by Madison, Ada
Bruce had mentioned that Virgil was investigating a homicide unrelated to Jenn’s mugging. Now I was hearing that Ponytail was the victim of that homicide. How much closer to Jenn’s attacker could we get? They were practically on the same video footage together. Bruce couldn’t have known, unless he’d spent the same inordinate amount of time I had thinking and acting as though I were on the payroll of the HPD.
I focused again on Virgil, who had already downed his first cup of coffee. “He’s the guy on the video, fighting with another worker, right?” I said. “The old newspaper called him Ponytail, the bank robber. He’s also my ponytailed campus stalker. And now he’s—”
“Murdered,” Virgil said, finishing my long summary, which provided no new, useful information to anyone. His voice was as low as I’d ever heard it. “He was shot a couple of times and dumped by the airfield.”
I shivered and pulled my sweater up to my chin, forcing the crewneck into a turtleneck. I’d always thought of the Henley Airfield, in the northwestern part of town, as belonging to Bruce. MAstar, to be precise. I didn’t like the idea of their beautiful open space being a dumping ground for killers. I sat back. More info to process.
Our waitress chose that moment to bring coffee refills, and, less than a minute later, our blue plates. “Here you go, honey,” she said to me. “Here you go, Detective,” she said to Virge. “Try not to eat hers, too, okay?” And she winked away.
I was ready to push my plate toward Virgil in case he did need a second helping of everything. But once the aroma of coffee, apple, and sausage reached my nose, hunger took over and I plunged in on my breakfast, adjusting to the news of Ponytail’s death, thinking of not only his violent end, but his appearances in Henley across a span of a quarter century. What had he been doing in between?
Virgil swirled a line of ketchup over his scrambled eggs. His action started a tapestry in my head where Ponytail’s killer was trailing blood, from the tower with Kirsten a long time ago, to the pathway with Jenn, a few days ago, and now to the airfield. Why Jenn was in the middle of the timeline, I didn’t know. A random victim, was one guess. Poor Jenn. Wrong place, wrong time. Either that or there really was something to my Curse of the Carillon theory.
Not too long ago, I would have been thrilled to have an iota of evidence of the Kirsten-Jenn connection. Now it seemed closer, but the gap might as well have been as wide as the icy chasms I’d watched Bruce clear on videos from his extreme sports vacations.
“Did the other man do it?” I asked, getting back to Virgil at last. “The worker Ponytail is fighting with on the video? Remember, Lauren saw them arguing in the cafeteria, too?”
“I remember. We don’t know yet who killed him.”
“Are you checking on that other guy? Fighting with the victim—I’d think he’d be your chief suspect.” This from a highly decorated civilian.
I looked down to see that my mug was filled to the brim again. I guessed our waitress was used to clientele who required discretion; she’d learned to keep us happy without asking to look at pictures of summer vacation.
“We haven’t ID’d that guy yet,” Virgil said. “We have Pete Barker, the foreman, coming in this afternoon.”
I loved that Virgil was being so forthcoming. I was about to thank him for filling me in, when an alarm sounded in my head.
Fortunately, I’d already had enough coffee and devoured most of my eggs and half my pancakes by the time I realized what Virgil hadn’t told me yet.
“Ponytail’s murder isn’t the real reason you took me into custody.”
“You weren’t in custody. You were—”
“What are you not telling me, Virgil? Did you really think Ponytail’s killer was coming after me? Why would you think that?”
Virgil made a show of chewing a hunk of sausage, washing it down with coffee.
“A lot’s happened since you took off for the state capital.”
“From the top, Virgil.”
Virgil inhaled deeply. “I had this homicide. I had the mug shot you sent, from years ago. Then your friend came down to look at the video.”
“My friend?” I asked, then remembered—Judy Donohue was planning to schedule a viewing session.
“Judy,” we said together.
Virgil’s plate was clean, so I pushed my sausage toward him. He stabbed it and chewed slowly. I was making heroic efforts to be patient.
“She recognized the other worker,” he finally said. “The one Ponytail was fighting with.”
“He changed his jacket on the video, right?”
Virgil nodded. “And the coeds swooned over him,” he added.
I wanted to clue Virgil in that we didn’t call them coeds anymore, unless he meant the male students, who were new on campus. And at the one rave I’d been to, I was sure I didn’t see any swooning. Quite the opposite, as far as the amount of energy involved in the activity. “From where did Judy recognize him?”
“From the basement of Ben Franklin Hall. He was fixing your heater.”
The guy who, allegedly, killed Ponytail was Judy’s hunky guy? The buff guy downstairs in Franklin? More than strange. As far as I knew, construction workers didn’t fix heaters.
“He was in our basement?” I tried to come up with a reason why he might have been anywhere in Franklin Hall. The crew had their own portables, and if he didn’t like those, there were many closer men’s rooms near the work site. “He was snooping?”
“Looks that way.”
Another shiver ran through me as I conjured up the image of my students and me blithely calculating the slopes of curves and discussing Archimedes while one floor below us a potential killer lurked.
“Now I have the two guys fighting on your campus,” Virgil continued. “One is casing Franklin Hall, hypothetically, and the other was involved in a robbery twenty-five years ago, and turns up dead. I also have a student attacked on campus, a student who spends a lot of time in Franklin Hall.” He pointed his fork, licked clean, at me. “And a professor who spends more than a lot of time in Franklin Hall.” I drew in my breath. “And, may I add, said professor is nosy. So nosy, she pops off to Boston at the drop of a hat, in a snowstorm—”
“It wasn’t snowing when I started out.”
“I rest my case.”
“You also know, according to Wendy Carlson, my informant, that the dead guy was associated with a student who died on campus that same twenty-five years ago.”
“That’s even more hypothetical.”
“She named him.”
“‘Ponytail,’ you mean?”
“Yes, ‘Ponytail.’”
Virgil shrugged and I knew I almost had him.
I needed a chart. I took out a pen and plucked a napkin from the dispenser. Virgil sat back and let me draw. The center of the napkin became the dividing line between “then” and “now.” Under “then,” I wrote a list of names: Kirsten, Wendy, and the two thugs, as I thought of them, Einstein and Ponytail. Under “now,” I listed Wendy, Jenn, Ponytail, and the Unnamed Worker. Ted Morrell’s name also belonged on both lists. I thought of our physics chair, Wendy’s mentor, wondering how much he knew “then.” But Fran Emerson, currently of Rwanda, had also been at Henley then, as well as other faculty. I decided to leave faculty off the list for now.
I drew connections: Kirsten, Einstein, and Ponytail were connected by at least one robbery, and probably by other crimes, big and small. All three were connected to Wendy, at least personally if not as accomplice. The Unnamed Worker was connected to Ponytail, maybe through long-ago criminal pursuits, certainly through the fights on the “now” side of the line. It took only a minute to see the setup on the napkin as an equation. Kirsten plus Wendy plus Ponytail plus Einstein then, equals Wendy plus Ponytail plus Unknown Worker now.
“He has to be Einstein,” I said.
“Huh?” Virgil asked.
“The guy fighting with Ponytail. He must be the other guy Wendy identified as Kirsten’s friend. They called him Einstein.�
��
Virgil moved his head side to side. I realized he couldn’t commit to my conclusion, and strictly speaking, the “equals” sign in the equation I purported to solve was on shaky ground. An arrow might have been more appropriate, indicating travel from the eighties to the teens. Or, if I remembered my basic (and only) chemistry, a chemical reaction.
“I know it’s not all wrapped up, but I feel like we’re getting somewhere,” I said to Virgil. I sat back and enjoyed the warmth of a refilled mug in my hands. “Do we know Ponytail’s real name?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Virgil said. “We—that is, the Henley PD, not you and I—are running his prints.”
“If he was arrested for that robbery, he must be in the system, right? Don’t they keep evidence forever?”
“Technically yes and yes, but the system doesn’t always work on weekends. Or during the week, or . . . well, you know.”
I was sorry I brought it up. Not that I wasn’t sympathetic. But by now, I could practically replace Virgil in sounding off on the sad state of police forensics resources, especially compared to what TV crime dramas led the public to believe and to expect. To make his point at our last pizza night, Virgil had told Bruce and me about a medical examiner in the Midwest who had a backlog of eight hundred cases, all pending, thus hampering police investigations, depriving survivors of insurance benefits, and . . . He’d stopped only when the whistle blew for the start of a game on TV (my signal to retreat to my office).
“As I said, we have the construction foreman coming in later today, around four,” Virgil continued. “We’re hoping the video’s good enough for him to give us ID on both men.”
So the only question still was how the attack on Jenn Marshall fit into my equation.
“Once I sent you Ponytail’s photo, you knew he was the dead man at the airfield, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then you knew he wasn’t going after Wendy in Boston.”
“Uh-huh.”
I paused, my mind churning away as if I had a fifth-level brainteaser on my hands. “But maybe his killer would be after her. Is that what you were thinking? Wendy could be a loose end from the robbery or who knows what else?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe Unnamed Worker, aka Einstein, even killed Kirsten.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m still not clear on why you’re protecting me. Why would Ponytail’s killer come after me? What makes you think he knew I was—”
“Asking around?” Virgil suggested. “Snooping? What makes me think he might have known that?”
“That’s it? Einstein knows I’ve been asking questions?”
Virgil blew out an unintentional whistle. “There’s something else.”
My heart raced as I thought of Jenn Marshall. Had she died? Had Ponytail’s killer decided to finish his attack on Jenn and gone after her in the hospital? Or was something wrong with Bruce? Had Bruce been in an accident? He had a dangerous job, dangerous hobbies. Had he gone off and hurt himself?
It was very strange that Bruce wasn’t here. What was more important than being with me after my stressful night? Virgil had said Bruce was “busy,” “tied up.” With what? Before my mind could go off track even further, into heartbreaking realms, I looked Virgil in the eye.
“I’m waiting, Virgil.” I picked up my fork and dipped a piece of pancake into a pool of maple syrup, hoping it might look like a threatening gesture—injury by a syrupy projectile.
“Your house was broken into last night.”
I dropped my fork, sending a sticky trail across the table. Virgil mumbled what I assumed was an apology, and motioned for our waitress. She arrived with a wet and suspiciously stained piece of terry cloth and spread the syrup around before capturing most of it.
I watched, dumb for the moment, then annoyed. First Pan’s and now Louie’s Dining Car. Why did everyone give me bad news while I was eating out? I’d soon be blacklisted at every decent restaurant in Henley.
I heard Virgil’s voice as if it were being filtered through all the ketchup, syrup, and whipped butter in the diner.
“Bruce says nothing was stolen, as far as he could tell, Sophie. Nothing even badly damaged. He’s there now, putting things back together.”
“Bruce is tied up, you said.”
Virgil nodded and put his hand on mine. “Not literally tied up, Sophie. He’s straightening things out at your house. He wanted to make sure you didn’t walk into a . . . a mess. I can take you home anytime you want.”
I nodded, letting the simple fact sink in. A breakin at my cottage. No one had been home; no one was hurt. I relaxed my shoulders. A breakin was nothing compared to an attack on someone I loved. Nothing to worry about.
Unless it was Ponytail’s killer. And he’d been looking for me. Which thought apparently occurred to Virgil and prompted him to send out the cavalry to save me.
I repeated to myself: Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about.
“Try to space out,” Virgil said, as he drove my car toward my home.
Easy for him say. My home might even now be harboring an intruder. What if someone was there, hurting Bruce at this moment? How could I be sure the guy had left? Or that he wouldn’t come back for regular visits?
“Are you spacing out?” Virgil asked.
“I’m trying.”
I focused on the winter trees and their bare branches, which made beautiful shadows on the snow. I noticed the few places where the snow hadn’t been trampled on, like the lawn of an elementary school, closed for the weekend. I imagined kids arriving later to build a snow fort or make snow angels. But not even all the angels, painted and sculpted, on display or in storage at the MFA could calm me down.
I tried preparing myself for the worst at my house—tables and chairs tipped over; dishes and vases in shatters; drawers and lamps overturned; carpets, pillows, and draperies slashed. I was on my way to mirrors with threatening messages written in blood, when I felt the car lurch.
“Sorry,” Virgil said, putting his hand on my arm. “I’m not used to this car.”
His studied expression told me he’d purposely maneuvered the jerky right turn, to jolt me out of my panicked, horror-movie state. He could probably tell his “space-out” suggestion hadn’t taken hold.
“Thanks,” I said, and he grinned.
“Better?” he asked.
“Much.”
I had to admit, things were falling into place, like a jigsaw puzzle in progress, and having a few pieces mesh was better than having them all upside down and scattered about. I couldn’t help wishing that a prettier picture were taking shape.
“Is there any feedback on that hundred-dollar bill I found in the bushes?” I asked Virgil, thinking of loose puzzle pieces.
“Not yet.”
“It’s probably still thawing out,” I offered, so Virgil wouldn’t start up again about the underfunded, understaffed forensics lab in Henley. I’d read recently in a news magazine that police in a city in China were using a newly developed chemical illumination process that provided better quality fingerprints. I had no plans to mention it to Virgil and get him riled up about US crime labs, as justified as his complaints were.
“ETA one minute,” Virgil said, as jargony as Bruce, turning onto my street with a smooth left turn.
I closed my eyes, counted to thirteen, my favorite prime number, and opened them to see my cottage, looking much the way I’d left it yesterday morning, except for a little more snow along the edges of the driveway. The outside was further enhanced by the presence of Bruce hurrying down the path to meet me. I barely let Virgil come to a full stop, then opened the car door and all but fell into Bruce’s arms.
Virgil stayed in my car, adjusting the seat and rearview mirror to my position, tapping away on his phone, giving us a few minutes.
“Welcome home,” Bruce said, holding tight.
I buried my face in his neck. Home had never looked so good. Never mind that the interior might look
like a prehistoric ruin.
• • •
Prepared for disaster, I found instead a setting worthy of a magazine cover.
A vase of cut flowers, a fresh pot of coffee, and a pink box with my favorite éclairs warmed my kitchen, giving it the look of a staged home for a Realtor’s open house. Bruce did his best to tempt me with the pastry, though he must have known that I’d already celebrated my arrival in Henley with a huge Louie’s breakfast—part nutrition, part Virgil’s stalling tactic, I now realized—while my house was being fingerprinted and put back together after my intruder.
The walk-through could have been worse. That’s what I told myself as I picked a few books from the floor and deposited them on the desk in my office.
“Sorry,” Bruce said. “I thought you wanted them there.”
Virgil laughed. I gave Bruce a poke in the arm and a smile. I couldn’t deny that the floor of my office often served as a resting place for books in transition from my briefcase to a shelf.
Bruce and Virgil trailed me as I moved chairs around and plugged my laptop in place and adjusted the lampshade next to it. I scooped up a few beads that had slipped off their wire, an unfinished key ring project. Little things, put right, seemed to make a difference, to restore order. The men formed a wall behind me, in case I fainted, I supposed, though I wasn’t in the habit of swooning. If I were in a joking mood, I would have tested them by going slack and falling back into their arms, like the leaders of faculty retreats often had us do, “to build trust,” they claimed. Some other time, maybe.
Our tour ended back in the kitchen, where the three of us sat at the table. I watched Bruce and Virgil eat éclairs while I pummeled them with a barrage of questions. Their answers were unsurprisingly guarded.
“What time did the break-in happen?” (Sometime after dark, from Virgil.)
“Did you know about it when I talked to you from Boston? (Yes from Virgil; a sheepish Uh-huh from Bruce.)