The Square Root of Murder (15 page)

“One more time: You were on the same faculty. You were up for the same promotions, true?”

“That’s not how it works. We don’t have a pecking order like that.” Not exactly, that is. I wasn’t keen on reciting the bylaws’ definitions for the various faculty rankings on a college campus, from adjuncts who taught one or two classes only, to instructors who were full-time but without significant credentials or seniority, all the way to full professors.

Archie flipped through pages of his notebook, back from where he started with me. “Weren’t you both in the running for full professor, coming up this fall?”

“Well, sort of, but there’s no law that says we can’t both be appointed. As I said, we submit articles to different journals; we both have plenty of students signing up for our classes.” I held my hands palms up, then quickly folded them on my lap again. There was no point in waving my DNA around in front of this man.

Neither did I want to share with this canny, knowledgeable detective that I’d set myself the goal of attaining full professorship for this year. I was on the young side of the demographic for the title, but I hoped my work supported it. Archie didn’t need to know that Keith had two years in age on me and one in seniority.

I looked around the bare room, catching my reflection in a window on the side wall. Haggard would have been a good descriptor. Sagging eyelids, hair frizzed beyond belief, disheveled shirt. I wanted to leave and head for the nearest shower.

Where was Virgil? Where was Bruce, best friend to Virgil? Why was I stuck with this know-it-all young partner who was interrogating, not interviewing? I’d been expecting to answer questions about Rachel, or Pam, or Liz, or Casey, or Fran, or Lucy, or Hal. Even Dean Underwood. I thought I’d been sent here to help. Now I had to face the reality that Virgil had not been joking when he’d implied I was in the pool of murder suspects.

I was getting hotter and hotter and hoped I wouldn’t pass out. I felt sure only guilty people passed out in situations like this.

Archie finished his flipping for the moment.

“Yeah, back to the promotions to full professor. There are perks with this, huh?”

“A small raise usually. We already have tenure. Mostly it’s the status, I guess.” I stopped. I should be answering with the smallest possible number of words. I’d read that somewhere. Or seen it on television.

“Usually you expect these announcements early in the fall term?”

Why was he harping on this? What made him think he knew anything about college faculty operations in the first place?

“That’s right.” Archie waited me out, and I added, “With four slots open in math and science, we were both very likely to get the promotion.”

“When was the last time you saw Dr. Appleton?”

From left field, but not a problem. I thought back.

“Outside the dean’s office on Thursday, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“It was on Thursday.”

“Was there a reason you were there, outside the dean’s office?”

Uh-oh. “She’d sent for me.”

“Because?”

I let out a heavy sigh. “Nothing that important. She wanted to talk to me about noisy parties . . . that is . . . seminars in our building.”

“Had she received a complaint?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Did she say who’d made the complaint?”

“No, she didn’t.”

“Did you have any guesses?”

“No.” I’d crossed my fingers by now.

“And you saw Dr. Appleton where?”

I gritted my teeth. “Coming out of the dean’s office.” “But you didn’t assume he was the one who’d made the complaint about your noisy parties?”

“They weren’t . . .” I paused and took a breath. “No.”

“Because?”

“Well, she’d already sent for me long before he would have been in her office.”

A victory, but a small, short one.

“You’re close to your assistant, Ms. Wheeler?” Archie asked, a knowing look in his eyes.

“It’s not like we go to movies together or anything, but yes, I consider her a friend.”

“And yesterday, can you tell me what your interaction with Ms. Wheeler was?”

“I had a class in the morning that she had set up, and then she came at the end to take it down, before the party.”

Archie checked his notes. “That would be the party for Dr. Bartholomew. And that was an actual party, not a seminar.”

Smart aleck cop. “Yes.”

“I’m curious. What’s involved in setting up for a math class? Don’t you usually just use a blackboard?”

I heard the hint of a jocular air, but no way was I letting down my guard. By now my lips were like chalk, dry enough to make a scratching sound on that blackboard he brought up.

“I’m in charge of a program to make students more comfortable with everyday math, giving them problemsolving skills especially. It’s a hands-on way of teaching math. We use a lot of manipulatives.”

“You mean blocks and balls, that kind of thing?”

I smiled and tried to strike a tone between informative and condescending. “These days we use videos, online graphing calculators, interactive websites,
that
kind of thing.”

“It’s not the math I remember.”

“It’s not your father’s math class,” I said, with immediate regret.

He laughed. I sighed with relief.

“Thanks for coming in, Sophie. You can go now.”

“I can?”

He nodded and gave me a genuine smile for the first time. “Thanks for your cooperation. Sorry to put you through this, but you know I had to.”

Not really, but I knew I should count my blessings and split immediately. So, why didn’t I?

“Do you have any leads in the case?” I asked, astonished that I hadn’t dashed for the safety of my car already. I took one more stab at shifting police attention from Rachel. “I’d be happy to share with you what I’ve observed about Dr. Appleton’s dealings with the students, the other faculty—”

“We’ll let you know if we need you,” Archie said, back to his serious cop tone.

I left without another word.

 

 

I replayed the entire interrogation over in my head a number of times on the way home. It seemed clear to me that Archie and/or Virgil had interviewed Dean Underwood before they got to me. I could think of no other way that Archie would have known to quiz me on promotions and on the summons to her office. I wondered what their approach to the dean had been, antagonistic or deferential. Was she an informant or a suspect? After all, if it weren’t for Keith’s support of the change to a coeducational institution, Dean Underwood might have been able to keep her ladies’ academy fantasy.

In my mind, everyone was a suspect, except Rachel and me.

The clock on my dashboard, not the most accurate, read five twenty-five. I’d hoped to have enough time before Ariana arrived with herbs and lotions to get a decent start on Keith’s files. I wasn’t completely satisfied that the police had eliminated me from their list. I counted on something concrete to point to the actual murderer.

I turned into my driveway, pressing the garage door opener from a few yards away. The door rolled up and I headed in, between my treadmill and my workbench.

The treadmill was in its place, if forlorn for lack of use this summer.

The workbench was empty.

It took some time for me to fully accept that my garage had been burglarized and my plan for a big breakthrough had been thwarted.

My gardening tools were in place, hanging from a pegboard; my fire extinguisher and two wooden ladders, one long, one short, were in their usual spots against a wall. Small items on racks here and there seemed unmoved. Besides the boxes, the only things that appeared to be missing were the shopping bags with clothing and odds and ends I’d been collecting for the charity pickup. My guess was that the thief assumed the bags were part of my haul from the campus, if indeed that was what this was all about.

I stood there looking around uselessly until I realized the burglar could still be on my property, even inside my home.

I made a dash for my car, banged the door locked with my elbow, and drove back out to the driveway. At least if he or she came out of my house, guns blazing, I’d have a little protection, and I might be able to screech away down the street.

Call the police, said my logical brain. And tell them what? my other brain asked. That I was a petty thief myself, having absconded with boxes of papers and office material that didn’t belong to me, and now they’d been re-stolen? I supposed I could call the station, drag a couple of officers out here, and report that I was missing a few bags of used clothing and usable discards. I could list my old toaster oven, a pillow that was too frilly for my taste, and a stapler that I’d replaced with an electric version.

No, calling the police was out of the question. How inconvenient.

I started to formulate a Plan B.

There were three entrances to my garage—the first was through a door from my kitchen; the second was the electric roll-up door; and a third, side exit led to the narrow passageway outside where I kept my trash containers. The kitchen door, like the rest of my interior perimeter, was always alarmed when I left the house; the other two were not wired for security.

All I had to do now was open the kitchen door a crack and listen for a beeping sound. Beeping would mean the alarm was still set and my house had not been entered illegally; no beeping would mean someone had intruded. Or might still be rattling around in there. If everything worked properly, in the event of an intrusion, the alarm company would have contacted me. But the system had never been tested in that way—both good news and bad.

I tapped my steering wheel, thinking.

I made my decision based on one, trusting the security system and its monitors, and two, the fact that I had neither heard nor seen, nor had I smelled, any sign of an intruder since I arrived.

I got out of the car, picked off a large rake from the pegboard, and headed for the alarmed but unlocked kitchen door. I turned the knob as silently as I could and pushed the door in, the long, potentially lethal rake at the ready in my other hand.

I let out a breath. My home had not been violated. I entered the security code, the beeping stopped, and my heart rate returned to normal. I walked back out to the garage, to the side next to my treadmill, and examined the most likely point of entry, through the door between the garage and the side alleyway. Sure enough, the push button on the knob was out, in the unlocked position. I imagined how easy it had been to pick the skimpy lock. Bruce had been after me forever to install a deadbolt and had offered to do it. Too bad I’d told him I’d take care of it.

Back to the problem of the missing boxes.

Maybe a gust of wind had blown through, knocking the boxes to the floor. Never mind that boxes were sturdy and heavy, and that there was no cross ventilation available. Even so, I looked under the workbench and behind the water heater. I walked around my garage like someone who couldn’t remember where she’d put a large load of freight. Maybe I’d stuffed the cartons into the tiny area under the metal shelving that held seasonal decorations and archives from my teaching career, or behind the treadmill.

Of course, there was no sign of them.

I had to face facts. The boxes had been stolen. Re-stolen. Only Woody knew that I had taken them, and unless he’d been stalking me, he didn’t know I’d taken them off campus. Even if he did know, I couldn’t imagine the sweet old man making tracks to my house while I was at the police station and carting everything back.

Had Woody told someone? The dean came to mind. But even if she’d already found out that her appointed messenger had been preempted, I couldn’t picture her sending someone to break into my home to retrieve the material. She’d be more likely to have Courtney call me to her office at an inconvenient time so she could cluck her tongue at me in person.

The thought I’d been avoiding, that someone had been lurking, following my movements this afternoon, kept creeping back.

Each possibility was more unsettling than the next.

I sat on an old metal stool and leaned on the empty workbench, working hard to calm myself and think clearly. Why would anyone want files from a dead man’s office? For the same reason I did, to look for clues to his murder. Or to remove something incriminating.

At the sound of a car entering my driveway, I started and nearly fell off the rickety stool. I’d never been so glad to see Ariana’s happy face and animated wave as she exited her decades-old convertible.

“How come your car’s out here?” she asked.

“I hope you brought your herbs and lotions,” I said.

 

 

We sat in my den, sipping a special tea that Ariana promised would cleanse my body and my mind, as I told her the events of my day. Laying it all out for her helped me think more objectively.

I reviewed my meeting with Rachel and recalled how surprised I was to learn that she’d walked in on Keith after his death. It came to me again how horrible that must have been for her.

“Woody found the piece of cake and soda Rachel was taking up to Keith, sitting on a chair in his office. Why wouldn’t Rachel tell me she left the cake there?” I asked Ariana. “She told me a bigger truth, that she lied to the police. Why wouldn’t she tell me the whole truth? Why would she say she left the cake outside the door?” The rambling questions were for me more than for Ariana.

“Some people can tell the truth only in small pieces,” she wisely observed. “I wish I could see samples of everyone’s handwriting. I have a new book that shows how strong T-crossings and dark, dominant periods are indicative of someone about to explode in rage.”

I checked to see if she were teasing. She wasn’t.