by Ada Madison
“Charter school kids,” the middle-aged woman said to me. “The one down the street? The Roger Williams School.” She held up her hand, the better to tick off her complaints. “They don’t have a regular schedule. They’re in here at all hours. They’re rude. They knock things over and don’t pick them up.” She indicated there were many more points she could make, but the exercise was exhausting her.
My first impulse was to rush to the defense of charters. Kids at any school could be rude or not rude. The same for adults. I had no time to get into it with the woman, however, and I figured my best bet was to change the topic.
I gave the woman a smile she could interpret any way she chose, and pointed to a seven-layer cookie in the display case.
“Are those new?” I asked. “They look delicious.”
“Jody will help you,” she said, passing me on to a younger woman with retro Goth hair, lots of silver, but no tats.
It could have been that the middle-ager’s shift was over. Or she could simply have decided I hadn’t appreciated her wisdom enough to be served.
“What can I get you?” asked the new clerk.
I almost said, Mayor Graves’s phone records, please, but caught myself and ordered two bagels, a cinnamon raisin for me and an “everything” for Fran, both with cream cheese. I hoped to get to the Mortarboard before Fran settled for one of their not-quite-thawed pastries.
As I waited for the order, I scooted back into my head and thought of my suspect list, with three men and only one female. Chris Sizemore. I wished I knew whether she was the female who’d been taken to the HPD station today.
I knew I’d have no relief until I was sure that the police had zeroed in on someone else before I was forced to contemplate the placement of my star student on my suspect list. I’d been Kira’s teacher for four years, and her thesis director. It shouldn’t have been that hard for me to have already figured out what was going on with her. Maybe I’d have fared better if I’d had access to the mayor’s emails and phone logs. I comforted myself with the fact that the police did have that access and therefore might already have enough information to close the case. As far as I was concerned, Kira was not a candidate for murder suspect. If anything, she was a victim of herself and her insecure state.
I tapped my phone on my hip. I could call Woody; he seemed to be always available these days, but I didn’t necessarily want to remind him of the current situation on campus. I ran down my list of faculty friends from the Music Department, English, Modern Languages. Most of them had already skipped town for the Cape beaches or the New Hampshire mountains. I resolved to make more friends in Admin in case this happened again.
Rring, rring. Rring, rring.
Ah, Bruce. He’d be getting in from the gym, ready to take a nap before his shift.
“Hey, I miss you,” he said.
“Me, too. I think you should retire and we’ll run away together.”
“One more year and I’ll be able to buy us an island.”
“Here you go,” said the clerk, handing over my bag of bagels.
I reached for our lunches and headed out of the shop, still kibitzing with Bruce around our island dream. A strange theme since we were both city people and more likely to retire to the heart of Boston, or to Philadelphia, where some of Bruce’s family still lived.
Things changed when Bruce said, casually, “I just talked to Virgil. I’m surprised you didn’t bring it up right away.”
“I wanted to talk to you first, my love,” I said, champing at the bit for whatever information was circling the MAstar helipad.
He laughed. “What a surprise, huh? I’d never have guessed. She doesn’t look the type at all, does she?”
“No, I heard about the pickup, but I’d never have guessed who,” I said. In my heightened state of anticipation, I squeezed the warm bagels until I felt the cream cheese go to mush against the side of the bag.
A long pause. I could hardly stand it. Finally, Bruce said, “You don’t know who they picked up, do you?”
I laughed in a “don’t be silly” kind of way.
“Okay, bye.”
“Bruce!”
“Chris Sizemore,” he said.
I felt my shoulders relax. “Bye,” I said.
Another laugh from Bruce, who, fortunately for our relationship, enjoyed games as much as I did.
“Go call Fran,” he said.
Which is just what I did.
It was hard to say which of my offerings Fran was more grateful for—the fresh, odoriferous bagel with light and dark seeds of everything on it, or the ID of the person of interest to the Henley PD.
It seemed to be a tie.
“I was starving, in more ways than one,” Fran said, working on her second squirt of cream cheese.
“I can see that.”
“After we hung up, I kept on with my telethon trying to find out who was taken away. I limited myself to faculty and staff I thought would have a good view of that part of campus. Even though the police car was outside the dorms…” Fran completed the sentence with a shrug and a knowing look.
I smiled, understanding her reasoning. “We don’t want the students to think we’re rumormongers,” I said.
“No, no.” Fran smiled back and wagged her finger at me. “That wouldn’t be good at all. And there’s nothing left to munch on in the Franklin Hall lounge”—she held up her bagel—“so thanks for this.”
“I couldn’t have you trudging all the way over here for last Friday’s coffee and rolls,” I said.
We both took a minute for bites of real food, followed by soft and contented “Mmms.”
We sat across from each other in the Mortarboard Café, having bought bottled waters and packaged cookies as the price of admission to sit at a table with food from the outside. A cleaning crew hired by Buzz, the new owner, was hard at work on heavy-duty scraping and scrubbing, starting in the back corner. I hoped the sticky floor was on their list, as well as the interior brick walls, which needed a good week of sandblasting just to remove the ketchup. And if they could do something about the cooking odors from the last century, that would also be nice.
Other than Buzz, the three young women scouring tables and chairs, and two guys washing the windows facing the parking lot, Fran and I were the only ones in the place. The background music was the Mortarboard’s standard pounding, backbeat fare, more suited to grunt work than to conversation.
“We should be at the beach,” Fran said. “Like every sane teacher and student the world over on the Monday after graduation.”
Except Chris Sizemore, I thought. I pushed my bagel aside and made a move to leave. “You’re right. Let’s go to the beach.”
Fran laughed. “Ha. There’s too much going on here.”
Fran was still as excited as when she’d called me with the breaking news. “I phoned Courtney after you gave me the scoop. She called Monty right away, using a cover story that she wanted to be sure his sister was okay, but really to confirm that Chris was the one who’d been arrested. Sort of arrested. Monty didn’t tell her much, as you can imagine, except that the police were simply doing routine questioning and would probably be back for another round with all of us.”
“Do you think that’s why they drove off with her? For routine questioning? Bruce couldn’t help me with that. Maybe Monty’s right and we are next. You up for a ride in a patrol car?” I asked.
Fran shook her head. Her short, silky bob showed signs of graying, but was as neatly and attractively arranged as if she’d been on her way to present a paper in Boston. “I wouldn’t mind the ride, though. My grandkids would get a kick out of it. But Courtney doesn’t think there was anything routine about the pickup. She said the police car pulled up right to the exterior steps of Admin on the Paul Revere dorm side, not bothering to park. She swears the car was running the whole time, though not with lights or anything, and then the two guys, one in uniform and one in plain clothes, came out with Chris, and she got in the back.”
/> “That doesn’t sound routine to me,” I said.
“Anything but.”
I forced myself not to be happy about Chris Sizemore’s plight, but was unable to suppress relief that the female Courtney had first reported on wasn’t Kira.
“Why do you think Chris would kill the mayor?” Fran asked. “Did they even know each other that well?”
“Meaning, once you get to know a person, you want to kill him?” I asked.
“That’s what the homicide stats would lead us to believe,” Fran said.
“When you put it that way, I have to agree.”
Virgil often quoted that nearly 40 percent of murders are in a category called “homicides by intimates,” adding that girlfriends were more likely to kill their men by stabbing them than by other means.
I remembered Bruce’s “Good to know” when Virgil reported on this over pizza one Friday night. The two of them had shifted their chairs away from me.
The truth was that, much as I disliked her at the moment, I had a hard time picturing Chris Sizemore as a killer, of an intimate or of anyone else.
“I’m still not sure I believe Chris committed murder. Maybe they have the wrong person,” I suggested.
Fran’s brow turned to a seldom-seen row of wrinkles. “Think a minute. Remember how Chris ran kicking and screaming from the faculty vote? And, there’s also the fact that the mayor fired her brother from the contract with the city. That can’t be good for his future as a businessman in New England.”
“So, you think Chris’s motive could have been that the mayor ruined her brother’s career?”
Fran wrapped her index and middle fingers around each other. “You know how close Chris and Monty are.”
I did know. My most recent experience of their compatibility and basic agreement on issues had been during our Main Street encounter only yesterday, as they’d sympathized with my current nemesis, Elysse Hutchins. At that time, it had certainly seemed to me that Chris would have killed anyone who did her brother in, and vice versa. But, in my thoughts, “killing” was a metaphor. I hadn’t envisioned a vicious stabbing.
I felt a breeze on my bare arms before I saw what caused it. Kira had opened the door and swept in behind me.
“Dr. Knowles, Dr. Emerson, wow! Hi,” she said, as if she were blown away by our presence.
I didn’t for a minute believe Kira’s shocked look. I suspected she had a telescope trained on the campus, with nothing better to do than look out the window until she found someone to talk to.
“Imagine seeing you here, Kira,” Fran said, keeping her sarcastic tone at a level too subtle for Kira to get.
“Are you guys, like, having a department meeting or something? I don’t want to interrupt.”
“Yes, we are talking business, but you can have a seat for a minute,” Fran said, in the smooth, inoffensive way that I’d never been able to master.
“Oh, okay, if you’re sure you don’t mind.” Kira pointed to the counter, where Buzz was busy with a spray bottle and a questionable cleaning cloth. “I’ll just grab a cup of coffee.”
Once Kira was at the counter, probably buying a drink she didn’t want, I addressed Fran.
“Thanks for taking care of that.”
“I know you worry about her,” Fran said.
I nodded. I’d been worrying about Kira since she arrived in my advanced calculus class four years ago, having aced all the placement exams. She had more than the usual freshman angst, which I expected would dissolve as she progressed successfully through a demanding math major curriculum. I thought eventually she’d become more socially sophisticated and comfortable with her peers, but year after year, she continued to spend more time with her teachers than with her classmates, participating in extracurricular activities only peripherally. She hung around with Jeanne, Nicole, Bethany, and a few other Franklin Hall science majors, but she seemed to me never quite in the inner circle.
Kira returned with a canned soda, a wise choice on a day like today, when the Mortarboard was only halfheartedly open.
I knew it was a question of when, not if, Kira would bring up the most recent development in the murder case that affected us all so deeply.
“Getting ready for the big school across the river?” Fran asked, using our pet phrase for MIT.
That simple question was enough to get Kira started on the real reason for her alleged ad hoc drop-in. It was clear that any comment would have been a prompt for her. After all, if she’d wanted a canned soda, she could have picked one up on any floor of her dorm.
“I can’t think of grad school right now,” she said, seeming to hold back tears. “Have you heard what they’re saying?”
“Tell us,” I said. A little lame, but at least I’d finally found my voice.
“Ms. Sizemore was arrested. I must have been still in bed or in the shower or something, because I didn’t see it, but the police came and took her away. They’re saying the two of them, Ms. Sizemore and Edward, were, like, together”—she closed her eyes tightly at this phrase—“and he wanted to break it off and so she killed him. Or, they think it could have been the other way around, that she wanted to break it off and he wouldn’t let her and they fought and she stabbed him.”
Kira’s words were punctuated with short breaks for lip biting and erratic breathing. I wondered which upset her more, that Chris might have been romantically involved with the mayor or that she might have killed him.
I noticed Fran flinch at Kira’s referring to Mayor Graves as Edward, although it was Fran who’d first suggested to me that Kira and the mayor might be “seeing each other.”
“Who are they, Kira? Who exactly is saying this?” I asked.
“Well, Bethany’s roommate, Jocelyn, is an art history major, so she has Ms. Sizemore a lot for class, and she says Ms. Sizemore used to talk about Edward all the time, like just bring up things in the newspaper, and one time Jocelyn saw them in the park together or something.”
It was good that Kira had never considered a career as a trial attorney.
“Did you—” Fran began.
“Then,” Kira said in a loud voice, the better to interrupt Fran. “Then, Jocelyn found out the police dumped Edward’s computer and supposedly found all this email correspondence with Ms. Sizemore. Jocelyn says she’s one hundred percent sure of this because she has a friend in the Henley Police Department.”
Hey, I have a friend in the Henley Police Department, I thought, with a bit of pique.
Kira’s revelation, through Bethany, through Jocelyn, through Jocelyn’s HPD friend, and who knew how many other channels, had been interesting, in spite of its shaky credentials. I’d been assuming that Chris’s display of animosity toward the mayor was due to the bad blood between him and her brother. It seemed there might be a more personal basis for her display of anger.
Who said college campuses were stuffy, uninteresting places with staid professors engaged only in the research of abstruse subjects?
“Did you know about Ms. Sizemore and the mayor before this morning when the police came?” Fran asked Kira.
Kira threw up her hands, nearly knocking over her soda. “No. And I don’t believe a word of it anyway. I don’t care who Jocelyn’s friend is.”
“You don’t believe Ms. Sizemore killed the mayor?” Fran asked, as if she were querying Kira about a line in the derivation of an equation. I seldom saw Fran in action with students, and I was impressed at her nonthreatening manner. I should have been taking notes.
“I don’t believe the two of them were ever together. Ever. They couldn’t have been. I…I thought he…” Kira drew in a long breath and then exhaled a pout. “Never mind what I thought.”
I had a good idea what Kira thought. That one day she and Edward would be a twosome. I recalled the emails Virgil had showed me. I hadn’t let Kira know that I’d read her declarations of love to Edward. I remembered some of them in too much detail to suit me.
I wish you’d let me stay last night. You know yo
u’re my number one priority. I’m here for you.
“Did Mayor Graves ever give you any reason to think he returned your affections, Kira?” I asked. In other words, I might have asked, Did he ever email you back? Did he ever give you any sign at all that he received your protestations? Or is this all in your head?
Fran cracked open a package of shortbread cookies, making a loud popping sound, spilling some crumbs, and, mostly, giving Kira time to consider how she’d answer.
“You’re going to think I’m really dumb.” Kira addressed this first to me, then to Fran, and then back again.
“Tell us,” I said, for the second time. Talk about dumb.
“The first time I met him, I was in the campaign office and he walked in and he gave me this smile, and I knew we really connected.”
I sat back, knowing I could write the rest of the script. A sheltered young woman and a man of the world—that is, the world of Henley, Massachusetts, population a mere forty-six thousand, but still larger than the California valley town Kira was born and raised in, hours from major cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco.
I listened now as Kira told her tale of working hard for the extremely important yet friendly guy who told her how talented she was, how smart, and how far she was destined to go, with her whole life ahead of her. Apparently Kira had taken that to mean that they would go far together.
I had to let Fran take the lead in drawing Kira out. I was too busy blaming myself for not monitoring Kira’s social life more closely. Did I think a party a week in the Franklin Hall lounge was the beginning and end of my duty to my students? I could have made a greater effort to bring my majors together, to help Kira be more a part of the group.
I realized that in loco parentis had pretty much been voted out of schools in the sixties. Technically, I had no obligation to watch over my students the way their parents did, but that didn’t mean I could brush off the sense of responsibility I felt, especially for young women like Kira, with little worldly experience.
