Academy Gothic by James Tate Hill

Author:James Tate Hill [Hill, James Tate]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: satire, novel, literature, fiction, murder mystery, literary fiction, mystery, academic satire
Publisher: Southeast Missouri State University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

“LOOKING FOR THIS?” The anger in Juliet Bibb’s voice was accompanied by a measure of anxiety not there when she had hurled a plant over my head.

Another voicemail announced its arrival as I pocketed my phone. Jefferson Totten thundered slowly down the stairs. There was something I had wanted to ask Delilah’s daughter. I was trying to remember what it was when she brought her hand across my cheek.

“You sent them, didn’t you?”

“You have an unhealthy hatred of botanicals,” I said, rubbing my tender jawline.

“The pictures, you jerk.”

Totten exited the building more delicately than Juliet had entered it. “What pictures?”

Juliet Bibb stepped off the elevator and threw her arms around me. Delilah’s daughter was shaking. I let her cry until her breathing steadied. I repeated my question.

“Bad pictures.” Juliet reached for the purse that had fallen to the floor between us. Her hands continued to tremble.

“Why don’t you just tell me about them.” I thought I could save us both some trouble.

“My mom,” she said, still fumbling with the flap of the envelope.

I took the envelope. “What’s your mom doing in the pictures?”

“S-s-s-sexual,” she said.

I tapped the top of the envelope, feeling my eyebrows rise. I forced them down. “You mentioned she’s been out on dates recently. Do you recognize the . . .” I tried to decide between lover and paramour.

“The m-m-man who died,” she said. “S-S-S-Simkins.”

I opened the envelope and removed several sheets of standard printer paper. The pictures were in black and white. Large as they were, I could make out Simkins’s desk and file cabinets. The person closest to the center had on a tie. Not until I made out the outline of heads, Delilah’s much lower than that of the late dean, did I grasp the sexual nature of the photograph. Only the angle seemed to change in subsequent photos. The last sheet contained lines of type.

“Did someone e-mail these to you?”

“Not me.”

“To your mom?”

Juliet nodded her orange head. “I check her e-mail whenever she mentions sending me back to college.”

I moved my eyes from left to right. “Do you recognize the name of who sent it?”

“It’s a fake address. They used a proxy server. I know a little about computers,” she said, sounding as though she wished she didn’t. The elderly floor quaked a bit as she composed herself enough to continue. “It’s from ‘[email protected].’”

“Does your mother know about these?”

“It was marked as read in her inbox. They sent it yesterday morning.”

It would have arrived before I got to her house, possibly around the time the meeting was canceled. The faculty had long suspected, with vague indifference and moderate repulsion, that Simkins and his associate dean worked together on matters beyond the academic. Dissenters noted that the two of them seemed disinterested in pleasure, carnal or otherwise. What the pictures seemed to confirm might be less interesting than knowing who took them.

“I was only kidding yesterday.” Juliet choked out a sob. “She didn’t really kill anyone. Mom would never kill somebody. Would she?”

Juliet

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