Unearthed from the rubble of one of the Paginator’s own crime scenes, the following chapter was unearthed by our great detective hero, the Schnoz himself. It has been authenticated by the Philly CSI team (which is still looking to start their own television series by the by), as being one of the original chapters of the Drexel Serial Novel.

As to where it fits into the story, however, they have not been able to discern. Is it a first chapter, a final chapter? Does it answer some of our mysteries, does it create more?

Take a read of Elizabeth Thorpe’s installment, and you tell us.

Chapter 1 by Ken Bingham
Chapter 2 by Kathleen Volk Miller
Chapter 3 by Fred Siegel
Chapter 4 by Paula Marantz Cohen
Chapter 5 by Scott Stein
Chapter 6 by Dan Driscoll

I’d had the feeling that Abioseh had been trying to tell me something in the meeting, and now he’d made himself perfectly clear.

“What made you think I’d be interested?” I asked Andy.

“Dr. Porter. He told me to tell you about it.”

I had been a bit of an Updike scholar in my grad school days, so much so that one of my papers on the Rabbit series had been published in the annual edition of the North Carolina Inter-Textual Journal Review. I’d long felt pride that it continued to be available through scholarly databases online, a pride I’d of course kept to myself. And then when I met Ginny, Ginny Updike, it seemed like incredible synchronicity, a sign from God. I wasn’t much of a believer, but it was the sort of thing that made me think about it.

Like that sign, there was no mistaking this message from Abioseh, no need to attend the meeting.

“Thanks for the offer, but I have work to do,” I told the kid. “Tell Dr. Porter I said thanks.”

The kid nodded and hitched his messenger bag tighter on his back.

I started to walk away, and then thought of something.

“Andy?”

“Yeah?”

“That blonde woman, in the meeting. Did you see her leave early?”

“Blonde woman?”

I sighed, irritated at having to describe her this way, “The deaf-mute.”

Andy just looked at me, ran his hand through his hair. The curls bounced right back, the way mine used to when I was a kid. Back then I never thought about going bald, no matter how many bald guys I saw around. My hair was a pain in the ass when I was a kid, my mom always trying to comb through the tangles or cutting all off for the summer, me without much control over it, over anything. Then, for a brief time, it was a bonus. Girls would come up to me at parties in dark concrete-floored basements, strangers coming close just to run their fingers through my hair. I remembered one Saturday afternoon when Ginny had made it into tiny braids, with colored elastics around the ends. It had been painful–all those tiny elastics pulling tiny hairs–but good pain. Nothing like the pain I’d been feeling since she left. And now my hair was gone and she was gone, and I wondered what she’d thought when she saw me this afternoon.

The curly-haired kid was still standing in front of me.

“You know, the woman with Don Riggs.” I hated that description of her even more.

“Um…” Andy pulled at his bag again. “I don’t think Professor Riggs was with anyone.”

“Well, maybe they didn’t come in together, but he was translating for her.”

“Are you sure you know who Professor Riggs is?”

“Of course I do. Everyone knows Don Riggs.”

“Well, I think he slept through the whole meeting. I never heard him say anything. And I never saw a blonde woman. There’s Maia, she’s blonde, but she’s not deaf.”

“You couldn’t miss this woman. Dog collar? Stilettos? Oh, but her hair wasn’t completely blond, it was pink on the ends. And she smells like a guy.”

“What?”

“Cologne, she wears men’s cologne. Used to, anyway.”

“Oh. Sometimes I don’t pay enough attention, I guess. Anyway, I have to go. I don’t want Dr. Porter to be disappointed in me if I’m late to the meeting.”

I sighed. “Well, thanks anyway.”

Goddamn kids, I thought as I walked toward the Market Street Bridge. This one seemed nice, but must be incredibly self-absorbed not to notice a woman as distinctive as Ginny.

I crossed the bridge, walking on the raised part near the railing, like I always used to when I walked home from Drexel. I still lived in the same place, a one-bedroom apartment in one of the hotels on the Parkway, but I didn’t come over to University City so often anymore. On my infrequent morning jogs I ran toward the Delaware instead.

The air was clear and cold and the wind had picked up. I pulled my hat down lower. Hats didn’t stay on the way they used to when I had hair. I turned left at the end of the bridge and went down the ramp to the paved river path. The river was running slow with cold, and there were few joggers or dog walkers out.

I tried to focus on the books again, the connection between them. Was it really possible that the Paginator was trying to establish a dialogue with me, by choosing the books I loved? But what about Palomino?

I thought about that pile of mass market paperbacks, smoldering on Penn’s campus, and the crime scene on South Street. Had we called anyone to document either scene, put some police tape around it? I hadn’t, and I doubted Phallic would have thought of it. He’d been too impatient to charge off and find a suspect. We’d been running all day, and suddenly I felt it. My head ached, and I was hungry. I should have grabbed a pretzel from one of the lunch trucks.

I was also disappointed in myself. Everywhere I went, I saw people doing their jobs badly. Unfriendly customer service agents on the phone. Asshole Wawa employees. Someone at the doctor’s office messing up the billing with my health insurance. But didn’t we cops have more of a responsibility? It was part of the reason I’d considered quitting teaching, before my final outburst made it a certainty. I felt like I had a responsibility to those kids, to guide them into loving literature, to inspire them to value the arts even if the rest of the world didn’t. And I kept failing them. I wasn’t like Ray or Abioseh or Don. I couldn’t keep the faith the way those guys did.

So I went into the police work, and there I really felt like I was doing some good. People need cops more than they need literature, or so I convinced myself. But then the killings started, and pretty soon we had fifteen bodies, and now we had one more. Yeah, homicides are too common in Philly, but still. Fifteen people with families, lovers, lives. And now another kid dead, and maybe a professor, too. How was it possible that nobody cared but me?

I walked under the Chestnut Street Bridge and reached the area with all the big flat rocks people sit on in the summer. One sparkled with mica in the late afternoon light. I sat down on it, letting my feet hang a few inches off the ground, like when I was a grammar-snob kid. My life, and I recognized the cliché even as I thought it, felt like one of those piles of charred books, but each book different. Interests, loves, family, pride, integrity, all gone.

But I still had a chance to turn things around. No more getting lost in the bottle, lost in fuzzy thinking. No more wandering around–it was time for action. What was Abioseh trying to tell me? He knew the Updike book would get my attention, probably knew how I compared my life to Rabbit’s. But did he know about the connection to Ginny? It seemed he would have to, if Ginny had been hanging around the English department. (Hanging around Don, I thought, torturing myself.) Not much seemed to escape Abioseh. So was it another clue that Ginny was involved? Did Abioseh think I was in danger? I don’t have an author’s last name, unless you count among literary greats the pop psychologist Maxine Schnall, but that didn’t mean I was exempt.

It seemed so strange that I hadn’t noticed Ginny in a room like 2020 MacAlister. It was dim in there, as usual, but still. Maybe Andy wasn’t observant, but I usually was. It bothered me that I had been so surprised, blindsided, by her. And it bothered me that I hadn’t been more careful about the South Street crime scene, had gone so far as to take a piece of evidence from it. If I wanted to get my job back for real, I’d have to get my shit together.

Of course, other people had to have seen Ginny. What about Don Riggs? It was preposterous to think that he had slept through the meeting. He talked to me, translating for Ginny, I know he did. I just couldn’t fathom why Ginny was there in the first place. Sure, she’d been an English major. But that was a long time ago, and Drexel didn’t have a masters program in English. They had that new philosophy major, but that didn’t seem like Ginny. So was she there for me? For Don? I couldn’t stop thinking about it, even though the sun was going down and it was getting colder. Long streaks of salmon pink clouds had appeared over the South Street Bridge. The thing I missed most about my life with Ginny was the half an hour before sleep when the two of us would read in bed. Neither of us read anything challenging after the long day. I mostly read sports biographies and she was into romance novels, fitting the gender stereotypes. She’d go through one after another, enjoying the orderly nature of the process. She went alphabetically through authors, and chronologically through their books. She wasn’t into the really trashy Harlequins, but went through stacks of bestsellers by Debbie Macomber, Nora Roberts. Right before we broke up she was on a Lavyrle Spencer kick. I loved lying there next to her, both of us absorbed in our reading, our bodies warming each other.

My cell phone rang. I’d thanked the God I didn’t really believe in many times for ending my teaching career before the advent of cell phones. College kids must drive their professors crazy with those stupid things.

It was Phallic, of course, and he was still breathing heavily, so much so that I could barely understand him.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Schnoz,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“First, there’s no Professor Steel on the goddamnable fourth floor of this building. And they’re telling me he retired four years ago. So what gives?”

“Oh. Just a false lead, then. But I think I’m onto something. Why don’t you go over to Penn and see if you can talk to the English students there?”

“You want me to walk all the way over to Penn?”

“Or whatever. Do whatever you think is best.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“I need to have a word with Dr. Riggs.”

Elizabeth Thorpe is an Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Drexel University.  She will soon be published in the Painted Bride Quarterly’s forthcoming Print Annual 4.