Spell of the Highlander

Page 18

Possibility: Maybe it was . . . uh, well, uh . . . cursed.
That thought made her feel inordinately foolish. Didn’t sit well with her inner analyst.
Still, better foolish than mad-as-a-mirrormaker.
She’d phoned the professor last night, using the direct line to his room that he’d left her in one of his gazillion messages, but he’d not answered. She’d tried again first thing this morning, but no luck. Still sleeping, she supposed.
Bottom line, she was a pragmatist. She’d not gotten this far in her life by being illogical or prone to whimsy. She was a what-I’ve-got-in-my-hand kind of girl. And after intense reflection, she decided that she didn’t feel crazy. She felt perfectly normal about everything except for this idiotic ongoing mirror-incident.
Maybe she should smash it, she thought peevishly. End of problems. Right?
Except, not necessarily. If she was crazy, her illusory sex-god would probably just take up residence in some other inanimate object (that certainly brought to mind a few intriguing ideas, especially something in her bedside table drawer). If she wasn’t crazy, she could conceivably be destroying one of the most pivotal, dogma-shattering relics in recent human history.
“Looks like I’m stuck fact-finding.” She puffed out an irritated little sigh.
Rummaging in her pack for her cell phone, she withdrew it, flipped it open, and glanced down at the screen. No messages. She’d been hoping the professor would call her back before she got tied up in classes all day.
Too late now. She turned off the phone, tucked it back in her bag, grabbed her coffee from the counter, paid the cashier, and hurried off.
She had classes back-to-back until 4:45 P.M., but the second she was done she was heading straight to the hospital.
5:52 P.M.
The Dan Ryan Expressway at rush hour was a level in Dante’s Hell.
Jessi was hopelessly gridlocked in stop-and-go traffic that was way more stop than go—so much stop, in fact, that she’d been working on homework for the past half hour—when her cell phone rang.
She tossed aside the notes she’d been taking, crept forward a celebration-worthy eighteen inches, whipped out her phone and answered, hoping it was the professor, but it was Mark Troudeau.
The statement was just forming on her tongue that there was no way she was taking on even one more paper to grade when he ripped all the words right out of her mouth by telling her he was calling to let her know the campus police had just informed him that Professor Keene was dead.
She started shaking, clenched the steering wheel, and exhaled a sob.
“And get this, Jess, he was murdered,” Mark relayed in an excited rush, clearly fascinated and clearly oblivious to the fact that she was crying, despite the wet snuffling sounds she was making. Men could be so dense sometimes.
Dimly, she realized traffic was creeping forward again. Eased her foot off the clutch. Dragged the sleeve of her jacket across her face.
“The cops are talking like he got mixed up in something bad, Jess. Said he recently pulled a lot of money out of his retirement and mortgaged his house big-time. I guess he owned some land somewhere in Georgia that he just sold too. Cops have no idea what he suddenly needed so much money for.”
Belatedly realizing the car in front of her had stopped again, she hit the brakes and came to an abrupt halt a bare inch behind the rear bumper of the car in front of her. The guy behind her honked angrily. Not just once, but laid on it, complete with assorted hand gestures. “Right,” she snapped through tears, making a gesture of her own in the rearview mirror, “like it’s my fault traffic stopped moving again. Get over it.”
Traffic was the least of her concerns. She closed her eyes.
The cops might not know why the professor had needed the money, but she did.
It would seem the mirror was a bona fide relic, after all, albeit one that had come—she was now willing to bet serious money—hot off the black market.
The professor had indeed gotten mixed up in something bad.
“Garroted,” Mark was saying. “He was actually garroted. Nobody does that anymore, do they? Who does that kind of thing?”
She palmed the microphone on her cell, stared unseeingly out at the sea of stopped cars. “What on earth is going on?” she half-whispered.
Mark continued talking, a distant, chafing din.
The professor and I have already had our time together this evening, the blond man had said. And she’d pushed the comment brusquely aside, too wrapped up in her own petty concerns and interests.
And now the professor was dead.
Correction, she thought, a little chill seeping into her bones, according to what Mark had just told her—time of death 6:15 P.M. Monday—he’d been dead before she’d even gone to pick up his books that night.