The Probability of Murder (26 page)

A montage of images of Daryl Farmer came to me, one of which showed him as the guy Mr. Gold saw entering my home to violate it, neat as he’d been. I saw Daryl in my mind at the Friday parties at Ben Franklin Hall, sitting in front of me in class three times a week for statistics, standing near me at functions on campus. Had Charlotte been standing next to me at those times also?

Had anyone at Henley ever been safe with Charlotte alive and Daryl out to get her? Were we safe now?

I answered Ariana’s question with one of my own. “What if Daryl has unfinished business?”

“He knows by now that there’s no money for him anywhere, don’t you think?” Ariana said. “Are you saying there’s someone else he has it in for? Like—”

“Like Chelsea,” I said, springing to my feet, not caring that carefully placed beads were slipping off my wire.

“Do you think he’d hurt her?” Ariana asked. “Why would he do that? I think he’s a guy who was just out for revenge. He’s not a serial killer or anything. I don’t get that vibe from him.”

I didn’t ask how Ariana could distinguish serial killer vibes from the vibes coming off someone who’d murdered only one person. I figured it would be too long a story for this hour.

“Maybe Chelsea knows who he really is or he thinks she does. Maybe he enlisted her help and now he has to get rid of her. I don’t know.”

Ariana put down her string of beads in such a way that
it stayed intact. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Sophie. Shall we get Virgil back here?”

“Good idea,” I said. “But I need to call Chelsea, too.”

“You can invite her over or something.”

Something. “Why don’t you call Virgil, to save time,” I said. “I’ll try Chelsea.”

Ariana nodded and moved to the hallway and then to my office, opening her phone on the way.

I punched in Chelsea’s number and took deep breaths, reminding myself that all I had was a theory based on unconfirmed similarities. I didn’t want to send the fragile Chelsea into a panic, but I’d never have forgiven myself if I did nothing to warn her of potential harm.

I waited through four rings, forming a decision tree in my head, with three branches, to account for Chelsea’s being with Daryl, Chelsea’s not being with Daryl, and no answer.

The winner was “no answer.”

I heard the click to voice mail and debated whether to leave a message. What if Daryl heard it? The message would be on her cell phone, I realized with relief, not shouted out to a kitchen answering machine as a message to my landline might be.

I spoke as calmly as possible. “Chelsea, this is Dr. Knowles. Please give me a call at home when you get this message. I want to talk to you about your statistics paper.”

Now I had to invent a plausible reason to single out Chelsea’s paper for a chat. I remembered that she’d chosen the application of statistics to agricultural issues, an interesting choice that reflected her ties to her roots in a farming community. I could dig out an advanced reference to give her or advise her to be sure to visit the site developed by the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Neither of these ideas merited a late-night call either from or to my home, but it was the best I could come up with on the spot.

When Ariana and I reconvened in the den, she gave her report. She’d also had to leave a message, for Virgil. Maybe he did have someplace to go on a Sunday evening.

“He wasn’t picking up, but, get this, if I have an emergency I should dial nine-one-one.”

“That’s comforting.”

“I guess that’s all we can do tonight,” Ariana said, yawning.

A minute later the clock in the den struck midnight and my friend Cinderella threw up her hands and said good night.

“This is getting to be a habit,” I said, as Ariana shuffled toward the guest room.

She waved and called over her shoulder, “You should be going to bed, too.”

“Sure, right away.”

I headed for my office.

It was nice to have Ariana’s supportive and often cheery presence. I knew her strategy was to be here for me in case I heard from Bruce or…about Bruce…in the middle of the night.

I went online to check the weather at Franconia Notch. I found nothing new about the storm, no new webcam graphic. It was as if New Hampshire had shut down. The number listed on the site was the same one I’d been calling, with a computer-generated message about regular business hours.

How does a mountain have regular business hours?

I hadn’t checked my email since early afternoon, and it was now overloaded with student queries. It seemed my majors had a hard time doing without me for a whole weekend.

“I can’t open the third link on your list for probability sampling examples,” wrote Rena. I responded, “Check your browser. Any recent version of Firefox should work.”

“Is stratified sampling going to be on the final?” Lamar asked, insinuating that it wouldn’t be fair, since I didn’t spend much class time on it. I wrote back, “I’ll post a study guide for the final in a week or so.”

“Can I change my topic from statistics in corporate
America to manufacturing statistics?” Brendan wanted to know. “As long as you don’t really manufacture statistics,” I answered, unable to resist.

I shot off quick replies to five other students, then opened a file with my notes for a class in about nine hours on statistical sampling. I was ahead of the game, having anticipated a time-out in Boston.

I reviewed my intro to the session. I wanted to emphasize the importance of understanding sampling methods without sounding like a preacher. If I had my way, every voter would be required to take my class or one like it before being issued a ballot. Though it should have been obvious, I planned to remind the voters in my class that no published survey obtains data from every single person in the pool of voters. Not just in politics, data is interpreted for us at every turn, and not necessarily by people who are objective about the results.

My electronic charts were in order, with examples from reports of so-called trends in climate, in sales, even in medical results. I decided I’d have time to cover aspects of sample design and introduce the formula for sample size to prepare the students for the homework assignment.

I closed the file, quit all the applications, and thought about trying to sleep.

I got as far as turning back my old lavender comforter when my landline rang from my night table.

Virgil’s number popped onto my screen. I sat on my bed and clicked on.

“You up?” he asked.

“I’m up,” I said, wondering why, in the midst of all the serious matters of the evening, I found myself curious about where and with whom Virgil had been earlier. If he had a girlfriend I wanted to meet her. “Did you have a good evening?” I asked, not to be too subtle.

“I’ve been on the phone a lot, setting up some contacts in New Hampshire.”

My breath caught. “Did you learn anything?”

“Not yet, but I have some avenues established, sort of like a phone tree.”

Only the near Luddite Virgil would hold on to the methods of our grammar school days, when our parents communicated about days off or worked out field trip details by telephoning around in chain letter fashion, before texting and emailing were invented.

“Thanks,” I said, grateful for any communication method, old or new, that put me closer to wherever Bruce was.

“What’s this about a theory around our Charlotte Crocker case? Ariana mentioned there’s something I should know?”

“How much time do you have?” I asked.

“Go for it.”

I did.

It was hard to explain what I’d found and what I’d guessed at without props like photographs and a nicely graphed timeline, but I did my best to fill in Virgil on the story I’d put together. I threw in what I’d learned from Daryl’s admissions file, the lies he’d told Chelsea about his age and background, and his two appearances at my home at the time of the break-in.

Virgil didn’t interrupt while I was talking, and he didn’t respond right away when I was finished, ending with my concern for Chelsea. When he finally spoke, he had a few questions.

“Do you know where Daryl Farmer is now?”

“No. Does this mean you think my little narrative has merit?”

“Anything can have merit in an investigation.”

Back to unforgiving cop mode, I noticed. “Right. And I don’t know where Chelsea is either,” I added.

“Okay. Give me some time and don’t do anything else. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“If Chelsea calls you back, play it cool and let me know. Don’t do anything yourself. Got it?”

“Got it.”

The second time I sang the words, just to make a point.

Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Whirrrr.

My cell phone.

I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep, only that I’d been tossing and turning. I’d left my night table light on and both phones handy. I checked the clock—two fifteen—and the screen on my phone.

Chelsea this time.

“Hey, Dr. Knowles. Hope I didn’t wake you. I know you stay up late.”

Had I ever been this cavalier about calling my professors? Yes, I realized, I had, though not too often. I was sure that Janice Barnard, former resident assistant on the fourth floor of my dorm at my alma mater, would testify to the fact that I’d awakened her more than once. And with very little at stake, usually that my boyfriend at the time hadn’t called all day.

“I’m awake now,” I said, my standard line for the roughly three times a month that students woke me up.

“I figured if you called me so late, it must be important.”

“Sort of, but nothing to worry about,” I said, untruthfully. “I was actually looking for Daryl and wondered if you knew where he was.”

Neither of us mentioned that I’d cited her statistics paper as the original reason for my voice mail message.

“Don’t talk to me about Daryl. We supposedly had a date, and he never showed. I’m ready to dump him.”

It sounded to me like he’d dumped her, which wouldn’t have been a bad thing in my mind.

“Were you going on a police-scanner jaunt?” I asked, before I could curb my sarcastic nature.

“No, I talked him into a normal date, like dinner and a movie, something I could actually tell my parents about.
We were going up to Cambridge to one of those arty movie houses.”

Where I should have been on Friday. “What are you doing now?”

“Studying statistics.”

For a moment, I bought it.

“That was nice. Thanks, Chelsea.”

She laughed. “Really, I did my homework. I’m just hanging out with some of the girls in the Paul Revere lounge. Sunday nights we all do our laundry and our hair and, you know, talk about boys. I mean math.”

I hesitated to put a damper on the carefree laugh of one who didn’t know she might be in danger.

“Do me a favor, Chelsea, and let me know if Daryl calls you.”

“What’s this about, Dr. Knowles?”

“I’ve got to go now. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”

Chelsea was safe in the dorm. There was a hotline to Virgil from authorities in the mountains of New Hampshire. Bruce’s new bookmark was 90 percent done, and I could count on Ariana to finish it up, fixing my end of the cord, too, in the process. Though I’d been reluctant to make it, I now saw it as a good omen. You can’t have too many good luck charms to avert disaster.

The world would probably be okay if I went back to sleep.

Ariana had left by the time I shambled into the kitchen to the smell of coffee she’d brewed, which was next to the fresh scones she’d whipped up, which were next to a paper bag marked, “S’s LUNCH.”

I was beginning to like having a roommate.

Ariana had left a note near my mug. The message read, “Force the Stress Out,” a cue to me to use the mantra method she’d taught me. The exercise was supposed to send the tightness she knew I was feeling from my head to
my feet, step by step, and then out through the floor, until the last phrases—“The bottoms of my feet are relaxed. I am relaxed”—became a reality.

Maybe later.

For now I had to take my stress to school.

Dressed in my standard fall teaching outfit of black slacks and black shirt, with a faux Victorian vest today, I drove onto campus, parked in one of my usual spots between the tennis courts and the Mortarboard Café, and walked toward Ben Franklin Hall. The well-cared-for lawns and small statuary on the seventeen-acre campus looked the same. The strategically placed lampposts stood straight up. Students with backpacks, cell phones, and bottles of water dotted the landscape.

It was another Monday among many, the start of a week of classes.

But I felt the whole world had changed since Friday.

My biggest challenge would be to act normal and hope the B. F. Skinner method of effecting inner change through outward behavior would work.

After a quick drop-off and pickup in my office, I stopped in at the first-floor lounge for my second cup of coffee, not as good as the brew Ariana had left for me earlier. I was glad I didn’t have to pay for it.

Fran, deep into her class notes at the conference table, looked up. She came over to me and hugged me, the first sign that it wasn’t an ordinary Monday for her either.

“I’m so sorry, Sophie,” she said. “Charlotte Crocker is all over the news. Different identities? A record a mile long? Crimes all over the country? I can’t believe it.”