The Square Root of Murder (32 page)

I thought of another favorite von Neumann quote, “If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”

Enough said.

My next creative venture was to think of something to tell Ariana about the dean’s dark past. I figured the best bet was to let her assume that we’d been right. The notion that an authority figure had been a pothead in the sixties would make her happy and keep her quiet.

For Courtney—why had I built up my urgent meeting in her mind?—I’d cover that tomorrow. I’d wait until tomorrow also to talk to Rachel and the rest of my colleagues. I might even be ready to address the Big Three junior chem majors and find out how they fared at the police station.

For tonight, I wanted to focus on a quiet, crime-free dinner.

I called Bruce. As I expected, he respected my wish not to talk about Hal’s confession and arrest. Instead, I explained the logistics that would eventually end in my serving him dinner.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Goofing off in your house.”

“Doing what?”

“I’m having fun with a little mental arithmetic.”

Funny guy. “No, really. Did you finish your gardening?”

“I did indeed. You’ll see the results this evening. And now I’m watching an old Hitchcock.”

“That I believe.”

“Sounds like there’s something you want me to be doing,” Bruce said. “Can I pick up something?”

I reminded him of his niece’s tenth birthday. “You could start rooting around in my box that has new greeting cards and pick one for Melanie. We should get it mailed soon.”

“You want me to write it out?”

“You’re her uncle; I’m sure she’d prefer to have it be in your handwriting.”

“I don’t think she’s ever seen my handwriting. You’re the one who always takes care of that.”

That was Bruce. Ask him to take out the trash twice a day and he wouldn’t balk, but writing out cards, whether Christmas, sympathy, birthday, thank you, even to his own family—that was my job.

Wait. That was my job. And probably the woman’s job in nine out of ten relationships or marriages.

I heard a loud noise in my head, like the sound my computer threw out when I made a wrong move during a math game.

Blat blat.
A loud noise battered my brain.

Hal didn’t write the cards Virgil handed over to his expert. Gil did.

“Sophie?”

Had Bruce heard the blatting, too, or was he wondering where I’d gone? I tried to process this new insight. Gil, a nurse, and also a murderer? Didn’t nurses promise to do no harm, like doctors? If not, they should.

“Never mind Melanie’s card for now,” I said. “New topic.”

“Shoot.”

“First, would there be handwriting samples of the staff at MAstar? Do you guys ever write notes to each other?”

“We don’t exactly write notes to each other, but we do have to keep logs and occasionally we handwrite reports on what happened during the shift. The computer goes down a lot or someone might be in the middle of a game, and if your shift is up you just want to get everything down as quickly as possible while it’s fresh. You know, there might have been a particular challenge up there or on the ground and you need to get it on paper.”

“What about the flight nurses?”

“Same thing. Plus the nurses sign daily logs. They have to leave a handwritten count of all the controlled medications.” He paused. “Is any of this helpful?”

“Immeasurably.”

My mind raced. I needed two handwriting samples, one we could be sure was Hal’s, and one we knew was Gil’s. I could take care of the first. I had many notes from Hal in my desk on campus. Unfortunately, all the samples I’d taken to Virgil had been from home, the personal cards that Gil most likely had written. I’d never thought to pull samples from campus correspondence also.

Bruce broke into my thoughts. “I assume you’re going to tell me why this matters to you?”

I gave him the short form of my reasoning. “I think it was Gil Bartholomew, not Hal, who killed Keith and Hal is taking the rap.”

“The rap? I knew it. You’ve been hanging around Virge too much.”

“Please, Bruce.”

“I’m just saying.”

I appreciated the levity, but continued past it. “It makes so much sense. Gil always reacted more strongly than Hal when Keith insulted her husband. And according to you and the other rumormongers, she suspected Hal and Rachel of having an affair.”

“That was more than a year ago.”

“That kind of thing doesn’t go away, Bruce.”

“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”

“I’m a girl. That’s all the experience I need. By framing Rachel, Gil’s actions get rid of two ugly people in her life.”

“Man, I am put on notice.”

“Believe it.”

“For real, I’m with you on this theory. I can see that Hal, good guy that he is, would rather be punished himself than have his wife pay the price,” Bruce said. “But it’s very hard for me to think of someone I thought I knew well as a killer.”

“I’m sure it is. Hal must have realized it was Gil as soon as Virgil brought him in and showed him the marked up pages. Virgil said he confessed immediately. Why else would he do that?”

I didn’t wait for or expect an answer. I was out of breath with excitement. I tried to calm down and plot the course of the next couple of hours. While I was on campus, I’d walk over to my office and see what I had in my files. I knew I’d recently had a note from Hal about changing my statistics exam date for one of his physics majors, and I’d seen his greetings on a “Welcome to Math and Science” poster Rachel was putting together for the incoming freshmen. She’d planned it for the display case. I hoped Keith hadn’t signed it yet. It would be too gruesome a reminder.

“What can I do?” Bruce asked, barging in again on my dizzy train of thought.

“If we had a couple of new samples, one from each of the Bartholomews, that would do it. Can you go to MAstar and get me a couple of samples of Gil’s handwriting?”

“Yeah.” Bruce stretched the word out. Suspicious. “What are you going to do with whatever I find?”

“Give it to Virgil.”

“Can I trust you to do that?”

“Yes.”

“You have to promise me that you won’t do anything yourself. You’ll turn over whatever we have to Virge.”

I was happy to hear the “we.”

“I promise,” I said, meaning it. I longed to get back to where the puzzles didn’t involve real humans and life and death.

 

 

It was almost pleasant this evening, still in the eighties, but with a slight breeze wafting across the Henley College lawns as the sun descended. There was talk that the heat wave was coming to an end. At least until the next one.

Near the library were a few students who must still have been living in Paul Revere dorm, but there were no cars to speak of. Even the lot nearest the admin building had emptied out. My car was near the tennis courts, only a short walk to my first-floor office in Franklin Hall.

I entered the building through the basement. It was hard not to relive my last trip through this door, the clumsy red dolly at my heels. The memory prompted a question in my mind. If Gil was Keith’s killer, as I now firmly believed, it must have been she who took the boxes from my garage, and then returned them here. The only reason I could think of was that Keith had secreted another incriminating letter or photograph—birth certificate?—that would be embarrassing to her or Hal or both. I wondered how he’d buried that one. In a file labeled “Christmas Lists” or “Facebook Friends” ?

Come to think of it, did Keith have a file on me? Maybe I should have bargained with the dean to let me look through the material in the boxes.

The basement was as creepy today as it had been on Saturday. I wished I’d taken the front steps to the first floor, but this seemed quicker and cooler than a lumbering trip up the long outside flight. The sounds of the generator and fans and the accumulated musty smells of waste and chemicals dominated the hallway. I hurried to the elevator.

More than any other year, I couldn’t wait for school to start, when generator sounds would be replaced by student footsteps and chatter and the smells would be of perfumes and lunches. Well, maybe not the lunches.

I got off on my floor and nearly ran to the far end where my office was, three floors below Keith’s. I unlocked the frosted glass-front door and stepped in for the first time since the day of the murder. With a strange reflex, I glanced at the floor behind my desk. Clear. That was one hurdle down.

The office seemed musty after four days of being closed up. Though I didn’t plan to stay very long, I opened a window onto the campus. I noticed a dark sedan parked next to mine but didn’t recognize it. It appeared to be empty, as did the campus around it. I walked back to the door, closed and locked it. I didn’t dwell on why I thought this was necessary.

I sat at my desk with my back to the window, enjoying the fresh air without benefit of cross ventilation. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. I pulled two notes from Hal from exam folders, and a page of notes from a recent Franklin Hall faculty meeting.

What I also needed was the handwriting binder Ariana had showed me. I wanted to present the most comprehensive case possible to Virgil in the morning.

Another day I might have enjoyed the peace and quiet and lingered a while to leaf through the journals stacked on a shelf in my bookcase. Not today. Nor did I allow myself the luxury of turning on my computer and posting to groups I belonged to.

I stuffed the notes in my briefcase, closed the window, and left. I made a quick on-the-run call to Ariana to alert her that I’d be stopping at her shop to borrow the binder.

“No need for you to go back,” I said. “I have my key. I’m going to collect the binder and zip back home.”

“Take as long as you want with the notes and let me know if I can help.”

“You’ve already helped a lot.”

“Keep me in the loop, okay?” she said, her tone expressing her delight at having been of assistance.

I assured her I would and hung up.

I exited through the basement, without mishap. The sedan was gone, thus eliminating the trepidation I’d felt over having to squeeze in next to it before I could drive away.

Once I had a chance to study the new samples from Hal and Gil, and the material in the binder, I’d take the package to Virge. It would be hard to wait, but I wanted to be sure this time.

I hated to admit that as much as I was looking forward to seeing Bruce tonight, I was also eager to see what he’d been able to round up from the various handwritten pieces around the MAstar trailer.

Some romantic girlfriend I was.

A little after seven thirty I let myself in through the front door of A Hill of Beads. I punched in the alarm code on the wall pad, reminding myself first not to use my own code, but Ariana’s, a numerology sequence pertaining to her birth date.

It was still light out, but thanks to the semi-transparent solar window shades Ariana had had installed, the interior of the shop was dark.

I was tired of wandering into unlit, spooky spaces and hoped this was the last of them. At least this one smelled nice. Sage, I thought. I was also tired of being frightened of every little creak, like the sound of the rotating rack of stickers when I bumped into it. I wasn’t used to the new layout with added crafts supplies.

It wasn’t only the new nooks and crannies that got to me, however. How many times had I seen the row of dressmakers’ forms above the counters? The velvety necks and chests sporting beaded necklaces had been there for as long as I could remember. This evening the sight of the headless, bejeweled women sent a ripple of fright through my body. Familiar baskets holding sale items made spindly shadows against the wall, which was crammed with beads, in plastic packages, on strings, and in small glass jars.

I’d decided against turning lights on so as not to attract attention or give would-be customers false hope. Now I questioned that decision, but I was more than halfway to my destination and I was determined not to give in further to irrational fear.

I dug my phone from my purse and hit “favorites” on the screen. I leaned on a counter and clicked on Bruce’s number, ostensibly to let him know what time I thought I’d be home, but mostly to have company in the store, if only in the form of a friendly voice.

I waited while the phone dialed. Or whatever these smartphones did.

Hal would know. Besides being a physicist, Hal was a techie and tutored everyone in Franklin on our latest i-purchases, doing a much better job than the manuals that accompanied them. I cheered myself with the fact that Hal’s ruse would soon be revealed and Timmy would have his father back, if not his mother.

I walked toward the new beaded curtain that led to the back room where I’d last seen Ariana’s binder.

I stepped over the threshold and into a loud noise.

Gillian Bartholomew had smashed the window and entered the shop by the back window, the better to avoid being seen, I imagined. Even in my shock, I had to admire her agility as she climbed over the low sill.

My heart seemed to stop; my throat tightened to the maximum as I pretended not to scan her body for signs of a weapon. Both her hands were visible and empty, but she was wearing a khaki fisherman’s vest with many pockets. It couldn’t have been for warmth, so I imagined the worst. A knife in the top right pocket, a gun in the lower right, a venomous needle in the lower left, and a bomb strapped across her chest.

I hoped I was wrong and she was packing only lipstick and tissues, like a normal woman.

I slipped my phone into my own pocket, ruefully empty of weapons. I didn’t have “speaker” selected and couldn’t tell if Bruce had picked up or if it had gone to his voicemail.