Adjunct

 Adjunct

Bradenton, FL – Police Department
Transcript of Dr. Goldie Dawes
Start time: 3:46pm
November 19, 2019

Lt. Morris: It’s Monday, November 19, 2019. Time is 3:46pm. Lieutenant Larry Morris and Detective Wilbur Brome present for interview with Mrs. Goldie Dawes.

Det. W. Brome: Please state your name into the microphone, ma’am.

G. Dawes: My name, for the record, is Dr. Goldie Dawes, Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Our Lady of the Redeemer Bible College.

The man here said I could just tell it, so that’s what I’m gonna do.

By the way, before I begin, I know you’re gonna ask me about Dr. Omar’s whereabouts. I mean, I assume that’s why I’m here? So let’s just go ahead and nip that in the bud before it comes to bloom: I haven’t seen him since Friday, October 12. I passed him in the hallway. We waved at one another and wished one another a happy weekend. Good bye! So long! And that was all. That was last I saw of him. Now, do I know what happened to him? I have some idea, yeah.

But if I’m gonna tell it, I need to tell you all of it.

If there was something off about Helen Hughes—and it was offer’n a dead skunk on the fourth of July—you couldn’t see it. Not at first anyway. I sure didn’t. Truth is, first time I met her, I thought she was just about an angel what dropped from heaven above. Her auburn locks of hair had the perfect shine and curl. What do they call it? Cherub? Cherub.

Outside, it was hotter’n the hinges hangin’ off the gates of hell. Middle of August, and we were all just gettin’ ready for the semester. She came into my office and sat down at the table across from me and I didn’t say one word when her hand was already reaching across the table and touching mine. And the first thing she said to me was, “Honey, I don’t know what it is, but you’re carrying something heavy. Don’t be afraid to let go if you need to. I’ll catch you.” I’ll be God damned if that didn’t just crumble my biscuits. She pulls this pack of tissues from on up out of her purse, and I just—well, I fell to pieces, didn’t I? She could see something in me limping like a struck pup, and she pounced on it—not with claws out or anything like that. The exact opposite, in fact. Claws retracted. A soft touch of her hand. How’d she know my mother passed not two months prior? I suppose I ought to know better now. Probably studied up on me—everything about me before she walked into my office and sat down for an interview. But at the time? It was exactly what I needed. And she had me. I was putty in her hands from that point forward.

Now, whenever I interview teaching candidates, I tell them right out the gate, question one: “Now listen, I am not one to beat about the bush. But, well, here it is: will you work for the minimum wage?” And didn’t Helen Hughes just flop her wrist like she was swattin’ at a moth? She said, “Oh hun, I don’t care about that. I’m here ‘cause I love teaching!” And I believed her too. Still do.

Of course, what Ms. Helen Hughes taught wasn’t so much English or Composition or even writing. It was psychopathy, pure and simple.

By the time that initial interview was over, I was the one contractually obligated to watch her housecat for what I was told would be a single weekend. What happened was she had these scratches on her arm and I showed her mine from my Thelma and Louise—look here, see? They got me lookin’ like a field been tilled by a drunk farmer. Detective? You need a look too? See that? That one there is Thelma, and that there’s Louise.—So anyway, I ask her what kind she got. And she goes, “North American Tabby. Orange.” I ask her its name and she looks at me like I’m a brick wall or a sack full of rotten peaches and repeats, real slow like I don’t speak English any good, “Or-ange.” And then she tells me she’s going out of town for the upcoming weekend and that she didn’t know what she was going to do with poor Orange. And I was just about to recommend our pet hotel when she says, “Say, why don’t you and Thelma and Louise take her?” And I—well, I don’t know how it happened either. Just that by the end of the interview, where I was supposed to offer her a job—where I did offer her a job—she was already makin’ me into someone who just hands out favors like they’re dimestore candy. I suppose we really were desperate for faculty. If I’m bein’ completely honest, we’d hire anyone with a pulse who was willing to sit down long enough to be interviewed. We used to joke around we’d take ‘em however they come in, dead or alive. But then again, I guess she knew how thirsty we were. I mighta let that slip during the interview. How thirsty we were.

Come to think of it, when she dropped the cat off the next day—a huge fat orange tabby, just like she said—it was wearin’ this collar that had a name inscribed into it—Oliver or Ollie or something like that. But Ms. Hughes placed one of those scratch-n-sniff stickers right over that little metal charm around her neck like it was a hole in a canoe.

It was a sticker of an orange.

If I’m allowed to take detours on this here road of ours we’re walking down memory lane, let me tell you right quick the saga of the end of the orange tabby called Orange. That feline let herself out, very first thing, when I opened the door next morning. And like a flash in the pan she was goner’n last Christmas. I did the decent thing and drove to her home to tell her about it, only I didn’t even bother knocking because if I didn’t see that same orange Tabby sitting in the window of her neighbor’s house, I’ll be damned right where I sit. I could even see where someone had peeled off the sticker and revealed the cat’s dumb forgettable name.

But do you think Ms. Helen Hughes ever let me forget that I was the one supposed to watch her cat and I was the one who had let it get out and probably run over? She held that over me like it was a worm on a hook. It’s like I forgot I was the Dean and she was only an adjunct. Because I could have gotten rid of her without a thought by just not renewing her contract. I could fire her without needing a reason. And I was the one feelin’ guilty? What in the name of hell is wrong with me?

Well, I know exactly what was wrong with me.

I was under her spell.

I think it was Dr. Petrachevsky’s idea to give her the reigns of the student magazine. I swear, these tenured English faculty can’t be bothered to lift a finger or do anything other than the bare minimum. If any of ‘em ever had a third arm, they’d need another pocket just to put it in. Well, Ms. Hughes wasn’t teaching English Composition for us a week and she was already on a crusade to gather submissions for the student magazine, The Beatitude. They publish it every semester. Usually the creative writing classes put it together. But Ms. Hughes is only teaching Composition for us, so she just up and started with her own students. Her first assignment was a personal essay where they had to write about a time they experienced hardship and then explain how they dealt with it. And that’s really how it all got started.

They wrote their essays and handed ‘em in. And that right there says something about how she came off to ‘em from the start. They liked her at first. Respected her, even. They wrote their essays and handed ‘em in alright. And that’s when the trouble started.

There were other red flags, for sure. But it’s hard to spot a red flag that really stands out when you’re standin’ in the middle of the red flag factory. I guess one thing that struck me was she was always inviting herself to where she didn’t need to be—mostly faculty gatherings. You see, because we don’t pay our adjuncts very much, we can’t expect them to do too much more than teach their classes. But Ms. Hughes walks around actin’ like she’s got tenure. She would show up to monthly department meetings with the full-time English faculty, Dr. Omar—the man you’re lookin’ for, remember—and Dr. Petrachevsky. We would sit there and go on and on about budgets and scheduling for next semester—things that were way beyond her paygrade to give one flea about. And she never said a word until the meeting was over and then she would touch Dr. Omar on the shoulder and start asking him about whether or not that was his motorcycle she had seen in the parking lot that morning. He’d tell her it was. And she’d ask him if he had an extra helmet; he said he might have one. So then she says, “I’ll bet your wife loves riding around with you on that thing.” To which he responded: “If I’m married, it’s news to me.” They both laughed. You get the idea. We’ve all read bad romance fiction, so you can probably guess where that was heading.

Now, I could have reported it to HR, but that probably would have resulted in her termination. Employee romance is forbidden at our humble little Bible College. But I suppose Eve was supposed to stay away from that apple tree too, now wasn’t she? The truth is, if we fired her, I doubted we’d be able to find another adjunct for the spring semester. Not for what we pay. So I didn’t say anything.

Anyway, Ms. Hughes starts readin’ their papers and meetin’ with ‘em. One by one.

Cyril Everett, he’s a psychology professor who teaches here. He told me one time about this article he read about these, these—well, I’m not sure you can call ‘em humans, even though that’s what they are. But it’s a personality type called a “dark empath.” Apparently, it’s like a bad joke: what do you get when you cross a narcissist, a psychopath, a Machiavellian, and an empath? That makes Ms. Helen Hughes the punchline. But I’m not laughin’. Can’t imagine why anyone would.

Joseph Cane completed the assignment. He wrote this essay about a time he endured hardship and how he dealt with it. Apparently Ms. Hughes announced to her class that whatever they wrote in that class would never leave those walls, and that if they wanted to make her happy and really make her day, they would tell the honest truth about a time they really suffered. But that’s one thing that every student told me that I spoke to. She pulled them aside after class one day—each one of them, individually, mind you—and told them all on separate occasions that she knew what they were going to write about. And every student I spoke with said this part too: She winked at them and gave them a thumbs up.

“Wither shall I go from thy spirit? Or wither shall I flee from thy presence?”

I mean who the hell does she think she is?

Whatever that nod and the wink meant—that was up to the students.

For Joseph Cane, it meant: write about the time your piano teacher touched you in the car on the way home from your eighth grade recital. She didn’t have to tell him to write it. But that’s what he wrote. And then she met with him about it. And I’m not sure I would have known what to say to the young man myself, other than to maybe just write an essay about what he did on his summer vacation—but what can I say? I’m no English teacher. But I would not have done what Ms. Hughes did, tell you that much. Because what she did was tell Mr. Cane that not only was his essay off-topic, it wasn’t even true. That it couldn’t have been true. She told him to his face that what he thought happened didn’t happen. She told him that he should write about something real. And then she gave him a scolding about his subject verb agreement and threw him out of her office. And one of our campus police officers reported hearing her shout down the hall—and this is at 11 AM on a Thursday, mind you, right when classes are going on: “Kill your darlings, Mr. Cane. Slit their pedophilic throats!”

Apparently, she also suggested to Mr. Cane that he write about a time he was actually harmed physically. He still didn’t know what she meant by that by the time he left the meeting. A few days later, on his way home from the library after midnight, someone wearing a black helmet and riding a motorcycle pulled up alongside him and smashed his kneecap with a tire iron. The culprit took his wallet. He had an email in his inbox by six AM next morning from her, sending her deepest sympathies and understanding, saying she had heard about his accident already somehow, and encouraging him to channel his feelings about it into his essay.

Now that there’s some hard evidence. You can look that one up. Mr. Cane has that email saved in his inbox.

This was also about the time Dr. Omar went missing, of course. He just stopped showing up to teach his classes. It was two full weeks before anyone bothered to tell me. The same day I passed by his classroom to see a handful of students napping studiously, I dropped by his house on my way home. By the way, if you find my fingerprint on his doorbell, that’s what it’s from. There was no answer. When he didn’t show up the next day, that’s when I phoned the detective here and filed a missing persons report.

Next up was Franklin Dahl. His first draft was apparently about breaking up with his high school sweetheart when she moved away to go to college and he had to stick around so he could stay home and take care of his sick father. Poor kid. So he writes this essay, spillin’ his guts and feelin’ kinda raw about it, and he meets with his professor and she starts asking him why he’s even in college and what his goals are. Franklin Dahl didn’t want much—just his Bachelor’s so they’d have to pay him a little more down at the garage and so he’d know how to keep his daddy’s tire business afloat during the next recession. Sweet kid, really. Turns out Ms. Hughes was only askin’ him so she could tell him he wasn’t ever gonna accomplish any of it, not with this essay he’d written. She told him it wasn’t good enough to wipe her feet on, let alone good enough for The Beatitude. Blessed are the meek, lest Ms. Hughes pass judgment. She spent an hour tryin’ to get him to think about something else to write about, wringing his heart till it was dryer’ than a couple of sun-bleached bones and just as brittle. So the next day, Franklin’s drivin’ into work and he gets a flat out on highway 68. Bunch of drywall screws just minding their own business in the middle of the road out there among all those cornfields. Franklin knows how to change a tire. He’s the type of guy who looks forward to it. So he gets out gets the bolts off his old GMC and then jacks it up, only now the tire’s stuck. I guess he shoulda known better, bein’ an expert on tires as he is and a mechanic to boot, but he figured he could get the wheel off if he got behind it, underneath it, and started pushing from the underside of the vehicle. So right as he gets down on all fours, rolls onto his back, shimmies under the vehicle, careful not to disturb the jack, and starts pushin’ real careful, he hears a car slow in the road and then stop. He hears footsteps. He figures someone stopped to give him a hand, but he’s already underneath the car, so he might as well finish the job. And he does; the tire pops off and rolls down into the ditch between the cornfield and the road. And the next thing he knows, the car above him starts wobblin’ and he tries to get himself out from under there, but he’s not quick enough and the whole shebang just falls and pins him to God’s green earth. The bulk of it fell right onto his hip bone, but it pinned him there real good. And amidst all his screamin’ and hollerin’, all he hears are footsteps getting’ back into a car and a car driving away. It was another hour before someone finally stopped and then saw a body pinned underneath the car. Franklin’s lucky to be alive, I’d say.

Ms. Hughes wanted her students to have something to write about. That’s all it was.

Mark Meadows wrote about losing his mother. Poor thing, that. His first draft was an essay about how he threw his favorite pocket knife into the coffin the last time he laid eyes upon her. He wanted her to have it, to take something with her to Glory. Then they lowered her into the ground and she was buried forever the end.

Ms. Hughes? When it was Mark’s turn to meet Ms. Hughes—that sweet kid never even had a chance of avoidin’ her tractor beam. I’m only surprised he’s not watchin’ her cat for her on top of everything else. But after their meetin’, Mark goes home and finds a pocket knife jabbed into the basketball sittin’ in his driveway. And wouldn’t you bet it matched the description of the one from his essay? Only now it was stickin’ out of that hunk of useless rubber sittin’ right there on his there driveway. Craziest part about it is that Mark thought he was seein’ things, so he just marched right straight past it into his house. He peeked his eye out the window once or twice to see if it was still there, but he didn’t want to touch the thing. So he goes to bed. And in the middle of the night, don’t he reach his hand under his pillow? And just what do you think he finds there?

The same knife that was plunged into his favorite Spalding had migrated into his bed, just like some kinda cockroach tryin’ to crawl on into his dreams.

No, you can’t make that kind of a person up. God knew what He was doin’ when He made the devil, and I suppose He had a reason for makin’ Helen Hughes too. I’ll be damned if I know what it was could make a person do a thing like that.

Det. Brome: Is that everything?

G. Dawes: I think that’s the short and the long of it. I hope it helps. Tell you one thing, it sure goes to show you never can really know a person. I hope she gets what’s comin’ to her.

Det. Brome: Thank you so much for your cooperation, Mrs. Dawes. But if you don’t mind answering a few questions for us, that would be swell.

G. Dawes: Fire when ready.

Det. Brome: Well, I appreciate hearing your version of the story, but there are a few details that don’t quite add up. For instance, we spoke to Ms. Hughes’ neighbor, a Mrs. Janice Trudeau. Mrs. Trudeau told us her cat did go missing, but she told us she saw a blue Honda Accord with a hubcap missing on the front driver’s side tire parked out in front of her mailbox the day—let me just double-check the cat’s name—Oliver! It was Oliver—the day Oliver went missing. We spoke with Mr. Cane, who showed us the email he received from Ms. Hughes on the day after he was attacked by someone on a motorcycle. And while the email was sent from Ms. Hughes’ campus email address, we also managed to trace its IP address back to a computer in the campus library. About two days before she went missing, Ms. Hughes—

G. Dawes: What? Ms. Hughes is missing? Since when?

Det. Brome: Last Wednesday. Like I was saying, we found a container of drywall screws in the trunk of her Subaru Outback. We went to several hardware stores and asked around if anyone recognized her or remembered her purchasing drywall screws. No one did.

G. Dawes: Ain’t that a shame!

Det. Brome: Mrs. Dawes, we spoke with Franklin Dahl, who told us that he saw the shoes of the person who tried to crush him underneath his own car. They were light-blue laceless keds,

much like the ones you are wearing right now. Finally, we spoke to a retailer at the Army Surplus store who couldn’t remember Ms. Hughes buying a pocket knife, not even when we showed him a picture of her. But he remembered you when we showed him your picture. Said he sold you not only a pocket knife but a couple of large tarps, some zip ties, duct tape, and a shovel. Let’s see, what am I forgetting?… Oh right, the fact that the librarian remembers you being at the computer from which the email to Mr. Cane was sent the night before. Also, the self-checkout machines at the hardware store recorded you purchasing drywall screws with cash two days before Mr. Dahl’s mishap.

G. Dawes: If you’re gettin’ at something, well, why don’t you just hurry up and get there already.

Det. Brome: Goldie—Mrs. Dawes—where are Dr. Omar and Ms. Hughes?

G. Dawes: I done told you already: those two probably run off together but wanted it to look like a double-homicide. I wouldn’t put it past them tryin’ to pin this on me. That Helen Hughes cannot be reckoned with, I’ll tell you what.

Det. Brome: If you don’t want to tell us where they are, that’s fine. We’ll find them soon enough. But can you at least tell me why you did it?

G. Dawes: Detective, now, you’re making me angry here. Why I did what? What is it I am supposed to have done?

Det. Brome: Why did you murder Dr. Omar? Why did you kill Ms. Hughes?

G. Dawes: Am I under arrest?

Det. Brome: Mrs. Dawes, isn’t it true that you were once engaged to Dr. Omar?

G. Dawes: Do I get a phone call or something?

Det. Brome: What kind of car do you drive, Mrs. Dawes? Isn’t it a blue Honda Accord—

G. Dawes: Excuse me, lieutenant, but I’d like to make a phone call.

Det. Brome: –with a missing hubcap on the driver’s side? You might as well just come out and tell us, Goldie. The police have been scouring your home for the last hour.

G. Dawes: Why? They ought to be lookin’ at Ms. Hughes’ house.

Det. Brome: And why’s that?

G. Dawes: Because I put their heads in her refrigerator.

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