Ada Madison - The Square Root of Murder

“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 to 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.