Death of the Black-Haired Girl Read Online Free

as she could. She was trembling.
    “You’re scaring me, Steve.”
    “Because I love you,” he said. Yet love was not really what he felt for her. In times to come he would long ponder what he had been trying to say.
    “I thought what you said about Shakespeare and Marlowe was on the money,” Brookman told her when all was in order. “Faustus and hell and so on. Well observed.”
    “Think I’m right?”
    “I do.”
    “Why?”
    “You tell me why,” Brookman said.
    “Because Shakespeare would never have said the world was hell. It would have been blasphemous.”
    “Shakespeare made some defamatory statements about the world.”
    “Yeah. But he wouldn’t have Mephisto be right. Not with hell right there. They both know a single drop of Christ’s blood could save him.”
    “What a wicked creature you are,” Brookman said. “Get out. What are you doing here anyway?”
    “I want to see you. Is your wife, like . . . ?”
    Brookman’s wife and daughter were returning early to keep their Christmas at home with him. Ellie’s parents were of a Mennonite sect that more or less rejected Christmas, but they still expected a winter visit from their daughter and grandchild. Watching Maud, Brookman saw a cloud of resentment cross her brow. She did not like hearing about his domestic arrangements.
    He cut her off.
    “We don’t know yet when she can get back. There’s a storm in western Canada. Planes may not fly. On the other hand, they may.”
    “But I want to see you.”
    “We’ll see each other.”
    “I’ll call you later, Steve,” she said. “Have to buy a pretzel and get to class.”
    When she was out the door, he went to the window, drew the curtains open again and watched her walk across the quad. Frozen rain clung to the coats of students passing by. The man Brookman had seen earlier was standing by the street gate, staring at Maud as she passed.
    He closed his heraldic curtains again and turned out the lights. Such domesticities served to bring Maud closer to him, because that was what he did when she came to his office outside of hours.
    Brookman’s appointments were about to begin, and he wanted a break between the stream of Maud’s frantic consciousness and his first actual student of the day. He kicked his rolling chair back against the wall and put his feet up. The room was still scented with Maud’s perfume and the soapy schoolgirl odors of her body, and Brookman found it difficult to banish her from his mind.

3
    C ROSS INN, WHERE Maud and Shell lived, afforded beautiful views of city and campus. In the twenties and thirties it had been the best hotel in town. Over time, like everything else downtown, it degenerated, eventually becoming a ratty dope-and-suicide hotel. In the end, the college acquired and renovated it for a dormitory, keeping some of the art nouveau pieces and paneling of the original. To Shell it still looked depressing. She liked to say that the place accommodated as much dope and nearly as many suicides as a dorm as it had as a welfare hotel. This was an exaggeration. But the dim-lit hallways, dusty mirrors and portraits of scholarly immortals were, Shell thought, a bringdown. She knew a cheapo hotel when she saw one. One tip-off was the smell of insecticide and garbage awaiting incineration. Shell and her mother had lived for a while in a welfare motel on the edge of a river running brown across from a stretch of woodland.
    On her way back from her poetry class, Shell had gotten a call on her cell phone from her ex-husband, John Clammer. She promptly switched it off. Then he called her on the college’s automated service line. It seemed humiliating to go through the business of taking the phone off the hook and trying to ignore the cacophony and wanga-wanga that would ensue. And she would be goddamned if Crazy John Clammer would drive her into the cold weather.
    Shell had a restraining order against her ex, but it seemed to provide no practical release from his phone