The Probability of Murder (20 page)

I remembered when I was in college, the earlier days of personal computers. Neither I nor any of my friends would
allow a crumb of food or a drop of liquid within three feet of the electronic workspace. We were all very blasé about it now that computers, small and large, were ubiquitous, came with cleaning kits, and were better constructed to withstand accidents. As often as not, when Bruce was on night duty, I ate dinner here.

I logged on to the webcam I’d been following. Instead of the hazy photo I’d seen earlier today, I was hit with a solid black rectangle. There was no explanation for why a proper image was missing. I tried general weather sites and got only generic, quick snippets of information about cold fronts and temperature. Useless.

I checked thumbnails for other New Hampshire spots. The webcams for Loon Mountain and Percy Peaks were up and running. I saw the campus of Plymouth State University, covered in a thick blanket of snow, looking picture-perfect, as Henley’s would in a month or so.

What was wrong with the webcam I wanted to view—Bruce’s webcam, as I thought of it? Shouldn’t there at least be some note about a broken camera cable or poor visibility?

Worrying about Bruce wasn’t a rare occurrence for me. As far as I was concerned, his daily job was hazardous duty. Fortunately, I wasn’t present in the MAstar trailer day and night when the alarms sounded and he went off to pilot helicopters into tricky territory. He might be maneuvering his aircraft onto a freeway one day and onto a mountain ledge to rescue someone who shared his hobby the next. But, from the comfort of my home, I could indulge in fantasy and imagine that he spent his time at work simply waiting for a dispatch call that never came, playing cards and watching videos with his crew.

Ariana had been correct, however, that the events of the weekend had me on edge, and Bruce’s being out of contact was more upsetting than usual.

I refreshed the computer screen and saw the terrain for the Ammonoosuc River in Lisbon, New Hampshire, and
for a lake in Barnstead. Still nothing but monochromatic black from Franconia Notch.

For many years, Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire had been home to the famous Old Man of the Mountain, a forty-foot granite formation comprising five ledges that together resembled the face of an old man in profile. In spite of the poems written about him, the magical powers attributed to him, and the fact that he appeared on the New Hampshire state quarter, the Great Stone Face, as it was also called, collapsed a few years ago.

“Doesn’t that mean the whole mountain is probably unstable?” I’d once asked Bruce.

“All mountains are unstable,” he’d said.

“Nice.”

Bruce Granville was not one to pull punches.

Wandering around a spotless house wasn’t doing much for me. I was caught up on class prep and puzzle deadlines and even the laundry was done, thanks to the deep cleaning inspired by my intruder.

After straightening posters here and there—a Women in Mathematics poster in the guest room, an attractive blowup of the periodic table from my brief fling with a physicist—I settled in my home office.

The male who was most on my mind after Bruce was Daryl Farmer. I wondered what he was up to with his police scanner and what he’d done before enrolling at Henley. I started with search engines and networking sites, but Daryl was not to be found. It seemed it was going to take a hacker like Daryl to uncover facts about Daryl. That wouldn’t do.

What was better than a good Internet search? A friend in the right place. One of my regular tennis partners, when the weather permitted, was Lori Tilden, Henley’s dean of admissions.

A Sunday afternoon call between Lori and me could
have meant an impromptu tennis game, even in the fall, but not in today’s weather.

After a quick catch-up on friendly matters, I admitted, “This is not just a social call.”

“I figured as much. What’s up?”

I sat forward on my office chair, elbows on my desk, pencil and paper at the ready. My business-conducting position. “A favor. It’s about one of my students. I need some info off his application.”

Lori’s “Uh-huh” sounded more like “Aha.”

“I don’t want you to do anything you’re not supposed to, of course, but it would help me to know a couple of things about him.”

“Such as?”

“His birth date and any transcripts or work experience. Anything about his life before he entered Henley.”

“Hmm. Why do you need this?”

“I’m just—”

“Is he a student of yours currently?”

“Yes.”

“Good. And did you say you need it for purposes of evaluating his semester’s work in your class?”

“Well, I—”

Lori cleared her throat, unnecessarily loudly it seemed. I imagined her looking over her shoulder before she spoke, softly this time. “What was that reason you gave me again?”

Not that I was too dense. “I need it to evaluate his work in my class this semester.”

“Fine, then, no problem. I’m going to campus this afternoon for a meeting of a dumb committee that can’t get its business done during regular hours. I’ll dig out his application and fax it to you.”

“Thanks, Lori,” I said, and gave her Daryl’s name and my fax number. “I owe you one.”

“How about this weather, huh?” Lori said, and we signed off.

Fifteen years at Henley College, and I still had to be tutored in its political formalities.

I realized I was forming a suspect list for Charlotte’s murder.

It was unclear to me why I cared at this point. I no longer really thought of Charlotte Crocker, or whoever she really was, as my friend. But by dumping her bag of money with me, she’d dragged me into her scheme, whatever it was. My house had been broken into and seriously messed up, my duffel bag stolen, and I couldn’t accept all that as coincidence.

Maybe I’d feel better if I knew the reason she felt she couldn’t be honest with me. Thanks to Virgil’s closemouthed approach, I still didn’t know whether Charlotte was technically considered a fugitive, but I knew she was as close to one as I’d ever come into contact with.

I needed to know more.

Finally, nothing Charlotte had done warranted her cold-blooded murder, and if I could help in any way, I was going to. My plan was to continue my intelligence gathering for another day and then hand it over to Virgil.

Won’t he be thrilled?
I thought.

Daryl seemed to be number one on my list, by virtue of his strange behavior concerning my break-in, and his somewhat oddball nature in general. I knew there were people who followed firefighters and police officers as groupies, and that could have been the only factor in Daryl’s eerie presence last night. I was glad I’d soon have some data in the form of Lori’s faxes to help me decide.

Martin Melrose was on my list simply because he played the lottery with Charlotte and a piece of paper with his name on it made its way into a duffel bag containing a million dollars, give or take. After our meeting tomorrow I’d either highlight him in yellow, figuratively speaking, or rule him out. Marty hadn’t mentioned having been
contacted by the police, aside from the routine interview on Friday night, but why would he tell me?

I thought of Garrett, whom I’d never met. Where did he fit in? Maybe he was simply a friend of Marty’s, and Charlotte had his name and number as an alternate way of reaching Marty. Or vice versa.

I assumed Virgil was tracking down the four Jane and John Does in Charlotte’s notes. What else had the cops done? Did their suspect list look like mine? I wondered if they’d share if I asked nicely.

Somehow I didn’t think it would be that easy.

The whole exercise in police work made me tired enough to plop into my comfortable reading chair for a well-deserved rest.

Beep. Beep-da-beep. Beep. Beep-da-beep.

The sound of my fax very close to my ear woke me up. Apparently the whole three hours of sleep I had last night weren’t enough, and I’d fallen asleep in the easy chair.

Thank you, Lori, for such fast service
, I said to myself as I pulled the sheets from the tray.

I looked at the time stamp and then at the clock.

Three thirty. As much as I wanted to get to know Daryl Farmer better, I’d have to delay that gratification. I freshened up and gave Bruce’s icy bookmarked URL one more glance before I headed out.

The rain had stopped, and I let myself believe there were also clear skies thousands of feet up.

I barely made it to the Clara Barton dorm on time to meet Hannah. I used my passkey to enter the foyer, where no one was on duty on a Sunday afternoon.

On the eastern edge of the Henley property, the Clara Barton was the oldest, and therefore the most run-down, of the residence halls. Cracked plastic chairs and couches lined its foyer, left over from when orange was a popular
color for furniture. The funds had been in place for a facelift for years, but no workmen had materialized. Even with cleaner, more modern décor, however, I wasn’t sure anything could be done about the high-pitched humming noise heard throughout the building. If the sound signaled that something in the infrastructure was broken, I hoped it wasn’t anything serious, like an electrical connection that had gone awry.

I used the old-fashioned phone on the desk to call Hannah’s room. She picked up immediately and within minutes entered the foyer from the interior of the building. A tall, heavy young woman, Hannah tended to wear wide pants and dramatic tunic tops during her shifts in the library, and now she was dressed the same way. The turquoise threads that formed the peacock feathers on her top fought horribly with the orange décor. Hannah herself looked a mess. She’d have done better to skip her makeup routine today; her runny mascara contributed to the sad picture.

Hannah rushed over to me and caught me unawares in a bear hug. My head flopped a bit and ended up just at her bosom, my nose crunched. I wanted to say, “There, there,” and pat her back, but my mouth was buried and my arms were pinned to my side.

“Dr. Knowles, I’ve been dying to talk to you.”

Poor Hannah. She’d put in several calls to me, all of which I’d ignored. I regretted my dismissal of her. I’d never had her in class but knew her from my frequent trips to the Emily Dickinson Library, our recently released crime scene. A senior English major, Hannah worked with Charlotte and hoped to go to grad school for library science.

She continued to talk over my head, literally.

“I can’t believe she’s gone. She was so good to me, trying to build my confidence and all.”

“We all miss her,” I mumbled, breaking away gently as possible. “Shall we sit here?” I asked, pointing to one of the less worn orange couches.

“I don’t know. It’s not that comfortable down here. Too bad the Mortarboard is closed by now.”

I gulped. “Too bad.”

“How about the upstairs lounge? It’s not busy on my floor.”

I knew what the residents called lounges—nondescript rooms on each floor, with a small kitchen area, vending machines, an ironing board, a bulletin board, and a hot plate. Plus whatever any student chose to add because it didn’t fit in her dormitory room and she didn’t mind the risk of losing it forever. This included odds and ends of furniture, clothing, and food.

“It sounds perfect,” I said.

Hannah nicely dismissed two students who were about to settle at the table with soft drinks and bags of chips that were a match in color to the foyer chairs.

“This is kind of private,” she told them. “And my room is, you know…” Hannah rolled her eyes and shuddered. The students seemed to know what she meant and left willingly. I figured the gesture could mean anything from “really messy” to a tiny, working pot farm.

“Can I treat you?” I asked Hannah, offering the contents of the vending machine. I was pleased to see a few healthy selections—fruit, juices, yogurt—among the candy bars and assorted salted munchies. I dared not inspect the contents of the small fridge under the counter.

“I’m good,” she said.

“I know it’s tough to lose someone close to you, especially since you were the one who found her.”

“I can’t get her face out of my mind, Dr. Knowles. She looked so sad. Not even pained, but just sad. And her legs were all tangled with the ladder. As soon as I opened the door to the stacks, I knew. The place was trashed. And I got this funny feeling, and I looked over and…”

“I know it’s hard, but you have to try not to keep picturing that scene.” I wished her luck, since I couldn’t stop myself and I hadn’t even been there. “Give yourself time to adjust, Hannah. Don’t be hard on yourself.”

She fell onto a folding chair, so hard I worried about both her and the chair. “It’s like I killed her.”

I stifled a gasp and took a long breath before I responded. I sat down and put my hand on hers across the grimy table. “What makes you say that?”

“That night? We had a lot of books to put back in the stacks, and that means getting up on that old ladder. I’m afraid to go too high on it. I’m afraid of heights and also, well, look at me”—she waved her hand north, south, east, and west of her upper torso—“I’m not exactly the climbing type, am I?”

An unfortunate question. I wished she hadn’t mentioned climbing, which distracted me for a moment as I remembered my missing-on-the-mountain boyfriend. I hoped it was only to me that he was missing and that the reason I’d had no contact was that all three guys had accidently dropped their phones into their campfire. I wondered if I should bother Jenna Ramirez again and decided to try her after my meeting with Hannah.

Hannah, who had just confessed to killing Charlotte. Not that I believed it for a minute.

I picked up on her story. “You left Charlotte to finish up in the stacks by herself. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Uh-huh. We usually leave and lock up together. But since I was going to be useless on the ladder and that’s all there was left to do, she said I should go.” Hannah paused to dry her face. “So Chelsea and I walked over to this party in Nathaniel Hawthorne. If I’d stayed—”

“You might have been killed yourself, Hannah. And that would be a whole lot worse than the situation right now.”

“Maybe I could have scared him away.”