I breathed deeply and stared down at it, confused and disbelieving.
What was my sweatshirt doing in Professor Farmer’s bathroom?
I searched the rest of the hamper, dumped its contents onto the tile floor and went through everything, piece by piece. And buried way down at the bottom were a pair of flared jeans much too small and feminine to be the professor’s, a lilac bra and matching panties, and a pair of flipflops with tiny red lobsters on the straps.
Katie’s, all Katie’s.
I went out to the living room, holding the sweatshirt hidden behind my back.
“Professor?” I said. He looked up blearily from a fresh bottle of #9. “Katie was wearing a sweater last night, you think?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Max, I just don’t recall. There were 15, 16 kids here. I don’t remember who wore—”
I should have run out of the house, jumped in my car and gone straight to Detective Branigan. Looking back at it now, I know that. I was a full head shorter than the professor and he probably had a good 60 pounds on me, but something inside me made me stand my ground, made me pull the sweatshirt out from behind my back and say, “Are you sure it wasn’t a sweatshirt?”
His eyes snapped into cold focus.
“Are you sure it wasn’t this sweatshirt?” I said.
The room went very quiet.
There was a rattle from the kitchen as the automatic icemaker in Professor Farmer’s freezer dropped a tray of new cubes into its bin.
“She—may have been,” he said. “Where did you find that?”
“It was in your hamper. Along with her jeans, her underwear, her shoes. Why did you take her clothes, Professor? Why did you keep them? Why didn’t you just get rid of them?”
Somewhere, a clock was ticking. I hadn’t noticed it before.
Professor Farmer took a slow sip from his bottle. He wiped the back of his hand across his mustache. The ticking now seemed deafening.
“I handed back the group’s final papers last night,” he said. “I’d given her a B+, which I thought was actually generous. She was obviously disappointed, though. She left here in a huff, early, maybe around 10:30. That was the last time I saw her. I don’t know what happened to her after that.”
“Her clothes are in your hamper, Professor. Was she naked when she left here?”
He shook his head, disgusted at his own sloppy thinking. “Her clothes,” he repeated slowly. “Her clothes were in my hamper.”
He drank again, finished the beer and set the bottle down clumsily on the coffee table. He dry-washed his hands nervously—I remembered seeing him make the exact same gesture in the seminar, whenever he was asked a question he couldn’t answer—and then he seemed to come to a decision.
“She came back,” he told the table, his voice low and dull, “about 1 AM. Everyone else had gone. I was sleeping, but she pounded on the front door and woke me up. I put on my bathrobe and went to the door and let her in.”
He picked up the bottle and looked at it, sighed and banged it back onto the table.
“She was drunk,” he said. “I think she’d gone to the party at Ross. She was angry about her grade. She didn’t have the paper with her, but she insisted she’d deserved an A. I told her to come to my office Monday morning, to bring the paper, and I’d go over it with her—but she wouldn’t listen. I tried to calm her down, but she took a swing at me.”
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “I pushed her away,” he said, eyes still closed. “She fell. She hit her head on—on this table, right here.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “And that killed her?” I said.
He opened his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure. There was blood on the floor. I tried to clean it up, this afternoon, but—” He waved a hand at the throw rug I hadn’t recognized.
I swallowed. “What happened after she fell?” I prompted him.
At last he raised his head to face me. “I felt for a pulse, but I couldn’t tell if there was one or not. I’m not a doctor, I—” He twitched involuntarily and a breath rushed out of him. “I picked up the phone to call 911,” he said. “I punched the 9 and the 1—and, and then—I hung up.”
“You hung up? Why?”
He licked his lips. “Two years ago, Max, a girl in my freshman seminar filed a sexual-harassment charge against me. You remember that, don’t you?” He smiled at me ruefully. “I remember. There was an investigation, the charge was eventually dropped, but still. Mud sticks, you know? I couldn’t afford another—I mean, here this girl was, at my house, obviously drunk. Dead or alive, I was in for it, either way.”
The light finally dawned. “So you decided to move her?”
“Yes. I—”
“Why take her back to the dorm? Why not just dump her in the woods somewhere?”
He stared at me blankly. “I have no idea,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking, I was in shock. I waited until I was sure everyone would be in bed, and then I put her in my car and put her bike in my trunk and drove her back to Stewart. It was late, around three. I put her bike in the rack and carried her up the steps. I didn’t want to use my access card—that would have left a record of my having been there on the computer. Hers was in her back pocket, though, so I just touched her jeans to the pad and the door clicked open. I put her in the bathroom and—came home. I thought that, if she was still alive, someone might find her there and—I didn’t—didn’t find out she was really dead until this afternoon.”
“But why did you take her clothes?” I demanded.
He sat there on the sofa, hands clasped in his lap, blinking at me. He seemed completely bewildered.
“I—fingerprints,” he said. “I thought the police might find my fingerprints on her clothing. I stripped everything off her and brought it home and put it all in the hamper until I could figure out what to do with it. I was going to burn it tonight, out in the woods.”
I stood over him, watching him wash and wash his hands. The silence between us stretched out in every direction.
At last I said, “It was an accident, Professor. You might get in a little trouble for moving the body, but—”
“No,” he said decisively. “No, Max, I can’t let you tell them. It would—I can’t—it would destroy my career. I can’t afford to be dragged into another scandal.”
He leaned forward, put his hands on the coffee table and pushed himself to his feet. Like a robot from one of those corny old science-fiction movies, he began to move jerkily towards me.
He didn’t leave me any choice, really. When he moved into range, I did what any good hockey player would do and punched him, right in the face.
* * * *
“—so when I retired in ’94, my wife and I moved up here. She grew up in Winooski, and we always talked about eventually settling in Vermont. I couldn’t stand the peace and quiet, though, after 30 years on the NYPD, so when I heard that Burlington was looking for an experienced homicide guy, I clipped on a new shield and went back to work.”
It was three days later, and I was sitting across from Detective Branigan in the Juice Bar, the oddly named coffee shop in McCullough Hall, at his invitation.
“I wish my grandfather would go back to work,” I said. “He just putters around the house all day and drives my gramma crazy.”
“If I hadn’t taken this job,” he joked, “I think my wife would have divorced me by now.”
I laughed.
“That’s nice,” he said. “That’s the first time I’ve seen a smile on your face. You’re a good looking girl when you smile, Max.”
I looked down at my coffee, embarrassed.
“I wanted to tell you a couple things,” he said, after a while, “now that it’s all over.”
I don’t know why I felt so nervous
, but somehow I was afraid of what he was going to say.
“Farmer made a full confession,” he said. “He even admitted that you were right when you accused him of harassing you two years back.”
I looked up. “He did?”
“He did. That was then, though, and this is now. Now, he wanted to go after you for assaulting him the other night—he never touched you before you hit him, he says, and he wound up with a broken nose—but I, ah, convinced him to let the matter drop.”
“If I hadn’t hit him, he might have killed me, too!”
Branigan sighed. “That’s speculation on your part, Max. He says he was going to the phone to call the police and turn himself in.”
“That’s a lie! He told me he couldn’t let me tell on him. He said it would ruin his career!”
“Your word against his. He’ll deny it in court, and there’s no way to prove it.”
I shook my head at the insanity of it.
“What’s going to happen to him?” I asked.
“Given the fact that he undressed her and moved her body, I would love to go for Murder One, but I don’t think we can make that stick. I’ll fight for it, but I’m guessing the DA will charge him with involuntary manslaughter and a couple other minor things, and he’ll plead it all down to one lesser charge. I don’t think he’ll do any time, but—”
“No time! That’s crazy! He killed Katie!”
“He killed her, sure, but it wasn’t murder, Max. It was an accident: she took a swing at him, and he acted in self-defense. At least that’s his story, and I don’t think we’re going to be able to prove otherwise. In any case, he’s finished at Middlebury, probably in academia altogether.”
I picked up my mug and sipped, but the coffee tasted like nothing.
All around us, students were talking in little groups, doing homework, opening packages from home. Professor Griffen, hunched over a table with a man who looked enough like him to be his younger brother, spotted me and waved. Katie was dead, but life at Middlebury went on.
“I’m sorry about your girlfriend,” Branigan said.
I looked up sharply. “My—she wasn’t—I mean—how did you—?”
He got up from the table and patted my shoulder. “I may be old, Max, but I’ve been a cop for a long time. I can see when somebody’s reacting to the death of a—”
“You can’t tell anyone,” I said in a rush. “If they find out, I’ll—”
He put up his hands in surrender. “Your secret’s safe with me,” he said. “It’s got nothing to do with the investigation—never did. I won’t tell a soul.”
“You promise?” I said. “You have to promise! You have no idea how much trouble I could—”
“Cross my heart,” he said, “and hope to die.”
He turned, then, and went away. I watched him disappear through the Juice Bar door, and when he was out of sight I sighed and reached for my headphones and slipped them on. I hit the Play button on my iPod, and the stuttering opening guitar chords of “Both Hands” filled my head with sound.
“In each other’s shadows, we grew less and less tall,” Ani sang breathily, “till eventually our theories couldn’t explain it all, and I’m recording our history now on the bedroom wall.”
History, I thought. Katie’s major.
There were tears in my eyes as I pulled a notebook and a pen from my backpack.
I sat there for a moment, gathering my thoughts, and then I began recording.
“I’ll never believe it was just a coincidence,” I wrote, “not if I live to be 40. Somehow, I’m convinced, Ani knew….”
THAT AFFAIR NEXT DOOR, by Anna Katharine Green
THE FIRST EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF AMELIA BUTTERWORTH
BOOK I: MISS BUTTERWORTH’S WINDOW
CHAPTER I
A DISCOVERY
I am not an inquisitive woman, but when, in the middle of a certain warm night in September, I heard a carriage draw up at the adjoining house and stop, I could not resist the temptation of leaving my bed and taking a peep through the curtains of my window.
First: because the house was empty, or supposed to be so, the family still being, as I had every reason to believe, in Europe; and secondly: because, not being inquisitive, I often miss in my lonely and single life much that it would be both interesting and profitable for me to know.
Luckily I made no such mistake this evening. I rose and looked out, and though I was far from realizing it at the time, took, by so doing, my first step in a course of inquiry which has ended—
But it is too soon to speak of the end. Rather let me tell you what I saw when I parted the curtains of my window in Gramercy Park, on the night of September 17, 1895.
Not much at first glance, only a common hack drawn up at the neighboring curb-stone. The lamp which is supposed to light our part of the block is some rods away on the opposite side of the street, so that I obtained but a shadowy glimpse of a young man and woman standing below me on the pavement. I could see, however, that the woman—and not the man—was putting money into the driver’s hand. The next moment they were on the stoop of this long-closed house, and the coach rolled off.
It was dark, as I have said, and I did not recognize the young people—at least their figures were not familiar to me; but when, in another instant, I heard the click of a night-key, and saw them, after a rather tedious fumbling at the lock, disappear from the stoop, I took it for granted that the gentleman was Mr. Van Burnam’s eldest son Franklin, and the lady some relative of the family; though why this, its most punctilious member, should bring a guest at so late an hour into a house devoid of everything necessary to make the least exacting visitor comfortable, was a mystery that I retired to bed to meditate upon.
I did not succeed in solving it, however, and after some ten minutes had elapsed, I was settling myself again to sleep when I was re-aroused by a fresh sound from the quarter mentioned. The door I had so lately heard shut, opened again, and though I had to rush for it, I succeeded in getting to my window in time to catch a glimpse of the departing figure of the young man hurrying away towards Broadway. The young woman was not with him, and as I realized that he had left her behind him in the great, empty house, without apparent light and certainly without any companion, I began to question if this was like Franklin Van Burnam. Was it not more in keeping with the recklessness of his more easy-natured and less reliable brother, Howard, who, some two or three years back, had married a young wife of no very satisfactory antecedents, and who, as I had heard, had been ostracized by the family in consequence?
Whichever of the two it was, he had certainly shown but little consideration for his companion, and thus thinking, I fell off to sleep just as the clock struck the half hour after midnight.
Next morning as soon as modesty would permit me to approach the window, I surveyed the neighboring house minutely. Not a blind was open, nor a shutter displaced. As I am an early riser, this did not disturb me at the time, but when after breakfast I looked again and still failed to detect any evidences of life in the great barren front beside me, I began to feel uneasy. But I did nothing till noon, when going into my rear garden and observing that the back windows of the Van Burnam house were as closely shuttered as the front, I became so anxious that I stopped the next policeman I saw going by, and telling him my suspicions, urged him to ring the bell.
No answer followed the summons.
“There is no one here,” said he.
“Ring again!” I begged.
And he rang again but with no better result.
“Don’t you see that the house is shut up?” he grumbled. “We have had orders to watch the place, but none to take the watch off.”
“There is a young woman inside,” I insisted. “The more I think over last night’s occurrence, the more I am convinced that the matter should be l
ooked into.”
He shrugged his shoulders and was moving away when we both observed a common-looking woman standing in front looking at us. She had a bundle in her hand, and her face, unnaturally ruddy though it was, had a scared look which was all the more remarkable from the fact that it was one of those wooden-like countenances which under ordinary circumstances are capable of but little expression. She was not a stranger to me; that is, I had seen her before in or about the house in which we were at that moment so interested; and not stopping to put any curb on my excitement, I rushed down to the pavement and accosted her.
“Who are you?” I asked. “Do you work for the Van Burnams, and do you know who the lady was who came here last night?”
The poor woman, either startled by my sudden address or by my manner which may have been a little sharp, gave a quick bound backward, and was only deterred by the near presence of the policeman from attempting flight. As it was, she stood her ground, though the fiery flush, which made her face so noticeable, deepened till her cheeks and brow were scarlet.
“I am the scrub-woman,” she protested. “I have come to open the windows and air the house,”—ignoring my last question.
“Is the family coming home?” the policeman asked.
“I don’t know; I think so,” was her weak reply.
“Have you the keys?” I now demanded, seeing her fumbling in her pocket.
She did not answer; a sly look displaced the anxious one she had hitherto displayed, and she turned away.
“I don’t see what business it is of the neighbors,” she muttered, throwing me a dissatisfied scowl over her shoulder.
“If you’ve got the keys, we will go in and see that things are all right,” said the policeman, stopping her with a light touch.
She trembled; I saw that she trembled, and naturally became excited. Something was wrong in the Van Burnam mansion, and I was going to be present at its discovery. But her next words cut my hopes short.
The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK ™: 20 Modern and Classic Tales of Female Detectives Page 56
