Ada Madison - The Square Root of Murder

I filled Bruce in on Virgil’s visit and Rachel’s second call. I was still smarting from how much evidence pointed to her, and still red-faced at how I’d kept shooting the messenger, Bruce’s best friend.

“Did Virgil tell you how I was a basket case last night?” I asked.

Bruce bit into the center of his bun, the best part, where most of the gooey sugar was concentrated. I often stole that part from him. He shrugged his shoulders. The stall spoke volumes. I had to wait until he swallowed to hear his answer.

“Virge deals with a lot of people in critical situations; he’s seen a lot of different responses, all legitimate.”

I laughed, only slightly annoyed to be lumped in with “a lot of people.” “Did you learn that in your ‘How To Deal With Trauma Victims’ class?”

He took another bite of pastry, hard to do when you’re laughing. “Mmaypbe,” he said.

“Seriously, Bruce, I don’t know who could have killed Keith, but I know it wasn’t Rachel Wheeler. I’m wracking my brain”-I shook my fork at him and a tiny bit of egg fell onto the table-“but not to come up with suspects. To eliminate them. The whole population of Franklin Hall could have done it, plus the entire membership of the faculty senate.”

“Even you, huh?”

“Yes.” I chose to ignore the attempt at derailment, but his comment did remind me that I had to call Virgil’s partner to schedule an interview. “Did I tell you that Keith tried to change the bylaws for choosing a faculty member for the Aurelius Henley Distinguished Professor Award?”

“Uh-huh,” Bruce said, but that didn’t stop me.

“Do you think that’s fair? Keith wants to change the requirements from ‘twenty-five years of service’ to ‘twenty-five continuous years of service.’ He only suggested it to eliminate Fran Emerson. My department head,” I added, making it sound like a personal slight.

“She’s been there almost thirty years but she took maternity leave twice,” Bruce said.

I gave a vigorous nod and took a mouthful of perfect eggs, not dropping a morsel. “I could go on-not only a bunch of students, but even Dean Underwood has her beefs with Keith over a number of things.” I paused. “ Had her beefs. I’m telling you, Rachel’s alleged motive, that Keith was giving her a hard time with her thesis-hardly even stands out in that crowd of suspects. Keith alienated almost everyone.” I took another breath and evaluated my conclusion. “Sorry, that’s a terrible thing to say about a dead colleague.”

Bruce reached for my hand and let me wallow in guilt for a few moments. He knew me well.

“Maybe it’s like Murder on the Orient Express ,” he said, holding his fork like a dagger. “You know, the movie where it ends up that everyone did it.” I turned away as he mimicked stabbing motions with the fork.

“You’re not helping.” Not quite true. Both the awesome breakfast and the objectivity Bruce brought to the table helped a lot.

After Bruce left, I had about an hour to get dressed, prepare the house for Ariana’s beading group, call Archie at the police station, and get to the Henley airfield where MAstar’s base station was located and where Rachel would meet me at noon. The downside of sleeping in-the day flew by.

To make up for skipping the beading class, I set out my most prized snack, peanut butter-filled pretzels, for the more-loyal-than-me crafters and their instructor. I arranged a plate of number-shaped sugar cookies that a flunking commuter student had baked for me. The cookies were doing double duty as bribe offerings, it seemed. It hadn’t worked for the student, who flunked anyway, but there was no law that said I couldn’t give the treats another try. In a gesture toward good health, I poured out a bowl of baby carrots, and in a fit of overly cautious behavior, I tossed a bag of hickory-smoked almonds into the garbage, convinced that they had a bitter smell.

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.