Death of the Black-Haired Girl Read Free Page A

situation. She actually
was
too young to know better.
    Maud was a passionate person; Brookman also. He was not immune to obsession, which was really the basis of his success as a travel and adventure writer. He had been crazy about Maud for a year, not only because she was beautiful and sexually inspired but because of her youth, her moments of sheer brilliance, the unquiet being behind her eyes.
    Not that the flame burned less brightly now but that the kindling furnished a different smoke. As far as Maud went, he would have to digest the venom of loss. There was only one love the loss of which he could not contemplate, and it was not Maud’s. A few days before, Brookman’s wife of eleven years had, with confidence and joy, confirmed to him that she was pregnant. She was on leave for the semester and had been in Saskatchewan on her family’s farm since Canadian Thanksgiving, their ten-year-old daughter along, leaving Brookman to his ways. He loved her very much and was filled with guilt and superstitious dread about their safety. He had resolved to break off the thing with Maud. Whatever it took.
    Brookman walked from his desk to the Tudor windows that opened to the quad. He brushed open the gray and black curtains, which displayed the same salvific motto of missionary days, about darkness and light and converting the Indians. His desk was genuinely old, a rolltop bequeathed to the college by Charles Sanders Peirce or some other Brahmin savant of the nineteenth century.
    Outside in the quad he saw a middle-aged man walking deliberately in the direction of the street gate, one of the lost souls who wandered the campus yards and passages at every hour. The security staff knew all the regulars and, even in the aftermath of the World Trade Center events scarcely three years before, let them have free range of the place. Art students who could make them sit still liked to pose such people. They had faces undergraduates would recall all their lives, not remembering who they were, where or when seen. Maybe, Brookman thought, Maud had one of them in mind, locating Faustus already in hell. Was it not an odd line for an adolescent to seize on—the world as hell? Not really. Father’s influence. Her father had been a New York City police detective. Her mother, dead.
    The man Brookman watched was in his forties and had been around the college for a very long time. He lived in the small downtown condo his parents had bought for him. No backpacks for him; along with the plastic bags from Price Chopper and Target and 7-Eleven he carried a worn briefcase with a college sticker he had pasted on it more than twenty years before as a student. Sometimes he walked silently, eyes fixed on the pavement. At other times he carried on a dialogue with the unseen, an exchange that sounded so nuanced and literate that new students and faculty thought he was addressing them or talking into a cell phone. Occasionally he grew angry and shouted a bit, but like many of the delusional, he had learned not to confront real people who—downtown—could prove all too substantial.
    Brookman stayed at the window to watch him. It was possible to picture this man sitting all night in the room his family had bought for him, and Brookman wondered if he was alone or accompanied through the small hours by the voices he heard. Whether he turned on the light or sat in the dark with them, whether they were visible to him or simply voices. What their identities were, how they treated him. Did they make him angry? Certainly he heard no good news from them.
    Sometimes the man wandered into the college buildings and rode the elevators. Security never stopped him; no one bothered him. If he was in an elevator when someone got on, he would get off, even if he had just got on. If he was trapped in the elevator by a crowd, he began to act desperately sane, polishing his glasses with his handkerchief, nodding pleasantly at no one in particular, ignoring his voices. When he