The Square Root of Murder (31 page)

“You’d be surprised at how many people do confess eventually. Sometimes they can hold out just so long and then guilt takes over.”

“Maybe it’s a false confession. Didn’t something like one hundred people confess to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby?” I was reaching.

Virgil gave me a patient smile. “Yeah, it was more like two hundred, as a matter of fact. Because they wanted to be famous. That happens a lot with high-profile crimes.” He aimed an index finger pistol at me. “Your friend Dr. Bartholomew is not going to be famous for this, trust me.”

“There must be some reason—”

“What’s up, Sophie? I thought you wanted this case solved, like yesterday. It turns out you helped a lot. You found the samples. We went over them. I thought we were on the same page.”

“I didn’t want it to be Hal. You weren’t mean to him, were you?”

Virgil laughed. “We weren’t mean to him.”

“Is he here? Can I talk to him?”

Virgil shook his head, sadly I thought. “His wife is in there, and then, he’s . . . off in the van.”

Gil. Timmy. It came to me again how profoundly they would be affected by this turn of events.

When Gil appeared in the desk area moments later, I rushed over to her.

“I’m so sorry,” I blurted.

Gil looked a wreck and seemed to want to avoid a hug of condolence. Not that she ever looked really made up, but this evening there was no sign of grooming or that she cared. “I have to go,” she said.

“Can I help with Timmy? I could take him for a while.”

“My sister is coming to pick him up.” Gil seemed to stare past me, her voice on automatic. It occurred to me she might blame me for her husband’s plight.

In a way, so did I.

 

 

I drove home slowly, not having the energy to push hard on the accelerator pedal. I’d noticed another voicemail from Rachel, but I had no interest in talking to her.
She’s not the enemy
, I reminded myself.
It’s not her fault that Hal was on his way to jail.
I still needed some time before I could show her the excitement she was due at not having to endure any more trauma.

I arrived home to rooms that were empty except for a note from Bruce.

“Out gardening. Dinner at eight?” it read.

“Gardening” was our code word for when Bruce brought me flowers. I wondered if he’d heard about Hal. If so, I hoped only through his friend Virgil and not because the news had already been broadcast to the twenty-four hundred Henley students and faculty and the entire population of the town. A better theory was that Bruce saw my empty vases and decided to fill them, as he often did. If he didn’t know of Hal’s arrest, we wouldn’t have to talk about it and it might go away.

In any case, I didn’t deserve flowers. I should have minded my own business, as the dean warned.

I’d wandered into my office and hit the key to wake up my computer, a built-in response when I first got home in the evening. The last active screen came up—the newspaper archives from my research on the dean. My finger seemed to move on its own to the delete key, ready to put an end to all aspects of my preoccupation with the murder investigation and the sea change it had brought into our lives.

Hal’s confession had given me no closure. Along with that unsettled feeling, Ariana’s voice in my head nagged me, urging me to follow through on our role-playing game. Should I confront the dean? Did any of it matter now?

I decided I had to finish the job.

My computer clock read five fifty-five. There might still be time to catch the dean in her office. I picked up the phone and dialed. Courtney answered and I quickly identified myself.

“Good, you’re still there,” I added.

“You think so?” Courtney asked.

“Well, not good for you.”

“Or my social life.”

“I can understand that, but I need to talk to her.” Naming Courtney’s boss didn’t seem necessary. “It’s urgent.”

“Quelle twist. It might even be worth hanging around.”

“I can guarantee it.”

“Now I’m really curious.”

“Go on to your social life and I promise to tell you tomorrow.”

“She’s about to leave, but I’ll put you through. You’ll definitely have to tell me tomorrow, though, okay?”

“Promise.”

The dean took her time getting to the phone. Being on hold was better than sitting outside her office, in any case, and I made use of the time by sorting through my mail and email and checked my calendar to see what was coming up the rest of the summer. I clicked on August and saw that because of my laxity the last few days, an important birthday had almost gotten by me. Bruce’s niece, Melanie, would be turning ten years old in a couple of weeks, on August fourth, the birthday of John Venn. We needed to make plans for a significant present and a visit to Boston to celebrate double digits with her.

Bruce had laughed when I’d told him what a great start in life his niece had, born on the same day as the author of definitive texts on logic and the creator of the widely used Venn diagrams. As it turned out, Melanie was outstanding in math. I doubted my stream of math-related presents and my online tutoring of her had more to do with it than her birthday.

Lame music continued to pour in over the line. Where was the dean? Had she guessed what urgent agenda I had with her? Maybe she’d fled to Canada. I was eager to get the meeting over with and return to normal life.

Even my busiest class days during the regular semester were less hectic than today had been. I’d started out with an early breakfast with Lucy, made two trips to the police station, role-played at A Hill of Beads, and now one more errand before I’d let myself enjoy dinner with Bruce.

“What’s this about, Dr. Knowles?” The dean’s voice interrupted the so-called music. I didn’t know which sounded worse.

My mind went blank, trying to make the transition from the mushroom sauce I’d be having soon, to the dean’s shady past. I hadn’t thought through how to get the dean to agree to a meeting where I could use the script Ariana and I had practiced.

“I need to see you,” I stammered.

“What in the world is so urgent?”

“It’s about what’s in a box from Keith Appleton’s office,” I said.

The long pause told me I’d hit on something. I thought I’d been put on hold again, this time without music. Finally I heard the dean’s voice, almost pleading.

“I can explain,” she said.

I was beginning to like the concept of bluffing.

 

 

I pulled into the southwest gate, now fairly used to the deserted look of the campus compared to last week. As I climbed the front steps of the admin building, I wondered if I even needed to rehearse my lines, as modeled by Ariana. It seemed entirely possible that the dean would pour out an unsolicited confession. An easy mark. Who would have thought?

A bigger issue was whether the dean knew of Hal’s arrest. I was sure she or Courtney would have mentioned it if the word had gotten to them.

I asked myself one more time why I was doing this, since the murder case was solved. There was no question that whatever Keith had been holding over the dean, it had not led her to murder him.

Was I trying to get even with Dean Underwood for all the small annoyances she was bent on dealing me? I sincerely hoped not.

On a positive note, I could show the dean what a good researcher I was, ferreting out her past, and therefore deserving of that promotion to full professor. The absurd reasoning made me smile.

I’d come to the realization that getting a promotion wasn’t as important as many other things in my life. If it had been, I would have bowed to the dean’s warning immediately and put my career above my commitment to helping Rachel and, even more important, figuring out who among us was a killer. I’d seen no compromise on the journey to uncover the truth of the event that would mark Henley forever.

The important thing for me now was a sense of completion. I’d done my best on a project and I needed to clear up loose ends, like wrapping up a geometric proof that was particularly sticky.

 

 

The dean was waiting for me this time. As Courtney would have said, quelle twist.

She was standing at her open office door holding a sheet of paper.

“I saw you pull in. Come, Sophie.”

I followed the dean into her office where a pitcher of iced tea—lemon zinger, I guessed—stood ready next to two glasses. The dean poured tea and handed me a glass. Nothing about this meeting was as usual. Even if it was Courtney who’d prepared the tea before she left, here was the dean serving it to me. Not your ordinary Tuesday evening.

Witnessing the dean’s dejected state clouded my delight in maybe figuring out the dean’s secret and her need to get her hands on the material in Keith’s office.

The dean held out the sheet of paper. “This is what you were looking for.”

“I don’t really need to see it.”

“I need to tell you.”

It appeared Virgil was right. Once people got on a path to confession, it was impossible to stop them. “I was a college student, and I tried to do the right thing. I think about my decision every day of my life.”

That was quite a bit of regret for a little hash.

I took the paper and saw immediately what it was. A birth certificate.

“This is—”

“Yes, that’s the birth certificate. I assume you found out about it another way. Maybe Dr. Appleton told you? It’s not unlikely that he’d bring a partner into his schemes.”

I started. “What? No, he didn’t. Make me a partner,” I said. I was still trying to process the new information. The dean had a child. The simple sentence sounded like the start of a riddle.

“I’m sorry I suggested your complicity, Sophie. I should have known you wouldn’t resort to something like this. You never have. You’ve always been open and honest with me.”

After all these years, was this a compliment from the dean? “I . . . uh . . . I’ve tried.”

“You’ve given me every reason to trust you.” She smiled. “Except for the story about the boxes.”

I returned her smile and hung my head. “Sorry.”

“That’s the copy from Keith’s files on me. It was in an envelope, along with family birth certificates and licenses and such, marked ‘Appleton Family History,’ as a security measure against an unlawful rifling of his desk by an intruder.”

Or by the police in the event that he was murdered.

“So you were fairly confident the police wouldn’t single it out as relevant to this case.”

“I hoped not.”

I had to be clear. I held up the paper. “This is your baby.” I tried to make it sound like a statement, consistent with the bluff that I’d known all along.

The dean took a long sip of tea and came back slowly. “I had a son out of wedlock. I was a few months from graduation and had my life all planned out, plans that didn’t include motherhood.” She sucked in her breath. “I gave him up for adoption.”

“And Keith found out.”

She nodded. “I think he was always looking for ways to discredit me, not for the sake of it, or to be mean, but to gain some leverage for the changes he saw as good for Henley College. And as we know, in today’s new computer world”—here the dean’s expression said she’d liked the old world better—“it’s easy to find just about anything if you’re determined.”

I went back to “out of wedlock.” Who even used that phrase anymore? I thought it had gone the way of “love child.”

“But surely if this came out, it wouldn’t threaten your career,” I said. “Would the board of trustees really care about something so far back in your past? It’s hard to see how Keith could have used the information as a bargaining chip. You did nothing criminal.” Like smoking pot, for example.

“Keith knew the technicalities didn’t matter to me. It was the attention and the embarrassment it would cause me after my firm stand on—”

“Everything,” I said, without thinking.

Was that an audible laugh coming from Dean Phyllis Underwood’s mouth?

“I know I’ve been hard on you, Sophie, and there’s no reason you should give me any consideration. You can keep that copy and do what you want with it.”

I tore up the certificate and handed her the pieces.

To make this a truly memorable Tuesday, Dean Underwood and I shared a silent embrace.

I rolled down my windows and sat in my car in the parking lot for a few minutes, letting the new information gel. I’d learned a lot, and not just that Dean Underwood had a son out there somewhere. I couldn’t imagine her having to make a decision like that, and living with it for the rest of her life. It might account for a measurable percent of her overall disgruntled outlook on life.

I drew a huge red X around the picture I’d created of Phyllis Underwood lying around with her scraggly-haired friends in an orange-fringed caftan snacking on brownies laced with marijuana.

If I were writing an essay about what I did this summer, I’d title it “Research Gone Wrong.”

There were so many more lessons to be learned about the complexity of people I thought I knew. The picture of Keith Appleton unfolded with more twists and turns than the most difficult metal twisty puzzle. I envisioned his calendar: Ten A.M., offer Woody the janitor a generous condolence gift. Noon, wander the second floor physics labs in Ben Franklin Hall and find a way to insult Hal Bartholomew. One P.M., send Delia the niece an unsolicited financial aid package for a private high school. Spend the rest of the afternoon digging into the dean’s past for leverage and thinking of ways to thwart Sophie Knowles’s policies and procedures recommendations.

Then there was Hal himself and the side I never could have predicted. And three cute young things, college chemistry majors, who were unethical and bold enough to sit at a computer and change their grades in the very room where their teacher lay dead. Granted, according to Rachel, only his feet were clearly visible, but they knew about the rest of him.