by Ada Madison
“Funny, that scene doesn’t stand out for me,” I’d answered.
“How about the potato soup and quail in My Dinner With Andre?”
The only way to stop Bruce at times like that was to force-feed him the most convenient snack, often involving high salt content.
There was no question tonight that I needed to finish up my latest journal article. Publish or perish was still an operative phrase in academia. Full professorship was contingent on a substantial publication record, and my clips from puzzle magazines didn’t count. I had a respectable list of peer-reviewed articles, but one could never have too many when one’s dean had an eagle eye out for maintaining Henley College’s accreditation. And mine.
I took care of the one additional reference I needed to round out my article on traveling waves of the mathematical kind. I printed and signed my cover letter and prepared the package for mailing on Monday to the antiquated press that didn’t take email attachments. They’d still have it long before Labor Day, and I could add the note to my resume by the official opening of the fall semester and the first meeting of the promotions committee.
I could now check off Lofty Academic Responsibilities and turn to my latest puzzle, which was calling to me loudly. I couldn’t stand that no one at the party had liked it. I picked up a copy of the brainteaser that had been ix-nayed by the Ben Franklin group this afternoon. Too tough, eh? What did they want? Simple word-in-word puzzles, like figuring out that CHIMADENA is “MADE in CHINA,” or that O ER T O is a “PAIN-less operation?”
Maybe I should heed the second loudest call instead. I put the puzzle aside and took out my bead case. I’d invested in a portable cabinet organizer that Ariana had recommended as a starter piece.
“Starter?” I’d exclaimed. Equipped with fifteen clear jars, three sliding storage boxes and many dividers, the cabinet seemed sufficient to last a lifetime of beading.
“You’ll see,” Ariana had warned.
She was right. I was already thinking of buying extra canisters to accommodate the charms I’d bought to add to key chains and bookmarks. Once into a hobby, I did tend to go all out.
I looked around at the ragged piles of books and journals scattered throughout my kitchen and den, and the overflowing briefcase I used for school. Beading was now the most organized area of my life.
I settled on a saddle stool at my large kitchen island, one of my favorite spots in the house. I pushed aside an issue of Bruce’s Rotor magazine and a copy of an article from the Mathematical Association of America to make room for one of my bead drawers. The light was good in the spacious, cheery yellow room, and I was comfortable with my food and my work, overlapping them in some spots.
A section of orange in one hand, I sifted through my collection of silver charms with the other. I picked out a few that I’d decided to use for my next projects. A tiny airplane charm for Bruce, since I hadn’t found a helicopter yet; a cupcake for Ariana, whose sweet tooth was legendary; and an old-fashioned telephone for my aunt in Florida who was once a switchboard operator.
Rrring. Rrring. Rrring.
Speaking of which . . . I should have unplugged the phone when I started working. Too late now, since I could never let a phone keep ringing.
My screen told me the call was from a private party. I grimaced. I liked the option of knowing who was on the other end. More inconsistencies in my life. My cottage kitchen had an antique glass-front corner cupboard on one side and the latest phone system on the other. Of course my purse hosted a smartphone.
Since I wasn’t fully in the beading zone yet, I picked up quickly.
“Dr. Knowles?”
I heard Rachel, sounding distraught, even more than yesterday when she’d talked of abandoning her research. Rachel didn’t block her phone numbers, so she must be in distress somewhere remote.
“What’s wrong, Rachel?”
“It’s Dr. Appleton.”
“Is he on your case again?” And after-hours at that.
“No.” I waited while Rachel took deep, audible breaths, as if she’d just come up for air after nearly drowning. “He’s dead.”
“He’s . . . ?” I switched ears as if that would send the message into a parallel mathematical plane where Dr. Appleton is not dead.
CHAPTER 4
A strange feeling overtook my mind and my body. In a matter of seconds, I’d become lightheaded and shivery and a wave of sorrow and guilt surged through me, as if my awful thoughts had caused Keith to have a heart attack and die.
I turned my attention to Rachel, on the other end of the line. “When did this happen?”
“Woody found him in his office,” Rachel said, sobbing now. It might not have been the first thing she’d uttered while I’d been trying to mentally undo the deed. I pictured our poor old janitor coming upon a body, and of someone he knew. I heard Rachel take some breaths. “I guess it was some time around four o’clock when Woody started his rounds on the chem floor.”
“What happened? A heart attack?” I gulped, not wanting to hear that a strong, nasty wish from a mathematician had knocked Keith off course.
“They told me he was poisoned.” Rachel’s voice was weaker with each utterance.
“Food poisoning?” I shot a look at my fruit, crackers, and cheese and lost my appetite on the spot.
I remembered partaking generously of the big spread at the celebration in Hal’s honor. I put my hand to my throat. Was I alive because I’d resisted a second piece of cake? I carried the phone to my patio doors and looked out on my lawn. Who else of the attendees might be sick? Or dead? I paused to check the status of my own system: no stomachache, no headache, no dizziness, no queasy feeling other than my response to this news. I was suddenly grateful for my roses, my crab apple tree, and even my new lawn chairs.
Maybe something I hadn’t eaten was tainted, like the onion dip or the store-bought pie.
“Was there something in the food at the party?” I asked Rachel, while my kitchen spun around. A serious solid of revolution.
“He was . . . they’re saying Dr. Appleton was murdered, Dr. Knowles.”
A whole new set of shivers and waves of unrest came over me and seemed to push me back into the kitchen and onto the ladder-back chair in the corner. Suddenly the room was too bright; the many tones of blue in the braided rug under my feet were too gaudy. I shaded my eyes and tried to process what I was hearing.
I’d wished Keith Appleton would leave Franklin Hall, not the land of the living. Hadn’t I? Really, I just wanted him to be civil, I explained to the universe around me. My mind raced to undo Keith’s demise. If I make my intentions clearer, I thought, Keith will spring back to life.
“Who told you all this, Rachel?”
A long, nerve-racking pause. “The police. They came to my house and brought me down here and they questioned me, for, like, hours.”
Down here? I remembered the lack of caller ID readout. “Are you at the police station?”
“Yeah.”
“Did they”—I could hardly get the word out—“arrest you?” I almost said, “like, arrest you.” I was that rattled.
“No, no. But they just let me go a minute ago; I wanted to call you right away. Believe it or not, there’s a pay phone here.”
“Did they confiscate your cell?”
I didn’t know where I got that idea, except perhaps from seeing hardened criminals give up their possessions on television crime dramas. I also didn’t know why it mattered. I was simply thrashing around trying to make sense of the last few minutes. I knew if Bruce were here, he’d recite the titles of a dozen movies where the star winds back time and redoes the past.
“No, they didn’t take it,” Rachel said, but I’d lost track of the question.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I still have my cell. But I didn’t want to use it. What if they’re bugging it or something? And I know once I get home, I won’t be able to call you. It will be awful. My mom is a wreck and all her sisters will be showi
ng up.”
“So you’re free and they haven’t charged you or anything?”
“Yeah, I’m free, but they told me not to leave Henley.”
I breathed more easily. “They must be questioning everyone, Rachel.”
“They said they were but I don’t see anyone else from school around here. I’m sure they think I did it, Dr. Knowles. They think I poisoned Dr. Appleton.” Rachel’s voice faded away and then came back. “Dr. Knowles?”
“Why in the world would they think you killed him?”
“I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. Will you meet me somewhere tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
“The police interview room was stifling and I feel like I haven’t had a shower in a week.”
I did a quick calculation of the timeline. It was now eight o’clock. If Woody called the police after four, by the time they arrived, questioned Woody, put things together, and decided to question Rachel, it would have been at least six. That meant the longest Rachel could have been at the station was a couple of hours. I had no trouble believing that two or three hours in adversarial interrogation by the police could seem like a week.
“Just one thing, Rachel. Was Dr. Appleton okay when you went upstairs to give him the cake and drink from the party?”
A long pause while I sat down and drummed my fingers on my knee.
“I didn’t see him. I knocked, you know, lightly. He doesn’t like to be disturbed if his door is closed. That’s the code for all his students. If he doesn’t answer a light tap, tap, tap, we just go away.”
I couldn’t recall Rachel’s coming back down to the lounge with the food and drink, but neither had I been tracking her movements. I wondered if she was a suspect simply because she tried to deliver a treat. Had Woody seen her, perhaps, and assumed she’d gone in and . . . I couldn’t imagine.
“You should be home with your family,” I said. A pittance of advice but I wanted her out of what must have been a depressing environment, though I had no experience to confirm it. I imagined the police had one set of rooms for casual visitors and another, more dismal setup for suspects.
“I guess I should get home. Can I call you tomorrow to set up a time to meet?”
“Absolutely.”
Once we hung up, I sat with the phone on my lap. I had so many questions. Did Rachel have a lawyer? Were there any other suspects? There should be. So many people had it in for Keith Appleton.
But who hated him so much they would kill him? No one I could think of.
Rachel’s thinly veiled plea for help rang in my head. I hadn’t a clue how to assist a murder suspect, but my faith in her innocence was unshaken. For all her whining and complaining about Keith, I couldn’t recall ever seeing her angry. Certainly not angry enough to hurt someone. When she was upset, as she’d been yesterday, she tended to cry or withdraw. Rachel would rather quit than fight.
I thought I was ready for more sustenance. I headed for the cheese plate, but still couldn’t bring myself to eat. None of the food in my house had been at the party, but what was to say that the person who poisoned Keith hadn’t snuck into my home and injected the contents of my fridge with whatever substance killed him?
The realization that this fear was irrational didn’t stop me from emptying my food into the sink. I flushed it down the disposal, holding my nose against the odor of shredding apple and cheddar cheese.
For some reason, they smelled of death.
It took a while for me to collect myself enough to take some action. Finally, I picked up the phone. I had one and only one contact in the Henley PD, and it was once removed at that.
I punched in the speed dial number for Bruce. I usually waited for him to call me when he was on duty, to avoid waking him from a nap or catching him mid-flight to an accident scene. Or in the middle of a serious poker game, as I had a couple of times.
“I know you’re not calling to tell me you love me,” he said. “Pretty awful what happened, huh?”
“You’ve already heard about Keith Appleton?”
“I’m not best friends with a homicide detective for nothing, Soph.”
Bruce had known Virgil Mitchell, of the small but very effective Henley Police Department, since college. I hoped to capitalize on that friendship for Rachel’s benefit.
“Why didn’t you call to let me know?” I asked.
“I was going to, as soon as I finished my second doughnut.”
I laughed in spite of the gravity of the moment. I pictured Bruce lying on his cot, flight suit on the floor at the ready, in one of the tiny bedrooms in the company trailer. He’d be heedless of how his steel-toed boots were sullying the quilted bedspread I’d given him, purchased at a crafts fair Ariana had dragged me to. “Doughnuts,” I echoed. “You try so hard to be a cliché.”
“But a well-informed one.”
I heard the sounds of explosions in the background and hoped it was coming from the television set in the den and not from outside his window. If Bruce had his way, he’d keep the facility’s media cabinet stocked with old movies and cult films, but, alas, most of his colleagues preferred contemporary action flicks.
“How much do you know about all this, Bruce? Rachel called me, but she wasn’t very forthcoming beyond that she thinks she’s a murder suspect, if you can believe that.”
I wasn’t happy about the silence that followed. I’d expected an immediate and hearty, “No way.”
“Bruce? Is there something I should know?”
“Maybe you should talk to Virge.”
My heart sank. “Can you set it up?”
“Matter of fact, he’s on the way.”
“What a guy. You knew I’d want to talk to him.”
“Just go easy on him, okay?”
“Of course.”
Whatever that meant.
While it was very handy to have a personal “in” with a cop, I tried not to abuse the privilege.
Only one other time had I needed to call on Virgil about a police matter, shortly after he’d left the Boston PD to sign on in Henley. One of my students had been caught with a small stash of drugs, but not a small enough one to escape police notice. When Jessie, who’d been clean for more than a year, told me her former associates had set her up, I believed her. I’d enlisted Virgil’s help and he’d come through for her, investigating personally and having the charges dismissed. Jessie was now a successful businesswoman and hadn’t had a substance abuse problem since.
Now Virgil would be investigating my assistant and friend for the murder of a colleague. I hoped there would be a similar happy ending—justice for Keith Appleton, and exoneration for Rachel Wheeler.
When I thought of poor Keith, I wondered what his last moments were like, whether he knew he’d been poisoned and even suspected or knew who his killer was. Or maybe he simply felt sick or thought he was having a heart attack.
It struck me that the police had determined the cause of Keith’s death rather quickly. Didn’t it take many complicated tests to determine that someone died of poison? I’d read that unless you knew exactly what you were looking for, the famous “tox screens” of crime dramas revealed very little right away. Had I misunderstood Rachel? Time would tell.
Poor Keith. Poor Keith. I couldn’t erase that refrain from my mind. I knew very little about how a person’s body reacted to poisons and I had many questions. Without answers, my imagination took over. I tried to shake away all the horrible images that flooded my mind.
Not many murders had been committed in Henley—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard or read of one—and certainly there were none in the history of the college. I was sure this case was taxing the resources of the small police department. I knew Virgil had more to do tonight than visit his good buddy’s fretting girlfriend. But I believed in Rachel as much as I’d believed in Jessie, and I knew I had to do my best for her.
While I waited for Virgil, I paced the rooms of my house—leaving the bright kitchen; walking int
o and around my dark-toned, comfortable den; stepping out the door to the hallway, lined with photos; weaving first into my modern home office; then into my spacious lavender-colored and lavender-smelling bedroom; and then into the whiter-than-white guest bedroom; rambling back down the hallway to the kitchen.
Along the route, I managed to take calming respites for puzzle solving. I always had a crossword, a jigsaw puzzle, several cubes, and metal and wood puzzles and games laid out strategically in different rooms of my house. I was never far from a mindbender of one kind or another, some bought, some made by me. I encouraged my guests to participate. Bruce, my most frequent guest, hardly ever did, citing his need to reduce stress when he was off the job. He tried in vain to get through to me that solving puzzles wasn’t everyone’s idea of relaxation.
When the phone rang, I was in my bedroom, leaning on my dresser to work a complex eye twister in a book I’d purchased, trying to determine which figures had been made with one continuous line and which had been constructed of two or more lines.
I checked the screen on the landline next to my bed and saw a Mansfield number. I picked up the headset and greeted Fran Emerson, my department chair.
Why hadn’t I thought to call her? Or anyone? It seemed I’d gone into a completely passive state, puttering around my house.
“Can you believe it, Sophie?” she asked. Her voice was muffled against a background of unintelligible sounds. I guessed I was hearing Fran’s grandchildren, visiting for the summer from out of state. “I feel so bad now, the way we were talking about him this afternoon.”
I knew what she meant. “You didn’t say anything mean, Fran,” I offered. Unlike me, who had wished the man off the campus.
I carried the phone to the den and sank into the corner of my couch. On the low antique coffee table in front of me was a beautiful cherry wood frame, four inches square, containing eight L-shaped wooden pieces and one rectangular piece in a different shade of wood. Bruce had given it to me a few weeks ago and it remained unsolved. The idea was to fit all the pieces in the frame, with no space left over. The L-shaped pieces interlocked nicely in the area, leaving only small triangles of space to fit the lone rectangle.