I used to love it, anyhow. But not anymore. On this occasion, as I twitched and shimmied, hamming up the prehistory of hominids, I felt silly and stupid. I resented my students for requiring entertainment, and I resented myself for stooping to it, quite literally. My heart wasn’t in it, and neither were my hips, and the few token laughs I heard from the students sounded forced and embarrassed. After class, I made a beeline for the door and hurried back to the bone lab, instead of hanging around to joke with students, as I usually did.
The lab’s heavy steel door banged open, hard and loud, when I entered. Miranda—sitting just inside the door, staring at her computer screen—yelped and jumped, sloshing coffee all over the desktop. “Dammit!” she said, scrambling to move papers and books out of harm’s wet way, then grabbing a handful of tissues from a box to begin mopping.
“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” My apology came out sounding sulky, as if I felt that I was the one who had been victimized by her reaction.
“Hey, no worries,” she said. “I didn’t really need those ten years you just took off my life.” She narrowed her eyes and examined my face. “Didn’t you just come from teaching intro?”
“Yeah.”
“That usually gets you superjazzed. What happened?”
I shrugged. “Nothing. It just . . . I dunno. I guess I’m just off my game.”
“You’ve been off your game for the past week,” she said. “Ever since He Who Must Not Be Named escaped from Azkaban.” Under almost any other circumstances, I would have laughed at her cleverness—equating a real-life scumbag, Satterfield, to the fictional evil wizard in the Harry Potter books. But with Satterfield on the loose, and possibly coming after me—or, worse, coming after my family—her attempt at humor hit me wrong.
“Glad you find this amusing,” I said.
“Hey, I just . . .” She trailed off, probably afraid of antagonizing me further. “Sorry.”
I saw the hurt in her eyes, and I knew my rebuke had stung her. “Yeah,” I mumbled. “Me too.” I held up a hand—a farewell, or a truce—and retreated to my private sanctuary. To brood.
I MUST HAVE BROODED FOR HOURS, FOR WHEN MY intercom beeped, I came out of my funk enough to notice that the steel girders outside my windows were beginning to sink into shadow. I picked up the phone reluctantly, expecting Peggy. “Yes?”
For a moment I heard only ragged breathing at the other end of the line, then a hoarse whisper. “Can you come here? To the bone lab. Please.”
It was not Peggy, and something was very wrong. “Miranda? Miranda, what’s wrong?” I bolted upright in my chair, then scrambled to my feet. Now I heard weeping—deep, racking sobs. “Miranda, are you hurt?” But the line had gone dead.
I considered calling the campus police—was it possible that Satterfield was here? had found his way to the bone lab, and to Miranda?—but I dared not waste the time it would take to call and explain my fears to them. Instead, I ran, hurtling myself down the stairs and out the door that exited beside the north end zone, sprinting along the one-lane service road that threaded the girders supporting the stadium. Students stared as I passed, and I heard one or two call my name, but I waved them off and kept running.
When I came to a stop outside the bone lab, I paused to look through the window, wondering if I’d see Miranda with a gun to her head or a knife to her neck. Instead, I saw her sitting at her desk, her hands to her mouth, staring at her computer screen. I burst into the door, and the expression on her face when she looked at me was one of heartbreak and horror. “Miranda, what’s wrong?” I repeated. “What’s got you so upset?”
Instead of answering, she just shook her head, unable to speak, and pointed at the computer. The screen was a pale gray, as if all the color had been bled from it, and it took me a moment to realize what I was seeing. The instant I did, I felt a shock wave of horror ripple through my whole body. The monitor was showing a video, grainy and low in contrast, but the place was clearly recognizable: a patch of woods, shown from a high camera that was looking down—looking down from the trunk, I knew, of a large tulip poplar on a Cooke County mountainside.