“May I help you?” The voice was young and bright and chirpy. In my present mood, I found it offensively condescending.
“I very much doubt it,” I snapped. “I was looking for someone I used to know, but it isn’t important.”
“I still have trouble finding people myself.” The owner of the voice, an attractive girl—woman, I suppose—who couldn’t have been more than twenty, giggled. “They moved everybody at the beginning of the semester when they changed everything around. Who were you trying to find?”
The child was trying to help. I struggled to control my surliness. “Sharon Clark. She used to be—”
“Oh, sure! This place would fall down without her. She’s got a new office, around the corner down there. First door on the right.” She smiled and sped on her way before I could thank her and apologize for being rude.
The first door on the right around the corner opened on a small office, nice and private. Sharon was sitting at her desk, her attention on a computer screen, but she looked up when I appeared in the doorway.
“Well, good grief, you never know who’s going to turn up! Dorothy, how are you? And what are you doing back in town, and how long are you going to stay, and when can you go to lunch with me?”
I laughed and sat down. “I’m fine, and I don’t know for sure how long I’ll be here, and any time you like, and how are you?”
“Busy, busy. My new boss”—she looked up at the door and lowered her voice—“is something else.”
“I saw him,” I said dryly. “Looks like a cross between Donald Trump, Attila the Hun, and C-3PO.”
“You got that right. In just about equal parts. So what have you been doing? You haven’t come back to stay, then?”
“No, I’m pretty well settled down in England. You knew I’d remarried?”
“I heard, and I was thrilled. Some people around here got bent out of shape, because they liked the professor so much, but I said good grief, she’s got her life to live, Dr. Martin wouldn’t have wanted her to go on being lonesome forever. What’s he like?”
“You’ll find out when we go to lunch. Are you free tomorrow?”
“You bet. Noon?”
“We’ll pick you up. Now, Sharon, I have to admit I didn’t stop by just for old times’ sake. I have an ulterior motive.”
She grinned. “You want me to look somebody up for you.”
“If you can. I don’t know if he ever took any courses here, so you might not have a record. Do you have access to the Continuing Ed side of things?”
“Not officially, but I can get in if I have to.”
A little adventure a while back had taught me a thing or two about computers and those who operate them. “I’ll just bet you can!”
She turned to her keyboard. “I don’t suppose you have a social security number?”
“No, just a name. James F. Boland.” I spelled the last name. She typed it in, and I waited, actually holding my breath.
“Ah, you’re in luck! A doctor, would he be? Medical, I mean?”
“Yes. You’ve found him?”
“There isn’t much. He took a couple of CE courses a year, just keeping up with new developments, I expect. And he did take one credit course.”
That surprised me. “Really? What? Chemistry? Biology?”
“Music. A graduate course in opera history.”
Of course. His passion. I smiled to myself. He was probably a royal pain in the neck in the class, knowing more than any of the other students and very possibly more than the teacher. But I was very glad he’d taken the class, all the same. “A graduate course. So he would have had to submit his transcripts from his other education.”
“Yes. Of course we wouldn’t have those. We don’t keep any paper records centrally anymore. They’d be in the music department.”
I moistened my lips. “And I don’t suppose you’d have any reason to look at them?”
She didn’t even hesitate. “We do need, every so often, to check and make sure records are complete. The new director is very particular about complete records.” With a perfectly straight face, she picked up the phone. “Hello, Donna? This is Sharon. Hi. Listen, I’m going over some stuff, and I need to check some transcripts. Could you pull some files for me?” She was typing as she spoke, and I saw a list of names appear on her screen. “They’re all graduate students. Gerald Bodine—okay, ready? Gerald Bodine, James Boland, Charles Hatcher, and Susan Miller. Do you want their ID numbers? No. Right. Okay, I’ll send somebody over for them in—half an hour all right?”
She put the phone down. “I didn’t want to make it obvious.”
“You’re wonderful. I owe you one.”
“For what? If I should happen to have some students’ files on my desk when you come tomorrow to pick me up for lunch, there’s nothing unusual about that, is there? And if I should happen to need to powder my nose, and you should happen to notice something in one of the files, well, neither of us can really be blamed for that, can we?”
“Of course not. Can you take an extra-long lunch tomorrow? And where’s your favorite place?”
I left feeling jubilant enough to smile brilliantly at the boss robot on my way out.
18
I got back to the room before Alan and was just trying to decide whether to take a nap or study the case notebook when he came in.
“You look,” I said, “exactly the way Emmy-cat did that time she caught that disgusting rat half her size. Triumphant and smug. What’s up?”
“I have spent a most productive afternoon, my dear.” He produced a paper bag of suspicious size and shape. “I looked more than slightly disreputable walking home with this. There is really no way to carry a bottle that does not make it look like a bottle. I did, however, refrain from drinking out of it until I returned. I felt a small celebration might be in order.”
“Well, you know I’m always ready for a celebration, especially when it involves Jack Daniel’s.” Alan poured us each a small tot and we sat down around the small table. I raised my glass. “Very well, what are we celebrating?”
“The acquisition of knowledge.” He clicked my glass.
“Oh, you can be infuriating when you want to be!”
He smiled his catlike smile again. “Can I, my dear? That’s very gratifying.”
“Okay, but I’m not going to tell you a thing until you tell me. As,” I added, “you are pining to do.”
“I am. It is, however, pleasant to be persuaded.” He took another sip from his glass and set it down. “I spent the time in your newspaper office.”
I waited.
“I find the local newspaper to be an interesting phenomenon. We do not, of course, have them in England. Aside from the odd local weekly—odd in both senses—we rely on the large national papers for our edification.”
“Yes, dear, I do know. I’ve lived there for some time, you may remember.”
“Indeed. I mention it only because I find it a pity that we have never adopted the notion of a daily local journal. Although the coverage of national news is somewhat sketchy and the world outside the United States appears not to exist for the editors of the Hillsburg Herald, it nevertheless proved to be a mine of information.”
“About—?”
“About the accidents.” He grew more serious. “You remember that we wished to know more about the accidents that befell Kevin. Or, more strictly speaking, the various incidents.”
He ticked them off. “The failure of the brakes on his automobile. The theft of his tricycle. The repeated failures of his telephone. The fire. His fall down the steps.
“The Herald prints, daily, a most useful report. I had noticed it whilst reading the copy this establishment kindly delivers to our door every morning. One can, by reading a good deal of very small type, learn about all the incidents requiring the attention of the police and/or fire departments on the previous day.”
I raised my glass. “So you looked up the things that happened to Kevin. Well done! I hadn’
t thought of that.”
His smug look intensified. He sipped his drink and then pressed his fingertips together in the tent formation that usually means he’s about to deliver a lecture. “When one is handicapped by the lack of access to official police reports, one must make do.”
“You sound,” I commented, “exactly like Bunter pontificating to Lord Peter.”
He ignored me and continued. “Many of the incidents, of course, were not in the police-fire reports. In fact, I found only two there. The first, the brakes on the car, figured in a report of an abandoned vehicle. Apparently someone saw the car before it was towed away and reported it. And the tricycle was reported as stolen. That gave me dates for two incidents.”
“What about the fire?”
“If you remember, Kevin’s phone wasn’t working then. Apparently he never reported it later, either. At any rate, there was no record. So I then proceeded,” he went on, sounding for all the world like a police report himself, “to other sections of the newspaper.”
“And?”
“And I discovered two items of considerable interest. The first was dated two days after Kevin’s tricycle was stolen. It was a syndicated column by a humorist whose wit, I fear, I was unable to appreciate. He went on for some time about small household disasters that certainly didn’t seem funny. However, he did mention a persistent telephone problem that no one could diagnose.”
“Aha!”
“You understand my interest. In his account, it transpired that a squirrel had chewed through part of the telephone cable. One of the two wires was damaged. The problem was intermittent because the wire would maintain contact so long as the wind did not blow. When it did, the phone would not function. The damage couldn’t easily be seen.”
“You think a squirrel …?”
“Possibly. I am more inclined to think that someone saw that column, someone who had tried at least twice to cause Kevin’s death. That someone got an idea.”
“And frayed Kevin’s telephone wire! Someplace where it couldn’t be easily seen or repaired.”
“Or, just possibly, a place where it could be easily repaired—just before Kevin phoned for repairs.”
“Oh, that’s brilliant, Alan! Diabolical, but brilliant. So not only would the repairmen be unable to find anything wrong, they’d begin to think Kevin was some sort of crank and be slower and slower to respond. AND they’d charge him an arm and a leg.”
“Charge? For no work?”
“We have a weird phone system in this country. If you call the phone company and the problem is in their lines, they fix it for nothing. If it isn’t, though, not only do they not fix it, they hit you with a hefty charge for a service call.”
Alan shook his head sadly. “Someone is very clever, Dorothy. But—do you want to know what else I read in the newspaper?”
“I can’t wait. So far, you’ve come up trumps every time.”
“You’ll not like this one so well, I fear, but I believe you’ll agree it’s interesting information. It was simply a very small news item on the business page, listing the names of area physicians who had attended a seminar on various rare diseases. One of those listed was Dr. Boland.”
“Oh, I already knew he was conscientious about keeping informed. Let me tell you what I found out today.”
“Wait, let me finish. The date of the seminar was the day Kevin’s tricycle was stolen.”
“But—but—”
“Yes, indeed. Dr. Boland could not have been responsible for that incident. And if we assume it to have been one of a series …”
“But then why did he leave town?”
We were right back where we’d been three days before, with a fugitive and no explanation for his flight.
19
I had trouble sleeping that night. For once Alan’s warm presence beside me offered little comfort. I punched my pillow into a more satisfactory shape, rolled over to my right side, and recited the multiplication table in my head.
My knee hurt, and my foot was trying to cramp. I rolled onto my stomach and tried reciting the Twenty-third Psalm.
Sleeping on my stomach was very bad for my back. I rolled onto my left side.
My nightgown was wound around my waist like a tourniquet. I heaved and tugged, hitting Alan with my elbow. He grunted once and continued snoring.
I was seized with the irrational resentment of the sleeper that possesses the sleepless. It was all very well for him, him in his comfortable oblivion. What did he care if I was awake and restless and miserable?
I sighed—loudly—and punched the pillow once more—hard.
No reaction.
You would think, with all the walking you’ve done in the past few days, that you’d be too tired for this, I told myself crossly. You would think you’d fall asleep as soon as your head hit the pillow. But no, all the exercise has done is make your knees ache more.
The pillow was still the wrong shape. Exasperated, I got up and went to the bathroom for a glass of tepid hotel water.
The fact was, of course, that my restlessness had nothing to do with the pillow, nothing to do with the hard mattress or the minor aches and pains that were always with me now. The trouble was in my mind. I was annoyed with myself, and no amount of tossing and turning and pillow-punching was going to help that.
It was all very well for Alan to say we were making progress, but it was all so slow. I wanted things to come to a head. I wanted something to happen. I wanted to find out something definitive, something that would get us somewhere. So far we’d uncovered absolutely nothing that would lead us to Kevin’s killer. All we had done, Alan and I, was to place ourselves under police suspicion and restrict our ability to accomplish anything useful.
True, we were both convinced that Kevin had not died a natural death. And what good did that do? I thought bitterly. We couldn’t prove anything about his death. We didn’t know anything about Jerry’s death, which was certainly related.
Or was it? I was at that dark stage of self-doubt that flourishes, rank and weedy, at midnight of a sleepless night. Maybe Darryl Lacey was right. Maybe Jerry had been killed in the aftermath of a drunken brawl. Maybe Kevin had been imagining things. Maybe Alan and I should go back home where people knew us and believed us.
That thought set me to pacing the floor. Home. I was home, wasn’t I?
Not anymore, said the horrid little voice that loves to torment me from time to time. This isn’t home anymore. Do you even have a home anymore?
The room was warm. Too warm. I opened the window, but no breath of air was stirring. Oh, wonderful. We were in for a spell of the kind of weather Hillsburg occasionally gets in October. Not Indian summer, with the pleasant warmth that implied, but stormy July, three months late. Hot, humid, unsettling.
Maybe if I went for a walk? There might be some air I could breathe outside, maybe a breeze that would blow the cobwebs out of my head.
I dressed as quietly as I could, put a note on my pillow in case Alan woke and worried—not that he will, the nasty inner voice sneered—and stole out of the room.
A little common sense began to assert itself once I was actually outside. The air, muggy and still, was really no more refreshing than inside the hotel. It was after midnight. Was this a stupid thing to do? I wouldn’t hesitate to take a midnight stroll back at home—back in Sherebury, I firmly corrected myself. But this was America, with a crime rate, even in little Hillsburg, that would send Sherebury into shock.
Oh, for Pete’s sake! I was in a bad mood, and it was making me silly. The campus was well lighted and well patrolled. The hour was not late, not for students. There would be people around, and none of them would be interested in a middle-aged lady—all right, verging on old—going about her business.
I crossed the street.
By night, the campus seemed far more familiar than by day. The basic layout was still the same, and darkness hid most of the recent changes. The lovely old oak and maple trees were in the same places, and so were t
he old buildings, empty now of the teeming energy that enlivened them during the day, slumbering in their creaky dustiness.
They were impervious to change, those ivied halls. The students might come and go, their dress changing over the generations, the forms of their rebellion. The faculty, more slowly, changed from wing collars to tweed jackets with leather patches to blue jeans and T-shirts, and they, too, rang new changes on the old academic ideals. All of them left their faint impressions on the fabric of the buildings: the worn stair treads, the floors scraped by hundreds of chairs. The bricks, though, the stone and glass and wood, these endured essentially changeless, except for the intangible atmosphere of learning, of academic endeavor, that had been absorbed over the years and would continue to linger and radiate until the buildings themselves were dust.
I rambled along my favorite paths, now and then encountering a couple locked in an embrace. None of them noticed me at all.
Gradually, almost insensibly, I began to relax.
What, after all, did my worries matter in the eternal scheme of things? Was this place another Oxford, like Dorothy Sayers’s in Gaudy Night, where learning was the only important thing? Where human passions were of far less concern than additions, however obscure, to the sum total of human knowledge?
Well, perhaps. In the eternal scheme of things. But that idea had not kept Harriet Vane from working very hard to solve the nasty problem besetting her Oxford college. And it wasn’t going to keep me from doing my damnedest to solve Kevin Cassidy’s murder.
I had wandered aimlessly. Now I looked up to get my bearings. I had gone right across the campus, my feet automatically following their old direction, and found myself in front of the Biological Sciences Building.
I allowed myself a tear or two. Dear old Kevin. And dear, dear Frank. What impression had they left on that building? Did the classrooms and laboratories, in some dim, inarticulate way, remember those two exemplary men? Did their friendly ghosts haunt the halls, inspiring those who came after them?
Those who came after them! Those who worked there now, doing their research, adding to the sum total of human knowledge. Something stirred in my mind. Was I about to get an idea?
Killing Cassidy Page 15
