Scholar's Plot

by Hilari Bell

  “And he wrote it up in the form of a play, in case someone came across this page.”

  “And kept it, with all these documents, separate from his register of payments,” I said. “So neither set screams blackmail to anyone who might find them. He was no fool. But then, his system told us that already.”

  “So hammer D, who was crossed out and hadn’t paid anything, he’s a contractor,” Katherine said.

  “And A. is a member of the university board,” I added. “Who’s been paying for years. We have our second suspect.”

  “Here’s our screw again.” Kathy picked up the next sheet in the pile. It was the same drawing we’d seen in the engineering book, but on cheap thin paper. It was also more roughly drawn and beneath it was a handwritten note: from the thesis of Willet Halprin. In force multp. Or change dir.?

  284.629 was printed in the upper corner, in Hotchkiss’ meticulous hand.

  “This was probably written by whoever put the Devices book together,” I said. “I don’t know how Hotchkiss got hold of it, but when he did I bet he remembered that passage in the math book and checked it out.”

  “This next page looks like it was crumpled up and then smoothed out,” Kathy said. “Do you think he pulled it out of the trash?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Spread on the desk and smoothed a bit more, it proved to be a course report for one Franklin Mabry. Judging by the topics he was being graded on: considerations, revocation, dissolution, misrepresentations, fraud, he was taking contract law … and failing.

  “Only a sixty-three,” said Kathy. “Benton said sixty-five was passing.”

  “And that a lawyer needed higher than eighty to get a decent job,” I reminded her. “The professor’s name’s not on this, but … let’s say that PB scales, otherwise known as Professor Bollinger, has totted up Master Mabry’s course score and finds he didn’t pass. He decides to break the bad news in person, instead of however they do it, and tracks Master Mabry down in the library, or maybe in the garden outside this window.”

  It offered a good view of the garden, and if the windows were open we’d have heard the students’ voices.

  “Mabry learns that he’s failing and loses his temper, rants, weeps—”

  “You do know you’re making this up, right?” Lady Katherine, critical. “He could have known full well he was likely to fail, and been plotting what to do about it for weeks. Professor Bollinger is quite surprised at how calmly he receives the news.”

  “Either way, Mabry makes Professor Bollinger some kind of offer, and the Professor accepts. He then gives Mabry this, the true report, and goes back to compose a fake one that raises Mabry’s score to a respectable number. M 87, Hotchkiss’ ledger said. High enough for him to get a job and then some. Mabry crumples this up and throws it away … and Hotchkiss, curious about what he’s just seen, unfolds it and learns that Franklin Mabry has failed. Only then he doesn’t, and his final score when he graduates is impossibly high. And Hotchkiss realizes that what he saw was Mabry offering Bollinger a bribe, and Bollinger taking it.”

  “How long have they been paying?” Kathy asked.

  “Over ten years. They were his first victims.”

  The next four papers were all letters, written in a flowing, extravagant hand.

  “‘My dearest Moonbeam?’” I couldn’t blame her for sounding incredulous.

  “Why not? They’re signed, ‘Your devoted Mugglewump.’”

  Kathy laughed aloud, then stopped with a guilty glance at the door.

  “It’s not a bad way for PN to avoid signing his name,” I pointed out, running my eyes down the page. Which I then shifted quickly out of Kathy’s sight.

  “Hey!” But she said it softly.

  “It’s not so much the content.” Although it was. “I’m afraid you’d laugh.”

  “I wouldn’t. If this is a professor writing to one of his scholars ’tis not funny.”

  “Benton says there’s no sign Nilcomb coerced any of them,” I reminded her. “Or changed their grades.”

  “Still, ick. At the best, ick.”

  “I don’t object to that as much as I do to his prose.”

  “Then you’re a horrible person,” Kathy said promptly. “This matters, Fisk.”

  “So does good prose. ‘Your breasts are like the two moons, touching as they cross. Except yours are matched for color and for size.’”

  Kathy made a choking sound, but at least it was quiet. “You’re kidding. No one would write that.”

  “No, really. The rest is almost as bad.”

  “Let me see.”

  I turned to avoid her reaching hand. “No, fair maid, I don’t think so. Oh, ick. You definitely don’t need to see them.”

  Neither did I. I folded them and added them to the pile, which I tucked inside my vest, rather regretting that she didn’t make another try for them.

  Michael’s sister, I reminded myself.

  “Were any of them signed?” Kathy asked. “I wonder how Master Hotchkiss came by such … personal documents.”

  “No idea. And they may not be signed, but I’ll bet Nilcomb’s students could identify his writing.”

  We had both sobered.

  “So,” said Kathy. “Board member A, who asked the contractor to bribe him; Halprin, who plagiarized his thesis; Mabry and Bollinger, who changed the grades; and Professor Nilcomb. Five suspects, if you count blackmail a sufficient motive for murder.”

  “Which most do.”

  “But no connection to Benton, or the project he was working on.”

  “We’ve just started looking,” I pointed out. “We need more information about all of these people. I wonder if the helpful Clerk Peebles would let us buy her luncheon.”

  “Dinner,” said Kathy. “’Tis an hour past midday, so she’s likely eaten by now. Besides, if she agrees to dinner we can bring Michael and Benton along and catch them up on what we’ve learned.”

  Clerk Peebles said she’d be happy to dine with us. Kathy and I snagged a hot pie from a street seller outside the campus gates, and spent the rest of the afternoon tracking down a sample of Professor Nilcomb’s handwriting.

  It matched.

  I wasn’t averse to dining with Mistress Peebles, but Benton suffered an attack of … not shyness, so much, as a perfectly understandable desire to avoid her pity, and he declined to join us. Given the way he colored up at the mention of Maddy Flynn’s name, I wondered how he’d have reacted had she been attending. But in order for Benton to have a love tangle with a scholar, he’d have to go back to being a professor.

  Benton also pointed out, unhelpfully, that he could alibi professor Bollinger for the time of the lecture, and even if Hotchkiss was killed before that, he couldn’t believe the man could come straight from committing bare-handed murder and then calmly listen to the speaker.

  There were two board members whose names began with A, Amliss and Arnoll. And Benton had no idea which of them was involved with the library renovations.

  We took Mistress Peebles to the same tavern we’d been dining at, but for this Fisk rented a private parlor and paid for a nice salad, cooked beets in a sauce of mustard and honey, mashed potatoes, a whole roast goose, and fruit tarts for dessert. It must have set him back two silver roundels, but then he still had most of his share of the reward from Tallowsport.

  I recounted some of Fisk’s and my more amusing adventures during the meal, Kathy supplied court gossip, and Fisk himself had the tact to speak only about neutral topics while we ate. ’Twas only as we finished up the sweetened cream that had topped our tarts that he expressed curiosity about one Scholar Franklin, whose name, he said, had “come up.”

  “Franklin Mabry?” Clerk Peebles blinked in surprise. “He can’t have anything to do with what happened to Professor Sevenson. He was a law student here … what, ten, twelve years ago?”

  “Ah.” Fisk sometimes delights in being uninformative. “Do you know where he is now?”

  “Not for c
ertain. I heard he’d finally become a judicar, in some town near D’vorin up on the north coast. That’s where his family’s from, I think.”

  “What’s the last time he was here?” Fisk pressed on.

  “After he graduated? Never, that I know of. He’d have no reason to return, except to enroll a son or daughter with us someday. That’s how I see most of the old scholars, if they ever come back.”

  ’Twas spoken matter-of-factly, but what would it be like to lose a son, and then to lose the children you befriended in his place, year after year? If we succeeded in restoring Benton’s reputation, I would tell him that we owed our triumph to this woman’s help, and that he should make it a point to seek her out in the future.

  She would have at least one youth in her life who wouldn’t leave her.

  Fisk went on to determine that some engineer in Crown City had also never come to visit the university, even though he was so near. Then Kathy took over, asking about the renovation of the library, what had been done there, who was the contractor, and how he’d been hired. If Peebles knew which board member A was involved, she didn’t say.

  I wished there’d been time for Fisk and Kathy to report more details of what they’d discovered, but I’d spent most of the afternoon perusing Professor Dayless’ data on the project. She said if I insisted on seeing everything I might make myself useful, and set me to making a new copy of the trials of one of the formulas that had produced inconclusive results. In fact, inconclusive was a fair description of my whole day. I now understood, both how the experiment with the rabbits had been done, and why Benton found it so boring.

  Fisk finished his interrogation by asking Mistress Peebles what she knew about Professor Nilcomb, and her lips tightened in distaste.

  “I can guess what you’re talking about, but I don’t see how that … how any of this has anything to do with Scholar Benton.”

  She’d been willing to relay harmless information about past students and building renovations, but she clearly wasn’t going to besmirch a man’s reputation without knowing why.

  Fisk eyed her over the gravy stained plates and half-full goblets, and made up his mind.

  “Master Hotchkiss was blackmailing the people I’ve asked you about. Which makes them suspects in his murder.”

  “Blackmail?” Mistress Peebles’ eyes widened. “You mean, for money? No, of course you do. I’m sorry, this is silly of me, but somehow I didn’t think your investigation would involve anyone else.”

  “’Tis understandable you’d be shocked,” I said gently, “that someone you knew would stoop so low.”

  “Hotchkiss… He helped me get my job.” She picked up her goblet, but didn’t drink, staring down at her hands. “That was after Seymour died, and I needed it badly.”

  “Then there must have been some good in him. I find people are seldom all one or the other. Benton told us of your son,” I added. “He says the professors still speak of his intelligence.”

  “And how odd he was?” She looked up at me then. Her eyes were bright, but there were no tears. “They were the only ones besides me who saw it. How very smart he was. Most people took him for simple, but he had notebooks full of mathematical formulas, and even scribbled them on the walls of his room. A few years after he started studying here, he told me that numbers could define anything.”

  She smiled, so sadly a heart of stone would have cracked.

  “I asked him, ‘Even love? How big is love in numbers?’ Teasing, because he was always so logical. Emotions confused him. Frightened him, I think. He told me, ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing.’ But then he kissed my cheek, because whatever he said, he knew it wasn’t nothing.”

  Now her eyes had filled, but she shook her head sharply, defying grief.

  I would definitely speak to Benton.

  “Unlike Fisk, I’m looking into Professor Dayless’ project,” I said, giving her a chance to regain her composure. “Can you tell me anything about her and Professor Stint?”

  “I don’t know much about Stint,” she said. “He’s only been here for two years. We’ve had the usual dealings, about course schedules and paying his salary and such.”

  She was calmer by the time she finished speaking. For all her grief, her son had died long ago.

  “What about Professor Dayless? Is she new to the university?”

  “Oh, no. Monica was hired before I was, and I’ve been working for the university nearly twenty years. In fact, she was kind. There aren’t many women working here, and we tend to know each other better than the men.”

  “We didn’t find any evidence of it,” Kathy said, “but could Master Hotchkiss have been blackmailing one of the professors who works on the project? You knew about Nilcomb’s … problem. Is there anything like that about either of them?”

  “No, there isn’t. And if there was, I’m not sure I’d tell you. I don’t mind giving you harmless information, but I won’t repeat malicious gossip. Which might not even be true! There’s one thing you should know, however. For Professor Sevenson’s sake. The first of the scholars applying for his job was interviewed this morning.”

  This was probably something she shouldn’t have shared with us, and her lips folded tightly over the words.

  “How many candidates are there to interview?” Kathy asked. “How long before they make a decision?”

  “Just two more interviews. One of them’s not even in town yet, but they’re talking to the other man day after tomorrow. So you may not have much more time, but I still hoped… Well.” She rose to her feet, declaring her intention to depart.

  “You hope to help Professor Sevenson?” Fisk said swiftly. “Then would you be willing to supply a bit more harmless information, such as where some of these people live? We have to talk to them, and it will be less likely to damage them if we can do so privately than if we have to track them down on campus.”

  That made her hesitate.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. “Come to my office tomorrow. I’d have to look up the directions to their homes, anyway.”

  She said I didn’t need to escort her home, but I insisted. And as it turned out, her house was so nearby Fisk and Kathy were still at the table when I returned.

  I thought Kathy looked a bit irritated, and Fisk can be annoying — though he usually wasn’t, with her.

  “I don’t suppose you got any malicious gossip out of her,” Kathy asked.

  “Whatever it is, Benton should be able tell us,” Fisk said. “Though it may be hard to sort gems from glass. Places like this are usually awash with gossip. I wonder why he hasn’t enlightened us already.”

  “You don’t know Benton,” I said. “The only people he cares about have been dead for thousands of years. He only told us about Nilcomb when we pointed to the man’s initials and asked directly.”

  “He probably tried to ignore all the gossip,” Kathy added. “I suppose we ought to sit down tomorrow and pry it out of him.”

  “That’s an excellent idea,” said Fisk. “If you would. Tomorrow I want to find the homes of all the people on our list and ask their neighbors what they’re like when they’re not at work. Which means we probably ought to head home.”

  He rose from the table as he spoke, and Kathy followed him as she said, “We don’t even know which board member A was being blackmailed. And if they’ve started the interviews for Benton’s job, we’re running out of time.”

  “We may not have his name.” Fisk closed the parlor door behind us, and gestured to a maid that we were leaving. “But I’ll bet we can find out who the contractor was, and he can tell us.”

  “Why would he?” I asked. “He paid that man a bribe to get the job.”

  “A solicited bribe.” Fisk put on his sympathetic face, which is so good that Kathy looked startled. “That poor man, he must have been furious doing all that work for nothing, to get a job that he deserved, anyway.” The kindly expression vanished, like a candle flame blown out. “When people are furious, they want to talk a
bout it. I’m not worried about getting our board member’s name.”

  “And assuming Halprin and Mabry are out of town, that leaves Professors Bollinger and Nilcomb,” Kathy said. “Benton might know where they live.”

  “And I want directions to the homes of Professors Dayless and Stint,” I added, as we stepped out into the dark street. It was cooler now, and both moons rode high in the sky. “Particularly Stint.”

  “Why particularly?” Kathy asked.

  “Because he’s new to the university, at least relatively, which leaves more room for secrets in his life. And he doesn’t much like the fact that Dayless was placed over him.”

  “That sounds more interesting than trying to get Benton to remember gossip,” Kathy said wistfully.

  Had I been truly noble I’d have volunteered to do that myself, and let her go with Fisk. There might be some gossip Benton would hesitate to repeat to our young sister, too. But I’d no doubt Kathy would drag it out of him, and I really wanted to learn more about Stint and Dayless, not to mention Fisk’s suspects.

  Kathy wasn’t all that noble either.

  “All right, I’ll do the dirty work. But you have to promise to tell me everything when you get home,” she said. “And that you won’t muck it up because of this stupid cock fight the two of you have—”

  Four men emerged from the alley that led to Benton’s door, three of them pulling another along with them.

  “Pepper in the soup,” he was saying. “The secret is moderation, not too much, not too little, or it sets the walls to sneezing.”

  “Hey!” Fisk shouted, but I had already broken into a run.

  They reached the street and tried to dash off, hampered by the jeweler who not only refused to run, but seemed to be struggling. We’d have caught them easily… In fact, we did catch them easily, whereupon two of them turned and pulled out short but effective cudgels.

  Fisk and I, unarmed, skidded to a stop. Kathy ran into Fisk’s back and set him staggering.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Fisk demanded. “That man is our guest.”

  “Yeah? Well, we been paid to un-guest him,” one of the men who’d stopped us said.