Chapter 9 Salem
CHAPTER 9
SALEM
Mortimer meant death.
Salem found out one day when researching it out of curiosity. Although why someone
would name a university after death, she didn’t know. Like a bad self-fulfilling prophecy, it did live up to its name.
But it seemed like she was the only one who remembered or cared. Everyone else seemed to have wiped deaths out of their memories. The students, the teachers, the townspeople, even the news that had been blaring with the report once. Had she not been certain of her sense of reality and the hard evidence in front of her eyes, she would have wondered if she was delusional.
“Let’s talk about the most basic argument in this subject for centuries. Nature or nurture. Any thoughts?” Dr. Merlin moved around his desk, his cadence charming as ever, half the girls in the class under his spell and half the guys inspired.
In the last few weeks of classes with him, observing him, Salem had found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about the man. He had a large house in the town, an affinity for a certain married professor (according to rumors), and a jet-setting lifestyle where he traveled around the world for seminars on weekends.
He hadn’t missed a single class, and he hadn’t let his teaching assistant, who had become a thorn in her side by just existing in the same space as her, miss one either after that first week.
Caz van der Waal sat on his desk at every lecture, looking bored but answering any questions Dr. Merlin sprung on him, sometimes even doodling in his notebook. Sometimes, when the professor was feeling particularly pissed, he made students prove themselves by pitting him against them.
But nothing was getting her anywhere. So she had to change tactics.
For the first time in class, she voluntarily raised her hand.
Dr. Merlin looked to her, surprised but smiling in a way she didn’t like. “Yes, Miss Salazar.”
“Nurture can be changed. Nature cannot.”
“That’s oversimplifying it,” came the wry tone from behind the professor, a voice she equally enjoyed and abhorred for the reaction it generated in her.
She looked to see Caz’s eyes on her. It was a jolt to the system, having his full attention. A heady, heavy jolt. Not one she wanted.
She focused on the professor instead. “You asked for my thoughts.”
Dr. Merlin looked between them. “Fair enough. But Caz is right. Things are rarely so simple when studying the human psyche. We need context for everything.”
Salem felt the scrutiny of the class on herself and held her ground, tipping her chin higher and looking pointedly at Caz. “Why don’t you explain it, then?”
Caz gave that one-sided smirk that got on her nerves. “Happy to. Nature—” He looked around at the class. “—can be greatly influenced by external changes. It may be familial, social, medical, or even justice system factors that influence any human being the most. Look at the data. The number of psychopaths in the world far exceeds the number of crimes. They could be keeping impulses in check due to a family support system, medical care, or even the fear of the law.”
She knew he was a TA and most likely knew the first-year course. But couldn’t he just have been a little stupid?
Salem clenched her jaw as he stopped speaking, his eyes coming back to her. “Your thoughts on that?”
“Regardless of what you do on the outside—add love, law, or medication—the inherent traits someone is born with don’t go away. Take away the external factors and people revert back to who they are born as.”
That was the most she had spoken in class, the most she had spoken in a while.
She saw his eyes flare up as she spoke in her icy tone, daring him to refute her.
“But it can be contained, can it not?”
The riveting eyes, the rumbling voice, the rugged face, the entire combination was making her heart pound for some reason as he continued staring at her with a glance she recognized, having seen it on herself a few times. It was the look of mentally splitting something open, looking at the insides, and unearthing everything to be unearthed about it. He looked at her like that.
Dr. Merlin’s slow clap broke the tension. “See, that’s what I’m talking about.” Salem turned to him, trying to put the staring man out of her mind. “It’s an endless debate. Would someone have done something if they hadn’t been born that way, or if they had gotten more love and support?”
Dr. Merlin moved on to the next student who raised her hand, and Salem kept her eyes forward, ignoring and not understanding the man who studied her from the corner.
“Come in.” Dr. Merlin’s voice from behind his office door made her exhale sharply.
Salem knew she had to find a way to find something about him, anything that confirmed her suspicion, and she had begun to engage more in class, to send the older man what she hoped were flirty smiles calculated down to the degree of her lip tilt, and to pretend to be as enthralled by him as most of the female population.
He had, over the last few days, started returning her smiles, his eyes lingering on her a little longer than was necessary, and today, after her last class, when she’d told him she wanted to speak to him privately, he had asked her to come to his office in the building, just behind the auditorium.
Salem took a deep breath in and entered the office, seeing it through the eyes of her sister as she’d described it in her letter.
Oh, Salem, it has the most gorgeous view. There’s a beautiful, very ornate desk that faces the window. He sits behind it and dictates notes to me. I sit on an armchair at the side and I can see the lighthouse from there. So pretty!
It was as her sister had described it. A large, comfortable room with everything as it had been in the letter, adding a fireplace, a mantel with awards, and shelves of books.
Dr. Merlin looked at her from his place behind the desk, a sheaf of documents in front of him. “You wished to speak to me, Miss Salazar?”
Salem mustered up another of those fake smiles. “Please call me Salem, Dr. Merlin.”
“Salem.” He smiled back at her, and the queasy feeling in her stomach returned. He indicated the armchair. “Please have a seat. What can I do for you?”
Salem sat down, in the same armchair her sister once sat on two years ago, and felt the hair on the nape of her neck prickle, like something was breathing down her neck, just as it did in her dreams. She stared at the lighthouse, seeing what her sister must have seen in her last weeks, days, who knew, and the feeling intensified.
She’d had it all prepared and planned, and she drew on her confidence from deep down, knowing this was the only way to go forward. “I know the session has just begun and I am technically a first-year. But I have already done a course on forensic psychology. I had to take a gap year after a family tragedy, you see.”
Dr. Merlin’s face fell into a sympathetic mask, one she knew he was donning on top of whatever his real face was. “I heard. I’m very sorry about it. My condolences.”
Salem gave a nod, morphing her own face into a mask of sadness. She did feel sad inside, but not as loudly as she was forcing herself to express. “Did you ever, by chance, you know, meet my sister when she was here?” she asked, as though she didn’t already have written evidence of it.
The corners of Dr. Merlin’s eyes tightened infinitesimally. “I think she was in my class,” he answered evenly. “It was very sad what happened. Such a bright young mind, gone too soon.”
Salem looked down at her hands in her lap, the perfect picture of contrition and grief. “It’s just, I miss her, you know. I thought asking you about her might offer me some… comfort.”
She heard Dr. Merlin’s chair push back, felt him walk around his desk and come to her. She barely restrained herself from overtly reacting, keeping her body loose and resisting the stiffness that wanted to seep into her spine.
The older man went down on his haunches and took hold of her hands in his.
A dirty, ugly feeling gripped her. She wanted to whip her hands out of his large ones, claw her nails down his face to add to the scar on his cheek, and take a hot, scathing shower.
Suddenly, like a bulb going off in her head, she looked up to see his face too close for comfort, and focused on the scarring on his cheek. She knew scars and marks, she had studied them enough on her own.
The one on his cheek was just about two inches long, thin, not deep enough to be too visible but deep enough to scar over. She had seen those marks in case files.
It was the scar left behind by a fingernail.
Someone had scratched him deep enough to leave a mark.
A chill went down her spine as she schooled her face into a stoic mask, her brain running a mile a minute. Had it been sexual or casual? Intentional or accidental? Had his skin tissue been lodged under someone’s nails? Someone who died or was alive?
So many questions.
Apparently, she had stared at his mark for too long. He let her hands go. “I fell and cut myself on a loose floorboard.”
A regular person would have believed it. She didn’t. She knew that scarring and she knew it had been another human being, someone with long nails, who had done this.
She cleared her throat and stood up, too uncomfortable to remain in his vicinity alone.
“I apologize,” she muttered quietly. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”
“No problem.” He gave her a nod, dropping his mask and looking at her with scrutiny. “I think you should get back to your room. It’s getting dark and you don’t want to be wandering around alone in it.”
The words, though expressed as casual concern, came off as a mild threat.
Salem heeded the warning, hitched her bag higher up on her shoulder, and took steps toward the door.
A glint of something in her periphery caught her eye.
She looked at the mantelpiece and the catch-all-type small bowl on it, and the glinting item within.
A red gemstone. Ruby.
A pendant. A pendant in the shape of a heart.
A red ruby heart-shaped pendant with a tiny diamond in the middle.
A pendant Salem had seen all her life, around the neck of her sister.
A pendant that had been Olivia’s thirteenth birthday gift from their parents, one she wore all the time, every single day.
A pendant they had never found, neither with her body nor in her possessions, and assumed someone had stolen.
And someone had.
She stared at it, shock coursing through her system, and realized he was watching her.
“That’s my ex-wife’s. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
He was lying.
Salem turned to him, and saw the look on his face.
He knew.
He knew it was her sister’s.
He knew that she knew.
And he still had it out on full display, a mockery of her memory, the arrogance of the mind game he was playing astounding her. He knew she would see and knew she couldn’t do a thing about it. Not when there was no evidence linking him to her sister.
At least none that he knew about.
Rage, unlike any she had ever felt, heated her blood like a fever. She didn’t let him see it, keeping her cool, keeping the aloof mask on her face.
“Very pretty,” she agreed amicably, and saw the surprise in his eyes. He’d maybe expected her to react differently, or maybe now thought that she didn’t recognize it. Whatever it was, she didn’t care. She didn’t know what he had done or how he had gotten it, but she swore she would find out.
She stared at the monster, and smiled in his face.
“Have a nice night, Dr. Merlin.”
If it was up to her, it would be one of his last.
With that, she walked out.
I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.
—Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls