The Square Root of Murder (13 page)

Woody wiped away the beginning of a tear and went on. “I couldn’t pick up all the stuff that was broke, but I figured I could at least take away that messy plate. It was the least I could do for him.”

Woody set his chin with a determined, proud look, and I thought maybe he was the one person at Henley who genuinely liked Keith and whom Keith respected.

How could I blame him for trying to uphold his friend’s reputation for neatness and order?

I had one more thing to clear up, once Woody was stable.

“I hear you saw Rachel Wheeler outside this door yesterday. Do you remember what time that was?”

“Yes, ma’am, Dr. Knowles. I know she’s your friend and all and I didn’t mean to get her in trouble or nothing, but I saw her while that party was going on. I figured I better tell the police everything.”

Except for that little matter of disposing of evidence at a murder scene. “And you didn’t see anyone else?”

Woody shook his head. “Just her. I come by the closet over there to pick up my rags for cleaning. Anyway, no way a sweet young kid like that did anything bad, and I’m sure everyone knows that.”

I sincerely hoped so.

Alone again in Keith’s office, I got back to my task. I piled what was left of his folders and binders into boxes. Each time I emptied a cabinet or a drawer of Keith’s desk, I had the urge to mark the piece of furniture for salvage. I wondered what the administration would do with the office and furnishings. I hoped at least they’d redo the whole place before reassigning it, bad vibes and all, to some unsuspecting freshman teacher.

I worked quickly. By now I’d convinced myself that I really had been sent by the dean. I told myself that there might well be a voice mail from her on my cell, which I’d turned off before entering the building, or on my home phone, which I could access but chose not to.

“Dr. Knowles, please go to Dr. Appleton’s office and take away everything but the office furniture,” she might have said.

On the off chance that I wasn’t the legitimate designee, I tossed material into the boxes without looking too closely, for the sake of speed. I counted on the fact that any sane faculty member—that would be the dean’s actual designee—would wait until Monday to carry out an ad hoc task she’d assigned him.

All the drawers were unlocked but showed signs of having been manipulated by police tools. Another good reason for me to take them—the police had already declared them useless. It felt strange to fling grade books, lab logs, and even a little black address book into a box for later examination, not only because their owner was dead, but because Keith Appleton was undoubtedly the most private person I knew.

When he inhabited this office, he kept all his drawers locked. If you wanted a piece of paper from him, you had to wait until he unlocked a drawer or file cabinet, took out the document, then locked the drawer again. Now here it all was, available to anyone. To anyone foolish enough to be here on a Saturday afternoon.

When I finished, I decided not to call Woody for help loading the boxes into my car. Maybe he was taking quiet moments to grieve for his friend. Or maybe the real delegate from the dean had contacted him. With the help of the metal dolly he’d left in the hallway, I could manage by myself.

I rolled my baggage back down the hall, noting the special building safety features Keith had added. Under the fire extinguisher was a metal box that I knew contained a fire blanket and first aid supplies. I remembered the Franklin faculty meeting when he’d made the proposal to outfit each floor with the kits.

Another time he’d come with a brochure from a company that made laboratory safety glasses out of recycled composition notebooks. We teased behind his back, asking each other what new thing Keith would come up with for the next meeting. We called him at various times, Green Keith and School Monitor Keith.

Now he was Deceased Keith. I felt the tension in my jaws increase with each step. I needed to stop the tape running in my head. Maybe whatever was in these boxes would hold the answer to the problem that kept me in this wrecked state.

I pulled my heavy load onto the elevator and pushed B for the basement, where there was a side door at ground level. Trying to get a loaded dolly down Franklin’s white marble front steps would not be a pretty sight. I hurried along a dark hallway, past storage areas and the noisy generator room. The wheels of the red dolly rumbled by entirely too many dark and dusty nooks and crannies. I hated coming down here when the building was alive with classes; the eerie feeling and musty smell were even worse on a day like today, hot and scary and reeking of death.

I reached the exit at last, fully expecting to see Dean Underwood waiting as I opened the exterior door to Franklin’s back pathway. I was ready with an answer. “Oh,” I’d say, “I must have misunderstood Woody. I thought he said you told him that I was to clear Keith’s office.”

I moved the dolly in position, pushed the heavy door open, and dragged the load to the threshold.

No Dean Underwood with arms folded to greet me as I’d envisioned.

Instead there was a committee.

“Hey, Dr. Knowles,” Pam Noonan said.

Liz Harrison and Casey Tremel stood on either side of her, blocking the path that led around the building to the parking lot. Pam and Liz wore denim cutoffs; Casey had gone for a spongy blue and brown trellis print that was popular in the seventies. They all had “aha” looks on their sweet young faces.

“Hey,” I said.

I couldn’t have been more disoriented if Virgil had been standing there with uniformed officers, holding out a set of handcuffs. I hadn’t remembered to put my glasses on for the transition from the cave-like basement to the blazing sun. I squinted and thought I must have looked like a thief caught red-handed. Maybe because it was true.

“Need some help?” Liz asked.

“We’ve been dying to come over, but we knew the building was locked,” Casey said, the clinking of her bracelets nearly drowning her out.

“Then we saw you go in.” Back to Pam.

“We called you on your cell.”

“We hoped you’d answer and let us in while you were in there.”

“We’ve been watching for you to come out.”

The trio, all junior chemistry majors, sounded like a Greek chorus, except that each girl took one line, in rotation.

I was acutely aware that the door to the Franklin Hall basement was open, being held in that position by the large dolly. Its chipped red paint seemed to glow where sunlight hit. The boxes it carried might have contained body parts for the anxiety I felt.
These are your students
, I told myself.
They have no power over you.
In fact, they were all in my applied statistics seminar this summer and I hadn’t turned in their grades yet. Talk about power.

“You saw me all the way from the dorm? Aren’t you in Paul Revere?” The residence hall that was farthest from Ben Franklin.

“We were sitting in the library,” Pam said, pointing to the closest building, at the Henley Boulevard entrance to campus.

One wing of the Emily Dickinson Library jutted out past the entrance to Franklin. If the girls had been sitting there, they’d have a clear view of the parking lot and the south side of the math and sciences building.

“When we heard a car pull in, we all rushed to the window.” From Casey.

“There’s not much going on this weekend,” Liz added.

“Except it’s kind of cool to see what they’re doing to accommodate the guys in the fall. Most of them will be in Revere because the bathrooms are bigger and they can, you know, fix them,” Casey said.

Fascinating.

Pam pointed past me to the inside of Franklin Hall. “Can we go—?”

“Not a chance,” I said.

Message received, I noticed, as the girls dropped their shoulders and sighed.

Maybe it was all the texting we did these days that enabled this kind of shorthand communication even without the benefit of an electronic device.

“What’s in the boxes?” Casey asked me, eyes on the dolly.

Not a chance I’d answer that question.

“Don’t you think you’re all being just a little bit disrespectful?” I asked. I stepped in front of the upright dolly and folded my arms. “One of your major teachers has been killed on this campus, in the building you practically live in every day. Hasn’t that hit home to you? There’s been a murder in Benjamin Franklin Hall and someone who cared about you and your education is dead. And until we find out who killed him, none of us is safe.”

I’d accomplished my goal. All three girls looked sheepish and frightened. They shuffled their feet and looked over their shoulders. I had the sense that if it had been nighttime, they would have clutched each other, or joined hands and run.

“Do the cops have any idea who did it?” Pam asked, in a considerably more diffident tone than before my speech.

“No. And come to think of it, can you all account for where you were from noon to four yesterday?” Rachel had given me a smaller window for Keith’s murder but I decided to stick to what the police were using.

Casey let out a little gasp. “I told you we should—” she began, addressing Pam.

Pam threw her arm out to Casey’s chest, interrupting her friend. “Casey,” she said, in a warning tone. “Like we told the police. We were at the party, like everybody else, then we went to the dorm.”

“We didn’t—” Liz began.

A look from Pam stopped her.

Very curious. “Have you all talked to the police?”

“They interviewed everyone last night,” Pam said.

“Remember when we called and told you?” Casey asked me.

Pam gave her a look of approval, mixed with “but not another word.”

I remembered the call last night, and now wished I’d taken advantage of the opportunity to quiz them, instead of virtually hanging up on them.

I wasn’t prepared for the girls’ behavior—suspicious, I thought, but given my state of mind, I could have been way off. As far as I knew Pam and Liz were doing all right academically, but Casey was on the edge of a passing grade in Keith’s organic chemistry class. To everyone’s surprise, he’d offered a makeup class this summer for the benefit of students like Casey. Their last shot.

I put the girls on my mental list of suspects, but only to add to the pool so Rachel wouldn’t be alone. A few stuttering remarks weren’t damning, but certainly called for a closer look. The idea of one or all them as killers seemed ludicrous at the moment, as they stood there, angelic and vulnerable in their crop tops and brightly painted toenails.

I needed a serious sit-down with them but not now. I couldn’t afford to be late to meet Archie.

“We need to discuss the statistics seminar,” I said. “I’ll be working with each student individually to determine how to test and grade.”

I was pretty proud of myself for coming up with that on the spot.

“Individually?” Pam asked.

“I think it’s the best way since it will be almost impossible to get all twelve of you together. At least four I can think of have gone back to their homes.”

“The three of us are in Paul Revere,” Pam said. I made a note: The leader.

“Maybe we could all meet together in our dorm room,” Liz said. I made a note: The follower.

Casey nodded vigorously. I made a note: The weak link.

I shook my head. “I don’t think that would be appropriate. I’m sure Huey’s will be closed tomorrow, but the library will be open.” Huey, who ran the campus coffee shop, took every opportunity to close up and go sailing. Who could blame him? “Let’s start at eleven with Pam. It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to a half hour. Then Liz, then Casey. That sound okay?”

Pam, taller than her friends by a few inches, chewed her lip mercilessly while trying to maintain her position of leadership. Liz and Casey looked to Pam for guidance.

“Okay,” Pam said, followed closely by nods from her subjects.

“Good,” I said. “Now can you please let me through?”

The girls split up and stepped back onto the grass, leaving the path clear.

I pulled the dolly past them. Too bad I didn’t have a recording device to plant on one of them. I’d have given anything to be in on their next conversation.

 

 

Three boxes that used to hold computer paper held what the police left behind. They just fit in the trunk of my car, once I consolidated junk that I didn’t need to be carting around in the first place. I considered what was I going to do with all that used to be Keith’s. I had hopes for the address book—I pictured an alphabetical list, in Keith’s own handwriting, with the heading “Likely suspects in the event of my murder.” I shuddered at the way my mind worked.

At the very least the book might open the investigation to suspects other than the residents of Ben Franklin Hall, who were some of my favorite people, even the stubborn little chem majors I’d just scrambled with.

I drove off campus, past Maureen in the security booth. I waved good-bye to her as if it were any other Saturday when all that was in my trunk was the emergency first aid kit Bruce had prepared for me and a down jacket leftover from the long ago cold winter days. I finally let out my breath when I reached Henley Boulevard and merged into a steady flow of local traffic.

My Bluetooth was busy on the way to the police station. First, Ariana called to thank me for letting her use my place for her class.

“I’m afraid we ate you out of house and home,” she said. “Let me bring dinner by tonight.”

I was so wired from the day already, I hardly even remembered that there had been beaders in my home. While I was packing up and ultimately absconding with a murder victim’s property, then entertaining three possible killers, notwithstanding the adorable outfits they wore, several Henley women had been sitting at my kitchen island making earrings and bracelets.