by Ada Madison
I brushed away the silly thought as I checked that my car doors were locked and that all the systems displayed on my dashboard were at normal levels.
With all this dubious behavior in high places, I wondered if the city of Henley was a candidate for appropriation by the state government. I recalled a precedent. About five years ago, the citizens of the Commonwealth watched the news as the government authorized the complete takeover of a city on the North Shore, something that hadn’t been done since the Great Depression. The city had been collapsing under the weight of the various mob bosses who ran the mayor and even the police. The state seized control, ousted the mayor, and installed a set of Commonwealth-approved managers to turn the city around and eventually return it to its citizens. I wouldn’t put it past my home state to revive the tradition.
But I couldn’t believe Henley was as bad as that. And surely Mayor Graves wasn’t so corrupt. Hadn’t Kira loved him? A questionable recommendation at this point.
Rring, rring. Rring, rring.
My car rang. I hated to interrupt my brilliant organizing session. I was at a stretch of busy city street where it would have been tough to pull over to check the caller ID on my phone. I’d have to either take potluck and answer through my Bluetooth, or let the call go to voice mail. It wasn’t as if I were getting far with my suspect analysis. In fact, I was getting nowhere, other than a few miles closer to home. I might as well take the call.
I clicked the lever to answer my phone through my hands-free system.
“Hello,” I ventured, in the suspicious-sounding tone I used for callers who blocked their ID or whose ID I couldn’t see, as now. My response was meant to carry the attitude that, one, I don’t like taking calls from unknowns; two, you’d better have a really good reason for calling me; and, three, if you’re a solicitor, you can expect an immediate hang-up.
“Professor Knowles?”
I didn’t recognize the voice, “Yes?” Wary, in case this was a call from a textbook publisher trying to influence my choices for the fall semester.
“Hi, it’s Elysse. Elysse Hutchins.”
As if there were more than one Elysse in my life at the moment. I felt a twinge of annoyance. If there had been a receiver in my hand like the old days, I might have hung up. Of course, now all I had to do was push the tiny off button. I didn’t want to risk justifying such a move in a court of law.
“Hi, Elysse,” I said, as calmly as I could.
“I think we ought to meet, don’t you, Professor? I mean, sometimes it’s hard to express yourself by emails.”
I almost jumped in with Yourself or myself? But, no, I’d better think before saying anything sarcastic out loud. What if she was recording the call for future use in a deposition? Or for posting on YouTube?
“When would be good for you?” I asked. Safe enough.
“I’m going to be on campus tomorrow morning. I could meet you in your office.”
I had no plans for tomorrow other than to, possibly, attend the service for Mayor Graves. I could make it easy for Elysse, or I could make it difficult.
I chose something in between. “I can meet you at eight thirty,” I said. Matter-of-fact, not snarky, but fully aware of the sleeping habits of most students, recently graduated or not.
“That’s kind of early.”
I didn’t hear a question, so I didn’t respond. This was not the Professor Sophie Knowles I was proud of, letting someone stew, especially a student. Power corrupts? I hated to think it was true.
Elysse blinked first, after a heavy sigh. “Okay, I guess I can do that.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
“So, are we good, Professor Knowles?”
I took a breath. “I’ll see you in my office tomorrow, Elysse.”
I thought of taking the leftover donuts to the meeting, but that would have been cruel and unusual.
I hoped by tomorrow morning, I’d have lost this attitude and would be ready to be “good” with Elysse.
What should have been a twenty-minute drive from Zeeman to my home was taking twice as long as traffic wisely slowed down during heavy spurts.
I’d gotten off track with my suspect list. And I’d forgotten to look for food. At times like this, I missed Ariana. Her approach to problem solving was decidedly not logical, which was not to say illogical. How her perspective aided me in my analytical approach didn’t exactly compute, but it worked every time. What would Ariana do? I asked myself.
She’d wisely tell me I was doing too much thinking-while-driving, especially in the rain. I took some relaxing breaths and a swig from my water bottle. I fished in my purse on the passenger seat and found a chocolate ball. Since it was wrapped in red foil, I figured it was from Valentine’s Day. Only three months old. It would do.
A little stale, the candy still worked its magic and my mind was ready to shift back into gear, in harmony with the world. Ariana would have been proud of me, making do, without the benefit of hot tea. I acknowledged the reaction I was having to what was undoubtedly the nastiest graduation weekend I’d ever experienced. Could it have been only two days ago? I couldn’t remember a single incident in the past when students, like Nicole Johnson and Jeanne Flowers, had openly dissed the commencement speaker, our own mayor, no less, at what was supposed to be a party in their honor. Had either of them been unhappy enough to stab him? It was hard to picture.
It wasn’t hard to envision Nicole Johnson’s father, Nicholas, in a heightened state of anger, however. I tapped the wheel with three fingers, one for each suspect, but had to withdraw the last one as I recalled again the sight of Mr. Johnson driving off with his family. He couldn’t have been near the campus at the time of the murder, unless he traveled faster than light. I wondered if that would even do it. I’d have to ask a physics prof.
I was left still with Richardson and Collins.
I got sidetracked, not for the first time, wondering if Collins had gone into Franklin Hall looking not specifically for the mayor, but for what Graves left in my office. Maybe Collins picked the lock and retrieved whatever Graves had put in there, when Woody was out of sight. No wonder I couldn’t find it.
I sat at another light and watched the windshield wipers do their orderly thing, back and forth. I wanted to reach out and stop them, freeze them in one spot. My usual method of rearranging a headful of scattered thoughts and facts wasn’t working as well as it should have. Still, I had to continue to get all my—emphasis on my—suspects in one virtual room. I needed a Starbucks; if I was lucky, one that carried their special dark chocolate–covered grahams. Starbucks were everywhere except when you were in desperate need of a mocha and fresh chocolate. Independents were more difficult to spot, but I kept my eye out for a large neon outline of a coffee cup or a clever name like the Coffee Filter.
I pushed on, leaving the expressway for city streets.
The bouncy Sizemore sibs showed up in the lineup of my puzzled mind. I could see why Monty and Mayor Graves were at odds if there had been conflict of interest while they did business together.
I remembered when Monty had just been hired into the adjunct faculty and was trying like crazy to make his mark as a person of importance. He’d made a big deal of the fact that his management consulting company had landed a contract with the city’s public works department. He and his colleagues had undertaken a major project: assessing and evaluating Henley’s infrastructure. I’d listened as Monty took over an informal gathering at lunch, boasting about his ideas for improving road and sidewalk maintenance, outsourcing the waste management function, meeting with union reps, and, in general, being the best thing that had ever happened, not only to Henley College, but to the city of Henley as well. When the news came out that the mayor had terminated their agreement, Monty was silent. It was hard to believe that, according to Kira, it was our trash that had proven his downfall.
Was it because Monty had a reasonable motive for murder that I listed him as suspect number three, after Richardson and Coll
ins, or was I acting simply out of vengeance, because he and his sister had sided with Elysse and her Facebook Friends instead of with me, their colleague? Maybe that was also enough to make Chris suspect number four. Why not? I needed a female on the list, and Chris had, after all, reacted out of proportion to the stakes during the vote on whether the mayor would be our speaker.
I recognized a hulking shortcoming in my method of lining up suspects. Unlike the procedure the Henley PD was tasked to follow, mine focused merely on motive. I’d been neglecting to factor in means and opportunity, which would have taken real police work.
But I doubted even the police would fare well in trying to investigate the means, a simple letter opener, unless they’d found a unique set of fingerprints on the handle. The Henley College letter opener was ubiquitous, in offices throughout the campus and somewhere in the homes of its twenty thousand or so alumnae. Or in the city of Henley landfill, into which they might have been unceremoniously tossed. There was no record or serial number on the letter openers as there would have been for a gun. No lot number or license application. No way of tracking chain of custody. The killer was either brilliant in choosing such a weapon, or incredibly lucky to be standing near it when he or she needed it.
As for opportunity, I could set myself up with a clipboard and some good walking shoes and find out who had been on campus at the time the mayor had come stumbling toward the fountain—toward me, actually—at ten fifteen on Saturday night.
At one time, even pedestrians had to log in after dark to enter a campus gate. Like overall national security in the last ten years, security on the Henley campus had gotten tighter and more sophisticated. The question was whether our system of cameras did as good a job as the old method of posting a guard at every entrance. If we’d gone with the lowest bidder on the cameras, maybe not. In any case, I was sure that, after the events of this past weekend, a high-level meeting of the college administrators and trustees was planned—or had already been held—to evaluate our entire security system. And to decide on a new present for our graduates.
I imagined the police had already looked at footage from Saturday evening. I wished I’d thought to ask Virgil about it at Sunday morning’s donut feast. I doubted he’d have been any more forthcoming about being hunched over a set of monitors all night than he’d been about anything else regarding the case.
Too bad my old friend, Charlie, in the campus security office, had retired. I figured it wouldn’t work to query the new guy while introducing myself to him for the first time. One more dead end among many.
I was fairly convinced that if means and opportunity had already been easily determined by either a clear set of prints on the letter opener or a sharp image of the stabbing on a security monitor, the killer would have been apprehended and we’d all know about it.
Clearly, I was on the right track by focusing on motive. It was such a heady thought that I wondered why I’d never considered entering the police academy.
Rring, rring. Rring, rring.
This time, I welcomed a distraction and clicked on without hesitation.
“Sophie? Fran here.” Whew, someone on my Favorites list. “Where are you?” she asked.
“Driving back from Zeeman in the pouring rain. You sound excited.”
“I’ll bet you haven’t heard.”
“These days, you can count on that.”
“They’ve arrested someone from the campus.”
No wonder phone calls were discouraged while driving. It was all I could do to keep in my lane and not drift into a parked car. “Who?” I asked, gripping the wheel. “Who was arrested?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you trying to cause an accident?”
“Sorry to get your hopes up. And I didn’t realize you were driving or I’d have waited.”
“No, you wouldn’t have.”
“Of course not. Courtney called me.”
“Courtney, the dean’s secretary? Courtney, the junior chem major? Or Courtney—”
“The dean’s Courtney,” Fran interrupted. “So, very decent cred.”
Courtney Dixon was a good buddy to Fran and me, keeping us tuned to the pulse of the campus and the whims of the academic dean, briefing us ahead of time about the agenda when we were summoned to her boss’s office. A young woman with the reddest curly locks I’d ever seen in person, Courtney had the level head and calm manner of an old woman with gray hair wrapped in a bun. Her cred was the best, as Fran said.
“I’m listening,” I said to Fran.
“Courtney tried to reach you, by the way, but couldn’t get through. I figured you had your phone off during class.”
The rain was heavy and I needed to concentrate on driving or on Fran. I chose Fran and pulled over at the next strip mall. I sat facing a chain shoe store and wondered what it would be like to be a clerk there and have no homework, no students to worry about. The grass is always greener. I wondered why Margaret’s sayings were so much on my mind lately. Maybe because she’d always seemed to have the answers.
“Tell me everything,” I said.
“There’s not that much to tell yet. Courtney was in the student union building going over some things with the construction crew for the remodel of the gym. You know, the girls have been complaining about the showers and the crappy lockers for the past hundred years; the boys are here one year, put in a complaint, and voilà, we fix the problem.”
“What else is new?” I asked. I knew Fran would take it as I’d intended, a rhetorical question with many levels of meaning.
“Courtney happened to see a cop car out the window over by Admin. She waited a couple of minutes, then saw them come out of the building taking someone with them in the car. She was kicking herself for not being in her office, where she’d have been up close and personal to the action.”
“Did she see handcuffs?”
“I don’t know. Why?” Fran asked.
“They could have just been taking someone in for questioning.”
“I love knowing someone with insider information on police procedure,” Fran said. “I’ve been dying to talk to you. No one’s around campus today, except a few people upstairs in Franklin. Either people are gone or they don’t have a clue about the pickup.”
“Lucky humanities types don’t have labs to clean up and equipment to put away.”
Not that Fran and I had much more than plotters and calculators to worry about. We did have assorted boxes of manipulables for our teacher training seminar, but nothing like the overwhelming number of pieces of glassware, magnets, and specimens on the floors above us in Franklin.
“Wouldn’t it be great to have this ordeal over with, so we can stop worrying about our majors?”
I knew Fran meant Kira most of all. She was as concerned as I was about Kira’s current state and what may or may not have been going on between her and the mayor and what it may or may not have led to. I’d told Fran about the one-way emails I’d seen, swearing her to secrecy. I knew we both had Kira’s best interests at heart, and I needed all the help I could get to figure out what had been going on around me all semester.
“It will be terrific when this is all a dim memory,” I agreed.
“Are you coming back here?” Fran asked.
I had no reason to go back to campus. Classes were over; I had two weeks to work on final grades. I’d planned to stop and pick up food, suddenly in the mood for real bagels and real cream cheese, and go home for a tasty, hassle-free lunch.
I tapped my steering wheel. Or I could go to campus and spend some time gossiping with Fran; that is, analyzing the situation to death, as we mathematicians liked to call it.
“I’m on my way,” I said.
“I’m in my office, just tying up some loose ends. I’ll call around and see what else I can find out before you get here.”
“Me, too.”
“It’s stopped raining. We can meet at the fountain,” Fran said, then everything seemed to come to a halt. No normal
breathing sounds from either of us. No background clearing of throats. Just low grunts. The fountain’s ledge had been a favorite spot to sit and chat, especially when the classroom and office walls seemed to close in on us. Once a popular campus landmark and meeting place, the fountain had suddenly become forbidden territory.
“Is the coffee shop open today?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Let’s meet there.”
I heard a long exhale from Fran. “Good idea. Oh, by the way, Courtney did say she was pretty sure the person the cops led away was female.”
I gulped. “Got it. See you soon.”
Since the food at the Mortarboard Café, the campus coffee shop next to the tennis courts, was only a half step up from what was served at the Zeeman Academy vending machines, I knew Fran would forgive me for making a detour. With no Starbucks in sight, I pulled up to a bagel shop a couple of blocks from campus.
I stood in a short line thinking that I shouldn’t be wasting this time. Whom could I call to seek more information about the unidentified person who’d been taken into police custody? Or was at least with the police at the moment.
It was useless to call Virgil, who was probably still at Zeeman. Would he be in communication with whoever escorted a female from the vicinity of the Henley College Administration Building? If not, wouldn’t he love to hear from me that the case had been closed? A better question: Where did I get this urge to do police work?
A sudden collision knocked me out of my mental state, into the physical present. It was my day to be battered by men, big and little.
“My bad,” said a young boy with low riding shorts who looked anything but apologetic.
He’d been on a direct course to the potato chip rack, and I was a small obstacle in his way. Nothing hurt and I didn’t see the wisdom of calling attention to the little mishap. The bagel clerk apparently felt otherwise.
“Hey, buddy, watch where you’re going. And can you give the lady a real apology?” the clerk said, sounding like this wasn’t the first time she’d addressed this problem.
The boy gave her a confused look, as if no one had challenged him in this way before. He took his bag of chips to a different clerk at the other end of the counter and flew out of the store.
