Graves in Academe
Roz Howard's English course syllabus is being used as a how-to manual--for murder!
The trials and tribulations of campus life have escalated at Canterbury College: members of the English department are slowly being removed by a chillingly systematic killer. And Roz Howard, newly arrived on campus to replace one of the recently deceased, has a more than academic interest in the proceedings when she discovers that each violent act parallels an occurrence in one of the works assigned in her own survey of literature course. Relying on her scholarly acumen (along with a bit of luck and a lot of pluck, Roz sets out to find the killer before her own term at Canterbury comes to an untimely end.
From GRAVES IN ACADEME
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Prologue:
The Last Streetlight
If you had been watching College Hill at that night in early November, you would have seen the mist rising out of the damp ground and blanketing the college in ever-thickening layers, until only the lighted spires of the library and the chapel are visible above it, and the last streetlight casts an ever-decreasing cone of yellow light across the street and sidewalk. A fine rain floats down, visible only in the arc of the glowing streetlamp, and slicks the sidewalk, the stiff grass, the street.
A person watching would have seen people walking by in pairs, in groups, singly, students returning up the hill from town to their dormitories, professors walking down the hill to their homes in town, all hurrying past, their voices muffled, huddled together in the fog, and cars creeping up or down the street, their headlights boring into the dense fog no more than a dozen feet ahead.
By dawn the fog has lifted, and the air is cold and clear so that from the street the girl is clearly visible, sitting in the small stone gazebo at the edge of the woods, not far from the last streetlight, bright red jacket like a beacon in the early morning light.
But she is not wearing the jacket, only jeans and a flannel shirt, the down jacket slung across the back of the stone bench next to her shoulder. There is a thick book open in her lap, but she is not reading it. She stares with half open eyes off into space, contemplative. An early jogger pads by, and, his eye caught first by the bright red jacket, cranes his neck around to look at her but does not stop.
From Page 166…
Screams and shouts, squeals, yells of protest and delight as the crowd started to break out and run in all directions. To her amazement Roz caught a glimpse of Kelley, the man who cried at department meetings, followed closely by Feeney, both wearing yellow slickers and huge bucket-shaped fire hats, hauling happily on a large white fire hose. The volunteer fire department had arrived. Relieved, Roz stuck her head out from under Percy Baxter’s cold bronze knee britches, where she had been huddled on hands and knees, and began to climb down the granite plinth.
….
Thor!" she cried, reaching out a hand toward him. But Thor had leapt down from the plinth, his tall figure shouldering deep into the crowd, so swiftly that finally even though she craned her neck, teetering precariously on the edge of the plinth she could not make out even his bald head above the crowd.
She again heard a noise behind her, and looked around curiously – to find an eerie Jack-O-Lantern grin with what appeared to be no face, mouthing some sort of incantation.
The next moment, unable even to articulate a scream, she felt herself falling, clutching at the stone, her palms abraded by the granite, landing on the ground, hands pushing her head so hard against the earth she could barely turn it, her nose pressed into a muffling, soft heavy object so she couldn't breathe and began to choke, her chest heaving as she ran out of air, thinking, no, stop you're smothering me, I can't breathe, managing to turn her head slightly, sucking in air, just in time to see a huge foot coming swiftly toward her, something hard crashing into her temple, thinking at the same time quite objectively, as though from far away in a consciousness buzzing with the clarity of revelation: Why, here's Othello after all, and here's who the next victim is: me.
Then everything went black.