The Square Root of Murder (33 page)

“Gil,” I said, loudly, in case Bruce was listening. “What are you doing here?”

As if I didn’t know.

It didn’t surprise me that “breaking and entering gracefully” might be part of an army reserve soldier’s skill set.

“Why, Sophie, why?” Gil asked, a sad look on her face.

Wasn’t that a more appropriate question from me to her? Not the time for technicalities, however.

Gil had a good four inches on me, and more than a few pounds. Moreover, she’d spent her life building up strength in physically demanding jobs, whereas, except for the occasional bike ride and kicking the exercise ball out of my way in the garage, the most athletic thing I’d done this summer was sharpening my puzzle pencils.

It was lighter in this area since the back window had no shades, and now, no glass either. I thought of running to the window and waving and screaming madly for help, but Gil was between me and the window, and the alley seemed deserted anyway. I could turn and run out through the sales floor, but I had a feeling she was quicker than I was. Wrong or not, I envisioned emergency workers like Gil able to run at the speed of light.

I saw that Gil’s eyes were tear streaked, her face a map of despair. She inserted her hand into one of the vest pockets. I clutched at my shirt and swallowed audibly. She pulled out a tissue and wiped her eyes. I relaxed. Sort of.

“We should talk, Gil,” I said.

Good luck with that
, I added to myself.

Gil shifted from one leg to the other, nearly hopping off the floor. “The funny thing is I knew I blew it, going back, moving the cake inside, adding those thesis pages. Overkill.” Poor word choice, I thought. “But when I saw that Rachel was going up to his office”—this came out as a hiss—“I couldn’t resist. I knew I should leave well enough alone but I wanted to be sure the little tart was suspect number one.”

“Tart? You think Rachel and Hal—”

Gil stopped hopping and began rocking on the heels of her heavy athletic shoes. She seemed to be warming up for . . . I didn’t want to think what.

“It doesn’t matter if they did or they didn’t. Rachel wanted it and Hal’s weak. God, is he weak. He took it on the chin for years from the great Dr. Appleton. The slights, the public insults, and then the letter, the final straw.”

Except for Gil’s deranged look and the smashed window, a passerby might have thought she was witnessing two girlfriends talking things over, albeit one more agitated than the other.

I began to relax. Maybe Gil actually had come to talk. She hadn’t threatened me physically. Yet. I checked the alley for a dark sedan, but the broken window was too narrow to provide much of a view from where I stood. Most likely she’d followed me here from campus, or she might have been on my tail all day for that matter.

Ergo, I reasoned, if she’d wanted to do me harm she’d have taken one of a wealth of other opportunities.

I was safe. Gil needed to talk; that was all.

Gil had mentioned a letter as the final straw. I went into the bluffing mode Ariana had taught me and that had served me well with the dean.

“You needed to remove that letter from the files in Keith’s office.”

Gil threw up her hands; her face took on an angry expression, directed at me.

Not safe anymore, if I ever was.

“See, you had to butt in and take those files away, Sophie. I was there, you know, parked right around the corner. I was on my way to go through his office but you got to it first. I knew immediately what you’d done. There just wasn’t time the day before to stand there and sift through all his poisonous correspondence.”

Another nice choice of words. I needed Virgil’s advice on how to deal with a crazy killer. Actually I needed Virgil’s gun. With neither at my disposal, I chose the sympathetic route, at the same time looking around for something I could use as a weapon if the need arose. I held on as long as possible to the delusion that the need hadn’t already arisen.

Ariana’s back room served as a storage area, among its many uses, with boxes and bits of inventory everywhere. The workshop table held unfinished projects and sharp tools—scissors, pliers, even a wrench—but none longer than a few inches. I’d have to close the gap between us to grab one, and even if I could bring myself to attack her at close range, it would be child’s play for her to take me down. I longed for a remotely operated weapon. The only one I had was my brain and it was currently on hold.

I woke it up and tried my skills at communication.

“I know you absolutely had to get that letter from Keith’s files,” I said, now a master of the big bluff.

Gil’s face sank into a deeper frown and she stood still for a moment. “The all-powerful, well connected Keith Appleton drafted a letter to the doctoral committee at Massachusetts University requesting a review of Hal’s thesis and asking them to his revoke his degree.”

I was genuinely shocked. “Why would he do that?”

She gave me a screwy look. “You know how much he wanted to discredit my husband. He had no respect for MU, for one thing. Thought Henley should have as few faculty as possible from a state college. Hal and I think he had a physicist friend from some stupid Ivy League school that he wanted Fran to hire in Hal’s place.”

“That sounds awful.” Agree with the captor, that was my plan.

“Keith researched some archaic standards about how many words you’re allowed to cite from another work and claimed that Hal had violated an old guideline. He showed Hal the letter, offering not to send it if Hal withdrew his name as a candidate for the degree.”

Gil bit her lip. Her eyes stared beyond me while her feet beat to an inaudible rhythm.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, wondering too late how smart it was to keep reminding her of my presence.

“We thought he’d changed his mind. We told him how much Hal needed this job, with Timmy headed for private school. Without the degree, he’d be so limited . . .” Gil threw her hands up. She’d made the best case she could. “But once Hal graduated, Keith brought the letter out again. I knew the police wouldn’t find it because he stuck it in a file labeled ‘Graduation Speeches.’ He had the nerve to show us where he was burying it.”

Keith’s office was a veritable hot bed of material for a tabloid, all in plain sight under innocuous labels. I was more certain than ever that somewhere in those boxes I’d ferried out of Franklin Hall was a piece of paper with research on me that he’d been keeping for leverage, should he ever have needed it.

Hal wasn’t in Keith’s department. Why would he bother vetting Hal’s thesis unless Gil was right and he simply wanted to hire his friend? Lucy’s defense of her boyfriend, that Keith wanted all medical workers to be from the top of their class, didn’t work here. Physicists didn’t do open heart surgery. But then, what did giving a baby up for adoption have to do with Dean Underwood’s academic credentials?

I was back to labeling my deceased former colleague “ruthless.”

“That was a terrible thing for Keith to do,” I told Gil.

“See, I knew you’d understand all this, Sophie, and I wish there had been a way to get your support before all this happened.”

Nothing had “happened.” Gil had killed Keith by her own hand. But once again I felt guilty—not only had I not befriended Lucy-the-new-girl, but I’d missed a chance to be pals with Gil and therefore have a chance to prevent Keith’s murder.

It was a lot to bear for a simple math teacher.

While keeping up my end of this life-and-death conversation, I’d been keeping up my search for a potential weapon. I knew there were knives in the drawer under the microwave oven. And there was always the flame from the small gas stove. And spray paint on a shelf in the sales area. Nothing I could reasonably reach or use. I’d already stopped fiddling with the phone in my pocket afraid that, instead of contacting help, I’d set off a ringtone and anger Gil beyond her current red-faced state.

My best chance was if my call had gotten through to Bruce and he’d heard what was happening. Unfortunately no police sirens accosted my ear.

I tried another bluff: Assume Gil was through with me. She could go back out the window and I could be on my way. I took a breath and started toward the table with the binder and handwriting material.

“Well, I need to pick up something—” I said.

Gil grabbed me by the arm.

It was worth a try.

She put her other hand in her pocket. This time she came out with a needle.

“If only you’d minded your own business, Sophie,” Gil said, seeming honestly broken up about the fact that she had to kill me.

With great effort, my adrenaline winning temporarily over Gil’s muscle and skill, I twisted my arm and pulled away. The unnatural movement sent my shoulder into a spasm. Small price to pay for freedom.

I backed up as far as I could in the crowded space, aiming for the beaded curtain. In the brief tussle, Gil had moved between me and the curtain and I found myself practically sitting on the worktable I’d sat at such a short time ago, blithely stringing beads into a little key chain.

Gil held the needle as if it were a dagger, waving her arm, ready to thrust.

“What would killing me accomplish?” I asked, holding my arms tight across my chest. “Bruce knows all about the handwriting and Hal’s false confession. And it’s going to be so obvious if you use that needle.”

What was I saying? Was I asking Gil to shoot me or stab me instead?

Gil didn’t bother to answer my question. It was clear that she’d lost it and wasn’t thinking past the moment. She lunged at me. I swung away and the needle ended up stabbing a large bag of cotton balls meant for the crafts section. I hoped it could be that easy; that the poison threat was over. There were still two pockets in her vest with unknown weapons, however, and even a weaponless Gil could knock me out in a heartbeat.

She lowered her arm. Had I managed to talk a killer out of a second murder? I didn’t trust her.

I revisited the idea of making a run for it, through the curtain, through the shop, and out the front door.

The curtain.

At last, I had a way to slow Gil down.

I knew I’d suffer Ariana’s wrath if my plan worked, but it was my only chance of survival.

I took a breath and made a sudden dash for the beaded curtain. I arrived there with my arms up. Ignoring the pain in my shoulder, I crossed the threshold into the sales area. I turned quickly to face the curtain and pulled down with all my might, grabbing the strings of beads and wrenching the heavy curtain from its mooring at the top of the doorframe.

As I hoped, the curtain came crashing down, the strings broke, and thousands—a million?—of tiny purple and green beads rained behind me.

By the time Gil could react to my flight, she was fighting off an avalanche of beads. I heard her slip and fall and crash into a counter, knocking more beads to the floor. The sound as the beads splattered behind me was sweeter than that of a cool summer rain.

I was almost at the front door. I heard Gil scramble behind me to regain her footing. I opened the door to the sounds of police sirens and the screeching brakes of two Henley PD squad cars outside.

Bruce had figured it out. Who said cell phones were an unnecessary luxury?

A moment later a female officer caught me as I fell into her arms and the other three ran into the store.

When the officer patted my back to assure me I was safe, tiny purple and green beads fell out of my shirt, onto the ground.

The romantic dinner for two turned into a midnight potluck with Bruce and me joined by Ariana and Virgil. We stretched the pasta and mushroom sauce with a large salad provided by Ariana and an extra large pizza ordered by Virgil.

“I really like pepperoni better than steak,” Virgil said, reminding me of my promise to cook him a better dinner some day.

“What a relief,” I said, swiping my hand across my brow.

We ate as though we’d been lost in the desert for a week, which, in a sense, was true.

As hard as we tried to avoid conversation about what had put Henley College on the front pages of Boston newspapers and YouTube, we strayed now and then.

We talked briefly of the tortuous route Gil Bartholomew had traveled on the weekend of the murder. She had to take measures to get what she needed for a lethal dose of a chemical that otherwise was stocked in small medicinal quantities. She had to murder Keith at a time when everyone else was busy partying. She worked hard to frame Rachel, then deepen the frame by adding to the crime scene. Who knew how long ago she’d retrieved yellow pages from the trash. She had to track down the files from Keith’s office, steal them, remove what she wanted, and take them back to Franklin Hall.

“Why did she return the boxes, again?” Ariana asked, confused by the timeline of people in and out of the deceased Keith Appleton’s office. “And what happened to Sophie’s usable discards?”

Virgil shrugged. “I’ll bet you’ll see those discards down at the Main Street Thrift Shop. As for the boxes of files, she probably just didn’t want to get caught with them. Otherwise she’d have to destroy all those files and boxes and that would take time, and also attract attention. A midnight drop at the school was an easy disposal method. One time, back in Boston, this bank robber took a briefcase—”

“Virge.” Bruce interrupted his friend in an attempt to get us off the crime tack.

“Never mind,” Virgil said, grabbing a few circles of pepperoni from the pizza, still in its box.

I couldn’t help apologizing over and over to Ariana about the mess I’d left in her shop. Between the undoing of the beaded curtain and the counter of bead trays Gil had knocked over, it would be many days before the inventory at A Hill of Beads was back in place.

Ariana waved away my mortification. “I’ve been wanting to reorganize anyway,” she said. “And I’m going to order this neat velvety, shimmery curtain that I’ve had my eye on for the back room.”