The Quotient of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles) (6 page)

“How about that?” Virgil echoed.

“Historians are calling it the equivalent of buried treasure. A firsthand account. Untainted.”

“Did they find out anything?” Virgil asked. “Some new facts of the case?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Exactly.”

I’d lost track of the point I was trying to make, but it was my own fault for taking us back to the Civil War.

“I know it seems nuts,” I said. “But maybe there’s a connection.”

“Between . . . ?”

Virgil wasn’t making this easy for me.

“I’m just saying—a girl is killed twenty-five years ago, and the tower is closed off. Then the tower is reopened and another girl is attacked.”

Virgil blew out a breath, looking understandably confused, trying to process what I’d suggested. “The connection between the Marshall girl and the nineteen eighties girl is your bell tower?” He lifted his arm and twirled his fingers in the air. If we’d been playing charades, I might have guessed “ringing bells.” Or “crazy theory.”

The theory sounded lame, even to me, its originator. I didn’t need Virgil to point out the holes. The girl’s fall from the tower twenty-five years ago was what motivated closing the tower. Today’s girl was attacked half a campus away from the tower, on the ground. And, in fact, the tower wasn’t open yet. Also, there’d been no mention in the newspaper accounts of whether Kirsten was a carillonist. I’d almost asked Ted while he was in my house, but it seemed neither the time nor the place. I needed to let Ted think I’d dropped the matter before I could surprise him again with a query.

I felt I’d been working on a maze that I now discovered was really two mazes with nothing in common except one bend in the road.

“Sophie?” Virgil said. Thinking he’d lost me? Pretty close.

I stood and cleared my head. “Never mind,” I said. “We should probably call it a night. I know you still have work to do.”

“You sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

I heard great relief as Virgil pushed his bulk off the recliner and grabbed his coat. I was relieved, too. Another two minutes and I was sure he’d have recommended therapy. Or something more serious, involving heavy doses of psychiatric meds and a skeleton key.

• • •

Could it be? My day had begun with simple calculus problems. It was now after nine in the evening, cold and windy in Massachusetts; three in the morning in Rwanda. Not a great time to call Fran. Unless she’d be thrilled to hear that a snowstorm was predicted for the weekend in the southern part of the state, namely, Henley, and she’d be missing it. I doubted Fran would have to worry this winter about polishing calf-length boots.

For another possible distraction, I could call Ariana in Florida for a simple chat. But, first, it was prime dating hour in Florida, and second, in spite of what I’d told Virgil, I wasn’t ready to call it a night on Kirsten Packard.

Being, for the most part, a dutiful teacher, researcher, and puzzle-creator, I thought I’d better check my email. But not without sustenance. I raided the leftovers on my kitchen counters and in the fridge and made up a plate of the least nutritious morsels I could find. A few potato chips, two cookies, and a sliver of previously frozen strawberry shortcake. Tomorrow I’d balance it all out with a real dinner, I promised myself. I took the food and my laptop back to the couch. Tomorrow I’d also exercise, by the way.

My email inbox was overflowing. A quick glance told me there was nothing from Fran. I’d been hoping for a note saying, “Please call me at any hour of the day or night for any reason at all.”

As I read notes from students, mostly about Jenn Marshall and not homework, I kept track of whom I might invite to the screening of security videos. I identified only two others besides the friends who’d been at my home this evening.

I emailed an invitation to all of the students, asking them to be ready to appear, time and place to be announced as soon as I knew.

I picked at the shortcake, which was mediocre at best, the kind of frozen dessert that has the smell and taste of ice, no matter what the ingredients listed on the box.

Skipping to puzzle business, I noticed a note from one of my magazine editors. I opened it, not ready for trouble. But there it was.

I’m writing to introduce myself—I’m your new copyeditor and look forward to working with you. By the way, on the most recent crossword you submitted, I took the liberty of changing the wording on some of your clues. I don’t think it’s anything your going to have to check, however, since we’re going to press soon. (signed) Kenny Simmons

What? This was completely out of line with our procedures. And what copyeditor didn’t know the difference between
your
and
you’re
? I’d already gone through rounds of revision on the puzzle. I’d assumed I’d already seen the final copy, ready for print. And what adult, if he was an adult, still called himself Kenny?

My reaction was far beyond reasonable for the situation. And I thought I knew why. Nothing had gone well today, starting with a trip to the faculty lounge, where all I’d hoped for was a little warmth and friendly conversation, and ending with this. This Kenny person.

I’d have to drag out my contract with the publisher of the magazine and see what kind of recourse I had. The puzzle was my creation, and while it was not up for a Pulitzer, my name, or at least my pseudonym, was on the page, and I should be allowed to see the copy before it went to press.

This was no time to respond to Kenny, but I couldn’t take the chance that I’d be too late. I sent a quick reply for now.

Thanks for checking in, Kenny. Please do not send the copy to press until we talk.

I hit send, hard enough to break my fingernail. Now I really was ready to call it a night.

I didn’t expect my Friday to begin so early. When my phone rang at four in the morning, I’d just gotten to sleep. At least that’s how it felt.

I was barely able to make out Fran’s voice from across the Atlantic, due in some part to the winds rattling my windows. “Sophie, I got the news about Jenn Marshall. Poor kid. I hope she makes it.”

“Me, too,” I managed.

“You must be crazy upset. Why didn’t you call me?”

In spite of my sleepy fog, I laughed. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

I heard a quick intake of breath, followed by a chuckle. “Omigod, Sophie. It’s the middle of the night for you. I miscalculated. Don’t tell anyone I can’t subtract. It’s ten o’clock here; don’t ask me why I thought you’d be just getting up.”

“No problem,” I said.

I envisioned Fran slamming her hand against her head. “Last night I called my sister in Chicago and got that wrong, too. I need to make myself a cheat sheet with all the time zones.”

“It’s great to hear your voice,” I said, now fully awake. “I’ve been dying to talk to you. Never mind the time.”

I knew I should ask first about how she and Gene were doing with the challenges of a different culture, whether they missed their grandkids, what it was like to teach on another continent, whether Fran’s wardrobe of flowing, colorful pants outfits was suitable overseas. I hadn’t talked to her since our Christmas call, nearly three weeks ago. She’d just arrived at KIST, the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology, and was eager to tell the world about today’s Rwanda and the impressive economic gains it had made. Since then, with both of us so busy, there had been only quick emails back and forth. But rather than ask how differential equations came across in another language, the first question out of my mouth this morning was, “How did you find out about Jenn?”

“Randy Stephens is friends with Jim Hollister, the new guy in Henley’s Budget Office, and Jim knows Gene from the business network in town,” Fran answered. “He called Gene this morning. Or last night.” She paused and laughed. “Or tomorrow.”

“Good one.”

I might have known. Henley was a small town-and-gown community. News of Jenn’s attack had gone from one academic department to another and then out to the business world that Fran’s husband was part of. It was the kind of chain I was seldom included in, however, because as Judy advised me, I can’t be trusted to keep the chain alive. Maybe I didn’t have enough friends. As I filled Fran in on the meager details I had of Jenn’s status and the progress of the investigation, I was surprised she didn’t already know more than I did.

When we’d sufficiently expressed our horror and disgust at what had happened to Jenn, and our sympathies for her parents, I turned the conversation to an earlier blemish on Henley College campus life.

“Do you remember an event on campus twenty-five years ago? A sophomore named Kirsten Packard?”

“Of course. The suicide from the tower.”

I’d already decided it wouldn’t be useful to ask Fran why it had never come up between us. “What do you remember about it?” I asked.

“Well, the whole thing, actually. She jumped from the Admin tower one morning. Very sad.”

“I’d never heard about it.” Neutral enough.

“There was quite an effort to keep it all quiet. For a while we felt the administration had installed bugs everywhere, ready to fire a faculty member or expel any student caught talking about it. They closed off the stairway in the tower right away. Put a wall up, actually, so there was no access. That’s when they installed the electronic chimes to strike the quarter hours. Then, after a generation”—I knew Fran meant not twenty-five years, but four years, a generation in academic terms—“it became less and less newsworthy. The construction for the new carillon program is bringing it all back for some old-timers, I guess. Is that how you heard?”

I gritted my teeth and renewed my decision not to ask Fran why she hadn’t thought of mentioning this during our fifteen years together, or even in the last months during the new construction.

“It came up with Ted and Judy yesterday.”

“Ah, Ted. He took it pretty hard.”

I sprang to attention. “What do you mean? How was Ted affected?”

“He was very close to Kirsten.”

“The roommate connection,” I offered, remembering that Kirsten’s roommate had been one of Ted’s physics majors.

“Right,” Fran said. “Ted and Kirsten’s father, Vincent Packard, were roommates in college. I think Ted was Kirsten’s godfather, in fact.”

Whoa.
I paused to absorb the little detail Ted had neglected to mention. He’d said he hardly knew Kirsten, and certainly never mentioned a connection with her prominent father. Better not to distract Fran with that omission now, though. I had more to learn.

“Do you remember hearing anything controversial about Kirsten’s death?”

“That someone might have been up there with her. Pushed her, you mean?”

That’s what I mean.
“Or that it was an accident?” I said, to soften my query. “Any talk that there was a cover-up of some kind?”

“There’s always talk when something like that happens, especially when a prominent family’s involved. The most sensational stories likened Kirsten’s plight to Patty Hearst’s.”

I had to think back. “The nineteen seventies kidnapping?” I asked.

I was in kindergarten or first grade when the newspaper heiress’s abduction and eventual conviction for bank robbery made international headlines. I’d seen documentaries since, and I was at a loss to see the connection with Kirsten Packard, except that they both belonged to wealthy families in the public eye.

“It was just a few blips in some tabloids,” Fran said. “Not enough to last too long. The story was that the privileged Kirsten had hooked up with some bad guys and, like Patty Hearst, got involved in a couple of bank robberies. Maybe she was forced into it, like Patty was by her captors, maybe not. Remember—well, you wouldn’t remember—when Hearst was kidnapped, she was a nineteen-year-old college student.”

“Like Kirsten.”

“Like Kirsten,” Fran echoed.

I hadn’t seen any reference to the Hearst case, nor any suggestions of wrongdoing on Kirsten’s part in the links I’d explored. But then, I hadn’t gotten around to the tabloids. “Did anything ever come of those rumors?”

“Nothing. They were very short-lived, as they would be with the Commonwealth’s attorney general stepping in. Packard was in the AG’s office at the time. Not that I think the rumors were true in the first place, but you never know, do you? By the way, why all the interest?”

Blame it on the poor international connection that I didn’t answer, but instead asked another question.

“I know it was a while ago, Fran, but do you happen to remember if Kirsten was a carillonist? Is that why she was up in the tower that morning?”

“Hmm. I’m trying to recall. I never paid much attention to the music program back then, and Kirsten wasn’t a Franklin Hall major, so I can’t say.”

“She majored in romance languages, I think,” I said, trying to trigger more memories.

“That sounds right.” Fran paused. Too long for a simple breath or a sip of water. Uh-oh, she was putting it together. “Wait a minute, Sophie. You’re thinking there’s a connection between Kirsten Packard’s death and what happened to Jenn Marshall?”

“Why would you think that?” My voice came out higher than usual.

“Uh—because I know how your mind works?”

“Never mind.” I didn’t need Fran to tell me how foolish—out of character, I liked to think—I was being. How the Kirsten Packard case had captivated me in an inexplicable way, with an intensity that was exacerbated by Jenn’s attack.

“How are your classes going? How do you like Rwanda?” I asked.

I knew that would do the trick. Before we hung up I’d learned more than I needed to about Rwanda’s new system of roads, how KIST was its first public technological institute of higher learning, and the emphasis the East African country placed on entrepreneurship and economic growth. She promised to send photos of her students and colleagues and ended with, “You’ve got to come here sometime, Sophie.”

“Sure,” I said.

We both knew I didn’t mean it. Starting with facing inoculation needles, all the way to learning another language, I had a list of reasons why I’d probably spend all of my teaching career on American soil. I was glad Fran was so enthusiastic, however. I was interested in her work and her goal to bring more applied math, rather than theory, to the math department there.

We hung up. I’d certainly learned a lot from Fran, more than from people in my own time zone.

But I still didn’t know whether Kirsten Packard had played the carillon.

• • •

At almost five in the morning I decided it wasn’t worth trying to go back to sleep for a couple of hours. Besides, my head was throbbing, my mind reeling from the realization that Ted must have known Kirsten all her life. Why would he have tried to keep that a secret? I wondered if Judy knew. I doubted it, since, unlike me, Judy was one of those who could be trusted to share a rumor.

Before I could get to searching for old bank robberies, there was the matter of Kenny, the new copyeditor on my puzzle magazine, to straighten out. I read his email again. Not a good idea to become agitated at this hour of the morning, but what a nerve! He talked about changing my crossword clues as if he had merely shifted a comma or dotted an
i
.

I brewed coffee and pulled a hard copy of my contract from my file cabinet. Ten legal-size pages of fine print, some of it in bold letters, some of it redacted, a plethora of margin notes. My eyes glazed over appendixes and items in even finer print, identified with tiny Roman numerals. I’d never needed an agent. I simply signed my contracts, relying on good relationships with my editors and with my tax man. Now I understood why no one wrote longer works without an agent to interpret for us laypeople. I plowed through the pages, making notes on what I’d have to come back to later.

No sooner did I have a handle on what I might say to Kenny on the next round, than it was time to get ready for class and drive to campus. If I wanted to protect my parking spot from a construction worker, that is.

• • •

True to my “she-who-arrives-at-dawn” epithet, I was early enough to park in the lot by the tennis courts, now hibernating under a black tarp. I sat in my car and checked a text from Bruce, on duty at MAstar.

“News?”

“None,” I texted back.

Repeated communications through emails, texts, and phone calls among Virgil, the most involved students, and the hospital had turned up nothing new.

Bruce and I closed our final texts with a long line of
xoxoxoxox
, which made up for the nasty way I’d started my day, steaming over Kenny.

At this hour, seven twenty in the morning, with the sun low in the sky, the campus was peaceful and beautiful. Last night’s wind had cleaned the air. I’d never share my theory with Ted, who taught an undergraduate class in meteorology, but it made sense to me that the wind had swept away atmospheric debris, leaving fresher, unpolluted air. The scattered patches of ice reflected the bright rays and seemed whiter than they did during the busy day.

I hadn’t been on campus since I left for lunch yesterday, and it was hard to grasp that it had since become the site of a brutal attack.

I exited my car and felt the brunt of an early January morning. The air was windless, but cold, cold, cold. I dabbed my nose and my watery eyes as well as I could, manipulating a tissue with heavily gloved fingers. I pulled my scarf up over my mouth, trying to breathe through the holes in the knit pattern. Ariana had given me the scarf, and I didn’t remember in time that it was more of a fashion statement, in bright shades of red, than effective protection against a New England winter.

I was close to Franklin Hall and could have ducked inside after a brisk three-minute walk. And though it wasn’t warm and cozy in the building this week, there were at least some protective walls and space heaters. But I walked in the other direction, toward the spot where Jenn had been attacked. I headed that way without a lot of thought, shuffling along the pathway, weighed down by what felt like ten pounds of clothing, plus the awareness that one of my student majors lay in a coma at Henley General.