Page 13 of Go Home (Kate Valentine #1)

Brantley College was in darkness: the cafeteria and the senior common room, the Provost’s office and the library, every classroom and lecture hall and study, quiet and empty.

Students.

Forget religion, academia had a fundamental flaw baked in.

It attracted the finest minds of every generation, true scholars like him, for whom it was no mere job, but a purpose and a calling, a process of adding to the global body of knowledge with their own blood, sweat, and tears.

To do that, they needed to research, to bury themselves in the repositories of culture, and above all else, to publish.

Without that, without an endless churn of papers and books and reviews bearing your name, you were nobody, a footnote, a flimsy wooden cross in your chosen field.

And all while you worked so hard at that, winning prestige and accolades for the institutions that gave you tenure, securing the grants and funds and investments for their libraries and their research centers… they expected you to teach.

The two pursuits were fundamentally incompatible.

Scholarship was a solitary pursuit; at the end of the day, it was a path unchanged since the ancient Greeks.

It was you and your books. There was something spartan about it, he often thought.

Noble and pure. He was an athlete of the mind. A warrior, even.

But teaching involved you setting the books aside.

Seeing your subject from the perspective of an ignoramus, coaxing them, gently and patiently, towards the light, with tact and encouragement.

There could be no single task less suited to the skills of a true scholar.

Asking – no, demanding – that a man like him should teach undergraduates was like hiring a hermit to head up your salesforce.

He could do it, of course. Hell, he could break up any standard religious-studies-philosophy-type syllabus into thirty, hour-long, ready-pureed packages for these intellectual toddlers without breaking a sweat.

Had done so, every year, for twelve years now.

But it was utterly, utterly unrewarding.

And it stole time, his precious time, from what he should be doing. Which was scholarship.

Worse yet, alongside trying to get these oversized children to grasp the difference between a law and a norm, or an animist and a polytheist – while not inadvertently outraging any of them with an outlawed term or pronoun – he was meant to play Daddy.

Hold their hands. Provide what they called pastoral care .

Which always sounded to him like something a farmer would do for his cows.

Some of them were okay. They took notes, they asked sensible questions, remembered to quote his books in their papers.

A few of the girls… well, he knew the boundaries and he didn’t cross them.

Never mind the faculty, Laura would have his balls with linguini.

But he saw the way some of them looked at him.

Flicked their hair. Laughed at his jokes. And if he wasn’t their professor…

But that kid. Brandon. It was very sad, of course.

It always was. But the clue was in the title.

Comparative Religion . You can’t study, contrast and compare, analyze and deconstruct the world’s ten major belief systems if you actually believe that one of them is a direct download from the Almighty.

You have to be able to zoom out. See context.

History. Demographics. Pressures within and without.

See a system created by humans, for altogether human reasons.

Understanding the incomprehensible. Explaining suffering and misfortune.

Separating one group from another. The kid just didn’t get it. It was plumbed in ignorance.

He stopped his pacing, but stayed standing up. Looked again at the email. The Dean was right. A reply was long overdue. Despite the inflammatory threats and the Bible quotes, yeah. She deserved a reply.

It was a howl of despair. He understood that.

And actually, he felt a lot of sympathy for her.

Who wouldn’t? What parent wouldn’t? But as for “ridiculing him in front of his peers,” as she put it – no way.

Young people could be pretty abrasive with one another; they took no prisoners.

He could see that with his own daughters, aged eight and eleven: able to switch from toffee-soft to merciless in a heartbeat.

It was far from unlikely that Brandon’s faith, or rather, his cow like, sheep like inability to question his faith, set him apart from the class, and that the isolation went beyond the seminars.

But. That. Was. Not. Down. To. His. Professor.

Making sure that Brandon made friends – that wasn’t his job, either.

And by the time you were nineteen you should have grown a bit of a skin, no?

You shouldn’t need your mother to come to the campus and complain.

She hadn’t helped him, not by intervening like that, but by bringing him up that way.

Number one: she brought the kid up to believe in fairy tales.

Number two: she brought him up to be, let’s face it, a drip, a pudding, a wet lettuce, unable to fight his corner or roll with the punches.

If the kid had sat in his classroom and actually argued with him, been capable of defending his faith with conviction and a bit of attitude, he would have respected him.

“A fundamental lack of sympathy and support.” Now that just wasn’t true.

He had sat down with Brandon twice, on his own time, when he should have been getting on with the new book, to try and get a handle on what was happening.

All Brandon could do was blush and mumble and stutter.

And take everything as a personal affront.

The professor had suggested that maybe this course wasn’t the right one for Brandon.

Somehow, that had translated into “Get out of my class.” And he had never said that, never would.

But why was the kid taking the goddam course anyway? He’d never even gotten to the bottom of that.

It was a disproportionate response. People sign up for things all the time, find out it’s not what they expected, it’s not right for them, they’re not right for it.

Move on. They don’t… they don’t do that .

To do what Brandon did… there had to be something seriously wrong.

And it was nothing to do with him. He wasn’t accountable for that.

He rubbed his eyes with finger and thumb. Checked the clock. Hell. It was ten-thirty already. The editor had sent across six pages of queries on the first draft, and he was barely through the first one. The kid’s mother would have to wait. There was no sense in emailing her tonight, anyhow.

He cracked his knuckles and returned to his work, gradually feeling a settling and an unlocking.

Clarity and focus replaced his irritation.

He would feel something sublime, sometimes, on these nights when he’d stay here alone, working well into the small hours.

A peace that he might have described as holy, if he didn’t know better.

This sense that the world had shrunk away to a pinprick, and that he was floating far above it – like an astronaut circling the planet – all its chatter and its nonsense a million miles away.

He was halfway through typing a sentence when a noise startled him. A slammed door, somewhere in the tower, maybe a couple of floors down.

That was odd. The building was locked. Security patrolled the grounds, but they didn’t come inside the buildings.

It could be one of his colleagues, come back to retrieve something.

Dr. Denyer was notoriously forgetful. But Dr. Denyer didn’t have a key.

As head of department, only he, Professor Whitman, had the key.

And the right to come here in the dead of night and work, undisturbed, was one he jealously guarded.

He listened closely for half a minute or so, but heard nothing else. He must have been mistaken. It could have been a car door slamming; townspeople sometimes used the staff car lot in the evenings, while they picked up a pizza or stopped at Marco’s for a drink. That’s what it was.

But he’d no sooner started to reply to the next query on his list, when he heard another sound. Different, this time – the clank of wheels and cables. It was the unmistakable sound of the elevator.

Someone was coming up.

He knew from long experience that each time the car passed a floor, the shaft made a kind of reverberating thud. A sound you felt, rather than heard.

And Professor Whitman counted them. One, two, three.

Four.