by Ada Madison
“I think we need to talk,” Marty finally said.
My thoughts exactly. “Oh?” I said.
“It’s not what you think.”
“And what would that be?”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, and hung up.
Ariana, who’d been paying close attention, high-fived me. “Nice going.”
“Not too Columbo?” I asked.
“No such thing. But what was that about a memorial service? I didn’t know you’d been working on something for Charlotte.”
“I haven’t.”
“Then you’d better get busy.”
“Do you know any hymns and prayers?”
Oops. As soon as I asked, I knew I was in for it.
“You’ve come to the right place,” Ariana said, and sang an Eastern-sounding tune while doing a kind of snake dance in my den. I caught a phrase or two. “Golden pathways.” “Chain of memories.” I could almost smell the incense.
What had I gotten myself into?
Whatever else came of Ariana’s performance, the moments of laughter it brought both of us were worth it.
Ariana and I set out before noon, heading in opposite directions. She was on her way home in her yellow hybrid; I drove my smokestone Fusion toward the campus to meet Chelsea in the coffee shop.
I’d let Ariana think she’d convinced me to stop worrying about Bruce, otherwise she wouldn’t have left me alone. There was only so much New Age dancing and chanting I could take at one time. Bruce would call when he could, Ariana reminded me over and over. He was probably having the time of his life. She was willing to bet on it. The more challenging the conditions the better, and he’d come home completely safe and refreshed.
I wanted to believe she was right.
As if to emphasize the importance of weather everywhere today, rain poured down on the lowlands of Henley. The sound of my windshield wipers, usually background noise that didn’t affect me at all, now seemed like labored breathing. Bruce’s breathing as he trekked through a storm.
I’d almost forgotten that Eduardo, more experienced than Bruce, was with him, and that was a plus. But the third member of the team, Kevin, a relative newbie, was a minus, who might get himself in trouble if the weather panicked him. I punched the Bluetooth device on my visor and dialed Bruce’s cell. Nothing.
I remembered that I had Eduardo’s wife’s number in my address book. No harm in calling a fellow stay-at-home to say hey. So what if I’d never met her.
No answer from Jenna, either. I didn’t leave a message, though I feared caller ID would tag me as a clingy, worrywart girlfriend.
One more thought brought me some consolation. Both Eduardo and Kevin were flight nurses at MAstar. Eduardo had been an ER nurse for many years before his air-rescue career, and Kevin had just returned from duty at an American medical station in the Persian Gulf.
That counted for something, and brought me a few minutes of peace.
I tuned in to a classical music station, the music my parents loved. If it didn’t put me to sleep, it would calm me down. According to my mother, my mathematician father was a great musician and could have been a professional pianist. “Music and math go together,” she’d say. “I can’t do either.”
I fell somewhere in between, good at math, but talentless in music.
Thinking of my parents and listening to their music relaxed me as I drove through the rainy streets of the town of Henley. I took comfort in familiar melodies and the routine of Sunday shoppers on its one main street.
I headed for the Henley College campus for the first time since it had been a crime scene.
I arrived on campus shortly after noon and parked in the lot next to the dormant, rain-soaked tennis courts. The Henley campus was beautiful, even in a downpour, when the old red brick buildings took on the look of sentinels guarding the pathways and lawns.
I made a point to look east, away from the library. I pulled my cell phone out of my spare charger and checked the battery capacity—fully charged, waiting for a call. The one time I’d been caught without a charged cell phone, my home was broken into. If I were a superstitious type, instead of a mathematician, I’d have resolved never to let that happen again.
I made a dash to my meeting place with Chelsea, only a few steps away, and entered one of the oldest buildings on campus.
The combination bookstore, to the left, and coffee shop, to the right, was brick inside and out. The wooden bookshelves and tables that filled each retail establishment had probably been there since the Ice Age.
Funny I should be thinking of ice.
The music seemed just as old, with elevator versions of sixties tunes. The Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” put into a blender and turned into a smoothie. And there was no question about how old the odors were. Grease and onions from the Pythagorean era, I guessed.
Who had chosen this venue for our meeting, instead of an upscale downtown café? I had, I realized with dismay.
I stomped my way through the lobby, shivering from the chill and shaking water from my shoes, jacket, and purse. A right turn took me into the Mortarboard Café, where the smells originated and where a student with disheveled hair was wiping down the counter.
“Nasty out there, huh, Dr. Knowles?” I regretted that I didn’t know his name, too, but he kindly bailed me out. “Nick,” he said. “Freshman, of course. Aren’t we all? The Henley guys, I mean. I’m taking biology this term.” He waved his stained white rag in the direction of Ben Franklin Hall. “Love those Friday parties you put on in your building.”
If I were in a better mood, I’d have enjoyed a joke about my owning the building, started a chat about Möbius and his surfaces, asked Nick if he had any ideas or special requests for scientists or inventors he’d like to see honored, inquired about what he might choose for his major. I was known as a student-friendly professor. When I was in a good mood.
But “Nice to meet you, Nick” was all I could drum up today. “Can I get a coffee?” I asked, walking away from the counter, to the area with table service. “I’m going to take a seat and wait for someone I’m meeting.”
“Sure thing, Dr. Knowles.”
I wished he wouldn’t keep calling me by name—it brought out the fact that I hadn’t known his and that I should be more accessible and engaging. The way the Henley College brochures and website promised, with its fifteen-to-one student-faculty ratio. It was hard to be anonymous on a small campus.
“Thanks,” I said when he brought the coffee without a word. Sorry to say, Nick had gotten my unfriendly message.
I wrapped my fingers around the warm ceramic mug, which is the only reason I ordered the drink. I had no intention of ingesting coffee from the Mortarboard Café, where the students called the drink “mortar,” like the lime-based bonding cement used in bricklaying. The times I met students here, I stuck with a cold drink from the dispenser and a bag of chips.
I got past the shivery stage and settled at an interior table in the otherwise empty shop to wait for Chelsea.
I was on my way to completing the solution to a puzzle, a four-by-four grid with A, B, C, D along the vertical, and the numbers from one to four across the top. Clues were in the form D1 is C3 divided by A2 and so on. What would I do without busywork?
With the rain pounding on the window, the too-loud music, and my concentration on the puzzle, I didn’t hear Chelsea arrive. She’d pulled the chair out quietly, either not to disturb me or because she was hesitant to talk to me at all. She had taken the waif look to the max with a huge gray muffler and an oversize sweater that was probably Daryl’s. Only the tips of her fingers were visible between her chin and her knees.
“Hey, Dr. Knowles,” she said, barely above a whisper, sitting on the edge of the chair.
“Hey,” I said, with a smile I hoped made her comfortable. “I’m glad you came.”
Nick appeared, with his hair combed, I noticed. “Lunch for you lovely ladies?” he asked, mostly to Chelsea.
&n
bsp; I thought we’d better order. I wanted Chelsea well nourished while I quizzed her for the next hour.
I gave Nick a smile, also. He returned it tentatively. “I’ll have a grilled cheese and a diet cola,” I said, playing it safe.
“Me, too,” Chelsea said. She didn’t make eye contact with the poor guy, who clearly wanted it.
I started on her as soon as Nick left. I didn’t want to scare off my bright sophomore major, but neither did I want to miss an opportunity to learn something about the principals in recent events.
“Chelsea, I sense you’re having a hard time right now, but I need to know why you were at my house yesterday.”
Chelsea’s eyes took on an innocent look. She shook her head, freeing long, loose curls next to her face. “I wasn’t—”
“Look, I saw you.” I cut her off with my sternest tone. “I saw you with Daryl. I don’t know who the others in your group were, but I know you and Daryl were in the crowd in front of my house right after it was broken into. Now you can tell me right here, right now, or we can march down to the police station and talk it out with the cops.”
I hoped this small-town girl didn’t realize I had no authority to march her anywhere. She could stare me down or walk out of the building, and I’d be helpless to stop her.
Chelsea made sobbing noises, wiping her eyes with her limp hands. I glanced at Nick, busy grilling. He had his back to us, fortunately for me, and missed a chance to rescue this damsel from an evil math professor.
Chelsea’s sympathy ploy didn’t faze me. I was running out of patience. The smell of melting cheese overloaded my nostrils, and not in a good way like at home with gourmet cheese.
“You can cry all you want, Chelsea. But one way or the other the police are going to find out what happened at my house. Did you and Daryl break in? Is that why you were hanging around?”
Chelsea gasped. “No, no, Dr. Knowles, I swear. Why would I do that? I would never do that.”
I believed her. Whatever she was hiding, that wasn’t it. “What about Daryl?” Would he do that? I meant.
A telling pause. “It was kind of a date.”
“What kind of a date?”
“Daryl has a scanner, and he hears police calls.”
Could it be that simple? Daryl was a crime junkie? An ambulance chaser in the making?
A noisy group of students entered the coffee shop, flicking rainwater at one another. This activity was a source of great amusement to them and to Nick, who finally had some good company. He brought our drinks and set them down with a quick “Here you go.”
I had questions galore for Chelsea, but I let her go on about her dating life with Daryl.
“Daryl and I have been sort of hooking up, you know, the whole semester. Actually, I met him in August when we had that big orientation week for incoming freshman. I volunteered to tour kids, and that’s when we met.”
“And you’ve been sort of hooking up ever since?”
“Well, more than sort of.” She giggled, which was only slightly less annoying than her sobbing. “He’s such a cool guy, and he started flirting with me right off. I was surprised, because the guys? The freshmen? Well, look at the boy-girl ratio, Dr. Knowles.” She sat back and made lecturing hand gestures. “They can just about pick any girl they want. It’ll never be this good for them again.”
“Ratios. I’m glad you’re paying attention to the math,” I said. Lighten the mood, soften her up.
She smiled, relieved of her burden, thinking I was through with her. “And Daryl’s older because he traveled all around Europe before coming to college, so that gives him even more girls to choose from. Like juniors and maybe even seniors.”
At my advanced, early forties age, I’d almost forgotten what college was all about.
An uproar from the group of students, seemingly caused by a spike-haired newcomer to the table, served to bring home further the nonacademic life of my charges.
“So, did you and Daryl have a date yesterday?” Or does he just wait for police activity? I added to myself.
I had to raise my voice to accommodate the overflowing table two rows over. They’d become louder as they greeted the new guy and decided what to eat. Nick, taking their orders, was having a well-deserved good time. I thought we might never get our sandwiches, which would have been fine with me.
I leaned across the soda-ringed table, the better to hear Chelsea’s answer. I’d never been so eager to hear about a date my students had been on.
“We were supposed to go to a movie at eight, but around four thirty he calls and says, ‘Hey, there’s some excitement over at Professor Knowles’s house. You should come over.’”
“He knew this because of the scanner.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How did he know the address was mine?”
“I don’t know. I guess from the directory.”
Chelsea’s answer was plausible but still didn’t tell me how Daryl recognized my address right away when he heard the announcement on the scanner. I let it go for now as Chelsea continued.
“I didn’t really want to go to your house, Dr. Knowles. I wanted a real date for once, but Daryl is Daryl.” She threw up her hands, barely visible inside the sleeves of her sweater.
“Do you guys follow up on a lot of these calls?”
“Daryl knows all the police department codes, even for places like New Bedford and Fall River, even when it means the cops are on a coffee break or it’s just a dog complaint.”
“I’m asking if you go to a lot of crime scenes.”
Chelsea returned to her flustered posture. “No. I don’t know. Sometimes. I shouldn’t have let him talk me into going to your house yesterday. But he made it sound like fun. He said to grab some other kids and we’d all go out for pizza afterward.”
Fun? Going to a crime scene—my crime scene—was their idea of fun? It was all I could do to keep myself from reacting.
“That didn’t seem strange to you?” I said, remarkably calmly.
Chelsea shrugged. “Daryl’s a strange guy. Like I said, he’s older, and he knows stuff.”
I didn’t want to know what stuff. “Did you recruit some students to join you as Daryl asked?”
“No. I said I would, but then I didn’t. It didn’t seem right. But anyway, when I got there, there was a bunch of our friends from the dorms. I found out he called them, too.”
“I saw you leave—”
“I’m so sorry, Dr. Knowles. I didn’t even ask you. Was your house okay? Did you lose stuff?”
Chelsea and her stuff. “Everything’s fine, Chelsea. No one was hurt. That’s the important thing.”
We both seemed to realize at the same moment that someone had been hurt only a short time ago.
“You had enough to deal with, with Ms. Crocker,” Chelsea said. “I still can’t get that out of my mind.”
“Did you have a lot of contact with Ms. Crocker in the library?”
Chelsea gave a sad nod. “She counseled me on some personal stuff, too. She seemed to really care.”
If Charlotte had been smart and caring, she would have warned Chelsea about Daryl and his ilk. But that wasn’t my business, and I had more of my own than I could handle.
“Why did you and Daryl come by my house again after one o’clock this morning?”
“I don’t know. Daryl said he wanted to see if anything else was going on. When the cops stopped us, he told them he wanted to be sure you were all right. We thought it was just a parked car sitting there, or I’m sure he would have driven right by. The cops must have been slumped down or something.”
Daryl and Chelsea must have been the only two people on the street who hadn’t spotted the unmarked car receiving special delivery food and drink.
“Does Daryl know you’re talking to me?”
“No, I’m mad at him. I stayed in my friend’s room the rest of the night. He’s been calling all morning, but I haven’t picked up. What if those cops arrested us for trespassing or somethin
g? How would I explain that to my parents? They’re already worried that I’m away in a big city.”
I held back a smile at the characterization of Henley as a big city, though it was physically close to cities bigger than Chelsea was used to. Most of our students took advantage of the fact that Boston was only about forty miles north, and Providence, Rhode Island, twenty miles south.
I knew that Chelsea talked to her parents every morning, without fail, before classes. When she’d told me about this strict monitoring of her college experience, I hadn’t been able to tell if it was okay with Chelsea. I’d been surprised to learn that the ritual had continued into her sophomore year.
I wondered how long a girl like Chelsea, with her upbringing, would stay mad at an alpha male like Daryl, with a manly swatch of blond hair on his chin. A soul patch, though Daryl didn’t exactly fit the soul profile I was familiar with.
When Nick brought what the Mortarboard Café considered grilled cheese—two pieces of warm white bread with a mustard yellow spread in between—I thought Chelsea was going to faint or worse. Her face turned as pale as the bread. I pushed both plates to the side and covered the sandwiches with paper napkins. I couldn’t do much about the greasy odor.
“Do you care if Daryl knows we’re talking?” I asked her.
Chelsea bit her lip. “He might not want you to know about the scanner. Like, is it even legal? I asked him and he said yes, as long as you don’t commit a crime with it. But I’m not sure.”
I knew I could find out with a quick call to Virgil, but I didn’t need to tell Chelsea. No need for her to get too comfortable.
“Does Daryl live in the dorms?”
“Uh-huh. He’s in Hawthorne, with all the guys. It’s a party house, for sure, but Daryl doesn’t hang out there a lot or go to their keggers.” She put her hand to her mouth. “Oops, not that they drink illegally or anything, Dr. Knowles.”
“I was young once,” I said, but Chelsea didn’t seem to get the humor. She nodded as if I’d told her something she didn’t know.