Maid of Murder (13 page)

Templeton was suspiciously MIA. I perched on the couch next to Theodore, who had made himself quite comfortable in my home, when the phone rang.

“India,” the voice rasped as consequence of two packs of cigarettes a day for forty years. “Lewis Clive. I just got a call from your old man and said that I’d call you myself. I’ll get the ball rolling on my end to take legal action against the college on Mark’s behalf. It’s unreasonable for the college to suspend him when he hasn’t even been officially charged by the police.” He paused, and I heard him inhale deeply through the end of his unfiltered cigarette.

“Legal action?” I asked.

He chuckled. “Nothing too serious, only making noise about contract and compensation violations to let them know that we mean business.”

“I see. Is there any chance that Martin could suspend me too?”

Lew barked another laugh that turned into a ragged cough. He cleared his throat noisily. “They wouldn’t dare. They cannot dismiss you for something your sibling allegedly did. Martin may be a private college, but they take state and federal money like everybody else for scholarships, grants, and the like. They’re susceptible to state and federal law.”

I nodded before remembering I was on the phone. “I understand.”

“Terrific, terrific. When I’m done with those patsies, they won’t have a leg to stand on,” he said with unmitigated glee. “However, without Mark’s consent, I can’t move much further in this case except to become an irritant in the backside of Martin’s admin. It is imperative I speak to him ASAP. Your father implied that you know where Mark is most of the time. I need to find your brother, the sooner the better. Can you do that?”

“I’ll try.”

“Terrific,” he rasped. “I should be in my office until eight tonight.” He gave me his office and cell phone numbers. “Remember, the sooner you find Mark, the sooner we can nip this thing in the bud.”

After hanging up, I called my father back to tell him that I had heard from the lawyer and planned to look for Mark. Dad agreed to stay home in case Mark called, but his tone implied that he would have preferred to actively search for his son. He promised to call Carmen and Mom.

I changed out of my skirt and blouse into an outfit more conducive to a suburban manhunt, as it were. It was a little past five when I left my apartment, and the sun was still well above the horizon.

When I turned onto campus, I envisioned Lepcheck behind every stately oak and under every overpruned shrub with a fresh pink slip in hand—though the logical side of my brain argued that Lepcheck wouldn’t be on campus after five during the summer. I drove through Martin’s grounds without incident and parked in the Dexler lot.

Dexler Math and Science, a squat two-story brick building, held few of the Western Reserve airs as the other structures scattered around campus did. When Martin’s board of directors vowed to improve Martin’s math and science reputation in the 1970s, they did so with half-hearted intentions. Martin trustees tended to be elderly alums, who had majored in pretentious subjects like Latin.

The building was quiet, the result of summer campus hours, but unlocked. I tiptoed past a classroom with a lecturer waxing on to a classroom of drone-faced undergraduates. The mathematics department resided on the first floor of the building, but my brother’s office was on the basement level, the result of constant overcrowding. In addition to Mark’s office and an astounding number of cobwebs, the basement level housed the boiler room, chemistry lab, and offices of other low-ranking faculty. The cement-walled hallway was dark and the air was damp and musty.

No light showed underneath Mark’s door, but I knocked anyway, I didn’t get an answer, nor had I expected one. Thinking maybe I’d leave a note, or pick up a clue where he was, I tried the doorknob—locked. Security has never been first and foremost in the Martin mindset, and the lock appeared flimsy enough. Taking a cue from television cop shows, I removed a spare library card from my wallet and slipped it in between the doorjamb and the lock. With a
click
, the lock gave way.

Inside the tiny room, I shut the door behind me, elated with my exploit. My smugness evaporated when I turned on the light. On the desk sat an overturned picture frame, which immediately struck me as odd. Mark wasn’t one to decorate his office with personal items. The only bit of his personality he’d ever displayed in the room was an old classroom slide rule that he’d bought at a sale of out-of-date school supplies held at Stripling High School several years ago. The slide rule hung on his wall beside a College-issued calendar. I was happy to see that the calendar in his office at least displayed the current year.

I walked around the desk and turned over the eight-by-ten picture frame. The sound of broken glass clattered as I moved the gilded frame. The glass was cracked, but I recognized the photograph immediately. It was Olivia and Kirk’s engagement picture, the one that had appeared in the Stripling newspaper. The matte photograph showed the couple looking at each other. They were wearing matching sweaters.

Why does Mark have this? Where did he get it? I thought.

My stomach turned. I thought of Lepcheck’s threats and the Blockens’ accusation against my brother. Wasn’t it my job to protect him? Wasn’t that what was drilled into me by my family? It was those thoughts that spurred me to do what I did next, even though the more logical side of my brain begged me not to.

I picked up the frame and stuffed it in my oversized canvas bag. As I tucked it away, I heard the sound of feet thundering down the basement steps. I turned off the overhead light.

Seconds later, someone pounded on Mark’s office door. “Mr. Hayes, Mark Hayes, this is the police. Open up. We have a warrant to search your office.”

My heart dropped into my shoes. I had nowhere to hide. The tiny subterranean office didn’t have a window and the only sizable piece of furniture was Mark’s desk. For a millisecond, I thought of hiding underneath it. In the dark, I felt for the tiny space, but discarded the idea when I remembered the cobwebs in the hallway. Who knew what lurked under his desk.

“Open it.” A key slid into the lock. Before the key could complete its turn, I opened the door and pasted a polite smile on my face as if I had every right and reason to be there. Which, of course, I didn’t.

Two uniformed police officers, one a woman, a Martin maintenance worker, and Detective Mains faced me. They’d jumped in surprise when I whipped open the door. “Yes?” I asked.

Mains found his voice first. “India. What a surprise.”

His voice was dry, and I didn’t think he was really surprised at all.

I swallowed. My mouth had gone dry. “Why are you surprised, detective? This is my brother’s office.”

He said nothing and stepped inside. I backed up.

He flipped on the lights. “Your brother’s not here.”

“Afraid not,” I said. My heart was beating so hard, I was surprised that he couldn’t hear it.

“We have a search warrant.” He handed me a folded document on legal-sized paper. I read it carefully.

My shoulders twitched. “Okay,” I said as if they needed my permission.

Mains motioned for the two officers to enter the office. The maintenance worker, eagerly watching the cops’ every movement, remained in the hallway, but peered through the door. The room was cramped, but I couldn’t abandon Mark’s office under the circumstances. Unfortunately, that wasn’t my decision.

After instructing the officers where to pry, Mains turned to me. “Would you join me out in the hallway?”

Walking through the door, my bag brushed up against the doorjamb, and I became acutely aware of the engagement picture resting at the bottom. What if I hadn’t found it before the police arrived? What if they asked for my bag? I worried. The shoulder strap cut across my body; I adjusted it to hide the bag behind my back.

The maintenance worker, whose name tag read Pat, looked at us eagerly, undoubtedly thinking he was about to witness his first untelevised pistol whipping. Mains also seemed to notice Pat’s excited expression and asked the maintenance guy politely, but firmly, to wait in the stairwell.

The two officers rooted through Mark’s desk, muttering to each other.

Mains redirected his attention to me. “Could you tell me what you were doing in your brother’s office? Alone, at this time of day?”

“I was looking for Mark.”

He appeared unconvinced. “How did you get inside the office?”

“The door was unlocked,” I lied. “Mark often forgets simple things like locking doors.”

“Why were the lights off?”

“I turned the lights off. I was about to leave.” I counted that one as a half-truth.

Mains made a note in the tiny vinyl-bound memo pad he had taken from his jacket pocket.

“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary in his office?”

The frame weighed heavily inside my shoulder bag. “No.” No half-truth there.

He snapped the memo pad shut. “You are free to stay if you like, but outside of the office.”

I nodded. A loud crash escaped Mark’s office door, followed by an even louder curse from one of the officers. Mains sighed heavily.

He and I peeked through the doorway and found one of the officers picking up the broken pieces of Mark’s prized slide rule from the floor.

“Make a note of the damage,” Mains said.

Red-faced, the youngest officer nodded.

I slipped back out of the doorway. “I need to make a call. I’ll be upstairs. There’s no reception down here.”

Mains barely gave me a nod in acknowledgment.

I hurried to the exit. When I reached the stairwell, I found Pat had abandoned his post. I broke into a trot. In Dexler’s parking lot, I hurried to my car. I unlocked the car and grabbed a T-shirt from the backseat. Like a fugitive, I glanced around before unlocking the trunk. I opened it and shifted the junk around until I could pull back the carpeted bottom to expose the empty tire well. Currently, the spare tire was on the right front wheel. I pulled the frame from my bag and wrapped it in the T-shirt. Carefully, I place the wrapped frame into the tire well, rolled the carpet back, and slammed the trunk shut. The bag was thinner, but I had to hope that I was the only one who would notice.

I was breathing hard as I stuck my hand in the bag again, this time for my cell phone. I scrolled through my phonebook for Lew’s number.

“Baxter and Clive, attorneys,” a woman’s voice chimed. I told her I’d like to speak to Lew and gave my name. Within seconds, he came on the line. “Did you find Mark?”

“Um, no, but I’m at Mark’s office, and the police are here searching it. They had a warrant, so I let them.”

Lew sucked air through his gaped front teeth. “I better come down there.”

I paced outside Dexler’s entrance until Lew arrived in his imposing SUV. Before we entered the building, I handed him the warrant that Mains had given me. He mumbled to himself while he read. Only five feet five inches tall, Lew was a stocky man with flaming red hair and beard and a perpetual sunburn. I didn’t know where he stood on the numerous left-wing causes that my parents chained themselves to, figuratively and literally, but he was an excellent lawyer. He’d bailed them out of lockup within hours of arrest and had helped them tap dance their way out of convictions.

Lew dropped his cigarette onto the pristine Martin walk, crushing it with his tasseled loafer. “The warrant does mention that the search is in connection to the Olivia Blocken case,” he said to himself more than me. I nodded anyway.

I fidgeted. My conscience nagged me about the purloined photo in the trunk.

In the dark stairwell that led to the basement level, we met the two uniformed police officers. One said that Detective Mains would like to speak to me. Lew and I continued down the steps. Aside from Mains sitting in Mark’s desk chair and the slide rule that sat in pieces on the file cabinet, the office didn’t appear disturbed. Mains frowned when Lew followed me into the cramped office space.

I introduced Lew as the family lawyer, and he rose to his full height. “I represent the Hayes family and, at this time, am providing legal counsel to Mark Hayes and his sister India pertaining to the untimely death of their good friend Olivia Blocken.”

“I see.” Mains stood up from Mark’s chair. “It would be wise if you’d advise Mark to come down to the police station.”

“Why?” I asked.

Lew waved my outburst away. “When I next speak to Mark, I’ll discuss the matter with him. Can I ask why you’d like Mark at the station?”

“I have some questions for him.”

“Such as?”

“You can hear them at the station. I assume that you plan to be there.”

“Yes, I’ll be there.”

“India, if you see your brother, ask him to come down to the station. It’s for his own good,” Mains said.

In my estimation, when something is for someone’s own good, it’s always bad news.

“I’ll try,” I promised.

Mains left the office. Lew followed him into the hallway, demanding to know if Mains’s officers had confiscated anything. Mains said that it would be in the report. I heard their heated voices travel further down the hall until they disappeared with the slam of the stairwell’s door. I sat at Mark’s desk and wracked my brain for an idea of my brother’s whereabouts. As far as I knew, he wasn’t close with anyone in his department or at Martin in general, aside from me, and I even suspected that had more to do with genetics than personal preference. I tried to think of people outside of Martin who Mark was friendly with, but no one came to mind. Mark never offered information to me about his friends or activities outside of his schooling and job. Was that because he really didn’t have any outside interests? Or was it because I never asked? I wondered

The door to the stairway slammed again. “India,” Lew’s raspy voice called down the corridor. I met him in the hall.

“What?” My nerves were shot.

He waved his cell phone. “Your father just called. Your brother’s at your parents’ house. Let’s go.” Not waiting for my reaction, he ran up the stairs like a warrior running full-tilt into battle. I got the distinct impression that Lew was enjoying himself.