Watching.
Waiting.
Monday morning brought more gray skies and drizzling rain. I walked to school under the black brim of my umbrella, boots splashing through the puddles along my narrow driveway to the road. As I reached the mailboxes, I caught sight of Mrs. Kathy grabbing her mail. As my first-grade teacher, nearly fourteen years ago, her blonde hair had been streaked with gray — now it had gone straight silver.
“Hi, Mrs. Kathy!” I waved to her cheerfully from under my umbrella. She narrowed her eyes at me, blinked rapidly behind her large horn-rimmed glasses, and then hurriedly walked back toward her driveway.
Well, damn. Okay then.
It was only a fifteen-minute walk to campus, but the cold made it feel longer. Then Abelaum University’s Gothic peaks and tall windows loomed up behind the trees, cloaked with creeping vines and spackled with moss. It looked as if it should have been abandoned and decaying, not swarming with students carrying iPhones and Starbucks cups. Umbrellas definitely weren’t the thing here: the misting rain didn’t seem to bother anyone but me. Everyone else merely had hooded raincoats.
Southern California didn’t require raincoats — there wasn’t a single one in my closet. I’d have to go shopping soon if I didn’t want to keep sticking out like a very cold sore thumb.
I wandered down the wide stone hallways in search of my first class, squinting for the tiny gold numbers affixed beside every dark wooden door. The rain increased and drizzled in slow rivulets down the narrow windows that lined one side of the hall. The view was obscured by aspen and spruce, but beyond the needles I could still see the university’s tall, sharp spires. The temptation to stop every few yards and pull my camera from my bag was barely resistible, and when I finally made it to class on time, I considered it a massive achievement.
Classes were the typical first day affair of going over the syllabus, but with one stark difference: both my morning professors addressed the recent “tragic loss of a student’s life.” There were reassurances of safety, of increased security, of local police doing “everything they could.” I was in the dark until I did a quick Google check.
Student Found Dead on University Campus: Investigation On-going.
Just before the semester started, a student’s body had been found brutally murdered in one of the university buildings. The true crime junkie in me kept searching for more, but there was little to go off. No suspects. No leads. No statements by local police. I was honestly stunned that a murder could occur in such a quiet small town and not result in an absolute explosion of press and speculation.
The morning mist lingered, seeping between the old buildings and dampening the stones to a darker shade of gray. The mossy roots of the evergreens were enveloped like a slowly rolling tide. But despite the weather, ASB had set up booths all across the quad to greet new students, as had a few dozen of the campus clubs. The excitement of a new semester felt at odds with the dampening fog; as if nature was trying everything in her power to silence the loud, chattering students.
With time to spare before my next class, I gave in and pulled out my camera. Everything from the bell tower above the library to the low, crooked stone walls that boxed in the hedges carried a pleasing aesthetic from behind my lens. The damp, the greenery, the Gothic drama of it all — I felt as if I had stepped into a Grimm fairytale, right back into my childhood fairy kingdom.
But death had come to the kingdom, and it announced its presence with the sudden shock of yellow caution tape cordoning off the entrance to one of the northwest halls.
I wandered closer. CALGARY was affixed in rusting letters above the building’s closed double doors, with an H and awkwardly spaced L following. The trees had grown close to it, their limbs snaking around the building’s steep roof as if slowly enfolding it in a living cocoon.
I knew that name from the news articles I’d read that morning: this was the hall in which the student’s body had been found. I snapped another photo, capturing the juxtaposition of the glaring plastic tape against the old pockmarked stone. It was beautiful, in a dreadfully grim way.
“Are you fucking lost?”
Don’t judge me, but there was something about a mean voice that got me hot — and the voice that spoke from behind me was as mean as they come. I turned, to find a man standing at the foot of Calgary’s stairs, his arms folded and his light green eyes sliding over me. He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than me, dressed all in black, with a tight long-sleeved athletic shirt, cargo pants, and laced-up military boots.