Read Online Impulse by Frederick Ramsay - Free Book Online Page A

you?”
    He turned to see a young woman, a very young woman, in a blue blazer and khaki skirt. She balanced a stack of books in her arms and looked inquiringly at him. She looked to be twenty but could have been older or younger. Everyone looked young to him now. He thought his new general practitioner couldn’t be more than twelve.
    “Thanks, Miss…ah—”
    “I’m Elizabeth Roulx. I teach English literature, and you must be Meredith Smith. Am I right?”
    “Yes, but…well, I’m impressed. How did you know?”
    “No mystery there…sorry, no pun intended….Doctor Darnell asked me to keep an eye out for you. He said he hoped you’d come early and if you did I should ask you to speak to my classes about writing.”
    “No, well, that might have been fun, but I couldn’t get away any earlier.”
    “Maybe some other time,” she said. He didn’t detect any annoyance in her voice so he guessed the plan to speak had been an impulse on someone else’s part, not hers. At least it never made it onto his agenda.
    “There’s a luncheon somewhere,” he said, consulting his map a second time. It felt strange needing a map to find his way around a part of the world he once knew so intimately.
    “Come with me,” she said. “We’re at the same table.”
    “The High Table, Doctor Darnell said.”
    She chuckled. “Felix is an anglophile. He wants to make believe he’s at Eton or Oxford. He had a low platform built and set one table in the front of the dining hall reserved for himself and department chairs. All veddy Brit. Next he’ll have us in hoods and gowns.”
    They made their way around a mound of very old lilacs. Frank remembered the lilacs. His mother planted them a long time ago. Somewhere in the middle should be a bird bath set in the ground with mortar he and Jack had mixed for her.
    “Do you mind?” he asked and pushed his way into the thicket. The shallow dish lay in pieces but it was still there. A touchstone.
    They resumed their walk, rounded the power plant, and headed toward a remarkably ugly building.
    “That’s Perry Hall,” she said. “If half of what I’ve heard about Black Jack Perry is true, I think the good colonel must be spinning in his grave over that architectural monstrosity.”
    Frank looked at the boxy lines and alternating glass and robin’s egg blue panels and decided it had all the charm of a toll booth.
    “Perry was a hard man,” he said.
    She glanced at him, one brow up. “You’re next to me, I think.”
    They stepped into the dining hall. It had an under scent—that’s the only way he could describe it—fried food and spilled milk, but barely strong enough to overcome the Lysol. Too late, Frank realized he should have taken a miss on lunch, too.

Chapter Ten
    Elizabeth Roulx ushered him into the dining hall. People milled about, looking for place cards that didn’t exist and faces they no longer recognized, their smiles vague but hopeful.
    “Your father used to head up the English Department, didn’t he?” she asked, leading him to the front of the room to a table set on the platform raised an inch or two above the black and white tiled floor. The High Table.
    “Yes, a long time ago. I doubt anyone would remember him now.”
    “Oh, but you’re wrong about that, Meredith…may I call you Meredith?”
    “I think you already have.” Frank hoped he didn’t sound short. He didn’t intend to be, but something about the room and its confusion set him on edge. He couldn’t think why. It might have been the odor.
    “I am the school’s archivist, too. The responsibility of cataloging and filing all sorts of documents falls to me. I recently came across your father’s old teaching notes. Your father is over there, by the way.” He looked in the direction she indicated. Sure enough, his father, or what passed as a portrait of him, smiled back.
    “Dad got a light,” he said, surprised. It looked new. An extension cord connected it to an outlet in the next panel