Title: Angels of the Silences
Author: E.A. Week
E-mail:
Summary: The tenth Doctor goes undercover at a small American college to unravel the mystery behind a brutal murder, but he's not the only incognito time-traveler on campus.
Category: Doctor Who.
Distribution: Feel free to link this story to any Doctor Who or fanfic site, or distribute on a mailing list, but please drop me at least a brief e-mail and let me know you've done this.
Feedback: Letters of comment are always welcome! Loved it? Hated it? Send me an email and let me know why!
Disclaimers: Copyrights to all characters in this story belong to their respective creators, production companies, and studios. I'm just borrowing them, honest! The story title and all chapter titles are shamelessly stolen from Counting Crows.
Story rating: This story is rated M for language, sexuality, and adult themes.
Possible spoilers: This story takes place after the fourth season of the new Doctor Who series.
Two
Anyone But YouBefore he called the police, Charles invited the Doctor to have a look at the meditation garden. While he watched, his father's friend made a circuit of the crushed gravel paths, examining each desecrated sculpture. He first looked at them with his reading glasses, then with his 3-D glasses, making small noises as he passed the sonic screwdriver across the pieces of shattered artwork.
"Anything?" asked Charles.
"Nothing." The Doctor returned both sets of eyewear to an inner pocket.
"None of that… that energy you were talking about?"
"No. No traces of anything non-terrestrial."
"Who could've done it? The doors are locked, there's an alarm system, and the garden is surrounded by a twelve-foot high brick wall."
"How many people have keys?"
Charles winced. "I really couldn't say."
"It's possible this is connected to your friend's death, but it might not be—was Lucille religious? Would any of the statues have meant anything to her?"
"Lucille was a Quaker," said Charles. "As far as I know, the only reason she ever came in here was to observe birds." He pointed to a clear cylinder hanging from a nearby tree. "That's a hummingbird feeder."
"Have your police look around, take fingerprints, whatever it is they do," the Doctor said. "This might just be an especially ugly act of vandalism."
They returned to the office, where the student who'd been on duty sat with Debra Katz, the Jewish chaplain.
"You all right, Cassie?" asked the Doctor.
"I've been better," the girl answered. "Can I go now?"
"We'll need you to make a statement to the police," Charles told her.
"I'm hungry," she groaned. "It's lunchtime."
The Doctor fished into a pocket and produced a bright yellow banana. "Will this help?"
She smiled up at him, brown eyes wide and adoring. Charles smiled; the Doctor was becoming a popular figure on the predominantly female campus.
"Thanks," Cassie said.
With great reluctance, Charles reached for the phone. He already felt so tired of dealing with the police.
(ii)
Three days after the incident in the garden, on Tuesday morning, Cassie's laptop crashed. She'd come back from a morning run and wanted to check her e-mail before class; she plugged in the computer and pressed the power button, but the screen flickered and went completely black.
"No!" Cassie tried unplugging the machine and plugging it back in, tried rebooting, but nothing, nada, zip: the blasted thing was as dead as a brick.
She raced into the hall and banged on Chelsea's door. "What's the number for IT?" she gabbled. "My lappy just bit the dust!"
Chelsea searched on-line and provided the number, and Cassie jabbed the digits into her cellular with a shaking hand. A woman's low voice answered, and Cassie wailed, "My laptop crashed! It has all my research data from last year—"
"Bring it in," the woman laughed.
The IT center had changed in two years, the offices reconfigured. Cassie didn't recognize half the staff, including the muscular, sun-bronzed woman who greeted her at the help desk. Cassie handed over the machine and stood whimpering while the woman plugged something into one of the laptop's USB drives. Some kind of diagnostic device? Cassie had never seen anything like it before. A line of letters and digits scrolled across a small screen.
"Hmm." The woman appeared to be about thirty, taut and strong-looking. She had a wide, comical mouth and a wild shock of Hermione Granger hair. She seemed familiar, though Cassie, in her agitation, couldn't think why.
"Give me a minute."
"Even if you can just save the data—"
"Did you back it up?"
"Some of it," allowed Cassie.
"Always save your important files." The woman fingered a pair of flash drives hanging around her neck on a lace. "If you don't have one of these, get one."
"Yeah, yeah," Cassie sighed. "The cliché about horses and barn doors applies here."
She didn't feel comforted when the woman opened up the laptop and examined the preponderance of circuitry inside. Cassie paced, sweating, cursing herself for having saved so much data to the hard drive. When she dared look again, the woman was putting the laptop back together, fastening the tiny screws that held the casing closed.
"Cross your fingers." She plugged the power cord into a nearby socket. A moment later, the Dell logo came up, followed a few moments later by Cassie's wallpaper.
"What's that?" the woman asked, staring at the picture.
"Mount Diogenes," Cassie explained. "It's a famous geological formation in New South Wales." The tech gave her a blank look. "In Australia," Cassie elaborated. "I went there on my Christmas holiday last year."
"Oh." The tech watched while Cassie's icons popped up onto the screen.
"There was a movie filmed there," Cassie said. "Picnic at Hanging Rock." She blushed to think that the film, which she'd first seen on cable TV as a child, had sparked her initial interest in Australia.
"I never saw that one," the woman murmured.
"It's kind of old," said Cassie.
"Here, try opening some files."
Cassie took the laptop and opened a couple of spreadsheets and documents, gasping when she saw that nothing seemed to be lost. "Ohmigod, you're a lifesaver!"
"Good as new, for now," the woman pronounced. "You might want to think about getting another machine, though—they don't last forever. And back up your data, for God's sake."
"Will do," Cassie laughed, so relieved she was shaking. "Thank you so much! I'm sorry—what's your name?"
The woman flipped up an ID card clipped to her belt. "Shira Nahar," she said. "I'm the new assistant director."
Cassie held out a hand. "Cassie Sterlin. I'm a senior." She realized then where she'd seen the woman. "Don't you swim in the mornings? White two-piece Speedo, white cap, black goggles?"
The woman's blue-gray eyes narrowed for a moment as she focused, then her smile widened. "I knew I'd seen you somewhere."
"I'm very jealous of your dolphin kicks," Cassie told her.
Laughing, Shira said, "You're observant."
"I'm a biology major… I have to be." Curious about the newcomer, Cassie asked, "Are you Israeli?" She had a good ear for accents, but Shira Nahar sounded like she could have come from just about anywhere. Almost certainly, though, she was not American.
Shira turned away for a moment as she unplugged Cassie's laptop. "My family was, or so I'm told." Something in her voice indicated she had no wish to pursue the topic, and Cassie let it drop: not everyone who immigrated did so for happy reasons.
Cassie admired the older woman's shoulders and arms, set off to good advantage by a plain white tank top. Her trousers were ordinary drab olive, her shoes black and functional. There was a leather gauntlet on her left wrist: Cassie couldn't tell if this were a fashion statement or an ergonomic support. Maybe both. With her taut body and distinctive face, Shira Nahar didn't need to waste a lot of time on clothes or hair or makeup. Cassie envied the woman's ability to make an impression with so little effort.
On impulse, Cassie asked, "You ever do a tri?"
"I'll try anything at least once, but you're not really my type."
Cassie burst into loud, raucous laughter. "No, no!" she said. "I meant a triathlon." She pointed to her new t-shirt, which bore logos for swimming, bicycling, and running. Beneath the pictures were the words, "Why not try a tri?" and beneath that, "Ethan Allen TRIpods."
Shira squinted at the shirt. "What's the one in the middle mean?"
"It's a bike," said Cassie. "There's three parts to the competition: you swim, then you do a bike race, then you finish with a run."
"Is a bike one of those funny things with two wheels I sometimes see people riding?"
Cassie stared: could the woman be serious? "You've never seen a bicycle before?"
"I'm not a local."
Flabbergasted that anyone on Earth could live thirty years without ever having seen a bike, Cassie said, "Yeah, bicycle. Two wheels. Bike for short."
"I've never been on one. Not sure I'd want to, either. They look a little flimsy."
"Oh." Cassie felt disappointed, but she said, "There's a master's swimming class that meets Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights. You can drop by for any class you want. Diana runs them. It's a great workout."
"I'll keep it in mind, thanks." A phone on the desk began to bleat, and Shira picked up the receiver. "Help desk," she said, winking at Cassie.
Cassie let her get to work, collecting the laptop and leaving. Her biochemistry lecture would begin in fifteen minutes.
(iii)
"Is it me, or do the frosh look like they just got out of playgroup yesterday?"
Cassie laughed at Exa's question. Leaning across the salad bar to snag some broccoli, she said, "It's hard to believe that was us three years ago. You should see them in the baby bio lab—they barely know how to write, let alone write a lab report."
"Do you get paid for overtime?" Exa joked. "Maybe you can tutor them."
"I get paid for whatever I work, but I'd blast through my work-study money in one semester. They can check out the Writing Center—I'm not getting paid to show them where to put apostrophes."
They joined Chelsea, who'd commandeered a corner table in the busy dining commons. Exa had already staked out their turf with books and notebooks, and Chelsea sat thumbing through a thick hardcover in a glossy black jacket.
"What's that?" asked Cassie.
Chelsea turned the book so that Cassie could see the cover. The book's title, in stark white letters, read, "SAXON," and beneath that, in smaller type, "The Seduction of a Nation."
"Ooh, cool," Cassie said. "That looks more interesting than anything I'll be reading this year."
"It's for my European politics seminar," Exa said. "We're using the whole Saxon thing as a case study."
"So, who was he?" asked Cassie. She'd just arrived in Australia when the newly-elected British prime minister had assassinated the American president, sparking a firestorm of international hostility. Her parents had kept her updated on the news, but at the time, like so many other things, the matter had seemed to Cassie very far away and unimportant. "Did anyone ever find out?"
"Nobody knows," said Exa, taking the book from Cassie. "They found a body they think was his, but they're not sure, 'cuz it was burned to a crisp. His wife was a fruit loop—they couldn't get anything out of her. What we're looking at in class is the way he took over the media, manipulated public opinion, stuff like that. He practically turned Britain into a fascist police state before his wife shot him to death."
"Guess she didn't like his politics," Cassie laughed.
The three girls dug into their lunches. "How're the burgers?" Exa asked Chelsea.
"Same as ever," Chelsea laughed. She wrinkled her nose at Cassie's plate of vegetables. "How can you live on that bird food?"
"I dunno, how can you live on cow fat?"
"I have to maintain my Reubenesque curves," said Chelsea in a lofty voice.
"If I ate that much grease, I'd break out like I had smallpox."
Exa's sandwich paused midway to her mouth. "Ohmigod, who's that guy?"
Cassie turned. "That's Dr. Smith," she said.
Both her friends turned jealous eyes on her.
"You're kidding!" said Exa. "You're working with him the whole year, you lucky bitch?"
"Oh, I've seen him around campus," Chelsea said, her eyes glazed. "The one who's so old and lonely and sad."
Now it was Cassie's turn to stare. "Old?" she sputtered. "And where the hell did you pull lonely and sad out of? It's not like you know him or something."
Chelsea blinked. "What?"
Exa sighed, passing a hand in front of Chelsea's eyes. "Earth to Chelsea, do you read me?"
"Shut the hell up," Chelsea laughed.
Exa's eyes roved up and down Dr. Smith as he stood waiting in the lunch line, hands in his trouser pockets. A long tan overcoat was looped through one arm. "Nice ass," she pronounced.
"Subtle," Cassie snarked.
"What, like you haven't looked?"
"We're usually sitting down."
"Is he really that tall?"
"Pretty much everyone's tall to me," said Cassie. "Except you." She took a better look at Dr. Smith, and she had to admit, the pinstriped trousers flattered his backside quite nicely. "You think he's hot?"
"Ohmigod, Cass!" said Exa. "He's gorgeous! How old is he?"
"I dunno, thirty maybe?"
"That's not too old," Exa winked.
Cassie crunched on a carrot stick. "He's my advisor, ferchrissakes. I'm sure there must be rules about that."
"We're graduating, so who'd care? And he's only here for what, a year?" said Chelsea. "It's not like anybody'd know."
"Get real," Cassie laughed. "A campus this size? If I screwed him, it'd be all over Facebook and MySpace the next morning."
They continued eating and bickering until Dr. Smith emerged from the kitchen with a tray in his hand. From halfway across the dining room, he caught Cassie's eye, and began to thread his way between tables.
"Ohmigod, he's coming over here!" Chelsea squeaked.
"Quick, clear some space," said Cassie. The other two girls hastened to move their books and bags from the one empty chair. "And try to act normal, okay?"
A moment later, Dr. Smith reached the table, smiling down with the expression of a man who knows he's welcome just about anywhere.
"Hello, is that a spare seat?"
"Yeah!" the three girls chorused.
He draped his long coat over the back of the chair and sat. Maybe because he was so thin, Cassie had expected him to be eating a salad or the vegetarian entrée; instead, he had a thick BLT and a large pile of French fries.
Cassie said, "Doctor, these are my friends, Exa von Alt and Chelsea Zariello. Exa, Chel, this is Dr. Smith, my new advisor."
"Hello!" he said, reaching over to shake hands. "So nice to meet you."
"What part of England are you from?" asked Exa.
"London," Dr. Smith said around a mouthful of sandwich.
Cassie almost dropped her fork. For a moment, she experienced an alarming sense of cognitive dissonance, as if she'd been flung around in an ellipsis and then set back on her feet. Until that instant, she hadn't realized—consciously—that Dr. Smith had any kind of accent. Did he? Or didn't he? His voice had sounded American to her ears, although British slang peppered his conversation. Maybe the year in Australia had altered her perceptions of people's voices? She was willing to swear Dr. Smith had sounded American to her, but now he suddenly seemed a Brit through and through: his voice, his manner, his expressions, even the way he handled his food. With degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, how could he be anything but English? Yet Cassie was absolutely certain he'd sounded American to her only moments earlier.
"That is the most amazing coat I've ever seen," said Exa.
"Thank you!" he beamed.
"Where'd you find it, if you don't mind my asking? Or was it a custom job?"
He smiled. "Janis Joplin gave it to me."
Chelsea almost spit out her soda. "Janis Joplin died in 1970."
Cassie said, "He's pulling your leg." She watched Dr. Smith eat French fries. Funny, she'd never really taken a good look at him until now: in her mind, he was still Lucille's replacement, and it hadn't mattered to her how old or young he was, how he dressed, whether he was nice to look at. Based on the creases around his eyes and the wavy lines on his forehead, she put his age at somewhere around thirty-five. He might be as young as thirty or as old as forty, but she was guessing mid-to-late thirties. His hair, brown and untidy, had begun to thin noticeably at the hairline. He had a pleasant face, though there was something guarded about his expression, especially around the eyes.
"So, what are you two here for?" he asked Chelsea and Exa.
"European Studies," Exa provided.
"Art," said Chelsea. Under the table, she'd slid a small sketch pad into her lap, and one of her pencils was working.
"Oh, brilliant; I love art. Who do you most admire?"
"Lots of favorites," Chelsea laughed. She kept eating with her left hand, while her right moved under the table: she could produce amazing freehand sketches without even looking. "Gauguin, Matisse, Caravaggio, Renoir… I'm partial to Impressionists, but there's pretty much no one I don't like."
Exa said, "Hey, what about that crazy theory that Jack the Ripper was one of Whistler's students?"
"Walter Sickert?" said Chelsea. "No, most of the surviving evidence is too old to really prove anything…" and the debate continued, loud and lively, Cassie providing details about the difference between nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA. From time to time, Dr. Smith would smile, enigmatic, down at his plate. He ate very neatly, even when using his hands, and Cassie admired the length of his fingers.
When he stood up to leave, Chelsea handed him the sketch.
"Aren't you clever!" he said, causing Chelsea to blush the deep red of cranberries. He studied the sketch. "You really think I look like that?"
"I did it under the table, without looking," she said. "It came out the way it came out."
Cassie and Exa craned their necks for a look. In a few quick lines, Chelsea had caught Dr. Smith: the long, angular line of his face, the shape of his nose, the thick eyebrows, the untamed shock of hair. She'd drawn his mouth as a single hard slashing line. But the eyes—she'd done each eye as a dark scribble, and they gave his whole face a dangerous expression. A sense of intelligence and energy, maybe even something ruthless, vibrated out from the image.
He looked at the sketch a few moments longer, lost in thought. Then he smiled at Chelsea, tucking the picture into a pocket. "Thank you," he said, before leaving with his coat over one arm. The room felt small and colorless after he'd gone.
(iv)
The sound of her cell phone chirping startled Cassie, and she set down her neurophysiology reading. Outside the window, night had fallen.
"Hello?"
"Well, hello to you, too," her father's dry voice said.
"Oh, hi, Dad."
"How's school going?"
"Okay."
"We were just wondering—you've been there a week with no phone calls or e-mails. I think we heard more from you when you were in the outback."
"Sorry, sorry."
"And then we read in the Times that Lucille Cavanaugh was murdered, and no suspect has been apprehended."
"Yeah."
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"I'm fine. I was kind of shaken up when I found out."
"You could've called us."
"Sorry," Cassie winced.
"So, who's supervising your thesis?"
"A new guy," said Cassie. "He's English. John Smith. He's friends with Dr. Holland."
"Is he competent?"
"He's brilliant. Really, really smart. I'm TAing his bio labs. A dozen kids dropped the class in the first week 'cuz they were so intimidated."
"Good, he'll keep you on your toes, then. How's the new dorm?"
"Gorgeous," Cassie told him. "I'm in a suite with Chelsea and Exa. Four rooms and a common bathroom. We love it."
"Who's in the forth room?"
"It's empty for now. They said we might get someone in January."
"Good. Well, here's your mother."
"Okay, bye."
A moment later, Cassie's mother came on the line.
"Hello, there."
"Hi, Mom."
"Are you all right? We've been worried about you."
"I'm okay now. I wasn't doing so well last week—got drunk and felt sorry for myself."
"Yes, that's very productive. So you have a new advisor?"
"Yeah, an English guy named John Smith. He went to Cambridge and Oxford. He's amazing—I'm learning a lot from him."
"Will he be able to help you with your vet school applications?" her mother asked.
"I'll get Rachel Fiske to help me. She's on the pre-med and pre-vet committee, and Dr. Smith doesn't know much about American veterinary colleges."
"So, where are you looking?"
"Tufts, Cornell, UPenn…"
"You'd like to stay in the northeast?"
"In a perfect world," said Cassie. "I'm also thinking maybe UC-Davis."
"When are the application deadlines?"
"October, November, most of them."
"Do you need to interview?"
"Only if I'm accepted," Cassie laughed.
"I'm sure you will." The Sterlins' unshakeable faith in their daughter's abilities always made Cassie smile.
"Now, what about standardized tests?"
"Most of them just want the GRE general exam," Cassie said. "I'm taking it next month, and I'm taking the subject exam in biology, for the hell of it, in November."
"Have you been practicing?"
Rolling her eyes, Cassie said, "Mom, I spent this whole past summer practicing." Cassie had never met a standardized exam she'd failed to ace.
"If there's anything you need, just let us know."
"Money," Cassie grinned. "There's a lot of fees."
"About how much?"
"Between the tests and the application fees, maybe 400?"
"We'll send you a check," her mother promised.
"Thanks," Cassie said. "I'll save the receipts for you."
"Are you coming home for Thanksgiving?"
"Weather permitting."
"Gigi misses you."
Laughing, Cassie said, "Did she get my postcards? I bought the biggest ones I could find."
"Dad read them for her. She was very excited. Wanted to know if you'd met any handsome Australian men."
"Plenty, but none of them interested in a dweeby little Yankee Sheila."
"She wants to know why you're not married yet."
Cassie joked, "Tell her to find me a husband… preferably someone who was born in this century."
"What do you expect? She's almost a hundred and five. In her frame of reference, any girl who wasn't married by twenty was an old maid."
"Yeah, well, tell her to get over it."
"You can do that yourself at Thanksgiving, if she's still alive."
"I wish it wasn't so hard to talk to her by phone," said Cassie. Gigi was her nickname for her father's irrascible grandmother: half-blind, hard-of-hearing, wheelchair-bound, and an unholy terror. Since the old woman refused to be called any variation on great-grandmother, Cassie called her G.G., or Gigi for short. "I miss her."
"Send us an email and your father will read it to her."
"Okay," said Cassie. "Is she doing okay in the new retirement center?"
"She's doing really well," Mrs. Sterlin reported. "She likes it much better than the other place. She already has a boyfriend."
"She has a better love life than me," Cassie groused.
"There's two of them, I think, that're fighting over her."
"I believe it—she'll be a siren 'till the day she dies. Listen, Mom—I need to run. There's about twenty more pages of biochem reading before I can go to bed tonight."
"All right, honey. Just so long as we know you're okay."
"I'd let you know if I wasn't."
Mrs. Sterlin made a noise in her throat indicating that she didn't believe it.
(v)
The September days unfolded in a mellow parade over the next two weeks, the weather crisp, the first color touching the maple trees. Time flew for Cassie: classes, labs, observing squirrels, training with Diana, pulling together her vet school applications. In her spare hours—there weren't many—she volunteered at the town's animal shelter. She set aside Saturday nights for her friends, knowing that the following May would likely see them scattered once more across the country, if not the world.
One especially beautiful afternoon, after her neurophysiology lab had ended, she came across Dr. Smith's ecology class on its way back from the campus pond. Long before she saw the group, she heard his voice: loud, clear, unmistakable. The students came into view, and Cassie waved, laughing at the way Dr. Smith looked with the kids flocking around him, like the Pied Piper, or a mother goose with a clutch of goslings.
"Right now, allons-y," Dr. Smith called. "Boat–back to the boathouse. The rest of you—back to the lab." The students clutched murky jars of pond water, which they'd be examining for microscopic organisms. Two others hefted an aluminum rowboat, while a third carried oars.
Cassie fell into step beside Dr. Smith, thumbing the power button on her iPod and tugging out the earbuds.
"Hullo, what are you up to?" he smiled, hands in pockets.
"My neurophys lab ended an hour early. I thought I'd squeeze in a run before supper."
"You like to run?" he asked, glancing at her feet.
"Run, swim, bike—I'm in the campus triathlon club."
"Can you run fast?" he grinned.
"Faster than you," she taunted.
"We'll see about that."
Out here in the open air, Dr. Smith seemed in his element, happy and animated. Cassie wondered, not for the first time, about his previous work experience. His knowledge of just about everything seemed boundless, and yet he was working on a one-year adjunct contract at a small, rural college. In the full light of day, she took a closer look at his face; he seemed young enough to have recently finished a doctoral program, though Cassie had begun to suspect he wasn't quite as young as he appeared.
"Did Dr. Holland tell you anything about the meditation garden?" Cassie asked. "Does he know what happened?"
"There's no suspects," Dr. Smith provided. "The police came and looked, took pictures and fingerprints, but security around the center is lax. Any number of keys has been given out over the years. Some student workers get copies of the key, then graduate or leave campus and never return them. Since there was no sign of forced entry, the police are guessing it was an inside job, someone who already had a key."
"That pisses me off," Cassie scowled. "Some kid getting in there and wrecking all that artwork. Why? Some big statement against religion? Or someone who doesn't like an ecumenical religious center?"
"You'd know that better than I would," Dr. Smith answered. "What are the students like here?"
"Pretty diverse," said Cassie. "It's kind of a campus joke that the only college more liberal than Ethan Allen is UC-Berkeley. There's a lot of kids from different faiths, there's lots of kids that are pagans or atheists or 'fuzzy,' as I like to call them—you know, they believe in something, but they're just not sure what it is."
Dr. Smith tipped back his head and laughed.
"So it's not a place that's really friendly to extremists of any stripe," Cassie said. "If you were a really strict Muslim or Catholic, for example, or a really evangelical Protestant, you'd never come here. Even our handful of born-agains are all peace signs and flowers and Jesus loves you. Exa jokes that the official campus motto oughta be 'I'm okay; you're okay.' Nobody's ever complained about the Interfaith Center before. I can't believe someone would hate the idea so badly they'd come in and smash up a bunch of artwork like that."
"Unless it was an attack against the students who created the work."
"The statue of Garuda came over from India with Dr. Gupta's parents. And most of the other stuff has been there a few years, so the students who made them have all graduated. The most recent thing was Chelsea's triple goddess."
"I hope she wasn't too upset?"
"She's furious. She said she'll make another one, if she has time, but it won't be the same. Inspiration doesn't strike twice, not the same way."
"No." Dr. Smith looked thoughtful.
"It's weird, though," said Cassie. "If it was just vandalism, you'd have expected smashed widows and graffiti and ruined flowers. But nothing else was touched. Just the statues. That makes it look like some kind of slam against religion."
"Yes, and with so many traditions represented, it's not like it was an attack against any faith in particular."
"Yeah." The Klugman Center was coming up. Cassie knew Dr. Smith had to get back to work, and she wanted to take advantage of her unexpected free hour, but she loved being around him, loved talking to him.
"Do American students ever take a gap year?" He made the question seem very casual, but Cassie sensed some purpose behind it.
"Not the way kids in other countries do," said Cassie. "Sometimes, but it's not that common. Most kids don't have the money to wander around on their own, and once they've finished college, the loans start coming due."
"What about you? Do you like to travel?"
"Oh, I love to travel. That's why I did my junior year in Aussie."
"So, you'd never think of taking a year before you start vet school?"
"No, I'm gonna jump right into it," Cassie said. "I don't wanna lose momentum. Besides," she laughed, "the 'rentals are paying for everything, but they're not gonna pay for me to go gallivanting for a year."
"Hmm." Dr. Smith smiled down in a way that made Cassie's legs feel wobbly. They'd reached the laboratory door. "Tomorrow, then?"
"Yeah, see ya!"
Cassie turned and jogged off before he could see the hot blush that had turned her face maroon. She had a weird sense that he'd been about to ask if she wanted to go traveling with him, and the prospect left her dry-mouthed and giddy. If he had in fact asked her, Cassie wasn't sure how she would have responded.
(vi)
On the last Wednesday of the month, the college's faculty and staff meeting took place. The meeting ran from 4:00 until 5:30, followed by dinner in the college center. Cassie had sweet-talked Dr. Holland into letting her have a minute on the agenda. Professors, instructors, and staff members piled into the big lecture hall; Cassie waved at admissions counselors she knew, at the director of the study-abroad program, and at Debbie Katz, who'd come in with other members of the philosophy department. A photocopied agenda was circulating.
Cassie spotted Dr. Smith, already seated, and grabbed an empty chair next to him.
"I hate meetings," he complained. "Charlie strong-armed me into this one. What're you doing here?"
Cassie pointed to her TRIpods t-shirt. "Drumming up membership," she said.
At the front of the room, Dr. Holland was signaling for quiet.
"Good afternoon, everyone," he said, and the jabber died down to a happy buzz. "Welcome back. Welcome to the start of the new year."
Everyone applauded.
"We have a busy agenda today, so please, if we can move right along. Our first item is the introduction of new faculty and staff members. When I call your name, will you please stand up and say something about yourselves?"
He went down the list, and all around the room, people hopped to their feet to say hello. Most of the newcomers were staff: custodians, librarians, secretaries, admissions workers. Cassie knew that this year, a search would be conducted to hire a full-time replacement for Dr. Cavanaugh. The thought depressed her terribly, and she was glad she'd have left Ethan Allen by the time the new person came onboard.
Dr. Holland had reached "S." He called, "John Smith?"
Beside Cassie, Dr. Smith unfolded his long body. "Hullo, I'm John Smith, in biology. When I'm not teaching, I practice origami and compose symphonies." Everyone laughed and applauded, and he sat again. Cassie gave him a little jab with her elbow, and he grinned back at her.
Dr. Holland finished all the names on his photocopied list. "Have I missed anyone?"
The director of financial aid stood up to introduce a new staff member. When she sat, the director of information technology got to his feet.
"Hey y'all, I'm pleased to announce we have a new assistant director in IT. She's been here less than a month, and she's already been an invaluable help. Some of you have met her—
Shira Nahar."
Shira hopped up, her honey-colored curls bobbing. "Hi, everyone," she called in her loud voice. "If your computer crashes, you know who to call." Everyone laughed, and the woman sat.
Cassie turned to Dr. Smith. "She saved my life a couple of weeks ago, when my laptop..." she trailed off. Dr. Smith had gone deathly pale, and he slowly began to crumple forward in his seat.
To be continued…