The Square Root of Murder

by Ada Madison

  From Gil: “Then there was the time we simulated a bus crash with thirty people on their way to a casino.”

  From Dean Underwood: “Does someone think that could really happen?”

  From Bruce: “Anything can happen.”

  Oops, the dean never wanted to hear something like that. But I hadn’t been asked to edit.

  From: Gil: “The idea is to practice our drills, get to know each other and how we operate, you know, just in case.”

  From Bruce, who had read the dean correctly: “On the outside chance.”

  From Gil: “We brought in twelve fire departments, three law enforcement agencies, an emergency communications agency”—she ticked off the list I’d heard more than once from Bruce—“the state office of emergency services, and the coroner’s office.”

  From Bruce: “Plus hospitals and an air ambulance.”

  From Dean Underwood: “My.”

  Gil was the first to spot me. She waved me to a seat next to her. “Hey, Sophie, look who’s all here.”

  I’d noticed. “Hey, Gil. Bruce.” I cleared my throat and all but bowed. “Dean Underwood.”

  Bruce stood and took my arm, leading me to a seat. I was sure the dean would be impressed by his old-fashioned chivalry, and the way I seemed to accept it. I also knew that’s what Bruce had in mind.

  “Hal has something to pick up or leave off or whatever in Franklin Hall, and Timmy’s with his grandmother,” Gil said, “so I thought I’d ride over and then get a lunch date out of it.”

  “You’re off today?”

  “Not supposed to be, but the schedule got crazy this week, with all hands on deck for the big drill and people switching here and there. Happens a lot.”

  “The nurses have it a lot easier,” Bruce said.

  Gil gave him a mock frown and pulled something from her purse. She handed me a sheet of paper. My word puzzle, completed. The one everyone else at the party had complained about and declared impossible.

  “Terrific. You did it.” All it took was one positive response to cheer me, and Gil was often the one who gave it to me.

  “It took me a little longer than usual, but I like that kind of challenge.”

  Suddenly the dean stood, and everyone stood with her.

  “Well, I must get to the reason I came by in the first place,” she said. She held up a stack of books and pointed to the returns desk.

  I wouldn’t have thought the dean would be subject to the same circulation policy as the rest of us, but, hey, what did I know?

  “Dean Underwood,” Bruce said, nodding. I was proud of my guy’s good manners.

  I was ready to return to my interview corner, but the dean beckoned me to her side with one of her crooked fingers. “Sophie,” she said.

  I gulped. Hearing the dean address me by my first name was, ironically, like hearing my mother use my full name, as in “Sophie Saint Germain Knowles,” followed by, “Stop that this instant.”

  Bruce and Gil seemed be involved in a conversation of their own now. I heard phrases like rotor downwash, high payload, and something about a new litter, which I took to be not about puppies or kittens.

  “Yes?” I croaked at the dean.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Pam, Liz, and Casey approaching. All I needed was for one of them to ask if I was through with my questioning them as part of a murder investigation.

  “I’ll see you in my office immediately,” the dean said.

  On a Sunday? Wait a minute. The dean might be able to make or break me careerwise, but she wasn’t in charge of my weekends.

  I swung my arm in the direction of the students who now stood a discreet distance away, thankfully, as if they were in line for an ATM. “I’m holding my student conferences this morning, to plan out the end of my summer classes. As President Aldridge requested.”

  I’d learned a long time ago how rank-conscious the dean was. Name-dropping was always a good bet for gaining the upper hand.

  She pushed back the sleeve of her pale linen jacket, her idea of casual Sunday attire, and looked at her watch. Could it be that she had a life? I doubted it. I’d often thought that the reason she and Keith got along so well was that he didn’t have one either. They were each other’s nonlife.

  “Very well, then. I’ll see you in my office right after President Aldridge’s all-faculty meeting in the morning.”

  “President Aldridge also called for each department to hold a meeting after the all-hands assembly.” I was almost huffy this time.

  The dean let out a long, annoyed breath. “Of course you’ll follow that directive. But, for now”—in a most unusual gesture, she took hold of my elbow and ushered me to a spot in the stacks, farther from the students—“you are to return to me the boxes of material you took from Dr. Appleton’s office immediately.”

  “What are you—”

  The dean’s “don’t you dare deny it” look cut me off. She stomped off in her sensible pumps.

  “See you then,” I said to her back, then flapped away in my sandals.

  CHAPTER 14

  I’d had no time to dwell on the boxes except to think about hiring a PI to locate them for me. My phone rang as I was on my way to my temporary conference table at the back of the library. I clicked my phone on and used hand signals to tell Casey to meet me there in five minutes.

  When did my life become so complicated? On Friday, when Keith Appleton was murdered, I remembered.

  Bruce was calling me from the other end of the library. I’d seen Gil leave the building and Bruce wander off to the periodical rack, maybe to slip in copies of Rotor magazine as a recruiting device.

  “I heard the dean call you ‘Sophie.’ That couldn’t have been good,” my perceptive boyfriend said.

  I growled. “She wants the boxes back.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  “Bruce!” The volume was low but the tone was a shout.

  “Kidding. Want me to help? I can call Virge.”

  “You can’t call Virge.”

  “Because you’re a thief? You know I love a good heist movie. The Score, The Thomas Crown Affair—”

  “Bruce!”

  “Go take care of your students. Let me see what I can do, okay? Do you need your car for an hour or so?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  “You can take my car, but you can’t call Virge,” I repeated. “And I didn’t do a heist.”

  I had one more chance with the Triad. Casey was the Queen of Bling, with a different set of shiny, tinkling baubles every day. While I couldn’t even stand to wear a watch on hot days, Casey decorated her wrists, ears, neck, toes, fingers and patches of bare skin with jewels and decals no matter what the weather.

  It was tough to search out her small face with today’s distraction, a matching beaded set of earrings, necklace, and bracelet, in shades of red and purple. I was tempted to ask if she’d made them herself, and if so, had she bought the beads at Ariana’s shop, but that would have compounded the distraction.

  I decided to try a new tactic with the third interview of the day, not counting the dean’s with me, and start with the elephant in the room.

  “Casey, I felt you had more to say yesterday, when we were chatting outside Franklin Hall. Is there something you want to tell me?”

  “We were at the party for Dr. Bartholomew, like everybody else, then we went to the dorm,” she said.

  Not again. I sent a soft, compassionate breath her way. “Casey, I know Pam can be a little intimidating—”

  “I don’t have anything more to say, Dr. Knowles. Can we just get to my grade for the class? Please?”

  Casey’s “please” was a drawn out plea. That and her eyes, on the verge of tears, got to me. Time to move on. I knew these girls were hiding something, but when push came to shove, I couldn’t beat up on this child.

  Casey was not doing well in applied statistics. To keep her scholarship she needed at least a B in each class. In
my class she was hovering around C, plus one day, minus the next. I told her the kind of research paper she’d have to do to bring her grade up, and that she’d need to take an exam.

  In my experience, there were two kinds of test takers, those who preferred oral exams and those who dreaded them. I gave Casey her choice.

  “Oh, my God, I love orals,” Casey said. “I get all clutched up when I have to write and I can’t explain myself because the questions are too . . . too . . .”

  “Too specific?”

  She nodded. “Like Dr. Appleton’s. Like, with true/false it’s do or die”—she clamped her hand over her mouth—“I didn’t mean it that way.”

  I patted her other hand, the one with six inches of thin multicolor spangles. “I know you didn’t mean it. You had that extended organic chem class with Dr. Appleton this summer, right?”

  “I like that. ‘Extended.’ Actually it was makeup, since we did so badly this spring.”

  “Do you know yet how that will be wrapped up?”

  “Uh-huh, that new teacher, Ms. Bronson, is taking over now as far as working out our grades.”

  “I’m glad it’s taken care of. What grade do you have going in?”

  A simple query, to show my interest, not meant to be a trick question. I was past trying to dupe the girls into giving me information I could use to clear Rachel. And I’d decided some time ago that getting to the truth of who killed Keith Appleton was more important even than a single student. I needed to follow the evidence and the logic of the murder, no matter where it led.

  I was taken aback to watch Casey stumbling over my simple question and looking as rattled as if she had one million dollars riding on her answer. She ran both hands through her unruly curls. “Uh . . . an A,” she mumbled.

  That was a surprise. But why mumble an A when it might be the first one you’ve had in a long time? Maybe I’d heard wrong.

  “Did you say an A?”

  “I have an A going in,” she said, not much more clearly.

  “Good for you. I thought you were struggling with that class.”

  “I, uh, was, but I, uh, pulled it up.”

  I looked across the table at Casey. She hadn’t been this flustered even yesterday while she was lying to me. She fidgeted in her chair, looked up to the ceiling and down to the table, glanced back over her shoulder toward the lobby, and then repeated the sequence. My guess was that she wished she could beam Pam and Liz over here to bail her out. Pam and Liz, on their part, were inching closer to us as it became increasingly obvious, even from a distance, that Casey was in distress.

  Casey’s behavior threw me back to being in Keith’s office a few days before his death.

  Keith is working on his laptop, updating his organic chemistry grade sheet. He’s in a hurry to finish up and print out the sheet to take to his class. “Look at this.” He spins his computer in my direction and shows me the screen. “Not one student even close to a B,” he says. I look. Sure enough, no grade above a C and most below it. I know he wants me to commiserate about the pathetic abilities of Henley chemistry majors. I don’t comment. He turns the laptop back and pecks away at his keyboard. He shakes his head. “Dumb sophomores,” he says. “Dumb juniors. Dumb every student at this dumb college.”

  Now a picture started to take shape, and it wasn’t pretty. I saw Casey and her friends poisoning Keith—the details weren’t clear—and changing their grades on his laptop. I tried to chase away the picture. Of all the motives I could think of, this was one of the weakest. I imagined every college in cities and towns across the country losing a few teachers every year if this practice became popular.

  Something was missing in my theory. I played with the murderous picture in my head, running a blackboard eraser back and forth across it but it wouldn’t disappear.

  Out of the blue, Woody Conroy with his barrel of mops and brooms, invaded the scene that was taking over my vision. I heard Woody mention how he’d hung Keith’s Fellow award that morning. Pam entered the picture and I heard her tell me how she and her friends hadn’t seen Keith all day on Friday. Then Casey’s or Liz’s voice joined in, talking about the Fellow award on the wall.

  Someone was lying. Either Woody put that award up the day before, or the girls had been in Keith’s office the morning he was murdered. How else could they have seen the award on the wall?

  I left the scene, with the imaginary Woody and Pam and Liz and Casey arguing about who was telling the truth. My chips were on Woody.

  My mind reentered the interrogation corner of the Emily Dickinson Library.

  “Casey, did you change your grade?”

  Casey lifted her head from the cushion of her arms on the table. Her blond hair was wet from tears that had started when the subject of organic chemistry came up. Her face was streaked with poorly applied eye makeup. She opened her mouth but no words came out.

  Pam and Liz had reached us by now. Liz began stroking Casey’s back. Pam’s arms were folded across her flat chest.

  “We can explain,” Pam said.

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” Liz said. “This whole place is creeping me out.” She wrapped her arms across her thin body as if she were freezing. Or at a crime scene.

  “I can’t stand this campus one more minute either,” Casey said, in a low scream, pointing toward Franklin Hall. She’d pulled herself together enough to stand up. “Can we go to, like, a coffee shop downtown?”

  “I have my car,” Pam said, before I could respond. She looked at me. “Unless you’re afraid to ride with us?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  How foolish was this? Was I now the same obstacle to Casey’s college funding that Keith had been? I refused to believe these young women would harm me.

  Still, I hoped Bruce wouldn’t travel too far out of range of my cell.

  We sat at a round table in Back to the Grind, only a few blocks from campus, an easy walk in better weather. The place wasn’t air-conditioned, but a large fan kept the room bearable. The ride over had been silent except for the sounds of an old AC/DC album in Pam’s CD player.

  Now with various levels of caffeine drinks in front of us, it was still silent. Until Casey started to tear up again.

  Pam put her hand on Casey’s arm and the waterworks stopped. “We just wanted to help Casey out,” Pam said.

  “So you two were happy with your Cs and Ds?” I asked, addressing Pam and Liz.

  “We just thought, while we were there, you know, we might as well up ours a notch, too,” Liz said.

  I rolled my eyes, shook my head, and otherwise showed my extreme disapproval.

  “Oh, come on. How many students does Dr. Appleton really flunk in the long run?” Pam asked in an updated version of “pshaw.” “Not that many when it comes to final grades. He likes to scare us is all. I’d have come out fine one way or the other.”

  “I knew I could make it up,” Liz said. “Honestly, a C or D here or there isn’t going to ruin my life. But Casey would have had to leave school.”

  “And that was worth your teacher’s life?”

  The girls turned to me, eyes all wide, mouths open.

  I heard the beginnings of sentences.

  “Oh, no . . .”

  “We didn’t really . . .”

  “How could you think . . .”?

  Their protests were intermingled; I couldn’t tell who was saying what.

  Pam and Liz each held one of Casey’s hands. All were in tears when the next round began.

  “He was already dead.”

  “I wanted to just leave.” This, I was sure, was from Casey.

  “We went there to help Casey try to negotiate.”

  “We started to knock, but the door just pushed open.”

  “I didn’t want to go through with it.” Casey again.

  “I’ve been a wreck.” And again.

  “It was a stupid thing to do, but he was dead. And there was his computer screen—”

/>   “With all our grades.”

  Eventually, the girls started from the beginning, when they’d headed up to the fourth floor around two thirty on Friday. They took turns describing the crime scene, with their professor on the floor behind his desk. It was like hearing Rachel all over again and I realized they didn’t match the profile of a killer any more than Rachel did. Assuming I’d know one when I saw one.

  “We really are disgusted with ourselves,” Liz said.

  “You should be,” I said. “But I’m glad you’re telling the truth now.”

  “What should we do?” Pam asked, surprising me. I’d have expected her to exact a promise from me to not breathe a word.

  “You should go to the police,” I said, all virtuous.

  “Aren’t you working with the cops?” Liz asked.

  Uh-oh. Virtue was about to fly out the open window next to our table.

  “Yes, I am,” I said, mentally reserving the fact that the cops didn’t know it. “And I have a couple of questions if you don’t mind—”

  “Oh, my God. Can we help?” Casey said, while Liz and Pam gave me an “anything you like” look.

  I took a notebook out of my purse, as befitted one helping out the Henley PD.

  “Let’s start with your arriving at Dr. Appleton’s office, about two thirty you said?”

  “Uh-huh. After the party. His car was still on campus, so we knew he was in and we thought if we all went up together we might be able to make him see reason.”

  An intimidating group, but I doubted Keith would have been fazed by three of his students. I envisioned his standing up behind his desk and flicking them out the door.

  “You all stayed to help me clean up, so it was after that?”

  “We wanted to make sure you were gone,” Casey said.

  Pam shot her a look. The old Pam was back. “We didn’t want anyone interrupting us,” she said.

  I got it.

  “About Dr. Appleton’s office. I know it won’t be pleasant, but if you can go back in your minds and tell me if you saw anything out of the ordinary?”