That’s no secret, fruit fly, Nina thought with a mean streak. “Um, can I help you with something down here? I’ll be sure to call you if I find a treasure chest of doubloons, okay?” Nina winked.
“Oh! Yes, um, I was just wondering if you will be coming in tomorrow. Dr. Smith just wants to know which faculty members will be using the office building, because they’re fixing the air-conditioner or something,” she informed the visiting fellow with the high tolerance for creepy atmospheres. Clara shivered visibly, folding her arms tightly across her chest.
“What’s the matter?” Nina asked deliberately. It was her own juvenile way of bullying lesser females of the species, especially snobs with no backbone, like Clara Rutherford.
“I don’t rightly know, Dr. Gould. But if I can share a secret for a second,” she whispered to Nina, “this place has always given me the creeps.”
“Aw, this little tomb, uh, room?” Nina played.
“The whole college grounds and the main building and even the cottages. You certainly have stones, Nina. But this archive room is far worse than any of the other storage rooms in the rest of this place,” she admitted, revealing a side of her Nina hadn’t seen before.
She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but it appeared that Clara Rutherford was actually just short of pleasant to converse with when she was not around Christa Smith’s asshole radar. Nina got to her feet and dusted off her pants. It dawned on her that this was actually the opportune moment to get some information she couldn’t get anywhere else.
“Listen, Clara, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she addressed the obviously uncomfortable woman. “Do you know anyone by the name of Cotswald?”
“Oh, that’s the woman that’s made an offer to purchase St. Vincent’s,” Clara revealed, without realizing that she was discussing something Nina was not even supposed to know about. “Why do you ask?”
Nina used a childlike innocence to reel in Clara’s knowledge. As long as Nina seemed dumb and harmless, most psychologies dictated that Clara would divulge all kinds of information to her. She shrugged, “Just heard that I was not as special as I thought I was.”
“Why?” Clara asked sympathetically.
Nina laughed and waved it off. “No, I just mean that I thought I was the only freelance historian ever invited to lecture here, instead of the usual formal teaching graduates or professors of great universities. I read that a Cotswald person was lecturing here long before me and I got jealous of the tenure he got.”
Clara frowned, perplexedly pulling back her head. “No, Dr. Gould. You must be mistaken. He never got tenure.”
That’s it. Hook, line, and sinker. Keep it coming, fruit fly, keep it coming, Nina coaxed in the shelter of her mind. “Funny. That isn’t what I heard.”
“No, he was dismissed. Christa and Daniel cut short his contract. They would never nominate him f-f…,” Clara suddenly noticed what she was giving away. “Who told you about Cotswald?”
“Mrs. Patterson just mentioned that there was a historian much like me teaching here before. That’s all. No big deal. I was just curious,” Nina said in the most naïve tone she could manage.
“Mrs. Patterson,” Clara sighed. “Of course. Anyway, will you be coming in tomorrow?”
“No,” Nina pulled up her nose. “I have a Skype date with a boyfriend and a lot of wine and nicotine on my menu for tomorrow.”
“Ah! I see.” Clara smiled. “Alright then. I’ll let the Dean know.”
She started up the stairs again, straining under the mild physical exertion with her plump body before she stopped and bent down to regard Nina through the bars. “Dr. Gould, I know it’s none of my business, but I’d just like to implore you to stop smoking. You know, for your health.”
“Oh my darling Clara,” Nina replied coldly. “That ship has sailed long ago. Let’s just say stopping now would be too little, too late.”
Clara did not know how to respond to a statement with such hopelessness from an individual who’d already made up her mind about her fate. “I’m sorry you feel that way, but I guess to each his own, huh?” she replied with a twinge of disappointment. “Those things will be the death of you. I was just trying to help.”
“Noted,” Nina said, smiling kindly.
She watched the frumpy administration manager’s feet slowly take on each step and heard Clara mumbling disgruntledly about Nina’s non-compliance and such.
“Looks like you’re the one who direly needs a bloody Stair Master,” Nina muttered, giving her an eyeful of hate until her feet disappeared from view. “My health?” Vexed, she scoffed at the idiot’s audacity to chide her on her smoking before sitting down again to find out how Dave Purdue was fitting into a Black Sun member’s college funding.
However much she wanted to uncover more on Purdue’s involvement, Nina could find nothing more on him in the drawer she was rummaging through. Already annoyed by the nosy administration wench and the growing agony in her chest, Nina felt her anger mounting. One by one she perused the documents she’d found, but the only thing she gained from searching for some proof of Purdue’s involvement was a bunch of painful paper cuts and useless letters and staff folders from the eighties, nineties, and early 2001.
“Look at this,” she whispered when she discovered the contract of the previous historian, Dittmar Cotswald. “The Dean never invited him here. My God, he was invited to lecture here by Dr. Christa Smith?” Nina looked up. “The same person who invited me here, but why not the Dean himself?”
She nicked her finger again, shortly after sustaining another paper cut mere moments before.
“Shit! Fuck!” she growled. Nina had noticed before that her nose bled a lot more since she’d taken ill, but with her rage and frustration she quickly realized that coughing fits held the same baleful courtesy.
As if Clara’s statement had kindled a curse, Nina started coughing profusely. She grabbed a woolen item of clothing she had packed in case of the cold front the weather stations had been predicting and held it in front of her mouth. Nina spewed out globs of blood onto the knitted cardigan as her chest caught fire inside. Her eyes teared up with water as she coughed, her emaciated body convulsing on the floor of the little archive room. On the stairs she swore she could have seen Gertrud watching her, but she did nothing to help. It took little over a minute for Nina to lose consciousness.
Chapter 19
In the ruckus of the clapping thunder nobody could hear Nina’s attack. She was all alone with no way of reaching her cell phone to call for emergency services. The latter did not seem an extreme choice to her by any reach — she thought she was dying. Furious with herself and the world alike, she crawled towards the emergency button in the corner, wired to what she had hoped would be the internal security alarm.
The security panic button, red in color, stood out against the greyish antiquity of the walls that it was mounted on. Nina’s weak eyesight could easily identify it, even in the pale light. While clutching her chest and spitting blood into the cardigan, Nina moved gradually over the piles of files and papers she’d been stacking since she’d started her snooping.
Her ears began to hiss and she lost her equilibrium under the force of her body’s convulsions just as she reached over the cabinet for the button. On her tiptoes Nina leaned forward to hit the button, but her balance abandoned control and she fell against the cabinet, capsizing the large cabinet with unnatural ease.