Death of the Black-Haired Girl Read Free Page B

reached a floor he would race out, plainly agitated. Madness was hardly unknown in the college. There were others like this man, forever groping through the maze of alma mater.
    Still at the window, Brookman watched the quad. The only color was of the autumn-yellowed grass on the lawns; the sky matched the sidewalks and the Norman tower of New Chapel. There was faint snow, salting a drizzle. It was slightly cheering because the month had been gray and wet, more chill than truly cold.
    He saw that the man with the bags had reversed direction. The man was now walking as fast as he could, fleeing a noisy group of students excited by the powdering of snow. He was dull-eyed, chin down, jaw clenched. He didn’t like the snow on his fair balding skull, didn’t like the happy youths. In a moment he would turn again and walk back to his own voices. It was so much work to be crazy, Brookman thought.
    There sounded a knock against the dark paneling of Brookman’s office door, a loud single rap followed by a pause, then two rapid knocks. It was a d-delta in toneless Morse code, a little of Brookman’s obsolete nautical education that he had passed on to Maud, an impractical skill for some decades but useful at that moment.
    Tiny snowflakes rested on the locks of her hair that showed around the edges of her watch cap. Brookman took a quick look right and left along the hall. Maud noticed his display of guilty stealth. She brushed back the hood she wore over the cap and laughed at him. He drew her into the room, gathering her up by her jacket and yanking her, somewhat violently, into his office. The containers of cold coffee at her feet went over.
    “Help,” she said.
    “If you don’t mind,” he said, walking to the inlaid window to close the dusty curtains.
Lux in umbras procedet.
Then he kissed her and found himself in his Maud transport. He felt as if he could drain her, overwhelm and consume her, all her scents and silky turns, the firm athlete’s body. Or else that he was the one being consumed, confused and incapable of escape.
    “Oh,” she said, “you’re hard.”
    “Don’t be coarse,” he said. It had taken him a moment to get the reference. She didn’t care for this reproach.
    “Coarse. What?” She demanded an answer of him in the agitated adolescent manner of the time. “You think that’s coarse? You’re such a middle-class prude.”
    “Working-class prude.” He had been around the world at least once and had never thought of himself as a prude. “Maybe just lower class.”
    Before long he was sitting at his desk and she was more or less under it, down on him, and he could only think of those long lips and those all-at-once—on a single day it seemed—suddenly knowing eyes. He bent to twist her long black silky hair into a coil and ran his fingers, wrapped in it, down the back of her neck.
    He sat in a dazzled aftermath, watching her every move. She brazenly blew him a kiss, lips to fingers.
    “Oh, baby” was all he could think of to say.
    Not poetry. Perhaps inappropriate? Certainly not the older-brotherly chat he had had in mind for this particular visit.
    “I love you,” she said. “I love your brains and cock and knees and eyes. I love your hokey dipshit tattoos. I don’t scare and you don’t scare, but I’m shit terrified that I so adore your bones, Professor Brookman. Aren’t you scared of loving me?”
    “Maybe I don’t love you, Maud. Maybe I’m just obsessed with you, body and soul.”
    “Now,” she said, “you’re scaring me.”
    “What we have is fearsome. We’re both going to live in dread.” He saw that she was at the point of tears.
    “But,” she said, “with your wife, with that shepherdess creature, the Albigensian or whatever—that’s all cozy sweetness and light, right?”
    “That’s right. But you’re a little tart. A little Kerry gallows bird of an outlaw. Maybe we’ll swing on a rope in the rain for each other.”
    She put a lock on him, held him as hard