The Quotient of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles) (22 page)

Brent and the Swiss Bernoulli family were the reasons I wasn’t surprised to see Ted in attendance today, already seated in the circle of chairs. I took a seat next to him and found myself once again, as with the security footage viewing, sitting between Professor Ted and Student Andrew.

“What a family,” Brent began, explaining that there were several other Bernoulli offspring who were also noted mathematicians and scientists.

Brent began with the intriguing enmity between the brothers. He talked about the professional jealousy and personality differences that marked their relationship. At least one didn’t murder the other, I mused, unable to brush off nagging thoughts of the Warnocky cousins, Harold and Gabriel.

“I did a lot of reading and I think it was Johann’s fault,” Brent said. “He didn’t get along with his own son, Daniel, either.”

And thus a more than three-hundred-year-old mystery was solved by a Henley freshman. I looked over and caught Ted’s eye. I felt we were both asking, which lucky department will claim him? A humorous moment in the little competition in Franklin Hall.

The dynamic between the Mathematics Department and the Physics Department wasn’t exactly adversarial, but there was always a little tug of war for students who showed interest in both. Math and physics were closely related, often interchangeable in subject matter. The two disciplines attracted students with similar habits and styles of thinking, distinctly different from the mental requirements of biology and chemistry.

Everyone in Franklin Hall, including the seminar students, was aware of the friendly competition.

When Brent walked us through the (Daniel) Bernoulli principle and its applications to thermodynamics, Ted clapped loudly. When our young seminar leader talked about the (Johann) Bernoulli rule to evaluate limits or the (Jacob) Bernoulli sequence of rational numbers, I clapped as hard as I could.

The students clapped and laughed with us equally.

Brent, probably having the best time of all, asked for a short break to set up a demonstration.

Most of us remained in the room since the classrooms were slightly warmer than the hallways. I also felt that some of the students were afraid the heat might go off at any moment and chose to soak up the Btu’s while they were available. Who could blame them?

I hadn’t noticed the entrance of Lauren Hughes, the sociology major who’d have majored in math if she had a different head. She came up now and knelt in front of the three of us—Ted, me, Andrew.

“This is so cool,” she said. She looked at me and offered a defense of her presence. “I came to hear Brent. We’re sort of together. He said it would be okay?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “We’re glad to have you.”

Lauren thanked me and glanced at Andrew, but still addressing me, said, “Andrew says he’s going to help you with an email problem?”

Uh-oh
, I thought.

“Oh?” Ted asked.

I’d hoped Andrew would have kept my request confidential, though I hadn’t explicitly asked him to. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Students talked. (Didn’t we all?) And Andrew was a dramatic sort who’d want to make the most of his professor’s special request for his talents.

I looked at Ted, who was giving me a questioning look. I hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings. He’d always been the go-to guy for Franklin Hall computer problems but, first, he’d been grumpy lately, and second, I wasn’t sure this kind of job, which required an understanding of hacking, was within his skill set.

I mumbled something to Lauren about how nice Andrew had been to offer his assistance, hoping Ted would interpret the comment to mean it wasn’t my idea. Then I mumbled something to Ted about how busy he’d seemed lately.

What a wimp I was when it came to situations like this. How was I going to handle the challenge of talking to Jenn this afternoon?

Brent called us to attention for demonstrations of Bernoulli’s principle of air flow. First up: He deftly opened the sides of an envelope by blowing over an open edge. We clapped. Next, he held the short end of an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper to his lips, blew across the surface, and—
ta da
(he would have said if his mouth weren’t otherwise engaged)—the whole sheet rose and floated on the air. We clapped again as the sheet of paper flapped in the breeze until Brent ran out of breath.

“Fluid mechanics,” Ted said, the way an ordinary person might say, “Good show.”

Brent used his laptop to show a video with other marvels of physical motion like the boomerang and the curve ball.

I waited for the math.

I listened with mild interest to Brent’s discussion of applications of the Bernoulli principle to the wings of airplanes and perked up when he showed a small ball could be held in place in the interior of an upside-down funnel.

Our knowledgeable presenter, who seemed to sense my “Where’s the math?” question, admitted to all that he couldn’t quite handle the equations that would describe the demonstrations he’d shown.

“All the more reason to major in math,” Andrew said. More points for Andrew, erasing the bad marks I’d given him earlier for spreading the news of my email problem.

When the seminar ended and we got up to leave, I couldn’t resist a little teasing. “Will we see you here tomorrow, too, Ted?” I asked. “The subject is Pierre de Fermat.”

He laughed. At least he wasn’t irreparably ticked off at me for choosing another fixer for my computer. “I don’t think so. Fermat’s too pure a mathematician for me. But I’ll be back later in the week when Monica talks about Caroline Herschel.” He turned to Monica, who was gathering her belongings. “As long as you promise not to whine about how she did all the work and her brother got credit for it,” he said.

“I won’t have to, Dr. Morrell. Caroline did her own calculations of the positions of heavenly bodies. And she discovered eight comets all by herself.”

Ted tipped an imaginary hat to Monica. So did I.

• • •

By the time I finished settling a few matters for individual students—Can I have an extension on Wednesday’s homework? How many references do I need for the Intersession paper? Did you read my seminar proposal yet?—Andrew was waiting outside my office. He sat on the floor cross-legged, his back against the locked door, his laptop open, supported by his knees.

I thought he might be studying a hacking manual, but as I got closer I heard carillon bells. Andrew was listening to a carillon and choir concert from France.

“I didn’t want to play it too loud,” he said. “But isn’t it awesome?”

“Awesome,” I said.

Clicking away, Andrew found an audio file of “God Save the Queen” played by a carillonist at the Peace Tower in Ottawa.

“Sometimes I think I should have majored in music,” he said, smiling.

“Bite your tongue,” I said, smiling back.

I leaned against the wall, but upright, grown-up style, and watched Andrew’s laptop screen as he tuned in on different videos. A young woman in a dark blue hoodie played movie themes at a carillon on a Midwest campus; an old man in suspenders played rousing hymns at a church in Belgium. Before I knew it, students from my seminar and other classes in the building had gathered around and Andrew raised the volume.

It might have been fewer than ten minutes, but as we made brief virtual visits to carillons in England, Poland, France, and universities across the United States, we were united in the special way that comes from sharing music.

I resolved to find a way to have more carillon music in my life.

• • •

In my office, I showed Andrew my little email problem. In the last hour, while I’d been at the seminar and then at the impromptu concert, about fifty ads had popped into my inbox.

Andrew scratched his head. “I don’t know, Dr. Knowles, this looks tough.”

My shoulders sagged. Until I caught the gleam in Andrew’s eyes and knew he’d already aced the job in his mind.

Andrew grinned. “Kidding. It’ll be done this afternoon, but”—he put his hand on his stomach—“do you mind if I run over to the Mortarboard first and grab a sandwich?”

I hadn’t noticed the time. Growing boys and all. Plus hungry professors. “Great idea,” I said. I dug in my purse and came up with money for a gourmet campus lunch for two. “Would you mind picking up a turkey and Swiss for me?”

“No problem.”

Andrew had to be talked into taking the money, but I told him it was worth a lot more than lunch from the Mortarboard for me to be able to stay warm inside for another little while.

Andrew went off to take care of room service, and I decided to find more carillon music while he was gone. I clicked away on his laptop, going into his browser history.

Instead of clicking on the music files, I was drawn to a link to the installation of the world’s largest bourdon, in the bell tower of the Riverside Church in New York City. I remembered seeing a photo of that particular bell in the Music Department hallway. This website showed the bell, weighing more than twenty tons, being hoisted onto a boat for its trip from a foundry in England in the early part of the twentieth century. With its more than ten-foot diameter, the bell towered, in a manner of speaking, over the men tugging on the ropes.

A clip of the foundry showed the steps involved in casting the bell. A frame appeared that showed the bell tipped on its side by a system of chains and pulleys, to give the foundry workers access to the inside surface. I remembered Pete Barker’s attempt to sell me on a tour of our tower.

“You could hide a person in that big one,” he’d said.

Or a load of money
, I thought.

It was a
duh
moment. I knew the police had searched places in the carillon tower where the robbers of twenty-five years ago might have hidden their spoils. Behind bricks, under floorboards, in the niches of dark stairways. But the real question was, where would a student, one who happened upon the money in the present day, hide it?

In a place that no construction worker would need to go, and no visitor would appear until the tower officially reopened—by which time, little by little, the money would have been “withdrawn,” as from a bank, and spent, or otherwise appropriated.

Inside a bell.

I grabbed my phone, left my office, and walked to the southernmost end of the building where the windows faced the fountain and the back of Admin. On the way, I punched in Virgil’s number on my smartphone.

No police cars on campus. No answer on Virgil’s cell. I was left with no official outlet for my brilliant thought. Or, not so brilliant, given my track record in this case. Virgil had been a step or two ahead of me all along. I should have been pleased; wasn’t that what my taxes were for? He was doing his job; I had my own. I had equations to solve. Puzzles to create.

Either the police had found the money or they’d given up and left campus. I called Virgil’s number again. This wasn’t exactly a nine-one-one emergency. I could simply leave him a message. Saying what?
I found the money
. Not really true.
Come back to the tower. I know where it is
. Risky. A waste of taxpayers’ money, unless I could figure a way to use only my contribution to the city’s coffers, especially if I turned out to be wrong.

I could always go up in the tower myself. Why not be sure before I caused a fuss?

My new plan, formulated as I walked back to my office, was to eat lunch, find money in tower, go to hospital to see Jenn, have dinner with Bruce. As I was cementing the plan in my head, item number one, lunch, had arrived.

Andrew agreed to a working lunch since we both had projects we were eager to get to. He held something that smelled spicy with one hand and pecked away on my laptop keyboard with the other. I bit into my turkey and Swiss between texts and phone calls, attempting to raise people who could help me out with access to the tower: Virgil, who should be on duty twenty-four-seven for me, if not for the entire city of Henley; Pete Barker, who’d given me his business card but clearly wasn’t conscientious about answering his phone (though I realized he had a real, full-time job); and Randy Stephens, our music chair, who was probably the least culpable of all, with no reasonable way of knowing that I’d need him. Any one of them could help me gain access to the tower. It seemed they’d all decided to take a real lunch hour.

“What are the chances that the tower would be unlocked in the middle of the day?” I asked Andrew.

“Zero. Dr. Stephens runs a very tight ship. I can run over to his office and sign out a key card if you want.”

I considered Andrew’s request, which, it seemed to me, would loosen Randy Stephens’s tight ship. “Thanks, but I think I’ll head over to the hospital first and talk to Jenn. If no one gets back to me by the time I return, I’ll ask you to let me in then.”

My unspoken hope was that Jenn would tell me if my guess about the location of the robbery money was correct, or if not, where it was. She’d had a lot of time to reflect on what she’d done and should be ready to share. It was time for tough love. Too bad I wasn’t medically or psychologically qualified to make that pronouncement.

“I wonder when they’ll let us see her,” Andrew said. His emphasis on
us
, that is, mere students, caused a twinge of guilt to attack me, but there was nothing I could do about the rules. Or the Marshalls. “You’d think they’d at least let her roommate see her, but not even Patty can get in,” Andrew continued. “I understand, though. Will you tell her we’re all still thinking of her and hope she comes back soon?”

“She’ll be glad to hear it,” I said, as I bundled up for the brief trip from Franklin Hall to my car. Another round of snow flurries was due today, though last night’s deposit was mercifully short-lived and picayune.

I left the building feeling good. Andrew the Hacker, or Unhacker, was at work on my laptop, and I had a police-authorized mission to talk to Jenn. By later this afternoon, Andrew would have solved one thing that had been nagging at me. And though the small violation of my privacy was insignificant compared to the major crimes of the last few days, checking that one off would go a long way to bringing me a measure of satisfaction.

After a few minutes of bone-chilling, serious clearing of my windshield, I drove toward the campus exit. I slowed down as I passed the carillon tower, giving one last thought to attempting to enter now. Too low a probability of success, I decided, and off-the-charts cold out there. I pushed the temperature lever on my heater to Hi, waved to Morty, and drove onto Henley Boulevard toward the hospital.

With any luck, Virgil would have arranged for Mr. and Mrs. Marshall to be otherwise occupied while I had a serious conversation with their daughter. I sighed, realizing there was probably nothing he could do about Jenn’s large, overprotective nurse.

• • •

I stopped to buy flowers at Henley General’s gift shop then made my way along a too-familiar path to Jenn’s room. I unwrapped my scarf and stuffed my gloves into my pockets as I walked, switching the pink and red bouquet from one hand to the other as I rearranged my clothing. I sniffed the air and wished I could plan my visits to avoid food carts, coming or going.

I arrived in time to see an orderly stripping Jenn’s bed. The young man pulled a top sheet off the mattress and dumped it into a hamper on wheels. He bent over and loosened the bottom sheet and did the same, then reached for the pillow.

My heart raced. How could Jenn have gone from waking up and recovering, to . . . I couldn’t say, or even think the first word that comes to mind at the sight of an empty hospital bed. Instead I switched to happy thoughts—Jenn was so much better, she’d been moved to the wing for nearly recovered patients.

“Excuse me,” I said, squeaking out the words as if I had a bad winter cold. “I’m looking for Jenn Marshall?”

The orderly, a tall guy who could have passed for fifteen years old, shrugged his shoulders and pointed down the hall in the direction I’d come from. “You’ll have to ask them.”

I hurried back and addressed my question to the very busy crew behind the desk.

“She’s been discharged,” said a woman with a headset. Surely she was talking to the person on the phone and not to me.

“Jennifer Marshall,” I repeated when I had her attention.

“She’s been discharged,” she said, more slowly, looking me straight in the eyes.

I was flustered to the point of asking a silly question. “Where did she go?”

Just in time, the large nurse I’d interacted with on my first visit to Jenn entered the workstation. “She’s been discharged,” I heard again.

“I just saw her last night. I didn’t think she’d be ready to leave so soon.” Not to mention that the police haven’t gotten all they wanted from her.

“Her parents took her about an hour ago,” a different nurse, nicer, told me.

“Do the police know she’s gone?” I asked whoever was listening.

“Not our problem,” one of them said.

Thanks, I knew that
. Flowers in hand, I stood in front of the desk, a wall, really, with its busy worker bees behind it, and recognized that I’d get nothing more from the staff.

I laid the bouquet on the high counter. “Here,” I said. “Please pass these on to a patient who might like them.” I strode off before they could refuse me that small service.

I made my way to the hospital cafeteria, not for the quality of the coffee, but because the place was warm and I needed to make some phone calls.

A nasty image made its way into my head as I pictured Jenn making a stop at the bank on her way out of town.

• • •

It was a good thing I’d had lunch, since the offerings in the cafeteria were slim and unappetizing. I bought a mug of tea, which was harder to ruin, and carried it to a table in a corner. The cafeteria was so crowded that the cleanup people couldn’t keep up, so I helped out by clearing my table of several large drink cups and a pile of napkins. I used a hand wipe to finish the job and took a seat, my back against the pale yellow wall.

Happy to have my phone back, and charged, I checked my messages and listened to a voice mail from Randy Stephens. He wasn’t planning to go to campus today, he said. He’d taken a long weekend at the Cape. Lucky Randy. Even in winter, the Cape was a haven of both natural and shopkeeper-made beauty.

“I can come if it’s urgent,” he’d added.

Not exactly. I’d had second thoughts about asking Randy in the first place. Did I really want anyone other than the cops with me when I pulled the money out of the bell?

I had the same question about Pete Barker, who hadn’t responded yet to my message. Rather than have him give me the tour he was so hot to give me, I’d prefer to wrangle a key from him and make the trip up to the belfry myself.

I supposed I could trust both of them to use discretion, but I had no idea how much either of them knew about the money or the past.

I sipped my tea, trying to let the bland aroma supersede that of the over-garlicky soups and pastas at tables all around me.

A call to Virgil worked this time.

“Did you know Jenn Marshall was released from the hospital?” I asked.

“I just found out. Did you get a chance to talk to her first?”

“I just missed her.”

“Too bad. But we couldn’t keep her. She claimed not to know her attacker and she didn’t commit a crime. Her bank records are clean, by the way. The recent deposits are consistent with her pay from the college.”

“She was so close to telling me more,” I said, regretting that I’d lolled around listening to carillon music in the Ben Franklin hallway and even had lunch in my office instead of heading straight for the hospital after my seminar. I consoled myself by noting how unlikely it was that I’d have been able to fend off Mr. and Mrs. Marshall if they were determined to take their daughter home to safety. I wondered if we would ever see Jenn again.

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Virgil said, referring, I realized, to my statement that Jenn had been on the verge of telling me more.

“What about her dorm room?” I asked, ruing the fact that Jenn was now on my list of suspicious characters whose life had to be dug into for evidence of a crime.

“Clean,” Virgil said. “We got permission to look around from Patricia Reynolds, her roommate, who said Jenn never even went back to get her belongings. Her clothes and books are still there.” I heard Virgil flipping through pages of a notebook. Or else I imagined it from seeing him do it too many times in person. “And speaking of striking out, the address that Warnocky—the one you call Einstein—gave to his boss is bogus. It’s a vacant lot by the airfield.”

“So there’s no lead on Ponytail’s killer?”

“Alleged killer. In any case, I doubt we’ll ever see the guy again.”

“Right.”

A feeling of hopelessness took over my spirit and flooded my mind. Wendy Carlson was gone. Ponytail was dead. Jenn Marshall was gone. And now Mr. Einstein Warnocky had also eluded our grasp. I couldn’t have felt worse if puzzle pieces kept falling into cracks in the floor, leaving gaping holes in the picture I was trying to put together.

Virgil echoed my thoughts. “We’re hitting a wall. I’m not sure there’s any hope now for finding the money either.”

I perked up, remembering why I’d called Virgil in the first place. “I think I know where the money is,” I said.

“Of course you do.”

“Can you meet me at the tower later today?”

“I’m going into a meeting. I’ll call when I get out.”

“Bring your badge,” I said. “Or whatever it takes to get a key card.”

I almost ended with “How’s Judy?” but thought better of it.

Instead, I called Bruce next and asked him if he knew anything about the now legendary date between his buddy and mine.

“I didn’t think you liked gossip,” he said.

“This isn’t gossip.”