The Measure of a Man

“No,” she snapped, “it’s not.”

Embarrassed, afraid that he might say something else, Jane abruptly turned on her heel and hurried down the still-darkened hallway. The sound of her three inch heels clicked against the vinyl until they finally faded out of earshot.

For a second Smith thought of following her and repeating his apology, but then he shrugged to himself. If he did that, he’d risk getting involved, however peripherally. It was the last thing he wanted or needed. Right now, it was hard enough just getting through the day.

Whistling under his breath, he got back up the ladder and finally attended to the bulb that he had originally set out to change.

As Smith began to climb back down, he saw Professor Harrison opening his door very slowly and peering out. Unlike the first time, the door completely cleared the space without coming in contact with the ladder. If Jane hadn’t come out like gangbusters, Smith thought, she wouldn’t have rocked his ladder and there would have been no need for any kind of verbal exchange to have taken place.

And he wouldn’t have noticed how pale and beautiful her eyes still were.

The professor looked up at him, as if startled to see him there. He shifted the files he was carrying to his other side. “Oh, Smith, I almost didn’t see you.”

“A lot of that happening lately,” Smith murmured nearly under his breath.

Gilbert looked up toward the ceiling and saw the new bulb. He shaded his eyes and smiled broadly. “Ah, illumination again. I knew I could count on you, Smith.”

The professor made it sound as if he’d just slain a dragon for him, or, at the very least, solved some kind of complicated mathematical equation that had eluded completion up until now.

Smith frowned. “It’s just a bulb, professor. No big deal.”

The expression on the professor’s face said he knew better. The old man was getting eccentric, Smith thought. The next words out of the man’s mouth seemed to underscore his feelings.

“Better to light one candle, Smith, than to curse the dark.”

That was probably a quote from somewhere, Smith thought. What it had to do with the situation was beyond him, but he didn’t have the time or the inclination to discuss it. He’d had enough conversation for one day. For a week, really.

“Yeah, well, I’ve got to be going…” Taking the two sides of the ladder, he pulled them together, then tilted it until it was all the way over to the side. It was easier to carry that way, although by no means easy. He silently cursed whoever had taken the extension pole. “I’ve got another ‘candle to light’ over on the third floor in the science building.”

About to leave, he felt the professor’s hand on his arm.

“Something else I can do for you, professor?”

Gilbert looked at the young man for a long moment. There was a time when Smith Parker had been one of his more promising students. He’d been like some bright, burning light, capable of so much. And then, just like that, the light had been extinguished. His pride wounded, Smith had dropped out of Saunders after those charges had been leveled against him, charges he could never get himself to believe were true. But Smith had left before he’d had the chance to try to talk to him, to see about making things right again.

“Smith, have you given any thought to your future?”

It wasn’t what he’d expected the professor to say. And it certainly wasn’t anything that he wanted to get into a discussion about. “Yeah, I have. Right after I replace the other bulb, I’m having lunch,” Smith replied crisply. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

The professor dropped his hand from Smith’s arm.

Before there could be any further conversation, Smith hefted the ladder beneath his arm and made his way down the hall.

Chapter Three

Just as Smith managed to clear the corner without hitting anything with the unwieldy ladder, he realized that he’d left behind the box of light bulbs. Most likely, it was still on the floor in the hall next to Professor Harrison’s office.

Stifling a curse born of an impatience he couldn’t quite seem to put a lid on today, Smith put the ladder down, leaning it against the wall as best as possible. He was pretty certain that no one would walk into it where it was. Even if the school year were under way now, this area of the building saw very little foot traffic.

Smith paused to wipe the sweat from his brow, stuffed his handkerchief into his back pocket and doubled back to the professor’s office. Just as he walked into that part of the hallway, he stopped in his tracks.

The professor was across the hall from his office and juxtaposed to Jane’s. He was unlocking the door to a storage room that was tucked between the door that led to the stairwell and east wall of the building. It was a room that saw, as far as Smith knew, next to no activity at all. For all intents and purposes, it was a forgotten room, an appendage no one paid any attention to. He hadn’t even been given a key to the room when Thom Dolan, the head of the maintenance department, had given him the sets for all the buildings that had been assigned to his care.

“Nobody ever uses that room,” Dolan had informed him on the first day while giving him a tour of the building. The heavyset man had lowered his voice before continuing, as if what he was about to say was a dark secret. But then, he’d noted that Dolan was given to drama. “Rumor has it that this place was built on the site of a boys’ reformatory. This was one of the original buildings. During that time, the people who ran this place used to stick the kids who gave them the most trouble into that room. It’s small, boxlike, with no windows. As far as I know, there’s only junk being stored in there now. No need for you to have a key to it. Hell, I’m not even sure there is a key for that room.”

Well, the professor obviously had a key to it, Smith thought now. He had no idea what prompted him to step back and keep his presence from being detected. Granted, by nature, he was no longer the type to call out a greeting when encountering someone he knew. That had been the teenager, not the man. Besides, he and the professor had just spoken. If he called out to him, the professor would undoubtedly pick up where he’d left off, asking about his “future.” There was no such animal and he had no desire to discuss it.

Still, stepping back so that he wasn’t readily seen by the professor made him feel as if he were skulking. That didn’t exactly sit well with him.

But there was just something almost suspicious, for lack of a better word, Smith thought, about the professor’s behavior right now. Before putting the key into the lock, the older man had looked over his shoulder toward Jane’s office, as if to make sure that the door was still closed and that no one saw him.

Why?

Smith thought for a moment, waiting for the professor to go into the room.

Maybe the old man was losing it. Maybe all those long hours he’d kept, sitting in his office amid dust that was never quite removed, just regularly disturbed by halfhearted attempts on the part of the cleaning crew to live up to its name. Baskets were emptied regularly and what could be seen of the worn beige carpet between the stacks of files and books haphazardly scattered around the professor’s office was vacuumed on a weekly basis, but the dust remained as permanent a resident as the books on the shelves.

That kind of thing had to eventually affect a man’s lungs, Smith decided. And who was to say that what the professor had breathed in hadn’t finally left its mark on the man’s mind, as well?

Still, the professor did seem to be more or less all right whenever they did run into each other. Harrison always had a good word for him, whether he wanted to hear it or not. When you came right down to it, of all the people on the faculty, only Professor Harrison seemed to see him, to treat him as a person rather than a tool or a lackey to be told what to do and then disregarded. Granted, the man had become a great deal sadder in these last eight months than he’d normally been, but he hadn’t withdrawn from life, hadn’t used it as an excuse to be curt or mean in his dealings.

For a second Smith debated saying something to let the professor know that he wasn’t alone in the hallway. He did feel somewhat deceptive about standing in the shadows like this.

But then he decided that none of this was really any of his business and the professor obviously wanted whatever he was doing to be kept secret. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have looked around so furtively before unlocking the door.

So he waited until the professor disappeared inside the room before moving out into the hallway. Picking up the box of light bulbs he’d returned for in the first place, Smith walked away before the professor emerged out of the room.

For the first time in a long while, Smith found that his curiosity had been aroused. He figured a stiff drink or two after work this evening would effectively take care of that.

The Sandwich Bar had been more crowded than Jane had anticipated today. A lot of the returning students were on campus to purchase new books for the coming semester, or just to settle back into their dorms in anticipation of the routine that was to come. A quick ten-minute venture had turned into half an hour.

She hurried to the professor’s office and dropped his order on his desk. He wasn’t around, but she assumed that he’d just stepped out for the moment and would be back shortly. Leaving his office, she hurried across the hall to her own.

Lunchtime was more than half over. Not that the professor ever placed any boundaries on her time. More than once he’d told her she could take as long as she wanted for lunch in case there were any errands she needed to run. He’d said that he knew a single mother with a young son had demands on her time that couldn’t always be neatly tucked away within the hours that came after she left the college for the evening.

But the university had a strict policy as to how long anyone could take for lunch and she didn’t want to be seen abusing it. It was bad enough that the board was after the professor. She didn’t want them saying that his secretary was found wanting, as well, and in some twisted way use that against him, too.

So she was going to have her lunch at her desk while she caught up on some data she needed to input into her computer. God knew she was behind this week. She’d taken the last week off, wanting to spend some time with Danny before he took that first big step into the world of learning. From here on in, once school began for him, her son’s next seventeen years plus were going to be accounted for.

She thought of that time in terms of money and the very notion sent a long, cold shiver shimmying down her spine.

Somewhere, somehow, she was going to find the money for Danny’s college education. There would be no mysterious benefactors for her son the way there had been for her, but that didn’t mean he was going to be deprived. Danny was going to receive his college diploma even if she had to work 24/7 to get the money.

Jane stopped her train of thought. There were times, she knew, when she got a little too carried away.

“First, you need to let Danny get through kindergarten,” she told herself as she opened the door to her cramped office.

Jane stopped in the doorway. There was a tall, slender blonde standing in her office with her back to the door, taking up what felt like one quarter of the tiny space.