Unabiding Halls

By C. E. Case

Shelby is a part-time assistant women’s soccer coach at Winston College, a small liberal arts school in North Carolina. Directionless at 25, she is unprepared for the upheaval in her life when one of her players is murdered.

Earlene is a rookie patrol cop working on her criminal justice degree. When a murder occurs at the soccer field, Earlene is asked to be a bridge between the police and the Winston community.

The students are rocked by the loss of a classmate, but mistrusting of police and outsiders. Earlene and Shelby must navigate campus politics, student secrets, and threats to their own lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Supposed Crimes, LLC
• Release date: Jun 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781944591625

C. E. Case

C. E. Case is a librarian and musical theater fan in Northern Virginia. Little Disquietude is her first novel. Her second novel, The Riches of Mercy, will be coming out in early 2012. Both novels take place in North Carolina, her home state.Little Disquietude is the product of a lifelong love of the theater and a frenzied National Novel Writing Month. Her muses include the big stars and the ones who never made it. She always wanted to be a writer. Her culture values the Great American novel. Little Disquietude is just genre romance, but she hopes it’s a fun read.Her second novel, The Riches of Mercy, will be coming out in early 2012.

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Unabiding Halls

C. E. Case

Smashwords Edition

Supposed Crimes LLC

Matthews, North Carolina

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2019 C. E. Case

Published in the United States

ISBN: 978-1-944591-62-5

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For Ruth

She was a queen of noble Nature’s crowning,

A smile of her’s was like an act of grace;

She had no winsome looks, no pretty frowning,

Like daily beauties of the vulgar race:

But if she smiled, a light was on her face,

A clear, cool kindliness, a lunar beam

Of peaceful radiance, silvering o’er the stream

Of human thought with unabiding glory;

Not quite a waking truth, not quite a dream,

A visitation, bright and transitory.

- Hartley Coleridge, 1851

Prologue

Shelby's knee ached. The cold air made it feel tight, sore. She limped through the pain, jogging in a half-assed fashion down the dirt path. The path led away from main campus and into the woods, sloping gently downward. She cursed an unusually cool September—only a few weeks into the semester, the team she coached only playing one game in decent weather so far. It wasn’t even Homecoming yet—that usually marked the turn of seasons at Winston College.

It was even colder in the woods but at least the dark didn't offer false promise like the chilly pre-dawn sunlight. The chilly shade was as advertised. The air temperature was well-matched to the temperature of the water she sipped, passing the bottle from hand to hand as she jogged. Strengthening her grip. Her arms felt strong, which was something.

Even if her knee was a piece of shit.

She jumped over a root, landing on her good leg, and jogged on, her footfalls covering other footprints on the ground. Her path sloped down to a ravine on the left. Other trails cut through the brush, leading down to the rocks where the pot smokers liked to gather. They would be asleep now, just like the drunks and the nerdy kids who stayed up all night studying and whoever partied on a Tuesday night.

Even the students unfortunate to have class at 8:30 were still asleep. That was a ways off, and they wouldn't get up until 8:25. No time for showers. Or changing out of their pajamas. Winston College was that kind of place. Which Shelby appreciated as she hobbled up the crest of the hill. She liked the laid-back feeling. And her alone time.

She paused at the hill’s precipice and pushed the water bottle against her knee. It didn't help.

The main athletic field, set up for football, sprawled below her on the flat bottom of the bowl carved from the hills. She stood on the edge, and around the curve opposite was the student union. Brick and stately and shrouded by ancient oaks older than its construction.

Shelby stepped from the dirt onto the concrete staircase and descended, squinting at a dark object that marred the endless field of green.

There was a person lying on the field.

Shelby reached the bottom of the stairs. She had been planning to do a few loops around the track. Her regular morning routine was four times—one mile, plus the off-terrain mile through the woods. Now that she lived off campus and rode her bike over in the mornings, she liked to pretend she was training for a triathlon.

Except the swimming portion was usually paperwork in the cramped confines of the athletic department.

Her office was past thing on the field. She huffed in frustration. Some drunk or high student passed out that she’d have to deal with, and even more paperwork. An obstacle in her perfect morning.

She slowed, her legs burning and feeling limber from the jog. Her knee, despite the lingering shadows of pain, felt satisfyingly liquid. The sun rose to her right.

Her stomach fluttered. She shook her shoulders, trying to ward off the sharp arrival of paranoia, tempted to pour the water down her neck. The chilly forest had become foreboding, and the field made her feel exposed. She looked around, disturbed by the silence. As if there should be noise. Something out there.

She cut across the field, feeling twisted in knots, tight with stress, even before she recognized the body lying still on the wet grass.

Sarah? she called out. Just couldn't stop practicing, could you?

She forced a laugh.

Sarah, her friend, a forward she coached on the Winston varsity team, was face half-turned to the ground, knees and arms bent like she was sprawling on someone's bed. Shelby thought of the buoyancy of the grass. Not a bad place to sleep.

Sarah didn’t move.

Shelby swallowed, wondering if she’d have to report Sarah to Coach. She didn’t want to get Sarah in trouble.

Then hoping Sarah would get a reprimand. The least terrible situation of all possible situations that appeared in her mind.

Shelby knelt next to Sarah and said, Sarah? Please don't tell me you're asleep. It's too cold to sleep out here.

She shook Sarah's shoulder. Sarah was dressed for jogging, just like Shelby. Track shorts, Winston College sweatshirt, Pumas. Her skin was warm, but she didn’t stir.

Shelby shook harder. Sarah.

Nothing.

It didn't take long to realize a person wasn't breathing. The tiny visual cues that Shelby picked up and ignored—the inflating of the chest, the shift of the back. The twitch of the lips. Blinking. Fluttering. REM sleep or a gust of complaint, a groan.

Shelby's eyes filled with tears. Her hands shook. Her chest hurt.

Sarah?

Shelby started to roll Sarah over, to shove her, to shake her back to life. But a dim part of her started flashing images from television. She shouldn't touch the body. She shouldn't disturb the scene.

She shouldn't disturb a perfect morning.

Sarah?

Sarah still didn't move.

The sight of an unmoving chest was strange, shockingly devoid of motion after a lifetime of the subtle expansions and contractions of thousands of people. The inert state made Sarah seem like a doll.

Not like a person.

Shelby scrambled back, sliding on her thighs, landing five feet away from the body. She stared at it, quivering involuntarily. Couldn't will herself to stop. She tried hugging herself as tightly as she could. Her knee hurt. Her lip trembled. She turned away and scanned the hills for people.

For joggers, for teachers, for friends.

For anyone who could help her not see this.

She then pressed her face to the grass of the field. The loamy, wet smell made her stomach twist. She breathed heavily, waiting for the pounding in her ears to subside.

Waiting for something to change.

Listening.

Her audible breathing, in the silence around her, made her feel uncomfortably vibrant. She dug her fingers into the grass.

She was alive. She was breathing. She could hear herself. Smell the grass. See—

She sat up, and Sarah was still there. Shelby turned away and heaved. The water that she'd drunk came out, along with breakfast cereal, leaving her shivering and cold and disgusted with herself.

Shelby had put her staff ID in her sock. She hadn't even brought her phone. She had only been going for a run.

She glanced at Sarah and quickly glanced away again.

Sarah had only been going for a run, too. She wore her iPod armband, the iPod still secure in the pocket. The headphones dangled beside her on the ground. The pocket of her shorts protruded with a cell-phone sized lump.

Shelby crept forward carefully on her hands and knees.

The sun rose higher. Sweat trickled down the back of her neck. She tapped the lump in Sarah's pocket with one finger, then jumped back. A hard plastic shell.

She glanced around, praying for someone to relieve her of this task, but no one came. In full view of nobody at center field, in front of three thousand seats, she dug into Sarah's pocket. The phone was there, delicately slender and pink.

Everyone made fun of Sarah for having a pink phone. She just wasn't the type.

Shelby blinked rapidly and coughed and then activated the phone. No missed calls. A picture of a girl—taller than Sarah, with darker hair—smiled up at her. Shelby didn't recognize her. No password protected it. She should chide Sarah for that later.

She dialed 9-1-1.

Then she stared at the numbers, thin and dark on the screen. Numerical.

Her natural aversion to bothering anyone, especially officials, especially the police, bubbled up inside her mind. She had to remind herself that this is what the numbers were for. Since birth she'd been trained to do this in emergencies.

She'd never had to use them before. First time was the hardest.

She hit send >.

A voice crackled into being in the stillness of the morning. Someone joined her on the field. Someone else alive.

9-1-1, what is the nature of your emergency? the woman asked. Calm but willing to listen.

Help, Shelby said, looking down at Sarah. She scooted back from the body, lost her breath, lost her voice. Her lips formed the words without sound.

Help!

She clutched the pink plastic so hard she heard a pop. Plastic came apart in her hands. Her throat constricted, filling with the lump that had silenced her voice. Her gaze blurred. She sprawled backward, scanning the place where she had come, blinking hazily at the tree line.

Remembering how different her world had been when she'd been right up there.

She saw something through the blur of tears.

A dark figure—a man--definitely a man—was there, staring down at her. She hadn't felt his presence at all, and his apparition spooked her. Maybe he had just arrived, jogging innocently as she had. Maybe he had been watching.

She shuddered and her stomach threatened to heave again. She fiddled with the broken phone to take a picture, blind, uncomprehending with the technology, and the man disappeared.

Maybe the sunlight had just cast a person-shaped shadow. The feeling of being the only thing alive in the world returned to her.

She looked at Sarah.

This time, no matter how sick it made her, she wouldn’t look away from her friend.

Chapter One

Earlene liked coming onto campus. Even on the days she had to wear her police uniform to class and make everyone uncomfortable, Winston College offered serenity. Its reputation was far from a party school and was not competitively academic or rigorous either, and Earlene experienced a lightness absent expectation when she stepped onto the brick pathway that led from the parking lot into Winston's heart.

Serenity or not, she had two hours of Criminal Procedure, followed by a six hour shift, followed by dinner and then her community service internship.

Wednesdays sucked.

And she was late.

The flash drive around her neck held her paper, which needed to be printed. The computer lab opened at 8:00 and was full by 8:01.

She checked her phone for the time and cursed. 8:06. Damn her printer. And damn the professor wanting to discuss their topics and class and have peer review. Otherwise she'd just email him for a grade and be done with it.

She couldn't wait, lovely campus or not, to be done with all of it.

Her B.S. in Criminal Justice would bring her a promotion, and she fantasized about being there in her new job in the future already, past all the papers and the theories that didn't mean crap. She’d be past being an intern assistant to the community division and instead, leading it.

She'd been in the program a year and a semester—long enough to know that what she was learning had absolutely no application to the job.

She straightened the cuffs on her shirt.

The computer lab was in an unassuming one-story brick building shaped a little like a temple, with an observation dome and Middle Eastern architecture. She was almost to the front doors, bounding up the steps to the patio, when someone called her name.

Earlene!

The campus security officer, wearing blue jeans and a faded flannel shirt, reeking of the cigarettes Winston was named for, came barreling toward her in a golf cart. She was friendly with him, but wasn’t sure he’d ever called her by her name before.

Mind hopping in? Jake asked.

What?

Someone called 9-1-1, and they called us. They're on their way, but we should get there too. They’re dealing with a fatal traffic accident that took down some lights.

I'm just a student here. I don't have any authority. She glanced down at her uniform.

Please, he said. I remember us talking the other week about the beat. I know we're not detectives. But—but there's a body. There's a body on campus, Earlene.

Her chest constricted. I don't—I'm not trained for that, Jake.

He gave her a plaintive look, and she got into the cart. He turned around, wheeling precariously on the sidewalk, heading for the student union. The golf cart creaked its way up the hill.

He said, I'm trained. Don't worry. I just think the uniform will help. The body—the girl it’s in the soccer field.

His face was as pale as hers felt.

He parked behind the student union. She waited until the cart was completely stopped before she made herself look at the field.

That part of campus looked disarmingly ordinary. The hill leading down to the body, face down, like someone resting after practice. A girl in a hoodie stood beside it, looking up at them.

When will the police get here? she asked. The real police.

Driving down the road, I guess. The girl's already dead. I got the call three minutes ago.

Who's the girl in the hoodie? Earlene forced herself to get out of the cart.

That's Shelby Kohl. Part-time assistant coach. Soccer in the fall, lacrosse in the spring.

Not a student?

Was a student. Jake took a deep breath and said, We'll need to secure the scene.

Yeah. Got tape?

He opened a toolkit on the back of the cart and tossed her a roll of yellow tape.

Where? she asked.

Across the gates to the field. All the ones you see.

Isn't that kind of a wide area?

How close do you want the students to get?

I see.

You can make it thin. They'll respect the line. You just have to draw it for them.

Okay, Jake.

He nodded and got out a blue tarp and tent pole from the cart. She went to the first