Majoring In Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “How do you do? I’m Jessica Fletcher.”

  “Oh, I know all about you. There was a write-up in the student paper about your coming. I have a copy if you haven’t seen it.”

  “I haven’t and I’d like to.”

  “I heard the department had a reception for you. I’m sorry I missed it. I just got back on campus.”

  “I’m sorry you missed it, too,” I said. “It was lovely.”

  “Why were you so late getting down here?” she asked. “Didn’t you know the tornado was coming?”

  “No,” I replied. “When I came in today, I saw a message on the TV in the faculty lounge that a tornado watch was in effect till four. But a watch only means the possibility of a storm, not that one is imminent.”

  “The watch was changed to a tornado warning half an hour ago.”

  “Was there an announcement? I didn’t hear anything.”

  “The public-address system is down, but the warning must have been flashing on the TV screen.”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t see it. I was working in my classroom and didn’t realize anything was wrong until I stepped outside.”

  “How horrible. You could have been killed.” She turned to Frank, who was working to get the door open. “Frank, why didn’t the alarm go off earlier?”

  “There’s a short in the system somewhere and I couldn’t get it going. Finally gave up and went to search for stragglers. The wind must’ve jiggled the wires and set it off.”

  “That should have been fixed a long time ago, along with the PA system,” Rebecca said.

  “Tell that to President Needler,” Frank said, grunting as he pulled on the dead bolts. “He’s the one holds the purse strings. George, take over for me here.”

  Turning back to us, Frank raised his voice to be heard above the noisy chatter. “Okay. Listen up, folks. Please keep your seats. I’m going to ask you to pretend we’re on an airplane, and I’m the flight attendant.”

  “You don’t have the legs for the job, Frank,” Eli shouted.

  “I don’t know, Eli: I look pretty good in tights,” Frank replied over giggles around the room.

  “Cool! We can’t wait to see.”

  “Kidding aside, there was no all-clear siren, so I’m guessing the tornado tore it down,” said Frank. He pulled a pamphlet from his hip pocket and held it up. “Once the door is open,” he continued, speaking loud enough to be heard in the back, “we’re going to follow the safety manual to the letter. Understood? I’ll go ahead to make sure there’s nothing dangerous on the way out of the building. There may be a lot of damage, so prepare yourselves. I have to report in to the Campus Security Office and could be a while. I’m counting on you not to move from your seats until I come back and say it’s okay to leave. Once we’re outside, you can try your cell phones, but keep in mind the towers may be down. Be patient. We’re uninjured. We’ll need to look for those who haven’t been as lucky. I know you want to help, but the best way to help right now is to sit tight till I get back.”

  Rebecca, who’d been watching George wrestle with the bolts, leaned forward. “Frank, what happens if you can’t open the door?” she asked in a loud whisper.

  “It may take a bit of time if there’s debris blocking it, and I may need some extra muscles to help out. But we’ll get it open.”

  “But if you can’t?”

  “Don’t panic now,” Frank said, laughing. “The storm is over. Everyone in the state knows we had a tornado out here, and they’ll send help. Campus security will be counting heads and they’ll find us. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, not sounding as though she meant it.

  After a short tussle, Frank and George managed to draw back the bolts that held the dented door closed and pushed it open. Faint light from above seeped into the concrete chamber, accompanied by the drum-beat of rain hitting a hard surface. There was a collective sigh of relief. The two men disappeared into the stairwell and we waited. At first everyone was quiet. But as the realization that we’d escaped harm percolated around the room, people began to talk. I heard some chuckles from the back and knew that Eli was cracking jokes again.

  I turned to Rebecca. “Aren’t we lucky this room was here?” I said. “Was it built as a tornado shelter?”

  “It looks that way, doesn’t it?” she replied.

  “If you’ll excuse my interrupting your conversation,” said an elderly gentleman sitting across from us, “I couldn’t help overhearing your question, Professor Fletcher. I’m Archibald Constantine, by the way.” He pulled himself forward, leaned on his cane, and thrust out his hand to me. “I teach sociology.”

  “How do you do?” I said, shaking his hand.

  He winked at Rebecca. “Professor McAllister, I hope you had a good summer. Did you get your paper finished?”

  “I did, Archie.”

  “Nice to make your acquaintance,” he said to me, sitting down again. “This bunker you were asking about was not originally intended as a tornado shelter.”

  “It wasn’t?” Rebecca said.

  “No. The Hart Building was built in the late fifties at the height of the Cold War. This was supposed to be a fallout shelter.” He peered into the gloom at the back of the room, squinting over his half glasses. “There are cupboards down there for food and emergency supplies,” he said, pointing a gnarled finger. “Several years ago I found some olive-green canisters that had been left behind—saltines, I think they were.”

  “What did you do with them?” Rebecca asked.

  “Gave them to Needler. He likes old things. I imagine he has them stashed away somewhere.”

  “Old crackers. Yuck! I hope he didn’t try eating them.”

  “Those containers must be collectors’ items these days,” I said.

  “He could probably get a good price for them on eBay,” Rebecca said. “I’ll have to mention it to him. Of course, if Harriet Schoolman Bennett hears about it, she’ll confiscate them and put them up for auction herself.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “Dean Bennett’s been conducting a fire sale ever since she came back, getting rid of old textbooks and supplies. She’s got plenty of money for a brand-new gymnasium, but every time I turn around, something else has been sold out from under me. It’s worse than the time my husband had his tag sale, and roamed through the house looking for things to add to his dollar table. For months I was looking for my bread-baking stone, only to learn that my neighbor, Lillian Kaplan, bought it from Ed for fifty cents.”

  “Yes, but she’s putting us back on the map,” Professor Constantine said, running a hand through his thatch of white hair. “We were about to go under.” He looked at me. “She’s got a good head for numbers, Harriet does. And her idea to bring attention to the college with celebrity professors seems to be working, too. I like her.” He smiled.

  “You like her because she hasn’t made any drastic cuts in the sociology department,” Rebecca put in. “She just hasn’t gotten around to you yet, Arch.”

  “Don’t you like her?” I asked her.

  “Oh, she’s nice enough,” she said, seeming to realize I might be a friend of the woman under discussion. “I’m just grousing because the English department’s share of the budget’s been cut down to the bone, and I can’t get any of the new texts I want. Don’t listen to me. Get Archie to tell you more about the bomb shelter.” She leaned back against the stone wall and folded her arms in front of her.

  I turned to Professor Constantine. “Do you talk about the shelter in any of your courses?”

  “I do,” he said, looking around. “I teach a class in twentieth-century life. We take field trips here. Occasionally I get small groups of students who want to stay here for a few days, experience living together in a fallout shelter. This place was designed for eight or ten people to live in for a week or so; there’s a rather elaborate ventilation system in place. In the fifties they stocked it with cans of water, food rations, first-aid kits, and a Geiger counter s
o they could check for radiation and know when it was safe to leave.”

  “Concern about nuclear weapons was a big part of our society then,” I said, “but it would seem to me that Indiana is pretty far away from where you would expect bombs to fall.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, “but like most states, we have military bases. And the Newport Chemical Depot, west of Indianapolis, was used to manufacture a potent nerve agent. If our enemies had known that—and it’s likely they did—it would have made Indiana a tempting target.”

  “In that case, you’d have to have quite a lot of these shelters if you were going to accommodate everyone on campus,” I said.

  “Precisely!” Constantine exclaimed, beaming at me as if I were a prize student. “The whole scheme was completely impractical given the size of the student body, even at that time. I’ve got maps of the campus dating back to the fifties, showing where the shelters were to be located and the tunnels connecting them. This is the only one I’ve seen that even looks finished. It was designated for the college president and administrative staff.”

  “Where was everyone else supposed to go?” I asked. “They couldn’t just save themselves.”

  He waved a hand in front of his face. “No, of course not,” he said. “The idea had been to build a series of these in each of the buildings, but they proved to be enormously expensive, and as you may imagine, their construction raised a great debate over who would qualify to take shelter in them during an atomic attack. Eventually the college decided to scrap the project entirely. But there are concrete shells in most of the basements, so they have become tornado shelters, hopefully effective ones. Of course, over the years some of them have been used for storage; they may be a tight squeeze these days. We haven’t had a tornado in Schoolman in more than sixty years.”

  “Just our luck to be here to experience one,” Rebecca said, squinting at an oversize watch she wore on her wrist.

  “I think we’re about to see how we weathered the storm,” the old man said.

  I looked up to see Frank in the doorway. He held a clipboard in one hand and a first-aid kit in the other. “All clear,” he said.

  Chapter Two

  It was raining lightly when we emerged from our shelter and stepped out onto the landing in front of the Hart Building. The wind had calmed and the thunder was rolling away in the distance. Off to the east, flashes of lightning could be seen against the sliver of horizon visible between those structures still standing. I took a deep breath. The air was bitter with the tang of mud. The smell reminded me of wet dog.

  The quadrangle was a vastly different sight from the one I’d seen earlier. The tall oaks that had barely begun to shed their autumn leaves still stood in the square formed by Schoolman’s academic halls and administration buildings, but were stripped bare of both leaves and small branches. What remained were skeleton trees, blackened as if they’d been victims of a fire, and draped with torn papers, shreds of fabric, and other fragments of rubble in a macabre decoration. The grass, what was left of it, was littered with more papers, splintered wood, and other bits and pieces that the wind had picked up in classrooms and offices, pulverized, and flung outside.

  Eli put his hands on top of his head and whistled. “Wow! It looks like Times Square the morning after New Year’s Eve in New York.”

  “How would you know?” said Tyler, one of his classmates. “You’ve never been outside of Indiana your whole life.”

  “I’ve got a television, don’t I?” he replied.

  As we gazed out at the devastation the tornado had wrought, the square slowly began filling with students, faculty, and staff from other buildings. Members of the Emergency Committee had pulled white T-shirts over their rain slickers—the large red cross on the front and the back a symbol of their office—and had fanned out across the campus. They were directing foot traffic toward the triage area for any who’d been injured, or to the Student Union, where a crisis center had been established for everyone else. I knew this because when I’d agreed to spend a semester at Schoolman, I’d read the pamphlet on emergency procedures that had arrived in my mail at home in Cabot Cove, along with a stack of other instructions and forms to fill out.

  “It’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be,” Frank said to no one in particular. “All the classroom buildings are intact; only a couple of the houses we converted into offices took a bad hit. Of course, most of the cars got dented, but it could have been a lot worse.”

  He was probably right. Except for a bank of windows in the Hart Building and bricks torn loose from the facade, the building was in surprisingly good condition; the basic structure had withstood the forces of the tornado.

  He looked back at the people who’d followed him outside. “Okay, folks, before you do anything, please check in at the Crisis Center. Then call your families to let them know you’re okay. Please stay out of any other building until it’s been cleared for safety.”

  “Why don’t you take my arm?” I said to Professor Constantine. “We can help each other down the stairs.” The steps in front of us were littered with wet papers and I was concerned he might slip.

  “My dear, it would be my pleasure,” he said, gripping my elbow. “Is this your first tornado?”

  “My first and I hope my last,” I said, slowly descending. “We get our share of nor’easters where I come from, but not tornadoes, thank goodness.”

  “I’ve seen a few tornadoes in my day,” he said as we reached the sidewalk in front of the building. “They can make a mess, as you see here. But they’re usually confined to a relatively narrow geographic area. The real danger comes from their unpredictability. You never know where they’ll touch down.”

  Harriet Schoolman Bennett jogged over to where we stood and called up to the people still on the landing. “Everyone all right up there?” At the nods, she continued, “Some of the phone and electrical lines are down, but the cell tower was spared. If you’ve got a cell phone, please share it so people can notify relatives they’re okay. We’ve set up a triage station in the Sutherland Library. If you come across any walking wounded on your way to the Union, bring them to the reading room.” Her cell phone rang and Harriet held it to her ear with one hand, extending her other to assist a woman coming down the steps.

  The group slowly dispersed, picking their way around the debris. Eli took over for Harriet, stationing himself on ground level and holding out his arms to help others.

  “Harriet, is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.

  “Sure. Come with me. We can always use an extra pair of hands. Frank, I want to see you, too.”

  Frank and I joined Harriet, walking rapidly to keep up with her pace as she turned back toward the building that housed the Student Union. She waited till we were out of earshot of the others.

  “Frank, what happened to the alarm? I didn’t hear it till the storm was practically upon us.”

  “I’m sorry, Dean Bennett. The wiring is just too old,” he said. “It’s been giving me fits for weeks now. I told President Needler, but he said there wasn’t any room in the budget for repairs, that I’d have to fix it myself. I’m a pretty good electrician, but this system is beyond what I can do. We need an electrical engineer to take a look at it, and that could cost big bucks.”

  “Call in an expert as soon as you can,” Harriet told him. “I don’t care how long it takes or how much it costs. We can’t afford to lose lives because our warning system fails.”

  “Have there been any fatalities?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of,” Harriet replied. “I had a telephone team call in to all the buildings when the tornado watch was upgraded to a warning. Hopefully everyone got the message and took shelter in time.”

  “I rounded up everybody who was still in the Hart Building and got them down to the shelter,” Frank said. “But I nearly missed Professor Fletcher here.”

  “What?”

  “But he found me, as you can see,” I said. “Professor Newmark had
warned me that there might be a tornado on the way.”

  “Was he with your group in the basement?” she asked.

  “No,” I replied. “He was leaving for a meeting, but he recognized the signs of an impending storm and told me to take shelter. Where were you?”

  “The library. The downstairs stacks are underground. It’s one of the safest places on campus.” Harriet pulled open the door to the Student Union. “We were lucky in one thing,” she said. “The basketball team was playing Wabash today, and a large contingent of the student body and faculty went over there to cheer them on. Thank goodness the tornado never made it that far. I told Coach Adams to get everyone’s name and see if the college could put them up for the night. We don’t need more people to worry about for the time being. I’m not going to feel comfortable until I’ve accounted for everyone on and off campus.”

  An animated crowd was milling about inside the lobby, where tables had been arranged on either side of a center aisle to funnel people into the adjacent cafeteria after they had signed in.

  “Everyone, we need to clear this area,” Harriet shouted over the commotion. “Make sure the Emergency Committee has your name—it’s very important—and then wait for instructions in the dining room.”

  “Dean Bennett, Dean Bennett,” a young man called to her, shouldering his way through the throng. “The police are here and they’re looking for you.”

  “Tell them I’ll be right out. Frank, can you get these people inside so we can report back to the Emergency Management folks if anyone is missing? We also should start assembling cleanup crews and see if we’re going to need overnight shelters.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” he said.

  Harriet’s phone rang and she pulled it from her pocket. “What? How did you get this number?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the noise of the crowd. “I don’t have time for that now. I don’t care what your problem is. No, I don’t know when.” She snapped the phone closed.