Upon making it downstairs, Violet did her best to pass by as quickly as possible despite the large crowds. For one thing, she hadn't had more than a piece of cake and a glass of milk for breakfast, so she was dying to have a bite to eat. Also, after her fight with Lizzie, she wanted to avoid speaking with anyone at this point. She had the tendency to grow easily irritated if she interacted with people after getting mad at someone, so at least at times like this, being ignored was preferable than getting noticed.
But upon making it across the main hallway, she still found herself facing the person she least wanted to see at the moment: Sarah Jane Smith. In comparison to Violet, she was dressed quite modestly, with a short-sleeved sky blue blouse and a long black skirt. And surprisingly enough, she wasn't all alone, or acting as seriously as she did during their school days. She had a boy by her side, who looked exactly like those hippie blokes which were all over the place nowadays, with shaggy clothing, a slightly chunky figure, and hair which looked as if he'd had to have it cut before starting university. And instead of blushing or looking away as she sometimes did when strangers spoke to her, Sarah was being quite chatty, laughing and going endlessly on about something which the boy found very amusing.
When Sarah noticed Violet, however, that carefree expression vanished, replaced with a look of uncertainty, almost as if she hadn't believed she would ever run into Violet at any point. However, Sarah then gave her a small smile and said, "Hi, Violet. Long time no see, right?"
Violet managed to smile back despite her longing to run out of there as soon as she could. "Nice to see you too, Sarah. How was your summer?"
"Pretty boring, actually," Sarah replied. "I spend a week visiting some old family friends in a village not that far from here along with my grandmother, and that was it. It rained the majority of the time we were there, so all I could do most days was read novels and those journalism books Miss Ramsey gave me as a graduation present. What did you do?"
"Spend an awful lot of time with my mother's bridge club, to be honest," Violet answered, hoping not to sound as reluctant to be around her as she was feeling at the moment. "When we weren't playing, we'd just swim in the pool on good afternoons or else sit around in the parlor, drinking tea and watching soap operas. The posh can be twice as boring as ordinary folks, you see. Lizzie's wedding came and went more quickly than I thought it would."
"I thought you would be heading to Santa Monica, since Aunt Lavinia said you would be joining Lizzie and her husband there for part of their honeymoon," Sarah said.
"Lizzie wasn't planning on heading there until now, actually. And they're not going to Santa Monica, but to Santa Barbara," Violet explained. "Besides, if they had asked, I would have refused. The last time I went to California, it was over a hundred degrees for three days, and I ended up getting a terrible sunburn and not being able to sleep for a week. If it wasn't for our trip to Disney Land, it would have been the worst vacation ever. I'd much rather go to New York if I had to go to America again."
"Am I really the only one who didn't have a dull summer?" the boy Sarah had been talking to asked with a cheerful smile. "I was able to find a couple of blokes over in a London night club who were aspiring musicians like myself, and we managed to practice together a couple of times. One of them, Ned Warner, is attending a university not that far from here, so we may get together and even consider starting a band if we can find enough people interested."
"Well, I happen to be a music major, and singing has always been my strong point. So, if you wouldn't mind having a girl in your group, I might be willing to offer my time and talent," Violet said, flickering her eyes in a slightly flirtatious manner. "I'm Violet Kingston Hughes, in case you need to know who I am."
However, she was far from being serious. First off, this would probably be the last boy she'd want to be caught in public with, especially if it was amongst people taking her musical talents into consideration. What good would it do her to be seen with someone who could be mistaken for a druggie or a bum? She wasn't aiming to be the crazy girlfriend of a rock star, after all, but rather a talented singer who was a rebel in her own right, not because of what a boyfriend was believed to do. Also, they would all be so busy during their first year of uni, so what made this guy think he'd find time to participate in a band?
However, the guy didn't seem to get that she was joking, because he went on to say, "That doesn't sound like a bad idea, actually. The Velvet Underground managed to get well-known in the New York music scene by including Nico into the group for their first album, so I don't see any issue with having a girl in the band."
"Although you could end up having another Yoko in your hands," Sarah said jokingly.
"That doesn't sound bad to me, actually, especially if that means I'll find a creative partner who's capable of leading me into new directions," Tom said. Then, shaking Violet's hand, he said, "The name's Tom Marsh, by the way. Your friend Sarah has been quite fun to be around with so far, so I wouldn't mind you joining us if you wish."
"Thanks, but I'm really tired from the move over here, and all I want to do right now is have a good dinner and some time to myself," Violet said, her eyes darting around the place to see if now was a good time to go away. "Maybe I'll spend time with you two once classes start."
"Let's hope that's true," Sarah responded with that all-knowing expression which Violet swore she saw whenever Sarah started becoming suspicious of someone's claims.
"I think it just might be so, Sarah," Tom said, and Violet wondered if there was anything that could break that boy free from his overly positive mood. "We'll see you later, Violet."
"Bye, Tom; bye Sarah," Violet said with a wave, practically forcing herself to keep smiling as she started walking as quickly away from them as she could.
And apparently, she went a little quicker than she'd intended, because she found herself stepping into a crack and almost tripping onto the floor.
But before she could fall, a man gripped her arm and pulled her back up within seconds. Upon being able to catch a glimpse of him, Violet noticed that there wasn't a single sign of panic or concern for her on his face. In fact, he acted as if catching young women from falling was just another regular part of his job.
"Are you all right, Ms. Kingston Hughes?" he asked, remaining calm as he spoke.
"I am, and thank you for helping me, but how do you know who I am?" Violet responded.
"As a professor of journalism, I'm able to get more information on students and faculty than anyone else at the university," the man answered. "It also helped that I heard a little of your conversation with Sarah Jane Smith and Thomas Marsh. I met them a while ago myself, and let me just say that you're wise in trying to avoid their company."
Violet frowned. "Why would you say that? I know they're both odd, but you make it sound as if they're criminals or something. I happen to know Sarah Jane personally, and she may have a tendency to walk into more than her fair share of trouble, but…"
"I see what you're trying to say, Ms. Kingston Hughes, but just because people can't help themselves doesn't mean they can't still be dangerous to interact with. If I understand matters well enough, Ms. Smith got you involved in the death of a former friend. Isn't that enough for you to want to stay away from her for good?"
"And how the hell do you know of something which is none of your business?" Violet asked in a sharp tone. "My name wasn't in any of the papers, so how can you be aware of my involvement at all. Are you some sort of spy?"
"My dear, much goes on in the world which the majority of people never become aware of during their lifetimes. Let's just say I'm one of the lucky individuals with a little additional knowledge," the professor said with an evil smile.
Violet shook her head and moved as far away from him as possible. "Freak," she mumbled as she did so. And strangely enough, when she saw the man walking through the hallway on his own, she thought she could hear him humming the song "Secret Agent Man".
…
Daniel More lived in a small cottage next to the woods of Monroeville, in an area overlooking a large lake where fishermen could be seen from dawn till sundown. Besides their presence, however, it was a completely solitary area, which was probably the best thing a man of his abilities and field of work could ask for.
Today, Sandie Nolan, the nine-year-old daughter of Joseph Nolan, a fisherman and farmer who managed to own several acres of land despite his modest income, was playing by herself with a ball in the area surrounding the cottage. She wore a simple red dress (girls in this area were rarely seen wearing trousers) with a black sash tied around the waist and Mary Janes, something which Daniel found odd to see a girl as lively as Sandie wearing every day.
Upon seeing Daniel walk by, Sandie smiled and said, "Good afternoon, Mr. More. How was your day today?"
"Quite well, my dear," Daniel said, smiling back at the girl. "You always meet a number of amusing students at the university, although that doesn't always mean you're coming across someone of good character."
"I see what you mean," Sandie said in a sweet manner. "Daddy says most students at university these days are delinquents who want to do nothing but sell drugs and say no to the government."
Daniel laughed. "Well, you tell your father that Monroeville is quite a sane place in comparison to some other universities. When I was visiting the University of Detroit during my brief stay in the states, for instance, I came across people who would burn draft cards in front of large crowds of people and smoke marijuana in the bathrooms when they should have been in their classes. Here, the biggest trouble we have are blokes who like growing their hair long like the Beatles and girls who wear their skirts a little too short."
"I'll remember, Mr. More," Sandie said, picking up her ball and preparing to head home for tea.
"And in case you don't, feel free to tell me, because I never forget things," Daniel told her, telling her the same thing he always told his students on their first day of classes.
When Sandie was out of sight, Daniel smiled to himself and took out the keys to the cottage. Once he was inside, he placed his suitcase containing all his important paperwork beside a stack of old newspapers which was beside the Welcome mat. He took out three papers which he believed to be of major importance, and then walked over to his office, which made up one of the contractor's five rooms.
The first thing any outsider who set foot into his office would have thought upon seeing it for the first time was that it resembled the office of a government agent more so than that of a journalism professor. In one area of the office, there was nothing but tall, black filing cabinets with labels: the first labeled "Names A-C" and the last one labeled "Cases 1967-69". Right next to these cabinets was a small bookshelf with a sign reading "CLASSIFIED READING MATERIAL" at the top, and contained magazines and periodicals with titles which would have gotten many intruders suspicious, including Beyond Science, Phenomena, and Supernatural Weekly.
On the other side of the room, things looked more ordinary, with Daniel's neatly kept desk and typewriter, and another larger bookshelf without any signs on it, which included Daniel's more standard reading material, including everything from Agatha Christie mysteries to John Updike novels, and from The Guardian to Punch. On the walls was everything from the standard to the plain bizarre, from a poster of 2001: A Space Odyssey to a picture of a gray creature with dark eyes on the spot of the recent moon landing, as well as clippings from newspapers, classic art recreations (the one of Van Goth's Starry Night was probably his favorite), and sketches artists created of some of the strange creatures witnesses have encountered over the years (the recent of the Yeti in the London Underground probably being the best of the bunch).
The majority of Daniel's days were spent in the latter side of the room, either grading dozens of papers or coming up with lesson plans for the week. But on this day, he was obliged to use the former side, since he'd come across what was probably the biggest case he'd encountered in three years. Coincidently enough, both cases involved women with the last name of Smith.
All of that included profiles from a large archive known as the M-cases, or mystery cases. They involved the records of individuals who either possessed abilities which were beyond those of typical human beings (most involved ESP, although there were other rarer powers included as well), or whose identities could not be traced through any official records, and the incidents in which they showed evidence of being such individuals. Although these cases were rarely reported to the government, people like Daniel More (who also had a profile in the M-cases) dedicated themselves to keeping record of such individuals simply for the sake of maintaining evidence that such people were out there. The International Committee of Supernatural Investigation (or the ICSI) was the main group in charge of such tasks, having been established in 1880 and growing bigger as time went on, with its largest membership in history being reached in 1967. While they weren't the only group involved in such work, they were the only people who could maintain the M-cases, and people outside the group had to seek their permission to add a new case in.
Daniel now shuffled through the file cabinet labeled "Names Q-S", which already consisted of 13 different names, including three different Smiths (it was the most common last name in the English Language, after all). The first two, Alan Smith and Julia Smith, involved a case of distant cousins in 1930s British Colombia who had formed a psychic connection. Alan Smith, a recent high school graduate who was left unemployed on account of the depression, disappeared in the summer of 1933 for a total of three months. His distant cousin Julia started having strange recurring dreams around this time of a lone traveler struggling to make his way through the woods. As a result, she set off by herself into Roosevelt Woods one night, and it was right there that she found Alan tied up in a pine tree, half-starved and with a high fever, but still alive and able to make a full recovery upon being brought back home.
It turned out that he'd been kidnapped by a group of bandits wanting to bring ruin to his father, who was a small shopkeeper, and that he'd been able to send telepathic messages through Julia to let her know where he was, which had come to her through the form of dreams. This case had been investigated by Collin Paterson, a Canadian policeman whom Daniel had gotten to know in his early days as a paranormal investigator, and had been recorded in the Autumn 1933 edition of Phenomena, an American-Canadian publication on supernatural incidents.
The other person, Melody Smith, whom Daniel had investigated himself while doing research in Detroit in 1966, had made it into these profiles for different reasons. She had taken up a position as a professor of Archeology at the University of Detroit, and although she was by all accounts an expert on what she did, there were several unusual things about her. The first of these matters was that her name couldn't be found on any official government records for any country; the only records of anyone named Melody Smith came from documents which had been proved to be falsified by one of Daniel's collages. The other matter was that she had associated herself with two other individuals without any official identity. The first was a teenaged girl who went by the name Raina Olsen, who was visually impaired, an aspiring musician, and whom Miss Smith was looking after as a tutor. The other was a black man who went by Marquis Province, who worked nights as a musician for parties and night clubs, and who had been reported to have psychic abilities which were unlike those of any human. Both him and Melody Smith (who was sometimes accompanied by Raina) were reported to go around the city making supernatural investigations of their own, sometimes with more success than any of the paranormal investigators in Detroit at the time.
Daniel had followed Melody Smith and her companions for six months, mainly following them along during their investigations while keeping himself hidden from their view (sometimes by watching them through his car or a distant seat, or while hiding behind storage closets, boxes, and even a trash can once). However, he'd also gone a little further when he had to, letting himself into their homes when they were gone and attempting to speak with them in person. It had been a difficult task indeed, but somehow, this became Daniel's most important case to date, with his final report on Melody Smith (which drew the conclusion that she and her companions were most likely not of this world)appearing on both Phenomena and Supernatural Weekly, and earning Daniel membership in the ICSI, a position which earned him a major allowance of over a ten thousand pounds to go towards his work, as well as permission for anyone around the world to seek him out for the examination of anything related to the supernatural.
Would his recent discovery of an eighteen-year-old university student who'd inherited her grandmother's extrasensory perception be able to overshadow his work on the archeology professor who turned out being only half-human? Perhaps not, but he would get the chance to do a more in-depth examination of her on account of the fact that he was his student. And in the Journalism field, you always got the chance to expose people for who they really were. Not that he wanted to make Sarah Jane Smith's university years anymore of a living hell than her previous school years had been (Daniel always shuddered whenever he recalled his own experiences; those with ESP rarely had it easy when they were young), but coming from a family which included con artists in addition to a grandmother who was on the M- Cases, he still had to keep a close eye on her regardless of his personal opinion of her character.
With that being said, he put the sheet of notes he'd jotted down on Sarah Jane Smith, along with the Polaroid picture he'd taken of her as she'd been walking outside, on a file to the back of Melody Smith. Luckily, he'd been able to get a better picture of this Smith than he'd gotten of that other old hag, in which she was wearing simple school clothes and was in an ordinary setting. She'd shown herself to be an insightful young woman, if not completely confident in her own abilities. However, he sensed something of rebellion waiting to be unleashed in the way she responded to his inquires, especially when he'd been speaking to Thomas Marsh. This wasn't unusual to sense in the people he investigated, especially those who were young, but it was always problematic to certain degrees.
Take Melody Smith, for example. The photo he'd taken of her showed the woman in a blue evening gown that showed off her overly curvy arms along with matching penny loafers, and her messy curly blonde hair in a ponytail. But what actually made this photo seem bad to Daniel was the fact that it had been taken when she was doing one of her investigations with Marquis Province, just as she was stepping out of Province's 1957 Ford Chevy, as a matter of fact. What exactly did that woman think she was, a serious supernatural investigator, or a leading lady in one of those silly secret agent shows which were a complete parody of the real thing? No wonder people had such crazy ideas about the work Daniel did nowadays!
But even worse was the action girl act the woman tried to take on, uttering silly phrases like "Hello sweetie" or "Spoilers", carrying around what looked like a fake blaster from a campy sci-fi show in her bag, but which Daniel found out was real after an incident where a ghost attempted to possess a teenaged girl, in which she shot the spirit down with that thing (which then made him wonder if she went so far so to keep it with her during classes; in a city like Detroit, that would certainly spell trouble), and even going so far as to punch Daniel after she'd caught him asking Raina Olsen questions while she was walking back from the university building. And no, he couldn't even read her mind to find out what unpredictable things she'd do next, which made the investigation all the more frustrating. The less he had to think about his experience with that Smith, the better. He even remembered laughing when he heard that Melody Smith and Raina Olsen had vanished shortly after a deadly incident at a concert, in which some sort of toxic smoke killed over thirty people. "Surely, Miss Smith's little blaster couldn't help her this time around, so she had no choice to banish off to Mars where perhaps she's seen as more tolerable by her own kind," he'd said to a shocked friend and fellow ICSI member, who'd told him the news two months after he left Detroit.
But who was to say that he didn't have a much more difficult Smith in his hands? Jane Harris, after all, had told Peter Fleming (an early member of the ICSI) to go to hell after he'd published an article about her in Beyond Science, the British version of Phenomena, and had gone so far as to send him a painting in which he had a big nose and made funny faces while scribbling through a notebook, with nothing but more notebooks surrounding him in the background. "If you keep on being nosy, all you'll have to your name are your ridiculous stories", she'd written at the bottom of the picture, followed by her fancy signature. And when George Stewart kidnapped her and planned to do experiments on her, Jane was said to have bitten his hand and kicked him fiercely in the shin when he revealed himself to her, escaping within four hours after the incident.
But Daniel would not allow this to happen. If Sarah Jane Smith was to prove herself to be problematic, he was certainly going to have to reconsider his slight empathy towards their shared abilities and show her that he was not just another James Bond, but someone who took his work seriously, perhaps a little too much so than other ICSI members. Regardless of what risks it involved, he was going to find out as much about her as possible, because this was an opportunity he could not afford to pass off. There were not that many close family members who shared ESP traits, and anyone who examined them was likely to remain a respected figure in the history of supernatural investigation for years to come.
With this work done, Daniel left his office with an evil grin on his face, humming "Secret Agent Man" once again as he went over to the kitchen to prepare himself some tea.