Myra Wendam, a professor, was killed in a head-on collision between a bus and a taxi outside the university.
Lots of students had a terror of her and her two gay colleagues, Ricky and Aba. They three had a heart of stone. They felt very bitter about their childhood and all that was denied them. They were subtle psychos. With the existence of the three at the college, all students were between the devil and the deep blue sea. So, some students wept for joy when they were told that their professor died.
A lot of students would get short shrift from them even if they fell sick while they were stressed out by being under a lot of pressure and, of course, by their waspish tongues which could hurt. The students found them arrogant and rude. Nobody could believe their pretentiousness but their innocent students, who thought that a diploma in communication arts was gold bullion. The three seemed to show signs of genius. They taught a lot of things, which they themselves didn’t know what these really were. Myra taught advertising, but never had she produced at least one half-decent advertisement. But they kept on believing that their MA’s (or EdD in the case of Aba) were credible evidence for convicting people around them.
***
Two years ago, both Ricky and Aba, who had been extorting money from their students for years, were found slain in an alley a block from a cinema where a lot of gays, who had promiscuous lifestyles, would go. Since then, the place was said to be haunted by the ghosts of the two gay professors.
There seemed no justice in the world as they were slain like that, but justice remained elusive for them and their family. Life just redressed the balance, perhaps.
***
Myra's cremation was a sad affair. Few mourners attended the funeral. All were her family. No students were there to symphatise. Only Ricky's family and his sister, who the rest of the class were sick of watching brown-nose, and Aba's cousin, who would dance attendance on all her professors. They all spent the entire afternoon schmoozing with Myra's family.
***
The death of Myra fuelled speculation that she had, indeed, struck terror into her students and that someone still must have held a grudge against her for doing all the bad things to him, or perhaps, her. The fault lay with her, whose manners were as worse as Ricky’s. But, of course, Ricky was a subtle evil genius.
No one, at first, knew what made the bus and the taxi collide at the crossroads, but after months of investigation the police suspected foul play. They investigated how a crime like that could have occurred. The killer or the mastermind must have borne any grudge against her. Myra died in mysterious circumstances, and there was a possibility that it was murder. For one thing, when the bus driver was in collision with a taxi, one passenger heard the noise of a gun firing at the helm.
The next scene was all a bit sudden. The one killed was not the real driver. The real driver had escaped, and her wife was on TV, weeping buckets and appealing to her husband to show up. After an autopsy was carried out, a week after, the police and the media concluded from the evidence that Myra was murdered.
A year ago, Myra kept herself aloof from what was happening around her. Her insensitivity towards the feelings of her colleagues, who would have a foul day with her at work, was remarkable. But one of her colleagues noticed that she'd been seeing someone on the quiet. The woman looked strangely familiar, though her colleague knew she'd never met her before. When the woman and Myra saw her, they gave her a black look, and, as she left the secluded restaurant, she was confronted by the angry women, Myra and her companion, who tried to block her way. They threatened to kill her unless she did as they asked. In order to escape threat, she resigned from her job unexpectedly and fled somewhere very far. Since then, she seemed to have sunk without trace.
Myra’s family were surprised to see her pray. Praying became part of her morning and evening ritual. She was an atheist and what she was doing seemed paradoxical to them. She erected a statue to her god and decided to devote herself to him. How she became like what she was remained a mystery until her death when, in the fading light, people saw bats flitting about on the street where the bus and the taxi ran into. Then police discovered a bundle of black books whose writings were difficult to decipher and small plastic discs whose information was fully encrypted and couldn’t be accessed. Myra's full name was carved into them. So, the police turned them over to her family. A week after, her family got a going-over and all the books and discs were stolen. The family questioned the motives, but it remained wrapped in mystery save Myra's only daughter, Alexandria.
Some of her students recalled how Myra had paraded up Commonwealth Avenue, past Tandang Sora Flyover. She looked like some mad old woman in her wide-brimmed buri hat while she was dragging a cart with a statue of her god down to the street, her shoes and socks taken off, she walking barefoot. But when they remembered how she would start to swear at them in class, they would swear like a trooper, too. They loathed having known her in their life. What was very clear in their stories, which they were spreading, was their passionate hatred of her.
Everyone rejoiced at the news of her death. Her colleagues cried as if it was not for joy when they heard the accident. She was believed to have died not in the accident but in revenge for what she had done bad in the past.
The news of her death was around for a week, then slid into oblivion.
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