Maid of Murder (An India Hayes Mystery)

by Amanda Flower

  “Olivia!”

  Olivia, who was whispering something to her jock boyfriend, either didn’t hear him or pretended not to, but Mrs. Blocken certainly did. She had her gaze trained on Mark with a glare that could have melted iron. She started toward him. Mark saw her coming and backed up into the buffet table. Somehow he managed to kick out one of the legs from under it and the table fell. Cucumber sandwiches, olives, and cake toppled to the ground. The well-groomed guests gawked at Mark, who had potato salad in his hair and punch down the front of his shirt. He struggled to get up and hurried toward Olivia. His tumble had gained her full attention. She’d left her jock and stood a few feet from him.

  “Olivia, I love you.” He smiled at her as if he believed that she would return his affection. “Please stay, or if you really want to go to Virginia, I’ll transfer down there.”

  Olivia looked at him for a long minute as if she realized for the first time that he wasn’t joking. Up to that point, she always accepted Mark’s attentions as if it were a game that they played. I had to admit to myself that I thought the same way, but seeing Mark there covered in punch in front of all those guests, there was no question that he was earnest.

  “I don’t love you,” she said. “I’m going to Virginia alone.”

  Mark sucked in a breath as if he couldn’t get enough air. I was frozen with embarrassment. If the earth would have opened up at that moment, I would have willingly dove in.

  Snickers and giggles coursed through the group.

  “Your brother is such a freak,” one of my classmates whispered into my ear.

  Mrs. Blocken shook with rage. “Get out, and stay away from my daughter.”

  Mark kept his gaze fixed on Olivia.

  “Leave,” Mrs. Blocken said.

  A group of varsity jocks were quickly closing in on my brother. They would like nothing better than to throw a nerd like Mark over the Blockens’ fence.

  Luckily, they didn’t get that chance because Olivia spoke first. “I don’t want you at my party, Mark. Go home.”

  Tears welled up in his eyes, and he staggered away, back through the open gate.

  Later, I found him curled in a ball in his apartment. I called my sister, and she took over with her usual efficiency, and, in the fall, I ran away to art school.

  The phone at the check-out desk rang.

  A moment later, Lasha Lint, the director of the library, bellowed, “Botswana, phone.”

  Startled, I jumped. Lasha shook the receiver at me. Black, solid, relatively young, and loud, Lasha is nothing like the withering-violet type that many think of when they conjure up the image of a librarian. With a brutal penchant for nicknames, she hadn’t called me India since my first day at Martin.

  “Botswana,” I said as I hopped off my chair, sending it skidding on its polished wheels into the reference counter. “That’s a new one.”

  “I’ve been studying the atlas, honey.”

  I chuckled and took the phone from her.

  “India, do you know where Mark is?” my mother asked in the tense, low voice she used to console divorcées.

  I prickled. “No, I’m not his babysitter.”

  “I’m not asking you where he is, I’m asking if you know where he is. I know where he is,” she rambled.

  “Then, why are you calling me if you already know where he is?”

  Lasha shamelessly eavesdropped. I leaned against the checkout counter and rolled my eyes.

  “Your brother called from campus. He was babbling.”

  A hereditary trait, I noted.

  “He said something about Olivia and a fountain. He was—he sounded strange. I’m worried about him. If you could walk over to his office and check—”

  “I can’t just leave the library—” I started to say, but was interrupted by shrill sirens that shook the book stacks.

  Lasha rushed to the window. “A police car and two ambulances. They’re heading to Dexler.”

  “What’s going on?” my mother asked. “Are those sirens? India!”

  “I’ll have to call you back.” I hung up and turned to Lasha. She had her nose pressed up against the glass.

  “Go on, Iran.”

  I staggered out the loading doors into the stifling heat and sunlight. Gathering my bearings, I jogged across campus to Dexler. As I closed in on the building, I saw three police cars, a fire truck, and two ambulances gathered around an iron fountain. The fountain, entitled Empowerment, was a twenty-foot metal embarrassment to modern art that a donor with more cash than class unloaded on the college. Never one to upset benefactors with impending tasty bequests, Martin accepted the sculpture, but tucked it behind the Dexler Math and Science building, the least visible location on campus.

  I forced myself to slow to a walk and tricked myself into believing that the sirens had nothing whatsoever to do with my loony brother. A handful of summer faculty and students had clustered about thirty feet from the fountain. A uniformed campus security guard blocked their view to whatever they were trying so desperately to see.

  “It can’t be Mark. He wouldn’t—” I refused to allow my brain to complete that thought. When I reached the assemblage of Martinites, I asked a dour chemistry professor. “What’s going on?”

  “Nobody knows. Something about Mark Hayes,” the professor said with a glint of excitement in his eyes.

  I forced my way past the security guard who looked just old enough to star in a zit cream commercial. He stood on his tiptoes to peek at the action and didn’t notice me until I was already well beyond his reach.

  “Wait! You can’t go back there,” the boy-officer cried, astonished that anyone would cross his imaginary line. Obviously, he hadn’t been at Martin long.

  I hurried around the left side of the fountain’s base. A cluster of public servants in different official uniforms stood over something on the ground. An EMT wheeled a stretcher over to the group. They swallowed the EMT and the stretcher into their ring. I stopped, afraid to proceed, afraid for Mark. An image of a somber orderly pulling a sheet back and asking me to identify the body entered my mind. Suddenly lightheaded, I doubled over, gulping deep breaths. I had to stop watching crime shows.

  “Miss, you shouldn’t be back here. Are you all right?”

  I stared at a pair of black walking shoes. After two more deep breaths, I straightened to stare into the concerned face of a middle-aged EMT. White remnants of sun block glistened on his bald head. The dizziness passed.

  “Is that,” I stopped and began again. “I’m looking for my brother, Mark Hayes.”

  The EMT nodded. “Don’t worry, Miss, he’s fine. He’s a little shaken up, but fine. I’ll take you to him.”

  Mercifully, the EMT led me away from the cluster of emergency workers to an ambulance. Mark was perched on the end of the ambulance’s bay. Despite the heat, a heavy wool blanket enveloped his frame. A dark-haired man in khakis and a green polo shirt asked him serious-sounding questions. Mark stared at the ground, his thin shoulders shaking.

  “Mark!” I rushed past the khaki-clad man. “What happened?”

  I hopped up beside him on the edge of the ambulance. He sniffled. Fat tears rolled down his face and stalled at his beard. I patted his arm, wishing that my sister Carmen was there. She was better equipped to handle emotions.

  The khaki-clad man uttered a frustrated sigh. “Who are you? We’re in the middle of an interview here.”

  I recognized the man’s face, but couldn’t put a name to it, a fairly common occurrence for a community of Stripling’s size. “I’m his sister. India Hayes. Can you telling me what’s going on?”

  “Well, Miss Hayes,” the man said. His voice had the lilt of recognition. “A woman tumbled into the fountain and was badly hurt. Your brother’s a witness.”

  “Who’s the woman?” I asked, but already I knew.

  The man consulted his minuscule memo pad. “Olivia Blocken.”

  Chapter Six

  “Olivia,” I whispered.

  T
he man peered at me. “Do you know her?”

  “She’s a friend. Is she okay?”

  Breathe. In and out, in and out, I reminded myself.

  Mark snuffled. I patted his arm again. I really wished Carmen was there.

  “She’s alive, but unconscious. She received a nasty gash and bump falling into the fountain, or whatever the hell you people call that thing.”

  I let out a breath. “And she’ll be okay? She’ll recover?”

  “Hopefully we got to her in time.” He flipped through his notebook.

  Mark stopped weeping and sat staring in the direction of uniforms by the fountain. His face looked carved from stone.

  “Does her family know? Have you called them?”

  “They’ve been notified and will meet Olivia at the hospital in Akron.”

  “What does Mark have to do with this?”

  “If you would give us a minute, that’s what I am trying to find out,” khaki man said.

  The light dawned. “You’re a police officer.”

  He held out his hand. “Detective Rick Mains.”

  I stopped short of shaking his hand. “Rick Mains? Ricky Mains?” And I remembered where I had seen Mains before. He was one of a long line of high school boyfriends that Carmen had dated before she’d settled down in college. Mains was one of the long-termers. Four months.

  Mains grinned. “You remember me?”

  “I’m sure Carmen does too,” I said.

  Mains guffawed the same intrusive and uproarious laugh that had caused Carmen to dismiss him for the happy hunting grounds of higher education.

  I frowned. The current situation was not conducive to any levity, and what I’d said wasn’t funny, anyway.

  Regaining control, Mains smiled. “I’m sure she does. Now, if you don’t mind, I only need a few more minutes with Mark.”

  I scowled, but stepped away from the ambulance. At the fountain, the small cluster of people divided again, and a female EMT rolled a stretcher toward the other ambulance. Although I couldn’t see her, I knew that Olivia lay on the stretcher. Two EMTs lifted Olivia into the ambulance. Sirens blared, and the ambulance raced off campus. The emergency workers cleared the scene, uselessly wiping their sweaty faces in the humid air. The half dozen police officers circled the fountain, like August yellow jackets around an especially fragrant garbage can.

  Mid-morning and the humidity had already plastered my hair to my neck and face. I heard snippets of Mains’s and Mark’s conversation. Mark was harder to hear. I found myself in one of those rare moments when I longed for my cell phone, if only to call my mother and tell her that Mark was okay. She would be climbing the church’s narthex by now. My cell was uselessly sitting in my office back at the library.

  Turning my thoughts from my mother, and from Olivia and the stretcher, I mentally replayed the scene at Blockens’ yesterday afternoon and Mark’s strange appearance. Why had he asked to see her? Did he honestly think that she’d leave Kirk for him? Did she actually come? I wondered. There was no other reason for her to be on Martin’s campus than to see Mark. Why would she come? To appease Mark? To finally settle things between them?

  I held my knit blouse away from my body, hoping a nonexistent breeze would cool me.

  “Miss Hayes,” Mains said, breaking into my thoughts.

  “Call me India,” I said, startled.

  “Okay, India.” He smiled. “Your brother’s free to go.”

  Mark removed the blanket from his shoulders. I gasped. He was soaked to the skin, and his clothes were covered with watery traces of blood. Olivia’s blood. I swallowed hard.

  Mark was completely composed. He folded the blanket and handed it to an EMT as if he were computing simple trigonometry. From personal experience, I knew this was a bad sign.

  “Do you need a ride home?” I asked. “I could take you to Mom’s, if you want,” I added, although I couldn’t think how that would be helpful. “Or Carmen’s? Wherever you want to go.”

  In my peripheral vision, I could see Mains still watching us.

  “I don’t need a ride,” Mark snapped.

  I jerked back, stung.

  “I have work to do in my office. You can leave.”

  “Hey,” I snapped back. “Don’t get pissed at me because—”

  “I’m not pissed at you.” Mark, who usually hated that kind of vulgarity, said.

  “Then don’t be such a—jerk. I’m here to help you. Mom called, and I—”

  “Great, just what I need, my mommy and baby sissy to watch over me. Call Mom and tell her everything’s fine. Okay?”

  “Why are you acting this way? Everything is not fine.” I stepped closer to him and lowered my voice so that Mains wouldn’t overhear. “What happened to Olivia? Did she meet you here?” I couldn’t hide the disbelief from my voice.

  “Is it so hard to believe that Olivia would want to speak to me?” My brother’s voice cracked.

  “No. Not at all.” I hastened to reassure him. I could deal much better with an angry Mark rather than a weepy Mark. “What happened?”

  He dropped his head. The white-hot sunlight reflecting off his blond crown nearly blinded me. “I don’t know. She called my office last night and said that she’d meet me by the fountain in the morning. By the time I got here, she was already in the water. I pulled her out and called 911. She was bleeding. From her head I guess, but there was blood everywhere. I couldn’t remember CPR. I couldn’t do anything.”

  “You called 911.” I tried to console him.

  “Like that’s enough. If she dies—”

  “She won’t die. Now, what time were you supposed to meet her?”

  “Nine-thirty. I found her at nine-forty-five; I looked at my watch.” Tears banked on his lower eyelids.

  The last remaining EMTs piled into the lone ambulance and exited Martin at a sedate speed. Mains had disappeared. I looked around and finally spotted him standing by Empowerment with a handful of cops.

  “Are you sure you want to go back to work?”

  His shoulders sagged. “I’d like to go to the hospital to see Olivia.”

  A Blocken lynching played out in my mind. “I don’t think that’s a great idea.”

  A silver luxury car pulled up to the fountain. The driver, a solid man with silver hair leaped out of the car before it was fully settled into park. The man was Sam Lepcheck, college provost and spin-doctor extraordinaire, and his presence was never a good sign.

  Lepcheck approached Mains and conversed for a few minutes, then nodded and scratched his chin. I could hear the bad press headlines careening through his mind. “Stripling native tumbles into Martin’s hideous fountain,” and the like. Lepcheck sucked in a big gust of air—Mains must have told him that the victim was Regina Blocken’s daughter. So much for the amicable town and gown relationship that Lepcheck tried so desperately to foster. Mark’s name floated across the pavement to us.

  I grabbed my brother’s arm. “It’s time to go.”

  I dragged Mark across campus toward the library and my car before Lepcheck decided to make my brother the fall guy. Mark already ranked on Lepcheck’s hit list because he hadn’t completed his Ph.D. Martin prided itself on having roughly ninety percent of its teaching faculty toting doctorates, and although Mark planned to reach this accolade sometime before his seventieth birthday, his pace was a bit slow for Lepcheck. Fortunately for Mark, and, I supposed, unfortunately for Lepcheck, Martin had a notoriously poor math department, and staffing was always a challenge. So the college had hired Mark on the basis of his master’s degree and his alumnus pledge that he would complete the higher doctorate.

  Halfway to the library, Mark froze. “Theodore! I left him in my car.”

  “You left your cat locked in your car? It’s over ninety degrees.”

  Theodore was Mark’s twenty-five-pound Maine Coon cat, and a permanent fixture around campus. Mark found him as a kitten abandoned outside Dexler three years ago and had no idea how much cat he was getting. Maine Coo
ns are known for their impressive statures, but Theodore was at least ten pounds overweight. Mark taught Theodore to walk on a leash, and it wasn’t uncommon to see the two of them strolling across campus together. Many students carried cat treats or goodies from the cafeteria in their knapsacks for Theodore, resulting in his present obesity.

  “I left the windows down,” he defended himself.

  Mark and I raced back across campus to the small faculty lot behind Dexler. The fastest way to reach the lot was to dash by the fountain. I saw Lepcheck’s gaze follow us as we flew by. We were the spitting image of respectable faculty.

  Mark’s hybrid car was one of three cars in the lot, and like he promised, the windows were down. I reached the car first. Theodore lay on the backseat of the small car, on his back, his front paws suspended listlessly in the air. I threw open the door and touched him. He chirped pathetically. Mark reached my side and cried, “Is he okay? Theo! Theo!”

  “He’s overheated. You don’t leave him in the car like this a lot, do you?”

  “No, just this once. Theo, I’m sorry.” he sniffled and patted the cat’s upturned belly.

  “Let’s get him out of the car and cooled off,” I leaned into the car to pick up Theodore. When I placed my hand on his round tummy, he attacked. His claws dug into my bare arm and he bit down hard on my fingers. “Ow! Get him off me.”

  Mark grabbed Theodore’s paws and pried them from my skin. I knocked Theo on the head, and he relinquished my fingers. I inspected my arm. Tiny puncture marks and purple bruises dotted my forearm and hand. Blood welled up from deep scratches. I jumped away from the car and cradled my arm.

  Mark pulled Theo out of the car. “Poor baby.” Theodore lay in his servant’s arms, purring happily.

  There was no time to tend to my wounds. With Lepcheck lurking about I needed to get Mark off campus. I ushered man and cat toward the library.

  Chapter Seven

  Taking a less direct way to the library, we avoided Lepcheck and the fountain. I made Mark put on my lavender cardigan. It wasn’t much of a fashion statement, but at least it covered the bloodstains on his white dress shirt. Luckily, he was wearing dark jeans, so I didn’t have to sacrifice my skirt. Just inside the service door, Mark slumped in a padded folding chair with growling Theodore stretched across his lap.