Melly waved that off. “Of course you’re involved. Your father is a suspect. How can you not be?”
Liss conceded the point. “That being the case, there is something you can help me with. You’ve worked in the theater department since you graduated from Anisetab, right?”
“More years than I want to count.”
“So, you must be familiar with Lincoln Hall from the days before the arts center was built.”
“Intimately familiar. I was a theater major as a student and worked in that building for the first dozen years I was on staff afterward.”
“What I’d really like is a tour. I think that whoever killed Dr. Palsgrave got in and out through the art gallery. Is that feasible?”
“It’s certainly a possibility.” Melly abruptly stood and collected their empty coffee mugs. Liss couldn’t even remember draining hers. “Come on. Time’s a wasting. We’ll take your car.”
It was only a short drive to the college campus, with its tree-shaded green lawns and at least a dozen redbrick buildings. Liss recognized the stone chapel from Willa’s description. She had no idea which one was Lincoln Hall, but parked where Melly told her to.
“This is not a classroom building,” she said when Melly opened a door and the distinctive smell of French fries wafted out.
“It’s eleven-thirty,” Melly explained. “We’re going to make our first stop the faculty/staff dining room.”
“Why?”
The fried food aroma faded as they made their way deeper into the building. The next time Liss inhaled it was to catch the yummy scent of freshly baked lasagna. Her stomach growled loudly.
“That’s why,” Melly said. “I’m hungry, too. But more importantly,” she added, lowering her voice, “this is where the history department’s secretary always eats lunch, from precisely eleven-thirty until twelve-thirty every day. Ah, we’ve lucked out. She’s at a table by herself. Go along with whatever I say.”
Liss trailed after her mother’s friend, feeling like an intruder. Everyone else in the room worked at the college.
“Hey, Norma,” Melly said. “This is Lisa. She’s going to be a visiting lecturer in the fall. Lisa, this is Norma Leeds. She’s the secretary for the history department.”
“Administrative assistant,” Norma corrected, and accepted “Lisa” at face value. She seemed happy to have their company while she ate.
It didn’t take long for Melly to bring the conversation around to the murder. “So, what’s the latest scuttlebutt on Palsgrave’s death?” she asked. “There sure hasn’t been much on the news.”
“Terrible, isn’t it?” Norma asked in a hushed voice, but her dark brown eyes brightened with the avid gleam of a natural-born gossip. She was a horse-faced woman of indeterminate years—somewhere between thirty and fifty.
“How was he killed?” Melly asked.
“The police won’t say, but I know for a fact that there was a lot of blood. Poor Willa Somener—that’s Caroline’s work-study student—she found the body. She was just hysterical. Well, I’m sure you can imagine.”
Liss wondered if Norma knew that Willa was now Caroline’s ex-work-study student.
Then she wondered how Norma had come to see Willa having hysterics. Had Willa returned to Caroline’s office after the police questioned her? Somehow, Liss doubted it.
The more Norma talked, the more she reminded Liss of Dolores Mayfield, Moosetookalook’s village librarian. Like Dolores, Norma didn’t let the lack of verified facts keep her from embellishing a good story as she passed it on.
“I heard the police were questioning some guy Lee quarreled with,” Melly said between bites of a club sandwich overflowing with sliced chicken and crisp strips of bacon.
“I’m not surprised. I told the officer about that, of course. And that the same man came back the morning of the murder. He said he had an appointment.” She made it sound as if that was the most outrageous thing in the world.
Liss could no longer hold her tongue. “But he didn’t see Dr. Palsgrave that day, did he? The day the professor died.”
“Not in his office, he didn’t. But he was headed for the classroom when he left, and that’s where the murder took place, isn’t it?” Norma’s long, narrow face lit with a triumphant smile.
“Did you send him there?” Melly asked, dabbing her lips with a napkin.
“No, I did not.”
“Who did?”
“It was Dr. Halladay who mentioned to that MacCrimmon fellow that Lee was probably still in class.”
“So it wasn’t yet eleven?” Liss interjected.
If Norma thought it odd that Liss would know when the class met, she didn’t say so. “I suppose not, although the professor often stayed in his classroom after class, discussing projects with students and so forth. He was a very dedicated teacher.”
“Didn’t it worry you at the time?” Liss was finding it harder and harder to sound nonchalant. “That Dr. Halladay had told someone who’d quarreled with Dr. Palsgrave where to find him?”
“Why should it?”
She shrugged. “Well, if they fought the last time they met—”
“It isn’t as if that was the first time I’d heard shouting from Dr. Palsgrave’s office, although I must admit it was usually him doing the yelling.” She frowned and even went so far as to stop eating. “Lee was prone to lose his temper, but he always smoothed things over afterward.”
Hadn’t Willa said she didn’t know of any disagreements in the history department? Liss set that contradiction aside to think about later. “Could you hear what this argument was about?”
“Well,” Norma said in a confiding tone, “I don’t know for certain, but it sounded like Lee was up to his old tricks. That man was a tomcat, if you know what I mean.”
“Cherchez la femme,” Melly said with a laugh. When Norma looked away, a tinge of pink in her cheeks, and began to shovel spoonfuls of her dessert into her mouth, Melly sent Liss an apologetic look.
“Did Mr. MacCrimmon threaten Professor Palsgrave?” Liss asked.
Norma nodded but didn’t meet her eyes. “He shouted, ‘You stay away from my wife, you son of a bitch, or I’ll make you sorry you were ever born!’ ”
“You’re upset,” Melly said a few minutes later. They were back in Liss’s car.
“Well, of course I’m upset.” When Norma had repeated her father’s threat, Liss had abruptly lost what little appetite she’d had. Although the department secretary had kept talking, Liss hadn’t heard another word she’d said. She’d stayed put as long as she could stand to and then mumbled an excuse about not feeling well and bolted.
Melly reached across and turned the key in the ignition. “Norma always takes her full hour for lunch. That leaves us just enough time to take a look around Lincoln Hall.”
Liss was silent during the short drive to the parking lot closest to the history department. She still felt shaky. She didn’t believe her father capable of murder, but she was beginning to wonder if she knew him as well as she’d thought she did.
Melly unlocked a very plain door at the side of the building. Her attention caught, Liss zeroed in on the key her mother’s old friend was holding. “Does everyone on faculty and staff have a master key to all the buildings on campus?”
“Oh, no,” Melly said. “That wouldn’t be prudent. But I have one for the arts center and another—this one—that unlocks all the doors in this building. We still occasionally use the old stage for student productions and the like.”
They entered a corridor with doors leading off on both sides.
“Way back when, there was only one office here, for the theater director.” Melly indicated the first door to her right. “There was a classroom beyond. On the left there was only one door, leading into a huge open space situated directly under the stage. That’s where we used to build sets.”
The left side of the corridor now boasted two doors. Between them another hallway veered off in the same direction.
“Now there are all
offices here,” Melly continued. “Two floors worth.” She chuckled. “If anyone tried to go through the trapdoor in the stage these days, they’d find themselves landing on somebody’s desk instead of on the elevator platform that used to sit beneath it.”
She sounded as if she missed the good old days, but Liss wasn’t so much interested in the past as she was the present. “Where is Palsgrave’s office?” she asked.
Obligingly, Melly led her into the side corridor and up a flight of stairs. On the second level, through another locked door, they entered an open space containing a desk and several file cabinets, along with the usual office equipment. “This is Norma’s area,” Melly said, “centrally located. Lee’s office is through there.”
Liss could easily understand how the secretary had been able to overhear the quarrel. Her work space was right in front of her boss’s door. She was in a perfect position to act as guard dog, as well as to get a good look at any and all visitors.
Liss took a few minutes to look around and to read the names on the other doors. Dr. Halladay’s office was opposite Dr. Palsgrave’s, making it reasonable for her to have heard Liss’s father asking for the professor and to have poked her head out to suggest he check the classroom. Liss wished Caroline hadn’t been so helpful.
“Seen enough here?” Melly asked. “We need to hustle if we don’t want to bump into Norma coming back from lunch.”
“Where is the art gallery?” Liss asked.
“We’ll get to that in a minute, but I thought you’d want to start from the same point Lee Palsgrave would have.”
Their route took them along a zigzagging hallway, down a short flight of stairs, and past a number of closed doors. Melly pointed out one of them as having formerly led into the costume department. They came out into a small foyer containing public restrooms.
Liss felt thoroughly turned around. She thought they were at the back of the building and glanced through the glass in a nearby exit door to confirm her guess. Outside was the driveway heading down to the lot where her car was parked.
“You coming?” Melly was already halfway up the ornate flight of stairs opposite the exit.
At the top was the theater foyer. Double sets of double doors led to a porch on Liss’s right and into the auditorium on her left. The box office and the entrance to the art gallery were straight ahead.
“Rabbit warren, indeed,” Liss muttered. “I’m not sure I could find my way back to the history department without a trail of bread crumbs to follow.”
Melly chuckled and once more whipped out her master key to open the gallery. She relocked the door behind them and hustled Liss past a handful of sculptures and dozens of paintings. Liss didn’t get a good look at any of them. Melly hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights.
At the far side of the art gallery was another locked door. In seconds, they were through and standing in a hallway flanked by classrooms. Most of their doors stood open and light streamed through from a multitude of windows. Only one door was closed. It also had yellow crime scene tape stretched across it.
Liss entered one of the other classrooms and crossed to the bank of windows. “We’re on the first floor,” she said in surprise.
“This section of Lincoln Hall is uphill from the theater wing. That’s probably half the reason Lee liked to use this shortcut. He hated to exert himself.”
“I’d think he’d get just as much exercise running through that maze.” Liss studied the street outside. The sidewalk wasn’t more than a few yards away from the building. “Whoever killed Dr. Palsgrave took a terrible risk of being seen. What if one of the demonstrators had looked in through a window at just the wrong moment?”
Melly studied the direction of the light, much as Liss had at her house on the day of her fitting. “Even if one of them came close enough, he’d have had a hard time seeing anything of the interior. And I don’t imagine the killer took any longer about his business than he had to. Or stuck around afterward, either.”
“No. I don’t suppose he did. And if I’m right, he came in and went out the same way we just did. And he probably exited the building through that door near the restrooms in the theater wing.”
“The one close to the pit,” Melly mused. “That means he probably parked there. Too bad there aren’t any surveillance cameras.”
“The pit?”
Melly laughed. “That’s the nickname for that lower parking lot. It overlooks the man-made duck pond that, once upon a time, separated the women’s dormitories from the men’s. Back in the dark ages when your mother and I were students here, before co-ed dorms became the norm, the powers that be tried to keep the sexes separated. That just made horny college students more creative. Those who had cars used them for parking, usually in that lot. Hence the name ‘passion pit.’ ”
They left the building by the main entrance, after carefully relocking the door to the art gallery. As Liss had been told, the paved path that ran alongside Lincoln Hall sloped steeply downhill.
“About the master keys to this building,” she began.
“I’ve already told you that I don’t know who has copies, although I’ve no doubt that everyone in the history department was issued one. And Norma, of course.”
“Anyone else? If Palsgrave locked up after himself, then his killer needed a key to use that route to get away.”
“Unless he took Lee’s.”
Liss shuddered at the image of a murderer cold-bloodedly going through the pockets of his victim. She had a good imagination, and no difficulty picturing the gory, gruesome scene. She only wished she could put a face to that vision of the killer.
“If only I had access to what the state police already know,” she murmured. “They must have a list of everything that was in Palsgrave’s pockets. They’d know whether or not he still had his key on him when they examined the body.”
“The custodians also have access to all the buildings,” Melly said, apparently still mulling over Liss’s original question.
“What about work-study students? Are they given keys?”
“Some are. It depends on what jobs they’re assigned. Back in the day, we used to hire a couple of boys just to do odd jobs in the theater department.” She grinned suddenly. “Which makes me think there might be even more keys to this building floating around than I first supposed. Those boys weren’t always good about turning their copies back in at the end of a semester.”
“You mean they’d forget and take them home with them?”
The grin got broader. “Nope. Those keys became legacies, passed on to a deserving underclassman.”
Liss frowned. “I’m not following you.”
“Ah, youth. You went to college long after the days when administrators believed they had to act in loco parentis for students. That means ‘take the place of parents,’ in case you didn’t study Latin in school, which you probably didn’t. Anyway, back in the day, we had curfews. Girls had to sign out when they left their dormitories after dark and sign in when they returned. If a girl wanted a little time in private with a boyfriend, they had to find someplace other than a dorm room—girls’ dorms were off limits to boys and boys’ dorms were off limits to girls.”
“The pit?” Liss guessed.
“And, for those who didn’t like freezing their butts off on a cold winter’s night, or having a gearshift poke them in unfortunate places, there were always buildings that were supposed to be empty.” She jerked her head toward the former theater as they got back into Liss’s car. “In the wings, up a flight of metal stairs—handy for hearing if anyone was coming—there are a couple of rooms used for storing scenery. As far as I know, they’re still used for that purpose.” A reminiscent smile came over her face, erasing years from her appearance. “I have particularly fond memories of scenery storage loft number two—the one with the bed.”
The car engine made a grinding noise as Liss turned the key too hard in the ignition. It had been a fruitful day. She’d learned a great deal, even if she wasn�
��t yet sure what it all meant. But she’d also heard way too much about what life was like on campus when her mother was a coed.
Chapter Ten
When Liss returned home from Three Cities, she found her parents on the little porch attached to the guest room—the same one she’d almost killed herself getting to on the day her father had locked himself in. The two of them looked quite cozy, sharing a late afternoon snack of iced tea and cookies. Apparently they’d talked while she’d been away. She hoped that meant her father had convinced her mother of his innocence.
Reluctant to shatter their rapport, she hesitated in the doorway. She might have retreated, had Vi not glanced up and seen her standing there before she could escape.
“Did you pick up the gowns?” she asked.
“Yes, I—”
“Did you hang them up as soon as you got home?”
“Yes, Mom. I—”
“We expected you back sooner. I hope there weren’t any last minute problems.”
“No problems with the dress, but I did take time to ask a few questions at the college.”
“Really, Liss. There was no need for that.”
Liss ignored her mother, keeping her focus on her father. “You were overheard threatening Dr. Palsgrave, Dad. His secretary says you yelled, ‘You stay away from my wife, you son of a bitch, or I’ll make you sorry you were ever born!’ Is that what you said?”
Mac winced. “I’m afraid so, honey, but the worst I was threatening was to get a restraining order, not to kill him, and even that was a bluff because I wouldn’t do anything to embarrass Vi.”
Vi gave a disbelieving snort. “What do you think quarreling with Lee was, if not embarrassing me?”
“I didn’t expect you’d ever hear about it.”
Vi sputtered for a moment, then rolled her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Liss said, moving closer, “but I need to know. Why were you so sure Dr. Palsgrave was out to cause trouble between you and Mother?”
“Because he tried once before, before we were married.”
Bagpipes, Brides and Homicides (Liss Maccrimmon Scottish Mysteries) Page 12
