Final Exam Felony a Spencer University Cozy Mystery Chapter 1

There is a week each semester when Spencer University loses its collective mind, and I mean that in the most literal sense. Dead Week, the five days before finals, transforms our quaint campus into something resembling a disaster relief zone staffed by people who haven't slept since last Tuesday.

I picked my way through the library lobby that Monday morning, stepping over a sophomore who had fallen asleep on a yoga mat between the water fountain and the recycling bin. Someone had draped a Spencer University pennant over him like a blanket. Two tables away, a group of nursing students had constructed a fortress out of anatomy textbooks and were taking turns quizzing each other with flashcards while a girl at the end of the row cried quietly into her laptop. The vending machine by the stairwell had been emptied of everything except prune juice, and I made a mental note to ask Don whether campus security had ever done a wellness check on a building before, because the library could have used one.

By the time I made it to the faculty lounge on the second floor of the Tillman Building, Polly was already there, in our usual corner with a coffee cup the size of a small bucket and a stack of battle-worn essays.

"You're late," she said, without looking up from the paper she was grading with a red pen in one hand and a highlighter clenched between her teeth.

I dropped my bag onto the chair across from her and unscrewed the cap on my thirty-two ounce travel cup of hibiscus raspberry tea, brewed that morning with more care than any beverage probably deserved. "I'm not late, you're just here at an unreasonable hour because you've been grading since five in the morning again, and I refuse to encourage that behavior by matching it."

"Four-thirty, actually." She pulled the highlighter from her mouth and drew a long yellow streak across a paragraph that even upside down, was clearly missing a thesis statement. "This student cited Wikipedia fourteen times in a paper about Hemingway. Fourteen, Olivia. The man invented a literary style and this kid is pulling quotes from a page that was probably last edited by someone named DogLover99."

"To be fair, DogLover99 might have some interesting takes on The Old Man and the Sea."

Polly narrowed her eyes at me over her coffee, took a slow, deliberate sip, and managed to communicate both deep affection and complete disappointment without saying a word. "How's your stack looking this week?"

"Forty-two grammar finals to write, sixty research papers to grade by Friday, and a Founders' Day lecture to attend tomorrow morning that I would rather chew glass than sit through." I settled into my chair and wrapped both hands around my tea because the library had decided that climate control was optional during Dead Week. "Have you heard anything about this Prescott guy?"

"Dr. Warren Prescott?" Polly set down her pen with deliberate emphasis. "The man who has made an entire career out of walking into universities and telling them they're terrible? That Warren Prescott?"

"That would be the one."

"He got here yesterday and managed to offend three separate department chairs at the welcome dinner before the salad course was even cleared." Polly leaned back and laced her fingers around her coffee cup, settling in for a proper gossip session. "Diane from the registrar's office told me he called the university's research output, and I'm quoting here, 'charmingly provincial,' and then spent twenty minutes explaining to President Thomas why small colleges like ours are 'part of the problem' in higher education."

"He said that to Thomas? At a dinner Thomas was hosting in his honor?"

"To his face, between the chicken and the crème brûlée. Diane said Thomas's smile got so tight she was worried his face might actually crack."

I could picture it. Thomas's diplomatic grimace, the one he wore when donors said something offensive or the football team lost homecoming. Eric Thomas had stepped into the presidency after the terrible events surrounding President Stoddard's death last year, and the poor man had barely had time to redecorate the office before the accreditation review landed in his lap. He'd been on edge all semester, sending emails with subject lines like "Excellence in Every Detail" and "Our Shared Commitment to Institutional Standards," which was administrator-speak for please don't embarrass me in front of the accreditation committee or I will never recover. Having a professional university critic on campus during the most stressful week of the year must have felt like inviting a restaurant reviewer to dinner on the night your oven broke.

"Why did Thomas invite him in the first place if the man is notorious for being awful?" I asked.

"The Founders' Day lecture is a big deal, and Prescott is a big name. Thomas probably thought it would look good for accreditation. See, we bring in well-known scholars, we're serious about academic rigor." Polly shrugged, tired and unsurprised. She'd been watching university politics from the inside for five years now. "Classic administrative trap. You invite someone important without researching what they're going to say once you hand them a microphone."

"So we have a human wrecking ball on campus during Dead Week, an accreditation review in three weeks, and students sleeping on yoga mats in the library." I took a long sip of my tea. "What a time to be alive."

"Speaking of being alive," Polly said, her mood shifting from shared misery to a gleam I recognized with dread, "when is Don taking you to dinner on Friday?"

I had been hoping she'd forgotten about that. Foolish of me, because Polly never forgot anything, especially where my love life was concerned. "Friday evening, and before you say anything, it is just dinner. We go to dinner. That is a thing we do."

"You go to Mama Rosa's and split eggplant Parmesan. You show up at La Casita in jeans and eat too many chips. This is different, Olivia. He made a reservation. At Mama Rosa's. On a Friday night. He called ahead and asked for the private table. He is making a statement."

"He is making a reservation. There is a difference."

"There is not a difference and you know it." She sat up straight and her coffee sloshed dangerously close to the rim, the Polly equivalent of leaping out of her chair. "He wants to take things up a notch. You two have been together for months now and the fanciest thing he's done is let you pick the booth at La Casita."

"I like that booth. It's comfortable and they never rush us out."

"You deserve a proper date once in a while, is all I'm saying. And I think it's sweet that he planned something special. Especially with how busy he's been."

She had a point. Between Don's workload and my grading schedule and the general chaos of the semester, we'd barely seen each other in weeks. A quiet dinner at a nice restaurant sounded wonderful, if I could stop thinking about dead men in locked rooms long enough to enjoy it.

"Just promise me you won't spend the whole dinner talking about the murder," Polly said, reading my face with the accuracy of someone who had known me for five years and could translate my expressions like a second language. "Don deserves one evening where you are not mentally assembling a suspect list over the eggplant Parmesan."

"I don't do that."

"You did it last time we were at La Casita. You rearranged the chips into a timeline of events and used the salsa as a murder weapon."

An unfortunately accurate summary. "I'll be on my best behavior."

"And wear something nice. Not the gray cardigan."

"What is wrong with my gray cardigan?"

"It says 'I've given up and I'd like to discuss comma splices.'"

She wasn't wrong, and we both knew it, so I changed the subject with the subtlety of a freight train. "Did Thomas send you the latest accreditation prep email, or is that just a special torture reserved for my department?"

"Oh, I got it." Polly picked up her pen with a groan that suggested the email had caused her physical pain. "Three pages, single-spaced, about how we all need to 'present a unified front of academic excellence' during the review committee's visit. He used the phrase 'brand ambassadors' to describe the faculty, and I nearly threw my laptop out the window."

"Brand ambassadors. We have PhDs and he wants us to be brand ambassadors."

"Welcome to modern higher education, where the professors have tenure and the branding is made up." Polly drew another long highlighter streak across her student's paper with grim satisfaction. "Anyway, I'm more worried about Prescott than the accreditation committee. If the man makes a habit of insulting everyone he meets, somebody on this campus is going to snap before the week is out."

"He's only here through Wednesday, right? Lecture tomorrow, some panel discussions, and then he's gone?"

"That's the official schedule, but Diane mentioned he's been asking about access to the rare books collection in the new library. Something about research for an article he's writing." Polly paused and gave me a loaded look over the rim of her coffee cup. "An article about institutional data practices at small liberal arts colleges."

I stopped mid-sip. A professional whistleblower on campus during accreditation prep, writing an article about data practices, while Thomas was already wound tighter than a clock spring. That wasn't bad timing. That was a grenade with a guest pass and a podium.

"You don't think he's here to…"

"I think he's here to do what he always does," Polly said, "which is walk into an institution, find the thing they're most desperate to keep hidden, and drag it into the sunlight while everyone watches."

My phone buzzed on the table between us. A text from Don that read, simply, Looking forward to Friday with a smiley face emoji that I found unexpectedly charming coming from a man who spent his weekends reviewing security footage and filing incident reports.

"Is that him?" Polly asked, craning her neck with zero respect for my privacy.

"It's none of your business is what it is," I said, but I was smiling when I tucked the phone back into my bag, and Polly saw it, and that was all the confirmation she needed to look pleased with herself for the rest of the morning.

I finished my tea, gathered my things, and headed across campus toward my first class of the day, passing students who looked like they were running on caffeine and prayers and a maintenance crew hanging the Founders' Day banner across the front of the administration building. I was rounding the corner by the guest suite when a voice stopped me. Not because it was loud, though it was, but because of what it said.

"...and you can tell the board that if they think I came all this way just to give a polite little lecture and shake hands, they have badly misread the situation." The man on the steps was tall, silver-haired, and wearing an overcoat that cost more than my monthly mortgage. He had his phone pressed to his ear and hadn't noticed me on the path below, which gave me a clear view of his face as he said, "I have the original data, Karen. The actual numbers before they were cooked. And I intend to use them."

He hung up, slid the phone into his coat pocket, and turned toward the guest suite door. His eyes swept the walkway and landed on me. No warmth in them. Just a flat, sizing-up look, like a man deciding whether I was worth stepping over or on.

Then he went inside, and the door closed behind him.

I stood there with my empty tea cup and a cold feeling that had nothing to do with the November air. Because what I'd just heard wasn't a man preparing for a lecture.

It was a man preparing for a detonation.