The Classroom Job

(Author’s Note: sorry! I posted this twice. It has been edited down to one story now. I apologize; it was late and I’m feeling very much like Eliot towards technology this week. I’d like to punch it.)

Hardison’s research was very complete, so it was no trouble to find her page on the university website, and from there her schedule. The fact that Hardison had her complete schedule in about three clicks made Eliot mad (because he was plenty capable of doing that himself) and Hardison wrathful (because he was able to find a ton of information that should have been better protected.). Sophie had to be called in to persuade Hardison not to leave taunting notes for the school’s IT staff.

Finding her classroom, on the other hand, proved to be far more annoying than he expected. The same people who built casinos, he thought, must build universities, because the intent to keep anyone from finding a clear exit was obvious. He finally gave up and asked someone. Her building was one of the older campus buildings, which he thought was more appropriate than the shiny modern buildings. Of course, it probably took a long time for her building to warm up on cold winter mornings.

Despite what he hoped was his casual appearance, he was on a mission today. He hadn’t told anyone when he left what he planned to do. After a handful of dates with Ophelia and one very charged conversation with Sophie, he was amending his course. After several hours and three cups of coffee in a diner in a state he couldn’t quite name, he had decided that Sophie’s idea of getting to know Ophelia better was a reasonable one.  Then he realized how very little he knew about her. Sure, she was fun and could make conversation out of almost nothing, but except for an allusion to a tragic backstory (her words), he didn’t know very much about her. He felt like she was hiding something, either out of an abundance of caution, because who wants to tell all their business to a near stranger, or she was actively hiding something. He decided over a very iffy coconut pie that he needed to know which one it was. She definitely wasn’t a spy or an agent, or secretly married or a terrorist. And he was pretty sure she wasn’t on the run from any of those things. But he’d had casual encounters with women and left knowing more about their families than he knew about hers, which couldn’t be an accident. Maybe she’d be more willing to talk about it on her own turf. She also couldn’t unleash her dog on him here. It wasn’t all upside, but it was the most he could give her.

The hope that he could sneak into a side door of her lecture hall was wrecked when it turned out she didn’t have a lecture hall or a side door. Much to everyone’s surprise,  he appeared right in the middle of her lecture, right in front of the entire class. With every eye in the room on him, he could hardly back out without saying something. She studied him with interest. He was wearing round glasses she’d never seen, a blazer with patches on the elbows, and his hair pulled back. This was clearly what he thought a professor looked like. He intended to blend in. Nobody bought it. Had she taken a poll at that moment in the class, the students would have overwhelmingly guessed he was a modern day Indiana Jones, and not in the sense that he was a professor.

“Class, let’s all welcome…,” she paused, waiting to see how he thought on his feet.

“Dr. Wes Abernathy,” he answered. “Forensic Archaeology.”

Three hands immediately shot into the air.

“It won’t be on the test,” she answered carelessly, not calling on any of them. Two hands dropped.

“Patterson?”

“Isn’t all archaeology forensic archaeology?”

She put a hand to her face, turning a laugh into a cough.

“It’s the archaeology of crime, in this case,” Eliot answered, stealing Sophie’s phrase. “We’re looking into a possible murder from the Civil War era. Possibly a Jack the Ripper situation.”

An awed murmur made its way through the class. Slowly, people began to look away.

“Won’t you have a seat, Dr. Abernathy? We’re not quite finished here yet.” He got the feeling she was seconds away from laughing out loud, and surely she was going to sprain her jaw suppressing that smile.

He took an empty seat to watch her work.

The classroom looked like a large, disused attic space filled with remaindered furniture leftover from about three dozen yard sales.  The students had arranged themselves in more or less a semi-circle around the lectern facing her and the white board, which looked out of place among the old furniture. Some of the students were on bean bags, a couple were sprawled on the floor with laptops or tablets, not a scrap of paper nor a pen amongst them. She also had three dummies from the Home Ec department attired in dresses in increasing states of disrepair, which he couldn’t readily explain. Her typewriter sat, covered, on a desk that looked like it hadn’t quite survived the sinking of a commercial fishing boat.

“The concept of ‘make do and mend’ is hardly a new one,” she said, resuming her lecture. “As you can see from these examples, one dress could be refreshed over the course of seasons or years when supplies were hard to get.”

Her voice sounded different; this wasn’t her conversational style. She sounded like an authority.

“How many of you have seen 1776?” she asked, casting a glance over the young faces in her audience. “Probably not that many of you, but that’s okay. One of the recurring themes in Abigail’s letters to John Adams are the lack of pins and needles in Massachusetts, so nobody was doing any sewing or mending. What do you do when a major piece of daily life is suddenly gone, and Amazon won’t be around for another 200 years?”

“Make do and mend?” came a tentative voice from the front row.

“Go on,” Ophelia encouraged. “Tell me how.”

Blank faces everywhere.

“Find a new source,” Eliot answered.

“A new source of pins and needles?” she asked, her tone indicating she’d like him to continue.

“A new source for materials. If you can’t get metal pins and needles, you make them out of bones. Same way the natives did.”

“Human bones?” one young man asked.

“Nah. Even finger bones are too big for sewing,” he said before he considered his audience or what he was saying. She leaned back against the desk, her fist jammed against her mouth. “But small animals: rabbits, field mice, even chickens. That way you’re also using the entire animal. Nothing goes to waste.”

She nodded, satisfied. Although they were definitely going to discuss the whole finger thing later.

“That will be on the test,” she informed them. Six of them typed it into their notes. “That’s all for today. See you Thursday, and extra credit for anyone who comes in here singing a song from 1776 next time.”

She sat on the front of the desk with one foot tucked under her while several students approached, ostensibly with questions. Today she was wearing a long sweater with patches, and jeans that were ripped. But they were ripped by design instead of by wear. He felt like she was making a point with the clothes but would have to ponder on it for a while first. Eliot didn’t think he was being paranoid, but he felt like the students were spending as much time staring at him as they were waiting for her. Finally she waved both hands.

“Shoo! Be gone with you all! I have office hours, and this is neither my office nor those hours!” Several of the students chuckled, so she must have said something similar before, or this wasn’t unexpected behavior. “Email me if it’s really urgent, but you’re all very smart and I’m certain you can sort it out with the help of your classmates.”

The students filed out, some more reluctantly than others, leaving the space empty. She gestured he should come closer and explain himself.

“Are you going to lecture me now?”

“I thought about it, then I thought I’d ask how you found my classroom, then I thought I’d ask why you would explain a human finger bone makes a bad needle. But now I’ve decided not to ask about any of that, and instead ask who Dr. Wes Abernathy is.”

“Because you’ve heard the name?” he asked hopefully.

“Because that’s likely to be the least horrifying answer,” she replied.

“What’s with the dresses? Are you teaching a course in Fashion History?”

“You first, Abernathy.”

“Oh,” he stammered. “You were serious about that. Sometimes I…for work, I mean. You know, sometimes you don’t want your real name floating around out there where just anyone can hear it.”

“What am I going to find if I google Dr. Wes Abernathy?”

“I don’t have a face page,” he said quickly. She tilted her head like that wasn’t an answer she had anticipated. It probably wasn’t.

“Oh…kay. Noted. I don’t have a ‘face page’ under my own name either.” He had no idea how Hardison had her doing the air quotes now too. “Because some of my students have boundary issues. And some of them are just a pain in the ass.”

“And it sounds like they want extra credit a lot,” he observed. She shuffled some papers together before stacking them on top of her typewriter.

“What brings you all the way out here today?” He felt like, in this case, her curiosity was legitimate.

“I just wanted to see what you do,” he shrugged. “And see if maybe you wanted to get some lunch?”

That caught her by surprise.

“And now I really want to know what all the dresses are about.”

“They’re to show in stages what happens when there’s a hostile force between you and new clothes,” she explained. “How you patch, and mend, and let things out, what happens when you’ve exceeded the useful life of a garment. Plus a discussion on what sort of garments survive for posterity and what garments don’t.”

“You teach a whole class on that?”

“It takes an entire semester, even. It’s not just clothes. It’s also rationing, canning, preserving, how a war disrupts agriculture and food stocks, how industry is affected, how transportation changes and why, and what happens in the aftermath. Because you realize that everything doesn’t go right back to normal when a war ends.”

Boy, did he.

“And then I have a lot of students who’ve seen the phrase ‘turn a dress’ who thought it meant you started wearing it backwards. Which…I just can’t.”

“That seems like a lot,” he said. “I’m impressed.”

She smiled at that and seemed to relax a little.

“It’s for people who major in history. It’s an elective, but I had enough people sign up that we had to add a third class this year. Plus I teach my other ‘history for people who need a course credit’ class, which is a lot less interesting, and a lot less well attended. I get to do fun stuff with these classes. We go on field trips. We watch movies and nitpick the details. And sometimes the main plots.” With that, she picked up her typewriter and her notes. “Come on, I’ll drop all this at my office, and you can witness the wonder that is everyday university catering.”

“Here, I’ll take it,” he offered. “I’d like to carry your books.”

She passed him the typewriter case before leading him to her office. Her office, he observed, was a lot like her house: crowded with pictures and memorabilia. To his surprise, she also had several pin-up type posters on her walls. Her shelves were packed with books that were not organized by any means he could discern, although most of the books seemed to either history or history adjacent. He wandered to her desk to find a book sitting on top of a pile of papers.

“You wrote the book for your class?” he asked. Writing a book was a big damn deal. He should have read the back pages of Hardison’s file more closely. Hardison would later ask just why the hell Eliot thought he included a bibliography in the first place. The conversation would spiral in a number of unproductive directions from there.

“Someone had to,” she answered. “Might as well be me. It’s nothing ground-breaking, and most of it is references from other textbooks, but this at least collects the information together for the students so they don’t have to buy 12 books and spend half the GDP of Guam for one course. And I don’t change a comma so there’s a new edition every year. But sometimes I give extra credit if the students will transcribe the notes other students have written in their books. One of my other topics is the useful life of everyday items, like books. And whether they were common, which is why they survived, or whether they were precious commodities, which is why they survived.”

“Or whether spies used them?”

“Maybe I’ll have a guest speaker to talk about that this year.”

She collected her bag while he looked around, trying to figure out how to ask the obvious question about the posters without sounding like he was asking the obvious question, which was not at all about posters.

“You’re into this?” he asked, gesturing vaguely at the ‘40s version of scantily clad women. She looked at them like she was noticing the posters for the first time.

“I think I’ll let you figure out why I’m into this,” she said. “What kind of unhealthy food would you like?”

“It’s not the quality of the food,” he answered. “It’s the quality of the time.” Which they both silently agreed, as lines went it wasn’t that bad.

She hooked her arm through his and led him across campus to a crowded cafeteria packed with students. He’d heard riots that were less noisy. For that matter, he’d participated in quieter invasions.

“We’re definitely not eating in here,” she half-shouted. This wasn’t even her lecture voice; it was just plain struggling to be heard. “But they have a lot of good grab and go options.”

She led him to the window for a national sandwich chain. Obviously she was a frequent patron, because the kid at the counter handed her a wrapped sandwich almost immediately.

“I have a guest today,” she told the student worker. “Please give him whatever he’d like.”

When they escaped the noise and confusion of seven thousand students all eating and talking at once, he followed her to a tree-filled courtyard near her building, where the atmosphere was much quieter. There were still students around, but the open air kept everything from echoing back at them from every flat surface.

“This is nice,” he said after they got settled. “Do you like it?”

She mused on the question for a moment.

“I do,” she finally said. “It’s quiet and it pays the bills. I usually have pretty good students and I like my colleagues.”

“That’s what you want? Quiet and paying the bills?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “I’m not ambitious. I don’t want to set the world on fire. Or put it out, for that matter. I’ve got a good dog, and a good house—”

“A family?” he interrupted. He hadn’t meant to be that abrupt; she braced for a conversation she’d been trying to avoid for weeks.

“Parents. We…correspond. My mom is retired, and my dad is about to be. They’re talking about selling their place and living on a cruise ship, which will suit them just fine. Waking up in a different port every morning is exactly the kind of thing they’ll love.”

“You’re not close, then. Did you want to be?”

“They were both really ambitious,” she answered slowly. “I think at some point we all wondered whether there was a mix-up at the hospital. I tell people I’m career focused, but my mom uprooted us all for two years in the middle of eighth grade to go study the writings of Henry VIII in London. They didn’t know what a relief boarding school was, because I finally had a routine, instead of the very bohemian-professor lifestyle they were both leading. It was exhausting.”

“Your parents left you in boarding school in the US so they could go to London when you were in the eighth grade?” His question was more of a yelp than he would have liked.

“Oh, no,” she assured him. “I went to London too, and after the first week asked my mother’s sponsor about boarding schools that would accept a transfer student in the middle of the year. Because despite what the books tell you, it’s not a great idea for a 14 year old girl to wander around London alone.” 

“Your parents sent you to a boarding school in another country? When they were both also in that country?” Surely she was kidding; surely they hadn’t done what she was suggesting.

“They did it based on the suggestion of colleagues,” she rephrased. “It wasn’t, like, 80s movie boarding school. I was friends with the other girls, I liked my teachers. There were no murders, although there were a couple of ghosts. And there were meals served with regularity, because the adults in charge realized you had to feed children. Whereas a lot of nights when I lived with my actual parents, I had Oreos for supper because nobody remembered to bring home food. I asked to be a boarder at Savannah Day when we came back. Everyone thought my parents were cool and hip and cutting edge and envied their lifestyle.” She, Eliot realized, was fighting very hard to sound flippant and not bitter, but the undertone was extremely clear to him: she considered her parents failures in the parenting department.

“Your parents sent you to a boarding school in their town?!” He’d been outraged that her parents would move to another country and send her to a boarding school. Moving back to America and sending her to a different boarding school was so much worse he didn’t know where to start; shouting seemed like a good reaction, although she didn’t seem to want to budge from resignation.

“It was Savannah. They weren’t about to send me out of town, everyone would talk. Oh, they toyed with the idea of a school in New Orleans, but the thought of living there made me break out in hives. Plus, my grandparents snuck me out a lot for weekends. I wasn’t a prisoner, but I wasn’t an influential part of their lives, either.”

He heard the change in her voice. She probably didn’t even know she did it.

“You have grandparents?”

“I’m from the South. I even have second cousins,” she answered, her eyes twinkling. “But: had. They’ve passed on now.”

“Whose parents were they?”

“My mother’s. My grandmother was from a very old Southern family. She was…very different from the rest of the family.”

“What about you? Are you different from them?” He knew Southern families would go to great lengths to protect their names, even if they didn’t necessarily protect their members. On the other hand, it sounded like anyone would have had to pay her a lot more attention than her descriptions of them implied for a relative to have done something egregious to her.

“Not the same kind of different,” she said briefly. It sounded like she was disappointed, but he had no way of telling for whom.

“What about your dad’s parents? Were they around?”

“He wasn’t from Savannah,” she said. “He was from California, and his mother was a war bride from France. He met my mother when he came to Georgia on a grant to study the architecture of Savannah. I think he thought he was causing a scandal by marrying my mother, when they’d known each other less than a year and he wasn’t from around there. He had no idea what constituted a scandal, honestly. It was almost charming.”

“A charming scandal?”

“It’s Savannah,” she shrugged. “Everything is charming. Even the ghosts are charming.”

“Your parents sent you to two different boarding schools and you didn’t have a problem with that?” he repeated, trying to make her see his outrage.

“They were both my idea, and my parents weren’t, as the kids say, all about that parenting lifestyle. It was really a much better choice than staying at home with them; it worked out better for everyone involved.” She didn’t elaborate, clearly thinking that was enough said on the subject.

He couldn’t wrap his mind around a lifestyle that included producing children and handing them off to someone else because you couldn’t be bothered to parent them. People treated unwanted kittens better than that. His own parents hadn’t been great, but at least they hadn’t functionally abandoned him or his sister, either. Her jaw was tense. He let it go for a minute, because they were definitely going to talk more about it later.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked, just to see where that took them.

“Of course I do,” she said. “Some other time I’ll tell you why ghosts are also part of my class. Don’t you?”

“I can’t tell if you’re trying to change the subject or not.”

“Do you know when ghost stories in America started popping up?”

“You definitely are.”

“Of course I am.”

“Ophelia, come on.”

“You come on,” she said, exasperated. “You’re not exactly what I’d call forthcoming about your past. And I’m not bugging you about it.”

She had him there; the less she asked, the less he had to lie or evade or cover over. Which he knew was bullshit and also not the reason she didn’t ask. This was no way to have a relationship. This was no way, he corrected himself, to have a healthy relationship. He’d had plenty of relationships the other way.

He wasn’t too distracted to notice that she didn’t say anything about asking about his present, and while he’d told her the truth about his future, he had no idea when or if that future might happen.

She stuffed the sandwich wrapper into her potato chip bag, obviously deep in thought.

“Does this matter?”

He was caught off guard. Then he recognized she wasn’t talking about ghosts anymore. Not in the sense of ghost stories, anyway.

“It’s your family. It’s important.”

“Important enough to drive out here and use an alias to come into one of my classes? Enough to eat this?”

“Ophelia, I—”

“I get that you’re coming from a good place with this, I do. And I don’t have anything to hide from you. I just prefer not to live in the past. And I get the irony of a history professor saying that.”

“You prefer not to live in your past,” he pointed out. “A lot of people do.”

She leveled an odd look at him. Like he was a specimen in a jar. He went ahead and bit that bullet.

“Look, I left home when I was 18. It was lousy. My mom had already taken off and I had to leave my sister with my dad.”

“Where is she now?”

“Away. Married. She’s got a son. I’ve spoken to my father twice since I left. So I get it.”

She sat back, trying not to look like she was crossing her arms to keep him out, even though she was.

He scooted closer to her on the bench; she was already in the corner and couldn’t back away, but he didn’t think she wanted to either. She didn’t. She laid her head on his shoulder. He wrapped his arm around her, which she didn’t seem to mind.

“This is a really painful conversation for you, isn’t it?” he asked.

She shuddered before she answered.

“It’s not that it’s painful,” she argued. “It’s that it doesn’t fix anything.”

“You only want to talk about things you can fix?”

“It’s like the water heater,” she said quietly. Eliot had to think before he remembered what she was talking about.

“I know you can fix it by yourself,” he said. “I also want you to know that you don’t have to.”

“But you said—” she began to insist. He caught her chin with his other hand, turning her face so she had to look at him.

“I know what I said, Phee. I know I said then that I didn’t want to talk about you doing it all on your own. I do now.”

She swallowed hard before speaking again.

“I don’t want to seem rude.” He let go of her chin, pretty sure he knew what was coming.

“But?”

“You don’t seem like a long-term guy. Which is fine. Meeting was a happy accident.”

He sighed, then kissed her on the temple.

“And not to keep harping on this,” she continued, “but you walked into my classroom and presented yourself as a completely different person than the one I know you to be. You didn’t even blink. It was almost like you didn’t have to think about it, because becoming someone else is just second nature to you. I feel like if I were to push on that, it would also result in a painful conversation that neither of us really wants to have. It isn’t a thing to be fixed, and while it might be interesting, it’s not a productive conversation to have.”

He ran his other hand over his face, realizing he was still wearing his glasses. He took them off, then pulled his hair free. He felt some of the tension leave her shoulders.

“I can’t tell you about what I do, Ophelia. And part of the reason is to keep you safe from the things I do. And the things I’ve done.”

He waited for her to ask, but she didn’t.

“And I’ve done a lot of bad things in a lot of places. But that’s not all. I wouldn’t say I’m a bad guy, but I wouldn’t say I’m a good one, either.” If she had parents who had cared about her at all, they would warn her off. Any reasonable adult in her life, he reflected, would warn her off if they met him, unless he took the trouble to make them think he was someone like Dr. Wes Abernathy.

“Is this the part where you tell me it’s been really fun but you’re just not sure it’s going to work out? Because, really, you’ve hung around a lot longer than I would have guessed. I mean, I’ve never wanted you to go, but I’ve never let myself make plans longer than next week either.”

He didn’t know who all had contributed to this dismal outlook on her part, but just now he would be glad to punt them all into a volcano. If you had a life that included kids, you didn’t treat them like this. He realized he felt the same way about Parker’s family.

“You’re working really hard to convince me that you just live for today. You gotta have something to look forward to.” He paused, considering how best to say what he was going to say next. He felt Ophelia brace for the impact his words would have. He leaned closer, these words only for her. “I’ve never been a long-term guy. Before now.”

She dropped her face into her hands, which was the exact opposite of the reaction he had expected. Then he realized she was very quietly crying, which wasn’t what he had intended at all.

“Talk to me,” he urged. “You can say it.”

“What if you change your mind?”

Well, and why wouldn’t she ask that. Her parents were failures at their one real job. Her grandparents were only marginally better. All at once, he realized why she had picked her profession and picked her discipline: neither would change, and neither would disappear.

“I can’t promise that I won’t,” he said as he tightened his grip. “But neither can you. You might get tired of me and decide you don’t want me anymore. We might get hit by a meteor tomorrow. But you can’t let that kind of fear keep you from living your life. I’m not saying you’re wrong to think that, I just don’t want you to be prisoner to it because of me.”

It was a long, silent minute before she nodded.

“Good,” he whispered. “Because I don’t plan to go anywhere.”

After a few minutes, she sat up straighter and wiped her eyes. Without asking, he produced a handkerchief, which she took carefully. Later, he would realize she was looking for initials.

He leaned back, taking in the scene in the courtyard.

“I gotta say, you didn’t undersell it. Lunch was terrible.”

That got something like a laugh from her.

“But it’s cheap,” she offered. “And their main audience is students.”

“Do you have another class today?” He knew she didn’t, but wanted to give her the out if she needed to take it.

“Today’s my short day; I don’t even have office hours today.”

“So nobody would miss you if you left?”

She raised an eyebrow at him. Okay, that phrasing had been questionable.

“It’s just, I know a place with the best desserts in town, if you’re into that kind of thing.”

“It’s an offer you may regret. I very much am into that kind of thing.”

“I’m sure I won’t. Do you need anything from your office?”

“Just to lock it,” she said. “Otherwise, my students are very smart. They’ll try to get in and find my test file.”

“I know how to stop that from happening,” he offered. “I mean, I can keep people out of your office if you’re…You’re not worried about that, are you?”

“How unusual that a heart surgeon is so interested in security.” He didn’t answer that. “My students are clever, but I’m older and wiser. I don’t even keep a test file here.”

He just assumed he was supposed to laugh at that as he followed her back into her office, where he got another look at her collection. Something about the pin-ups struck him as familiar, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

“Are these original?” he asked.

“That one is,” she pointed to one with a girl in a striped bathing suit. “The rest are reproductions. And this canning one is an original from World War I.” She tapped on a framed poster of a glaring Uncle Sam surrounded by dancing vegetables.

He also got the feeling she was trying now to draw his attention away from the pin-up pictures. Surely, he thought, she wasn’t embarrassed that he had seen them. Her office opened onto a hallway, and if her door was open these were plainly visible. They would be a much stranger thing for Dr. Wes Abernathy to have in his office, to pick a random example. While she scratched out a note for the door, he took a picture of two of them. He’d figure this one out without Hardison’s help.

“Ready?” she asked. “I put up a note sending anyone who’s looking for me to the head of the department. That should keep everyone away.”

“Won’t the head of the department wonder where you are?”

“Nobody will ask. He hasn’t known the status of any professor here since about 1972, which is how we all prefer it.”

“A little checked out?”

“Nobody can say for certain that he’s ever logged in to his email. Sometimes, if something is really important, his admin will print out a copy and hand it to him. But that means convincing the admin that it’s important.”

“How hard can that be?” he asked. Literally, how hard could it be.

“I believe the correct phrase is ‘piss up a rope’. Ready?”

As she pulled her office door closed, the one directly across from hers popped open, a curious professor leaning out of it.

“Going so soon, Dr. Mason?” she asked coyly. Eliot felt like he’d been through x-rays less thorough than her gaze.

“Eliot Spencer, meet Melanie Allen who is dating someone and therefore does not need your phone number.”

“Killjoy,” Melanie mumbled. 

“Hold my calls,” Ophelia responded. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

Melanie looked Eliot over again.

“Why?”

He did, in fact, know an excellent place with a large dessert selection. After finding her a spot outside that was shady enough to be comfortable, he went inside to return a few minutes later with a tray loaded with desserts and two spoons. Eliot knew a lot of ways to a person’s heart, but also knew sugar was one of the best, least messy, and most enjoyable. He wasn’t wrong.

They were discussing the merits of different types of frosting when he decided this conversation, while interesting, wasn’t really all that informative.

“Tell me more about your grandma,” he asked quietly. “What was she like?”

Sensing that more interrogation about her parents was not in her immediate future, Ophelia perked up.  Her grandma was one of her favorite subjects.

“She traveled a lot before she met my grandfather. I think she wanted to be a famous journalist, but then she got married.”

“She didn’t want to be a journalist any more after that?”

“I think after that she wanted to travel around the world with my grandfather solving crimes. Sort of like Hart to Hart, but with less kidnapping.”

“Who’d she write for?”

“The Savannah Morning Times. That’s her typewriter I use. She used it to cover Guadalcanal, I use it to cover history on the home front. But I think she’d like it.”

“You think she’d like you being a professor?”

“She knew; this isn’t my first teaching job. She and my grandfather came all the way to Tennessee when I got my first job there, then she came to Florida to see me there after my grandfather died. Which she found appalling, but she came anyway. She always found Florida to be tawdry.”

“What else did she cover? Did she get the opportunities she wanted?”

“More or less,” Ophelia answered. “Mostly she had to make them. She wrote some kind of gardening or gossip column but really wanted to cover the war. The editor didn’t want to send her, first because she was a woman and second because if she got killed he would never hear the end of it. So he said he wouldn’t provide her the equipment; if she wanted to go, she needed to come up with a portable typewriter. She popped up like three weeks later with a secondhand one she refurbished herself. He told her she could go and file her stories, he promised to run them. So she left for California with her press pass and her typewriter.” She paused to take a bite of a dessert with figs and balsamic glaze, then another. It was better than she expected. “After a couple of years she met my grandfather. He was a Navy pilot. She created a scandal by posing for the picture he painted on the side of his plane. Which nobody in Savannah would have known, except that some photographer saw the plane and filed the picture back to the Savannah Morning, who ran it, because at that point the editor thought decorum was one of the first casualties of the war.”

“That seems a little underhanded,” Eliot observed.

“You’ve never met a newspaper man, have you? You haven’t asked what my grandfather did,” she commented.

“Bombed a newspaper office?” She giggled in a way that did not imply “no”.

“He was in oil. The Navy accepted him because he already knew how to fly from flying pipe in Texas. When the war ended, he bought the paper. Then he sold it off to a conglomerate and made sure they didn’t keep the editor.”

Well, that was ruthless. Eliot kind of liked him. At the very least, it sounded like the kind of business with which he was familiar.

“What happened to the gossip column?”

“Savannah barely needed it in column form to sustain it,” she shrugged. “They were fine.”

“What I’m hearing is that you come from a long line of traveling people, but you find a lot of appeal in staying put.”

“Roots,” she said. “I’d just like some. If I go, I’d like to be able to come back and have people who are interested in where I’ve been.” She looked to see if she could read anything off his expression. She couldn’t. “But you’ve traveled a lot, haven’t you? Maybe that sounds crazy to you.”

“Everyone wants a home they can come back to,” he answered. “Let’s go for a ride. I want to show you something.”

She wasn’t sure if he was being intentionally confusing or not, but they ended up in a part of town with which she wasn’t familiar. He led her to a locked gate that gave her more pause than him; he acted like it was a trifling inconvenience.

“Is this breaking and entering?” she asked, watching him pick the lock.

“I mean, technically,” he answered. “But we’re not going to take anything and I’ll lock it back when we leave.”

Fine, she figured. He could probably protect them both from whatever was in here.

Quietly pulling the gate closed behind them, he reached for her hand.

“Maybe close your eyes,” he suggested. “It’ll be a surprise.”

He led her to an area covered in moss, down by the water, and obviously near a waterfall. It was cooler, so they were near trees too.

“Now look.”

They were on a bridge overlooking a tranquil stream full of giant koi.

“Oh,” she said abruptly. “It’s the Japanese garden. Do you like it here?” She didn’t sound judgmental, just curious.

“It’s one of my favorite places,” he answered. “If I were gonna put down roots, I’d put them here. With all the other things that have been transplanted.”

“I think I see your point,” she said quietly. She breathed deeply with her eyes closed.

“I don’t have one to make,” he answered. “I just wanted to bring you to a place I liked.”

“When you said your parents might sell their place and live on a cruise ship, were you serious?” he asked later.

“Yeah,” she nodded. “They’ve been talking about it for a while, apparently. It’s probably just a question of getting their passports in order and selling the house. But it shouldn’t take long to sell. They’re on a popular square.”

The real estate aspect of this discussion was possibly the part that interested him the least.

“How do you feel about that?”

She looked at him again like he was something to be studied.

“Is Dr. Wes Abernathy a psychologist?” she asked, teasing him just a little. A very little, but he’d take it.

“He’s a heart surgeon. But you were talking about roots, and you just said they were selling their house like you’ve never been there. Didn’t you live there too?”

She shrugged.

“It’s not like I can never go back there,” she answered. “And I like the house, but it doesn’t necessarily have that many good memories for me. And not even a good ghost, on top of all that.”

“Rude,” he grinned. “But—”

“You want to go to Savannah and meet my parents before they leave?” she asked. “You don’t. I promise you don’t. And I don’t have plans to go back before they leave.”

“I just—”

“I didn’t leave anything behind I thought I’d need later,” she continued. “If you met them, you’d understand.”

“You don’t want them to meet me?”

Eliot was so very, very far from the sort of man her parents would like for her to even acknowledge on the street, much less date, that a tiny little part of her wanted to immediately and forthwith present him to them. Preferably in front of a large crowd of their peers. The rest of her realized that was an unworthy motive, because she actually liked him as a person and not as a bad example. Although he was everything plus a good bit more than she could have dreamed of in her worst bad example.

“I don’t want you to meet them,” she said finally. “And I need you to understand those two things are very different.”

“You can’t think I would—”

“I would rather introduce you to my students than my parents,” she interrupted. “And they think you’re a spy.”

She was sitting on the bridge, her feet twisted underneath her as she peered at the phone she’d been ignoring since they left campus. He was lounging on one elbow, but moved to peer at her over his sunglasses at that.

“They what?” he asked. “They think I’m what?”

“They have a message board,” she answered. Great. More nerd stuff. “And they think I don’t know about it. Instead of discussing how war impacts clothing trends, they’re discussing whether or not you work for the CIA.” She scrolled and read. “Do you work for the CIA?”

“Work?”

“Never mind,” she shook her head. “There’s a secondary group that thinks your story about searching for a Civil War killer is a cover story to hide the fact that you are a killer,” she paused and scrolled, furrowing her brow in consternation.

“Who do they think I killed?” he prompted, a suddenly active corner of his brain wondering how college students could have hacked him so fast. And how he could blame Hardison for it if they had. And then get Hardison to fix it anyway.

“I’m trying to find a through-line that makes sense,” she temporized. “Oh. I got it. They think you’re a time traveling murderer who is in this century trying to cover his own tracks, and I am the professor who’s going to solve both crimes.” She set her phone down on the bridge and rocked back, leaning against his knees and contemplating while his mind raced. “You know, that’s not a bad premise for a novel? Maybe a vampire who poses as some sort of law enforcement officer but really likes the publicity his rediscovered murders bring, so to prolong the attention he seeks out a history professor under the guise of solving these cold cases. Hmmmm. I’ve heard worse.”

He continued to stare at her.

“Does your mind work this way all the time,” he wondered. “Did you really just come up with all of that right now?”

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below,” she answered enigmatically. “I’ll make a note of it for later.” Even though it was dusk, nobody seemed to be coming through to clear the park of its visitors. “Don’t they check the park before they lock it up at night?”

He moved to sit up, suddenly much closer to her than he had been.

“Dr. Wes Abernathy is a real supporter of the park,” he explained. “Do you want to have dinner here?”

”Is that a service they provide?” She sounded surprised because she was surprised, and at this point thought anything might actually be possible.

”Well, it’s good to have a plan, but there’s room for making it up as you go, right?”

“All kinds,” she confirmed, then leaned the tiniest bit to kiss him. Whatever other questions he had could wait for another time.