“Go on, Iran.”

I staggered out the loading doors into the stifling heat and sunlight. Gathering my bearings, I jogged across campus to Dexler. As I closed in on the building, I saw three police cars, a fire truck, and two ambulances gathered around an iron fountain. The fountain, entitled Empowerment, was a twenty-foot metal embarrassment to modern art that a donor with more cash than class unloaded on the college. Never one to upset benefactors with impending tasty bequests, Martin accepted the sculpture, but tucked it behind the Dexler Math and Science building, the least visible location on campus.

I forced myself to slow to a walk and tricked myself into believing that the sirens had nothing whatsoever to do with my loony brother. A handful of summer faculty and students had clustered about thirty feet from the fountain. A uniformed campus security guard blocked their view to whatever they were trying so desperately to see.

“It can’t be Mark. He wouldn’t—” I refused to allow my brain to complete that thought. When I reached the assemblage of Martinites, I asked a dour chemistry professor. “What’s going on?”

“Nobody knows. Something about Mark Hayes,” the professor said with a glint of excitement in his eyes.

I forced my way past the security guard who looked just old enough to star in a zit cream commercial. He stood on his tiptoes to peek at the action and didn’t notice me until I was already well beyond his reach.

“Wait! You can’t go back there,” the boy-officer cried, astonished that anyone would cross his imaginary line. Obviously, he hadn’t been at Martin long.

I hurried around the left side of the fountain’s base. A cluster of public servants in different official uniforms stood over something on the ground. An EMT wheeled a stretcher over to the group. They swallowed the EMT and the stretcher into their ring. I stopped, afraid to proceed, afraid for Mark. An image of a somber orderly pulling a sheet back and asking me to identify the body entered my mind. Suddenly lightheaded, I doubled over, gulping deep breaths. I had to stop watching crime shows.