The Probability of Murder

by Ada Madison

  I realized I couldn’t make assumptions about Charlotte’s motivations for anything she’d done. I didn’t know her beginnings, but her whole adult life seemed to me a series of bad choices and wrong paths taken. I couldn’t fathom her reasons or those of anyone who made a profession out of taking advantage of people.

  That she’d spent two years conducting herself as a model citizen was a conundrum, but not a reason to give her a pass on her prior life. And Virgil couldn’t say for sure that she hadn’t been working a con at Henley right before my eyes. I’d wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, even allowing that the money in the duffel might be clean, but the Foxwell story had set me anew against that hope.

  Maybe my lunch date with Marty tomorrow would set that straight, one way or another.

  Meanwhile, I had more of the detritus of Charlotte’s life to go through.

  The clippings from the Foxwell file included several photographs of the family before and after Hurricane Charlotte struck. To all appearances, Robert Foxwell and his wife were happy shop owners before they met her. As for the after photos, his son, David, who dropped out of college when his father died, looked despondent in one, angry in another, ready to explode in a third.

  Mrs. Foxwell died a year after her husband from an undisclosed cause, leaving David to fend for himself at twenty years old. He was quoted as saying that, although nothing could bring his family back, he believed “no sentence is long enough” for Crawford.

  I wondered what had become of him.

  Buzzz.

  Anger and disgust at what Charlotte had done returned in full force as I stuffed everything back into the envelopes and back into the box. I shoved the carton aside and went to answer the doorbell.

  It was going to take everything Ariana had to pull me out of this recurring bad mood.

  “I know just the thing to do,” Ariana said, depositing her bags where Charlotte’s condemning property box had been.

  She lined up four clear plastic organizer trays on my coffee table, each containing an assortment of colorful beads in different materials. I scanned the array of beads of stone, glass, gemstone, wood, and metal, all of varied sizes and shapes, each one beautiful.

  I plunked down on the floor to be closer to the treasures. I decided to give my loyal friend a thrill and name the more unusual shapes, as she’d taught us in one of the first classes I’d taken with her. I touched a sample of each bead as I recited its official name. Faceted, saucer, melon, tube, pipe, chip, and—the most exotic of all, of Native American origin—heishi, tiny pieces of shell that have been drilled and ground into beads.

  I’d seen a heishi necklace on someone recently, but couldn’t remember the circumstances.

  As I hoped, Ariana leaned over from her place on the couch and gave me a very American high five for my fine bead-naming performance.

  Ariana removed the last box from her tote, this one with the serious tools of the trade—findings, needles, cords, chains, pliers, wires, tweezers, wire cutters, and at least ten kinds of clasps.

  “I guess I’m in for a work session,” I said.

  “We’re going to make a little present for Bruce,” Ariana announced. “It will send a message to the universe that we know he’ll be back soon to accept it.”

  I let out a long breath, wanting badly to believe as Ariana did that there was something I could do to bring back Bruce and his friends safely.

  “Good idea,” I said, sounding pretty convincing, given the way I felt.

  Ariana brought out a spiral-bound beading book from one of the bags she’d carried in. She had flagged several pages already and opened the book to the first floppy blue marker. I knew this organized approach was all for my benefit, since Ariana didn’t believe crafts books had much to offer except “to stifle our creativity,” as she put it.

  “How about a key chain?” she asked, showing me one made of delicate Murano glass beads cascading from a silver jump ring.

  I shook my head. “Bruce is never going to carry a beaded key chain.”

  On to the next marked page. “How about this copper wire basket for his desk, to hold paper clips and things?” Ariana asked. “We could do it in manly colors like brown and navy.”

  “He doesn’t really have a desk at MAstar. The guys don’t have their own rooms in the trailer, and they don’t leave much personal stuff there. But even at home, his laptop is on a little end table by his recliner. Bruce is not a desk or paper clip kind of person.”

  To back up my observation, I pointed to the array of mountain-climbing photographs of Bruce on the walls of the den. Not a desk, stapler, pencil holder, or tape dispenser in his life.

  “I see what you mean,” Ariana said, returning to the crafts book. “Let’s see what else we have.”

  She sorted through one flag after another.

  I heard simply, “Ankle bracelet, no. Beaded pen, no. Zipper pull, no. Beaded box top, no. Beaded napkin rings, no.” Then finally, a little light sparkled in her eyes. “He reads, doesn’t he?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We’ll make him a bookmark. It can be fun and a lot more challenging than the key chain I had in mind.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “Yeah, too bad your boyfriend doesn’t wear jewelry. We could make a simple necklace.”

  We both laughed at the idea of Bruce Granville, medevac pilot and ice climber, wearing anything that wasn’t completely functional.

  I had an unwelcome thought of Daryl Farmer, who was never without something decorative. Aha, Daryl was wearing a heishi necklace at the Möbius party. I’d used it, in fact, to demonstrate the value of mathematics.

  The mystery of where I’d seen heishi beads recently was solved, but only partly.

  There’d been another instance.

  I sat up straight, struck by a set of pictures that fit together. I scrambled across the carpet to the abandoned box of Charlotte’s belongings. I searched for the last envelope I’d opened and pulled it out.

  “What are you looking for?” Ariana asked. “You can’t get out of this project. It’s for Bruce, who might need it.”

  “Here it is,” I said, looking closely at the newspaper shots of David Foxwell. Blond, with a soul patch and a necklace. The same muscular build, not very tall. He had one hand on his hip, a stance Daryl often took. The same initials, like someone who’d taken a new name but kept his initials. Like Charlotte Crocker/Coleen Crawford and the other CCs.

  Now I was really reaching. One more minute and I’d be willing to swear in court that the shirt in the picture was one that David Foxwell still owned, but as Daryl Farmer, Henley College freshman.

  I showed Ariana the photographs of David Foxwell. “You’ve only seen him a couple of times, but who does this look like?”

  Ariana stretched her neck and screwed up her face, studying the grainy likenesses. “I’m not sure.”

  I groaned and tapped the photo with the shot that was closest in on Daryl’s upper body. “Look at this necklace. Does it look like heishi?”

  Ariana pulled back. “Do you want it to be heishi?” she asked. Poor Ariana. I was positive she felt like an unsure eyewitness in front of a lineup window. “It’s a great necklace, but it’s really hard to tell. It could be made of saucer beads. They’re almost the same size. You’d almost have to feel the texture to tell.”

  She gave me an apologetic look.

  “You’re right. There’s no way to know from a newspaper photo,” I said, disappointed.

  “I feel like I failed a test.”

  “No, no, never mind. How about the guy himself? If he were two, two-and-a-half years older? Do you recognize him?”

  Ariana brightened. “Oh, I get it.” She touched her smooth chin. “The soul patch? That guy in your class who hangs around a lot. I forget his name.”

  “Daryl Farmer. He’s always with Chelsea Derbin.”

  “Right, that’s him.”

  Thanks anyway, I thought. I knew Ariana was guessing, wanting to suppor
t my imaginings.

  I turned the clippings around to face me again. Maybe I was grasping at straws. How many small coincidences added up to a match?

  I knew it would help me to tell Ariana the story I’d half-formed in my head. Maybe if I heard it out loud, the concoction would sound as far-fetched as it truly was, and I’d be able to move on.

  “Listen to my theory and tell me what you think,” I said. “Be honest.”

  “Okay.”

  I gave Ariana the basic story of Charlotte-as-Coleen’s investment scheme and Robert Foxwell’s suicide, and took off from there.

  “Say our very own freshman Daryl Farmer is really David Foxwell. I just learned—never mind how—that Daryl is really twenty-six years old. Six years ago, when his father committed suicide, he was twenty, and had to leave college and go to work. His father’s killer, in David’s mind, gets out of prison”—I looked again at the article and verified the data—“two-and-a-half years ago. In between times, David was working in computers in California.”

  I paused for a reaction.

  “I see where you’re going,” Ariana said. “Young David is very smart. He hacks around, however they do it, and finds out that the woman who has ruined his family is now a librarian at Henley College in Henley, Massachusetts.”

  I picked up the thread, getting more and more excited that I might be on to something important. “He enrolls as a freshman. He notices that the woman he’s after is very close to this young woman who’s a sophomore math major. He sees that the sophomore is very naïve and ripe for the picking.”

  “Chelsea Derbin.”

  “Yes, what luck. Chelsea told me she met Daryl right away last summer at orientation. He signs up as a math major also, which is right down his alley, and he dates Chelsea to get close to Charlotte.”

  “Kind of a reversal of how you’d think it would work. Usually a guy would befriend the older woman to get to the girl.”

  “Well versed as you are in the art of romance,” I said. “In this case, we have Daryl using Chelsea to gain the librarian’s trust, find out her schedule, and so on.”

  “He wants to get even,” Ariana said, covering her face while she said this, lest the universe think she approved of any violent act.

  “He wants to kill her,” I said, having no such limits on my relation to the universe. “And he wants the money.”

  Ariana gasped and slapped her forehead. “I forgot about the money.”

  “We don’t know for sure whether he ever got back what his father lost.”

  “He thinks of that money in the duffel bag as his.”

  I smiled. I had a convert to my theory.

  Things were looking up.

  I needed to busy myself with a physical activity while I played with my theory in my head and figured out how to approach Virgil.

  “Let’s make a bookmark,” I said, bringing a smile to the face of my good, honest friend.

  Ariana had taken pity on me and had chosen a relatively simple idea for a bookmark, a twelve-inch-long black cord with a pattern of beads hanging from each end.

  “We beaders call it a book thong,” Ariana explained, with a grin.

  “Bruce’s birthday is in June. Pearl is his birthstone, right?” I asked. Ariana knew such things.

  Ariana nodded and produced a chart from the pocket of a tote. She unfolded a full-color rendering of gemstones, from beautifully striated agate to a translucent blue-green zircon.

  “A pearl is one choice for June,” she said, tapping an image on the chart. “It’s magical, created by a living organism, and said to be formed from tears of joy.” She moved her finger two rows back, to the Ms. “Moonstone is the other gem for June. The Romans thought it was made of moonlight. Both go really well with black onyx, which makes its wearer brave, so I think we’re on our way to something beautiful. In a very masculine way, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Using a thin needle, Ariana expertly drew seed pearls from a compartment in one of her trays. I found four moonstone beads in the shape of ellipsoids, two onyx beads of teardrop shape, and two that were spherical.

  We each took an end of the cord and worked with the beads and assorted silver findings. I approved a pewter heart-shaped charm for the top end of the bookmark. Ariana talked me out of first sketching a pattern on graph paper.

  “Let it flow,” she said, flapping her long arms.

  I nodded, though I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant. That’s what made our friendship so wonderful.

  Unlike most times that we work on a crafts project together, we embraced periods of silence.

  As I worked with cones, spacer beads, and pliers, my thoughts were on Bruce, picturing him using our creation to mark his place in a book on World War II planes that I’d ordered for him. He hadn’t been gone all that long, I reasoned. He’d called from the base of the mountain at about eleven yesterday morning, and now it was eleven at night. Only thirty-six hours, though it had seemed like weeks.

  If he were at sea level, would the police even consider looking for him? I tried to focus on the shortness of the time Bruce had been away, but it was hard to dismiss the extenuating circumstances of an icy mountain, a heavy snowstorm, and an avalanche of rocks and snow.

  I switched my thoughts to David Foxwell, aka Daryl Farmer, a less personally involving matter. As pleased as I was with my narrative, there were some loose ends to my story.

  I addressed Ariana, whose bead design was flowing much better than mine was, with multicolored branches and perfect knots. I knew Bruce would have no trouble figuring out who had fashioned which end.

  “How would Daryl have known about the money in Charlotte’s duffel bag?” I asked.

  “He probably just assumed she had a bunch, and came to claim some of it.”

  “Could be. Or his intention in crossing the country to find her might have been simply to kill her.” I swallowed at that. “Maybe he learned about the money only when he arrived at Henley.”

  “Why do you think Daryl is still around if he did what he came to do? Charlotte’s dead. Do you think he’s the one who broke in looking for the money after he killed her?” Ariana put the end of a long string of beads in her mouth and swept her arm across my den, as if I might not know which break-in she referred to.

  A montage of images of Daryl Farmer came to me, one of which showed him as the guy Mr. Gold saw entering my home to violate it, neat as he’d been. I saw Daryl in my mind at the Friday parties at Ben Franklin Hall, sitting in front of me in class three times a week for statistics, standing near me at functions on campus. Had Charlotte been standing next to me at those times also?

  Had anyone at Henley ever been safe with Charlotte alive and Daryl out to get her? Were we safe now?

  I answered Ariana’s question with one of my own. “What if Daryl has unfinished business?”

  “He knows by now that there’s no money for him anywhere, don’t you think?” Ariana said. “Are you saying there’s someone else he has it in for? Like—”

  “Like Chelsea,” I said, springing to my feet, not caring that carefully placed beads were slipping off my wire.

  “Do you think he’d hurt her?” Ariana asked. “Why would he do that? I think he’s a guy who was just out for revenge. He’s not a serial killer or anything. I don’t get that vibe from him.”

  I didn’t ask how Ariana could distinguish serial killer vibes from the vibes coming off someone who’d murdered only one person. I figured it would be too long a story for this hour.

  “Maybe Chelsea knows who he really is or he thinks she does. Maybe he enlisted her help and now he has to get rid of her. I don’t know.”

  Ariana put down her string of beads in such a way that it stayed intact. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Sophie. Shall we get Virgil back here?”

  “Good idea,” I said. “But I need to call Chelsea, too.”

  “You can invite her over or something.”

  Something. “Why don’t you call Vir
gil, to save time,” I said. “I’ll try Chelsea.”

  Ariana nodded and moved to the hallway and then to my office, opening her phone on the way.

  I punched in Chelsea’s number and took deep breaths, reminding myself that all I had was a theory based on unconfirmed similarities. I didn’t want to send the fragile Chelsea into a panic, but I’d never have forgiven myself if I did nothing to warn her of potential harm.

  I waited through four rings, forming a decision tree in my head, with three branches, to account for Chelsea’s being with Daryl, Chelsea’s not being with Daryl, and no answer.

  The winner was “no answer.”

  I heard the click to voice mail and debated whether to leave a message. What if Daryl heard it? The message would be on her cell phone, I realized with relief, not shouted out to a kitchen answering machine as a message to my landline might be.

  I spoke as calmly as possible. “Chelsea, this is Dr. Knowles. Please give me a call at home when you get this message. I want to talk to you about your statistics paper.”

  Now I had to invent a plausible reason to single out Chelsea’s paper for a chat. I remembered that she’d chosen the application of statistics to agricultural issues, an interesting choice that reflected her ties to her roots in a farming community. I could dig out an advanced reference to give her or advise her to be sure to visit the site developed by the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Neither of these ideas merited a late-night call either from or to my home, but it was the best I could come up with on the spot.

  When Ariana and I reconvened in the den, she gave her report. She’d also had to leave a message, for Virgil. Maybe he did have someplace to go on a Sunday evening.

  “He wasn’t picking up, but, get this, if I have an emergency I should dial nine-one-one.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “I guess that’s all we can do tonight,” Ariana said, yawning.

  A minute later the clock in the den struck midnight and my friend Cinderella threw up her hands and said good night.