A Function of Murder

by Ada Madison

  “Hey, Bruce,” I said.

  “You must be doing math,” he said.

  “Lucky guess?”

  “Not really. You sound a lot cheerier than I’ve heard you since…well, in a while. Nice to hear.”

  “Sorry if I’ve been a pain.”

  “Not so much that I won’t be there in a couple of hours, with dinner.”

  Now I was really cheery.

  Knowing Bruce would be arriving soon grounded me. That he was bringing dinner gave me hope that the weekend could be salvaged. I imagined I smelled basil and interpreted it as a paranormal message from Bruce that he was bringing Italian. I guessed I missed Ariana more than I’d expected to.

  It took only a moment to realize how selfish my thoughts had been. Neither the weekend nor the rest of their lives could be salvaged for Mayor Graves’s family. A wife had lost her husband; a teenager would grow up without his father; and perhaps the nation had missed out on a worthy statesman.

  My father had died of cancer the winter before my third birthday, and, though Margaret did her best to keep him alive for me through stories and photographs, I was always aware of the loss. As a teenager I’d been frustrated, not knowing whether I remembered his purported beautiful piano playing, or whether it was simply Margaret’s mesmerizing descriptions that I recalled. Now it hardly mattered. I found myself wishing I could have told him I loved him. I was grateful Margaret had been around for me to tell her that often.

  Cody Graves was old enough to be able to distinguish between reality and fiction, but I knew that living with the loss might be even harder for one who had grown to know his father.

  I hoped Nora’s and Cody’s last words to Mayor Graves were what they would have wanted.

  I had every confidence in Virgil Mitchell and his colleagues at the Henley PD, but I also had a strong urge to try to help them solve the murder case. I couldn’t say why, exactly. It wasn’t as though I inserted myself into every homicide case in the city. Nor into every Bat Phone call Bruce and his crew received. They had their jobs and I had mine.

  If I had to put words to the feeling, I’d say it had to do with the connection that Mayor Graves had tried to establish with me at the end of his life, from his telephone message to my cell, to his nonverbal reaching out to me on the rickety commencement stage, to his seeking entry into my office, and finally, his dying attempt to tell me something as he staggered toward the fountain.

  With what I judged to be uncharacteristic tunnel vision, I’d glommed on to Zeeman Academy as holding the key to the mayor’s murder. Admittedly, my feelings were partly due to my refusal to believe that anyone associated with the Henley campus could have been involved in the crime. I conveniently brushed aside the nagging worry about a possible intimate relationship between Kira and the deceased. I also dismissed the hostility between the mayor and the Sizemore sibs. They were, after all, Henley faculty.

  The controversy I’d been witnessing revolved around the charter schools, Zeeman in particular. I ticked off the incidents: the way the mayor had been hanging around the Zeeman offices looking at documentation of one kind or another, and his argument with Superintendent Collins at the pre-graduation reception. Never mind that your average mayor and your average superintendent might just as easily be two guys arguing about the basketball play-offs. But Zeeman came up again in the anger toward the mayor that Nichole Johnson and her family had expressed at the Franklin Hall ceremony and at the Inn at Henley dinner.

  And, looming larger than life, Mayor Graves had mentioned it to me directly—I heard it again in my mind. Something’s troubling me about Zeeman.

  The police had to deal with all the areas of the mayor’s life. I was sure they were hard at work unearthing motives that members of Mayor Graves’s family may have had—perhaps there was a second cousin once removed who owed him money. If the waste management conflict was any clue, there must have been a host of political enemies and business associates, and possibly every city of Henley citizen.

  I convinced myself I’d be best at tackling the one area I had some expertise in—school issues. I planned to get to Zeeman Academy well before my class in the morning and see if I could get some idea of what the problems were. I grabbed another water and went back to my office.

  To get the most out of the time tomorrow, I needed to prepare. I went online and found the .edu site for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It shouldn’t be hard to find a clear presentation of how charter schools were created, funded, and managed. And, I supposed, closed down.

  A few basic facts would be a good start.

  I clicked on glossary/definitions and immediately learned that a charter is a license. So far so good. A charter is issued by the board, I read. But which board? There were two boards referenced in the description, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Board of Trustees. One paragraph, labeled with a string of numbers, explained that the Board of Trustees was entrusted to supervise and control the charter schools, independent of the school committee. On the other hand, a memorandum of understanding governed the funding of the charter schools by the school district, and on the third hand, budgets were to be submitted to the superintendent of schools.

  What? Neither “school committee” nor “school district,” both of which were listed in that paragraph, had the benefit of an entry in the list of definitions. Were they synonyms? Different entities?

  Apparently the superintendent, Patrick Collins in the case of Henley, had budgetary oversight of all schools, charter or not. Was he also in charge of the school committee? What about the school district? Was that simply a geographic designation, or was it another governing board? Or committee?

  Highest on my list of questions was where the mayor fit into the charter school picture. Did he have veto power over all the mountains of paperwork such an organization must generate? Was he a member ex officio of any of the bodies mentioned in the circuitous narrative that passed as a page of definitions? Did he preside over all the bodies?

  Impossible to figure out. I was sure it was my fault. Certainly the town’s officers and various departments knew what they were doing. If not beyond my level of intelligence, the complexities of politics and city management were definitely outside my training and skill set. I longed for a page or two of simple text on the application of second-order differential equations to mechanical vibrations.

  I thought back to Kira’s claim that Mayor Graves wanted to save Zeeman Academy, to keep it a charter school but without a suspect grading system. I needed to know if he could influence that decision. Could he make or break it unilaterally, for example?

  I felt a twinge of gratitude for the simplicity of the Henley College administrative org chart. Whether we liked or agreed with an official or not, at least we could always figure out who was in charge of what.

  I’d done all I could. I needed Bruce to appear with dinner and rescue me from the quagmire of .edu.

  Rring, rring. Rring, rring.

  Not Bruce, but any interruption was welcome.

  “Dr. Knowles, it’s Kira. I feel like such a dope.”

  “Hi, Kira.” Noncommittal until I learned which aspect of her life Kira had examined and found wanting.

  “I’ve been so selfish and not even thinking of poor Cody Graves, and even Edward’s wife.”

  There was a lot of that going around. “It’s a hard thing to grasp, Kira. You seem to be feeling better, though.”

  “Yeah, I guess. I have a favor to ask you, Dr. Knowles. I would really, really like to offer condolences to Edward’s family. I read online that they’ll be receiving—that’s how they put it—on Tuesday. They’re setting something up at the city hall. The family will be there. Mrs. Graves is on her way back from Rome—”

  “Mrs. Graves is where?” I asked, wondering who had been on the stage at Henley if the mayor’s wife was in Rome.

  “She took off for a charity mission in Europe right after graduation, then, of course she had to turn right around and com
e back after…”

  “How do you know this?”

  And why didn’t I know it? Virgil must have known it when I suggested I’d be dropping in on the mayor’s wife. That’s what he’d meant when he said Nora wasn’t home. An understatement if I ever heard one.

  “It’s on all the news, Dr. Knowles. Don’t you get it on your browser home page?” Kira sounded disappointed in her professor. “Anyway, the whole public is invited on Tuesday morning, but I don’t want to go alone.”

  And here I was thinking that my friendship with a cop was a better connection than the average Internet user had available.

  “I’m surprised they’re ready for a public memorial so soon,” I said.

  “The Facebook notice said something about how Ms. Eddington, the acting mayor, wants to give the city closure. I’m sure she also wants to introduce herself to the community.”

  I was getting a little tired of being a few steps behind on the news, both official and unofficial. And I wasn’t spending enough time getting Likes on social media. That phenomenon did originate on a college campus, after all.

  Once again, I came close to asking Kira point-blank what, if anything, she and the mayor had going on, catching her off topic and off guard. But she still seemed too fragile for such a confrontation. I wished Fran were on the line. She’d find a way to determine who was seeing whom.

  After my talk with Kira at the Coffee Filter, I was close to concluding that the relationship was all in her mind. Either way, I didn’t want to be responsible for what would happen when the facts came spilling out into reality.

  In the end, I wimped out, deciding not even to ask whether there was some reason she didn’t want to go to city hall alone. “Wouldn’t all your friends from the campaign headquarters be attending? Or Jeanne and the others?” I asked.

  “I don’t exactly have a lot of friends at headquarters. None that I can call up, anyway. And Jeanne is going to hook up with her boyfriend in Boston for the rest of the week before she starts her summer job, and Bethany is so out of here, packing for this trip out west. Nicole—I don’t even want to know if she and her family plan to pay their respects. So will you come with me, Dr. Knowles?”

  I needed a stall. “I’ll have to see what the college administration is planning, Kira. In case it overlaps.”

  “Okay, I understand.”

  I hated that she sounded so despondent. “Is anyone around the dorms today?” I asked.

  “No. I might take off myself. I have to leave by the end of the week anyway, when they close for a month. I might crash at Megan’s after that. Or maybe Bethany’s cousin Matt’s. One of Matt’s roommates might be moving in a few days. Or I might stay with a friend of Jeanne’s.”

  That was a lot of “mights” to hang one’s living arrangements on. I’d forgotten what it was like to crash anywhere there was a couch or a patch of bare floor. Between my junior and senior years in college, I’d backpacked through Germany carrying a couple of changes of clothes, a tour book, and a toothbrush. I’d made no reservations, landing here and there, connecting with other “kids” on a tour now and then, finding a hostel, or curling up on my backpack on someone’s living room floor. I often didn’t know from one day to the next which train I’d take to the next city, or where I might spend the night.

  At some point in the last twenty years, I’d replaced that spirit of adventure with one of stability, as good a word as any to describe my current lifestyle. I was now attached to my little cottage, with its bright yellow kitchen and cozy den. I loved my home office and my lavender bedroom, even my washer and dryer. In my travels now, I traded only up, adding amenities like maid service and breakfast in bed. Bruce and I hiked often on vacation, during the day, but I liked the security of knowing I’d be taking my shower at night in a modern facility with towels even larger and more plush than the ones I owned.

  “Dr. Knowles, will you call me and let me know if you’ll go to city hall with me?”

  I’d almost forgotten the start of the conversation. “I’ll call you, Kira. I’d better go now and take this other call.”

  A call that might possibly come in. I was becoming hopeless as a role model. As I brooded over this, my cell vibrated once, spinning a bit next to my keyboard. A text from Bruce with a quick message: “ETA 15.”

  I left my office to put water on for coffee and set the table—the least I could do.

  Buzz. Buzz.

  Bruce was early. Why was he ringing the doorbell? Unless he forgot his key. I went to the door.

  And opened it to the police.

  Virgil Mitchell wiped his feet on my outdoor mat, out of habit, and entered the kitchen.

  “I see you were expecting me,” he said, glancing at the table set for two.

  “Uh-huh, but I’d better add a third place, in case Bruce drops in.”

  Virgil laughed and plopped down on a high stool by my kitchen island, one that I had to climb up to. He was in his Sunday best—jeans and an HPD polo shirt. His old brown briefcase looked out of place at his side. I gathered it meant he wasn’t off duty, simply off dress code.

  “A beer?” I asked.

  “Just water.”

  No beer, and his smile had already disappeared. Virgil was definitely on duty.

  I set a large glass of ice water in front of him and took a seat on a stool opposite him. “Having a good day?” I asked, mimicking his downturned expression.

  “If you mean did I keep my cool while a guy in handcuffs reminded me that his taxes pay my salary and if I lay a hand on him he’ll get his second cousin’s friend’s wife who answers the phones at a law firm to figure out how to sue me and the whole department.”

  I pushed the package of cookies that I’d opened at lunch toward him. “Makes my day seem like a party,” I said.

  He snagged a handful of chocolate snaps and seemed to swallow one whole, then pulled a folder out of his briefcase. “Our tech guys spent the morning dumping the mayor’s computer. These are some of the emails from the past week.” He slid the folder across the counter, working around the pile of catalogs, this morning’s juice glass, and a bowl of fruit that had seen better days. Bruce was due to tease me about never making good on my promise to bake banana bread with the overripe stock.

  “They got to this pretty quickly,” I said.

  “They printed out the easy ones, still in his inbox. Now they need to go in and get the ones that were deleted. And remember, this is the mayor we’re talking about. Things have a way of moving a little faster than normal.”

  I opened the folder and riffled through more than a dozen sheets of paper. All of them were emails from Kira to the mayor, dated within the past week. Certain sentences stood out as I flipped through, growing more agitated with each one.

  I hate to see you so miserable, Edward. Remember I’m a phone call away.

  Say the word and I can be at our spot in ten minutes.

  I wish you’d let me stay last night. You know you’re my number one priority.

  I can’t wait until the campaign is over and you can have a normal life. I’m here for you.

  I blew out a slow breath and tucked the emails back into the folder. My theory that the relationship was in Kira’s mind was now on rocky ground. “Did he respond to any of these?”

  “Not that we found so far.” Virgil sucked in his cheeks. A sign that he was unhappy about something. And that it most likely had to do with the person sitting in front of him. Me. “Is there something you should have told me about this student, Sophie?”

  I knew he didn’t want to hear that Kira was from a small town in the Central Valley of California, that she was nearly six feet tall, on the heavy side, with a short bob that resembled Fran’s, but looked better on Fran. “She was one of this year’s valedictorians,” I offered. “With a grant for graduate work at MIT starting in about a month.”

  He let out an exasperated breath, which I should have expected. I wasn’t trying to be difficult, merely protective of Kira while I th
ought about how to respond. I thought about invoking teacher-student confidentiality. If there wasn’t such a thing, there should be.

  “You know that’s not what I’m after. I got that much and more from the interviews the officers did at the scene. I probably could have gotten it from the printed graduation program or the write-up in the newspaper. But she wasn’t just another onlooker at the fountain that night, was she?” Virgil tapped the folder with his index finger. “This Kira Gilmore”—I thought better of correcting him as he pronounced her first name to rhyme with Sky-rah, instead of with Key-rah—“was one of your math majors. And I know the kind of teacher you are, Sophie. You get close. Were you aware of this relationship?”

  I swallowed. “Not exactly.”

  He heaved a sigh of annoyance and gave me a long-practiced withering look. “Sophie?”

  “There was talk.” I held up my hand. “I’d hardly even call it talk. More like innuendo. Until today.”

  “And today?” Virgil made circling motions with both his hands, as if to hurry me along.

  “Today she did mention to me that she loved him. But that’s all.”

  “She said she loved him, and you didn’t think that would be something to pass on to me?”

  “It just happened this morning. And I’m not even sure there’s anything behind it. If I went to you with every dormitory rumor, you’d never get any work done.”

  “I’m the best judge of that. Is there any other little dormitory rumor you want to tell me about?”

  “No. Look, Kira may be a brilliant student, but she’s very immature. I don’t think she’s gone on a date in the four years that I’ve known her, and that would include with boys her own age or with the mayor.”

  “You’re saying this could all be in her head.”

  I nodded. “I think it could be, yes. My guess is that’s the case.”

  “And you think that’s enough to clear her of murder?”

  I swallowed hard. Of course it was. Along with many other things, like the fact that Kira was incapable of hurting someone, other than herself. Disloyal as it seemed, I told Virgil about Kira’s pitiful attempt to blame Nicole.