Murder is Academic

by Lesley A. Diehl

  “Help, help! I can’t swim.”

  “You’re on dry land, you idiot. Let go.” I tried to jerk my leg out of his hold. Desperate to grab anything to help pull myself out of Donald’s grip, my hand closed around a tree limb lying on the shore. I picked it up and turned on Donald. I swung the branch toward his head, missed and hit his shoulder. He let go of my leg, but continued to struggle toward me. I turned and hit him again, this time connecting with the back of his head. He lay still on the shore.

  “Did you kill him?” Annie leaned over Donald’s unconscious figure.

  “I doubt it.” My voice was filled with disgust and only a little regret.

  Annie and I were both shaking from the cold water. I was shaking harder, probably with the rage I still felt at Donald Hall. As soon as the adrenalin rush was over, I knew I’d have to deal with my feelings of a moment ago, the impulse to kill another human being, something I’d never experienced before.

  “You could have killed us!” Annie said to me.

  “What do you think he was going to do? Take us on a vacation to Montreal?”

  “But my car.”

  “Let’s go. We need a phone.”

  “There’s my cell phone in the car.” Annie looked at the spot where the car went in.

  “Good, you go get it. I’ll wait here.”

  Annie shook her head and continued to stare at the lake’s surface. “Funny. You know, you could have warned me.”

  “I did warn you and you let me know you caught on, too.”

  “What did I do?”

  “You winked at me.”

  “I had dirt in my eye.”

  “I thought you got the message I was going to run the car into the lake and Donald couldn’t swim. I mean, we executed the whole thing so smoothly. I rolled down the window, and we swam out.”

  “You did. I was so scared, I was holding my breath. I had no idea what to do after that. Good thing you grabbed my hand.” Her lips were quavering.

  Good God. I did almost kill my friend. By this time, several of the crew from the bridge construction project, having seen the car go in the lake, came running over to help us out.

  “Anyone got a phone I can borrow?” I asked.

  One of the men handed me his cell phone. I called Der.

  “Where are you? I just pulled into your drive. There’s a box of chocolate donuts on the floor and fresh coffee in the pot, but no you.”

  I explained the events of the last several hours and told him where we were. “I don’t want to have to drown him or hit him again, so you’d better hurry.”

  Der arrived on the scene in several minutes. He must have exceeded the speed limit.

  Annie, Der and I walked to where I left Donald. He still wasn’t moving.

  “Did you kill him?” Der asked.

  “No, I did not. I just hit him. Real hard. And I’d do it again. Okay?” My voice shook with anger, my defense against tears.

  “Okay, okay. Just asking. It would have been understandable if you did kill him, with what you’ve been through and all.”

  “It would not have been okay, but I sure felt like it.” I whispered these words, not eager for anyone to hear me.

  “What?” Der asked.

  I just shook my head and turned away from Donald’s prone form. Annie continued to gaze at the lake’s surface.

  “It’s not coming back up on its own.” I put my arm around her shoulders and squeezed.

  Donald began to stir, and Der slapped handcuffs on him after searching him thoroughly. It appeared the night in the lake followed by this morning’s plunge and his encounter with the tree limb left old Donald somewhat weakened. He appeared to be dazed and unsteady on his feet.

  “Hey, Laura,” Der said. “I’m calling an ambulance for Donald here. I think you and Annie could use some medical attention too. What do you say?”

  “No thanks. We were offered a ride back to my house by one of the guys on the construction crew, and I think we’ll take him up on it. C’mon, Annie, I’ll buy you a donut.”

  “It’s the least you can do.” Annie squinted up at me.

  “You seem to have lost your glasses in the lake.”

  “So that means you owe me a car and new glasses.”

  “Don’t forget the donut.”

  “I brought them.”

  “I know, but they’re on my floor.”

  Chapter 28

  Guy left the hospital the day after I drove Annie’s car into the lake. I had a wrecker pull it out. Repairs on it were uncertain, as was the possibility of removing the smell of lake water from the upholstery. Regardless, I was committed to getting the car back into shape with or without the help of the insurance company. They were skeptical of the circumstances leading up to its positioning at the bottom of the lake although Annie and I both swore it was an accident brought on by the stress of having a murderer threaten our lives.

  Although the summer was quickly winding to an end, I had little time to think what that meant for Guy and me because I was caught up in preparations for my son’s upcoming wedding. I hoped the autumn winds and cold rains would hold off until late September so the wedding could take full advantage of the fall foliage.

  A few fallen leaves skittered ahead of us on the roadways as Guy and I took late afternoon rides. Although the weather was still unseasonably warm, the nights were growing colder so that we had to bundle up on our way back from our jaunts. Usually when we returned home, Guy built a fire in the wood burning stove in the living room, and we spent long hours gazing through the glass front into the blazing logs beyond.

  We talked almost nonstop about Donald Hall and about the final hours before his capture and Annie’s and my role in apprehending him. I knew in my rational mind he was behind bars, but sometimes when I awoke in the night, I thought I could smell wet earth and fishy lake water in my room and see his shadowy form in my doorway. Only by rolling over and touching Guy could I chase the phantom of Donald from my mind.

  I was aware Guy would leave sometime the end of August. The bridge construction was almost finished, and he would return to his position in Canada as a high school biology teacher. He was anxious to see his children again. Despite my understanding about his eagerness to be with them on a more regular basis, I was concerned what would happen to us. To avoid ruminating too extensively about our relationship, I turned to the wedding preparations to occupy my mind.

  Separation seemed to be the theme of the month. Annie was cementing her relationship with Ron before she left on her sabbatical to Sicily. I was trying hard to ignore both Guy’s and Annie’s departures. One morning Der stopped by for his coffee and pastries and announced that Alicia was taking a position elsewhere and would not be returning to the college in September.

  “Where’s she going?” I asked.

  “She’s been offered a position as an executive director with the NAACP in Atlanta. It’s not teaching, but Atlanta is her hometown, and she has family there. I certainly can’t fault her for leaving, but it reduces the number of minorities in this community to all of ten or eleven. I definitely feel the isolation. If a promotion came through for me, I’d be off to Albany where there’s at least some semblance of an African-American community.”

  I looked at Der in surprise. Sometimes I forgot about his Haitian roots, but apparently others did not and found his ancestry too unique not to mistrust him. His connections with his heritage were strong, and I could see that his friendship with me was hardly enough to hold him here for long. It was yet another loss I would have to face sometime in the future.

  Any more contemplation of saying good bye to those who mattered would put me into a real funk. I decided I needed to make the best of the end-of-summer blues with a barbeque for all of us. With enough good food, wine and great friends, we’d end the summer with a bang and look forward to the coming semester. The list of guests included Der, Annie, Beth, Alicia, Guy, and Ron. I would host. Beth called and asked if she could bring one of her fellow doctora
l students from the university.

  The night of the barbeque was perfect—no wind, no rain, and higher temperatures than we had had at night for several days. Regardless of the mild weather, I decided we should spend after dinnertime in the living room in front of the stove.

  Guy laid the fire, but suggested we play it by ear. “With the evening this warm, we may just want to go down to the dock and sit by the water.”

  Beth introduced her friend, Natalie, to everyone and we gathered on the back deck.

  “You know,” Natalie said, accepting a glass of wine from Guy, “Beth hasn’t told me all the details of the Donald Hall thing. She said you could tell it better, Laura. And that Der would help fill in the legal stuff.”

  “It’s really a fine bit of sleuthing on Laura’s part with the help of her sidekick here, Annie. The two of you did great work with the exception of the thing with Bunny Talbot. Using a poor paperboy to run your errands.” Der clucked his tongue in dismay. “Laura thought there was something fishy about Stanford’s suicide note. What gave it away, finally?”

  I turned to Guy and said again, for my audience’s benefit, “What word did I ask you to spell for me once I knew Donald’s real name was Henri LeBeau?”

  “You asked me to spell ‘behavior’.” He smiled, knowing what I wanted. “B-E-H-A-V-I-O-U-R.”

  “But that’s not the way to spell it,” Alicia said. “That’s the English or French spelling, not American.”

  “That’s the point, though. That was the way it was spelled in the suicide note Stanford supposedly wrote. But Will was American. He would never spell behavior that way,” I said.

  “But I did because I’m French-Canadian and Henri LeBeau alias Donald Hall would spell it the way I did because he was from Montreal. So, voila. The note was written by someone other than Will Stanford. And the likely culprit was Donald Hall once we knew he and LeBeau were one in the same.”

  “And LeBeau was the hydrolic engineer who designed and signed off on the waste water treatment system for the condominiums. Of course, when the condominium developers including Talbot decided to build twice as many condominiums as originally planned, they decided to simply go with the size of the original system and paid LeBeau to certify it would handle the added volume of waste water, knowing that the water would be inadequately treated. But the smaller system would save them money, and Talbot knew he could buy Will Stanford with position and favors for the field station.” I took a quick sip of my drink.

  “You know what’s interesting?” Beth said. “Will kept records on what the water samples really tested, and there were some interesting things going on with the lake water. Of course, he never spent any time looking at those results, but they give us a rather complete picture of what was happening to the lake over a period of about a decade or so. It will make an interesting study in and of itself.”

  “Where did you find those records?” I was surprised to hear the real readings were available.

  “He e-mailed them to me every day at Syracuse, then erased his e-mail messages from his computer. My e-mail is automatically saved to my hard drive. I only took a look at those e-mail records after we knew Donald had killed him.” Beth paused and looked across the lake for a moment.

  Natalie touched her shoulder.

  “No, it’s Okay.” Beth smiled and continued speaking. “Clearly Will was not without weaknesses. I’m just glad to know he recorded the real results of the water testing as well as phonying the results. It doesn’t redeem him in my eyes or probably anyone’s, but at least something beneficial may come of looking at the actual data.”

  “If Talbot hadn’t kept the original report from LeBeau reporting the condominium count at half that actually built, we wouldn’t have been alerted to the discrepancy in the count and the phony water sample reports.” For Beth’s sake, I wanted to move our discussion away from Will’s role in the situation. “For once Talbot’s suspicious and malicious nature gave us the lead we needed to finally put this all together.”

  “That’s been bothering me for a while,” Annie said. “Why did Talbot save the original report? It incriminated him.”

  “Ah, yes, that’s true,” I said to Annie, “but in true Talbot character, I believe he knew it also incriminated LeBeau. He saved it in hopes that it would serve as an insurance policy protecting him from LeBeau if LeBeau tried anything funny.”

  “He tolerated the blackmail,” Der said. “probably because he couldn’t decide what else to do at the time. If LeBeau had upped the amount he wanted, Talbot would have found a way to use those papers against Henri, or Donald, as we knew him.”

  “Say, I heard that Bunny Talbot moved out of town in a hurry. Does anybody know where she’s gone?” Annie asked.

  No one knew a thing about Bunny.

  We spoke of Annie’s sabbatical, Alicia’s relocation and Guy’s return to Canada. Although the conversation was pleasant and interesting, it seemed to sadden all of us that many members of our group would be leaving. We wandered down to the dock and stared into the water until the moon’s rising could be seen reflected on the lake surface. Soon everyone began to depart in couples—Annie and Ron to her house to finish her packing as her plane left in two days, Beth and Natalie for Syracuse to complete a summer project on which they both were working, and Der and Alicia, probably to his apartment where they surely would be interrupted by a call from his office.

  Guy and I walked arm and arm back to the house after seeing everyone off from the driveway. The screen door to the kitchen was still off its hinges from the storm, but neither Guy nor I seemed eager to spend any of our time working on it. Guy had removed the limb from the roof and replaced the shattered sky light.

  “I forgot to tell you. I bought you a present. It’s upstairs in the bedroom. Let me just run up and get it.” Guy seemed as eager as a kid giving his first girlfriend a friendship ring.

  I had no idea what to expect as Guy and I never exchanged any kind of gifts. He carefully descended the stairs with a large box resplendent with a large red ribbon on its top. The ribbon seemed to be shaking with a life of its own and suddenly popped off the top of the box. A small fuzzy blonde head pushed its way through the box flaps and looked at me with black eyes.

  “It’s a dog.” Guy was obviously pleased with himself for keeping the gift a secret this long. I could tell he had given no thought to whether or not I would welcome a pet into my life.

  “I can see that.”

  “Don’t you like animals?” Disappointment began to show on his face.

  “Of course I like animals. I love them. I adore them. It’s just that I haven’t had a pet for a long time. And usually when I have one pet, I end up with several. They seem to gravitate to me. This means that by the next time I see you, this house will be filled with several dogs and litters of cats.”

  I reached out for the puppy who greeted me by licking my hand. I pulled the pup close and a little wet tongue tickled my nose and began to tentatively explore the rest of my face by nuzzling my ears and nudging its face into my hair.

  “Boy or girl?” I turned the little wiggling body upside down. “Oh, a little girl. Named yet?”

  “I thought you could name her. You do like her, don’t you?” Guy still looked a bit worried his impetuous gift was not what I expected and was not well received.

  “Of course I do. I just never expected a dog in a million years.”

  “I thought she could be a watch dog of sorts and kind of protect you while I’m not here. I mean, when she gets bigger, of course. We can take her to obedience classes and train her to voice commands.”

  “Hey, wait a minute. What’s this ‘we’ stuff. I thought she was my dog.” I tucked her closer under my chin.

  “Well, of course. It’s just that I thought I might share in all of this cuz I’ll be here some of the time, and some of the time you’ll be visiting me in up north. I thought she would be a good traveling companion for you when you drove up to see me. You could even take her
to the college with you.” Guy’s eyebrows pulled together with concern.

  “Guy, I love her, and I love that you thought to give her to me, but I’m okay. I don’t need protection. I’d like her to be my companion. I don’t want to make her into a guard dog. I think it’s a good idea we take her for obedience training and all, but if she’s going to live with me, then she’s going to be a pet. Okay?”

  “Good. So long as you like her. I fell in love with her. She’s a bundle of fuzz, isn’t she?” Guy reached out and patted her downy head.

  “Here.” I shoved her into Guy’s arms and ran for the bathroom.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s just so sweet.” I was sobbing and blowing my nose on the wad of tissue I grabbed in the bathroom.

  “I can’t believe it. You’re crying. I’ve only seen you cry once. I’ve seen you mad, even furious, scared, passionate, but never did I expect to see you cry over a little dog.”

  “Give me my dog.” I grabbed her and wept into her fur.

  “Geez, I think you’re scaring the little gal, and you’re getting her fur all wet. Time to go to bed. I think the excitement of the past several weeks finally got to you. Along with all the wine tonight.”

  “Noooo, it’s not that at all. It’s your giving me such a wonderful gift. I think she’s about the best thing that’s happened to me lately.”

  “And what about me?” Guy patted me on the rear as he maneuvered me up the stairs and into the bedroom. “I’m the one who thought of the puppy as a gift. Don’t I get some credit here, huh? How about some attention for me.”

  Guy took the puppy gently out of my arms and placed her into the cage that he had somehow smuggled up my stairs and into my bedroom without my knowledge.

  “Oh, yeah, you. You are pretty thoughtful, I guess. But I really like the dog.” I pretended to turn my attention back to her, but Guy began an exploration of my neck with his lips that far surpassed the nuzzling the dog gave me earlier. I mean, this didn’t tickle quite the same way. She watched us intently as we began to shed our clothes, and a sharp little bark greeted our dive under the blankets.