The Square Root of Murder (28 page)

I was satisfied that I’d gathered enough handwriting samples for Virgil. I wished he’d left the photos so I could get started now vetting the phrases on Rachel’s thesis pages. It was impossible for me to get anywhere from memory. I needed the pages with their gruesome bloodred marks in front of me. But Virgil had been firm about taking everything away with him, even though he’d be missing a chance to profit from the expertise of Ariana Volens, a professional.

“I’ve met Ariana,” Virgil had said, as if that explained why he wouldn’t let me give her copies.

The most I could coax out of my new (again) favorite detective was that I could stop by the office with my samples at ten in the morning.

“That late?” I’d remarked.

He gave me that look, before he realized I was kidding.

Nothing better to do than go to bed. I knew I’d sleep better with Bruce in the house, but I didn’t like that loss of my own confidence. I’d lived alone for many years and not been afraid. The only reason I had an alarm system in the first place was because of my mother. When she became disabled I wanted her to have a way to call for help, so I’d had a security system installed, with a panic button on every pad.

Another reason I’d felt safe had to do with the Henley crime statistic—no murders in recent history, let alone in Franklin Hall where I spent many hours a week.

All bets were off now, and I wondered if I’d ever feel completely safe again.

For tonight, I could relax. I fell asleep counting I-dots and loops and the relative weight of T-bars in fine penmanship.

When Lucy quickly agreed to meet for coffee at Back to the Grind on Tuesday morning, I was mildly shocked. From the way she’d stormed out of the faculty meeting in Franklin Hall yesterday, I’d expected her to hole up somewhere until after Labor Day. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she withdrew and ended her career at Henley before it began.

I felt bad that I’d never invited her for lunch or even a girl-to-girl chat until now, when I needed her. How did I let myself get so busy that I couldn’t reach out to a new teacher in my building? Granted she was in the chemistry department, not math, but a distance of three floors was no excuse.

I let myself off the hook a tad, recalling that I’d never sensed that Lucy needed anything. Students talked favorably about her. I’d heard that she’d landed a small research grant that would employ a half dozen chemistry majors during their free hours, doing calculations related to some kind of reactions. She seemed to be doing well.

I hadn’t realized how well. Dating Keith Appleton! I was now convinced she was the woman Keith had spoken of to his cousin Elteen. In her short tenure, Lucy had achieved something no longtime faculty member could claim.

Lucy had arrived first at the small café where I’d met with Pam, Liz, and Casey a couple of days ago. If the baristas were listening in on my recent appearances here, I hoped they wouldn’t think I was setting up shop. I ordered an iced cappuccino and a raspberry scone and left a big tip.

Lucy seemed forlorn, and not that much older than the freshmen she’d be teaching in a few weeks. She wore a knit sweater and hugged a mug of what looked like hot chocolate with a pile of whipped cream. To look at her you’d think we were in the kind of cold wave we’d had after Christmas, that had set teeth chattering and lasted for weeks. In truth, it was sweltering and all we had now was the weak fan of the coffee shop, barely adequate even at eight in the morning.

She half rose when she saw me. I felt old, and to confirm it, my knees creaked as I sat down.

I looked around the shop, relatively empty this Tuesday morning. I recognized some Henley dorm students whom I didn’t have in class, group studying, it seemed. I certainly understood why they might seek a change of scenery from the desolate campus.

It was clear that if Lucy and I were going to have a conversation, I was the one who’d have to go first.

“Thanks so much for coming, Lucy. I noticed how upset you were at the faculty meeting and I figured all those negative comments about Keith got to you.”

Lucy bit her lip and nodded. “I knew he wasn’t popular on campus. But he really was the coolest guy, you know.”

“You two had something special, didn’t you?”

Lucy’s eyes widened and I sensed she was about to deny it. Then I saw a tiny shrug, as if she realized there was no point. “We just hit it off right away. It didn’t matter that he’s a little older.”

What’s twenty years?
I thought. “I’m sorry you had to hear all that at the meeting yesterday. There’s a lot of history you’re not aware of.”

“I know that, Dr. Knowles.”

“Sophie, please.”

“I’m just saying there was another side to him,” Lucy said.

“I know.”

Lucy smiled at last. “Keith had such a sense of humor. He’d find a cartoon on the ’net or in a magazine almost every day, something related to science or to school, and he’d leave it on my desk, so I’d start the day with a laugh. But mostly he had this sense of, I don’t know, I guess you’d call it a duty to maintain high standards. Especially for premed students. He claimed he didn’t want to be operated on by someone who barely got by in med school and he didn’t want anyone to be taken care of by a C student.”

Not a bad point. But I was here to see for myself whether I thought this sweet young woman was capable of killing her new boyfriend. The more we talked, however, the more the probability of Lucy as killer approached zero.

I was ready for another iced cappuccino. Lucy was fine with her hot chocolate, so I went to the counter myself. Only once did I look over my shoulder to be sure she hadn’t fled.

As I waited for my iced drink, a jumble of boxes on the other side of the counter prompted a new thought. The cartons were labeled “filters,” “napkins,” and “lids,” but they might as well have said, “Keith’s Stuff.”

“Did Dean Underwood ask you to clean out Keith’s office?” I asked Lucy as soon as I could reasonably broach the subject.

“Uh-huh, but someone else got there before me.”

Imagine that. I tried to second-guess the dean’s reasoning in asking Lucy to collect the material. Probably of all the faculty in Franklin Hall, the dean thought Lucy would be the least likely to be curious as to why the dean wanted the files in such a hurry. That would mean she didn’t know about the special relationship between Keith and Lucy. Not that it mattered, since there was no rule against faculty dating each other. In fact, during my tenure at Henley I’d seen two full-blown courtships that ended in marriage, one between fine arts and history and the other between biology and phys ed.

“I wonder why the dean wanted the material so quickly after the police left?” I asked Lucy, all naïveté.

“She said there were some sensitive files in his office and she wanted to be sure they were secure. She was very upset when I had to call her and tell her the drawers were empty.”

I’ll bet. I made a mental note: check what’s sensitive to the dean. “Did you ever find out who took the files?” I asked, wondering if everyone in Back to the Grind noticed how shaky my voice was.

Lucy shook her head. “Nope.”

So the dean hadn’t broadcast the fact of my little trick. The only questions that remained: Who retrieved the boxes from my garage? And what material did the dean consider sensitive? I knew Lucy wouldn’t be able to help me with either.

It was time to do what Bruce would call fish or cut bait. “Keith must have thought a lot of you,” I told her. “He told his cousin in Chicago all about you.”

Lucy’s eyes brightened. “He did? Wow. Thanks for telling me. He wouldn’t let me mention anything to anyone around here.”

“That sounds like Keith. I hope you didn’t argue too much over it.”

Subtle. That was me.

“Oh, no, I didn’t care, really. We loved the same things. We went to Boston most of the time. To the theater, the ballet, the MFA, the science museum. There’s nothing like that in my little Down East town, believe me.”

Lucy’s eyes, fixed on a spot over my shoulder, told me she was traveling back a few weeks and reliving her excursions with Keith. I was amazed to hear that Keith had taken that much time to experience the arts and leisure Boston offered. Maybe all he’d needed was a companion who gave him a chance to show his better side.

I wished again that I’d tried harder to understand him. And, as current wisdom had it, I was his best friend. Except for Lucy.

“Lucy, did you see Keith on Friday at all? The day he . . . died?”

Lucy came back to the current reality. “No, I went to the party and he was going to come down later. When he didn’t make it, I figured he was just too busy,” she said, blinking back tears.

“Or, before Friday, did he mention anything unusual happening around him?”

“The police asked me that, too. I didn’t tell them I was having a relationship with Keith outside of school, though. Do you think I should have?”

Not unless you had a big fight and killed him. “That’s up to you, Lucy. If you think it will add to their ability to find his killer, then you should.”

She shrugged. “I don’t see how it could help them, and I don’t think I have the energy right now.”

So far I was batting zero on getting people to go to the police with what they knew of Keith or his death.

“You don’t have to decide now,” I said. “You might feel like going in the next day or so, or you might think of something that would help them.”

“Maybe.” Lucy looked at me and smiled, but once again she was smiling at the past. “Do you know how we started going out?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Actually our first date? I asked
him
. I had these tickets to the special Renaissance exhibit at the Gardner that my friends in Maine gave me as a going-away present. Everyone else I’d met up to then was married or in a relationship, so I asked him. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to, that he was mean and all. I just thought it would be nice to have a friend who wasn’t hooked up either.”

How simple it all sounded.

Lucy’s eyes teared up. She brushed back her very straight, very shiny black hair. I could almost read her face: Now I don’t have a friend anymore.

I couldn’t bring myself to put her through another minute of anguish. I took a small piece of paper from my purse and slipped it across the table to Lucy.

“This is the address for Elteen Kirsch, Keith’s cousin in Chicago. In case you want to send her a note.”

Lucy let out a little gasp. “Thank you very, very much, Dr. Knowles.” She put her hand, warm from the mug of hot chocolate, on mine. “It’s so good to have a friend,” she said.

I felt like a heel.

 

 

It was now close enough to ten o’clock so I went to the police station to meet Virgil. I hoped he didn’t expect me to simply hand over my bag of samples. In my mind, he and I sat at a table that was anywhere but in Interview Two and worked together, comparing loops and slants until one of us shouted, “Eureka!” And then Virgil would go out with handcuffs and an arrest warrant and bring in the killer. Bruce and I could go away to the Cape for a few days and I’d be back to prepare fall syllabi and lessons as I always did in August. I longed for reuniting with my steady, well-behaved math majors.

A girl can dream.

Once again I found myself in the waiting area of Henley’s police station. I tucked the paper bag of handwriting samples near my legs, checked my email using my phone, and replied to a few students with applied statistics questions. Then I resumed my practice of staring at the bulletin board across from me, with its wealth of memos and flyers.

Last time I’d focused on the fascinating stats about my hometown. This time I looked at the material around the charts. Wanted and missing persons flyers. A bicycle and pedestrian safety notice. A policy statement regarding abandoned vehicles. A bright orange “buckle-up” bumper sticker. I chuckled at a little cop humor: a cartoon picturing one policeman giving another the Heimlich maneuver while a doughnut pops out.

I remembered that two simple themed crosswords were due to one of my children’s puzzles editors in a couple of weeks. Why not use the surroundings for inspiration? I whipped out a small pad and pen. My vast experience in waiting rooms like this during the past week told me I had plenty of time before I was summoned. Working on puzzles would be a good release of the nervous energy coursing through me.

For the first level puzzle I sketched out a simple grid with four across and ten down and only nine common letters. I drafted simple fill-in-the-blank clues like “A (blank) is pinned to a police officer’s uniform” and “A policeman’s car is often called a (blank).” The next level would have a much larger grid. I’d use my standard fifty across and fifty down. I started making a list of words I’d fit into the intermediate level grid. Beretta. Miranda warning. Canine. Search warrant. I looked at the bulletin board for ideas. Mug shot. Home security.

The background noises of chatter and ringing phones didn’t bother my concentration. But a sudden burst of screaming startled me. Two officers had entered the front door. The inordinately loud yelling came from an old man with a leathery face and a long, unkempt gray ponytail being dragged between the uniformed men.

“I know my rights. Check your own laws. I did nothing wrong,” I heard between yelps of “police brutality.”

Virgil came out of the office area at the same time that the old guy was spitting out terms like “fuzz” and “pigs,” epithets I thought had died with the sixties. The man himself was a throwback to photos I’d seen of “the good old hippie daze,” as my mother called them, spelling out the last word for me each time.

“It’s Dweezil,” Virgil said to me. “He’s harmless.”

“I take it this is a repeat performance?”

“Oh, yeah. There’s a little settlement on the west side of town. A bunch of people who were in college in the sixties and haven’t quite adjusted to real life. They have their own little pot farm out there.”