Sounds of Murder (11 page)

Candide, her poodle, rubbed against her leg
and she reached down and petted his head. He was the only one in
the house with whom she could share this secret.

“Hey there, little fellow,” she whispered.
“Are you as anxious to check out that CD as I am?” Candide sniffed
and rolled over on his back, begging for a tummy rub. Pamela
obliged, bored with what had turned into several hours of paper
grading.

Angela was ensconced at the front door
handing out candy to trick-or-treaters. She’d actually volunteered
for the job and Rocky was willing to let her have the position
seeing as how she’d completed her homework. Every once in a while,
Pamela heard the doorbell and Angela's squeals when she recognized
the outfits of the tiny costumed children. Rocky had, as usual,
prepared a warm, comforting dinner—cornbread and a savory beef and
wine concoction he called “Sergeant’s Stew.” He was now seated at
the dining room table grading essays for his freshman English
classes. Every once in a while he’d saunter into the bedroom and
announce how many papers he’d completed, a sort of contest they had
when they were both grading.

She tried to concentrate on the paper she was
correcting. She glanced at the various red marks she’d made, hoping
to refresh her mind as to the content of the manuscript, with no
luck. Oh, she thought, it's no use. I simply won’t be able to
accomplish anything until I see what—if anything--is on that disk.
At that moment, Rocky walked in, with his stack of papers and a
gleeful look.

"Done!" he chirped.

"What? No!" she responded, "I was ahead of
you just a bit ago."

"You're not keeping up, Babe," he announced.
"How many more?" He gestured to the stack of uncorrected papers
piled on the hassock in front of her.

"At least forty," she sighed. Rocky always
won these grading battles because he didn’t agonize over every
error the student made. He circled problem areas, made a general
assessment, gave a grade, wrote a note of encouragement, and then
went on to the next paper. The sooner he finished a stack of
papers, the sooner he could be whipping up some new recipe.

"How's Angie doing?,” she asked, “Has she run
out of treats yet?"

"Nope," he said, "We still have several
bags."

She placed the paper she was correcting down,
along with her pencil and stretched her arms up in the air. "I
can't believe she volunteered to hand out Halloween candy. That's
so unlike her. So altruistic."

"She’s a college freshman," he mused, "she
should take on some adult responsibilities."

"And handing out Halloween candy is what
you’d consider an adult responsibility," she laughed at him, poking
him in the belly as he moved closer to her, "Maybe next we can have
her help us pay off the mortgage."

“Or your traffic tickets.” He sat on the edge
of the hassock, careful not to disturb her stack of student
masterpieces.

“Rocky.”

"Sorry. I didn't really get a chance to ask
you how things went today," he said softly, putting his large hands
on her knees. "Was it hard for you? I hope they were supportive
over there. I know that department of yours can be a bunch of pit
bulls sometimes."

"Actually," she said, smiling at him, "people
were very nice. The students, of course, were concerned too."

"So concerned that they probably thought the
best thing for you was to cancel class, right?"

"How well you know them," she laughed.

"I have the same ones, remember," he
said.

“I know.”

"What about Marks, your Chair?" he queried,
"He ought to give you an all-expense paid sabbatical. You deserve
it."

"Only," she said, caressing his cheek, "if
you can get your Chair to give you one at the same time so we can
go away together."

"Ummm," he sighed, snuggling into her neck,
"if only." Angela bounded into the room, her auburn hair hanging
over her face. She was carrying a large basket full of wrapped
candies.

"Hey, Dad," she announced, "I'm on the last
bag.” She stopped short when she saw her parents romancing in the
arm chair. “Oh, no! Not again! Can't you two get a room?" She
puckered up her face in disgust.

"Angela," said Rocky, standing now, almost at
attention, "where did you ever hear such a banal expression?"

"Don't use those big English teacher words on
me, Dad," responded his daughter, her oversized t-shirt hanging
loosely around her knees, "every time I turn my back, you and Mom
are acting like teenagers."

"And of course," smiled Pamela, gathering her
papers and returning to her grading, "we wouldn't want to act like
one of them." She looked directly at her 18-year-old daughter with
a very pointed expression.

“Hey, Mom,” queried Angela, “did the police
find the murderer yet?” She pronounced “murderer” in a shaky,
horror movie voice. Rocky scowled. He obviously didn’t like either
of his girls concerned with murderers. “Did you go back to the
scene of the crime? What was it like?” asked Angela.

“I did and it looked like it always looks,
Angie,” she replied calmly, “Just a plain, ordinary lab filled with
computers.”

“Bor--ing,” sang out Angela. “No blood?”

“No blood. Sorry, sweetie.”

“Not a very interesting lab,” Angie sighed.
She plopped down on her parents’ bed.

"And what would make a lab interesting,
Angie?" queried Rocky, "Wires and beakers spewing dry ice? A mad
scientist in a lab coat cackling gleefully?"

"That," answered Pamela, "would be some
English teacher's dream of an interesting lab." She smiled.

"Dad," said Angela sitting up, obviously
trying to be helpful to this adult lacking in real-world knowledge.
"You have computer labs in the English Department too."

"Yes," continued Rocky, "but in the English
Department we do not suck out our students’ brains or give them
lobotomies." He did his best Bela Lugosi imitation.

Angela grimaced at her father's lame attempt
at horror humor.

"Nor do we," responded Pamela, "in the very
humane Psychology Department."

"If by humane," he countered, "you mean that
you reduce all emotions to multiple choice questions."

"Rocky," she sighed. "Not tonight. What is
this, Halloween or something?"

"Sorry, Babe," said Rocky, hanging his head,
and then added with a shrug, "just can't resist myself." He smiled
at her, licking his lips, and she returned the smile.

"You two make me sick," snarled Angela,
noticing the romantic spark between the couple. "Why do my parents
always have to make google eyes at each other?" She was now sitting
up on the bed, flipping the remaining pieces of candy in the
bowl.

“I think that's goo-goo eyes," corrected
Rocky.

"Wrong," challenged Pamela, laughing.
"Everything is Google these days." They laughed together and
Angela, unaware she was the subject of their joke, looked annoyed.
Candide took advantage of the parents' distraction to jump up on
the bed to beg for Angela’s attention.

"Actually," said Angela, scratching Candide’s
head, and wary that she might not be taken seriously. "I’d like to
see that lab some time. I mean, don't you think I should know about
my mother’s job?"

"Absolutely," responded Rocky, nodding. "I
absolutely think you should know all about your mother’s job. But
that doesn’t mean you have to hang out in that lab."

"I may just drop by some time to see what it
looks like," She looked up at them to see their reaction. There was
none.

"Or you could," said Pamela, "just take a
Psychology class and then you could actually participate in one of
our experiments in the lab."

"I could?" asked Angie, with delight, then
suddenly hit with a new thought, “I wouldn’t have to take your
class, would I, Mom?”

“No,” answered Pamela, laughing, “any
psychology class would do.”

"Come on," Rocky said, motioning to Angela,
"scoot! Let your mother finish her grading. We're both disturbing
her." He escorted the young woman out of the couple's bedroom.

Pamela smiled and was grateful for the brief
recess from her otherwise dreary chore--and from the relentless
stress of contemplating the contents of the secret in her
pocketbook.

She thought about what her husband had said.
Her colleagues in the department had been very considerate--very
understanding. Many of them seemed to believe that she shouldn’t
have come in to work today.

After Mitchell's pronouncement about the
entire department having sufficient animosity towards Charlotte to
murder her, not much more had happened in her meeting with her
Chair today. She wished she’d gotten an idea or at least a hint
regarding the reason for the big fight between him and Charlotte
yesterday, or the photograph that Charlotte had put in his mailbox.
If these were issues that were causing Mitchell Marks any guilt, he
didn’t indicate as such to Pamela in his office this afternoon. No,
Mitchell seemed as concerned about Charlotte's murder as the rest
of them. But he didn’t seem particularly guilt-ridden--at least,
not to her. But, she wasn't a detective. How was she to know?

What she really wanted to do, needed to do,
was examine the CD. But the computer was in their study which was
right by the front door. If she suddenly stopped grading papers and
went into the study to use the computer--for whatever reason—Rocky,
and probably even Angie, would want to know what she was doing. It
would just have to wait.

She frustratingly picked up the same paper
she’d been grading for over an hour and tried again to pick out the
student writer's main theme. Finally, after several more hours of
bad grammar, poor vocabulary, and incredibly simplistic ideas, she
finished the last paper with a flourish and placed it with the
others in a manila folder. Then, she took the folder and her purse,
with its forbidden treasure, and placed them both on the dining
room table.

Returning to the bedroom, she quickly got
ready for bed. She brushed her fine, chin-length hair, removing the
tangles and making it shine. She brushed her teeth and rubbed her
favorite smelling cream all over her face and arms. As she peeked
out into the living room, she could see that Rocky was in the
kitchen starting the dishwasher and turning off the lights.

"Is Angie...?"

"She went to bed a good hour ago," he
whispered. "I guess all that Halloweening was exhausting." He came
toward her in the bedroom, his arms extended for an embrace. After
a goodnight kiss, she crawled into bed, yawning as she reached out
to turn off her nightstand lamp. Rocky quickly got ready for bed
and slipped in beside her. She remained very quiet and breathed
regularly. Soon--amazingly soon, she always thought--Rocky was
sound asleep, snoring gently. Candide, as if in sync with his
master, timed his delicate doggie snores with Rocky's.

Pamela was rigid. She glanced at her
nightstand clock with the digital face, discreetly trying not to
move her body and disturb her husband. It was 11:20 p.m. She lay
there listening to the snoring sounds beside and below her.

Again, she looked at the clock face. Now it
read 11:45 p.m. Very carefully she pushed back the covers and
gently slid her feet out, stepping into her slippers. Grabbing her
robe from the back of the door, she quietly exited the bedroom,
pulling the door shut behind her. She grabbed her purse from the
dining table and walked softly down the hallway into the study.

Rocky had shut down the computer; she wished
he hadn't done that, because the computer made the normal start-up
noises when she pressed the power button. It couldn’t be helped.
She removed a pile of papers and clothing from the computer chair.
She needed to clean up this room—some day. The kitchen was always
immaculate because that was Rocky’s domain and he kept it spotless.
The rest of the house was hers and it showed. Her sloppy
housekeeping bothered her, but not enough to actually work more
industriously at it. She sat at the computer and reached into her
purse for the CD. Removing the disk from its folder, she inserted
the shiny circular disk into the CD drawer. Impatiently, she waited
while the computer uploaded the data. She brought up her favorite
acoustic analysis program and nervously loaded the data.

Immediately, the screen filled with a
spectrograph and wavy lines, indicating the presence of sound. Some
of the waves were rounded rather than sharp, indicating to Pamela’s
perceptive eye that she was looking at human vocal sound in
addition to mechanical or non-human sound.

Placing a set of earplug speakers in her
ears, she turned the volume control to a low level. She was totally
engrossed in the screen in front of her as she moved her cursor to
the start of the wavy line on the spectrograph and pressed
play.

An unbelievably strange, guttural sound was
emitted. It was hard to determine what it was or even describe
it--like nothing she’d ever heard before. Certainly it was human,
but it sounded like choking and there were also non-human sounds
too--things being bumped, pushed, a double-clicking noise, a
scraping, and various other sounds she couldn't identify. The
entire visual display was comprised of these sounds.

Towards the end of the recorded section, the
guttural, choking sound faded, as did the bumps and other noises.
Finally, all the sounds ended abruptly. The wavy line on the
spectrograph disappeared. Pamela clicked her cursor to indicate
stop.

"What in God's name are you doing?" asked a
voice.

She turned abruptly, petrified, her earplugs
tumbling into her lap. Rocky was standing behind her. He’d entered
quietly, while she was caught up in listening to the recording.

"Rocky!" she whispered, inhaling.

"What is that, Pamela?" he demanded. He used
his drill sergeant voice—one she never liked.

"It's ... it's," she stammered, attempting to
think of some way to explain what recording was so important that
she’d kept it secret from her husband and had sneaked out of bed in
the middle of the night to listen to.