The Fever Cabinet, page 1
part #9 of Professor Molly Mysteries Series
The Fever Cabinet
Professor Molly Mysteries, Volume 9
Frankie Bow
Published by Hawaiian Heritage Press, 2019.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
THE FEVER CABINET
First edition. November 20, 2019.
Copyright © 2019 Frankie Bow.
Written by Frankie Bow.
Also by Frankie Bow
Miss Fortune World: Hair Extensions and Homicide
Once Upon a Murder
Tabasco Fiasco
Schooled
Miss Fortune World: Supernatural Sinful
Sinful Science
Miss Fortune World: The Mary-Alice Files
Mary-Alice Moves In
Bayou Busybody
The Vanishing Victim
Aloha, Y'all
The Two-Body Problem
Black Widow Valley
The No-Tell Motel
Vampire Billionaire of the Bayou
The Pajama Murder
The Lost Weekend
Professor Molly Mysteries
Trust Fall
The Musubi Murder
The Cursed Canoe
The Black Thumb
The Invasive Species
Mother's Day
The Nakamura Letters
The Perfect Body
The Fever Cabinet
The Case of the Defunct Adjunct
Watch for more at Frankie Bow’s site.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Also By Frankie Bow
Fiona: Not Exactly What it Says on the Tin
Molly: Refusing a Perfectly Unreasonable Request
Molly: A Mediocre Mentor
Fiona: An Unexpected Visitor
Molly: Lost and Found
Fiona: Found and Lost
Molly: A Drive to St. Aelred School
Fiona: The Only Thing Worse than Being Wrong is One’s Mother Being Right
Fiona: Not Snooping
Fiona: A Minor Misdirection
Molly: A Visit from Young Bryce
Fiona: Still Waiting
Fiona: A Visit with Mahina’s Finest
Fiona: By the River’s Edge
Molly: Back to the Pua Kala Garden Society
Fiona: A Good Deed
Molly: Not Eavesdropping
Fiona: The Last Place You Look
Molly: Think of a Hedgehog. With a Bonnet.
Fiona: Whose Assistant (Professor) Are You?
Molly: There’s the Price, and There’s the Cost.
Molly: Brigham & Brewster
Fiona: Emmett’s Good Whiskey
Fiona: Word Gets Around
Molly: The Baby’s Cry
Molly: Good News
Molly: A Good Start
Molly: Only Trying to Help
Fiona: Not an Abattoir
Molly: Threat Assessment
Molly: Overkill
Molly: A Banana Bafflement
Molly: Christmas Shopping
Molly: Gay Casanova
Molly: The Rodge Cowper Rule
Molly: It’s the Optics
Molly: The Tanning Bed Accident
Fiona: Surely it’s Not That Simple
Fiona: A New Perspective
Molly: Several Bottles were Harmed in the Making of this Chapter
Molly: BFFs
Molly: Who Watches the Watches
Molly: A Purple Glob
Fiona: Thanksgiving
Molly: The S-Word
Fiona: Closure
Molly: A True Femme Fatale
Molly: A Pretty Good Liar
Molly: Big Scrap
Molly: His Poor Grieving Mother
Molly: I Can’t Bear to See a Man Grovel
Molly: You Should Talk to Someone
Molly: We Absolutely Disapprove of Murder
Fiona: Dear Old Oscar
From the Author
Also By Frankie Bow
About the Publisher
Fiona: Not Exactly What it Says on the Tin
FIONA SPENCER WAS CLOSE to finishing her first term as Assistant Professor of Business Ethics at Mahina State University in Hawaii. Both the tenure line and the tropical location had provoked a satisfying level of envy among her graduate-school cohort. Best of all—or so she’d thought at the time she accepted the offer—the position would allow her to live with Emmett, a luxury academics did not take for granted. They would spend their first Christmas together as a married couple.
All tickety-boo. Until she set down in Mahina.
The “historic” new College of Commerce building turned out to be a disused sanatorium, across town from the main campus and currently under repair. Thanks to some bureaucratic cock-up, her office was officially listed as vacant, so the builders used it as a tip (or a “dump,” as the Americans called it). Each morning she came in to find a new layer of plasterboard scraps and scaly old pipes added to the rubbish heap along the back wall of her office.
The two senior members of the management department, Hanson Harrison and Larry Schneider, did worthwhile scholarship. She would have gladly collaborated with either of them, but they were never there. Rodge Cowper, who hadn’t published a thing since he got tenure, was forever stopping into her office, preening and trying to chat her up.
Home, unfortunately, was no refuge. The house Emmett had rented was ugly and cheap, surrounded by overgrown trees and vines that blocked out the sun. Emmett himself made her feel like an unwelcome guest; he had grown even more distant after he was blamed for the boy’s suicide. Last night they’d had a row, Emmett had stormed out, and she hadn’t seen him since.
Fiona had shut her office door, despite the air con being out of order. She didn’t want to talk to anyone today. Not Rodge, not her whingeing students, and especially not her nosy department head, Molly Barda. Not a day went by, it seemed, without the woman popping in and checking up on her. Fiona suspected Molly was watching for an excuse to sack her.
There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
My life is a bloody Oscar Wilde quip, Fiona thought.
A sudden pounding on her door nearly made Fiona jump out of her seat.
“Fiona?” called a voice from the other side of the door.
Fiona’s heart dropped. It wasn’t Rodge. Or Molly. This was far worse.
“Fiona! I know you’re in there. Do open the door, darling.”
Molly: Refusing a Perfectly Unreasonable Request
“IT WOULDN’T BE AN ETHICS violation, Molly,” Emma insisted. “You’re exaggerating.”
I frowned disapprovingly at my phone, which of course had no effect, as Emma couldn’t see me.
“It’s not an ethics violation to take university property and give it to my friends? Hey, how about I go over and ask Fiona about it? She’s an actual professor of business ethics. And before you make the business ethics is an oxymoron joke, I’ve already heard it, so don’t bother.”
Emma Nakamura is my best friend at Mahina State, and I would do anything for her—anything that’s legal and not likely to get me fired. Unfortunately, she had called me to lobby for the fever cabinet, an antique medical device we’d found when the College of Commerce was moved into the old Inebriates Asylum.
“Don’t bother her majesty,” Emma said. “I know it would be wrong to give department property to me personally. That’s not what I’m asking for. I’m saying the College of Commerce should do an interdepartmental loan to the biology department.”
“So that you, personally, can take it home and use it as a giant Crock-Pot for your luau.”
“Not a Crock-Pot, Molly. An Imu, for make kalua pig. And it’s not my luau, it’s Yoshi’s.”
“Oh, not for you, for your husband. Even better. Emma, it’s a medical device. It’s had sick people inside it. How can you even consider eating out of it?”
“I’m not gonna eat out of it. I just don’t want those furshlugginer dummkopf friends of Yoshi’s digging a big hole in my backyard.”
Emma grew up in Hawaii. Right on this island in fact, just a few miles down the road from Mahina State University. But she got her doctorate in upstate New York, at Cornell. This, in her mind, entitles her to throw in Yiddish now and again as she pleases.
“Even if I said yes,” I said, “how would you bring it home? The thing’s enormous. It’s like an iron lung. I don’t know how they got it up here in the first place.”
“We can take it apart. I’ll bring a screwdriver.”
“Oh, we can take it apart with a screwdriver? Yeah, sounds like a well-thought-out plan. Anyway, with all the construction going on in our building, they’ve been moving stuff around. I don’t even know where the thing is now.”
“You lost it?”
“Emma, I personally did not lose—ooh, speaking of construction, I better go. It sounds like the landing’s caving in out there and I think I smell something burning.”
This wasn’t a ruse to put Emma off. The banging noise out on the landing was insistent enough to rise above the ordinary construction din in our building. And I really did smell something burning.
I hung up the phone, cutting Emma off mid-argument, and peeked out of my office. Across the landing I saw a disheveled figure hammering on Fiona Spencer’s door. He held a smoldering pipe with his free hand. Which expl
This was not good. My prime directive right now (according to Dan Watanabe, my dean) was to keep our new hire happy. And whatever was going on, it didn’t look happy.
“Fiona?” The hobo had an English accent and pronounced it like “Fion-er.” “Fiona! I know you’re in there. Do open the door, darling.”
Now what do I do?
Go back to my office, call security, and wait for someone to drive across town from the main campus? Or intervene, and risk getting myself tossed over the railing? Our building has an open atrium-style design. From the top-floor landing it’s a straight forty-foot drop to the ground floor. And it’s a hard floor.
“Fiona, darling, do let me in,” the visitor persisted. This couldn’t be Fiona’s husband. From what I’d heard, Emmett Spencer was tall, good-looking, and American. This character had a fireplug build and wore a flat cap, a rumpled, oversized jacket, and wool trousers stuffed into knee-high rubber boots.
“Excuse me sir,” I started to say, when Fiona Spencer yanked her door open.
“Oh, do try not to make a scene,” Fiona snapped as her visitor entered her office. She glared at me and slammed her door shut.
I went back to my desk, looked up Fiona Spencer’s phone number in the online campus directory, picked up the phone, and dialed. I could hear the phone ringing across the landing.
“Spencer,” she answered.
“Fiona, this is Molly,” I said. “I’m just calling to remind you about the budget meeting this afternoon.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I saw what just happened. Do you want me to call security?” I asked.
“No,” she said emphatically. “Please don’t. Thanks ever so much for your concern.”
And she hung up.
Okay, fine. I mentally checked off my mandatory daily chat with Fiona Spencer. I pulled out the stack of reflection papers from my Intro to Business Management class and resumed grading. (Intro to Business Management—IBM—get it? It’s business-y! The course titles and descriptions were already set before I was hired on. Changing them now would only confuse the students. But I want to make sure no one thinks these names were my idea.)
I finished grading the papers, stood up, and looked out onto the landing. Rodge’s door was propped open. Larry’s, Hanson’s, and Fiona’s were shut. Larry and Hanson weren’t here, of course, but how Fiona could bear having her door closed was a mystery to me. The building’s air conditioning was out of service because of something the construction workers were doing, so I had my window and door open as far as they would go. The banging of pneumatic tools, the traffic out on the main road, and even conversations on lower floors reverberated up the center of the building and directly into my office. But at least I had a breeze.
The sputter of an engine starting up outside cut through the other noise. I ran back into my office and looked out of my window, just in time to see a motorcycle disappear around the corner of the main hospital building.
Fiona was on the back of the motorcycle. Or at least, someone who sure looked like Fiona. Her thin, strawberry-blond hair peeked out from under a helmet, and her floral-print dress fluttered in the wind as the bike sped off.
Molly: A Mediocre Mentor
I DON’T USUALLY LOOK forward to budget meetings, but today I welcomed the break. I was drenched in sweat after spending most of the day in my un-air-conditioned top-floor office, and hours of grading freshman writing had made me cross-eyed. At a quarter till, I locked up my office and went down the four flights of stairs and across the utility road to the main hospital building.
I passed a man in a bright-pink Konishi shirt and a hard hat. He was standing in the shade of the cantilevered terrace, talking on his phone.
As unpleasant as it was for me to sit in my office and swelter, I realized I had nothing to complain about compared to the Konishi Construction crew. They had to toil in the soggy heat, wearing hard hats, long sleeves, and work boots.
“Nah, no good,” the man was saying. “Lava rock too hard. Cannot dig a hole big enough. Listen. I get one place. I get you the key. Top floor but we get the elevator working now. Eh, no leave one mess, ah?”
(Later it occurred to me that the man was probably arranging for even more junk to get dumped into Fiona’s office.)
The College of Commerce budget meeting was scheduled in the dining room on the ground floor of the main hospital building. It’s a gorgeous space. They held the donor banquet there when the university first took over the old hospital complex. You’d think it was originally a grand ballroom, with its lofty stamped-tin ceilings and its tall French doors leading out to the terrace. In fact it had been a tuberculosis ward, before the discovery of antibiotics, when the state-of-the-art treatment was healthful quantities of sunlight and fresh air. With the doors propped open to let in the trade winds, the temperature was actually tolerable.
Serena, the dean’s secretary, was the only other person there when I arrived. I jumped in to help set up the room, shoving tables out of the way and unfolding metal chairs.
“This is so much nicer than our old building,” I said.
“Hm,” Serena said. “If you ask me, the university should’ve asked a few more questions before they moved us in here. Sorry, that’s just my opinion.”
“Why?” I asked. “Is there something wrong with the new space?”
“No,” she said offhandedly. “Unless you mind your workplace being haunted.”
“You mean the ghost of Constance Brigham?” The Brigham family heiress was rumored to roam the old hospital complex, occasionally tossing people out of windows or off balconies.
“Nah, not that,” Serena said. “The thing about Constance Brigham was made up in the seventies to scare tourists. I’m talking about the baby’s cry.”
“The what?” I asked.
“If you’re close to the hospital and you hear the baby’s cry, it means you’re gonna die. You only hear it if you did something bad, though. You should look it up.”
Two of the marketing professors came in, and Serena put them to work unfolding metal chairs.
By the time the meeting started, everyone in the management department was present—except Fiona Spencer. It’s not like she’d get lost in the crowd. We only had a couple dozen faculty in the College of Commerce, and only a few of those were women. I started to get concerned.
Worried for Fiona, of course; while she seemed to have gone off on the motorcycle willingly, it was no guarantee she was safe. But I was also concerned for myself, which I realize sounds a little selfish. I was afraid Dan Watanabe, my dean, would blame me for Fiona’s absence. Not only was I Fiona’s department chair, I was her assigned mentor, and the first in my college to participate in the new campus wide Encompassing Mentoring Initiative. Which meant I was singlehandedly responsible for cultivating Fiona’s Sense of Community and Belonging at Mahina State University. And also in a position to embarrass the whole College of Commerce if I failed.
It's not false humility to say when Dan chose me as Fiona’s mentor, he couldn’t have picked a worse candidate. I have such a low tolerance for unstructured social interaction, on Sundays I time my arrival at Mass to avoid the Passing of the Peace.
But Dan didn’t have many alternatives. I’m the only woman in the management department, and I’m also apparently the only one Dan can trust to take on extra work and do it properly. So I’m the one who gets to check in daily with Fiona to make sure she is feeling Fully Integrated into the Life of the College.
Fortunately for me, Dan Watanabe seemed to have more important things to do today than hassle me about the Encompassing Mentoring Initiative. Dan usually gave an impression of grayness: salt-and-pepper hair, silver-framed glasses, gray-and-beige reverse-print aloha shirts. But today he looked like his own ghost.
“Thank you for coming, everyone.” Dan’s weary voice rang and echoed in the great room. “You may have heard the rumors about an unexpectedly large budget cut coming down. Well, the rumors are true.”
He looked around to make sure he had everyone’s attention. He did.
“It seems,” he went on, “the construction on this building has cost more than anticipated.”
