There Will Be Time

By Wilson Roberts

There Will Be Time is a grab bag of a novel, a murder mystery, a comic look at life in a small college in the Carolina mountains where relations between faculty, staff, and administration are on a relatively first name basis and everyone seemingly knows everybody else's business.
Wilson Roberts knows such places, having taught at Lees-McRae College in the Carolina Mountains, Paul Smiths College in the northern Adirondacks, Delaware Valley College in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Greenfield Community College in Massachusetts. He brings wit and insight into his depiction of campus life, as in his description of the single faculty apartment building at Banner Grove College: "The apartments had been built quickly and cheaply by a sub-assistant dean of grass cutting who hadn't spent a cent more than necessary to get an occupancy permit from the building inspector, who was his wife's brother."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilder Publications, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781515455516

Book preview

There Will Be Time

by Wilson Roberts

© 2022 Wilder Publications

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or transmitted in any form or manner by any means: electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express, prior written permission of the author and/or publisher, except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-5550-9

E-book ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-5551-6

Table of Contents

BOOK ONE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

BOOK TWO

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

BOOK THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

FORTY-FOUR

FORTY-FIVE

FORTY-SIX

FORTY-SEVEN

FORTY-EIGHT

For Ted Ledford, Harry Brown, Rececca Price Grindstaff, & the boys of Mother Vineyard’s Jug Band at Lees-McRae College, 1967-1968, David, Rob, Ronnie, and Bill. Still playing music after 55 years.

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

T.S. Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

ONE

SCRATCHING THE BACK of his neck, the gun clenched between his thighs, Clevenstine studied the photograph he had taken several weeks before. He was pleased. She was perfect for the tea hunt, and she never had a clue that he had stolen her likeness, never saw him in the shadows of the trees lining street where she ran, the camera silently snapping shot after shot. It was difficult to get good pictures of a stranger without anyone being aware of it. You had to wait, lurk and wait, hoping the person wouldn’t see you pointing a camera and freak out.

Lurk. A good word for it. He liked the sound of it, ominous, yet pleasing, reminding him of lark, and this was all a lark for him, certainly. But never let the person you were lurking around know you were lurking. That would ruin everything.

He ran his fingers over the glossy surface of the photo, pausing on her breasts, then running them on down, over her stomach, down her legs. Damn good picture. It would look fine on the wall with the others.

He stretched, resting his head against the back of the seat. The plastic steering wheel was cool and smooth beneath his fingertips. The music from the CD he had chosen was perfect, Credence Clearwater’s Greatest Hits. He shivered lightly as a dark snake slid across the surface of his brain, its tongue darting between the crenulations, tickling him in places he had not felt for far too long, the sensations rousting images long buried, desires long unsated. Sitting up straight, he glanced in the rearview mirror. His eyes were bleak fathomless holes in his face. Anyone else looking into them might think they led into the abyss. He knew better. The abyss was not in his eyes. It was in his heart, if that wasn’t stretching the metaphor too much, although like all metaphors putting it in such a way would be little more than an attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible. In his soul? He shook his head. Heart and soul were no more than words and they could never explain him. He was what he was. Clevenstine. Don’t look for answers.

Shifting his gaze to the street beyond the car window, he smiled. This was a fine spot. Tree lined with little traffic, three houses, all set back from the road, landscaped with thick bushes. No one would see him, especially with his car obscured in the thick shadows of the oaks, maples, and poplars and with so few streetlights. It was a good spot to begin the tea hunt.

Good starting spots could be used only once. Not that it mattered. In the years since coming to the North Carolina mountains, he had found and used several good ones and barely scratched the surface. There were many more excellent possibilities here among high peaks and dark hollers of the Appalachians, along the twisting gravel roads winding among the hills and thickly wooded land, as well as on the tree lined side streets of the towns. Mountains were made for people like him, dark and merciless.

Coming here had been a good choice. The countryside was beautiful, the climate reasonable, the restaurants fine. There were excellent public radio stations, and he enjoyed his job. The hunting held the promise of being all he could ask for. All it needed was for him to find some way to reclaim the peak exhilaration his hunts had once given him. Even so, the climate, the beauty of the mountains and the satisfactions of the job went a long way to compensate for the loss of intensity. And the tea hunts were satisfactory, even though they no longer raised the shivering thrill they once held. That, he knew, was just part of life. We all grow old and wear our trousers rolled. The mermaids sing elsewhere, for other ears. Still, this was a good place and he planned to stay as long as he was safe.

He’d had only a few tea hunts since he arrived in Random County. The first few years had been a time of adjustment, getting used to a job radically different from anything he had done before, learning the ways of the area, the landscape, the roads, the folkways of the people. He hadn’t even felt the need to hunt the first year or so, but slowly the pressure built, the anxiety grew, and finally he’d gone in search of prey.

The first hunt had been a fine one, almost like old times as he loped through the forest, fully alive and excited, alert to every track, every bent blade of grass, every broken twig and ruffled leaf. The second hunt had lacked clarity, and by the end of the third hunt he knew his hunts had lost their hard and shining edge, the shivering thrill of pursuit and kill dulled. He was counting on tonight’s hunt to restore it. He’d been stalking the prey all summer, watching her from distances, taking photographs, reading articles she had written in minor academic journals. He’d gotten a copy of her dissertation and read it from cover to cover. Insightful and tightly written, he admired her clarity of thought, the incisiveness of her analysis.

Prey with such intelligence should be a challenge. If hunting her didn’t bring back the excitement, the release, if it didn’t delight him, then he would have to re-examine his life, his future.

He settled back against the seat to wait, still running his fingers over the smooth cool plastic of the steering wheel. Sooner or later, she’d be along. She ran here every night, not on any regular schedule, but he could count on seeing her sometime between six and ten. He sighed. North Carolina Public Radio was broadcasting a full evening of Chopin, filling the car with sweet music. He was very pleased. Soon he would be content. He had to be. The alternative was too dispiriting, too sad to contemplate, a life as dull as anesthesia.

TWO

KIM HICKS FLICKED off the computer and stood at her desk, stretching and yawning. She was tall and angular, athletic, with muscular arms and legs, long brown hair, and brown eyes. She petted the head of the stuffed kangaroo sitting on the top of her monitor, exhaled with a heavy sound, then stretched and took in a long deep breath.

Frustrated and tired, stiff from sitting at work all day, she walked across the study and looked out the window at the campus below. Enough of this damn article on the Supreme Court and its growing limitations on the right to privacy, its Nineteenth Century conservatism. She’d worked on it all summer and hadn’t been able to finish. Now, it was fall, the colors in the high mountains already beginning to change, the students were back on campus and the demanding cycle of the academic year had started all over again.

The pressures of classes and advising graduate students would prevent her from finding the uninterrupted hours necessary to get much more research and writing done until the winter break. That, plus the Court was changing so radically, so rapidly that her conclusions could well be based on precedents soon to be overturned. She was furious, sure the President’s most recent appointment was the final nail, a sure end to the era of progressive court decisions around which her life and career had been built.

Between her workload and her depression over the Court’s direction, she wished she’d never agreed to write the article. When she met Tom Manning, editor of the Northeast Journal of Legal Theory, at the Harvard conference on the Court and the Constitution last summer, she’d let him twist her arm.

You’d blow all these Yankees out of the water, he had told her. Just imagine their reactions to a brilliant analysis by a southern feminist of the influence of the Bush and Trump administrations on the lower courts and especially on the Supreme Court. Everybody up here expects a southerner to defend the Court, to imitate Marjorie Taylor Green and talk about Alito and Amy Comey Barret like they were next to God, right up there with Strom Thurmond and Jessie Helms. Those two may be gone from the Senate, but their successors live on. I need this article from you, Kim. Come on, tell me you’ll write it.

He’d carried on, cajoling, begging, acting like a ten-year-old boy.

All right, she had finally said. I’ll write it, but you’ve got to guarantee me complete editorial control. I don’t want to write it, then get a twenty-page crit back from you telling me what I’ve got to do to make it intellectually respectable according to your standards.

You write it, I’ll publish it. If it makes sense.

It’ll make sense. You might not like it, but it’ll make sense.

Why wouldn’t I like it? He had suddenly sounded worried.

You’re a man. You might not be comfortable with my analysis. The Court is a bastion of male power, after all.

He had shrugged, laughing her off. I respect your intellect, he told her. I’ll respect your article, and even if I am uncomfortable with your brand of feminism, I’ll publish whatever you write. You’ve got total autonomy.

She had given him a wry smile. As long as you think it makes sense.

He had nodded.

She said, Maybe what makes sense to me won’t make sense from your male perspective. I need a better guarantee.

He had laughed. All right. I guarantee I’ll publish it if you spell everything correctly and use proper grammar. The content’s completely up to you. I might question your analysis and I might question your politics, but I won’t let my questions stand in the way of publication. If I really disagree, big time, I’ll publish it and write a rebuttal. Deal?

Deal, she had said. And they shook hands.

Now she was three quarters of the way finished, and the whole thing seemed stale to her, dry words, completely without vision, totally lacking in passion and with no chance of meeting the deadline for the winter issue.

She straightened up her desk, put rubber bands around several batches of note cards, bundled the recyclable scrap paper in a paper sack, set the timer on the coffee maker for morning, then turned the computer back on. After ten minutes editing the last few pages she’d written, she rubbed her eyes and turned it off again. This was nuts. She’d just quit, cleaned up, then started again. There was no point in being so obsessive.

What she needed was a long run, a hot shower, and a nice dinner, maybe at that new Mexican place in Blowing Rock with Rick. She dialed his number. He answered in his clipped New England manner. Yankees, she had noticed years before, either sounded twice as Yankee after living in the south for a few months or ended up sounding as if they’d lived in the region their whole lives. Rick would never sound southern.

Once, after a few glasses of wine, he confided to her that he always associated southern speech with ignorance. You people just can’t seem to talk normally. Cahn’t seem to tahk namally, he said.

She’d repeated it to him, just as he’d said it, and he nodded. Well, you cahn’t, he said.

He picked up the phone on the third ring.

Hey, Rick. She turned her mountain dialect up a notch or two, just to bug him. How about if I take yawl out to dinner?

Just as long as it’s not to the Red Neck Roadside Cafe and Gas Station for pig snouts and grits, he said.

How about we shoot on over to Blowing Rock for Mexican?

Burritos and Corona Beer. You’re on, babe.

Good. I’m going for a run. I should be showered and ready to pick you up at eight.

Five minutes later, she was standing in the steamy shower enclosure, needles of hot water bouncing off her shoulders and back. She closed her eyes and hummed as the water ran over her, the steam clearing her head of the Constitution and the Supreme Court. She imagined the conservative members of the Court, melting and washing down the drain, swirling for a moment with the soap particles and disappearing with a light belch in the drainpipe.

Ten minutes later she was jogging past the Eury Library as Dr. Cratis Sawey came walking down the steps, carrying a heavy briefcase loaded with books. In his late sixties, he had a white goatee and wore a Tyrolean hat and tweed suit. He had been her mentor since she came to teach at Watauga State University six years earlier. Their eyes met and he smiled at her.

Good Evening Dr. Hicks. I hope you’re well. He set his briefcase on the steps, folding his arms over his chest as he spoke. Students walked by, coming and going from the library, headed for classes. Some lounged beneath the campus trees, lying on the grass smoking cigarettes or making out.

Running in place, she smiled at Sawey’s courtly formality. She had worked there for six years, and he had yet to call her Kimberly, let alone Kim. Probably never would. And that was all right. Something would be lost if they fell into familiarity, something reassuring and important to her.

Hey, Dr. Sawey. I’m fine. You doing all right?

Not bad for an old man. How’s that article coming?

Dead in the water, I’m afraid. I can’t seem to come up with a new angle on it.

I don’t see why, he said. It seems like the Court’s coming up with new angles every day, and to hell with all the precedents.

Maybe that’s my problem. I’m having a hell of a time with it.

So, you’re out trying to jog something loose?

She laughed, waving a hand at him.

Save me from the academic sense of humor. Actually, I’m out because I’m bored to death sitting at my desk pretending I’m working on that damned paper.

When’s the Journal’s deadline?

Day after tomorrow. There’s no chance I’m going to make it. The next one’s not until just before Easter, so there’s no big hurry anymore, and I was sick of staring at a blank computer screen. I decided to take to a run and treat myself and Rick Bradford to a nice dinner.

He raised his eyes, smiling at her. Bradford? Nice young man. A little conservative for my taste in his analysis of class and voting patterns, but pleasant. Something happening there?

She felt herself blush. Not really. I think he’s a bit too conservative for me too, but he’s a good dinner companion and I can always count on a stimulating intellectual argument with him.

Sawey picked up the briefcase, waving at her with his free hand. Well, I hope dinner and company helps you unwind. With the students back on campus and classes in session you won’t have much time for your own writing.

She grunted. If the faculty had any real clout, and the administration would come into the Twenty-first Century, they’d be teaching by the semester instead of the ridiculous quarter system, which Watauga State alone of all the state universities still held to. Then at least she’d have two more weeks before classes started, rather than having it all begin at the end of August.

Thanks Dr. Sawey. Now that you’ve cheered me up, I think I’ll go on trying to jog something loose.

She waved to him and ran on.

THREE

LOOKING THROUGH THE windshield, arms resting on the steering wheel, Clevenstine saw the prey coming toward him, a small figure still a hundred yards away. He sat erect in his seat, straining to hear her footsteps on the pavement. Sweet mountain air blew in the open window as he reached into his crotch, the tips of his fingers running over the smooth cold metal of the gun.

Pondering Thurgood Marshall’s final dissents supporting a right to privacy, Kim didn’t see the car until it was twenty feet away. Nearing it, she hesitated, then continued jogging. Hell, she was right in the middle of the campus, less than a quarter mile from her office. What could be more familiar? Safer? Probably some student’s car had broken down and been left here while its owner went to get help.

As she reached his front fender, Clevenstine opened the door and got out, standing in the shadowed roadway, holding the gun in both hands, pointing it at Kimberly, the rag drenched with ether tucked under his arm. Already he was shivering with anticipation at her reaction.

This was, after all, one of his best parts. The Dirty Harry voice, grotesquely parodied. It was only one of many voices. There will be time for some of the others, time to prepare a face to meet the faces he will meet, time for all the works and days of hands. Now was the time for this one, the one that always cut their cries off in their throats. He made his harshest sneer, then let the voice say the words.

Go ahead. Scream. Make my day.

FOUR

SMILING OVER HER herbal tea, Carolyn Burkett watched from the window by her desk at West Lunceford Heavy Equipment Sales as Jack Reed head toward the office in the one story unpainted concrete block building her father had put up years before. She could tell Reed was a hot prospect by the way the Banner Grove College superintendent of buildings and grounds had been coming in once or twice a month, walking along the rows of used bulldozers, running his fingers longingly over their paint jobs, feeling the edges of their blades, picking at their treads with a stick or small stone.

She’d seen the kind before. He was not a contractor who knew exactly what he wanted for a specific job, looking for a piece of equipment to precisely fill an empty niche in his lineup. This was a man looking for something he couldn’t quite explain. There was no plan, no niche to fill, just the desire of possession. Most men were like that with women, she thought. This one, like the ones she tended to run across the in heavy equipment business, wanted a machine.

Sooner or later, he would buy something. She could tell by the way he looked at each bulldozer, each tractor, and dump truck. This was a man who lusted to move earth and burn diesel fuel. This was a man who was dying to sit up on that black vinyl seat and feel roaring diesel engines thundering through his body, a man who wanted to put his hands on the hydraulic levers, raising and lowing the yellow painted arms and buckets and plows.

As he came through the door, she stood and put her hand out, just the way her daddy always had done before he retired to the islands to fish and loll on the beach, leaving her to keep the business going. She was a tall woman, heavy hipped with huge swollen legs and gray hair rolled into a bun on the top of her head.

Captain Reed, glad to see you back. You going to buy a machine today?

Jack Reed shrugged, his face expressionless, his voice flat. Depends on what kind of a deal you’re willing to make me.

She had him. This was the first time he’d talked in terms of wanting a deal and he was doing it in a contrived monotone, designed to mask his excitement. She’d seen it a hundred times with a hundred prospective buyers. With Reed it was exceptionally obvious. Always before he’d come in and asked if it was all right for him to go out to the yard and window shop. He always called it window shopping.

Sure, she’d say to him each time. Window shop all you want. When you’re ready to buy something, I’ll be here. Just let me know what you want, and we’ll come up with a great deal for you.

He’d always smiled at her and said she’d be the first to know when he’d made up his mind. Now he was saying he’d buy a machine if she made him the right kind of deal.

She needed Jack Reed. She needed a whole army of Jack Reeds. Business had been off, the boom in the price of fuel cutting deeply into sales and maintenance. Nobody in Random County was building and people who owned machinery were putting off any repairs except the most pressing, and here Jack Reed was talking about what kind of a deal she’d make him.

If she had known him just a little better, she would have laughed and told him she would give him twenty percent off book price and a blowjob. Whenever she spoke like that to the men who came into the yard, she got a good laugh. Sooner or later, she usually got a sale. Men liked to hear her talk dirty like that. It made them feel, right, somehow. She wasn’t sure just how, but she’d seen it work, seen how they looked startled at first, then started to play along.

Still, Reed didn’t strike her as the type it would work on. There was something straight about him. Not like a preacher, not that uncomfortable holy judgment kind of straight, just a kind of straight that wouldn’t know how to deal with a woman talking dirty to him, wouldn’t like it. With him she’d play it by the book. The sale was more important than the pleasure of seeing his face if she jokingly offered him a blowjob as part of the discount.

What kind of deal I can give you depends on what kind of money you’ve convinced Banner Grove College to spend. I would think some of the equipment we’ve got for sale would come in right handy on that big campus you all’ve got up there. You folks got a lot of acres with a lot of earth to move around and shape to your visions and needs.

It was a good line. Her daddy had used it many times and sold a lot of heavy equipment. Enough to build that house overlooking Coral Bay where he sat on the porch, drinking gin and tonic and watching the sailboats racing along Drake’s Channel in the British Virgin Islands.

Let me show you some of our best deals, she said.

Don’t try to con me, Reed said. Show me good stuff at good prices. I’ll know when I see the right piece.

Five minutes later the two of them were trudging down a row of shiny yellow bulldozers. Captain Jack Reed, heavyset, with thick, loose jowls, in his mid-fifties, his iron-grey hair cut in a military flat-top, the sides nearly shaved, humming softly, would stop to examine a bulldozer, running a hand over its side, asking Carolyn the price.

At the first one, she took a notebook from her pocket, paging through it.

Twenty thousand, she said, smiling up at him.

Reed grunted, walking on down the row. Pausing beside a slightly smaller machine, picking at a speck of tar on the paint, he looked at her.

How about this one?

Carolyn looked at the notebook. Twelve, maybe ten, if you’ve got something to trade.

He