The Square Root of Murder (3 page)

Never one to be left behind, Margaret (at her request, I’d used her given name since I was in high school, so she wouldn’t “feel so old”) had joined the sudoku craze. We had an ongoing match: each took on the challenge of creating a sudoku that would be declared “impossible” by the other. She completed one of my challenge sudokus two days before she died.

“Too many backtracks this time, though,” she’d said, honest to the end.

The finished puzzle hung on my office wall next to a photograph of the two of us on Cape Cod with the Sandy Neck Lighthouse as a backdrop.

Lemon zinger tea had also been Margaret’s favorite. I raised my glass to her and took a sip.

In spite of the urgency of the dean’s request and Courtney’s assurance, I’d made a quick trip home and changed to a more respectable outfit than the summery pants I’d taught in that morning. Nothing said
professional
more than close-toed shoes.

The last time I’d been summoned here had been about my “classroom appearance.”

“Your attire is much too casual, Dr. Knowles,” the dean had told me one snowy day, taking in my tasteful slacks, boots, and corduroy jacket in one sweeping, reproachful gaze. “You know we like to keep a dress code at Henley, no matter what the weather, and certainly no matter what the trends of the day may be.”

I’d been tempted to ask why the academic dean didn’t have more to do than monitor faculty wardrobes. Wasn’t there curriculum to watch over? The northeastern colleges’ accreditation committee to worry about? And it wasn’t as if I’d been showing cleavage. Not that I had any to speak of.

Like most of my faculty friends, I’d already caved on the clothing issue. The dean had met us halfway by allowing an exception for hot days during summer school and blizzard-like days in the winter.

So today’s call was definitely not about fashion. What, then?

I tapped the soles of my uncomfortable pumps on the cracked marble floor of the old Administration Building, a grand Gothic structure that, sadly, had had its marvelous interior chopped up to accommodate more offices than originally planned. Here and there a bulky air-conditioning unit had been wedged into an arched window, entering into an odd pairing with the radiator, and interrupting a lovely recursive pattern of gray stone rosettes.

As the minutes ticked away, I reminded myself that I was forty-four, not sixteen years old. This was not high school, when the principal had caught Ariana and me and two friends cutting class to take the subway to downtown Boston for a shopping spree.

I treated my back to a yoga stretch and took a deep breath, giving up on guessing what the dean wanted with me on a scorching Thursday afternoon. Too bad her recommendation was essential if I wanted to make full professor this year. True, I was relatively young for the title, but there was a rumor that a whopping four slots in math and science were open at Henley, and I wanted a place in line for one of them. Badly.

I’d paid my dues as assistant professor for six years, then associate professor for eight more. I had a decent list of publications on my differential equations research in nationally recognized journals and was often sought out as a speaker at conferences. I’d taken my turn as Mathematics Department Chair and served on a countable infinity of faculty committees. Plus—a big concession on my part—I’d yielded to Dean Underwood’s request that I write my puzzles and brainteasers under a pen name, though I bristled at her reasoning.

“We wouldn’t want anything frivolous to appear on Henley’s faculty publication record,” she’d clucked.

After fourteen years, I was finally used to being addressed as Margaret Stone, my mother’s maiden name, when a puzzler fan emailed me.

Now here I was wearing pumps and what could pass for a suit, with a dark brown skirt and an almost-matching jacket, hoping to please the person who held my career in her wrinkled old hands. The thought produced another wave of perspiration and new, sweaty smudges on my leather briefcase. I wasn’t this nervous sitting next to Bruce in his helicopter, even when he surprised me with a new stunt.

To calm myself, I took a newly purchased cube puzzle from my briefcase, this one with six images of Tiffany windows, and set the case down on the immaculate floor.

Dr. Underwood was too old for the job, I decided, fingering the smaller blocks that made up the colorful cube. The academic dean seemed to have come with this building. I loved hundred-year-old buildings, but not the antiquated customs that sometimes accompanied them.

I knew that Dr. Underwood was upset for reasons bigger than me. Her side had lost the great debate about whether Henley College should follow the trend of the day and admit male students.

“Coed?” she’d exclaimed at meetings when the issue was first raised.

She’d made the word sound profane. The dean and her allies had fought the idea long and hard, citing the history of Henley, founded in the early part of the twentieth century as an academy for “young ladies.” There had been plenty of boys at the all-male schools a stone’s throw away to invite to mixers. If that model worked a hundred years ago, it could work now, the dean said in so many words, skipping past the fact that there wasn’t a single all-male school left in New England.

Times had changed and demanded creative ways of maintaining a large enough student body for our college to survive. The reality was “coed or no ed” as the pro-coed side—my side—warned.

It took the board of trustees and the faculty senate another two years to seal the deal. This fall was to mark the debut of men on campus. The undergraduate enrollment had climbed to more than double what it was last year.

“More men in your life? Should I be worried?” Bruce had asked me.

I let him think so.

The old clock chimed three fifteen. The sound echoed down the empty hallway. During the summer, no classes were held in the Administration Building. The only people around were the admin staff, and whomever the deans summoned. Today that privilege seemed to be mine alone.

I worked the Tiffany puzzle, clicking the dogwood, the grapevine, and the hibiscus into their slots on the different faces of the cube. I checked the other sides. The views of Oyster Bay, the magnolias, and the autumn landscape were lined up correctly. Stunning, but too easy.

“Good afternoon, Sophie.” A statement cum greeting.

I looked up to see Keith Appleton walk toward me. He’d just come through the door from the dean’s office. The not unreasonable thought went through my head that Keith was involved in why I was waiting for the dean right now instead of beading.

“Hey, Keith,” I said, in part to aggravate him. He hated when we faculty took on the slang and tone of the students.

Having made that point, I decided I wouldn’t follow up right now with a request to talk to him about Rachel’s thesis. I needed to time my battles more carefully.

“Did you have a chance to look over the amendment I proposed to the Distinguished Professor bylaws?” he asked.

“Yeah, about that. The change would eliminate several women on the faculty.”

Keith gave me a quizzical look. “Is that a problem?”

“We’d be penalizing women for taking maternity leave.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Again, is that a problem?”

“Keith, how can you—”

The tune of
Come Fly With Me
rang in my purse.

My cell phone. I smiled when I heard it and saw the ID for MAstar, the nonprofit medevac company Bruce worked for. And just in time to prevent me from an irreversible setback in my so-called friendship with Keith.

“We’ll talk later,” Keith said, turning on his heels, clearly too important a man to be standing around waiting for me to take a call.

“And a good day to you, too,” I said to Keith’s back, but not loud enough for him to hear me.

“Huh?” Bruce, who did hear me, asked.

“Not you,” I said.

“Come on out and visit me,” Bruce said.

How tempting. Not just to see my guy, but because the temperature at the airfield was always about fifteen degrees cooler than in town.

“I’m outside the dean’s office.” I whispered, though I was sure no sound penetrated the thick door between me and my superior.

“Uh-oh.”

“You said it.”

“Any idea what she wants this time?”

“Not a clue, but Keith just walked out of the office.”

“Uh-oh squared.”

“I love when you talk math.” I looked at the big clock. “Up from your nap?”

“Starting to think about dinner,” he said.

Bruce kept a pretty predictable routine on the days he worked. He’d have an early dinner, relax for a while, and then go into work for his twelve-hour shift as an EMS helicopter pilot. “Officially, it means Emergency Medical Services,” he’d say. “Unofficially, it means Earn Money Sleeping.” It was Bruce’s way of trying to convince me that his job of touching down at crash scenes amid telephone poles and power lines wasn’t as dangerous as it sounded, simply because he could sleep or watch movies between heart-pounding incidents.

I started when the dean’s office door opened. I clicked the phone shut with a soft, hasty, “Gotta go. Love you,” to Bruce.

Dr. Underwood, in a legitimate navy suit with a mid-calf hemline, filled the doorway. I was annoyed at the shiver that rippled down my spine. So what if the dean was at least six inches taller than my five feet three inches? I was about twenty years younger.

But this wasn’t a physical contest, and Dr. Underwood’s folded arms and serious expression wielded a lot of psychological power. I stuffed my phone and my puzzle cube into my briefcase as if I’d been reading comic books instead of doing my homework.

After what seemed too long a time, the dean unfolded her arms and indicated the path I should follow. “Come in, Dr. Knowles.” The invitation fell somewhere between those of an oral surgeon and a serial killer.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Underwood,” I said, through dry lips. No “Hey, dean” from me. I took my place across from the dean at the wide, dark oak desk that dominated the office.
How bad can it be
?
What? Was I too noisy in class?

“You’ve been very noisy,” the dean said. I could barely suppress a smile. But Dr. Underwood’s tone was somber. “I have complaints that your gatherings in Benjamin Franklin Hall are getting out of hand.”

I raised my eyebrows. This was what the urgent summons was about? “I’m sorry? You’ve had complaints?”

The dean nodded and let out a heavy sigh, perhaps in memory of an earlier time when only sweet young girls and sedate faculty populated the seventeen-acre campus. “Apparently you had an exceptionally loud and disruptive party in the faculty lounge of your building last Friday afternoon.”

I wanted to point out that it wasn’t my building, though I had a great fondness for it. Benjamin Franklin Hall and its lounge were shared by the departments of mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry, in ascending order, up through the four floors. Some said the top floor was specifically designed for chemistry—in the event of an explosion, the roof might blow off, but at least the other departments would survive.

The complaint had to have come from Keith Appleton, the least social and the biggest snob in the building, if not on campus, if not in the state of Massachusetts.

“Friday was Tesla’s birthday,” I said, with great restraint.

“Whose birthday?”

“The physics department chose the theme for July. They selected Nicola Tesla. He was born on July 10. Well, at midnight on July 9, so it could go either way.”

“Tesla?” the dean asked.

I nodded. “I’m sure you’ve heard of his work in electricity.” I pointed to the lovely Victorian-style lamp on the dean’s desk, as if it were an example of Tesla’s great genius. I thought what a nice jigsaw puzzle the lampshade would make.

I’d deliberately spoken as if I assumed science and mathematics literacy on the part of anyone who deemed herself liberally educated. Or anyone who was a dean at a liberal arts college.

“He was there? At your party?”

I grunted—inaudibly, I hoped—though Dr. Underwood’s severe lack of appreciation for math and science was familiar to me. “No, he, uh, died about seventy years ago.” I fantasized Dean Underwood’s name on my class roster and marked it with a failing grade.

“Of course he did.” Dean Underwood’s pointy nose seemed to take off on its own, now with flaring nostrils, now curling upward toward her frown lines.

I wasn’t proud of this little tactic—putting someone in her place by trying to sound smarter. The truth was that, given the right teacher, anyone could learn mathematics. One of my greatest missions in life was to help students over hurdles that kept them thinking that there was a certain “science brain” or that only a select few had a “knack for math.”

I bristled as I recalled a report from Bruce’s niece, Melanie, that her fourth-grade teacher had promised, “If you behave yourselves this morning, boys and girls, we won’t have to do math this afternoon.”

Grrr.
I could have gone on forever on this topic, even with no audience, but the dean was back on track, having straightened out her face.

“The complaint mentioned, in particular, bolts of lightning and fireworks.”

An image of Tesla came to me. Today we would have called him an
outside-the-box thinker
. One day he’d be experimenting with electromagnetism as a route to time travel, and the next he’d ply himself with enough current to discharge sparks that would make the crackling at our little Franklin party seem hardly worth the trouble.

I called up last Friday in my mind. Almost a week ago. We didn’t have fireworks exactly, but we did create a healthy display of static electricity. On my phone, I had a photo of one student with her long red hair standing out straight from her head. I thought it best not to show the dean.

“The physics majors put together a demonstration of one of Tesla’s experiments. It was spectacular, but harmless, really,” I told the dean.