My Professor’s Dark Christmas Obsession

Chapter 4

It was December 20th, and the last of Hartwell's lights had gone out.

As Autumn drove past the campus on her way to Gabriel's, the whole place looked like it had been switched off at the wall. There were dark buildings, empty lots, and not a single person on the paths between the trees.

She had never seen it like that before, fully abandoned, and there was something about it that felt wrong in her stomach. Like the world she had spent four years in had just quietly folded itself up and left without telling her.

She just brushed it off, turned the radio up, and kept driving.

Something had been shifting between her and Gabriel over the past week, some unspoken thing that neither of them had named but both of them could feel. He touched her more now. Not in any way she could point to and call inappropriate.

It was nothing obvious, just small things like a hand at the small of her back when he moved past her, his fingers staying on hers a beat too long when he passed her something, his thumb at her jaw once, just once, when he moved her hair back to show her something on a page, and he had done it so naturally that she hadn't pulled away.

She thought about that thumb more than she wanted to admit.

On Thursday he got a phone call and excused himself upstairs. Autumn was alone in the library with a list of texts to find. As she moved through the shelves slowly, trailing her fingers along the spines, she realized the house was so quiet she could hear the fire from two rooms over. Gabriel's voice came from somewhere above her, but she couldn’t catch anything he was saying.

She drifted into the hallway without really deciding to. There was a door at the far end, dark wood and unremarkable, and she had walked past it a dozen times without thinking about it. She tried the handle just out of pure habit. It was locked.

She started to turn away, but the smell stopped her. She caught a whiff of sawdust, fresh paint, and the clean, unmistakable smell of a room that had very recently been finished, coming through the gap at the bottom of the door.

She stood still, breathed it in, and then her brain went somewhere she didn't want it to go. She thought about the weight of the door, heavier than any interior door had a reason to be. She thought about the frame. It looked reinforced somehow; she could see it in the make of the door. She thought about why someone would build a room like that, behind a locked door, in a house where they lived alone.

Her hand was still on the handle as she took one step closer. Then she heard Gabriel's footsteps on the landing above her.

She moved, walking back down the hall and into the library. She grabbed a book off the nearest shelf, quickly flipping it open in her hands, and by the time he appeared in the doorway she had been standing there for at least thirty seconds, and her breathing was almost normal.

He crossed the room toward her. She felt him reading her face before he said a word.

"Find everything you needed?" he asked.

"Almost," she said. Her voice came out completely normal. She was impressed and also terrified by that.

He took the book from her hands, slow and easy, looked at the spine, and placed it back on the shelf in the wrong spot. He didn't comment on it. Then he turned to look at her with that expression she could never quite read, the one that was patient and certain all at once, like he was a man who had never once been caught off guard by anything.

"You wandered," he said.

It wasn’t a question nor was it an accusation. It was something in between, sitting in the air between them with all its weight, and she had exactly three seconds to decide how to handle it.

Just then he smiled quietly and turned toward the kitchen to start dinner.

She stood at the shelf and told herself she was overreacting. It was an old house with heavy doors, so she’d probably imagined the smell. She was tired and her brain was doing what it did when she was tired, which was find problems with things that didn't have any problems.

Autumn ate dinner and stayed another hour. As she drove home in the dark, she told herself four separate times on the fifteen-minute drive, that it was nothing.

She couldn’t sleep.

At two in the morning, she gave up, reached for her phone, and searched for his name. “Gabriel Moreau Hartwell University.”

The results were positive and plentiful. All she saw were things like: Published author. Department head. Awards she didn't recognize. Faculty reviews calling him demanding, brilliant, and the best professor they had ever had.

There was not a single odd thing. Not one result that didn't fit.

She searched again. “Gabriel Moreau former students.”

And then she saw a forum thread from three years ago, from a student message board she had never heard of. Someone was asking if anyone else had found Moreau's attention a little intense. There were four replies, all dismissive, all from people who clearly hadn't been in his class. The thread ended there.

She was about to close her phone when a link at the bottom of the page caught her eye. It led to a campus archive page, a section she had never known existed.

It was titled: “Student Disappearances.”

There were three entries. She scrolled past the first two and stopped on the third.

Claire Donovan. Twenty-two years old. Literature student. Disappeared December 19th, four years ago. Found in the lake behind a private residence eleven days later. Death ruled a suicide. Case closed.

Autumn read it twice. Then she read it a third time, slowly. The cursor kept blinking at her in the dark.

She told herself it was a coincidence and she was catastrophizing at two in the morning because she hadn't slept and her brain was just doing what tired brains did. She told herself there was no reason to connect any of this to anything at all.

She took a screenshot of the page. Then she took a second one.

Afterward, she lay in the dark with her phone face-down on her chest and her eyes wide open.

Her heart was beating at a pace she couldn't quite slow down, and as she listened to the silence of her empty apartment, she thought about a door that was too heavy and a room that smelled like it had just been built, and a lake, and a girl who had studied literature, and a case that had been closed.

Autumn ended up not sleeping at all.