where is she? How did she get here? Why isn't she wearing her parka? Or a hat? How did she end up under this tree? There is something important she is trying to remember, too. It gnaws at the edges of her consciousness, and has something to do with Dante, the poet, whose hell was cold like this one, but perhaps a bit less wooded. Can that be right? It doesn't sound right. It also, she feels, has something to do with the death of Ellen Toomey, but this also sounds implausible.

At 91 degrees, apathy. Who cares who killed Ellen Toomey? At 90, stupor. If the ghost of Ellen Toomey came along now and spoke the name of her murderer, what would it matter? What would she do?

At 88, a hallucination. Someone is coming to her through the snow. He is carrying a lantern, the old-fashioned oil kind in a metal and glass case. In the other arm, a Navajo fleece blanket. But she knows he is a hallucination, because he is also barefoot.

She knows she is dead when she feels hot again: burning in fact, like the blanket enveloping her is made of fire. She smells woodsmoke, a pinon fire. She grew up on this mountain, and there is a saying: "You aren't dead until you're warm and dead."

With her last bit of oxygen, carried to her brain by her increasingly sludgy, viscous, cooling blood, she remembers what she was trying to remember, about Dante, and about Ellen. And about how she got here, and who left her on the side of the mountain, which might be the mountain of Purgatory, if only it were a little warmer, if only Virgil was there to guide one up to safety. She opens her mouth and tries to tell the hallucination with the lantern what she knows, as he's the only one here. The words die somewhere near her soft palate, and she slips down into darkness, into Hades, where the heroes and shades wander.

Chapter 1

My name is Helen Cantor and I must begin by apologizing for everything you have read so far.

When my former student and colleague Julia Nowak first asked me to write down my own account of the small mystery in which we were mutually involved, I naturally thought of other forms: the epic poem, the tragedy in five acts. Even the serviceable little tragedy in a mere three acts. But I realized almost as soon as I began that none of these would do. It was Aristotle who first observed that the form must fit the content, and that a low subject must not be the subject of high tragedy. And it’s hard to think of a much lower subject than a sordid little death in an admissions office on the eve of a campus festival whose main feature in these fallen times is nudity and inebriation.

And so I hit upon it at last: the perfect form to fit the subject. The murder mystery! That little recipe for titillation. That fracturing and then semi-miraculous restoring of justice in 30 chapters or less, that meal from the supermarket that promises satisfaction to anyone with $5.99 and a microwave.  

Hence that little prologue that I cooked up for you. In truth, I haven't the faintest idea what it's like to freeze to death. All that business about the descent into hypothermia was purest invention, borrowed from an ancient copy of Outside Magazine in my doctor's waiting room, wedged between a seven-year-old issue of People and a dog-eared thriller in which the serial killer turns out to be the detective's brother-in-law: the least likely suspect, naturally, between his alibi, well-established history of rescuing fuzzy animals from harm, and not appearing in the book until the last quarter or so. 

But, I thought to myself, I might as well start with it, as well as not. After all, I am about to become a Narrator, and a Narrator does nothing so well as hop and bang around in other people’s heads in service of pretending that they know what it is like to be them. A nasty little habit, but one that we’ve gotten so used to that my students now call almost any long piece of fiction a “novel.” I quote from a recent paper: “When William Shakespeare wrote his most famous novel, Hamlet…”

Well, perhaps we should begin again. 

As I said, my name is Helen Cantor. I teach, or taught, at that small alpine liberal arts college which used to provide one of the last real educations in the country at a reasonable price to almost anyone who saw the value of reading Homer and Plato and Shakespeare and Dante. This was, even I can admit, not a large number of people, even in its halcyon days, which ended somewhere around 1974. Still, we soldiered along and resisted the urge to add climbing walls and Olympic swimming pools and lacrosse teams for as long as possible. Well, I resisted as long as possible. By the time Julia arrived my resources and my nerve were both on the verge of collapse. 

That I was in the position to offer any resistance at all was a small and delightful quirk of our founding Charter. It specified that a faculty member must sit on the Admissions Council, be present at every important meeting, and remain “an integral part of any decisions made by the administrative function, which is to remain secondary and advisory to the full voting body of the faculty and their chosen representative.” 

All sorts of dire consequences were triggered if the College failed to follow this provision. Loss of endowment draws, the immediate firing of everyone up to the president, and so on. The chain of cause and effect was so dire that one almost wanted to see it activated, just for the sheer pleasure of destruction! 

So it was that I found myself, in late August of that year, summoned to the office of the administrative function.

His name was Martin Stanhope, and he received me with his usual fuss, making a show of pulling out the large armchair in his office and extending a hand as if to lower me into it, like that enormous ball that drops to the cheering of the masses when the year cycles over again. He’d even ordered tea and his assistant, Ellen, brought it in with an expensive arrangement of shortbread and resentment, clanging it down on the table so hard that the porcelain rattled in its saucers. Dear Ellen! She will be dead in several chapters, so we shall take a moment to appreciate her now. 

Martin was our Dean of Admissions, although as far as I can tell, he possesses no academic degree beyond artium baccalaureus, and not from a very distinguished school at that. (Harvard, where I am reliably informed that some undergraduates now manage to graduate without having read a single book through to the end. The doctor’s office waiting room strikes again! At my age, one spends quite a lot of time there.) 

I’m sure all of this would look like solicitousness to an outside observer, but the fact is that Martin never tires of finding opportunities to remind me that I am old. During the late pandemic, he made a particular show of masking up every time we walked into the same room, and drawing attention to himself for “protecting vulnerable populations” and casting significant looks in my direction.

The causal inference was that I really ought to retire my position as faculty advisor. At the end of every admissions season, Martin makes a particular point of soliciting applause for my “many years of distinguished service” and asking, “And how many years is that again, Helen?” and chuckling amiably when I looked bewildered. 

The truth is that I have lost track. On the afternoon when he made the fuss with the tea served at his gleaming mahogany table in his gleaming mahogany office (this, while the faculty office building had gone so long without a new roof that they’d recently had to evacuate the top floor!), I had been prepared to announce to him that it was my last year on admissions. As I said, I was tired. I couldn’t imagine another five winters of sitting in a conference room, my tailbone aching, debating Martin and his deputy Daria and the host of “admissions professionals” that they’d assembled over whether we could realistically expect a young woman from one of those flat California suburbs who wrote to us that her “favorite novel is Mr. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible” to learn Ancient Greek or understand Oedipus Rex. (I wasn’t sure what offended me more: the fact that she thought that a play was a novel, or that she thought we’d be impressed by that transparent propaganda piece.) I knew that I had a limited amount of fight left in me, and that I would exhaust it all and then some by February. I wanted to sit in the armchair in the small second bedroom I had converted into a library, my cat Ruby purring on my lap, and live out my days in the knowledge that nothing I could have done would have prevented the decay that only I seem able to see. 

But then Martin handed me a folder. 

I opened it, and then glanced up at him in a way that I hoped was casual and benign.

“I would have emailed it to you and saved you the trip, however…” He trailed off meaningfully. He just couldn’t resist! I famously did not use electronic mail. Ellen was forced to print out all communications addressed to the non-existent “box” that the College maintained for me.

“Well?” he asked, after a few moments had passed.

I said, “It’s a job application.” Rather stupid of me, but I was surprised. Astonished, actually. 

“Ellen,” he said, tilting his inverted egg-shaped head in the direction of where the department’s assistant sat, surrounded by large-eyed pastel porcelain figures, “tells me that you might know the applicant.”

“Julia Nowak,” I said. “Yes. Marvelous student. I’m surprised she didn’t become an academic.” I was not surprised, in fact, but I didn’t mention this to Martin.

“Ellen also thought,” he said, with a small, dry clearing of his throat, “that you might have had an issue.”

“An issue,” I said, considering the offensive word.

“Bad blood,” he supplied. “Something that might make you reluctant to welcome Julia as our next Associate Director of Admissions.”

Martin’s eyebrows were always expressive. Right now, they were telling the story of our last Associate Director of Admissions, whom it was true that I hadn’t exactly welcomed. The man had a penchant for speaking entirely in acronyms. “The VPAA needs IRB approval for the NSF grant before the QEP review by the HLC and BOT, pending DOE compliance with the ADA and Title IX under FERPA guidelines, while the STEM departments submit their MOUs to HR for the FY budget cycle.”

Or something like that. I couldn’t imagine that would be Julia’s particular problem, however. 

“A minor academic disagreement. It was 12 years ago, Martin.” Damn, I thought. Twelve was too specific. Better to have said 10, or 15. “It hardly matters now.”

And here I knew I was at an advantage, because to Martin a “minor academic disagreement” was the sort of thing that could hardly matter. “Shall I interview her?”

I could see the eyebrows considering this question from several angles. Finally, they said, “I think it might be for the best. She’s in town. I can have Ellen…”

“Here?” I said. I felt that Martin had put me on the wrong foot again.

“Yes. She moved back to town a month ago. Helen, she’s very qualified. She’s been working for [and here he named an undistinguished member of the Ivy League] for several years now. We would be lucky to have her. You know we like to hire our own.”

I gathered his meaning, even though the part about hiring our own was a lie. Martin, in fact, preferred not to hire graduates of the College, because he was too afraid that they might be able to think. But he didn’t quite believe me that I wasn’t cultivating a grudge, or that I wouldn’t do something to dissuade Julia from taking the position. He was warning me. But he needn’t have worried. I was most pleased by the prospect of seeing Julia again. She really had been a wonderful student.

***

I ignored Martin’s suggestion that Ellen set up the appointment. It was best to avoid Ellen when possible. Ellen was of a type that many academics will recognize: a long-standing administrative employee who has managed to sink roots into almost every jagged crack in every popcorned asbestos ceiling in every building on campus and consequently would require a breaking of the entire college to displace. She was a kind of campus institution, traded from department to department for 30 years, each taking a turn at finding a way to neutralize those unpleasant occasions when she might have to interact with the general public. Her salary, I later learned, exceeded mine.

In my capacity as faculty advisor to a department that clearly doesn’t believe that it needs any advice from faculty members, I protested her appointment to admissions. I did. If you dug deeply into the records, you would probably find a sharply worded letter to that effect, and thus a Motive. It is hard to imagine a more public facing department, or one which calls for more tact and charm. (Amazing, frankly, that I have lasted as long as I have, but then again, they mostly trot me out for alumni cocktail parties as evidence that the college's traditions continue, if in a slightly more wrinkled and rounder form.) And Ellen was singularly lacking in charm. Martin knew it. Everyone up to our multiple MBA-endowed president knew it. But it was our turn.

***

I considered many possible locations for my initial meeting with Julia Nowak before settling on “Coffee,” one of four overpriced coffee shops in overpriced Abadia del Rey. The College is set a gradually sloping mile up the mountain from the town, which is already at a lung-straining 7,200 feet. The first week of classes is generally lost to freshmen vomiting aggressively, passing out from headaches, and those who have not been directly made sick from the elevation looking around them and imagining that they have. 

The primary advantage of Coffee was its lack of a punny name. I somehow couldn’t imagine myself asking Julia Nowak to meet me at The Muse of Mocha or Bean There. I realized only belatedly that the owners of Coffee had meant a reference to that dreadful Hollywood film where the skeletal actress names her cat “Cat.” 

I paid $4.50 after asking for “plain coffee” and waiting 12 minutes for a young woman to do something complicated with an apparatus and a pot of water. Then I sat down in the middle of row of men and women on computers.

I had just finished scolding the one to my left, who seemed to be carrying on a conversation with his computer, when Julia walked in the door, and directly to me. 

She was different. I could see that easily enough. She walked with a confidence that had eluded her as an 18-year-old student, and I like to believe that, as her teacher, I had something to do with that. 

What else am I supposed to say? I suppose it’s a requirement of the genre that I give her a deft little physical description that helps her remain memorable, like Watson does for Sherlock. But I’m afraid I’m no good at this sort of thing! Julia was neither fat nor thin, tall nor short. She had a halo of black curly hair, a heart-shaped face, and a singular facial feature which would keep her from ever being regarded as entirely attractive (and which was thus quite a bonus for her scholarship when I had her as a student): whenever she smiled, a large crevasse appeared at the bridge of her nose, between her dark, shrewd little eyes, which were set just a bit too close together. Apart from the shrewd little eyes, there was nothing to indicate that she would become the Detective-General of the College. 

I stood. “Good morning, Ms. Nowak.”

“Good morning, Ms. Cantor.” 

It might be just the right moment to say a little bit about the College by way of explanation of a greeting that would seem positively Victorian to most. We were founded at the turn of the century by disgruntled refugees from the universities that were turning into “research institutions.” They envisioned a return to a mere College where books were the center of the education, classes were small enough to facilitate real discussion of them, and faculty members and students considered themselves–if not exactly equals–at least equals when they prostrated themselves before the books. For many years, women were not admitted, but when they were, there was some question about what to call them. Unkind and misinformed persons have insinuated that I resisted the change from Mrs. or Miss to Ms., but this was untrue. I was one of its foremost advocates! I see no reason why a woman’s marital status should matter when she is discussing Plato’s definition of justice, any more than a man’s. 

We did not embrace, but then again, we never did. There was something about Julia that remained distinctly unhuggable. It was one of my favorite things about her. 

Instead, we sat down across the table and studied each other. 

“Why did you come back?” I asked. It was the custom in our seminars for the faculty member to open with a question, and it was a habit that I’d had a hard time shaking, even when I stopped teaching full-time.

She considered the question as if she hadn’t heard it before during the course of the interviews Martin had undoubtedly put her through already. It made me believe that I would get an honest answer.

“For Lena, I think,” she said eventually.

I found out then that she had a daughter, a five-year-old. I wasn’t entirely sure I approved. She noticed me noticing her lack of a ring. 

“Divorced,” she said, simply. 

That part I did approve of. 

“I thought it would be good for her to know her grandfather,” said Julia. “And grow up in the mountains.”

She was not, I found out later, giving me the full story, but that was later. I am making a distinct effort to give things their proper order, not breaking any of the famous Ten Commandments of Detective Stories. Thank goodness Julia’s offspring wasn’t a twin! 

“And,” she added, almost as an afterthought, “I thought I might be able to do some good.”

This was precisely what I wanted to hear. “It’s a horrible state of affairs,” I admitted. “You’re entering a morass.”  

“Really?” she asked, and I could see her confusion.

“Yes, Miracle Martin,” I said, not bothering to keep the acid from dripping down my chin. “Miracle Martin and the 11 Spots!”

When the faculty first appointed me to be their representative, I made an effort to learn all that I could about my new field. It turned out that there was not much to learn. There was a single object of Holy Writ and it happened to be a list released by a certain magazine every September. (My doctor’s office waiting room was well-stocked with them.) Colleges apparently lived and died by an obscure formula promoted by this magazine as the absolute last word in what it meant to educate the young. It included such rigorous criteria as administrators’ opinions about the pecking order and the quality of the cafeteria meals. And, of course, how many students were turned away each spring by curt electronic communiques. In the natural way of things, turning away more students somehow convinced the next group of applicants that the school must be even more desirable than they thought. More of them applied, which gave us the ability to reject even more of them during the next round, and so on and so forth until the breaking of the world, or of my mind. 

Martin’s arrival seven years ago had happened to coincide with a climb up this list of an unprecedented 11 spots. It made him even more arrogant than he was when he’d started, as–of course–he considered himself responsible for our improving reputation.

It occurs to me that I probably should have given a short biography of Martin in the previous section, while I was sitting in his office, so allow me to do so now, as it will make several things easier to understand later. Martin was the typical Dean of Admissions of a small and expensive liberal arts college in that he was the kind of child that aristocratic families would once have shunted into some comfortable church sinecure. His family tree hung heavy with politicians, captains of industry, and one absolutely disastrous former director of the CIA who had entangled us in an Asian land war by having the bad taste to be caught assassinating a foreign leader, and spying on some domestic ones besides. In this company, Martin was not particularly distinguished, but my, did he look the part. But those political connections, along with a certain lean and hungry look in his eyes, did sometimes concern me. He coveted the president’s office, or possibly just the president’s house, an absurdly elegant building that was remodeled at least once every two years. Meanwhile, our library had recently seen its buying budget cut. Again.

His 11 Spot Triumph had given him, for my tastes, entirely too much power on campus. My one small consolation had been that for the last two years, we had flattened out, failing to obtain a spot in the Top Twenty, the dubious goal which Martin had had printed out by a professional in color and stapled on the bulletin board in the lounge. It was looking rather sun-faded and sad now, and it gave me a sadistic little frisson of pleasure every time I looked at it.

But the pleasure was short-lived, because Martin, in true administrative style, had turned lemons into a five-year plan to leverage the powerful synergies of lemonade in service of the Strategic Vision to Make More Lemonade. 

I told Julia all of this, more or less, adding at the end, “He wants to stop kicking out 10 percent of the freshmen after their first year and institute majors.” My face puckered. 

Julia said, quietly, “I thought he might. It hurts you in the rankings.” I noticed that she hadn’t said “us.” She hadn’t decided yet whether to take the job. I saw I would have to convince her: give her a problem to solve. The confidence and the motherhood were new, but that one part of her personality would surely not have changed. I was counting on it not to have changed, in fact.

I exploded, or at least created the facsimile I’m capable of at my age. “And why should that be? Oh, do stop looking at me that way, Julia—one would think I'd suggested feeding the bottom ten percent to lions rather than simply suggesting they might be happier elsewhere. The Spartans understood something essential about education that we've forgotten since approximately 1974: not every infant tossed into the pedagogical river should be fished out. Martin and his administrative acolytes have declared war on the very concept of failure, as if it were possible to eliminate it through bureaucratic fiat, while graduating young people who couldn't identify Homer in a police lineup and think Achilles was a dim-witted Windsor princeling with more muscular calves. In the healthiest of gardens, one must occasionally prune; in the strongest of herds, natural selection plays its part—I'm not suggesting we throw anyone off the side of the mountain, though I admit I've been tempted during particularly egregious class discussions. When we pretend that everyone can succeed at everything, we devalue true excellence and mock genuine achievement, turning the gold standard into fool's gold while pretending not to notice the difference. Meanwhile, we give ‘scholarships’ to rich children from nice families to make them feel better, thereby denying an education to the children of the poor and delightedly kicking them out when they can’t pay. So yes, I maintain that it is not merely acceptable but necessary to release from our grip that bottom ten percent—call it what you will, culling, pruning, natural selection—but for God's sake, let's stop pretending that every student who can fog a mirror and sign a tuition check deserves to graduate.”

I saw the hint of a smile. Yes, I thought, yes. A problem to solve. That was what my dear Julia needed. How to keep us on the top of the heap without losing our essential character.

“And the majors?” she asked.

Since its founding, the college had offered a single degree and major: the Bachelor of Liberal Arts. We read all of the same books, offered the same classes to every cohort of students, in the same subjects. It was in truth a hard sell to parents who were concerned that their children learning Ancient Greek, philosophy, and literature might take away important time from their internet activism and eventual careers as consultants and investment bankers. 

I decided to let this go for the moment. “I doubt it will work,” I said. “But when I retire next year, Martin will push for it again.”

I saw the genuine despair on Julia’s face, and I knew that I had succeeded. But now for the final thrust. “If I were you, dear, I would run far away. We’re doomed, you know. Whether Martin succeeds or fails. Either we lose our soul and keep our lives, or lose our lives and keep our souls. As Aristotle pointed out, the two must needs exist co-equally.”

There’s nothing like a lost cause to raise an army. The best generals have always known that, and I am nothing if not well-read in the history of warfare. 

It will surprise you, perhaps, to hear me describe it this way. After all, what does war have to do with a small liberal arts college in the mountains where the only thing we really do is read books alongside our students, eschewing even the title of “professor” to emphasize our equality before the altar of books? But by the time she left that day, I knew that Julia and I were colleagues in the same battle, even if she wouldn’t have quite put it that way. 

When she got up to leave Coffee, I decided to impart one final thought. “I am curious about why we flattened,” I said. I didn’t, of course. I didn’t give a damn about the List, but again, I needed to give her a puzzle to solve.

When she had one, she frowned, and the ridge between her eyes disappeared entirely. It was the only time that she looked fully at peace. 

And here is where I leave you, for the moment, although I will reappear in occasional chapters, darting in and out of rooms and narratives. I returned to my suite of rooms on campus. I am the last faculty inhabitant in residence. The suites and their nominal rent used to be a way to attract talented young faculty who struggled with the millionaire housing prices in our isolated ski town. Now the younger ones merely gave themselves the license to complain about their low salaries while eschewing the suites, which they said were too small for families. I read recently—in the same doctor's office lobby where I read the very helpful piece about hypothermia which I used to contrive my prologue—that the number of square feet the average American requires has dilated to somewhere north of 1000, up almost 100 percent from when anyone bothered to start asking anyone this silly question in 1974. But I found this fact very satisfying and filed it away for later, because I have long suspected that 1974 was about when everything started to go wrong. I mentioned this to Avery Braun (whom you will probably remember as one of the foremost authorities on Nietzsche's later works, or perhaps you won't), who retired from his position here at the college some 19 years ago, and then almost immediately died. (I warned him.) He merely chuckled and laid his cold, liver-spotted claw on mine and said, “No, Helen, dear, you're wrong. Things first started to go wrong around the year 399 before Christ's birth, and they haven't slowed down much since.” 

I find my suite most satisfactory, and see no reason to expand. Ruby and I grow in girth together, but we crowd each other comfortably enough. Meanwhile, the block of suites that were once crammed with the detritus of small, sticky faculty children—their baseball bats, and roller skates, secondhand bicycles, all of it smeared with peanut butter—are increasingly ghostly and spectral. How is that for a murdering mood? Though I draw the line at the ancestral mansion with secret passages. The College was built in the 1910s, and if there are any secret passages, they are accidents of poor architectural planning rather than deliberate hiding places for convenient plot developments. I realize I am allowed exactly one, and I haven’t decided yet whether I will take advantage of it. There were only three occupants in the faculty residences: myself, Ruby, and Ellen. And as Ellen will be dead by the end of the third chapter or so, that will just leave me. And Ruby, of course. Heaven knows how Ellen–not a faculty member–managed to procure a rent controlled suite on campus. But she had, and we were reluctant neighbors. I’d never been inside hers, and she had never been inside mine. That was likely for the best.

I mention Ruby not because she is going to provide invaluable assistance in solving the murder, by the way. Of all of the books I have had to read to complete this miserable project, the ones I most detest are the mysteries where a psychic animal, usually a cat, drops astute observations about the identity of a murderer right in the laps of its dimwitted prison wardens. The only thing Ruby has ever dropped in my lap was a half-eaten bird. And this is as it should be. It strains credulity, for one thing, that a cat would have any interest at all in human affairs. I love Ruby, but I am of that school that believes that love requires pragmatism and absolute honesty about the object of one's affection. There are some animals—the slavish domestic terrier or pug, for instance—who might very well take an extraordinary interest in human affairs, and I suppose if some terrier were smart enough to follow a blood trail that didn't involve raw meat, it might very well solve a murder. But I do not kid myself about the creature snoring on my lap right at this moment. If she were 10 times her current size, she would slash my stomach and play with my intestines, just as she did with the bird's. I respect her more for it.

No, I mention Ruby because she is my alibi. As detective stories go, I realize that a cat is not what one might call “airtight.” But as the host of irresponsible students I have cycled through as petsitters could tell you, Ruby demands to be fed at exactly 7:30 on the dot. If she doesn’t, she raises a series of high-pitched yowls that could be heard in Abadia del Rey. Perhaps if everyone wasn’t walking around with massive headphones covering their ears, at any rate. 

I shall follow the conventions in all other respects. This isn’t one of these stories where it will be revealed on page 318 that you’ve been following the thoughts of the killer all along, or that some exotic poison was shot through a special pinhole device manufactured only in a very particular part of Sardinia. Nor will I–or on those occasions when I must inhabit Julia’s mind–conceal any clues. I abjure twins entirely and find the new preponderance of them in these days of in-vitro fertilization unsettling. There are several pairs in the student body now and I once earned an especially withering look from Martin when I suggested that we adopt a blanket policy of not admitting more than one of them at a time, to avoid the development of any inferior Shakespearean comedies. Julia Nowak is–emphatically–not the murderer of Ellen Toomey, so you can put that out of your head right now, if you were thinking it. Neither am I, for that matter, although I understand that there is more precedent for this sort of thing, so you may well be inclined to disbelieve me. I know myself to be unpleasant in many ways, but murder, I think, is not one of them. I am so very tired, you see.