Maid of Murder (15 page)

The article ended with a request that anyone with information about the case contact Mains or the Stripling Justice Center. Theodore had watched me pace as I’d read the article. He yawned enormously, allowing me to view his full range of sparkling white teeth. Templeton, persistent in his war for dominion, was MIA, probably doing undercover work. However, I didn’t have time to worry about their feline domestic dispute. All 20,000-plus Stripling residents and the entire Martin community were hungrily reading the Smythe article. The paper had committed irretrievable damage to Mark’s reputation, to my family’s reputation. Innocent or guilty, public opinion would hang my brother.

Knowing that my parents read the
Dispatch
religiously, I called their home. The answering machine picked up. “You have reached the home of Alden and Rev. Lana Hayes,” my mother’s preacher voice announced. “We are unable to come to the phone right now and encourage you to join us at Martin College in support of our son, Mark, who has been unjustly suspended from employment there. If you have an emergency to share with Rev. Hayes, please contact the church office. Have a blessed day and may the peace of Christ be with you.”

Oh, hell.

I circled campus with the windows down, hoping to locate my parents. Not much of a challenge. At the south end of campus near Dexler, I heard them.

“Hark, Hark, bring back Mark! Hark, Hark, bring back Mark!” A militant’s call that wrote itself, I thought. I still couldn’t see the protest from Dexler’s lot but heard it clearly. The chanting increased in volume and ferocity. “Hark! Hark! Bring back Mark! Hey! Hey! We want Hayes!”

My father’s specially-equipped van dominated the lot. Massive and olive green, a barely readable Save the Amazon sticker decorated its tarnished bumper.

I jogged around the corner of Dexler with escalating dread. Then, I saw them. My mother marched in front of a small band of protestors as they circled the fountain. My father was stationed in front of the marchers, bullhorn in hand, leading the chant. Nicholas sat on his lap, covering his tiny ears with his palms. I didn’t see Carmen or Chip. A small group of students and faculty congregated to the side of the spectacle. The dozen or so marchers carried chalkboard-sized placards that read, Unlawful Suspension!, Innocent Until Proven Guilty!, and my personal favorite, Martin College: Equal Opportunity Executioner! Mom toted that one. I suppose I should be relieved that they hadn’t strung an effigy of Lepcheck from the fountain.

Beyond the small cluster of Martinites, a TV van from Akron Canton News parked on the science quad. The finicky grounds crew would love that. A cameraman zoomed in on the protestors as the petite correspondent recorded a sound bite.

Not yet eleven, the day was already scorching in the low nineties. The marchers’ energy began to wane. Most participants were elderly parishioners from my mother’s church and associates from my parents’ liberal causes.

I proceeded across the brick walkway. Nicholas spotted me before I reached them. He jumped off his grandfather’s lap. Running full tilt, he flung his small frame into my arms.

“Ufh,” I uttered.

“Dia!” Nicholas’s cry was barely decipherable over the commotion.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, stalling the looming confrontation with my parents.

“Mommy and Daddy had to teach today.”

“They did?”

He nodded importantly. “They’re helping people get their graduate equalizer degree.”

“Ahh. GRE is probably easier to say.”

He thought about that and nodded. “I’m helping Gram and Granpa.”

“You are?”

“I’m learning to use my First Amendment right to peaceful protest.”

Dad bellowed through his bullhorn, instructing the protestors to continue their chanting, then wheeled over to Nicholas and me. Zealous and sheepish looks fought for control over his expression. The zealot won.

“Dad,” I said, the weight of my disapproval heavy in the name.

“That horrible article was in the paper this morning, and your mother and I had to do something to support our son.”

I shifted Nicholas off my hip and put him down. He unshouldered his Hugs-not-Guns backpack, a gift from his grandfather, and poured its contents of action figures, markers, papers, and plastic blocks on the brick walk. He squatted on the walk and began constructing an intricate fortress.

“The article upset me too, but you don’t see me marching on Martin. This isn’t just about Mark. I could lose my job.”

“Is it more important to keep your job than support your brother?”

I wiped both my hands down my face.

“Hey! Hey! We want Hayes!” the chanters shouted.

“Why would you want to work for an organization that condemns your brother?” He sounded disgusted.

The late morning sun burned my dark head. I wished I’d worn a hat like all good militants do. “All of Martin isn’t against Mark. Good people work here too. This is Lepcheck’s work. He’s wanted to boot Mark for years, because Mark never finished his PhD.”

“After everything settles down,” my father argued, “Mark will complete his doctorate. He needs more time.”

I wouldn’t be dragged into a debate about Mark’s perpetual dissertation. “Fine. Whatever. All I’m trying to tell you is it’s not the entire school. It’s Lepcheck.”

“Who has the most power?” He spat like a true patron of proletariat. “Individuals rise to the level of their incompetence.”

Under my breath, I counted to ten backwards. I don’t know why I thought my parents would retreat because it put me in an awkward position. They’ve been marching on something or other, motivated by sheer principle, since the Summer of Love.

Several of the elderly protestors sat on the knee-high stone wall that surrounded the fountain to catch their breath. They limply held their signs, every so often jerking them upright in a half-hearted wave.

I decided to change my tactic. “Your troops are exhausted. Why don’t you give them a break for at least a half an hour or so?”

“We will not break ranks,” he bellowed. Nicholas looked up from his blocks. “But I see what you mean,” he added in a normal tone. He fished into the Velcro pouch of his carpenter pants, which he wears for the endless amount of pockets. He’d said once that if his legs couldn’t carry him, at least they could hold odds and ends for him. He handed me the keys to the van. “I have a cooler of water in the van. Can you go fetch it for me?”

Who was I kidding? I took the keys. I played with the key ring, swinging it around my index finger as I walked back to the Dexler parking lot. The key chain was a palm-sized plastic ornament that declared, Save the Koalas.

I unlocked the van and opened the sliding door. More placards about Mark’s suspension lay across the bench seats. My parents expected more walkway warriors than those who had shown up. A box of bright poster paints and brushes sat on the floor next to the cooler. If I were in a more forgiving mood, I would’ve remembered that I have my parents’ activism to thank for my early interest in art. At a young age, I helped my father paint posters and pickets for different protests that he spearheaded across the country. Carmen and Mark took no interest in the activity, so it became my father’s and my own. When we painted those placards for AIDS awareness, gun control, and library levies, he noticed a talent that I hadn’t known I had and enrolled me in art class at a local studio. Three days a week for twelve years, I took classes from that studio, honing my skill. It was understood that I would one day be a famous painter that those outside of the art world would recognize.

I pulled the cooler out of the van. It ka-thunked onto the blacktop. Many
understood
things never happened. That was never truer than when I thought of Olivia, and what her life might have become.

On the sidewalk, I opened the lid to the cooler. It indeed held water. A lot of water. I tightened the lid, then hefted the container into my arms and waddle-walked back toward the fountain.

I was passing a cluster of evergreen bushes when I heard, “Psssst. Psst. India.”

Alarmed, I dropped the precariously held cooler. On my foot.

“Shh . . .” I exclaimed.

“India?” The bushes asked with concern. “Are you okay?”

Because the bush was not engulfed in flame, and I recognized the voice, it was safe to assume that I was not having a Mount Sinai moment.

“Mark?” I barked.

My right big toe, which had been creamed by the falling cooler, was already turning blue. I may never wear flip-flops again, I thought forlornly.

The bushes rustled as Mark crawled out of his hidey-hole. His glasses sat crookedly on his face, and dead leaves and twigs snarled in his hair and beard. He brushed the majority of the dirt and underbrush from his T-shirt and shorts.

“Is this what you did Monday? Roll around in the bushes while you ditched work?” I asked.

Mark pulled a large twig out of his hair. “Huh?”

“Never mind. What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been staying with Mom and Dad. I heard them prepare for a rally this morning. It didn’t take a genius to guess what the rally’s for. What are you doing here? You could get fired if Lepcheck sees you.”

“Supporting you is more important than my job,” I said quixotically, although I’d shared that exact sentiment with my father.

Mark shook his head. The remaining twigs flew back into the hedge. “This suspension is the least of my worries.”

I thought of the picture in the trunk of my car, and I silently agreed. The perfect opportunity to confront him about it presented itself. “The police searched your office Monday.”

“You told me that already.”

“What I didn’t tell you is that they didn’t find anything incriminating.”

“Of course they didn’t.”

“Not even that engagement picture.”

“Engagement picture? What are you talking about?”

“I reached your office a few minutes before the police. There was a framed copy of Olivia and Kirk’s engagement picture in the middle of your desk. How did you get it? Why was it there?”

“Why would I have that? It’s not mine. That’s the last thing that I would want to have.”

“I saw it with my own eyes,” I insisted. “I have it, if you don’t believe me.”

“You took it from my office?”

I crossed my arms. “You do know about it.”

“No, I don’t. But you stealing, well…”

“You wanted me to leave it in your office for the police to find? You should be thanking me you’re not in jail right now. Tell me where you got it.”

“I’m telling you, it’s not mine.” His voice cracked like an eleven-year-old boy’s. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. And that you would accuse me of hoarding a picture of Olivia, like, like some psycho. You’re—” he stopped, apparently searching for the most scorching epitaph. “An idiot.”

Having called myself worse in the Monday morning mirror, his insult didn’t faze me. “I don’t think you’re a psycho.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. You think that I had something to do with . . . with . . . Olivia’s death. Just like her family, just like Lepcheck. My own sister.”

“No, I don’t,” I protested.

A pair of students walking by paused at my outburst. Contrary to national folklore, librarians have been known to yell now and again. Feeling disgruntled, I gave the students a nasty mind-your-own-business look that I had mastered behind the library’s reference desk.

Mark’s hand went to his mouth. “I know. I know what happened.”

I watched him wearily. “What?”

“Someone planted it in my office. They wanted the police to find it because then they would have some real evidence.”

“Planted? Come on. Who would do that?”

“Anyone could have done it. Security on campus is down in the summer, and any nimrod with a credit card could break into my office.”

“Maybe not any nimrod,” I said under my breath, thinking of my own B&E.

Mark’s eyes shone. “Whoever was with Olivia at the fountain planted that picture. I just know it.”

Now that Olivia’s death was a puzzle, a mystery, a tricky logarithm that he could possibly unravel, he could see it as a mathematician, with scientific detachment. He used the same gusto when teaching quadratic equations. When he turned off his emotions, Olivia’s death was like arithmetic, and Mark was very good at arithmetic. His idea was logical if not provable.

“Tell me about the other person. Male? Female? White? Black? Asian? Anything?”

“I already told you, I didn’t see anyone.”

“What did the person sound like?” I persisted.

“I didn’t hear the other person speak.”

I threw my hands up in the air. “Then how do you know anyone was there?”

“I heard Olivia’s voice; she was talking to someone.”

“This is the twenty-first century, Mark; she was on a cell phone.”

“You’re wrong. I felt that someone else was there.”

Terrific, now he’s receiving psychic inklings.

I tried to keep my voice at a quiet level as more students strolled by between classes. In the background, the chanters continued their mantra, “Hark! Hark! We want Mark! Hey! Hey! Bring back Hayes!” My father would be wondering what happened to me and the cooler.

“Did you tell the police this?” I asked.

“Yes, and they said the same thing you did about the cell phone.”

“You’re sure someone was there?” I shifted, trying to ignore my throbbing toe.

Mark looked me directly in the eye for the first time, his eyes as wide as dinner plates. “Yes, I swear.”

I believed him, just like I believed him when we were kids and he’d told Mom that he hadn’t stolen all the figurines from the church’s nativity set and hidden them in odd places throughout the church. The janitor had found the frankincense-bearing wiseman inside the church’s industrial tub of orange punch mix the following July. Okay, I had believed him then because I’d done it—the manger kidnapping, anyway, not the blackmail. Olivia and I had done it, to be exact, but when faced with the angry accusation from our mother, Mark had had the same face he wore at the moment. If he could wear that earnest face when confronted with Mom’s full-on fire-and-brimstone persona, he had to be telling the truth. And for the record, it had been Olivia’s idea to put the wiseman in the punch.