A Function of Murder (17 page)

I picked up my sandwich, intending to eat it at my kitchen table, like a normal person
on a normal Sunday. However, at the sight of my robes, draped over a chair, the notes
of the trumpet voluntary came flooding in and I lost my appetite.

I supposed I should have thanked Elysse for providing at least one hour when I hadn’t
been thinking of our murdered mayor and trying to figure out why he’d pulled me into
the last hours of his life.

My little cottage housed a lot of options for further distraction. Puzzles waited
on every table, large and small. Some I’d made up myself; some were from other creators.
My beading hobby, which Ariana oversaw, was also evident in the form of an unfinished
bracelet for Bruce’s niece, Melanie, and several fringed bookmarks. I knew I’d have
to have something to show Ariana when I picked her up at the airport. She herself
would never go a week without beading and wouldn’t be able to understand if I had.

But I wasn’t in a beads-and-wire mood.

I settled down instead at a website that had a long list of math games for kids. I
could use some new ideas for my visit to Zeeman Academy tomorrow.

I could also use a few answers from Zeeman Academy.

I didn’t remember having as many fun ways of doing math when I was a kid. I didn’t
recall if we even used colored chalk. We certainly didn’t have a program for doing
fractions with interactive pie charts. It was a wonder I went into math, with all
the boring drills I’d had to recite.

I’d recently found and bookmarked a web-based game for learning to multiply. The game
involved a Jeopardy-like board, where the student chose an amount to “bet” and then
had to perform an arithmetic or algebraic operation,
like finding greatest common factors or least common denominators. The idea was to
beat a countdown clock, in which case a happy tune played and computer voices sang
out congratulations. Talk about instant gratification and positive reinforcement.
All that was missing was a bowl of ice cream at the end.

I got hooked on a game that required dragging and dropping a ball into several slots,
each of which applied a coating or decoration to the ball, until the ball had the
requisite number of extras to ring a bell. I couldn’t figure what math skill was used
or being taught, but it was fun to hear the different bell tones.

A more instructive app reeled me in quickly—a mystery being investigated by a pair
of ten-year-old twin detectives, Kate and Kyle, who had to determine which of three
bags had fake coins. I got so involved that I nearly missed the soft ring of my phone.

“Hey, Bruce,” I said.

“You must be doing math,” he said.

“Lucky guess?”

“Not really. You sound a lot cheerier than I’ve heard you since…well, in a while.
Nice to hear.”

“Sorry if I’ve been a pain.”

“Not so much that I won’t be there in a couple of hours, with dinner.”

Now I was really cheery.

Knowing Bruce would be arriving soon grounded me. That he was bringing dinner gave
me hope that the weekend could be salvaged. I imagined I smelled basil and interpreted
it as a paranormal message from Bruce that he was bringing Italian. I guessed I missed
Ariana more than I’d expected to.

It took only a moment to realize how selfish my thoughts had been. Neither the weekend
nor the rest of their lives
could be salvaged for Mayor Graves’s family. A wife had lost her husband; a teenager
would grow up without his father; and perhaps the nation had missed out on a worthy
statesman.

My father had died of cancer the winter before my third birthday, and, though Margaret
did her best to keep him alive for me through stories and photographs, I was always
aware of the loss. As a teenager I’d been frustrated, not knowing whether I remembered
his purported beautiful piano playing, or whether it was simply Margaret’s mesmerizing
descriptions that I recalled. Now it hardly mattered. I found myself wishing I could
have told him I loved him. I was grateful Margaret had been around for me to tell
her that often.

Cody Graves was old enough to be able to distinguish between reality and fiction,
but I knew that living with the loss might be even harder for one who had grown to
know his father.

I hoped Nora’s and Cody’s last words to Mayor Graves were what they would have wanted.

I had every confidence in Virgil Mitchell and his colleagues at the Henley PD, but
I also had a strong urge to try to help them solve the murder case. I couldn’t say
why, exactly. It wasn’t as though I inserted myself into every homicide case in the
city. Nor into every Bat Phone call Bruce and his crew received. They had their jobs
and I had mine.

If I had to put words to the feeling, I’d say it had to do with the connection that
Mayor Graves had tried to establish with me at the end of his life, from his telephone
message to my cell, to his nonverbal reaching out to me on the rickety commencement
stage, to his seeking entry into my office, and finally, his dying attempt to tell
me something as he staggered toward the fountain.

With what I judged to be uncharacteristic tunnel vision, I’d glommed on to Zeeman
Academy as holding the key to
the mayor’s murder. Admittedly, my feelings were partly due to my refusal to believe
that anyone associated with the Henley campus could have been involved in the crime.
I conveniently brushed aside the nagging worry about a possible intimate relationship
between Kira and the deceased. I also dismissed the hostility between the mayor and
the Sizemore sibs. They were, after all, Henley faculty.

The controversy I’d been witnessing revolved around the charter schools, Zeeman in
particular. I ticked off the incidents: the way the mayor had been hanging around
the Zeeman offices looking at documentation of one kind or another, and his argument
with Superintendent Collins at the pre-graduation reception. Never mind that your
average mayor and your average superintendent might just as easily be two guys arguing
about the basketball play-offs. But Zeeman came up again in the anger toward the mayor
that Nichole Johnson and her family had expressed at the Franklin Hall ceremony and
at the Inn at Henley dinner.

And, looming larger than life, Mayor Graves had mentioned it to me directly—I heard
it again in my mind.
Something’s troubling me about Zeeman.

The police had to deal with all the areas of the mayor’s life. I was sure they were
hard at work unearthing motives that members of Mayor Graves’s family may have had—perhaps
there was a second cousin once removed who owed him money. If the waste management
conflict was any clue, there must have been a host of political enemies and business
associates, and possibly every city of Henley citizen.

I convinced myself I’d be best at tackling the one area I had some expertise in—school
issues. I planned to get to Zeeman Academy well before my class in the morning and
see if I could get some idea of what the problems were. I grabbed another water and
went back to my office.

To get the most out of the time tomorrow, I needed to prepare. I went online and found
the .edu site for the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It shouldn’t be hard to find a clear presentation of
how charter schools were created, funded, and managed. And, I supposed, closed down.

A few basic facts would be a good start.

I clicked on glossary/definitions and immediately learned that a charter is a license.
So far so good. A charter is issued by the board, I read. But which board? There were
two boards referenced in the description, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education
and the Board of Trustees. One paragraph, labeled with a string of numbers, explained
that the Board of Trustees was entrusted to supervise and control the charter schools,
independent of the school committee. On the other hand, a memorandum of understanding
governed the funding of the charter schools by the school district, and on the third
hand, budgets were to be submitted to the superintendent of schools.

What? Neither “school committee” nor “school district,” both of which were listed
in that paragraph, had the benefit of an entry in the list of definitions. Were they
synonyms? Different entities?

Apparently the superintendent, Patrick Collins in the case of Henley, had budgetary
oversight of all schools, charter or not. Was he also in charge of the school committee?
What about the school district? Was that simply a geographic designation, or was it
another governing board? Or committee?

Highest on my list of questions was where the mayor fit into the charter school picture.
Did he have veto power over all the mountains of paperwork such an organization must
generate? Was he a member ex officio of any of the bodies mentioned in the circuitous
narrative that passed as a page of definitions? Did he preside over
all
the bodies?

Impossible to figure out. I was sure it was my fault. Certainly the town’s officers
and various departments knew what they were doing. If not beyond my level of intelligence,
the complexities of politics and city management
were definitely outside my training and skill set. I longed for a page or two of simple
text on the application of second-order differential equations to mechanical vibrations.

I thought back to Kira’s claim that Mayor Graves wanted to save Zeeman Academy, to
keep it a charter school but without a suspect grading system. I needed to know if
he could influence that decision. Could he make or break it unilaterally, for example?

I felt a twinge of gratitude for the simplicity of the Henley College administrative
org chart. Whether we liked or agreed with an official or not, at least we could always
figure out who was in charge of what.

I’d done all I could. I needed Bruce to appear with dinner and rescue me from the
quagmire of .edu.

Rring, rring. Rring, rring.

Not Bruce, but any interruption was welcome.

“Dr. Knowles, it’s Kira. I feel like such a dope.”

“Hi, Kira.” Noncommittal until I learned which aspect of her life Kira had examined
and found wanting.

“I’ve been so selfish and not even thinking of poor Cody Graves, and even Edward’s
wife.”

There was a lot of that going around. “It’s a hard thing to grasp, Kira. You seem
to be feeling better, though.”

“Yeah, I guess. I have a favor to ask you, Dr. Knowles. I would really, really like
to offer condolences to Edward’s family. I read online that they’ll be receiving—that’s
how they put it—on Tuesday. They’re setting something up at the city hall. The family
will be there. Mrs. Graves is on her way back from Rome—”

“Mrs. Graves is where?” I asked, wondering who had been on the stage at Henley if
the mayor’s wife was in Rome.

“She took off for a charity mission in Europe right after graduation, then, of course
she had to turn right around and come back after…”

“How do you know this?”

And why didn’t I know it? Virgil must have known it when I suggested I’d be dropping
in on the mayor’s wife. That’s what he’d meant when he said Nora wasn’t home. An understatement
if I ever heard one.

“It’s on all the news, Dr. Knowles. Don’t you get it on your browser home page?” Kira
sounded disappointed in her professor. “Anyway, the whole public is invited on Tuesday
morning, but I don’t want to go alone.”

And here I was thinking that my friendship with a cop was a better connection than
the average Internet user had available.

“I’m surprised they’re ready for a public memorial so soon,” I said.

“The Facebook notice said something about how Ms. Eddington, the acting mayor, wants
to give the city closure. I’m sure she also wants to introduce herself to the community.”

I was getting a little tired of being a few steps behind on the news, both official
and unofficial. And I wasn’t spending enough time getting Likes on social media. That
phenomenon did originate on a college campus, after all.

Once again, I came close to asking Kira point-blank what, if anything, she and the
mayor had going on, catching her off topic and off guard. But she still seemed too
fragile for such a confrontation. I wished Fran were on the line. She’d find a way
to determine who was seeing whom.