by Ada Madison
“This is getting to be a habit,” I said, as Ariana shuffled toward the guest room.
She waved and called over her shoulder, “You should be going to bed, too.”
“Sure, right away.”
I headed for my office.
It was nice to have Ariana’s supportive and often cheery presence. I knew her strategy was to be here for me in case I heard from Bruce or…about Bruce…in the middle of the night.
I went online to check the weather at Franconia Notch. I found nothing new about the storm, no new webcam graphic. It was as if New Hampshire had shut down. The number listed on the site was the same one I’d been calling, with a computer-generated message about regular business hours.
How does a mountain have regular business hours?
I hadn’t checked my email since early afternoon, and it was now overloaded with student queries. It seemed my majors had a hard time doing without me for a whole weekend.
“I can’t open the third link on your list for probability sampling examples,” wrote Rena. I responded, “Check your browser. Any recent version of Firefox should work.”
“Is stratified sampling going to be on the final?” Lamar asked, insinuating that it wouldn’t be fair, since I didn’t spend much class time on it. I wrote back, “I’ll post a study guide for the final in a week or so.”
“Can I change my topic from statistics in corporate America to manufacturing statistics?” Brendan wanted to know. “As long as you don’t really manufacture statistics,” I answered, unable to resist.
I shot off quick replies to five other students, then opened a file with my notes for a class in about nine hours on statistical sampling. I was ahead of the game, having anticipated a time-out in Boston.
I reviewed my intro to the session. I wanted to emphasize the importance of understanding sampling methods without sounding like a preacher. If I had my way, every voter would be required to take my class or one like it before being issued a ballot. Though it should have been obvious, I planned to remind the voters in my class that no published survey obtains data from every single person in the pool of voters. Not just in politics, data is interpreted for us at every turn, and not necessarily by people who are objective about the results.
My electronic charts were in order, with examples from reports of so-called trends in climate, in sales, even in medical results. I decided I’d have time to cover aspects of sample design and introduce the formula for sample size to prepare the students for the homework assignment.
I closed the file, quit all the applications, and thought about trying to sleep.
I got as far as turning back my old lavender comforter when my landline rang from my night table.
Virgil’s number popped onto my screen. I sat on my bed and clicked on.
“You up?” he asked.
“I’m up,” I said, wondering why, in the midst of all the serious matters of the evening, I found myself curious about where and with whom Virgil had been earlier. If he had a girlfriend I wanted to meet her. “Did you have a good evening?” I asked, not to be too subtle.
“I’ve been on the phone a lot, setting up some contacts in New Hampshire.”
My breath caught. “Did you learn anything?”
“Not yet, but I have some avenues established, sort of like a phone tree.”
Only the near Luddite Virgil would hold on to the methods of our grammar school days, when our parents communicated about days off or worked out field trip details by telephoning around in chain letter fashion, before texting and emailing were invented.
“Thanks,” I said, grateful for any communication method, old or new, that put me closer to wherever Bruce was.
“What’s this about a theory around our Charlotte Crocker case? Ariana mentioned there’s something I should know?”
“How much time do you have?” I asked.
“Go for it.”
I did.
It was hard to explain what I’d found and what I’d guessed at without props like photographs and a nicely graphed timeline, but I did my best to fill in Virgil on the story I’d put together. I threw in what I’d learned from Daryl’s admissions file, the lies he’d told Chelsea about his age and background, and his two appearances at my home at the time of the break-in.
Virgil didn’t interrupt while I was talking, and he didn’t respond right away when I was finished, ending with my concern for Chelsea. When he finally spoke, he had a few questions.
“Do you know where Daryl Farmer is now?”
“No. Does this mean you think my little narrative has merit?”
“Anything can have merit in an investigation.”
Back to unforgiving cop mode, I noticed. “Right. And I don’t know where Chelsea is either,” I added.
“Okay. Give me some time and don’t do anything else. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“If Chelsea calls you back, play it cool and let me know. Don’t do anything yourself. Got it?”
“Got it.”
The second time I sang the words, just to make a point.
Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Whirrrr.
My cell phone.
I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep, only that I’d been tossing and turning. I’d left my night table light on and both phones handy. I checked the clock—two fifteen—and the screen on my phone.
Chelsea this time.
“Hey, Dr. Knowles. Hope I didn’t wake you. I know you stay up late.”
Had I ever been this cavalier about calling my professors? Yes, I realized, I had, though not too often. I was sure that Janice Barnard, former resident assistant on the fourth floor of my dorm at my alma mater, would testify to the fact that I’d awakened her more than once. And with very little at stake, usually that my boyfriend at the time hadn’t called all day.
“I’m awake now,” I said, my standard line for the roughly three times a month that students woke me up.
“I figured if you called me so late, it must be important.”
“Sort of, but nothing to worry about,” I said, untruthfully. “I was actually looking for Daryl and wondered if you knew where he was.”
Neither of us mentioned that I’d cited her statistics paper as the original reason for my voice mail message.
“Don’t talk to me about Daryl. We supposedly had a date, and he never showed. I’m ready to dump him.”
It sounded to me like he’d dumped her, which wouldn’t have been a bad thing in my mind.
“Were you going on a police-scanner jaunt?” I asked, before I could curb my sarcastic nature.
“No, I talked him into a normal date, like dinner and a movie, something I could actually tell my parents about. We were going up to Cambridge to one of those arty movie houses.”
Where I should have been on Friday. “What are you doing now?”
“Studying statistics.”
For a moment, I bought it.
“That was nice. Thanks, Chelsea.”
She laughed. “Really, I did my homework. I’m just hanging out with some of the girls in the Paul Revere lounge. Sunday nights we all do our laundry and our hair and, you know, talk about boys. I mean math.”
I hesitated to put a damper on the carefree laugh of one who didn’t know she might be in danger.
“Do me a favor, Chelsea, and let me know if Daryl calls you.”
“What’s this about, Dr. Knowles?”
“I’ve got to go now. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”
Chelsea was safe in the dorm. There was a hotline to Virgil from authorities in the mountains of New Hampshire. Bruce’s new bookmark was 90 percent done, and I could count on Ariana to finish it up, fixing my end of the cord, too, in the process. Though I’d been reluctant to make it, I now saw it as a good omen. You can’t have too many good luck charms to avert disaster.
The world would probably be okay if I went back to sleep.
Ariana had left by the time I shambled into the kitchen to the smell of coffee she’d
brewed, which was next to the fresh scones she’d whipped up, which were next to a paper bag marked, “S’s LUNCH.”
I was beginning to like having a roommate.
Ariana had left a note near my mug. The message read, “Force the Stress Out,” a cue to me to use the mantra method she’d taught me. The exercise was supposed to send the tightness she knew I was feeling from my head to my feet, step by step, and then out through the floor, until the last phrases—“The bottoms of my feet are relaxed. I am relaxed”—became a reality.
Maybe later.
For now I had to take my stress to school.
Dressed in my standard fall teaching outfit of black slacks and black shirt, with a faux Victorian vest today, I drove onto campus, parked in one of my usual spots between the tennis courts and the Mortarboard Café, and walked toward Ben Franklin Hall. The well-cared-for lawns and small statuary on the seventeen-acre campus looked the same. The strategically placed lampposts stood straight up. Students with backpacks, cell phones, and bottles of water dotted the landscape.
It was another Monday among many, the start of a week of classes.
But I felt the whole world had changed since Friday.
My biggest challenge would be to act normal and hope the B. F. Skinner method of effecting inner change through outward behavior would work.
After a quick drop-off and pickup in my office, I stopped in at the first-floor lounge for my second cup of coffee, not as good as the brew Ariana had left for me earlier. I was glad I didn’t have to pay for it.
Fran, deep into her class notes at the conference table, looked up. She came over to me and hugged me, the first sign that it wasn’t an ordinary Monday for her either.
“I’m so sorry, Sophie,” she said. “Charlotte Crocker is all over the news. Different identities? A record a mile long? Crimes all over the country? I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it.”
“I need your take on it. Lunch?” she asked, checking her watch and packing up to leave for class.
“Not today,” I said, though sharing a sandwich with Fran was much more appealing than trudging over to Admin and eating with Martin Melrose. Especially since I no longer considered him or Garrett, whoever he was, a suspect in Charlotte’s murder.
“Earlier, then? Are you free at ten?” Fran asked.
“Uh-huh. Let’s meet in my office.”
Robert Michaels, the Chemistry Department chair, walked in, apparently having just shared a joke with Judith Donohue, the head of biology, who was right behind him. Both stopped laughing when they saw me, and while they didn’t embrace me, they were flustered enough to drop a pen (Robert) and a textbook (Judy).
“Hey, you must be devastated to read all this about Charlotte,” Judy said, with Robert nodding in agreement. “I was blown away. I find it very upsetting, and I didn’t even know her all that well.”
“Neither did I, it turns out.” I smiled as a way of accepting the sympathy of all.
In some ways it was a relief that the news about Charlotte’s past, and maybe her present, had spread. No more secrets, no more solitude in my grieving. And I knew that, at least with Fran, I’d be able to share my feelings of resentment also.
Thirty students, give or take, fell silent when I entered the classroom just inside Franklin Hall’s front door. I didn’t have to clear my throat till it sounded like a foghorn, or tap on the desk and shout, “Good morning. Let’s get started. Please.” I half-expected them all to jump up and join me for a group hug.
It dawned on me only at that moment that I might have to say something about the crime on their campus, the fate of their librarian. Even those who didn’t know that Charlotte and I were friends, not simply casually acquainted as colleagues, deserved some words of explanation or acknowledgment of the crime that had been committed in their midst.
I had a fleeting memory of a story my high school physics teacher told us of Marie Curie. The famous chemist and physicist stepped in as professor to replace her husband at the Sorbonne after he’d been killed in a street accident. An entire auditorium of people sat in silence waiting for her first words. It added to the drama that Marie became at that moment the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. With reporters present and all eyes on her, Marie opened Pierre’s notebook to his last lecture and picked up the discussion of radioactivity from the middle of a paragraph.
Or so the tale went.
Even if the story was only partly true, it put my own little drama in perspective.
I addressed my waiting class, and, unlike Madame Curie, satisfied their need for a transition.
“Good morning, everyone. I’m sure you’ve heard the news of the death of our reference librarian, Charlotte Crocker. I’d like us to take a moment to remember her. She was an important part of our daily lives on the Henley campus. Let’s think of her service and all the good things she did for us, and remember also those who loved her and will miss her.”
It was the best I could do ad hoc, and maybe even if I’d taken hours to prepare.
I looked over the heads of my students, past their laptops and their textbooks, at a poster Charlotte had given me featuring the prime numbers in bright colors. I hoped eventually the nice things she did would outweigh her crimes in my memory.
I was conscious of Chelsea, safe and sound in the front row as usual.
Though it had been decades since we recorded attendance in college, it was a time-honored tradition, an unwritten rule, that students took the same seats in every class session. If a brave student did try to take a different place, chances were the rightful owner would glare, face the intruder with a questioning look, and then be extra early for the next class.
The practice was a help to professors who could then map a person to a seat, and thus learn students’ names more quickly. It was easy to see now that Daryl Farmer’s place, one row over and one seat behind Chelsea, was empty.
During the silence, ostensibly for Charlotte, I sneaked in a thought of Bruce, imagining him safe at home. I took a breath and tried Ariana’s method of pushing the stress out of my body, through my modern Mary Janes and onto the old wooden floor of the classroom.
“Thank you,” I said to the class. “Now let’s look at chapter seven.”
I got through examples on sampling techniques without much of a hitch. As when I worked a puzzle, once I started on a math problem, my focus was complete. Halfway through the explanation of sample size and confidence levels, I might have taken on a confused look if someone mentioned the names Charlotte Crocker or Bruce Granville, thinking they had theorems named after them.
A good discussion of populations and probabilities could do that for me.
I knew it would be impossible to walk back to my office at the opposite end of the building from my classroom by myself.
Several students hung back to accompany me, and it would have been insulting to dissuade them. I’d been grouchy enough lately.
The overriding theme of the entourage taking me down the hallway was, “Anything new on who killed Ms. Crocker, Dr. Knowles?”
I continued to shake my head and promise that I’d let them know if I heard anything before they did.
Nothing came up about Charlotte’s nefarious background. I decided that the sixties were officially over and college students didn’t read newspapers, especially not before a nine o’clock class. I figured it wouldn’t be too long before the Charlotte Crocker case went viral on a social network.
I was moved by my students’ gestures of care and support, summed up by a senior biology major’s offer: “Let us know if you need anything, Dr. Knowles. Like, we could take you to a movie or something.”
How about The Eiger Sanction?
In my office, waiting for Fran, I checked all possible avenues for news of Bruce or Daryl.
A voice mail from Virgil had the simple statements, “DF is in the wind. Not official.” As long as it wasn’t “BG is in the wind,” I hardly cared. I figured I’d done my part and it was now up t
o the Henley PD to find DF and prosecute him for Charlotte’s murder.
An email from Martin Melrose read, “If today is still on, I’ll be here.” One might have thought Marty wasn’t looking forward to seeing me. At this point I’d lost motivation for the lunch date myself and was tempted to call it off. If he was involved in a scam, did I really care? I felt my only job now was to help keep Chelsea safe while Virgil and his department went after Daryl.
“Knock, knock,” Fran said, pushing my office door farther open than the rather uninviting crack I’d set it at.
Who would have thought that a simple “Come in” to a friend would have set me off, choking me up once again, prompting Fran to give me another hug. Her grandmother persona was working overtime today.
It was a couple of minutes before I could intelligently explain to Fran that my distress at the moment was about 15 percent Charlotte, 80 percent Bruce, with a 5 percent random stress factor having to do with deadlines for the new statistics research paper and life in general. Few people other than Fran Emerson, former chairwoman of mathematics, would have understood my report.
I gave her a rundown on my Daryl Farmer–cum–David Foxwell theory, partly to test it against someone who knew Daryl and partly to spread the word that if she saw DF she should not approach, but rather call the HPD. I also threw in a request that she keep her eye on Chelsea, though I figured that if Daryl did skip town, we’d never see him again. At least, not by that name. Doug Finch, maybe. Or Don Fletcher. Or Daniel Fuller.
I felt a new idea for a word puzzle developing on the spot.
“I guess you never really know anyone,” Fran said. She’d taken a seat and now stretched out her long legs and gazed up at a corner of my office, as if mulling over a basic issue of epistemology. “First Charlotte wasn’t who she said she was, and now Daryl? A freshman with a past?”
“Not your ordinary freshman,” I said.
“Not as far as computers go,” said the one who, as the director of our new computer science major, would know. “He’s writing an advanced app for a smartphone. Way ahead of the curve.”