Page 53 of Hell Bent

“But that’s about his students,” Alex said, “not him.”

Mercy folded her arms. “It’s just sour grapes. I had a professor warn me off choosing him as my faculty adviser.”

“Who?”

“Does it matter?”

Alex had promised to try not to lie, but she was already skirting the truth. “Just curious. Like I said, I’ve never heard a bad word about him.”

“It was a group of them. From the English department. I show up for office hours to talk about a paper and three professors ambush me to insist I stay in the English major, telling me that Dean Beekman isn’t about serious scholarship. They called him a glad-hander.” She put her nose in the air and adopted a tone of disdain. “‘All sizzle, no steak.’”

Lauren shook her head in disbelief. “I’m barely passing econ, and you have faculty staging interventions to keep you in their departments.”

“It’s nice to be friends with a genius,” Alex said.

Lauren scowled. “It’s depressing.”

“Not if some of it rubs off on us.”

“There are different kinds of smart,” Mercy said generously. “And it didn’t matter anyway. I told them I planned to major in American Studies.”

Was professional jealousy enough to get a man killed? And what could that possibly have to do with Marjorie Stephen?

“Who were these assholes, and how do I avoid them?” Alex asked, fishing for names.

“I don’t remember,” said Mercy. “I had Ruth Canejo in Directed Studies, but I didn’t know the other two. That’s part of why it annoyed me so much. Like I was just a point they wanted to score.”

Lauren rose to clear her tray. “I’m the kind of smart that’s going to get a nap in before practice. We need to talk Halloween.”

“A man was killed on campus,” Mercy said. “You can’t seriously think we’re going to throw a party.”

“It will be good for us. And if I don’t have something to look forward to I’m not going to make it.”

When Lauren was gone, Mercy said, “Why all the questions?”

Alex stirred her coffee slowly. She’d told Mercy she wouldn’t lie, but she had to tread carefully here. “Do you know a professor in the psych department? Marjorie Stephen?”

Mercy shook her head. “Should I?”

“She passed away on Saturday night. In her office. There’s a chance her death is just some kind of sad accident. But it’s also possible she was murdered.”

“You think the deaths are connected?” Mercy drew in a sharp breath. “You think there’s magic involved?”

“Maybe.”

“Alex, if the societies … if some bastard did this to Dean Beekman…”

“We don’t know that’s the case. I’m just … exploring every avenue.”

Mercy put her head in her hands. “How do they get away with this? Isn’t Lethe supposed to stop this kind of thing from happening?”

“Yeah,” Alex admitted.

Mercy shoved back from the table, her tray rattling as she snatched up her bag, fresh tears in her eyes. “Then you stop them, Alex. You make them pay for this.”

The Peabody originally stood at the corner of Elm and High Street, stuffed to the rooftop with items both interesting and obscure. Plans were made for a new building and the basement was dug, but materials were challenging to come by, what with the war being on. The collections from the original museum were scattered all over campus, in basements and carriage houses. It took so long to build the museum, and the documentation was so haphazard, that parts of the museum’s collection were still being discovered in old outbuildings as recently as the 1970s. Of course there are some items in its mighty rooms that will never be catalogued, and in some cases, it’s best that provenance remain unknown.

—from The Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of the Ninth House