The Probability of Murder (22 page)

I read a few lines about a four-man team of climbers who’d had to be rescued from Scud Wall in Wyoming because they’d been “surprised by nightfall.” How were four adults shocked when daylight ended?

On California’s Mount Shasta, one member of a private expedition of six had struck out on his own without enough provisions. Even after an intensive air search, the man was never found.

On Longs Peak in Colorado, an ice cliff had collapsed and killed—

I slammed the magazine shut, imagining the next issue of the
Accident Review
featuring the threesome from MAstar who’d died trying to climb a steep and challenging route in New Hampshire in a snowstorm.

I allowed myself one more brief crying jag and finally called a halt to the depressing tour of my house.

I took a mug of Ariana’s special blend tea to the den, determined to ignore the underside of the coffee table and enjoy a puzzle of someone else’s making. I’d just begun solving a measuring puzzle—two pieces of string each take thirty minutes to burn, et cetera—when I remembered the fax sheets that had come in from Lori Tilden earlier in the day. Daryl Farmer’s application for admission to Henley College.

Maybe there was something useful I could do after all.

I retrieved the fax sheets from my office. Lori had come through big-time. I now had a folder full of material on Daryl Farmer, including his high school transcript, letters of recommendation, and a writing sample.

The first number that stood out for me was Daryl’s birth date. If I hadn’t lost my subtraction skills, Daryl was born in Seattle, Washington, twenty-six years ago. He was more than just a year or two older than Chelsea, as she thought. At this stage of their lives, six or seven years makes a huge difference, especially given the basic naïveté of Chelsea,
the Midwest pastor’s daughter. I felt a song coming on, about the Midwest farmer’s daughter, which, corny as it was, constituted a definite improvement in my mood.

I called up a mental picture of Daryl. His somewhat round features gave him a youthful appearance, but something in his manner had always struck me as more mature than most of his peers at Henley.

From his application materials, it seemed Daryl had not been traveling around with his backpack, enjoying the museums of Europe as he’d told Chelsea. He’d worked for a software company in the famous Silicon Valley of California. It wasn’t impossible to work in the software industry without a degree, so why did he want one now? Of course, he had about eight years to get a degree somewhere else, not something he would have included on his application to enter the freshman class.

Which left wide open the question of why he was in Henley College’s freshman class in the first place.

Was Daryl another con artist, like my deceased pseudo-librarian friend? I had to admit that Charlotte’s many names and long rap sheet had poisoned my trustworthy nature, but there was no doubt that either Daryl had lied to Chelsea or Chelsea had lied to me.

Did no one tell the truth anymore?

I thought of the class of riddles that never failed to interest me, “Everything I tell you is a lie” being the trademark sentence.

It didn’t make sense that Daryl would downplay his age and experience if he was trying to attract Henley coeds, Chelsea especially. Maybe he’d figured out exactly the right formula to impress her as worldly, but not scare her away as too much man for her.

At least he had no record, I mused, or none that I knew of. His use of a police scanner was certainly creepy, but legal. And, anyway, who was I to judge Chelsea’s choice of boyfriend? Mine was showing anything but responsible behavior at the moment.

I was only slightly tempted to tell Chelsea about Daryl’s
true age and past, but I knew her mother and father tracked her movements and her choices of friends carefully, even from Nebraska. I wondered briefly if they micromanaged their sons the same way. Chelsea had daily contact with her parents by phone; she didn’t need a local nag.

But lying was never a good way to start a relationship.

Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Whirrrr.

Another wake-up call, at seven
PM
, from my cell phone.

I couldn’t remember a time since cramming for finals in college when I’d had such crazy sleeping patterns. Even as a child, transitions from sleeping to waking up and back were tough for me, which was why I’d never been a fan of napping. Each time I woke up from the involuntary naps in this latest spree, no matter the length, I was groggy all over again.

No wonder I felt a week had passed since Charlotte’s murder. Since Bruce left for his climbing trip. Since my home had been invaded and bugged and my duffel bag stolen.

“Hey,” Ariana said. “I just got your messages. I’m on my way.”

“Your phone was off.” A completely gratuitous comment, but just another sign of my lack of coherence on first waking up.

Ariana cleared her throat. “Luke just left.”

“Got it.”

Buzzz.

My doorbell.

I clicked off with Ariana and tucked the folder of fax sheets under a large coffee table book on the history of mathematics, just in case my visitor wasn’t cleared to see the material on Daryl. If President Aldridge dropped by, for example, she might have questions about how I came to have the files. I smiled at the thought of Olivia’s stopping by for tea.

My amusement turned to amazement when I looked out the peephole at a tall, fiftyish woman in designer rain gear.

“Olivia,” I said. “Come in.”

Olivia kicked off her fashionable burgundy boots before I could tell her it wasn’t necessary, and walked into my humble abode. Though the president was very formal at school, I knew her to be quite the opposite in a social setting. She’d been to my home only one other time, when I hosted a faculty party here and, as I recalled, she’d all but led a conga line.

“Sophie,” she said, in a tone that was half-reproachful and half-best-friendish. “I assume you know.”

“And didn’t tell me” hung in the air. That was the reproachful half.

No sense playing dumb. “I haven’t known for long,” I said, following her to my den. I was impressed that she knew her way, and that she maintained her presidential bearing in the face of a college scandal; that is, she wasn’t hysterical, as I might have been in her shoes.

While damage to the reputation of the college had slipped through the cracks on my list of concerns around Charlotte’s murder, Olivia couldn’t afford that luxury. I realized now that I should have gone to her with the information, but I’d had no way of knowing if Virgil intended it to be public at that time.

Olivia plopped into an easy chair in the den, thankfully not near the buried fax sheets, and helped herself to a chocolate from a candy dish on the end table. “How in the world could we have let this happen?” she asked, working her mouth around the truffle.

I didn’t know whether “this” was Charlotte’s murder or hiring her in the first place, so I responded generically, “We couldn’t have known.”

“It’s hopeless to raise anyone in Human Resources on a Sunday, but I need to know how an ex-convict could have made it past all the supposedly foolproof screens we have in our hiring process. We buy all this expensive software and still…” She blew out an exasperated breath and took another candy. “You read about this all the time, like that
man who forged a Harvard law degree and was attorney general of some southern state for a while.”

“You just don’t think you’re going to be conned yourself,” I finished, glad to share my sense of betrayal and humiliation with my boss.

While I made coffee, I texted Ariana and called her off until later in the evening. My antiestablishment friend did not mix well with the upper levels of management.

“Nothing personal,” she always said.

For the next half hour, over coffee and a modest plate of snacks I’d put together, Olivia and I commiserated and reminisced about a woman we both mistakenly thought we knew.

I felt it was about time I shared the highlights of what I’d learned from Charlotte’s rap sheet. Olivia would be facing the press soon, as well as the campus community, and she needed to know at least as much as I did.

She took it all in with as much equanimity as could be expected.

“The memorial service,” Olivia said at one point, as if she were announcing an agenda item at an all-hands meeting.

“I haven’t done anything about it,” I admitted.

“I should think not.”

“What are you thinking? Skip it altogether?” I asked, hopeful.

Olivia took another deep breath; I’d stopped counting how many.

“This news about Charlotte’s past is just out on one of my Internet news services. I imagine by tomorrow it will be in every paper and on everyone’s tongue. I suppose I’ll call an assembly and just put it out there with some weasel words about how no one is perfect, et cetera. She was a member of our staff and she was murdered on campus. I can’t just dismiss that.”

Olivia seemed to be brainstorming with herself. I let her talk. She’d been in office about four years and was one of
the more forward-looking administrators in Henley’s recent history. I was confident that she would do us proud.

“I did reach Martin today to get his take on it,” she said.

“Martin Melrose?” Apparently he was taking calls from the president, if not from me.

“Melrose, yes. He’s on the hiring committee. I wondered if he remembered any red flags when she was being considered for the job. He says he can’t recall what her application looked like, but he’ll check her file in the morning. He says he’s hardly seen or talked to her since she was hired two years ago.”

“Is that right?”

Shame on you, Marty. Lying to the president.
At the moment I didn’t feel compelled to explain the lottery pool to Olivia. She had enough to think about without worrying that her money guy might have some shady past of his own. But I planned to grill him intensively at our brown-bag lunch date tomorrow.

Olivia stood and picked crumbs from her skirt and deposited them on her plate. I followed her as she carried it to the kitchen. Nice manners.

“We should close the loop on a memorial service soon, but I’m inclined to have a simple moment of silence for her sometime this week,” she said, retrieving her boots from the entryway. “Would that work for you? In lieu of a formal ceremony?”

I pretended to consider the idea for a few seconds and then nodded, rejoicing inwardly. “Whatever you think,” I said.

It had been a stress-free visit, with some faculty-administration bonding and a decision that got me off the hook for eulogizing a woman I’d lost all respect for. It felt good.

Why did Olivia have to spoil the moment? Her gaze landed on one of the framed climbing photographs of Bruce that hung by the front door.

“That looks very dangerous,” she said.

“Bruce is an experienced climber,” I said, echoing what all my supporters had been telling me.

I realized I needed to get some new photographs. Maybe one of Ariana in her shop and a couple of the Friday Ben Franklin Hall parties.

I hoped Bruce, the experienced climber, would be around to help me mount them.

My landline rang the moment Olivia drove off. If I didn’t have caller ID, I wouldn’t have answered. I’d been keeping both phones next to me all evening, waiting for a call from Jenna, or from Bruce himself.

“Hey, Virgil,” I said.

“I’m soaking wet. I hope you have something stronger than tea,” he said.

“Where are you?”

“Two houses down, walking in the rain.”

“Were you waiting outside for Olivia to leave?”

“Uh-huh. I pulled up right when she did. I didn’t think she’d stay that long.”

“You could have joined us,” I said, rummaging in the fridge for a beer, which is what Virgil meant by “something stronger.”

“I figure you had private college business to discuss. And I didn’t figure her digging into the pizza I brought.”

“I’m starving.”

“I’m clicking off.”

By the time I pulled out a beer, Virgil arrived on my doorstep, dripping wet and loaded down. He held in his arms a large moving box and on top of that a pizza box wrapped in a waterproof sleeve.

“Where did you get this cover?” I asked, relieving him of the food, enjoying the aroma of tomato sauce and the works even through thick, dark plastic.

“Badges are still good for something,” he said. I couldn’t imagine how Virgil had managed to carry the boxes and talk on his cell at the same time until I noticed his Bluetooth earpiece. “I suppose you’re going to comment on this thing on my ear,” he said.

“Since you brought food, I’m letting you off the hook, but congratulations, and welcome to a technology that’s only about twelve years old.”

“Smart aleck.” Virgil removed his Bluetooth device and put it in his jacket pocket. “They gave them out to everyone. I intended to accidently lose it, but I have to admit it’s pretty handy. ’Scuse the pun.”

I’d waited long enough. I faced Virgil, my back to all the boxes. “Not that you’re not always welcome, but are you here because of Bruce?” I was amazed I got the whole sentence out without falling apart.

“Bruce? Should I be?”