The Square Root of Murder (23 page)

Robert pulled a greeting card from his briefcase. “I’m going to send this around the room now for everyone to sign, and I’d like to arrange for flowers to be sent to Keith’s family also. Since we don’t have a secretary for the summer, Sophie, can you do that? And can you see to it that the family gets the card?”

“Of course,” said I, the official liaison with Keith Appleton’s family.

Fran shot me a look that said, “I knew you were his best friend.”

The department chairs took turns going over which classes remained to be brought to an orderly end. I’d neglected to mention to Fran that I’d jumped the gun with three of my students, combining the conference on grades with an interrogation. One that had yielded interesting results, by the way. I didn’t feel guilty in any way for not waiting to follow department procedure. All that mattered in my book was that each student finish the summer term and that my grades be in by the deadline.

Another announcement from Robert brought sighs of relief: due to the unfortunate circumstances of last Friday, to give everyone a chance to recover sufficiently from the shock of a death in Franklin Hall, an extension had been granted by the dean: grades did not have to be posted until the end of August.

The business over, people started getting up from the chairs and heading for the buffet table. The mood remained subdued.

“Can everyone wait just a minute?” I asked. “I think we should talk about the investigation into Keith’s murder.”

Heads turned in my direction, toward the back. Eyebrows went up, hands reaching for cookies stopped midair, but I was the most surprised person in the room.

I hadn’t exactly planned it, though in the back of my mind this sort of meeting was the ideal forum to make progress on the investigation. Ariana would have said my subconscious mind knew all along that I would do this, this way. Bruce would have asked what had brought on such rashness. I didn’t want to dwell on what I knew the dean would think.

“What are you saying?” Robert asked, incredulously. “That we do our own investigating?”

“We’re teachers, not cops,” Hal said.

“How would we go about it?” Judith asked.

“I don’t have a plan,” I admitted, addressing Judith, who might be an ally. “But it seems to me we should do more than sit around and wait for the police, who at the moment have nothing solid.”

“There’s a rumor going around that Ms. Wheeler is their key suspect,” Robert said.

“That’s just what it is. A rumor,” I said. “Who here really believes that Rachel Wheeler, who gives over and above what her job requires to make sure classes and labs in this building run smoothly, who believes she’s a killer?”

“How would we know? I don’t know any killers,” Hal said.

Why was Hal resisting? Maybe there was truth to the rumor that he and Rachel had crossed the teacher/student line. Or were still crossing it. What if Keith found out and threatened to tell Gil her fears were well-founded? Taking on Gil would have been a formidable task for Hal. Easier to eliminate Keith.

I hated the way I was thinking. It was the product of a frustrated mind the logical powers of which had hit the wall.

“I don’t see the harm,” Judith said, stirring sugar into a glass of lemonade that was already too sweet for my lemon zinger taste. “Why don’t we just brainstorm for a while? Who knows? We might come up with something.”

Bless you, Judith.

“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt,” Fran said.

“It’ll be useless,” Robert said.

“We’re the ones who knew Keith best,” I said. “Surely we can spare a few minutes to think about whether we saw anything unusual in the days before he died. Someone in the building who didn’t belong, maybe, or someone doing something out of character.”

“We’ve been through this with the police,” Robert said.

“This is different. We’re his friends,” Judith said, joining the ranks of one, me, who made up his cadre of friends.

Besides the young woman he was seeing, of course. I still couldn’t get my head around that. Keith on a date. With a woman. With someone he thought enough about to mention her to Elteen. I hadn’t abandoned the possibility that he’d made the woman up out of whole cloth so that Elteen wouldn’t keep trying to set him up with a nice girl in Chicago. When did I become so cynical?

“We could start with who would have a really strong reason to want Keith dead.”

“You’re kidding,” Robert said. “You mean like that he kept me from getting full health care benefits because I took a lighter load the term my daughter was born?”

“That was an administrative decision,” I said. “Keith was only one vote on the faculty senate.”

“The deciding vote,” Robert said.

I’d forgotten that. It was harder to justify Keith’s vote in this case as beneficial to the college, unless it was to prevent faculty from sloughing off just because they had families. If so, I’d have to call it cold.

I looked at Fran, who was biting her lip. Probably dying to mention the change in bylaws that would have denied her the award she deserved for distinguished service.

“Let’s face it,” Hal said. “We’d have a hard time thinking of someone who didn’t have a gripe against him.”

How well I knew.

A loud noise interrupted us. The sound of Lucy’s chair as she pushed it back across the tile and dashed out of the room. I didn’t get a look at her face as she uttered a raspy “ ‘Scuse me, please,” but I doubted she was smiling.

Thanks to support from Judith, my faculty friends indulged me in telling me how they’d spent the day on Friday. Of course not for an alibi, I told them, just to see if something useful surfaced.

Nothing did.

“Too bad Lucy left,” Fran said.

“She’s new. She’s probably whacked out by all this,” Judith said.

I snapped to. Or she’s the girlfriend, I thought. Bonnie, Annie, Lucy might all sound the same to elderly ears. And Lucy’s last name was Bronson. Both Bs, two syllables. Close enough.

Lucy could be the name of Keith’s girlfriend.

Or his killer.

I passed on joining the Ben Franklin faculty for lunch downtown. I felt I’d gotten all the information I could out of the group—that is, none—and I’d put off my meeting with the dean long enough. If I wanted to have lunch with anyone other than Bruce, it was Lucy Bronson. I made a note to make that happen.

Like a good employee, I headed for the boss’s office. After one stop and one phone call, that is.

The stop: I’d brought with me the manila envelope with the journal article I’d finished on Friday night before things fell apart. I stepped into the business office, two doors down from the assembly hall, said hello to Joey behind the desk, and slipped the envelope containing my twenty-first peer-reviewed research paper into the outgoing mail slot. Now I could say truthfully that I had more than twenty publications on my resume, should it come up. I wouldn’t mention the hundreds of puzzles and brainteasers.

The phone call: I settled on a bench along the path between Franklin Hall and Dickinson Library. The heat from the concrete quickly penetrated my thin cotton dress and I shifted around to put more fabric between me and the cooking seat. I pulled out my cell and punched in Elteen’s number in Chicago, where it was mid-morning. I wasn’t proud of what I was about to do, but extraordinary circumstances, etc., as Winston Churchill, or someone of that ilk, once said.

“Well, hello again,” Elteen said when she learned who was calling.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “But I wonder if you could help with a little task.”

“Anything I can do, surely,” she said.

“It’s about the young woman Keith was seeing. Lucy, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, yes, I couldn’t think of her name, but yes, Lucy Brownson, something like that. What about her?”

“Aha” nearly slipped from my lips.

“Would it be all right if I gave her your address in case she wants to send a card to express her sympathy?” I looked up to the searing sun and hoped its rays wouldn’t turn into lightning bolts, set to chastise a sinner.

“Oh surely. Do you have my address?”

“I do have it, but I didn’t want to give it out without consulting you.”

After a few more utterances from Elteen about how very sweet and thoughtful I was, I was nearly in tears and finally hung up the phone and hung my head in shame.

 

 

“She should be back any minute,” Courtney said as I approached her desk. We both knew who “she” was. Courtney’s long, red hair was pulled back tight off her face, her short skirt dangerously close to the dean’s limit. She had a tall glass of lemon zinger iced tea ready for me. “Just in case,” she said.

I thanked her and gave her a hug.

“Oh, one little thing, Courtney. Lucy Bronson had to leave the meeting early and I’d like to get in touch with her. My faculty directory is in my office in Franklin.” I swung my arm in the direction of the faraway building, such a tough journey on a day like this. “Can you give me her numbers?”

“You know, she’s so new, I don’t think she’s in the directory yet anyway.” I knew that. “But I’m sure I have it here.”

“Thanks for being the only cooperative person on campus at the moment,” I said.

Courtney gave me a knowing smile as she handed me a pink stickie. She probably thought I was referring only to her boss.

I took up my post on the waiting bench. Any more of these summonses and I’d expect a plaque with my name on it nailed to the back. At least this seat wasn’t giving me a third-degree burn. I was itching to talk to Lucy and annoyed that the dean was taking my time.

I dug in my briefcase for a small metal puzzle with interlocking rings. The idea was to unlock them, freeing them completely from each other.

In a way I felt sorry for Dean Phyllis Underwood. In a couple of months her long-held fantasy of Henley College was to end as young men poured onto the campus, requiring separate restrooms and careful monitoring in the dormitories.

Dean Underwood’s last-ditch effort before the recruiting for men began had been to warn the board of trustees that all alumnae funding would come to a halt if the admissions policy were changed.

“They won’t send money, and they certainly won’t continue to send their daughters,” she’d prophesied.

Now that I thought of it, it had been Keith Appleton who’d come up with statistics to prove otherwise, based on similar situations across the country. My privately held response to the dean’s argument was simply, what daughter obeyed her mother anymore?

The last time I sat outside the dean’s office was also the last time I saw Keith Appleton. I wondered if Benjamin Franklin Hall birthday parties would ever be the same. Would we maintain hushed tones in his honor? Eschew cake and soda? I shivered as I thought of the turn all our lives had taken.

Today the dean approached her office from the outside, presumably having had things to do between the president’s assembly and our meeting.

She addressed me immediately, even before we were behind her office door. “I suppose you think that was a very smart move, Sophie, but let me tell you it was not.”

Courtney busied herself at her computer, seeming to make more noise than necessary as she hit the keys and slapped papers on her desk. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she broke out into a high-pitched
la la la la la la la
. At one point she gave me a sympathetic look.

I took a sip of tea. It felt good on my parched lips and throat. “Dean Underwood, I’m sorry I misunderstood. I thought you’d be happy someone took care of packing up Dr. Appleton’s office.”

The dean, more perceptive than I was used to giving her credit for, was not impressed. I’d had a whole day to come up with a better cover. Too bad I hadn’t done so. “Don’t insult me, Sophie.”

“Really, it’s just one more task you don’t have to worry about.”

The dean shook her head in a “tsk-tsk” manner. “And then returning them like that. Did you think that would be the end of it?”

Returning them? I didn’t know what she was talking about and was about to say as much.

By now we were in her office. She closed the door behind us and I saw a brown cardboard mirage in the corner between two antique bookcases. Three cartons, two on the floor, one piled on top. My boxes? Rather, Keith’s boxes? The boxes had been returned? The box thief stole them to give to the dean? I blinked my eyes a few times, and thought of pinching myself.

“I hoped it would be, Dean Underwood. The end of it, I mean,” I said. When in doubt, fake it.

“You’ve gotten poor Mr. Conroy very upset and he doesn’t deserve that.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“He thinks it’s his fault that you went off with those cartons and didn’t take them immediately to my office.”

“It wasn’t at all his fault.”

“And then, when he found them outside today at the basement entrance to Benjamin Franklin Hall . . . well, he was completely confused. He called Courtney, quite distraught.”

“Poor Woody. I’ll bet his head was spinning.” Like mine. “Who was supposed to collect the contents of Dr. Appleton’s office, anyway?” I asked. No harm trying.

“Dr. Knowles.” I thought it was a good sign that she was back to our normal mode of address, though the tone was an exasperated one, as if I had such nerve asking a question like that.

“I’m sorry. I meant no harm.”

“I’m not dumb, Dr. Knowles, whatever you and your liberal friends think behind my back. I know that your assistant, Rachel Wheeler, is the main suspect in Dr. Appleton’s murder. And I know how important it is to you to clear her name. That’s very noble. But investigating a murder is not your job. And it is certainly not seemly in a faculty member of Henley College.”

Is it seemly to be murdered on campus? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. The dean’s face was red enough already. The campus couldn’t handle another medical emergency.