Curiosity Killed The Crow

Chapter 9

Almost everyone else had already left for lunch.  Pushing myself up, I stretched and felt several joints pop.  I’d been sitting still too long.  Lilli-Mae rolled her head, cracking her neck.

“I’m hungrier than a woodpecker with a headache,” she said and I snickered.  Every once in a while she’d say something like that and no matter how often I heard them, they never quit being funny.

Matt hadn’t spoken any more to us so we ignored him as we turned in our logbooks and left.  Lilli-Mae kept glancing over her shoulder, clearly hoping he would join us.  I just wanted to get out.  I didn’t like the way he made me feel: unsteady and slightly out of control.

“Would you do me the favor of showing me where we eat here?”  Matt snuck up on us and I jumped.  He fell into step next to me as we headed for the dining hall.  He nearly glided as he towered over me, his posture perfect.  Too perfect.  I wondered if he’d been in ROTC or something.  The only people I’d ever seen walk like that had been military or ballerinas…somehow I didn’t think he fell into the latter category.

“Here we are,” I shot him a small smile that quickly dissolved when he walked off without us.  It stung.  Even though I didn’t want to like him nor did I care if he liked me, it still smarted that he just walked off like that.  I reminded myself that he was a college student so there was certainly no reason for him to be interested.  And above all, I didn’t want to be interested.

Standing on her toes, Lilli-Mae gazed around.  I don’t know who she was looking for but Danny spotted us and waved enthusiastically.  She blushed and turned back around.

“Isn’t Matt going to join us?” she asked.

I shook my head.  “I don’t think so.”  He just wanted directions.

I headed to the salad bar and loaded up my plate.  I noticed Matt was nowhere to be seen.  He must have gone to eat with the teachers or something. 

Danny sat with us again.  Lilli-Mae seemed upset by this but stayed polite.  He even managed to get her to laugh at some of his jokes.  It startled me.  This wasn’t her high-pitched girly giggle she did around boys; it was her full belly laugh.  The kind she got at 2 a.m. when we stayed up too late.  I noticed she went back for seconds on dessert, which she never did around guys.

After lunch we had what they called research lab, a time set aside for us to work on the papers they had assigned us, so we headed for the library.  As we walked out of the dining hall we passed a crowd of kids around a tv.

“It’s a little early for movie night, don’t you think?” Danny said, walking past.  I slowed down as images of a covered body on a gurney covered the screen.

“What’s going on?” I asked a girl standing nearby.

“Someone was murdered here on campus,” she murmured, her eyes still glued to the tv.

“Do they know who did it?” Lilli-Mae asked.

The girl shook her head.  “They don’t even know who it is yet…apparently the victim was skinned.”

“When you say skinned…”

“Yeah, they have no face, no fingerprints, no id.  It could be anyone.” 

We started moving again.  Revulsion made me regret my choice to eat lunch.  What kind of person skinned another human being?  I couldn’t wrap my brain around it.  And here on campus, too. 

Danny had Lilli-Mae laughing again.  I didn’t know how she could forget what we’d just heard.  Someone had murdered on campus.  What if it happened again?

We passed a shadowy area between two buildings and chills crept through me.  A bird swooped over us and landed in the grass.  I stifled a scream as panic rose.  It was the same crow that had come to my window and accosted me in the desert.  One ragged wing, hung slightly from its body.  I tugged on Lilli-Mae’s sleeve.

“Lilli, it’s that bird again, look.”

She sighed and gave it a cursory glance, shaking her head before she’d really looked at it.  “There’s no way you could know it’s the same one.  Haven’t you noticed there are more crows than people in this state?”

Danny gave us a funny look and asked, “What’s going on?”

Lilli-Mae rolled her eyes.  “Ava thinks she has a secret admirer.”

Danny glanced around the mostly empty sidewalk, pushing his dark frames up his nose.  “Really?  Who?”

She pointed to the bird who was still staring at us.  “The bird, who else.”

Despite her jokes and Danny’s laughter, I felt uneasy as we walked past it.  It watched us go, not at all intimidated by three humans so close.  I guess a bird living in a big city would get used to people.  Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling it was the same bird.

We spent the rest of the afternoon doing research.  The professor had announced that we should already have decided on a topic and have started compiling resources.  It panicked Lilli-Mae, who hadn’t given a thought about what she would do.  She frantically flipped through various books, looking for a topic that wasn’t too deep yet not cliché.  I hadn’t completely decided what my topic would be either, but I still had that book I’d checked out over the weekend and I kicked around the idea of using that.

I’d figured out what the librarian had meant by controversial.  I hadn’t even thought twice as I’d read about the theory that violent tribes from Mesoamerica had found their way to the peaceful Anasazi and forced them into servitude.  The author had some pretty compelling evidence in favor of his theory and I’d read, fascinated, about butchered bodies and deserted villages, uprisings and mass exoduses.  I’d tried to find more about it at the library but there was a glaring shortage of info on the subject.  It seemed I’d somehow managed to stumble on the only literature pertaining to it on accident.

I found little more to supplement the book and left the library empty handed.  We headed back to our dorm with Lilli-Mae muttering under her breath and shuffling the stack of photo copies she’d made.  I had to stop her before she ran into a lamp post.  She smiled wanly and kept her eyes on her paper.  I shook my head.  She was always like this when she ‘got a bee in her bonnet’ as she put it.  No matter how she acted, her grades were incredibly important to her.

I headed to bed early, knowing we had to get up and go on a dig the next day.  I slipped my earbuds into my ears, not willing to take a chance of hearing the howls again.  I did not need to be kept up by nightmares with us actually working in the morning.  Not that they really let us newbies dig much, we were more there to do the grunt work but whatever; it would still look good on my resume.  I shot a look at Lilli-Mae, who was whispering into her phone, as the crow’s shadow swooped past our window but she seemed oblivious.  Sighing, I turned on my mp3 player.