by Ada Madison
This was news. “Rachel and Hal?”
“You know, whether they were an item.”
Not only news, but shocking news. “I can’t believe you never told me this.”
“Thought you knew.”
“Hal was Rachel’s freshman adviser and they’ve always been close. Well, not close close. You mean there was talk?”
“Just talk. I’m sorry I brought it up. I figured you knew but didn’t want the talk to grow. I was impressed at your integrity, but now I see you didn’t know.”
Bruce laughed; I didn’t.
“Where did you hear this talk?”
Bruce’s long breath told me he was sorry he mentioned it. Too bad. Too late. “Gil brought it up once or twice, but not lately I don’t think. Ernie told me she asked him for advice about it once. Ernie’s the nurse that’s on shift with her a lot. She asked him, should she confront her husband, that kind of thing. Then I think Sim got wind of it, too, and had a couple of talks with her.”
Who would have thought? The MAstar trailer was gossip central, as bad as the Clara Barton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Paul Revere dorms.
“What other Henley gossip are you keeping from me?”
“Not a thing. What’s new with you?” he asked, sounding eager to move on.
“I’m just leaving campus.”
“I’d have thought the campus was still a crime scene.”
“Nah.”
“Where are you headed?”
“I’m going home, then I have a meeting with Virgil’s partner.”
“Archie? Watch out for him. He’s single and, you might say, hot. What’s he want with you?”
“We’re going to compare notes,” I said, checking my rearview mirror for a state trooper on lie patrol.
“You’re not getting into any trouble, are you?
“Pfft. Why would you think that?”
“Let’s see. No reason. Except”—I heard a snap of his fingers—“oh, yeah, there was the time you put together a petition to get rid of the Chairman of the Board of Trustees—”
“He was breaking labor laws by posting jobs he’d already wired for his friends.”
“I love how naïve you are about how things are done in the real world.”
“Well, if that’s reality, I’ll take . . . math.”
Bruce laughed but he wasn’t finished with me. “And then there was the week you went to Washington to track down the fraud issue, and the proposals you submit every month to get credit for interns in spite of all the precedents against it, and—”
“I get it. But this time is different,” I said, turning a corner. “I’m not sticking my neck out.”
The sound of heavy cartons thunking around in my trunk flooded my ears.
I’d decided not to leave my car with its special load parked in town, even though it would be in or near the police station lot. Actually, that was not a plus—I didn’t want my special load anywhere near the police.
Thoughts of Rachel and Hal together swirled around my head. How could I have missed that? If there was anything to miss. One thing I was sure of, I’d now be focusing on how Rachel and Hal acted when I was in the same room with them.
I pulled into my driveway and hit the garage door opener. Attaching a garage had been one of the best home improvement ideas my mother and I had come up with. We appreciated it in all seasons. Today it served as a dumping ground for my boxes. I pushed aside shopping bags of clothing destined for a charity drive and unloaded the cartons onto a long workbench that the construction foreman had told me would come in handy whether or not I was a tinkerer. He’d been right.
I ran into my house and changed into a clean shirt, wanting no dust mites from a former crime scene falling off my torso in the middle of a police interview. I hadn’t eaten since my candlelight breakfast with Bruce, so I spent ninety seconds putting together a peanut butter and rhubarb jam sandwich on whole wheat. I shoved the edge of the uncut sandwich between my teeth in a most lady-like manner, and ran out again to meet Archie.
Back in my car, I pressed the button on my opener and watched my garage door descend, locking in the boxes, inch by inch.
CHAPTER 10
The miserably hot day that began with my interview with Rachel in a trailer was to continue with one in Henley’s rundown old police building, in a part of town I seldom visited. My local travel was restricted to campus, MAstar now and then, and Ariana’s shop.
The town budget hadn’t allowed for an upgrade to the Henley PD parking lot, which was now full. Did all these vehicles belong to suspects in Keith’s murder? I didn’t recognize any of them as belonging to Franklin Hall faculty. Perhaps the criminal element I knew so little about was experiencing a surge in activity that caused an overflow in and around police headquarters.
I looked for easy street parking and found a spot mercifully under a tree three long blocks away, making me even happier that I’d left the valuable cartons at home.
The police station stood alone in a large area once occupied by a host of city buildings, including the library, performing arts auditorium, city hall, and the courthouse. One by one, the various components of civic life moved to a new building in a government center close to downtown. Chain-link fences marked off vacant lots that were their former turf. The police station was the last building standing.
By the time I walked the three sparsely shaded blocks, my clean shirt might as well have been dipped in water and wrung out. I entered through swinging doors that lead to a shabby lobby, not at all like the cool, cavernous entryway to the new library, for example, or the inviting dome of the snazzy new city hall/courthouse combo.
Three narrow hallways radiated from the central desk that was staffed by a civilian volunteer, a thirtysomething woman whom, surprisingly, I recognized from a math anxiety class I’d given at an adult ed school. I made a note to mention this to Ariana, who thought I didn’t know anyone in town.
I’d called the class “Getting Past Ten.” I couldn’t remember the volunteer’s name, but I did remember that she’d been one of the quickest to catch on to arithmetic tricks I’d proposed. She’d taken the class to prepare for an administration of justice exam. I hoped it worked and that she had a more permanent job than the volunteer desk.
Terri Gable, I now saw from her name tag, brightened at my approach. A nice change. “Dr. Knowles. I’ve been meaning to email you. Those little tricks of yours have come in sooooo handy.” Terri had turned so into a short tune, about eight bars long.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Like multiplying by eleven in your head. Sooooo cool. Not that I have to do it that often, it just makes me more comfortable with numbers.”
“That’s music to my ears,” I told her, sincerely. I didn’t mention that my weekend was sorely in need of music.
“You’re here to see Archie?”
My “yes” was weak. I would have preferred to stand there and do arithmetic for the rest of the afternoon with the chubby, curly-haired woman.
“I’ll walk you down.”
Terri waddled slightly in front of me, past several bustling offices. It seemed there was a lot of paperwork to law enforcement. Old model fax machines rolled out documents and keyboards clacked.
“Busy place,” I said, to fill in a hole in our conversation. My other option would have been to mention a new mathcast I’d seen on squaring two-digit numbers, but I didn’t want to overdo the math connection.
Terri apologized in advance for the room I’d be waiting in. “It’s really warm in there,” she said. “I don’t know why Archie told me to put you in Interview Two, when there are better ones available with more comfortable chairs and a working A/C and all.”
I had some idea why.
Terri dropped me off in a dismal, stifling room with stagnant air. The furniture in Interview Two was worse than that in MAstar’s trailers, by a factor of ten. I figured they were castoffs from the government departments that had left this part of town for the right side
of the tracks.
Of the two gray metal chairs in the room, I chose the one with the least number of rips in its faux-cushioned seat. There was no clock in the room and since I tended not to wear a watch in the summer, the better to avoid a rash, I had no idea how many minutes ticked by. I alternated between letting my head hang freely from my neck onto my chest, to sitting up straight and stretching my neck backward. I paced for a while, but the room was so small the laps made me dizzy. No position was comfortable, but shifting my body around gave my muscles momentary relief.
I tried to use the time to organize my thoughts, but there was no controlling them in this hostile environment. Images of my three students, Pam, Liz, and Casey, wearing evil masks crowded my mind and alternated with videos of Keith Appleton falling off his chair repeatedly, clutching his throat and taking his last breath each time. In the mental video, Hal and Rachel were off in a corner while Gil searched for them, a hatchet in her hand. Who said mathematicians weren’t creative?
I wished with all my heart that Pam had let her two friends—followers, I now saw—finish their sentences. Besides that, something else nagged at me. Something one of them said at the party? On the phone the night of Keith’s murder? Probably something from the statistics seminar, like Casey’s mixing up means and medians.
I shook my head to clear it. Bad move. A new headache set in.
I wondered how long Archie would leave me to sweat, literally.
The answer came when the door opened and Archie appeared. The large clock on the hallway wall behind him read five after four. I’d been ten minutes early, therefore, I’d been captive for seventy-five sweltering, mind-numbing minutes.
“Sorry,” Archie said as he entered Interview Two looking cool and crisp, and hardly sorry. He’d probably spent the time with a cold pack around his neck.
In spite of his name—which called to mind a bumbling, wrinkled old caricature of a detective—Archie looked like Hollywood’s idea of the insightful young cop who one-ups his dumpy-looking colleagues and his boss and takes down the serial killer. His well-groomed, sharp look, the opposite of Virgil’s, unnerved me.
“Can I get you some coffee?” he asked.
A hot drink. Just what I needed. I almost laughed.
I shook my head. “No, thanks.”
“A soda?”
Another shake. “I’m good.”
I kept my hands on my lap, careful not to touch anything. I pictured what Archie would do after I left, pulling out a handkerchief, picking up a soda can, and shipping it off for DNA analysis. Of course my fingerprints and DNA would be all over Keith’s office anyway, but with legitimate reasons as well as the one bad one. Still, one couldn’t be too careful.
Archie took the seat opposite me. Although he loosened his tie, he managed to sustain the in-charge male model look.
“So, Dr. Knowles.”
“Sophie,” I said, eager to put this experience on an informal, less stressful level.
“Sophie, then.” If this was Archie, yielding, I’d hate to see his rigid side. “How well did you know Dr. Appleton?”
An easy one. I cleared my throat. “He was a colleague. We saw each other several times a week in Franklin Hall, plus there were faculty meetings, committees, the usual.”
“Would you say you two were close?”
“No, not close,” I answered, putting a spin on close, marking it as truly the wrong word.
“Would you say you were competitors, then?”
“No, not at all.”
“Not even a little?”
“No,” I insisted.
“I have in my notes that Dr. Appleton just won an award of some kind. Were you up for that award also?”
“You mean the Mass Association of Chemists naming him a Fellow? No, I don’t belong to that group. It’s not my field.”
“What about Henley College awards? For good teaching, publishing, that kind of thing?”
“We’ve both had our share. We weren’t competing for them.”
He scratched his head. “No offense, but it’s kind of hard to believe.”
“We’re in completely different fields. Differential equations”—I pointed to my chest—“and protein purification.” I cast my hand away from my body to indicate where Keith might be, were he still alive. I tried not to sound exasperated.
Archie appeared to be writing this explanation in his notebook, but I couldn’t see the details. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he were writing, “Beer, Chips, Beef Jerky.” I was tempted to spell “protein purification” for him.
“One more time: You were on the same faculty. You were up for the same promotions, true?”
“That’s not how it works. We don’t have a pecking order like that.” Not exactly, that is. I wasn’t keen on reciting the bylaws’ definitions for the various faculty rankings on a college campus, from adjuncts who taught one or two classes only, to instructors who were full-time but without significant credentials or seniority, all the way to full professors.
Archie flipped through pages of his notebook, back from where he started with me. “Weren’t you both in the running for full professor, coming up this fall?”
“Well, sort of, but there’s no law that says we can’t both be appointed. As I said, we submit articles to different journals; we both have plenty of students signing up for our classes.” I held my hands palms up, then quickly folded them on my lap again. There was no point in waving my DNA around in front of this man.
Neither did I want to share with this canny, knowledgeable detective that I’d set myself the goal of attaining full professorship for this year. I was on the young side of the demographic for the title, but I hoped my work supported it. Archie didn’t need to know that Keith had two years in age on me and one in seniority.
I looked around the bare room, catching my reflection in a window on the side wall. Haggard would have been a good descriptor. Sagging eyelids, hair frizzed beyond belief, disheveled shirt. I wanted to leave and head for the nearest shower.
Where was Virgil? Where was Bruce, best friend to Virgil? Why was I stuck with this know-it-all young partner who was interrogating, not interviewing? I’d been expecting to answer questions about Rachel, or Pam, or Liz, or Casey, or Fran, or Lucy, or Hal. Even Dean Underwood. I thought I’d been sent here to help. Now I had to face the reality that Virgil had not been joking when he’d implied I was in the pool of murder suspects.
I was getting hotter and hotter and hoped I wouldn’t pass out. I felt sure only guilty people passed out in situations like this.
Archie finished his flipping for the moment.
“Yeah, back to the promotions to full professor. There are perks with this, huh?”
“A small raise usually. We already have tenure. Mostly it’s the status, I guess.” I stopped. I should be answering with the smallest possible number of words. I’d read that somewhere. Or seen it on television.
“Usually you expect these announcements early in the fall term?”
Why was he harping on this? What made him think he knew anything about college faculty operations in the first place?
“That’s right.” Archie waited me out, and I added, “With four slots open in math and science, we were both very likely to get the promotion.”
“When was the last time you saw Dr. Appleton?”
From left field, but not a problem. I thought back.
“Outside the dean’s office on Thursday, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“It was on Thursday.”
“Was there a reason you were there, outside the dean’s office?”
Uh-oh. “She’d sent for me.”
“Because?”
I let out a heavy sigh. “Nothing that important. She wanted to talk to me about noisy parties . . . that is . . . seminars in our building.”
“Had she received a complaint?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Did she say who’d made the complaint?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Did you have any guesses?”
“No.” I’d crossed my fingers by now.
“And you saw Dr. Appleton where?”
I gritted my teeth. “Coming out of the dean’s office.” “But you didn’t assume he was the one who’d made the complaint about your noisy parties?”
“They weren’t . . .” I paused and took a breath. “No.”
“Because?”
“Well, she’d already sent for me long before he would have been in her office.”
A victory, but a small, short one.
“You’re close to your assistant, Ms. Wheeler?” Archie asked, a knowing look in his eyes.
“It’s not like we go to movies together or anything, but yes, I consider her a friend.”
“And yesterday, can you tell me what your interaction with Ms. Wheeler was?”
“I had a class in the morning that she had set up, and then she came at the end to take it down, before the party.”
Archie checked his notes. “That would be the party for Dr. Bartholomew. And that was an actual party, not a seminar.”
Smart aleck cop. “Yes.”
“I’m curious. What’s involved in setting up for a math class? Don’t you usually just use a blackboard?”
I heard the hint of a jocular air, but no way was I letting down my guard. By now my lips were like chalk, dry enough to make a scratching sound on that blackboard he brought up.
“I’m in charge of a program to make students more comfortable with everyday math, giving them problemsolving skills especially. It’s a hands-on way of teaching math. We use a lot of manipulatives.”
“You mean blocks and balls, that kind of thing?”
I smiled and tried to strike a tone between informative and condescending. “These days we use videos, online graphing calculators, interactive websites, that kind of thing.”
“It’s not the math I remember.”
“It’s not your father’s math class,” I said, with immediate regret.
He laughed. I sighed with relief.
“Thanks for coming in, Sophie. You can go now.”
“I can?”