The Square Root of Murder (20 page)

“Uh-huh, that new teacher, Ms. Bronson, is taking over now as far as working out our grades.”

“I’m glad it’s taken care of. What grade do you have going in?”

A simple query, to show my interest, not meant to be a trick question. I was past trying to dupe the girls into giving me information I could use to clear Rachel. And I’d decided some time ago that getting to the truth of who killed Keith Appleton was more important even than a single student. I needed to follow the evidence and the logic of the murder, no matter where it led.

I was taken aback to watch Casey stumbling over my simple question and looking as rattled as if she had one million dollars riding on her answer. She ran both hands through her unruly curls. “Uh . . . an A,” she mumbled.

That was a surprise. But why mumble an A when it might be the first one you’ve had in a long time? Maybe I’d heard wrong.

“Did you say an A?”

“I have an A going in,” she said, not much more clearly.

“Good for you. I thought you were struggling with that class.”

“I, uh, was, but I, uh, pulled it up.”

I looked across the table at Casey. She hadn’t been this flustered even yesterday while she was lying to me. She fidgeted in her chair, looked up to the ceiling and down to the table, glanced back over her shoulder toward the lobby, and then repeated the sequence. My guess was that she wished she could beam Pam and Liz over here to bail her out. Pam and Liz, on their part, were inching closer to us as it became increasingly obvious, even from a distance, that Casey was in distress.

Casey’s behavior threw me back to being in Keith’s office a few days before his death.

Keith is working on his laptop, updating his organic chemistry grade sheet. He’s in a hurry to finish up and print out the sheet to take to his class. “Look at this.” He spins his computer in my direction and shows me the screen. “Not one student even close to a B,” he says. I look. Sure enough, no grade above a C and most below it. I know he wants me to commiserate about the pathetic abilities of Henley chemistry majors. I don’t comment. He turns the laptop back and pecks away at his keyboard. He shakes his head. “Dumb sophomores,” he says. “Dumb juniors. Dumb every student at this dumb college.”

Now a picture started to take shape, and it wasn’t pretty. I saw Casey and her friends poisoning Keith—the details weren’t clear—and changing their grades on his laptop. I tried to chase away the picture. Of all the motives I could think of, this was one of the weakest. I imagined every college in cities and towns across the country losing a few teachers every year if this practice became popular.

Something was missing in my theory. I played with the murderous picture in my head, running a blackboard eraser back and forth across it but it wouldn’t disappear.

Out of the blue, Woody Conroy with his barrel of mops and brooms, invaded the scene that was taking over my vision. I heard Woody mention how he’d hung Keith’s Fellow award that morning. Pam entered the picture and I heard her tell me how she and her friends hadn’t seen Keith all day on Friday. Then Casey’s or Liz’s voice joined in, talking about the Fellow award on the wall.

Someone was lying. Either Woody put that award up the day before, or the girls had been in Keith’s office the morning he was murdered. How else could they have seen the award on the wall?

I left the scene, with the imaginary Woody and Pam and Liz and Casey arguing about who was telling the truth. My chips were on Woody.

My mind reentered the interrogation corner of the Emily Dickinson Library.

“Casey, did you change your grade?”

Casey lifted her head from the cushion of her arms on the table. Her blond hair was wet from tears that had started when the subject of organic chemistry came up. Her face was streaked with poorly applied eye makeup. She opened her mouth but no words came out.

Pam and Liz had reached us by now. Liz began stroking Casey’s back. Pam’s arms were folded across her flat chest.

“We can explain,” Pam said.

“I’m all ears.”

“Let’s go somewhere else,” Liz said. “This whole place is creeping me out.” She wrapped her arms across her thin body as if she were freezing. Or at a crime scene.

“I can’t stand this campus one more minute either,” Casey said, in a low scream, pointing toward Franklin Hall. She’d pulled herself together enough to stand up. “Can we go to, like, a coffee shop downtown?”

“I have my car,” Pam said, before I could respond. She looked at me. “Unless you’re afraid to ride with us?”

“Of course not,” I said.

How foolish was this? Was I now the same obstacle to Casey’s college funding that Keith had been? I refused to believe these young women would harm me.

Still, I hoped Bruce wouldn’t travel too far out of range of my cell.

 

 

We sat at a round table in Back to the Grind, only a few blocks from campus, an easy walk in better weather. The place wasn’t air-conditioned, but a large fan kept the room bearable. The ride over had been silent except for the sounds of an old AC/DC album in Pam’s CD player.

Now with various levels of caffeine drinks in front of us, it was still silent. Until Casey started to tear up again.

Pam put her hand on Casey’s arm and the waterworks stopped. “We just wanted to help Casey out,” Pam said.

“So you two were happy with your Cs and Ds?” I asked, addressing Pam and Liz.

“We just thought, while we were there, you know, we might as well up ours a notch, too,” Liz said.

I rolled my eyes, shook my head, and otherwise showed my extreme disapproval.

“Oh, come on. How many students does Dr. Appleton really flunk in the long run?” Pam asked in an updated version of “pshaw.” “Not that many when it comes to final grades. He likes to scare us is all. I’d have come out fine one way or the other.”

“I knew I could make it up,” Liz said. “Honestly, a C or D here or there isn’t going to ruin my life. But Casey would have had to leave school.”

“And that was worth your teacher’s life?”

The girls turned to me, eyes all wide, mouths open.

I heard the beginnings of sentences.

“Oh, no . . .”

“We didn’t really . . .”

“How could you think . . .”?

Their protests were intermingled; I couldn’t tell who was saying what.

Pam and Liz each held one of Casey’s hands. All were in tears when the next round began.

“He was already dead.”

“I wanted to just leave.” This, I was sure, was from Casey.

“We went there to help Casey try to negotiate.”

“We started to knock, but the door just pushed open.”

“I didn’t want to go through with it.” Casey again.

“I’ve been a wreck.” And again.

“It was a stupid thing to do, but he was dead. And there was his computer screen—”

“With all our grades.”

Eventually, the girls started from the beginning, when they’d headed up to the fourth floor around two thirty on Friday. They took turns describing the crime scene, with their professor on the floor behind his desk. It was like hearing Rachel all over again and I realized they didn’t match the profile of a killer any more than Rachel did. Assuming I’d know one when I saw one.

“We really are disgusted with ourselves,” Liz said.

“You should be,” I said. “But I’m glad you’re telling the truth now.”

“What should we do?” Pam asked, surprising me. I’d have expected her to exact a promise from me to not breathe a word.

“You should go to the police,” I said, all virtuous.

“Aren’t you working with the cops?” Liz asked.

Uh-oh. Virtue was about to fly out the open window next to our table.

“Yes, I am,” I said, mentally reserving the fact that the cops didn’t know it. “And I have a couple of questions if you don’t mind—”

“Oh, my God. Can we help?” Casey said, while Liz and Pam gave me an “anything you like” look.

I took a notebook out of my purse, as befitted one helping out the Henley PD.

“Let’s start with your arriving at Dr. Appleton’s office, about two thirty you said?”

“Uh-huh. After the party. His car was still on campus, so we knew he was in and we thought if we all went up together we might be able to make him see reason.”

An intimidating group, but I doubted Keith would have been fazed by three of his students. I envisioned his standing up behind his desk and flicking them out the door.

“You all stayed to help me clean up, so it was after that?”

“We wanted to make sure you were gone,” Casey said.

Pam shot her a look. The old Pam was back. “We didn’t want anyone interrupting us,” she said.

I got it.

“About Dr. Appleton’s office. I know it won’t be pleasant, but if you can go back in your minds and tell me if you saw anything out of the ordinary?”

The girls closed their eyes, séance style, and at that moment I felt they were putty in my hands. I wasn’t proud of the rush I got. Was this how Archie felt when I was cowering before him yesterday afternoon? If I didn’t get my promotion, was I too old to sign up for the police academy? Questions for another time.

“It was a mess,” Pam said. “And, you know, Dr. Appleton always kept everything in order.”

“A real neat freak,” Liz said.

“Was there any food around?”

The girls looked at each other and nodded.

“There was a paper plate with cake outside the door,” Pam said. “I think I saw Rachel make up a plate for him.”

“And a can of soda,” Liz said. “Some kind of cola, I think.”

“We were going to pick it up and take it in, but we decided not to move it, in case that’s where he wanted it,” Casey said.

“You know, like, maybe he was trashing it,” Liz added.

I tried to process this factoid and insert it into my mental timeline. Rachel took the cake upstairs and left it outside Keith’s door at about one forty-five. The girls saw it there at two thirty, but Woody saw it on the chair in Keith’s office at four. And, of course, the police didn’t see it all because Woody tossed it to protect Keith’s reputation as a neat freak.

I was already juggling all the visitors to Keith’s postmurder office. The killer was there before Rachel and the girls arrived, but someone else was there between the girls’ visit and Woody’s discovery. It had to have been the killer coming back to plant evidence against Rachel. Would a killer risk two trips? I wondered if all crime scenes were as busy as this one.

It was clear that I was going to need to create a real, physical timeline. I wished I’d brought my laptop to the library, but there’d be time once I got to my home office.

“I know things were broken and on the floor, but was there any extra paper? I’m wondering about that yellow paper you all use for your drafts.”

“Dr. Appleton wouldn’t look at the yellow drafts,” Pam said.

“Never,” Casey said.

So I’d heard. “And no one had, say, just dumped some there?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Nope.”

“Nuh-uh.”

I made a note. For Rachel and the girls, it was yes on the cake at the door; no on the yellow pages. For the police, I recalled, it had been no on the cake and yes on the yellow pages. Something kept bugging me about the yellow pages, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

If I could just separate all this from the horrible fact of Keith Appleton’s murder, it would be a fun puzzle.

The old problem of withholding information from the police reared its head again. I now had information from Rachel, Pam, Liz, and Casey that would be useful to Virgil and Archie in establishing a timeline. I also had that clue from Keith’s cousin that he was seeing someone. I assumed the police could track her down even without a name and probably had done so already. Wasn’t that the first thing they did, look to the spouse or significant other?

I wished they’d told me if they found a girlfriend in Keith’s life. More than that, I wished I had an official role in the investigation, but how realistic was that? Both Virgil and Archie had made it clear that I was useless at best, a hindrance at worst.

I’d encouraged all four girls to go to the police with the truth about their tramping on the crime scene. Maybe that was it, as far as my responsibility as a citizen. Should I waste time reporting to the police and nagging the girls, or wouldn’t it be better if I could just figure everything out first and hand everyone the solution? That process worked well with my puzzle editor. Why not with the Henley PD?

Yeah, right.

My interview with the girls had been so satisfactory, I almost forgot about the boxes and the dean. Pam had given me a ride home. As we’d approached my driveway and I’d dug out my spare remote control for the garage door, I’d had the fantasy wish that the boxes might have reappeared.

No such luck.

At three in the afternoon on Sunday, alone in my house, I had approximately nineteen hours before the president’s meeting, followed immediately by my meeting with the dean, at which time I needed to have either the boxes or a good story.

I checked my messages. There was nothing that shed light on my current state. Even a ransom note would have been welcome. I imagined: “Give me an A in applied statistics and I’ll return the boxes.”

“Deal,” I’d have said.

A message from Ariana reminded me about the next beading class where we would make “fun, fantastical, magical luggage tags.” Ariana liked to note that her December 5 birthday was the same as Walt Disney’s. I pointed out that the same day in the same year was also the birthday of Heisenberg, the quantum physicist who came up with the uncertainty principle.

I wished I could fit something fun or magical anywhere on my to-do list.

I left a text message for Bruce. “Where R U? Where’s my car? I need U.”