Majoring In Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  SCHOOL FOR MURDER

  “In a tornado, everything gets whipped around,” the lieutenant said. “It could have been anything flying in the air that knocked him down.”

  “But that’s precisely what I mean,” Jessica said. “All those pieces may have been swirling around the room upstairs, but when the floor gave way, they fell straight down through the hole.”

  “What are you suggesting, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just wondering what exactly hit him.”

  “I think your imagination is getting the better of you, Mrs. Fletcher. Wes Newmark’s head was cracked open like an egg, and half a house was sitting on top of him. The bottom line is that if he’d taken shelter, he’d be alive today.”

  “Why do you think he didn’t take shelter?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe he was a stubborn son of a gun. Maybe there’s no logical explanation. Why do you think he didn’t take shelter?”

  “I think he may already have been dead.”

  Other Murder, She Wrote mysteries

  You Bet Your Life

  Provence—To Die For

  Murder in a Minor Key

  Blood on the Vine

  Trick or Treachery

  Gin & Daggers

  Knock ‘Em Dead

  Murder at the Powderhorn Ranch

  A Little Yuletide Murder

  Murder in Moscow

  Murder on the QE2

  The Highland Fling Murders

  A Palette for Murder

  A Deadly Judgment

  Martinis & Mayhem

  Brandy & Bullets

  Rum & Razors

  Manhattans & Murder

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

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  First Printing, April 2003

  Copyright © 2003 Universal Studios Licensing LLLP. Murder She Wrote is a trademark and copyright of Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67353-5

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  For Zachary, Alexander, Jacob, Lucas, and Abigail

  Prologue

  “Watch out, Mrs. Fletcher,” a voice called to me as a Frisbee came sailing toward my head. I ducked quickly, the books I’d been carrying spilling to the ground. The red disk passed overhead, bounced on the grass, and rolled on its edge another twenty feet away.

  A young man, in a baseball cap with the brim to the back and a navy blue sweatshirt with SCHOOLMAN COLLEGE in bright yellow letters across his chest, ran to assist me. “Are you all right?” he asked, picking up the books that had fallen and returning them to my arms.

  “If I’d had one hand free,” I said, lifting my briefcase in my right hand and cradling the books in my left, “I might have caught that thing.”

  “You’re welcome to join our game, Professor,” he said, sprinting to retrieve the Frisbee and tossing it to a girl who was waving her arms in the air. “We’re just killing time till the buses leave.”

  Across the road, in front of the new gymnasium, four coach buses idled, their front doors open. A banner proclaiming GO, TIGERS was draped on the windshield of one. A large crowd, mostly students, milled about, many wearing blue-and-yellow sweatshirts and holding matching pom-poms and foam tiger heads mounted on sticks.

  “What’s happening over there?” I asked.

  “We’ve got a scrimmage in Wabash today.”

  “You get that big a crowd for a scrimmage?”

  “Sure. That’s Indiana basketball. The season doesn’t officially start till next month. But we got into the play-offs last year and we’re gonna do even better this year.” He leaped into the air to snag the Frisbee his friend had thrown back.

  “Well, good luck,” I called over my shoulder as I crossed the road that separated the athletic fields from the rest of the college campus. Behind me, the Frisbee game continued on a section of grass leading to the black oval where Schoolman’s track-and-field team was practicing sprints. From beyond the track and the baseball diamond that adjoined it, I could hear the whine of a combine as it moved along the field, threshing grain in neat straight lines.

  This part of Indiana was flat, the perfect geographical configuration for farming. Fields of corn, soybeans, and wheat, as far as the eye could see, surrounded the small college. The only relief to the horizontal plane was an occasional line of scraggly trees marking the junction where one crop e
nded and another began, and the college itself, a cluster of two-story limestone buildings and Victorian houses, down the road from a small village.

  I’d come to Schoolman College to teach a course on writing murder mysteries. Harriet Schoolman Bennett, dean of students and the granddaughter of the founder, was an old friend. We’d served together on the mayor’s committee to combat illiteracy when I’d taught at Manhattan University in New York City and she’d been earning her Ph.D. at Columbia. That was before Schoolman suffered the financial consequences of declining enrollment, and Harriet had come home to rescue what she’d wryly called “the family business.”

  Schoolman was a small liberal-arts college in a state that boasted large universities. Situated midway between Purdue and Notre Dame, it struggled in the shadow of its larger and more sophisticated rivals. Recently, however, its fortunes had begun turning around, thanks to its writing curriculum. Harriet had instituted the program five years ago to gain much-needed publicity and to shore up the student base. Contacting her connections in the academic world and buttonholing old friends to help out, she’d attracted a series of bestselling authors to come to Indiana to teach. Each semester, a different well-known novelist led a course in creative writing. And she planned to expand the “famous names” program to include journalists, poets, playwrights, and biographers. My course was entitled “The Mystery Genre in Publishing Today,” and Harriet had promised that I’d find the bucolic college campus a stimulating environment, both for teaching and for working on my own manuscript.

  I’d been here for less than a month, and so far had found it just as promised, an idyllic and peaceful setting, all the problems of the world miles away, out of sight beyond Indiana’s amber waves of grain. I was looking forward to a semester of teaching and writing, to soaking in the academic atmosphere, debating with students, sitting in on my colleagues’ classes, attending the guest lectures, musicales, and impromptu events that constituted small-college life, and, of course, rooting for Schoolman’s basketball team.

  But it was not to be. The ivory tower was not the sanctuary it seemed. Beneath the tranquil surface, there was a storm brewing.

  Chapter One

  I’d seen a green sky before, but nothing like this. The color was not the green you picture when you think of grass and trees. It wasn’t mint green or hospital green or even olive green. It was more like the color of the ocean when it pushes into the bay and up the river, when the bottom is murky and an oar dipped in the water roils up the particles of silt into a muddy cloud. It was that color green.

  I climbed the steps of the Hart Building, debating whether to return to my apartment or go inside and wait out the approaching storm. The quad, usually alive with students, was eerily empty. Only the soft rumble of thunder and the rustle of leaves in the oak trees in the square broke the silence.

  “I don’t like the looks of this, Mrs. Fletcher.” Professor Wesley Newmark, chairman of the English department, stood on the top step studying the darkening sky. The wind elevated the few strands of sandy hair he’d carefully combed over his bald pate.

  I followed his gaze. “What do you see?” I asked.

  “You ever been in a tornado?”

  “I thought we were north of Tornado Alley.”

  “Those borders are very flexible in Indiana. Wind is coming from the southwest. From the back of the building. Probably why we aren’t seeing anything.” He squinted at me as a gust of wind spit droplets on the lenses of his glasses. He pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his gray tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. “You’d better get inside. If the alarm goes off, take shelter in the basement.” He wiped his glasses and replaced them on his nose. “I’ve got to get to my appointment. I’m late already.” He started down the steps, hugging his bulging leather briefcase with both arms to keep the wind from catching it. A strong gust pulled the sides of his jacket back, exposing a wrinkled white shirt flapping over his generous stomach.

  “Where are you going?” I called out, but the wind carried my voice in another direction. He didn’t answer, or if he did, I didn’t hear him. He hurried down the stairs and ran across the quadrangle in the direction of Kammerer House, where the English department had its offices.

  I opened the door to the Hart Building. It was Saturday morning and most classes had finished for the week. A few students sat cross-legged on the floor of the hall, their books piled beside them, half-empty coffee cups in their hands. I recognized two of them and smiled as I passed. Across the hall from my classroom, a television set played to an empty faculty lounge. A message flashed on the screen: Tornado Watch till Four p.m. This Afternoon.”

  Oh, my. A tornado was not the kind of stimulation I’d had in mind when I’d agreed to come for the fall term.

  It had been cloudy, but not threatening, when I’d left my small but cheerfully decorated one-bedroom apartment to walk to campus. One of four carved from a large Victorian house, the apartment was a model of efficiency, every piece of furniture in the combination living room/dining room serving a multiple purpose. The sofa could pull out to a guest bed, the side tables contained drawers or cupboards for storage, and the chairs were on wheels so they could be easily moved to wherever they were needed. The table by the bay window would make a lovely place to serve dinner, but it functioned as a desk for now. Usually I would have worked from home, but I’d been driven out by the sounds of a rock band practicing next door, an occurrence, my neighbor assured me, that happened only once a month, when it was his turn to host the musicians.

  The classroom offered a quiet sanctuary in which to work on my next manuscript; at least it would have if my thoughts didn’t keep drifting to the impending storm. After an hour of fussing with my outline and trying to dictate notes into my minicassette recorder, I decided the time had come to leave. Perhaps the band had gone home by now. Outside my window the rain had stopped, but a charcoal-gray sky promised more to come. I packed up my papers and mentally calculated how long it would take to reach my off-campus quarters. I hurried down the empty hall, pushed open the doors, and stepped outside.

  A pinging noise and the sharp feel of hail hitting my scalp made me shrink back under the narrow overhang and raise my briefcase over my head. This was a novel experience. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in a hailstorm, and certainly not one with golf ball—size ice pellets. I watched fascinated as the hailstones bounced down the stairs and rolled onto the path. Across the quad, between two buildings, was a small parking lot, and I heard the hail strike the hoods of the cars. The unmusical percussion jarred me from my reverie. Oh, dear, I thought. There’s going to be a lot of damage from this storm.

  The door opened behind me, and Frank, a maintenance man at the college, grabbed my elbow.

  “Professor Fletcher, you can’t stay out here,” he said, tugging me back into the building. “Everyone’s already in the shelter. Come quickly. There’s not a lot of time. I’ll take you to the—”

  A series of short horn blasts interrupted his instructions. Spurred by the alarm, I ran after him down the deserted hall to the emergency staircase. The thunder was louder now. Or was it the wind? I was having trouble distinguishing the source of the sound. The loud roar was deafening, punctuated by the clatter of breaking glass and crashing debris. I felt the building shake, and the hairs rose on the back of my neck.

  We raced down the flight of stairs to the basement and through an open door into a concrete bunker illuminated by bare lightbulbs screwed into wall fixtures. A dozen people were huddled on benches or sitting on the floor.

  “Oh, good, you found her,” someone called out. “What about Professor Newmark?”

  “Couldn’t locate him,” Frank called back as he and another man hauled the iron door closed and shot three dead bolts just as something massive slammed into the metal from the other side.

  “I saw him over an hour ago,” I said. “He said he was late for an appointment across campus.”

  I felt a hand on my arm an
d turned.

  “Come. There’s room on this bench.” A woman slid over to make space for me to sit.

  The concrete walls muffled the blast of wind, but the iron door creaked and rattled on its hinges as if a giant were throwing his weight against the panel to break it down. A moment later the lights went out. Only a red bulb above the door remained illuminated, casting a feeble light. The rest of the shelter was steeped in darkness.

  “Talk about just in time,” yelled a voice I recognized as one of my students, Eli Hemminger. “Like to keep us in suspense, huh, Professor?”

  “I prefer to save these kinds of hairbreadth escapes for my novels, Eli,” I said, shivering as I realized the danger I’d been in. “But this is more like a thriller than a mystery.”

  We lapsed into silence, awed by the demonstration of power beyond our concrete walls. In the dim light, there was nothing to do but concentrate on the fury of the storm and wait for it to subside. Eventually the bellowing wind passed over us, and the door, dented but still locked, stopped creaking. I heard the faint static of a radio as someone attempted to pull in a signal.

  “Frank, don’t you have a flashlight?” a voice from the back of the bunker called out in the dark.

  “Yeah. Hang on a minute. I’ll find it.”

  He flicked on the flashlight and panned the beam around the confined quarters. “Everyone okay?”

  A chorus of assents came back to him. The simultaneous response seemed to break the tension, and a buzz of conversation filled the close quarters.

  “I’m Rebecca McAllister, by the way,” said the woman next to me as she put out her hand. “I teach the American Lit class.”

  From what I could see in the dim light, she was a tall woman, probably in her early thirties, with the pale looks of someone who spent a lot of time indoors. She had gathered her long brown hair into a twist on the top of her head, held by a plastic comb, and wore jeans and a suit jacket that didn’t quite fit. The jacket was too large.