Experiment One: Murder in the Lab

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Yvette Bilodea u parked in the faculty lot next to the Neuroscience building on the sprawling oak tree dotted campus. As she exited her car, she could feel the breeze snap her curly brown hair across her face. It wasn’t the cool wisp felt on a summer’s night, but the sharp edge of just enough coldness to predict Fall around the corner. A confirmed academic, the season of Fall for her, was always a time of renewal. Leaves abandoning the trees, shorter and more brisk days usually meant the start of a new academic year filled with new books, new paper, new pens and new students. Fall also meant a resurrection of cashmere sweaters and the wearing of light woolen scarves, more for accessory than for need. Fires in the fireplace and a ritualized preparation of mulled cider seemed so appropriate.

She avoided the sidewalk, choosing instead to cross over a sea of brilliant red, rust and burnt brown covering the lawn. Hearing the leather soles of her loafers flatten the crinkled dead leaves wasn’t quite as much fun as she remembered of jumping into piles of them as a child, but it had the same overall effect. The fragrant and subtle smells of flowers in bloom were lost and replaced with the smell of leaves being reduced to smoke. Yes, Fall had its own caché. This morning, however, she kicked the dried leaves with extra enthusiasm, wishing they were the asses of her irritating faculty colleagues. Over and over in a repeating cycle she asked herself the same question. “With a bajillion square feet of space in a new five story science building, how can they waste precious faculty meeting time arguing over who gets what, how much of it will be for them to own and where exactly will their space be? For heaven’s sake, couldn’t this be done at another time. Why waste time when time together was the most precious quantity they had and they had so little of it.” On the previous afternoon, she had abruptly left her office after the faculty meeting from hell, packed her briefcase and went home in disgust. Now she had to make up lost time by coming in on Saturday morning.

She knew that the laboratory would be empty today. Talk on the previous morning had centered on the coveted tickets her students had garnered for a homecoming football game that afternoon. Her encouragement of them to all have a good time together had been taken as tacit approval of their absence from their usual Saturdays at work. Now she could try to relax, to be entirely herself and to really get some work done without interruptions.

She reached the large unlocked door to the main corridor of the old gothic styled building and entered the hallowed space. Yvette’s tempo changed as she walked down the corridor. While she was looking forward to the solitude of an empty lab, she wasn’t crazy about coming in on Saturdays, but she had to complete what she had not finished yesterday. The only thing that had gotten finished after she reached home, were exactly two glasses of merlot.

At this stage in her career, Saturday’s were supposed to be her day away from the University and the lab, a day for errands, for herself and whatever she felt like doing that was fun. It was a rare thing for her now to feel pressured to work seven days a week. Occasionally she dropped in to see if her students, who proclaimed to always be in the lab, were in fact, really there. She was even sometimes pleasantly surprised to see them working or just hanging around on weekend afternoons. It reminded her of her own graduate school days when the lab was all that was in her life. Saturday or Sunday and evenings, she could always be found in the lab. Things were different now. Students were so much more casual. She didn’t really blame them. Why hurry up to get your degree when job positions were so scarce anyhow?

Yvette’s lab was at the end of the long corridor on the first floor of the Neuroscience building, one of the oldest buildings on campus. She was always conscious of the sound of her feet on the old golden oak floor, woodwork worn to a smooth satin finish by untold numbers of scholars and not so scholarly before her. Yvette shuffled with her keys and took out the bright red nail-polish covered one and placed it into the lock of the door. The room wasn’t illuminated but she wasn’t really surprised. She flipped the switch for a single set of lights which brightened her path along the left side of the three rows of lab benches and back to where her office was. The lab itself wasn’t as large as the spaces of her older more senior colleagues but it was significantly larger than the closet she was given when she first arrived at the University.

Time and tenure had helped relocate her into a moderate sized series of rooms. She was comfortable and there was enough room for her students to spread out and not be in each other’s way. She was content.