Murder Misread (2 page)

“
Come on, Sarah, want to
go to the playground?” Competently, Liz bustled the children from
the office.

Charlie turned back and
saw the inner office door open behind Cindy’s desk. Bernie
Reinalter came out holding a sheaf of papers. Bernie was lean, very
fair, no taller than Charlie but with an aloofness that was
suitable for the chairman of the department. “Good morning,
Charlie,” he said.

“
Hi, Bernie.” Charlie
started to smooth his hair but stopped himself. Bernie was always
carefully and conservatively dressed. Even now, in shirtsleeves for
summer, he was in a pale yellow button-down shirt, and there was a
crease in his gray trousers. “Uh, Bernie, this is my statistical
consultant for the summer. Dr. Ryan. This is our chairman,
Professor Reinalter.”

“
Glad to meet you,” said
Maggie.

“
Sorry I don’t have time
to talk to you just now,” Bernie told her. “I’m just bringing Cindy
some material to type up. I’m meeting a couple of Japanese
scientists for lunch so it helps to have it in written form
too.”

“
Sure, we’ll have time to
get acquainted later.”

Bernie disappeared back
into his office. Cindy glanced at the stack of papers he’d left on
her desk, then turned back to Maggie. “You’ll be using the corner
office in Charlie’s wing. Professor Schiff’s office. He’s moved
out, but the custodian says he won’t be finished cleaning till late
this afternoon so I’ll give you the key later.”

“
Okay.”

“
And now
forms. All assembled in one color-coordinated packet. Unlike
socks,” she added, with just a hint of a glance at Charlie. In his
pocket, his fist tightened on his keys.
Bitch.
Cindy continued smoothly,
“Why don’t you take them along, Dr. Ryan, and fill them out when
you can? I’m here till four-thirty.”

“
Fine. And please call me
Maggie.” She scooped up the packet. “The checks come to this office
too?”

“
Right. I’m the money
lady.”

“
You sure are. Another
day, another dollar, eh, Cindy?” said Charlie.

“
Now, where have I heard
that before?” Cindy turned her shell-pink back abruptly and resumed
typing.

“
Dismissed,” said Maggie.
Her smile was as mischievous as her daughter’s.

“
She rules us all,”
explained Charlie as they walked back toward his yellow hall.
“Money, keys, typewriters—she controls the mainstays of
life.”

“
I’ll treat her with
proper deference,” Maggie promised. “Okay, now. Tell me about this
project of yours.”

“
Fine.” Charlie pushed his
door open and kicked the wedge under it to hold it open. He hung
his jacket on the wooden coatrack, then picked up his briefcase and
pulled out a stapled manuscript. “You’ve seen the
proposal?”

“
Skimmed it.” She slid
Cindy’s varicolored forms into her own briefcase. “But my
experience has been that proposals often get altered as the first
results come in.”

Charlie laughed ruefully.
“You’ve got us pegged, all right. A lot of the details have
changed. But we’re still hacking away at the same basic question:
How does a skilled reader read? When we know what the best adult
readers are doing, we can start thinking about how to teach kids to
do it too. I mean, just think what happens when you read.” He
gestured at the papers in his hand. “You pick up a sheet of paper
with funny little marks on it, and your eyes look at the marks. Not
all the marks—your eyes bounce from one fixation point to another,
usually hitting just a few spots per line.”

“
Right, I remember the
basics. You process hundreds of words per minute. More like picking
up thoughts instead of letters.”

“
Something like that. But
remember, all you have on the page is letters, grouped, with spaces
between groups.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose and waved his
proposal eagerly. “So an efficient reader must have some sort of
plan, or he’d be misreading all the time, having to go back and
check. Obviously your peripheral vision will have some blurry
information about what’s coming up next on the page, so when you
know how, you can bounce your eyes to the best possible next
fixation point.” His fingers stabbed at the pages he held. “The
point that will give you the most information about the thought
that the writer is developing. We’re trying to figure out what
kinds of points are chosen for fixation by skilled readers. How the
hell do we do it? What blurry peripheral cues do we respond to?
It’s not easy. As you guessed, we’ve already given up on half of
our bright ideas about how to measure this process.”

Maggie cocked her head,
her hands thrust into her jeans pockets. “But the other half must
be working or you wouldn’t have sent for an expensive New York
statistician like me to help analyze it.”

He couldn’t help
responding to that smile, a sudden glow like Diane Keaton’s. “Well,
I have hopes.” Boy, did he ever! He’d been promoted on the basis of
work that had grown out of his long-ago thesis. This was his first
major project since then, his bid to prove that the department
hadn’t been wrong to choose him to fill the famous Professor
Chandler’s shoes as reading researcher. If this multitude of
interconnected studies didn’t work out—well, he’d still have
tenure. But he’d seen too many professors scorned and patronized
when their early promise had fizzled out, human deadwood in their
own departments. Last year, two of his pilot studies in a row had
failed, and for a week he’d had nightmares: rigid shoulders
marching out the door, little Charlie screaming, “Wait, wait!”
unable to follow.

But he’d succeeded on the
next experiment and dared to hope again. “At least we’ve got a
usable method,” he told Maggie. “Here, let me show you.” He flicked
on the television that sat on the side table, and went to the
bookcase-covered back wall. The books in fact sat in carefully
organized stacks on the floor, crowded out by rows of plastic
videotape containers. Charlie selected one and fed it into the
machine. Uncooperatively, the screen began lazily to flip up
horizontal bars.

“
What we’re using is
basically a double-exposure technique,” he explained as he
struggled with the controls. “Camera one is recording the
reflection of a light on the cornea of the reader’s eye. You see
the reflection as a white spot on the TV. Camera two is on the page
he’s reading. So the white spots you’ll see superimposed on the
page are the places on the text where the eye fixates.” The bars
were rolling down the screen now.

“
Ha! I told you it’d never
replace the horse,” declared a cheerful new voice.

Trust Tal to be around
when anyone new appeared. Charlie turned. “Tal! Hi!”

Tal Chandler was bald, a
wiry, twinkling old gnome with knobby nose, knobby chin, knobby red
cheeks, as though his face had been constructed of little hard
apples. He reminded Charlie of a Walt Disney dwarf. He wore
shapeless gray trousers, a heather-gray tweed jacket with leather
elbow patches and sagging pockets, and a wide grin. He nodded
toward Maggie, who was studying the video controls. “And who is the
lovely learned lady?”

“
Dr. Ryan. Our statistical
consultant, just arrived from New York,” said Charlie. “Maggie,
this is Tal Chandler. The Meredith Professor of Educational
Psychology. Emeritus.”

“
Talbott Chandler! Of
course!” Maggie turned from the video. The screen was behaving
itself now, showing a clear page of text with white spots
hopscotching across it. She extended her hand enthusiastically, and
Tal dropped his bookbag to shake it. “You did that famous stuff on
how kids learn French!”

“
A
linguist as well as a statistician! Delightful!” Tal beamed. “Tell
me, are you related to the small children I saw a few minutes ago
in the preschool playground? The younger announced that I was ‘Da.’
The elder told him, I believe,
‘Fiche-moi la paix.’
”

“
Oh, God.” Maggie clapped
a hand to her forehead in mock dismay. “I’d hoped that if I did my
swearing in French they wouldn’t pick up nasty words to shock
innocent bystanders. Not a good strategy around a university, I
see.”

Tal’s smile widened, his
little round cheeks bunching even tighter. “Fear not, I shan’t
translate,” he assured Maggie.

“
Hey, c’mon,” protested
Charlie.

Tal rolled his eyes at
Maggie, beckoned Charlie closer, and whispered in his ear, “It
means ‘shut the hell up.’”

“
Mm. A truly useful
phrase,” Charlie admitted.

Tal turned back to Maggie.
“And where is the lucky father of these phenomenal infants? Will we
have the pleasure of his company?”

“
He’s still in New York,
but he’ll join us a little later this summer. He’ll be acting near
here, at the Farm Theatre again.”

“
Ah, the
Farm Theatre. Good outfit, that. Saw a splendid
Cyrano
there a few years
back,” Tal reminisced.

“
That was Nick!” exclaimed
Maggie. “He did Cyrano!”

“
He did?
Send him my congratulations!” Tal snatched up Charlie’s borrowed
ruler left-handed and waved it on high. “What moments, eh? ‘Let
death come! I wait, standing proud, with sword in
hand!’
Debout, et l’épée
à
la main!
”
He hopped onto a chair,
commenting aside, “My wife can do this all in French, you know. She
makes a far better Cyrano than I. You must meet her. Let’s see…
something about old enemies… ah—”

Maggie’s blue eyes were
dancing. “‘Despite you all, old enemies that round me loom…’” she
prompted.

“
Ah yes!” Right hand
cocked behind him in a fencer’s pose, he thrust the ruler at the
air. “‘Despite you all, old enemies that round me loom, I bear
aloft unstained, unyielding—my white plume!’”

He swished an imaginary
hat and bowed extravagantly. Maggie applauded, laughing.
“Quel geste!”

Charlie said, “Tal, you’re
bouncy today!”

“
Yes. The delightful
company, of course. And I’m celebrating!” He twinkled down at them.
It had been months since Charlie had seen him so
ebullient.

“
Celebrating
what?”

Tal shook his head
vigorously. “That’s a secret! Tell me, Dr. Ryan, will you be free
for lunch today?”

“
I’ll probably have to
meet the kids.”

“
Tomorrow, then! And you
must meet my wife. She can’t come today either.” He jumped down
from the chair, stumbling a little but catching himself by grabbing
at the jacket on the rack. “But Charlie, you must join today’s
celebration! Not the cafeteria. Someplace on College Avenue, with
proper champagne. Plato’s, all right? At noon?”

“
It’s a deal,” agreed
Charlie.

Tal’s cheeks bunched in
another grin. “A celebration! I’ll see who else can come. Of course
I asked Cindy, but she had another appointment. I told her I’d save
her some champagne. But now perhaps you should tend to your tapes.”
He gestured theatrically at the TV screen, where little white
flashes continued to bounce silently across the displayed text. “Do
you know how we used to do eye-movement research, Dr.
Ryan?”

“
No, I’m afraid
not.”

“
One brave fellow,
Professor Ahrens, actually stuck a tiny cup on his eyeball with a
thin marker attached, so as he read, the pattern of eye movements
was traced onto a smoked drum in front of him.”

“
God! That’s hideous!”
Maggie shuddered. “How could he read normally?”

“
Yes, indeed, that’s what
the rest of us all said! You see, we didn’t want to have to do
experiments like that ourselves. We scientists like to think that
we can endure anything in the search for truth, but really we hate
to sacrifice our little comforts and little vices. But luckily, in
this case someone eventually thought of bouncing light off the eye
and photographing it, and bright young folks like Charlie here are
refining the methods all the time. Though I don’t know about
Charlie.” He shook his head in mock sorrow. “This young sprat
thinks we make up hypotheses as we read, whereas anyone sensible
knows we look at the words.”

“
This old geezer says we
struggle along word by word without any coherent ideas about what
they mean,” Charlie returned.

“
You see what I mean?” Tal
appealed to Maggie. “He twists simple statements of fact. Why,
according to him there’s no need to look at the page at all, just
open the book and start hypothesizing. Daydreaming.”

Charlie laughed “Tal,
who’s twisting now?”

“
Well, wait’ll you hear my
paper at the MPA convention!” Tal glanced at his watch. “But right
now, I’d best return these books to the library. Now that I’ve
finished daydreaming my way through them.” He hoisted his bookbag
and whisked out as quickly as he’d come.

“
Famous scholars never
look the way I think they will,” said Maggie, amused. “His
publications are very sober.”

Charlie nodded. “He was a
little giddy today, though he’s always cheerful. He’s been retired
four years now, and still bustles around. Publishes a lot even now.
We have great discussions about the control of eye movements. And
he’s curious about everything. You notice the grilling he gave you
already!”