Entering the office, both Angel and Harvest present their badge and introduce themselves to the witch who stands to greet them.

Dean St. James motions to the two seats in front of her desk. “It’s just such a shock,” she says, as she sits down absentmindedly turning the gold bracelet around her wrist. There are delicately etched symbols in the metal, though Harvest can’t make out anything recognizable. “I’ve already let the other staff know. There aren’t a lot of classes that occur on Saturday, but we’ve rescheduled just as well.”

“Thank you. We won’t take up too much of your time,” says Angel. “As I said on the phone, we would like to take a look at Professor Jones’s office and just speak to a few of her colleagues, including you, if you have a few minutes.”

“Of course. Whatever you need.”

“When was the last time you saw Professor Jones?”

“We had a brief staff meeting on Thursday that began a little after five. It lasted about thirty minutes.”

“And how did she seem? Attentive?”

“She seemed okay. Nothing unusual. She left as soon as the meeting finished. I didn’t speak with her.”

“But you did see her?”

She nods, her large gold hoop earrings dangling against her blushed cheeks. “Yes, she was sitting in the back. I remember because her phone went off during the meeting. She turned it off quickly, but I had still been hoping to gently remind her that phones are to be silent during staff meetings. She was gone before I could speak with her about it.”

“And what about the days leading up to her death. Did you notice any behavior changes? Any altercations?”

The Dean frowns. “Not that I’m aware of.”

“But there could have been?” asks Harvest, noting the cautious wording of her reply.

“There have been some complaints in the past. Disgruntled students. Nothing out of the usual for the school as a whole, I assure you. Although our students are adults, they are often still rather young and under the mistaken impression that magic is easy, simply because they’ve been using it all their lives.”

“But there hadn’t been any complaints against Professor Jones recently?” confirms Angel.

“Not officially,” replies Dean St. James.

Like pulling teeth, thinks Harvest.

Angel must notice the evasive answers, too, but decides to move on, rather than belabor the point. Sometimes what’s left unsaid is just as important, and they wouldn’t want to alienate their witnesses too early on in an investigation. You never know when a witness will become a suspect, after all. “What was her class schedule like? Was she on campus often?”

“She was full-time, so she was here five days a week. She taught Advanced Elemental Magic, in particular the more advanced courses on water-working. Her teaching assistant, Adam Turner, would know more about her class schedule and her office hours, of course, and if there were any recent issues with the students.”

“Is Adam on campus today?”

“Possibly. You might find him in Professor Jones’s office.”

----------------------------------------

Adam Turner is sitting at Professor Jones’s desk with his head in his hands, the afternoon light streaming in from the window behind him just lining his hunched shoulders and dark, messy hair. The door is open, though Adam hasn’t noticed their presence yet. The office is a mess, haphazardly stacked books, artifacts, and half-filled boxes strewn about. The desk takes up most of the space, though it is so covered in stacks of paper and open books, Harvest can’t see any inch of the surface. The walls are white plaster and dotted with small framed pictures of elemental diagrams.

Harvest knocks on the door with a knuckle and Adam looks up, startled.

“Sorry,” she says, holding out her badge. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Angel doing the same. “I’m Agent Rosenbloom and this is Agent Fernandez. Can we ask you a few questions about Professor Jones?”

“Yeah. Sure.” He looks around, slightly panicked. “There are chairs here. Somewhere.”

“It’s okay. We can stand.”

“Do you mind if I keep—?” He points toward the stack of papers on the desk.

“Of course. We just have a few questions and then we’ll get out of your way.”

Harvest wishes, not for the first time, that she had some way of hiding her second-sight. She desperately wants to check his aura. He’s jittery and red-eyed, but is that truly grief? How close were they? A highly-inappropriate relationship between a student and a teacher, particularly with an age gap, would be motive for murder, she thinks.

“Sure,” he says. “I’m just in the middle of cleaning out the office.”

“It’s rather soon to be doing that,” says Angel with a frown.

“The Dean told me to,” he says defensively.

“Of course. I didn’t mean…” Angel smiles. “Is there a reason she would want it cleared out so quickly?”

He shrugs, rifling through the stacks of paper on the desk. “Beats me. I just do as I’m told.” He adds the last part under his breath and Angel arches an eyebrow at Harvest. They both wonder if there’s something in that, just a hint of a dysfunctional working relationship.

Harvest nods curtly before turning back to Adam, whose focus is still on the desk. “When was the last time you saw Professor Jones?”

He looks up, eyes trained somewhere just above Harvest’s head as he remembers. “Thursday. She stopped by here after the staff meeting and then left for the day. I was here grading some essays.”

“Do you have a copy of her class schedule?”

“Yeah.” He looks down at the desk. “Somewhere.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Why don’t you email it to me?” suggests Angel, handing him a business card.

“How did she seem the last time you saw her?” asks Harvest.

“Fine. Not sick at all.”

“Sick?”

“Oh, sorry. She called in sick on Friday. Asked me to teach the class for her.”

“When was this?”

“Thursday night.”

“And you spoke to her?”

“No, it was an email.”

“Do you still have it?”

He nods and stares blankly at the desk for a beat, until he remembers where he last saw his phone: on top of a stack of books by the half-empty bookshelves. He taps the screen, navigating to his email app, then hands the phone toward Harvest. She glances at the email, which is short and formal, and then passes the phone to Angel.

Angel reads through it quickly. “Can you forward this to me, too, when you send the schedule?”

He nods, slipping the phone into his back pocket.

“Did she have a computer?” asks Harvest.

“A laptop.” He laughs, motioning toward the box next to Harvest. “I actually know where that one is. I packed it up with her tablet and reading glasses.” The corners of his mouth turn downward, whatever levity he found in the situation gone in the reminder of what he’s doing here, standing in a messy office packing up the belongings of his recently deceased mentor. She doesn’t need her second-sight to recognize this. The grey is unmistakable.

“Did she have any enemies? Angry students?” Angel asks.

“Probably. All the professors do, at some point,” says Adam with a wry smile. “Some students do the bare minimum and expect glowing feedback. But it’s not our job to hold their hands. That’s what Professor Jones would always say.”

“And did Professor Jones speak from experience?”

“She always spoke from experience,” he says. “She didn’t…well, she didn’t mince words. It didn’t make her the most popular professor, but she was an expert in this field.” He absentmindedly shuffles a few papers together. “I don’t know how I’m going to finish my thesis without her,” he adds quietly, after a few seconds of silence.

“Were there any specific altercations or incidents you can think of?”

He finally tears his attention from the desk and stuffs his hands in his pockets as he considers the question. He looks messy, a bit unkempt but not any more so than you would expect from a twenty-something college student. He frowns. “Well, there were some comments. Some disagreements with a colleague.” He folds his arms across his chest and leans his head to the side, as if weighing what he should say. “I did overhear something on Thursday. A meeting with the other teacher. It sounded heated. He said something like, ‘this needs to stop.’”

“Did you ask her about it?”

“No. She didn’t mention it and it didn’t seem like my place to comment.”

“Who was the other staff member?”

“Professor Evans. Ezra Evans. He teaches Basics of Elemental Magic.”

----------------------------------------

Harvest sighs at the door.

“Are we going to knock?” asks Angel, leaning against the wall, “or just stare at the name plaque?”

“Sorry.” Harvest bites her lip. “I just haven’t seen him in a while.” Since last October, she thinks, when a postcard from Hazel started an argument that ended with her throwing her engagement ring at him. Or rather, she reminds herself, the last time she actually saw him was in an interrogation room after he was found standing over a body that looked like Hazel. It wasn’t Hazel, as she later proved, but standing in the artificial lights of the dingy gray room, she knew her relationship with Ezra was well and truly over. She stopped answering his phone calls and cut off all contact with him after that.

“If you’d prefer, I can speak to him while you wait outside,” suggests Angel.

“No, I’ll be okay.” With a sigh, Harvest knocks on the door.

“Come in,” comes the shout from inside.

When she opens the door, Ezra looks up from his computer, blinks confusedly, and then smiles. It’s such a familiar movement, a soft sparkle in his eyes when he recognizes her, as if she’s just the person he was looking for regardless of the fact that they haven’t had any contact in months.

“Hey, Harv,” he says with a lopsided smile. But when he sees Angel standing beside her, his smile falls away into something vaguely neutral—but only just. She’s never truly seen Ezra with a neutral expression. He does everything with some sort of emotion. He doesn’t “do apathy,” as he once told her. Even now, there is a hint of something in the quirk of his lips. She recognizes it. He’s happy to see her, yet annoyed at being interrupted.

“We just need to ask you a few questions, if you have a few minutes. Or we can come back when it’s more convenient,” she says, and then chastises herself for falling into old habits. She’s not here to be convenient for him. She’s here to solve a potential murder.

Ezra runs a hand through his hair as he checks the time on his phone screen. A wayward curl falls across his forehead and she flexes her fingers against the urge to brush it away. “I have some time. Have a seat.”

The office is similar to Professor Jones’s. A window looks out onto the pine trees, dappled sunshine casting shadows against the white plaster wall which is decorated with a single abstract painting that fills up the entire wall. The opposite walls are lined in bookshelves that reach the ceiling. There’s a picture of Ezra and his brother on the bookshelf. Ezra closes his laptop and slides it to the side of the desk, as Harvest and Angel sit across from him. Harvest extracts her notebook from her bag and begins to take notes as Angel takes the lead.

“What was your relationship with Professor Aila Jones?” asks Angel.

“Professional. We…were work colleagues.”

“When was the last time you saw Professor Jones?”

“Thursday at the staff meeting.”

“And how did she seem?”

“Preoccupied. She spent all of the meeting texting on her phone.”

“And did you have any altercations with the victim?”

He snorts. “I see where you’re going with this.” Ezra, for all his faults, was never slow-witted. “We had differing opinions on teaching methods. We were in the same field, and it was a courteous, professional disagreement. But there were never any altercations.”

“Are you sure about that?” Angel raises an eyebrow. “We heard that some words were exchanged Thursday afternoon.”

“Some words? Yes, some words were exchanged, but that was it.” He laughs but it lacks any type of humor. “If you keep trying to pin murders on me, I’m going to start being offended.”

“Just doing our job, Professor Evans.”

He grins. “Of course.”

Angel smiles tightly. “Where were you Thursday night?”

He glances at Harvest, just a flicker of his green eyes, before answering. “On a date.”

“And where did you go?”

“Dinner. A few drinks. Then back to mine.”

“We’ll need to confirm that,” says Angel.

“I can give you her contact details.”

“I would like that.”

Ezra unlocks his phone and writes his date’s name and number on a piece of scrap paper.

“Thank you,” says Angel, slipping the paper into their pocket. “That’s all we have for now, but we may reach out again if we have any further questions.”

“Of course.” He smiles, eyes flitting over to Harvest. “You know where to find me. My number hasn’t changed.”

As they leave, Ezra reaches for Harvest’s arm, his palm warm as it slides down to her elbow. It’s so familiar but wrong and she smiles stiffly.

“Is there something else you’d like to tell us, Mr. Evans?” she asks with a wavering smile.

He grins. “Nothing at all, Agent Rosenbloom.” His amusement falls away, and he tilts his head, lips pursed in a mix of desperation and want and maybe a little regret, too. “It’s nice to see you. I really want to talk. Catch up, you know?”

“Maybe later,” she says, unsure of how to say no. “I’m busy with this investigation.”

“Of course.” He leans against his desk, arms folded across his chest. “I’ll be here whenever you’re free.”

As she walks away, she can’t help but feel it’s more of a threat than an invitation.