The Probability of Murder (6 page)

The amount of gear he carried on each climb astounded me. I could name a few pieces, like the belaying device that attached to a climber’s harness and controlled the rope, special self-boring ice screws, and strange-looking clips called carabiners. And who couldn’t identify pitons, steel spikes of different lengths and thicknesses, that appeared in every movie-climbing scene? I flashed onto Roger Moore clutching the side of a straight-up-and-down mountain face in one of Bruce’s favorite James Bond movies, the titles of which were interchangeable to me.

I worried about Bruce’s center of mass shifting, what with his backpack, plus all the odds and ends hanging from his harness.

“Everything’s attached and racked very carefully,” he’d assured me. He favored me with a demo of where each screw, each piece of nylon webbing, each layer of extra clothing was assigned its location, packed in the order in which he might need it while standing on a tiny ledge, or in other situations I preferred not to hear about.

Now, sleepless at one in the morning, I wished Bruce were here. Fortunately, I’d had the good sense not to call and invite him over. He’d made good on his promise to get Kevin to help ferry my car here before morning. They’d put my Ford Fusion on the street at the end of my walkway, to keep from waking me up with a noisy garage door opening, I figured. I could, therefore, drive to his house across town right now.

Not a good idea.

I wandered around my small cottage-style home, picking
up puzzles here and there. First I worked on some of my own construction, for my freelance work. I had a brainteaser due to a puzzle magazine in a week.

Or, more exactly, my aka, Margaret Stone, had a delivery deadline. I’d been using my mother’s name for my second vocation, at the request of the college administration, particularly the academic dean, who wanted me to keep my professional research identity unsullied by frivolous pursuits. While I’d resisted the edict at first, I now found it fun to have another persona.

I finished the puzzle, formatted it for submission, and started two more beginning-level teasers involving puns on the names of the days of the week and months of the year.

When those problems didn’t make me sleepy, I went to work as a solver myself. I sat in my den and polished off two diagramless acrostics. I cracked the code of a difficult crossword called “Reverse the Terms,” waving my fist in the air and hooting at figuring out the answer to the clue “Laundry room short.”

“Fire in the iron!” I shouted to the empty rooms.

A few more successes like that—“Hand in the bird” for the clue “What a turkey stuffer has”—and I switched to cryptograms from an old book Ariana had found for me on one of her many yard sale excursions. The cryptoquote that resulted made me smile: “The mind that is anxious about the future is miserable.”

Had Seneca been thinking of me?

Puzzled out, I considered working on a bracelet I’d started in Ariana’s shop, A Hill of Beads, but decided I needed daylight to work the tiny glass beads. Ariana would have rolled her eyes at my excuse.

I left my den and plodded into the kitchen. Maybe more food would induce sleep. I took the remains of the dinner casserole from the fridge and sat at my counter pulling burnt cheese, my favorite part, from around the edges. I wouldn’t tell Bruce his creation tasted better cold.

A few casserole bites and cookies later, I headed down the hallway toward my bedroom, regretting that it was too
late to call Ariana to tell her how good her peanut butter fingers were.

I passed my home office on my left and saw my duffel bag near the doorway. Bruce had dropped off the load—my briefcase, my red-and-gray bag that had been destined for Boston, and Charlotte’s bag of gym clothes. All three were lined up, their contents all less important than they were even twelve hours ago.

Might as well unpack my bag, however; maybe the exercise would tire me out.

I flicked on the light and knelt down to unzip my bag. Something shiny on Charlotte’s bag caught my eye. A small silver padlock hanging from the main zipper of the green-and-gold duffel.

Strange. Why would anyone lock up sweats and sneakers, clean or dirty?

Not my business.

I pulled my vacation clothes out of my own overnight duffel and carried them to my bedroom. Upscale sweats for the long ride and one relatively nice pair of pants for the Friday night dinner that never happened. I put my duffel back in a low corner of my garage with the rest of my luggage, as usual leaving in it small bags with duplicate cosmetics and other essentials for the road, like my favorite travel slippers. I’d need everything soon enough for our Thanksgiving weekend at Bruce’s cousins’ place in Connecticut.

I looked over, past my car, at what we called Bruce’s corner of my garage. I generously allotted one whole wall where he could display some special pieces, like an antique ice ax his father had given him. I frankly didn’t see the difference between the forty-year-old ax and the brand new one next to it. They both looked lethal, with the sawtooth heads and pointy tails that could dig into hard ice.

The shiny padlock on Charlotte’s bag called to me. I kept thinking about it, as if it were a logic puzzle I hadn’t been able to solve.

Not my business.

On the other hand, Charlotte was gone forever and her
bag was in my possession. I thought back to her facetious comment about how it would be all mine if she didn’t reclaim it. For whatever reason, Charlotte had left it in my care.

Who else’s business was it now? What if there was something in the bag that would help the police find her killer?

Maybe Charlotte kept an address book in her bag, or even her cell phone. I could use it to contact some of her friends and family and notify them of her death. I had no idea even how to reach her nephew, perhaps her only relative. Noah’s telephone number could be in the book that I was now positive I’d find. I’d done a cursory checking of my own records for his information earlier this evening and had come up blank. I knew the police would track all this down, but wouldn’t Noah like to hear from his aunt’s friend also?

I could think of a long list of reasons to open Charlotte’s bag, not the least of which was that I was curious. What had she deemed necessary to lock up in a flimsy nylon bag?

Not that she’d been that security conscious. The tiny padlock was identical to a set of six I’d bought for myself. They were TSA-approved and simply provided some small measure of protection against random unzippings around airports or hotel rooms.

I fished around in my travel drawer and pulled out a small key that I knew would fit Charlotte’s lock also.

Back in my office, on my knees again, I inserted the key, removed the padlock, and took the zipper pull between my fingers. At each step, I paused, reconsidering.

This was Charlotte’s private property. Did her death take away her rights? Did I have any claim to snooping in her bag just because she was no longer able to protect those rights?

But Charlotte had been murdered. That changed things and involved different questions, didn’t it? Was all of her property, even her laundry, now part of a homicide investigation? Did that mean that I should get in my car right now and drive it to the police station? I couldn’t use the excuse
that they’d be closed at this hour. But how silly would I look, delivering dirty tennis clothes to the police in the middle of the night?

Finally, I came to a decision: Open the bag and determine whether the police should see the contents, or simply get busy, wash Charlotte’s clothes, and put them in the box I kept for a charity pickup.

I pulled the zipper across the top of the bag and eased the sides away.

Inside the bag were neither gym shoes nor socks nor sweats nor a magazine nor sunglasses nor a bottle of water.

It wasn’t a gym bag at all, in fact.

It was a money bag.

I could hardly breathe. It took three attempts to get my oxygen intake back to normal.

The bag was full of bills. Stacks of old used bills in several denominations. The bills had been tossed in, only a few packaged together with rubber bands. There was no orderly arrangement of crisp new bills, such as I’d seen in briefcases and duffels in heist movies and television crime dramas. I riffled through the currency, as if I were tossing a very expensive salad. I saw hundreds, fifties, an occasional twenty-dollar bill, nothing less.

I sat back on my heels.

I ran through the Ws: Whose money was this? Where had it come from? Why did Charlotte have all this cash? What should I do with it and when?

The bag had small zippered compartments at either end and along the sides. I swallowed, took a breath, and explored each one. All were empty except the smallest, at one end of the bag. Only a couple of inches deep, the pocket held several slips of paper, each with names and numbers. I counted seven separate pieces of notepaper, torn from a small book and clipped together. Not exactly the complete address book I’d hoped for, but it was a start.

Perhaps the money belonged to these particular friends and Charlotte was keeping it safe, as she’d eventually asked me to do. My gut told me such an innocuous explanation
wasn’t realistic, but neither was one that involved prim librarian Charlotte Crocker as a cat burglar. I fought against the nasty images that came to mind of Patty Hearst, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Willie Sutton. If Bruce, the movie buff, were here he would have rattled off the best heist movies. And he’d have known which actors—De Niro, Affleck, Wahlberg, Pitt, Clooney—went with which movie.

I wished he were here to joke about it. I reminded myself that it was my own choosing that he wasn’t, so I switched off the pity track and went to work.

I shuffled through the notes and found one that read “Jeff/Noah,” followed by a phone number. I’d call Charlotte’s nephew, Noah, in the morning. I guessed Jeff was a roommate. Noah might know exactly what this money bag was all about.

“That was just like Aunt Charlotte,” he’d say. “She never trusted banks and kept every penny of her savings in cash in a duffel bag.”

“There are a lot of pennies in the bag,” I’d say, and we’d both have a good laugh over dear Aunt Charlotte.

A wave of tiredness came over me, as though my mind and body had created enough alternate stories and made enough decisions for one day. I zipped the bag shut and pushed it behind my couch in the den, now realizing why it was so heavy. Bruce hadn’t been kidding.

Without standing upright, I lifted myself onto the cushions and sank into the soft burgundy fabric. I pulled a favorite afghan, knitted by my mother in many shades of purple, over my body.

Just before I fell asleep, with an image of Boston’s Great Brink’s Robbery of 1950 in my head, it occurred to me that maybe I should have put the bag on top of the couch and myself behind it.

I woke up to the sound of my neighbor’s truck. He worked construction on weekends and often served as my alarm clock. But why was I hearing him roar off from the couch in my den, fully clothed, and not from under the lavender comforter in my bedroom? I sat up, disoriented, certain only that it must be nine on Saturday morning, since Jay kept a rigid schedule.

I wrapped the purple afghan around my shoulders as my mind grappled with strangely angled puzzle pieces that seemed to be from different boxes. A campus scene, close-up on a library with blood-spattered books on its shelves. A hotel on the Leonard P. Zakim Bridge over the Charles River, both hotel and bridge waving in the fall breeze. A mountain climber in full gear, hanging off a steep cliff with only a one-finger grasp on the rock. A montage of American and foreign currency in many colors, and blood-spattered, like the books in the library.

The experience was disturbing, as if I was dreaming while awake.

When my phone rang, it was a relief, something real and focused. I reached behind me to the end table, picked up the receiver, and checked the screen. Even better, it was Bruce, and I wouldn’t have to feign cheeriness.

I muttered something close to “Hey, good morning.”

“Are you doing okay?” Bruce asked. “Kevin and I got your car home last night. I tried not to wake you.”

“I didn’t hear a thing.”

Not because I was sleeping the sleep of the just, but because I was in a fog.

“So are you okay, really? I know you like to be alone when you’re stressed, but this is different. And I can blow off this trip in a minute.”

I let out a hoarse laugh. “Let me guess. You told Eduardo that you didn’t go to Boston after all, and he arranged to move up the climbing trip.”

“Uh…,” followed by a guilty groan from Bruce.

“And you’ve packed all your cams, ice axes, and pitons and you’re on your way to his house. You’ll pick up Kevin in Medford and be crossing the border to New Hampshire by”—I pulled back the sleeve of the turtleneck I’d worn yesterday and all night, checked my watch, and added a couple of hours travel time—“well before lunch.” I took a breath. “How’d I do?”

Bruce chuckled. “You’re very good. You know me too well. But I could still hang back. Eduardo can manage Kevin just fine by himself.”

I remembered that this was to be a teaching trip for Kevin. “But you’re the best teacher, right?”