Majoring In Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  I looked at her with raised brows. The strain of the situation was showing. Although I knew Harriet to be aggressive, occasionally to the point of being abrasive, I’d never witnessed overt rudeness on her part.

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  “A reporter. I don’t know how they got my number so fast, but I can’t stop what I’m doing to talk to the press. I’ve got enough to do.”

  “That call won’t be the only one, Harriet. The TV stations must have broadcast reports about the tornado. News accounts may be the only way some of the families will be able to find out about their friends or relatives. Don’t you have a public relations person who can handle the press for you?”

  “I forgot all about her. Frank! Frank!” She looked around till she spotted Frank herding a group of students into the cafeteria. He looked back at her. “Have you seen Roberta Dougherty?” she yelled.

  Frank pointed to a table down the hall where three people were conferring, their heads bent over a sheaf of papers and a yellow pad.

  Roberta looked up when Harriet approached. A slim woman in her late twenties, she was dressed in a blue pantsuit. Her cell phone was clipped to her lapel. She ran a hand through her auburn hair to tame curls that looked as if she’d just gotten out of bed.

  “Dean Bennett, Mrs. Fletcher, I’m so glad to see you,” she said, rising from her chair. “We’re working up a statement to give to the press.”

  “Good, I just had a call I had to defer,” Harriet said smoothly. I smiled at the spin she put on her rude response to the reporter. “What does the statement say?”

  “They want to know about casualties and damages. So far, according to the Emergency Committee, we’ve got three hundred forty-seven unaccounted for,” she said, referring to her yellow pad.

  Harriet gasped. “That many?”

  “That’s a preliminary number.”

  A young man ran up to the table and slipped a piece of paper into Roberta’s hand. “No, make that two hundred ninety-two—thanks, Leroy,” she said as he ran back to the sign-in table. “The number is changing every minute. We’re waiting for Coach to send in the names of all the folks who went over to Wabash. We’re only, what?”—she consulted her watch—“a little over an hour since the tornado came through. We’re in pretty good shape with the numbers.”

  “All right. Did you get the names of the people in the library?”

  “Not yet. That’s where the injured are, right?”

  “Yes,” Harriet replied. “The building was untouched. Amazing, considering that Kammerer House next door is practically a pile of sticks. I’m going over there in a little while. I’ll have them send in a report. Do you want me to read that?” She pointed to the paper in Roberta’s hand.

  “Sure, but I was going to have it typed. Should the statement come from President Needler?”

  “No, he’ll be too busy.” Harriet scanned the statement Roberta had prepared and nodded. “We don’t have a damage assessment yet, but this is okay. Take any media calls. Just stick to this and you’ll be fine.” She handed the paper back to Roberta. “Give me your cell phone number so I can forward any press calls I end up getting.”

  Roberta tore a sheet from her yellow pad and wrote down her number. “I could call the news services and give them a report, kind of handle them in a group. Okay with you?”

  “Do whatever you think is right,” Harriet replied. “You’re the college spokeswoman.”

  Roberta grinned.

  “I’ll talk to you later when I have more information,” Harriet said over her shoulder, pulling me back down the hall.

  “Where is President Needler?” I asked. “Who knows? He was here this morning, but right now he’s among the missing.”

  “Could he be with the basketball team?”

  “It’s possible but unlikely. He’s not exactly a fan, but he recognizes the importance of basketball in Indiana. Everybody does. The state is crazy for the sport. The season doesn’t officially start for a month, but they’re already scrimmaging. Basketball’s like a religion in this state. Seems like the season is twelve months long.”

  “He would have let someone on campus know if he was going to the game, wouldn’t he?”

  Harriet looked to the ceiling. “Don’t count on it. I’ve never been able to figure out that man. Sometimes he’s the classic absentminded professor, and other times he’s a brilliant administrator. Working with him has been awkward. While I’m the dean of students on campus, I’m also on the college’s board of trustees representing the Schoolman family.”

  We waded back into the crowd surrounding the sign-in tables. The numbers hadn’t dwindled, but maybe it was because more people had come in. Harriet found Frank again.

  “I sent George to do an inventory of damages,” he reported. “It looks like the tornado touched down on three buildings, hit the quad, and bounced up again. We should know in a couple of hours about the dormitories and the off-campus housing, but I’m expecting everything there to be fine. In the meantime, the kitchen guys have hooked up the generator. In a pinch, we can use the cafeteria as a shelter.”

  “Wonderful! I’ll go over to the library now. That’s where I’ll be, but call me if you need me.”

  “Harriet, don’t forget about the police,” I reminded her.

  “I did forget. Thanks, Jess. You’d better come with me. I seem to be a bit scattered today.”

  “For good reason,” I told her.

  We retraced our steps outside and walked around to the back of the building where a couple of black-and-white patrol cars were idling, the volume of their radios turned up so the officers could hear them from a distance. Two uniformed policemen and a police-woman were on the road, setting up flares and red cones to divert traffic away from the college. A fourth in plainclothes, a cell phone to his ear, waved Harriet over.

  “Sorry it took us so long, Dr. Bennett,” he said, folding his phone and dropping it into his coat pocket. “We had to clear the road in a couple of places.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here now.” Harriet introduced me to Lieutenant Bill Parish. “Bill’s mother and I went to high school together,” she told me.

  “Do I know you from somewhere?” he asked me. “Your name sounds familiar.”

  “Jessica is one of our celebrity authors,” Harriet said before I could answer. “She writes murder mysteries and is here for the semester to teach our students about the genre.”

  “Oh, yeah. I knew I knew that name. You picked a tough time to come,” he said. “It’s rare to get a tornado in the fall to start with. I don’t ever remember one hitting Schoolman, and I grew up here.”

  “I understand the last one was more than sixty years ago,” I said.

  “That long, huh? Well, I hope it goes sixty more before we get another.” He turned to Harriet. “The hospital has been alerted and we’ve got an ambulance and a passenger van on the way,” he said. “Where are the injured?”

  “We’re using Sutherland Library as a triage center. It’s on the other side of the quad. I’ll take you there.”

  “I know where it is.”

  “We’re going there anyway.”

  “Did the storm do a lot of damage?” I asked him as we crossed the quad.

  “Schoolman got the worst of it,” he replied. “Mostly trees and telephone poles down. Haley’s Market lost its front window, and everything inside was overturned. If I didn’t know the storm did it, I’d be out looking for kids on a tear. There wasn’t a box of cereal or a piece of fruit left on the shelves. Everything was broken and spilled on the floor.”

  “Anyone hurt?” Harriet asked.

  “Nothing serious, but the ER has a pile of people waiting to be seen.”

  “How’d they do on the other side of town?”

  “The twister took out a swath of corn about two hundred feet across over at the Wasserstrom farm, but it missed the barns, and Dick reported only one cow lost. Mrs. Hampton’s house was badly damaged, but at least she wasn’t
home at the time. I heard from Adam Finch that she’s up visiting her sister in Elkhart.”

  “Thank goodness for that,” Harriet said. “Maybe we can see if there’s anything we can salvage for her before she gets back.”

  “I asked the mayor to send someone over, told her to have them especially look out for any photographs.”

  She patted him on the shoulder. “You’re a good boy, Bill.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, smiling at her.

  The “boy” Harriet was complimenting was a man in his thirties with a thinning crew cut and square features.

  We reached the library, and Lieutenant Parish held the door open for us. Inside, several members of the Emergency Committee were administering first aid to those who’d been injured in the storm. Less than a dozen people were scattered in chairs around the graceful reading room, which boasted a beautiful stained-glass skylight that arched overhead. The light filtering through the colored glass cast mosaic patterns on the carpet.

  Elizabeth St. Clair, the college’s nurse and head of the Emergency Committee, greeted Harriet brusquely. “Where’s the ambulance? I’ve got wounded here.”

  “On its way, Betty. The road was blocked, but they should be here any minute.”

  A short, stocky woman, with wiry salt-and-pepper hair stuffed under a baseball cap and a stethoscope looped around her neck, Betty nodded sharply and consulted her clipboard. Harriet had told me on the way there that Betty St. Clair had been a field nurse in Vietnam; her military training was evident in her bearing and in the report she handed Harriet.

  “We’ve set up a triage system and divided the injured into three groups based on the seriousness of their condition,” she said.

  “How many?” Harriet asked.

  “Eleven so far. Over there are a couple of bumps and bruises, and a few who are just shook up and need to sit quietly for a bit,” she said, pointing to a small group gathered in the back of the room near the computer terminals. “If you can send over a counselor, that would be helpful.”

  “I’ll see who I can spare.”

  “I gave everyone’s name to the Crisis Center. We’re patching them up and releasing them unless they tell us they want to see the doctor. So far, two of them do. I told them it may be a while till we can even get them over there. There are others we’ll be moving out first.”

  “Which ones are those?”

  “Next to the stacks,” Betty said, cocking her head toward the side of the room where tall bookcases were lined up, one behind the other, like a row of dominoes standing on end. “I’ve got a sprained ankle, a wrenched shoulder, and a stomach pain,” she said, ticking them off on her fingers. “Last one’s probably psychosomatic, but we’d better check it out. One youngster banged his head, can’t remember how, needs stitches. I’ve got a butterfly bandage on the wound till the doctor can see him. My urgent cases are up front—two fractures, one compound with possible internal injuries.”

  I walked to where the more seriously injured were being tended. They were stretched out on two of the reading tables, each wrapped in a gray woolen blanket with another folded and placed under their heads. A young woman was one of them. The side of her face was badly bruised, but I recognized her as a student in my morning class.

  “Hello, Alice,” I said. “How are you feeling? Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Oh, Professor Fletcher,” she said, tears welling up in her brown eyes. “I can’t believe what happened to me. It’s so awful.”

  “What did happen, Alice? Couldn’t you make it to the shelter in time?”

  “I was running to get there and I tripped and fell down the stairs.”

  “How awful.”

  She nodded. “My heel got caught in something and I went flying. They had to carry me into the shelter. Everything hurts.”

  “I imagine it does,” I said, smoothing her hair away from her brow.

  “Mrs. St. Clair says my ankle is broken.”

  “The doctor will fix you up.”

  “Will you sign my cast?”

  “I’ll be happy to. Is there anything I can do to help you now, Alice? Would you like me to call your family?”

  “I think Mrs. St. Clair did that already, but there is something you can do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you see my shoes anywhere? They took them off, and I don’t know where they are. I know I can’t wear them now, but I don’t want to lose them.”

  I looked around. Under the table was a shopping bag with a folded jacket inside. I groped under the jacket, felt the heel of a shoe, and pulled out a pair of black suede pumps with four-inch high heels. “Are these yours?” I asked.

  An ecstatic smile spread across her face. “Thank goodness. I spent a month’s allowance on those shoes. I would have died if I lost them.”

  You almost died wearing them, I thought. It would be hard not to trip in a heel that high, especially attempting to run. But I said only, “They’re right here,” and replaced them in the bag, which I set on the table near her feet.

  Behind me, Harriet was talking to the other injured person, the college’s bursar, Philip Adler.

  “Betty says you’ve got a bad break, Phil. Can you tell me how it happened?” she asked.

  “Got trapped under a beam when the storm blew away the roof.”

  “Why weren’t you in the shelter?”

  “Never got there. Working,” he said, gritting his teeth.

  “Working! What could be so urgent that you’d jeopardize your life to keep working at it?” Harriet scolded. Then, seeing his discomfort, she immediately added, “I’m sorry, Phil. We’ll have you at the hospital in no time.” She stroked his arm.

  “I was going over the budget and waiting for Wes Newmark,” he said, grimacing against the pain. “He’d said he had something important to discuss with me. But he never showed up.”

  “Whatever it was, it’s not important now,” Harriet said. “We’ll get you taken care of, and then we’ll worry about the budget.”

  “I’m sorry, Harriet.”

  “Don’t you be sorry. And I’m sorry I yelled earlier. Just worried about you, that’s all.”

  We heard a siren blaring, and a moment later an ambulance pulled up to the side entrance of the library.

  “At last,” Harriet said, looking to the door. “Here are the EMTs, Phil. I’ll come see you in the hospital as soon as I can.”

  Lieutenant Parish escorted three emergency medical technicians to where Betty St. Clair stood, and she began directing them to the tables. Dragging chairs out of the way, they wheeled a portable gurney to the side of Phil’s table and, after checking the splint Betty had used to stabilize his leg, deftly transferred the injured man onto the padded surface.

  Alice was assisted into a wheelchair. Those who’d sustained other injuries waited to be helped into a passenger van, the only vehicle the hospital had left to transport patients to its emergency room.

  Lieutenant Parish bade us good-bye and Harriet and I walked outside. The air was now crisp and the sky had cleared, the sun starting its downward arc.

  I took a deep breath. “You’d never believe a storm came through here, looking at that sky,” I said.

  “That’s what it’s like in Indiana,” Harriet replied. “The weather is so changeable.”

  On the quad in front of us, some of the staff, dragging green plastic garbage bags, had already started cleaning up. We walked slowly in the direction where the storm had done its worst. Others had preceded us, and there were groups of students strolling down the walk and lingering in front of the blown-out buildings like visitors to a tourist attraction. Police officers, aided by campus security, were stringing yellow tape around the perimeter of three properties and hanging Keep Out signs every fifteen feet. A photographer from the college newspaper was shooting pictures of the devastation while a student reporter took down the comments of the witnesses.

  Kammerer House, where the English department had its office
s, was badly damaged; only the front wall was left on the second floor, and there was a gaping hole where the ceiling of the first floor had given way and debris had poured through. Milton Hall next door, which housed the office of campus services, was worse, the back of the building entirely gone, and only part of the facade still standing. Beyond them, the bursar’s office was minus a roof, and the front porch had disappeared.

  I looked up at the second floor of the bursar’s office. Harriet’s gaze followed mine and she shuddered. “I don’t know what Phil was thinking, staying at his desk. People can be so foolish.”

  As we turned and started back to the library, a security guard left his post and hurried up to Harriet. “Dr. Bennett, may I see you for a moment?”

  “What is it?”

  “I need to show you something.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t think so.”

  We ducked under the yellow tape and followed the guard around to the back of Kammerer House. He picked up pieces of siding and roofing and threw them aside, clearing a path so that we could get closer to the remains of the building.

  “It’s there,” he said, pointing through a missing window.

  “What’s there?” Harriet replied, leaning in to make out what he’d seen.

  “There. Under the file cabinet,” he said, his finger and voice trembling. “Can you see it now?”

  “I can see it,” I said, moving closer, being careful to avoid the shards of glass that littered the ground. A dented file cabinet was overturned, covered by several feet of rubble, the other end lying on an upended chair. Behind the chair, on a crumpled piece of carpet with a dark blotch, I made out the top of a head. Strands of sandy hair, stained red, dangled from the bare scalp on which a cleft an inch wide exposed the white bone of the skull. I didn’t need to see the gray tweed sleeve, nor the leather elbow patch, to know I was looking at the battered body of Professor Wesley Newmark.

  Chapter Three

  It would take several hours to extricate the body of Professor Wesley Newmark from the collapsed portion of the building. By good fortune, his was the only fatality of the day. To ensure it stayed that way, the local fire and police departments cooperated in developing a plan to lift the wreckage of Kammerer House that had fallen through the ceiling to gain direct access to the end of the room where the body lay. Until then, the file cabinet could not be shifted or the office chair removed without possibly causing a further cave-in.