Ada Madison - The Square Root of Murder

“I’m in charge of a program to make students more comfortable with everyday math, giving them problemsolving skills especially. It’s a hands-on way of teaching math. We use a lot of manipulatives.”

“You mean blocks and balls, that kind of thing?”

I smiled and tried to strike a tone between informative and condescending. “These days we use videos, online graphing calculators, interactive websites, that kind of thing.”

“It’s not the math I remember.”

“It’s not your father’s math class,” I said, with immediate regret.

He laughed. I sighed with relief.

“Thanks for coming in, Sophie. You can go now.”

“I can?”

He nodded and gave me a genuine smile for the first time. “Thanks for your cooperation. Sorry to put you through this, but you know I had to.”

Not really, but I knew I should count my blessings and split immediately. So, why didn’t I?

“Do you have any leads in the case?” I asked, astonished that I hadn’t dashed for the safety of my car already. I took one more stab at shifting police attention from Rachel. “I’d be happy to share with you what I’ve observed about Dr. Appleton’s dealings with the students, the other faculty-”

“We’ll let you know if we need you,” Archie said, back to his serious cop tone.

I left without another word.

I replayed the entire interrogation over in my head a number of times on the way home. It seemed clear to me that Archie and/or Virgil had interviewed Dean Underwood before they got to me. I could think of no other way that Archie would have known to quiz me on promotions and on the summons to her office. I wondered what their approach to the dean had been, antagonistic or deferential. Was she an informant or a suspect? After all, if it weren’t for Keith’s support of the change to a coeducational institution, Dean Underwood might have been able to keep her ladies’ academy fantasy.

In my mind, everyone was a suspect, except Rachel and me.

The clock on my dashboard, not the most accurate, read five twenty-five. I’d hoped to have enough time before Ariana arrived with herbs and lotions to get a decent start on Keith’s files. I wasn’t completely satisfied that the police had eliminated me from their list. I counted on something concrete to point to the actual murderer.

I turned into my driveway, pressing the garage door opener from a few yards away. The door rolled up and I headed in, between my treadmill and my workbench.

The treadmill was in its place, if forlorn for lack of use this summer.

The workbench was empty.

It took some time for me to fully accept that my garage had been burglarized and my plan for a big breakthrough had been thwarted.

My gardening tools were in place, hanging from a pegboard; my fire extinguisher and two wooden ladders, one long, one short, were in their usual spots against a wall. Small items on racks here and there seemed unmoved. Besides the boxes, the only things that appeared to be missing were the shopping bags with clothing and odds and ends I’d been collecting for the charity pickup. My guess was that the thief assumed the bags were part of my haul from the campus, if indeed that was what this was all about.

I stood there looking around uselessly until I realized the burglar could still be on my property, even inside my home.

I made a dash for my car, banged the door locked with my elbow, and drove back out to the driveway. At least if he or she came out of my house, guns blazing, I’d have a little protection, and I might be able to screech away down the street.

Call the police, said my logical brain. And tell them what? my other brain asked. That I was a petty thief myself, having absconded with boxes of papers and office material that didn’t belong to me, and now they’d been re-stolen? I supposed I could call the station, drag a couple of officers out here, and report that I was missing a few bags of used clothing and usable discards. I could list my old toaster oven, a pillow that was too frilly for my taste, and a stapler that I’d replaced with an electric version.

No, calling the police was out of the question. How inconvenient.

I started to formulate a Plan B.

There were three entrances to my garage-the first was through a door from my kitchen; the second was the electric roll-up door; and a third, side exit led to the narrow passageway outside where I kept my trash containers. The kitchen door, like the rest of my interior perimeter, was always alarmed when I left the house; the other two were not wired for security.

All I had to do now was open the kitchen door a crack and listen for a beeping sound. Beeping would mean the alarm was still set and my house had not been entered illegally; no beeping would mean someone had intruded. Or might still be rattling around in there. If everything worked properly, in the event of an intrusion, the alarm company would have contacted me. But the system had never been tested in that way-both good news and bad.

I tapped my steering wheel, thinking.

I made my decision based on one, trusting the security system and its monitors, and two, the fact that I had neither heard nor seen, nor had I smelled, any sign of an intruder since I arrived.

I got out of the car, picked off a large rake from the pegboard, and headed for the alarmed but unlocked kitchen door. I turned the knob as silently as I could and pushed the door in, the long, potentially lethal rake at the ready in my other hand.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

I let out a breath. My home had not been violated. I entered the security code, the beeping stopped, and my heart rate returned to normal. I walked back out to the garage, to the side next to my treadmill, and examined the most likely point of entry, through the door between the garage and the side alleyway. Sure enough, the push button on the knob was out, in the unlocked position. I imagined how easy it had been to pick the skimpy lock. Bruce had been after me forever to install a deadbolt and had offered to do it. Too bad I’d told him I’d take care of it.

Back to the problem of the missing boxes.

Maybe a gust of wind had blown through, knocking the boxes to the floor. Never mind that boxes were sturdy and heavy, and that there was no cross ventilation available. Even so, I looked under the workbench and behind the water heater. I walked around my garage like someone who couldn’t remember where she’d put a large load of freight. Maybe I’d stuffed the cartons into the tiny area under the metal shelving that held seasonal decorations and archives from my teaching career, or behind the treadmill.

Of course, there was no sign of them.

I had to face facts. The boxes had been stolen. Re-stolen. Only Woody knew that I had taken them, and unless he’d been stalking me, he didn’t know I’d taken them off campus. Even if he did know, I couldn’t imagine the sweet old man making tracks to my house while I was at the police station and carting everything back.

Had Woody told someone? The dean came to mind. But even if she’d already found out that her appointed messenger had been preempted, I couldn’t picture her sending someone to break into my home to retrieve the material. She’d be more likely to have Courtney call me to her office at an inconvenient time so she could cluck her tongue at me in person.

The thought I’d been avoiding, that someone had been lurking, following my movements this afternoon, kept creeping back.

Each possibility was more unsettling than the next.

I sat on an old metal stool and leaned on the empty workbench, working hard to calm myself and think clearly. Why would anyone want files from a dead man’s office? For the same reason I did, to look for clues to his murder. Or to remove something incriminating.