Finals    Chapter Twenty-Three  Unfortunately for Vickie, Claudia Eames, a reporter for The Oregonian, was the first to report on St. Elizabeth’s third tragic occurrence this year. This surely wasn’t Claudia’s first rodeo because the information she gathered in such a small timeframe was incredible, and slightly worrisome.   Eames described the scene in picture perfect detail following the aftermath of the car bomb. She went on to state that the car bomb resulted in two causalities, Cheryl Quinn and Gordon Rogers. Like me, the reporter was able to discover Quinn’s restraining order against Rogers, which led to some rational speculation on her part as to the motive behind the crime.   The article could have ended there, and personally, I would have preferred it, but Eames then went on to discuss Rogers’s mental condition. Unbeknownst to yours truly, from the time of Rogers’s “physical altercation” as Eames described the incident involving Rogers damaging Quinn’s car with his textbooks, Rogers went from living from one rehabilitation center to next until very recently. According to Rogers’s therapist, Dr. Portman, who had been seeing Rogers for several years, this “disturbed young man had only just been granted permission to live by himself five months ago.” However, Rogers still attended weekly group therapy meetings and frequent counseling sessions with the good doctor.   I was already feeling sick to my stomach reading about the disaster I had instigated, but my queasiness intensified when Portman addressed the likelihood of patient relapse. “Individuals with mental health afflictions are no different from those with alcohol or gambling problems,” Dr. Portman began. “One drink or one bet can cause a backslide on an individual’s progress. The same can be said for a person such as Gordon. If that individual begins to digress back to the old way he behaved in certain social circumstances, the progress made up to that point is essentially lost. It can be as simple as a phone call from an old friend giving advice, a lucid opinion, or a forceful suggestion from someone that the patient admires or respects. Any of these happenings can lead to atavism.”   Eames ended the piece with a typical unsolved mystery conclusion, stating that the police were looking to gather more evidence linking Rogers to the bomb before ruling the case closed.   Father Beci, the university president, gave a small excerpt as well saying that university life would continue despite this unforeseen tragedy as he prayed for the families involved in this awful misfortune.   Incidentally, the following day the president sent out a rather long-winded email going into further detail about the tragedy and the university’s plans to continue the course, and that the immediate plan was to carry on with finals and the graduation ceremony. Although the event did happen a mere week and a half before finals, Beci’s decision wasn’t surprising considering he was one hardnosed Italian son of a bitch. He constantly preached hard work, determination and relentless fortitude and given the fact that as a child he had to walk uphill both ways to get to school, the thought of him canceling or postponing finals due to Quinn’s death was unimaginable.   How was I managing to cope after this series of adverse events, you ask? I was teetering on the fucking brink. If a reporter had found all of that information in one day, how were the police not supposed to find evidence linking me to Rogers and the car bomb? Suppose Rogers wrote my name down on a piece of paper and had it sitting around in his apartment or what if someone saw us at IHOP? What if a student or a professor overheard my argument with Quinn and told the cops about it?   There were too many questions, too many ways of uncovering my identity, and far too many possibilities of being caught. I was a sitting duck waiting to be blown to smithereens. I was done, finished, game over, hasta la vista, baby. My life was over.   For days, I sulked around the house, venturing out only to attend class. I told everyone I was feeling under the weather, but I really just wasn’t in the mood to talk. Hell, I was depressed. The death count was up to four and not only was the crushing Catholic guilt starting to eat away at my insides, the odds of being captured seemed all but a guarantee. What was there to live for anymore? I was a goner simply waiting until the long arm of the law barged into my room and tossed me in the slammer.   As I moped on my bed, face down in the pillows, I weighed my options. To me, there were three viable choices. The first was to give up. This was the quitter’s route. I would be accepting defeat. I was benching my starters for my second stringers in the belief that victory was unreachable. The one pro in selecting this option was that my worrying would stop. I’d be behind bars, and at least I’d have a chance to finally read and work out. Then again, I wasn’t fond of ass play, nor was I one hundred percent sure I was going to get busted. The odds were not in my favor, but why throw in the towel when a thread of hope remained?  Since I wasn’t quite at the point of handing myself over to the authorities, I went on to my next alternative: hop in the Honda and peace out. At least I’d have a head start on the coppers if I decided to hit the open road. Nevertheless, I didn’t have the black market essentials to make it very far. I didn’t have a fake passport or even a fake ID. I had no cash, and the cops could easily trace any of my credit cards. This option again assumed the police found out about my involvement with Rogers, and if for some reason they didn’t know, this decision was bound to put me on their radar. The only way this plan was ever going to succeed was if I completely gave myself to the dark side. Sure, I was a murdering sociopath, but thanks to my facade I still had parents who loved me and wonderful friends. I’d have to give that all up if I wanted to make it to Mexico or Canada.   I would probably have to steal vehicles and lots of dough if this plan was to succeed, but even if I did make it across the border what was I going to do? Become a migrant worker? That didn’t sound too appealing.  The final choice was to put up with the accumulating stomach ulcers and wait it out. I had one week left until I received my diploma, then I’d be on a plane faster than you could cancel James Woods’s latest television disaster. Once home, it’d be all bonbons and Guitar Hero. There would be no pointless fretting over the chances of the police learning of my homicides or plots to destroy more lives. None of that nonsense. I could sit on my can, Bud Light in hand, and catch up on The Big Bang Theory. Boy, did that sound like a splendid arrangement. But at this point, getting home unscathed seemed more a hallucination than a probable reality.   Until that point when I was in the air with a SkyMall magazine in my lap, my objective was to appear ghostlike. With Dead Week on the horizon, classes were basically over. Final assignments and study guides would be handed out shortly, meaning I didn’t have to be on campus. Also, I had but one job left to do at The Gazette, so my presence would no longer be required in the newsroom, freeing me of all responsibilities on campus.   In the span of a week, I was going to be incognito. Like a drunken student on pub crawl, I was going to spend so much time wandering from one place to the next, Dunn and his police dogs were going to have to hire Kyra Sedgwick to hunt down this sociopath. If I was actually going to get away with my horrible, dark deeds, this was my last hope.