by Madison, Ada
“It’s great to hear your voice,” I said, now fully awake. “I’ve been dying to talk to you. Never mind the time.”
I knew I should ask first about how she and Gene were doing with the challenges of a different culture, whether they missed their grandkids, what it was like to teach on another continent, whether Fran’s wardrobe of flowing, colorful pants outfits was suitable overseas. I hadn’t talked to her since our Christmas call, nearly three weeks ago. She’d just arrived at KIST, the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology, and was eager to tell the world about today’s Rwanda and the impressive economic gains it had made. Since then, with both of us so busy, there had been only quick emails back and forth. But rather than ask how differential equations came across in another language, the first question out of my mouth this morning was, “How did you find out about Jenn?”
“Randy Stephens is friends with Jim Hollister, the new guy in Henley’s Budget Office, and Jim knows Gene from the business network in town,” Fran answered. “He called Gene this morning. Or last night.” She paused and laughed. “Or tomorrow.”
“Good one.”
I might have known. Henley was a small town-and-gown community. News of Jenn’s attack had gone from one academic department to another and then out to the business world that Fran’s husband was part of. It was the kind of chain I was seldom included in, however, because as Judy advised me, I can’t be trusted to keep the chain alive. Maybe I didn’t have enough friends. As I filled Fran in on the meager details I had of Jenn’s status and the progress of the investigation, I was surprised she didn’t already know more than I did.
When we’d sufficiently expressed our horror and disgust at what had happened to Jenn, and our sympathies for her parents, I turned the conversation to an earlier blemish on Henley College campus life.
“Do you remember an event on campus twenty-five years ago? A sophomore named Kirsten Packard?”
“Of course. The suicide from the tower.”
I’d already decided it wouldn’t be useful to ask Fran why it had never come up between us. “What do you remember about it?” I asked.
“Well, the whole thing, actually. She jumped from the Admin tower one morning. Very sad.”
“I’d never heard about it.” Neutral enough.
“There was quite an effort to keep it all quiet. For a while we felt the administration had installed bugs everywhere, ready to fire a faculty member or expel any student caught talking about it. They closed off the stairway in the tower right away. Put a wall up, actually, so there was no access. That’s when they installed the electronic chimes to strike the quarter hours. Then, after a generation”—I knew Fran meant not twenty-five years, but four years, a generation in academic terms—“it became less and less newsworthy. The construction for the new carillon program is bringing it all back for some old-timers, I guess. Is that how you heard?”
I gritted my teeth and renewed my decision not to ask Fran why she hadn’t thought of mentioning this during our fifteen years together, or even in the last months during the new construction.
“It came up with Ted and Judy yesterday.”
“Ah, Ted. He took it pretty hard.”
I sprang to attention. “What do you mean? How was Ted affected?”
“He was very close to Kirsten.”
“The roommate connection,” I offered, remembering that Kirsten’s roommate had been one of Ted’s physics majors.
“Right,” Fran said. “Ted and Kirsten’s father, Vincent Packard, were roommates in college. I think Ted was Kirsten’s godfather, in fact.”
Whoa. I paused to absorb the little detail Ted had neglected to mention. He’d said he hardly knew Kirsten, and certainly never mentioned a connection with her prominent father. Better not to distract Fran with that omission now, though. I had more to learn.
“Do you remember hearing anything controversial about Kirsten’s death?”
“That someone might have been up there with her. Pushed her, you mean?”
That’s what I mean. “Or that it was an accident?” I said, to soften my query. “Any talk that there was a cover-up of some kind?”
“There’s always talk when something like that happens, especially when a prominent family’s involved. The most sensational stories likened Kirsten’s plight to Patty Hearst’s.”
I had to think back. “The nineteen seventies kidnapping?” I asked.
I was in kindergarten or first grade when the newspaper heiress’s abduction and eventual conviction for bank robbery made international headlines. I’d seen documentaries since, and I was at a loss to see the connection with Kirsten Packard, except that they both belonged to wealthy families in the public eye.
“It was just a few blips in some tabloids,” Fran said. “Not enough to last too long. The story was that the privileged Kirsten had hooked up with some bad guys and, like Patty Hearst, got involved in a couple of bank robberies. Maybe she was forced into it, like Patty was by her captors, maybe not. Remember—well, you wouldn’t remember—when Hearst was kidnapped, she was a nineteen-year-old college student.”
“Like Kirsten.”
“Like Kirsten,” Fran echoed.
I hadn’t seen any reference to the Hearst case, nor any suggestions of wrongdoing on Kirsten’s part in the links I’d explored. But then, I hadn’t gotten around to the tabloids. “Did anything ever come of those rumors?”
“Nothing. They were very short-lived, as they would be with the Commonwealth’s attorney general stepping in. Packard was in the AG’s office at the time. Not that I think the rumors were true in the first place, but you never know, do you? By the way, why all the interest?”
Blame it on the poor international connection that I didn’t answer, but instead asked another question.
“I know it was a while ago, Fran, but do you happen to remember if Kirsten was a carillonist? Is that why she was up in the tower that morning?”
“Hmm. I’m trying to recall. I never paid much attention to the music program back then, and Kirsten wasn’t a Franklin Hall major, so I can’t say.”
“She majored in romance languages, I think,” I said, trying to trigger more memories.
“That sounds right.” Fran paused. Too long for a simple breath or a sip of water. Uh-oh, she was putting it together. “Wait a minute, Sophie. You’re thinking there’s a connection between Kirsten Packard’s death and what happened to Jenn Marshall?”
“Why would you think that?” My voice came out higher than usual.
“Uh—because I know how your mind works?”
“Never mind.” I didn’t need Fran to tell me how foolish—out of character, I liked to think—I was being. How the Kirsten Packard case had captivated me in an inexplicable way, with an intensity that was exacerbated by Jenn’s attack.
“How are your classes going? How do you like Rwanda?” I asked.
I knew that would do the trick. Before we hung up I’d learned more than I needed to about Rwanda’s new system of roads, how KIST was its first public technological institute of higher learning, and the emphasis the East African country placed on entrepreneurship and economic growth. She promised to send photos of her students and colleagues and ended with, “You’ve got to come here sometime, Sophie.”
“Sure,” I said.
We both knew I didn’t mean it. Starting with facing inoculation needles, all the way to learning another language, I had a list of reasons why I’d probably spend all of my teaching career on American soil. I was glad Fran was so enthusiastic, however. I was interested in her work and her goal to bring more applied math, rather than theory, to the math department there.
We hung up. I’d certainly learned a lot from Fran, more than from people in my own time zone.
But I still didn’t know whether Kirsten Packard had played the carillon.
• • •
At almost five in the morning I decided it wasn’t worth trying to go back to sleep for a couple of hours. Besides, my head was
throbbing, my mind reeling from the realization that Ted must have known Kirsten all her life. Why would he have tried to keep that a secret? I wondered if Judy knew. I doubted it, since, unlike me, Judy was one of those who could be trusted to share a rumor.
Before I could get to searching for old bank robberies, there was the matter of Kenny, the new copyeditor on my puzzle magazine, to straighten out. I read his email again. Not a good idea to become agitated at this hour of the morning, but what a nerve! He talked about changing my crossword clues as if he had merely shifted a comma or dotted an i.
I brewed coffee and pulled a hard copy of my contract from my file cabinet. Ten legal-size pages of fine print, some of it in bold letters, some of it redacted, a plethora of margin notes. My eyes glazed over appendixes and items in even finer print, identified with tiny Roman numerals. I’d never needed an agent. I simply signed my contracts, relying on good relationships with my editors and with my tax man. Now I understood why no one wrote longer works without an agent to interpret for us laypeople. I plowed through the pages, making notes on what I’d have to come back to later.
No sooner did I have a handle on what I might say to Kenny on the next round, than it was time to get ready for class and drive to campus. If I wanted to protect my parking spot from a construction worker, that is.
• • •
True to my “she-who-arrives-at-dawn” epithet, I was early enough to park in the lot by the tennis courts, now hibernating under a black tarp. I sat in my car and checked a text from Bruce, on duty at MAstar.
“News?”
“None,” I texted back.
Repeated communications through emails, texts, and phone calls among Virgil, the most involved students, and the hospital had turned up nothing new.
Bruce and I closed our final texts with a long line of xoxoxoxox, which made up for the nasty way I’d started my day, steaming over Kenny.
At this hour, seven twenty in the morning, with the sun low in the sky, the campus was peaceful and beautiful. Last night’s wind had cleaned the air. I’d never share my theory with Ted, who taught an undergraduate class in meteorology, but it made sense to me that the wind had swept away atmospheric debris, leaving fresher, unpolluted air. The scattered patches of ice reflected the bright rays and seemed whiter than they did during the busy day.
I hadn’t been on campus since I left for lunch yesterday, and it was hard to grasp that it had since become the site of a brutal attack.
I exited my car and felt the brunt of an early January morning. The air was windless, but cold, cold, cold. I dabbed my nose and my watery eyes as well as I could, manipulating a tissue with heavily gloved fingers. I pulled my scarf up over my mouth, trying to breathe through the holes in the knit pattern. Ariana had given me the scarf, and I didn’t remember in time that it was more of a fashion statement, in bright shades of red, than effective protection against a New England winter.
I was close to Franklin Hall and could have ducked inside after a brisk three-minute walk. And though it wasn’t warm and cozy in the building this week, there were at least some protective walls and space heaters. But I walked in the other direction, toward the spot where Jenn had been attacked. I headed that way without a lot of thought, shuffling along the pathway, weighed down by what felt like ten pounds of clothing, plus the awareness that one of my student majors lay in a coma at Henley General.
I passed the Mortarboard Café and the gym and arrived at the narrow path between the Student Union and the Clara Barton dorm. I positioned myself in the middle of the path, where the three commuters might have been when they saw the attack.
I expected to see crime scene tape, but apparently the police were finished scooping up evidence. I looked up to the right at the dorm windows. Had there been a student at one of them yesterday afternoon? Someone whose daydreaming had been interrupted by a sudden attack below? I doubted it, because the only nine-one-one call had come from one of the commuters. No harm in checking, though. I wondered if the Henley PD had done that. Had they made sure to interview all the residents? I smiled at my arrogance. Good thing Virgil and his buddies on the force had me around.
I stood on the path for a while, for no good reason, the campus quiet and eerie. I looked south, toward the other two dorms. My view of the wide Henley Boulevard, past Paul Revere Hall, was blocked by equipment that should have been familiar to me by now. This deserted morning the dull yellow behemoths, badly in need of a hosing, seemed animated, the sweeping arm of a cherry picker waving at me, the sharp prongs of the forklift aimed angrily at me.
I turned away.
I took one last look north, down the path where Jenn had walked. A piece of paper, green or gray, stuck on a bush, caught my eye. Something left behind during yesterday’s attack? I’d learned what Virgil called Locard’s Exchange Principle, named after an early twentieth-century forensic scientist—the theory that anyone who enters a crime scene both takes something and leaves something behind. But the police had searched the area and surely would have found a piece of paper as large as the one that I spotted halfway down the path.
Unless the gusty winds had sent it to this spot during the night. In that case, it could have come from anywhere on campus or across Main Street, for that matter, and was useless to the investigation.
What was wrong with me? There was no barrier keeping me from walking forward, to the bush and the paper, except in my fearful mind. I finally stepped past the invisible obstruction onto the path, and walked a few steps.
Lacking binoculars and the courage to keep going, I could only squint at the paper from about twenty feet away. It looked like a bill. Money? I inched closer. Definitely money. Closer still, on top of it now. A one-hundred-dollar bill.
I squatted down for a better look. No doubt about it. A one-hundred-dollar bill was entangled in the dry twigs of the leafless bush.
I considered calling Virgil, but that seemed silly. Someone had lost one hundred dollars between yesterday afternoon and this morning. Someone headed to or from the Coffee Filter on the other side of Main? A lot of money for a student to be carrying around. Did the fact that the bill was at the crime scene make it evidence?
My answer was to cover all bases. I took out my phone and clicked on my camera app, though doing so required removing my gloves. I hoped no one was watching as I took pictures of the bill from five different angles, plus one long shot to show the distance between the bush and the side wall of the Student Union. If caught in the act, I could always claim that I was on an art project photo shoot of flowerless, leafless twigs.
Before frostbite took over, I put on my gloves and snatched the bill. I stuffed it in my jacket pocket, not worrying about smudging at this point, and walked back down the path I’d come from. I could decide later what to do with the money. It might end up being fake money from a game. I wasn’t going to remove my gloves again to examine it right now.
It felt good to move, and I took the long way to Ben Franklin Hall, walking around the fountain, behind the Administration Building, close to the back of the tower, but not too close. I stretched my neck and studied the crevices, cutouts, and layers of curved arches as they caught the sun and repeated themselves in shadows.
I resigned myself to the fact that neither the buildings nor their strange shadows would give up their stories. I’d have to dig out the secrets myself. I still had more than an hour before my calculus class, and I’d already sketched out the lesson and problems for the day. I had an idea where to start digging for stories.
• • •
I was the only one waiting at the door of the Emily Dickinson Library, stamping my feet to keep up my circulation. The door opened at ten to eight, moments before frostbite became a real threat. Donna Martin, our librarian, had taken pity on me and unlocked the dead bolts.
“Dr. Knowles, you must be freezing. You should have called in.” An experienced librarian, but new to Henley College, Donna wasn’t aware that such an act would have been anathema to our previo
us keeper of books and journals, who adhered to a strict schedule no matter what the circumstances.
“Thanks. You came just in time,” I said, drawing much needed warm breaths.
“I heard what happened to Jenn Marshall. It’s terrible,” Donna said. She made a gesture to help remove my coat, but I wasn’t ready to give up a single layer. “Jenn works in the stacks for us one day a week. Lovely girl, quiet. I know you know that. I hope she makes it through all right.”
Once again, I voiced a “me, too,” to a well-wisher.
I rubbed my hands, then shook them out, trying to recover the feel of my fingers. I wondered if Donna would be amenable to bending the rules enough to let me teach my classes here until the Franklin Hall heater was fixed.
We chatted a few minutes about whether there was anything Donna could do for Jenn (nothing I could think of) and how we needed better security during the day (I agreed), since times were changing for the worse in town and in the world (I uttered a neutral grunt).
“Anything special I can help you with this morning?” Donna asked. Chipper already, but then she’d been warm for a while.
I considered saying that I just wanted to browse, and find what I needed myself, but in the interest of time, I owned up to Donna. “I’d like to look through some old yearbooks. How far back do you keep them?”
Donna straightened to her full height, probably average, but everyone over five three looked tall to me. “We have every single one,” she said. “The last ten years are in the corner”—she pointed to a small reading area at the back of the library—“older ones are in the stacks. What year are you interested in?”
I gave Donna the dates for the two years Kirsten was a student. If she was at all active—in music, sports, drama, or any of the dozens of clubs I assumed Henley supported back then—I’d find her picture and who knew what else about her. Maybe I’d come across a photo of her in a beret like the one Patty Hearst was often shown wearing.
I took a seat by a window in the main reading room, facing the west wing of the Administration Building. The tower, off center architecturally, was closer to this end of the building. I fought off the image of a woman falling? . . . jumping? . . . being pushed? . . . to her death.