“Did you know,” I said, “When I was a freshman at UCSC I asked an English professor something about Guppy in Bleak House, and the professor said he’d never read it!” That was true, by the way. I’ll never forget the shock it was to learn that an English professor had not read every novel written in English.
Weatherill snorted. “I’ll bet that was Culbertson, wasn’t it? He wasn’t worth hiring. I told them so at the time. His specialization was free verse poetry. No scholarship needed at all to analyze that stuff! Anything goes, any interpretation is as valid as another. The thoughts of a ten-year-old about the poem are just as likely to be taken seriously as a scholar of forty years’ standing. Authorial intent not an issue. Bah!” He was almost conversational now.
“It’s not everyone that has the brain for true scholarship,” I said. “You are unique.”
Flattery, as E. L. Konigsburg said, is as important a machine as the lever: give it a proper place to rest and it can move the world. It moved the deranged mind of Dr. Weatherill.
“I am unusual, yes,” he said. “The things I have undertaken—not one person in a million has the capacity to do the same.”
“Proper interpretation of pre-twentieth century poetry, now that is what takes vast amounts of knowledge.” I leaned casually against the arm of the sofa. I couldn’t yet reach my phone undetected, but I thought that if he got distracted somehow, I might have a moment to snatch it and use it. “It’s not merely the language that most students have a hard time with, it’s the classical allusions they don’t get.”
“Exactly!” He made the old gesture with his hands that I remembered from classroom days; it looked a little different with a gun in his hand. “I’ve been saying it for thirty years and no one will listen. Just like Milton and Shakespeare classes are required for every English major, a class on Aristotle and Virgil should be compulsory.”
He was only about five feet away from me now, and I wondered if I could throw the book at him and make a run for it. I only considered it for a second; with my lack of athletic skill I’d probably miss him, or just barely touch him. Then I’d have to get to the door, open it, and run down the hallway to the staircase all the while hoping he couldn’t hit me with a bullet. The odds of it working were not good.
“This is all very interesting,” said Dr. Weatherill, “but we need to get back to the topic of the safe.”
“But I don’t know anything about a secret safe,” I said. “I’d tell you if I did. You could even take whatever you wanted out of it. But I still don’t know anything about it.”
He sighed. “That is really too bad. I can’t just leave you here, you know. You’ve seen me with a gun.”
“But you didn’t do anything to me,” I said. “It’s not like you have anything to cover up.”
He laughed. “Nothing to cover up! My dear lady, you have no idea. And I refuse to be brought to book merely because I left you alive to tell tales.”
“Wilkester Police!” came a voice from outside, and the door was flung open at the same moment. Todd came in, gripping his gun with both hands, arms straight out in front of him.
The relief I felt was tremendous. I expected an entire squad of policemen to come in behind him, but Todd remained the only officer there. “Put your gun down, Dr. Weatherill,” he said.
For an older man, Weatherill moved quickly. With his free hand he grabbed my arm, which was still clutching Dickens, and pulled me out away from the sofa. He positioned himself behind me.
“Put your gun down,” he said to Todd. “Or I’ll be forced to shoot her.”
“If you hurt her, it will be the last thing you do.” Todd’s voice was calm but carried conviction.
“Then we are at an impasse,” said Dr. Weatherill, and I was irresistibly reminded of The Princess Bride.
“It’s no good,” I said. “We have no iocane powder for the battle of wits.”
“What?” said Weatherill. At that moment I heard the wail of a siren.
“Oh, look,” I said, turning toward the window beyond Weatherill as if I could see the street from it. “Here come the rest of the police cars.”
Weatherill was distracted enough to try to see out the window, which meant he turned away from me. I gripped Our Mutual Friend with both hands and aimed for his head. I felt the book make contact with him and he staggered back. I dove down to the floor in case any shooting started and automatically closed my eyes.
No shots were fired, but there was a lot of thumping and grunting, and when I opened my eyes again, Weatherill was on the ground, face down, the gun was across the room, and Todd was kneeling beside him, pointing a gun at his back.
“Put your hands on the back of your head,” said Todd. “And stay still.” Without moving his head or looking at me, Todd said, “Are you all right, Katrina?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Nice shot with the book,” he said. “That was a crazy thing to do and I hope you never, ever do anything like it again, but it did the job.”
“Thanks. Are you going to put handcuffs on him?”
“I’ll have to wait for backup to arrive,” he said. “I’m off duty, and don’t usually carry handcuffs with me. It will take them a few minutes to get here.”
“But I heard them!”
“That was an ambulance, not a police car.” He grinned. “Excellent distraction, though.”
It really was only a few minutes before more police arrived. Dr. Weatherill was handcuffed and led out to a police car, his gun was bagged and taken away, and Todd and I drove in his car to the police station to make statements.
“This really wasn’t the kind of date I was anticipating when I asked if you would see me tonight,” Todd said as he drove down the road toward Wilkester.
I had to laugh. “Me neither. But it’s a first date we’ll never forget.”
“I wouldn’t have forgotten our first date, no matter what we did on it,” said Todd. “But I agree that this was extra-memorable.”
“How did you know he was in my apartment? And it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet.”
“I got there really early,” he said. “I didn’t want to be late for our date. I was just going to stay in my car until seven. Then I noticed a car parked out in front of your building with Oregon plates. We’d just started investigating Weatherill last weekend and his license plate number was fresh in my mind. It was his car. I barely paused to call for backup before I came charging up to your place.” He stopped and swallowed. “I knew that he had shot Frank with no warning, and I was horribly afraid I was going to burst in and see he’d done the same thing to you. I had no idea how long he’d been there, you see.”
“He just kept asking me about a secret safe that he claimed Frank had. He said in that email Frank sent him, ‘everything is safe’ meant ‘everything is in a safe” in some kind of code language. I think he’s gone a bit crazy.”
“Yes, he looked—and acted—not quite sane. Impossible to say, for sure. Guilt can do a lot of things to a person. His thinking certainly has gotten twisted.”
It took a long time for Todd to write out his report and for me to be interviewed as a witness. By the time we were finished it was nearly nine thirty and we were beyond starved.
“Sally’s is open,” Todd said.
We sat in the same booth we’d sat in after the book club. This time we ordered chicken pot pie and hot biscuits. It tasted divine.
“You know, I think this is the finest restaurant in the city,” I said.
“I think you were very hungry,” said Todd, “but it is good.”
“Maybe it’s the company that makes it so enjoyable to eat here,” I said.
“Maybe.” He smiled and my heart fluttered. This time I didn’t smack it down.
“Listen, Katrina,” he said, pushing his nearly-empty plate aside and leaning toward me, resting his forearms on the table in front of him. “I told you what I was thinking and feeling last Saturday, and then we were interrupted before you could tell me what
you thought of it. All you were able to say was that God had been working on your heart regarding second attachments, and I’ve been clinging to hope all weekend on the strength of that. That, and the fact that you agreed to see me tonight. You don’t seem like the kind of woman who accepts a date only to tell the guy she wants to remain friends.”
I had to laugh. “No, I’m not.”
“So tell me, please. Is a relationship with me a possibility?” ‘The expression of his eyes overpowered her’… So this is what Mr. Knightley looked like when he proposed to Emma! I pulled myself together enough to say something coherent.
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
He grinned. “What about you going overseas?”
“I’d already decided not to teach at the mission school.”
“And what about Jason?”
“You got here first,” I said. “Kim already told Jason to hold off asking me again.”
“Bless her,” said Todd fervently.
I shook my head. “I feel like our relationship has been stage-managed. Between her telling Jason not to ask me and Ed arranging for you and me to work together at that Family Fun Day…”
“What? That wasn’t Ed. That was me.”
“That was you? You planned that?”
He nodded. “I asked John—Detective Ortega—if he could arrange that I be paired up with you. He’s good friends with the lady that was organizing it, so they made it happen.”
“Oh!”
“I was hoping for a chance to explain about the divorce. And to spend time with you in some setting that didn’t involve detective work.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m probably one of the few people on the planet for whom an interrogation room can hold pleasant memories.”
Todd raised his eyebrows.
“The first moment of comfort I had after the shooting,” I went on, “was when you looked me in the eyes and told me I was handling it well.”
“You were,” he said. “But you had me at the very beginning when you didn’t want to be called Ms.”
“I remember that. As soon as I said it I was afraid you would think I wanted to make sure you knew I was single, because I was after you or something. But of course I didn’t realize how it would sound until after I said it. I was really embarrassed.”
“Just like when you told me I should spend more time with you if I wanted to see you say something silly? You are adorable when you blush. You’re doing it right now.”
“I know,” I said. “I can feel my face getting hot.”
“Shall I drive you home? Are you ok going back there?”
“I’m fine. I didn’t think I would be, but I am.”
Todd paid the bill and we walked out across the parking lot. Just like the last time, the air was mild, the moon was full, and we walked close together. This time we held hands.
The End
All is well in Wikester again… for now.
Todd and Katrina have time to spend getting to know each other without the hassle of murder and mayhem.
Or do they?
You might think that a professor could expect at least a few weeks with her new boyfriend… errm… suitor! Um… beloved? But there is that pesky event coming up. Still, it shouldn’t take up too much of Katrina’s attention, right?
Austen, tea parties, and snuff boxes—the things of days past. Simple. Elegant. Deadly?
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Here’s a sneak peek at book two in the Wilkester Mystery series:
Snuffed Out
Chapter 1
Wilkester College is generally quiet during the summer months. Just after school lets out in May they offer a few accelerated courses for two weeks—a semester’s worth of class squashed into a fortnight. These courses are popular with those students who prefer intensive misery over a more extended tedium. During the rest of summer, the campus hosts various conferences and conventions, ranging from kids’ sports camps to political think-tanks, and walking across the campus in July you might overhear conversations about thirteenth century Chinese art or the overall ineffectiveness of the primal scream psychotherapy technique.
I love the academic chatter on such a wide variety of topics. You can imagine yourself at Oxford or Cambridge for a moment…if you shut your eyes to the buildings around you. The style of architecture was considered modern in 1955, which means that the campus is made up mostly of unadorned concrete structures: giant off-white blocks with orangey-pink streaks caused by the incessant rain of Washington State spilling off the roofs with no overhang.
The one big exception in this cubists’ paradise is the large lecture hall in the Johnson building. Whoever designed that knew what a college lecture hall should look like. It’s a large room—seats five hundred—and has dark oak panels on the lower half of the walls. The windows above them are tall and have matching shutters, and the front wall of the room is entirely panelled in oak with medallions carved into the top row of panels. You really can imagine yourself at a European university in there.
“It’s the perfect location for the Regency Conference general sessions,” said Susan as we stood at the back of the hall and looked down toward the front—literally down, as each row of seats goes down a level to give everyone in the audience a fair view of the speaker.
“I agree,” I said. “I only wish there were more lecture halls like this for the breakout sessions.”
“Or something besides the gymnasium for the dancing lessons and the ball,” said Susan. The Regency Conference was her brainchild. A professor of history, Dr Susan Langton was a dedicated scholar, an enthusiastic teacher and a masterful organizer. She was a small, thin woman in her mid-forties, and she wore her slightly-gray hair in a pageboy style that was always falling into her eyes. She had the habit of swooping her hair back out of her face with one hand at least once a minute. She did it again now, and I wondered for the hundredth time why she did not get some kind of clip for it, or even a different hairstyle.
This was the first year the college had put together anything like this conference. Usually, established groups rent the premises for their meetings, but this one had really sprung from the college itself. Several of the faculty were giving lectures and the catering would be provided by the college kitchen. A few experts were being brought in from outside to give instruction in English country dancing, period clothing, and late Georgian food, and the lecture offerings included topics on the history, literature, music, and society of the Regency period. More than two hundred attendees had registered, most of them from Seattle or Tacoma but a few from other states. About half of them were historical novelists hoping to make their fiction more authentic and accurate, and the others were history or literature students or teachers.
“Which lectures are you giving again?” asked Susan.
“One called ‘Beyond Austen’ about Regency authors other than Jane Austen, and ‘From Novel to Movie’ which is all about the strategies used in adapting a book to film.”
“Ooo, I might sit in on those.” She swooped her hair back again and sighed. “I hope everything will be ready by tomorrow. There’s still so much to do.”
“You’ll get it done. I have every confidence in you.”
“Oh, my part is pretty much completed, it’s just coordinating everyone else. The printers can’t deliver the campus maps until four o’clock, for one thing. And I thought the food was all set, too, but I got a note today to meet with someone tonight about a possible change to the menu to make it more authentic. I said it didn’t matter but he was insistent.” Her brow clouded in an uncharacteristically anxious expression. She seemed to be dreading the meeting.
“Can’t you get out of it?” I said. “Send someone else?”
“No, I can do it. I’ll be on campus anyway getting the nametags sorted and t
he welcome packets collated after the maps arrive.”
“Do you need help?”
“No, I’ll be fine. I’ll recruit the history department secretary to help me if I need more hands. Look, I’d better go. I’ll see you tomorrow, ok?”
“Bright and early,” I affirmed.
I’m not really at my best early in the morning, and by early I mean eight o’clock. Thankfully the session I was leading wasn’t until after lunch, so my brain had time to wake up before I was called upon to be intelligible. I attended the morning general session, the topic of which was “The Importance of the Regency Period in the Shaping of the Modern World.” It was a good lecture by someone I’d never heard of before, and I enjoyed myself. I’ve always been grateful that if I couldn’t have my first choice of profession (that of housewife), I could at least have my second choice, which was to be a college professor. Even though the tenure track hadn’t worked out and I had to pad my adjunct professor income with editing work, I still enjoyed what I did. I would have risen from my bed weeping every morning if I’d had any job that required a calculator or a spreadsheet.
I was looking forward to lunch by the time twelve-thirty came, and I was discomposed along with everyone else when we got near the cafeteria only to be told that there would be a half-hour delay in the serving of the mid-day meal. I caught sight of Susan from a distance hurrying along the main path through campus with someone who looked like a secretary at her heels. Even at twenty yards I could feel the nervous energy emanating from her and I wondered if it had to do with a crisis in the catering.
I suddenly remembered I’d left my briefcase with my lecture notes back at the Johnson building. It would probably be safe enough there, but with the delay in lunch I might as well get it now. There were a few people still in the lecture hall when I came in, the inevitable flotsam that washes up on the shores of post-lecture auditoriums. Two of them were middle-aged women who looked like authors, still chatting in their seats. From what I could hear it seemed that they were trying to impress each other with their average daily word counts and Twitter follower statistics. One man sat writing furiously on a notepad; he was either an author suddenly seized with inspiration or a college lecturer who was trying to reproduce the talk he’d just heard for the benefit of next semester’s students. Someone else who looked administrative and vaguely familiar was digging through the trash can—probably he’d dropped his keys or something in there accidentally. I felt a surge of compassion for him: I’ve done the same thing a few times. Hopefully whatever he’d inadvertently tossed wasn’t the keys to one of the classrooms we were using.
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