The Square Root of Murder

by Ada Madison

  I wrote a note to Ariana telling her that my house and fridge were hers and, by the way, I’d just ordered a new book on how to make beaded napkin rings and would make her a sample set by Labor Day. Bribes, bribes, bribes. Promises, promises.

  I stuffed a “best of” puzzle book in my tote and headed out to meet Rachel.

  There were pluses and minuses to living in a town that was only twenty-five miles from Buzzards Bay, the north end of Cape Cod. One drawback was that there was no good route to avoid traffic on a Saturday morning in July. It was marginally better that I was heading away from the Cape, on highway 495, and not toward it. Henley Airfield was on the northwestern edge of town, the opposite direction from hot spots like Old Silver Beach in Falmouth and the quaint shops of Provincetown at the tip of the Cape.

  Traveling in my direction were vacationers leaving the Cape, but with four lanes, the traffic was somewhat bearable. The common wisdom was that these drivers, having had to check out of their time-shares by eleven on Saturday, were the worst, since they were not happy to be heading back to their daily work lives. Having been cut off three times since leaving home, I believed it.

  An ambulance sailed by me, sirens blaring. I’d trained myself to think positive thoughts about emergency vehicles on the road: help is on the way. Since Bruce, however, my first thought was: too slow; instead of driving you should have taken a helicopter.

  As a mathematician, I tended to see everything in terms of logic diagrams and spreadsheets. I’d been mentally setting up a chart, even though it had been less than twenty-four hours since I’d learned of Keith’s murder and Rachel’s plight. I had nothing written yet, but I used the driving time to edit my lists anyway. I’d gone through possible suspects, alibis, motives, and access to the murder weapon. I’d started with everyone who attended the party, and added a few stray faculty members, plus the dean, all of whom I knew to have been at odds with Keith over one thing or another.

  The mental lists were too long now, and I was having trouble driving and concentrating.

  Screeeeech.

  I jammed on my brakes, luckily not slamming into an SUV in front of me. Some states had a hands-free law—no cell phones for the driver without a Bluetooth. I needed a mind-free law—no thoughts of anything other than the rules of the road.

  I needed to put off my diagramming task and switch to a different form of multitasking. Once I was on a back road to the airfield, I hit the Bluetooth device on the visor of my car and called Detective Archibald McConnell.

  I wasn’t looking forward to the call or the interview. My discomfort didn’t make sense. Thinking rationally, I should be jumping at the chance to talk to the Henley PD. The more information I had from them, the better my chances of figuring out something that would clear Rachel unequivocally. So why was I resenting an interview with Archie? Ever since I realized that Virgil was not joking when he’d implied that I was a suspect like every other Franklin Hall resident, I’d felt uneasy.

  Maybe just because, in general, cops were intimidating. I was a big fan of those whose daily jobs required putting themselves in potentially dangerous situations, just to protect and serve me and my loved ones. Bruce and the entire MAstar crew were in that number. Still, how many times had I been tooling along the turnpike at only one or two mph above the speed limit, and tapped my brakes when I saw a two-toned blue state trooper vehicle up ahead?

  I could only imagine how much worse it must be for the guilty.

  My Bluetooth speaker came alive. “Henley PD. McConnell here.”

  I gripped the steering wheel. “Yes, this is Sophie Knowles. Virgil asked me to call you?” But by the way, my inflection said, I can’t imagine why.

  “Yeah, hi, Sophie. I think we met at some shindig or other. Sorry about your friend.”

  “Thanks. I think she’ll be all right.”

  “Yeah, sorry about the victim, too.”

  Oh no! If I could have banged my head on the wheel without going off the road or activating my airbag, I would have. Before I could utter an apology for my insensitivity, Archie continued.

  “What’s a good time for you?”

  “Some afternoon next week would work. Classes have been cancelled.”

  “Let’s make it this afternoon, say, three o’clock?”

  I gulped. “Okay.”

  Archie had managed to keep a pleasant cadence in his voice, appearing to ask if the time was convenient, while issuing a nonnegotiable summons.

  “Do you know where the station is?”

  My first thought was to remind Archie that I’d been born and raised in Henley, a town that did not regularly move its government buildings. I recovered in time.

  “Yes, but thanks for asking.” Now I was brownnosing.

  “Have a nice morning,” he said.

  I could hear a pompous smile in his voice. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t blame him. I had a lot to learn about dealing with cops.

  I loved being at the airfield on the outskirts of Henley. It wasn’t at all like Logan in Boston, or Green International in Providence, or any major airport I’d ever been to. Henley Airport had a small control tower, only four runways, and acres of wide-open space. Rows of Cessnas and other two-to four-seaters sat parked next to hangars and on all sides of the trailers that comprised MAstar.

  I got out of my car and relished the breeze, warm as it was, that swept through the landscape in all seasons. With the majestic wings of aircraft visible in every direction, I always felt I’d entered an adventurous world, as if I could simply stand beside one of the planes or under a wing and take off myself.

  “Peter Pan,” Bruce said every time I shared that feeling. “The nineteen fifty-three version with Bobby Driscoll’s voice.”

  “You took the words right out of my mouth.”

  During one visit, Bruce let me try on his night-vision goggles. I’d seen them used often as props on TV, but it was something else to have the heavy equipment on my face and see for myself how everything turned green. Bruce took me into a windowless office in the MAstar trailer. After only a second or two, the desk, chairs, and computers came into focus, albeit with an eerie glow.

  One time was enough for me once I learned that a single pair of binocular goggles cost fifteen thousand dollars. It seemed that MAstar owned the latest and best in goggle technology, previously available only to the military.

  Ariana had been with me that day. When Bruce explained how the system’s optics took even the lowest available ambient light and multiplied it thousands of times, Ariana pretended to block her ears.

  “I like to think they’re magic, turning darkness into daylight,” she’d said.

  As a mathematician, I appreciated both the engineering and the mystical definitions. One of my favorite quotes was from John von Neumann: In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.

  Night-vision goggles were a small reminder of how different Bruce’s life was from mine. The polar opposite, in fact.

  After college in Boston, I’d worked in software development while I did my graduate work in differential equations. By the time I was thirty years old, I had my doctorate in mathematics but hadn’t traveled more than a few hundred miles from Henley. By then, Bruce, the same age as me, had done a stint as an air force pilot, flying helicopters over hostile deserts.

  When I started teaching at Henley, Bruce was on his way to his medevac career, accumulating the necessary three thousand hours of flight time. He’d worked many commercial jobs, from carrying local broadcast photographers on a shoot, to flying oil workers to a rig in the Gulf of Mexico, to transporting the super-rich to galas and sporting events.

  “The corporate world was my least favorite,” he’d told me. “Mind-numbing—chauffeuring CEOs and celebs to the airport in their private helicopters. And toting a bunch of tuna watchers was no picnic, either.”

  “Back up. Celebrities? Anyone I know?” I’d asked.

  “Oh, you know, the usual starlets on their way t
o a club or a concert.”

  “Rich, young, and beautiful?”

  “Yeah, but I couldn’t name one of them.”

  I’d been glad to hear it.

  So, not all of Bruce’s assignments had been life threatening or lifesaving in nature. And I did think I was making a contribution when I helped a student in such a way that she became a better member of society. When you added it all up, however, Bruce got the prize—providing a service that often meant the difference between life and death.

  It felt good to have an in with the emergency services pool. I hoped I’d never need them. And if I continued to lead this very unexciting, no-risk life, I never would.

  Rachel was waiting for me in the MAstar parking lot, outside a heavy-duty chain-link fence. We walked across the gravel lot and embraced. Or rather, Rachel threw her tiny self into my arms. When she stopped crying and had removed long, wet locks from her face, she asked, “Remember when I asked you to talk to Dr. Appleton for me?”

  Strange question. Was I being criticized for not having had time to appeal to Keith on her behalf before he died?

  “I do remember, and I was going to contact him right after the party,” I said, a little on the defensive.

  “No, no. I mean I wouldn’t have asked you to do that, would I, if I were going to . . . to kill him?”

  I patted her back. “No, you wouldn’t have, Rachel.”

  Things were worse than I thought if that was her only defense.

  With Bruce off duty these few hours, I’d called Gil Bartholomew and asked if she could let us into the MAstar trailer, secured behind the ten-foot fence.

  “Oh, and I’d like to use your bedroom so Rachel and I can talk in private,” I’d added.

  She’d laughed. “No one’s ever asked me that.”

  Gil was the only woman in the crew at MAstar’s Henley Airport base, and therefore had her own bedroom. All the pilots were men, as were the other flight nurses. “Most of these nurses come from a military background,” she’d explained, “and regular nursing in a hospital just doesn’t have that edge. As much as they might deny it, they’re looking for the thrill of the battlefield.”

  “And you?” I’d asked.

  “Guilty,” she’d said, with a smile. “When I got out of the reserves I took a job as an ER nurse, but even that didn’t cut it. We flight nurses get a lot more training, especially in drugs, and we have a lot more autonomy.”

  “I’m not tempted,” I’d said.

  As requested, I called Gil now from my cell. She came out wearing her navy flight suit up to her waist, a sleeveless white T-shirt on top. Bruce called the outfits “extra large, fire-retardant onesies for EMS professionals.” The jacket part of Gil’s suit hung over her butt, its sleeves looking like the arms of a raggedy doll. Or a corpse, I thought, unexpectedly.

  We climbed the rickety metal stairs, then entered the double-wide. Anyone’s first visit to the trailer held many surprises. Rachel seemed to be examining the unfamiliar features as if she were being sentenced to live here.

  The washer/dryer combo was situated right at the front door, where you might expect a comfortable chair and reading lamp, or at least an inviting rug. A toaster and other small appliances lined the counter next to the imposing laundry set, and the kitchen stretched out a whole ten feet back.

  By trailer standards, this one wasn’t all that bad. Sure, the brown paneled walls looked like they could use a good scrubbing, but the grime was hardly noticeable, with so many signs plastered all over—schedules, maps, warnings about safety, flight preparation and protocol lists, even a kitchen duty sign-up sheet, the numbered lines on which were blank except for Gil’s name. What a surprise.

  The overlapping notices reminded me of the kiosk in the student center at Henley, which, of course, reminded me of the turned upside-down campus.

  I glanced at the weather maps, which I always enjoyed perusing. I’d memorized the special coding to indicate flight—or not—conditions. Today’s map showed some splotches of pink, which meant dense fog, but larger areas in green. Depending on where a call came from, this afternoon’s victims and patients needing transport might not be stuck with snail’s-pace ground level conveyances.

  “REMEMBER THE KEYS” was the most prominent alert today, in large letters, tacked over the door we’d just walked through. Did helicopters have ignition keys? If so, did pilots really forget to take them out the door?

  “Nice party yesterday,” Gil said, bringing any small talk among us to a halt.

  Except for the way it ended hung in the air, unspoken. Gil’s face indicated that she wished she could take back the words. Our throat clearings and gulps were louder than whatever was clacking around in the dryer.

  “Can I get a tour?” Rachel asked.

  Gil gave Rachel a look that I couldn’t interpret, but it was clear by her expression that being a docent wasn’t on Gil’s agenda. I sensed that Rachel wasn’t that interested anyway, but simply putting off our conversation.

  Gil moved quickly out of her unpleasant reaction to Rachel’s request. “You bet,” she said. She rubbed her hands together, scraping away her inadvertent reminder of the murder of someone close to us, and led the way down the hall.

  It was sobering to realize how easily we returned to normal.

  I was dismayed to note that my headache was back.

  CHAPTER 7

  I’d visited the MAstar facility many times during my five years with Bruce and learned something new each time. First, that star was not a reference to flying up where the heavenly bodies were, but an acronym for “shock, trauma, air rescue.” He’d taught me other acronyms, like LZ for “landing zone” and AGL for “above ground level.” He’d had me lie down in the back of the aircraft to see how efficiently everything was laid out, each medical supply or instrument with its own slot. I was most impressed by a field EKG system that generated a report and transmitted it to the hospital before the patient arrived.

  Today was different, the first time I was here without him. It felt strange to walk by the room he shared with another pilot, knowing he was now most likely napping in his own townhouse bed. I peeked in—once I knew his roommate was outside kicking the tires on the helicopter—and checked out the row of photos on Bruce’s side of the dresser. I knew what to expect—small framed shots of the two of us on favorite outings, and a grade school picture of Melanie, his only niece, whom he adored. I felt a pang of missing him and couldn’t wait until he was off for seven days, starting Monday morning.

  With classes cancelled, that meant we were both off for a stretch and might be able to get out of town for a few days. The scorcher days were perfect for a trip to a sweet Hyannis beach.

  It was a nice thought, until I recalled the reason summer school had been interrupted. My gaze fell on Rachel, walking slump-shouldered between Gil and me, her pink flipflops slapping pitifully on the floor. Something told me not to get psyched for anything other than helping her until further notice. The Cape would have to wait.

  We tiptoed past a bedroom with a closed door.

  “Don’t worry about making noise,” Gil said. “You’d never be in this job if you needed a lot of privacy or the comforts of home. But it’s the perfect career for a family person.”

  Rachel registered surprise. “I would have thought just the opposite.”

  I knew better. The dynamic worked especially well when both parties had flexible schedules, as was true for Hal and Gil and for Bruce and me. Neither Bruce nor I was a Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five kind of person, and neither were the Bartholomews, I suspected. It was the perfect combination: an EMS job offered long stretches of days off, and most college teachers, like Hal, had at least one day off a week during the regular semester, ostensibly to do research. Timmy Bartholomew, a kindergartener, was guaranteed to have one parent or the other free to drop him off or pick him up.

  “Flight nurses work two twenty-four hour days in a week,” Gil told Rachel.

  “Like, forty-eight hour
s straight?”

  “Not necessarily. I came on at four o’clock yesterday, and I’ll be here until four this afternoon. But of course, we’re not usually up and working all those hours. And then”—Gil spread her fingers, palms up—“I’ll have four whole days off. Then back for twenty-four, and so on.”

  Rachel seemed to be considering this trade-off. At this point in her grad school life, even one day off without homework or lab work to think about would appeal to her.

  Gil helped us settle in her room, pulling in an extra chair and carrying two glasses of iced tea on a tray. Were all flight nurses this agile?

  I was pleased to see a copy of the puzzle I’d handed out at the party lying on top of a stack of puzzle books from my competition. I couldn’t help sneaking a look to see how far along Gil had gotten. I ran my finger down the page. Not bad. Maybe Gil would be the one to validate this new entry of mine.

  Gil caught me reviewing her work. “Don’t you dare tell me how it ends,” she said.

  I zipped my lip. “Not a chance.”

  “Gotta go. Mi casa . . .” she said, closing the door behind her.

  Gil didn’t have to share this room, but the eight-by-ten space could have belonged to anyone in the crew. In fact, Bruce’s room had more homey touches, with movie posters on one side (his) and NASCAR images on the other (his roommate’s). Gil, on the other hand, had gone with the MAstar-issue dull blue bedspread, kept the walls free of decoration, and had just one photo, of herself with Hal and Timmy on Hal’s graduation day.