The Probability of Murder (17 page)

The first hit gave me a step-by-step guide on how to avoid scams, which, of course, worked just as well as a blueprint for pulling one off. Much like building a bomb, or poisoning someone. The Internet was the new personal life coach for people who didn’t have a life.

If I wanted to scam people, as Charlotte apparently did, I’d first need a database of victims. Anyone who’s ever entered a contest or answered a sweepstakes ad for a free TV or a week’s vacation was vulnerable. Scammers mined names, email addresses, and physical addresses from dating sites, Internet chat rooms, game sites, call centers, and social networking sites. I felt like unplugging my computer then and there, but even a check sent through regular mail could be intercepted and my information co-opted.

Some of the warnings against lottery scams in particular seemed pitifully obvious, and I wondered who needed them. “If you did not buy a lottery ticket, you cannot win the lottery,” I read. I couldn’t believe this was news to someone. Another piece of advice pointed out that “If it seems too good to be true that money is on the way, it is!”

Once the scammers had pegged a victim, they’d send a letter or email with fake letterhead informing him that in order to collect his winnings, he’d have to pay taxes on the amount. They’d ask for a small percentage of the alleged millions of dollars the victim won to be released to them, the “official” lottery notifiers. I thought of the small bills in Charlotte’s duffel and wondered if the twenties were hard-earned wages from unsuspecting workers.

I thought no one could be so gullible as to send money on the anonymous promise of receiving more money. But Virgil had verified that there were too many cases of
people who fell for this and other mail scams, like one I’d received recently, offering me a large sum of money I’d supposedly inherited, for just the cost of certain bank fees and handling.

I’d started out looking for general information on scams to help me understand what Charlotte and her crew had done, and ended up making a list of things I could do to avoid being scammed myself in other ways. It pained me to think I might have to freeze my credit and hold back from conveniences like putting outgoing mail in my own mailbox.

At the bottom of the screen was a number to call for the Secret Service if you suspected you’d been a victim of a scam.

But what if the scam site was itself a scam?

I latched onto the paradoxical nature of my question, which sent me in the direction of the village with the barber who shaves only those who don’t shave themselves. Who shaves the barber?

Finally, I was ready to sleep.

I woke up to what seemed like an ordinary morning. It wasn’t unheard of for Ariana to stay overnight now and then. The last time prior to this weekend had been a month ago, when her house was being tented for termites. The time before that, we’d decided we needed a slumber party with popcorn and our favorite period movies, the one category Bruce eschewed. We’d never had armed security right outside before tonight, but no one said life would be normal all the time.

This morning, Ariana was at the breakfast table with an assortment of food, reading the newspaper. She was already dressed in one of the tops she kept at my house. Today’s was a rainbow-hued tunic that she wore over black tights. I’d chosen a daring combination of black jeans and a navy jersey.

Ariana scanned my outfit with a questioning look.

“I’m going to meet one of my students on campus around noon,” I said, by way of excuse for the business
casual outfit, though really it was my mood that kept me from adding the funky layers that I favored.

“Poached eggs? French toast? Blueberry pancakes?” she asked, a brightness in her voice that could be irritating if you didn’t know that it was natural for her.

“You know I don’t eat until I’ve been up awhile. And where did you find blueberries?” Sophie the Ungrateful couldn’t seem to help herself.

Bruce knew enough not to be too cheery or energetic around me in the morning, but Ariana had a hard time with the concept of low-key.

Undaunted by my ugly mood, my houseguest hummed a tune while she poured coffee for me. I recognized the drinking song from
La Traviata
. I had to smile and let the music and the rich aroma from my French press work its magic.

“I can always hope.” She pushed a plate of pastries in front of me.

I turned my head away. No solid food yet. “You’ve been out grocery shopping already?”

“Uh-huh. Thus, the blueberries. I slept really well. No bugs in the house. Two buff young cops outside.”

“Still? And isn’t one of them a female?”

“It’s a new pair. Both guys. I brought them breakfast.”

“I think that defeats the purpose of
unmarked
.”

Ariana shrugged. “They seemed grateful.”

“Unlike me. I get it.”

“And I might meet up with one of them later. The dark one. He’s interested in seeing my shop.”

“I’ll bet he is.”

To show my gratitude I gave in and picked a cinnamon roll from the plate. I broke off a corner and dunked it into my coffee. Maybe there was something to this idea of eating as soon as you got up. I rifled through the Sunday paper for the puzzle section. Today’s contribution was a variation of the classic tree riddle. I read a couple out loud, hoping to stump Ariana.

“Which tree is least selfish?”

“The yew.”

“Which tree is the dandiest?”

“The spruce.”

“We’ve done this riddle before, haven’t we?”

She nodded. “They’re peachy.”

“You’re good,” I said.

I picked up the main section of the newspaper and scanned the front page. I should have stayed with the benign puzzle page. A small piece at the bottom announced, “Henley College Murder Victim.”

There went the normal morning. I remembered that our president had asked me to deal with the media and wondered if she’d intended that I initiate contact or just wait until they contacted me. Just wait, I decided easily.

Not that I’d forgotten that my friend had been killed, that she was really not the friend I thought she was, that my house had been broken into and bugged, and that a couple of my best students and an esteemed member of Henley’s administration might be involved in all of it.

I read the notice quickly. There was no mention of anything but the “beloved librarian at Henley College” who was “very brutally murdered” on Friday afternoon while at work on campus. No mug shot or akas, no sample page from her long rap sheet. No further comment from the investigators who were “working diligently to find her killer.”

I turned away from the article and caught the weather at the top of the page by the banner. “Severe Winter Storm. Blizzard Headed for New Hampshire.”

“Severe? A blizzard?” I said, hardly able to believe something else could go wrong this weekend.

“I read that whole weather piece. It’s not a problem. The storm was headed for the New Hampshire–Vermont border,” Ariana said.

“Bruce is in Franconia Notch. That’s practically on the border.”

“I’m sure it’s okay,” Ariana said, without giving any data to support her claim.

I’d never broken our agreement. I needed to trust that Bruce would initiate a call when he could, if he had
reception when he was on the mountain or once he was safely off. He’d never said it in so many words, but I got the picture that if he wasn’t in contact, he was hanging by a thread, leaning backward from a straight-up-and-down icy face and couldn’t spare an iota of attention for a phone call.

That’s how it usually worked.

But this was no usual day.

I grabbed my cell phone from the counter and pushed the icon for Bruce.

No answer. I tried three more times, so close together that I got a busy signal once.

I put my elbows on the table and my head in the cradle they made.

Ariana came up behind me and rubbed my neck and shoulders. “This whole weekend has got you all disoriented, Sophie. I knew I should have brought my massage table and lotion case. I do have some oils with me, though. There’s a new sweet almond concoction I’ve been wanting to try. How about it?”

“Not right now.” I didn’t want to be soothed until I had more information, preferably from my boyfriend himself.

“You have to remember, dear, Bruce is used to all kinds of weather,” she said, maintaining a steady rhythm on my shoulders and back, matching the cadence with her words. “He’s an ice climber. It always snows this time of year. That’s why he goes there.”

I sat up. “I know that. But it’s one thing to climb an icy mountain before an incoming storm, and an entirely different thing to actually be on the mountain during the storm. Who knows what point they reached before the blizzard hit New Hampshire? What if they didn’t have any place to retreat to? No ledges or caves? They may not even be able to hear or see one another. Remember when that friend of Bruce’s was visiting and told us how he was caught in a storm and couldn’t communicate with anyone for nine days? He barely made it out alive. He almost starved. He had hypothermia and I forget what else.”

“I think he was trying to impress us,” Ariana said, pushing my upper body into position for further massaging.

“He was definitely trying to impress you, but that doesn’t mean he was exaggerating.”

“Anyway, that was more than ten years ago. Things were different. It wouldn’t happen now, with all the cell towers there are. I read that there’s hardly any place to be alone anymore.”

“Then why can’t I reach Bruce? By now the three of them should be having breakfast in a warm coffee shop or driving home already. Why hasn’t he called back? He knows I’d worry about the storm and if he could, he’d call.”

“Sophie, you know how little to trust a weather report in the newspaper. It’s old, for one thing. Weather changes by the minute.”

“You’re right. I should look online at the climbing sites.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Ariana said, but I barely heard her as I made a dash for my computer.

My desktop computer was overloaded with bookmarks for puzzle pages, so Bruce had set up some of his favorite climbing sites on my laptop. I carried it to the den, which might not have been the best move, given the framed photograph that dominated one wall.

A poster-size rendition of Bruce on his favorite ice-climbing trip to Washington State. Not that you could tell it was Bruce, just a body in red, smack up against a vertical wall of sheer ice that looked like a waterfall had frozen in place and dared anyone to scale it.

The figure I knew to be my boyfriend was the only body in the photo, though the long rope coming from his harness told me someone was below him with a belay device. In each hand was an ice ax, one with a hammer on its head, the other an adze. The pick ends of both were stuck in the ice, as were both of Bruce’s feet, thanks to the sharp metal spikes protruding from his crampons. The effect was of a
four-legged creature making its way up the iciest, steepest cliff on the planet.

I turned my head away and logged in to one of Bruce’s bookmarked URLs.

Unlike my pages of math games and brainteasers, Bruce’s sites came with warnings. A sort of “Don’t try this at home” for casual visitors. A message at the top center of this site read:

PARTICIPATION IN ICE CLIMBING INVOLVES
SIGNIFICANT RISK OF PERSONAL INJURY AND
DEATH. NO AMOUNT OF SKILL, EQUIPMENT,
AND EXPERIENCE CAN MAKE ICE
CLIMBING SAFE.

No kidding.

I took a breath and clicked on a live webcam. Things looked surprisingly calm in the White Mountains. I was relieved until I noted that the camera was facing the mountains, not on it. The peaks were off in the distance. I peered at them, moving my face closer and closer to the screen, as if I’d spot Bruce and his buddies if I looked hard enough. The whole upper half of the image was white. Bruce’s vacationland of choice was shrouded in fast moving clouds and blowing snow.

Thumbnail sketches showed webcam images of more than thirty other New Hampshire sites. Lakes, rivers, parks, and significant peaks. Why couldn’t my boyfriend be cruising around the calm waters of Lake Winnipesaukee right now, or skiing on Loon Mountain, which looked civilized, with patches of grass and a handsome lodge?

I turned my laptop toward Ariana, who had joined me in the den and sat beading next to me.

“Look at this lovely area in Dixville Notch,” I said. “Why didn’t I fall in love with a simple skier?”

“Heavy,” Ariana said.

I figured she meant the concept of falling in love and not the beading needle perched between her lips.

Bruce and I had had “the heavy conversation” more than once. I knew from the first day I met him what his passions were and, while “take it or leave it” sounded cold, it made sense to the two logical people we were. I guessed I’d been lucky that this was the first time my logic and commitment were being put to the test.

Understanding was one thing in theory, another in practice.

I went back to my search.

It was harder than I thought to find information on the weather, hidden by ads, special offers, and promotional material.

I inadvertently downloaded an ad for two sizes of ice screws, and another one for helmets, followed by the writer’s hot picks for ropes and harnesses. I learned that New Hampshire was the best place in the country for ice climbing, that is, according to New Hampshire itself. Mount Washington boasted the highest point in the northeast at more than six thousand feet. And so on, with praise for the terrain, multi-pitch ice, and alpine climbs.