Ada Madison - The Square Root of Murder

“Dr. Knowles, please go to Dr. Appleton’s office and take away everything but the office furniture,” she might have said.

On the off chance that I wasn’t the legitimate designee, I tossed material into the boxes without looking too closely, for the sake of speed. I counted on the fact that any sane faculty member-that would be the dean’s actual designee-would wait until Monday to carry out an ad hoc task she’d assigned him.

All the drawers were unlocked but showed signs of having been manipulated by police tools. Another good reason for me to take them-the police had already declared them useless. It felt strange to fling grade books, lab logs, and even a little black address book into a box for later examination, not only because their owner was dead, but because Keith Appleton was undoubtedly the most private person I knew.

When he inhabited this office, he kept all his drawers locked. If you wanted a piece of paper from him, you had to wait until he unlocked a drawer or file cabinet, took out the document, then locked the drawer again. Now here it all was, available to anyone. To anyone foolish enough to be here on a Saturday afternoon.

When I finished, I decided not to call Woody for help loading the boxes into my car. Maybe he was taking quiet moments to grieve for his friend. Or maybe the real delegate from the dean had contacted him. With the help of the metal dolly he’d left in the hallway, I could manage by myself.

I rolled my baggage back down the hall, noting the special building safety features Keith had added. Under the fire extinguisher was a metal box that I knew contained a fire blanket and first aid supplies. I remembered the Franklin faculty meeting when he’d made the proposal to outfit each floor with the kits.

Another time he’d come with a brochure from a company that made laboratory safety glasses out of recycled composition notebooks. We teased behind his back, asking each other what new thing Keith would come up with for the next meeting. We called him at various times, Green Keith and School Monitor Keith.

Now he was Deceased Keith. I felt the tension in my jaws increase with each step. I needed to stop the tape running in my head. Maybe whatever was in these boxes would hold the answer to the problem that kept me in this wrecked state.

I pulled my heavy load onto the elevator and pushed B for the basement, where there was a side door at ground level. Trying to get a loaded dolly down Franklin’s white marble front steps would not be a pretty sight. I hurried along a dark hallway, past storage areas and the noisy generator room. The wheels of the red dolly rumbled by entirely too many dark and dusty nooks and crannies. I hated coming down here when the building was alive with classes; the eerie feeling and musty smell were even worse on a day like today, hot and scary and reeking of death.

I reached the exit at last, fully expecting to see Dean Underwood waiting as I opened the exterior door to Franklin’s back pathway. I was ready with an answer. “Oh,” I’d say, “I must have misunderstood Woody. I thought he said you told him that I was to clear Keith’s office.”

I moved the dolly in position, pushed the heavy door open, and dragged the load to the threshold.

No Dean Underwood with arms folded to greet me as I’d envisioned.

Instead there was a committee.

“Hey, Dr. Knowles,” Pam Noonan said.

Liz Harrison and Casey Tremel stood on either side of her, blocking the path that led around the building to the parking lot. Pam and Liz wore denim cutoffs; Casey had gone for a spongy blue and brown trellis print that was popular in the seventies. They all had “aha” looks on their sweet young faces.

“Hey,” I said.

I couldn’t have been more disoriented if Virgil had been standing there with uniformed officers, holding out a set of handcuffs. I hadn’t remembered to put my glasses on for the transition from the cave-like basement to the blazing sun. I squinted and thought I must have looked like a thief caught red-handed. Maybe because it was true.

“Need some help?” Liz asked.

“We’ve been dying to come over, but we knew the building was locked,” Casey said, the clinking of her bracelets nearly drowning her out.

“Then we saw you go in.” Back to Pam.

“We called you on your cell.”

“We hoped you’d answer and let us in while you were in there.”

“We’ve been watching for you to come out.”

The trio, all junior chemistry majors, sounded like a Greek chorus, except that each girl took one line, in rotation.

I was acutely aware that the door to the Franklin Hall basement was open, being held in that position by the large dolly. Its chipped red paint seemed to glow where sunlight hit. The boxes it carried might have contained body parts for the anxiety I felt. These are your students , I told myself. They have no power over you. In fact, they were all in my applied statistics seminar this summer and I hadn’t turned in their grades yet. Talk about power.

“You saw me all the way from the dorm? Aren’t you in Paul Revere?” The residence hall that was farthest from Ben Franklin.

“We were sitting in the library,” Pam said, pointing to the closest building, at the Henley Boulevard entrance to campus.

One wing of the Emily Dickinson Library jutted out past the entrance to Franklin. If the girls had been sitting there, they’d have a clear view of the parking lot and the south side of the math and sciences building.

“When we heard a car pull in, we all rushed to the window.” From Casey.

“There’s not much going on this weekend,” Liz added.

“Except it’s kind of cool to see what they’re doing to accommodate the guys in the fall. Most of them will be in Revere because the bathrooms are bigger and they can, you know, fix them,” Casey said.

Fascinating.

Pam pointed past me to the inside of Franklin Hall. “Can we go-?”

“Not a chance,” I said.

Message received, I noticed, as the girls dropped their shoulders and sighed.

Maybe it was all the texting we did these days that enabled this kind of shorthand communication even without the benefit of an electronic device.

“What’s in the boxes?” Casey asked me, eyes on the dolly.

Not a chance I’d answer that question.

“Don’t you think you’re all being just a little bit disrespectful?” I asked. I stepped in front of the upright dolly and folded my arms. “One of your major teachers has been killed on this campus, in the building you practically live in every day. Hasn’t that hit home to you? There’s been a murder in Benjamin Franklin Hall and someone who cared about you and your education is dead. And until we find out who killed him, none of us is safe.”

I’d accomplished my goal. All three girls looked sheepish and frightened. They shuffled their feet and looked over their shoulders. I had the sense that if it had been nighttime, they would have clutched each other, or joined hands and run.

“Do the cops have any idea who did it?” Pam asked, in a considerably more diffident tone than before my speech.

“No. And come to think of it, can you all account for where you were from noon to four yesterday?” Rachel had given me a smaller window for Keith’s murder but I decided to stick to what the police were using.

Casey let out a little gasp. “I told you we should-” she began, addressing Pam.

Pam threw her arm out to Casey’s chest, interrupting her friend. “Casey,” she said, in a warning tone. “Like we told the police. We were at the party, like everybody else, then we went to the dorm.”

“We didn’t-” Liz began.

A look from Pam stopped her.

Very curious. “Have you all talked to the police?”