Ada Madison - The Square Root of Murder

Casey’s “please” was a drawn out plea. That and her eyes, on the verge of tears, got to me. Time to move on. I knew these girls were hiding something, but when push came to shove, I couldn’t beat up on this child.

Casey was not doing well in applied statistics. To keep her scholarship she needed at least a B in each class. In my class she was hovering around C, plus one day, minus the next. I told her the kind of research paper she’d have to do to bring her grade up, and that she’d need to take an exam.

In my experience, there were two kinds of test takers, those who preferred oral exams and those who dreaded them. I gave Casey her choice.

“Oh, my God, I love orals,” Casey said. “I get all clutched up when I have to write and I can’t explain myself because the questions are too… too…”

“Too specific?”

She nodded. “Like Dr. Appleton’s. Like, with true/false it’s do or die”-she clamped her hand over her mouth-“I didn’t mean it that way.”

I patted her other hand, the one with six inches of thin multicolor spangles. “I know you didn’t mean it. You had that extended organic chem class with Dr. Appleton this summer, right?”

“I like that. ‘Extended.’ Actually it was makeup, since we did so badly this spring.”

“Do you know yet how that will be wrapped up?”

“Uh-huh, that new teacher, Ms. Bronson, is taking over now as far as working out our grades.”

“I’m glad it’s taken care of. What grade do you have going in?”

A simple query, to show my interest, not meant to be a trick question. I was past trying to dupe the girls into giving me information I could use to clear Rachel. And I’d decided some time ago that getting to the truth of who killed Keith Appleton was more important even than a single student. I needed to follow the evidence and the logic of the murder, no matter where it led.

I was taken aback to watch Casey stumbling over my simple question and looking as rattled as if she had one million dollars riding on her answer. She ran both hands through her unruly curls. “Uh… an A,” she mumbled.

That was a surprise. But why mumble an A when it might be the first one you’ve had in a long time? Maybe I’d heard wrong.

“Did you say an A?”

“I have an A going in,” she said, not much more clearly.

“Good for you. I thought you were struggling with that class.”

“I, uh, was, but I, uh, pulled it up.”

I looked across the table at Casey. She hadn’t been this flustered even yesterday while she was lying to me. She fidgeted in her chair, looked up to the ceiling and down to the table, glanced back over her shoulder toward the lobby, and then repeated the sequence. My guess was that she wished she could beam Pam and Liz over here to bail her out. Pam and Liz, on their part, were inching closer to us as it became increasingly obvious, even from a distance, that Casey was in distress.

Casey’s behavior threw me back to being in Keith’s office a few days before his death.

Keith is working on his laptop, updating his organic chemistry grade sheet. He’s in a hurry to finish up and print out the sheet to take to his class. “Look at this.” He spins his computer in my direction and shows me the screen. “Not one student even close to a B,” he says. I look. Sure enough, no grade above a C and most below it. I know he wants me to commiserate about the pathetic abilities of Henley chemistry majors. I don’t comment. He turns the laptop back and pecks away at his keyboard. He shakes his head. “Dumb sophomores,” he says. “Dumb juniors. Dumb every student at this dumb college.”

Now a picture started to take shape, and it wasn’t pretty. I saw Casey and her friends poisoning Keith-the details weren’t clear-and changing their grades on his laptop. I tried to chase away the picture. Of all the motives I could think of, this was one of the weakest. I imagined every college in cities and towns across the country losing a few teachers every year if this practice became popular.

Something was missing in my theory. I played with the murderous picture in my head, running a blackboard eraser back and forth across it but it wouldn’t disappear.

Out of the blue, Woody Conroy with his barrel of mops and brooms, invaded the scene that was taking over my vision. I heard Woody mention how he’d hung Keith’s Fellow award that morning. Pam entered the picture and I heard her tell me how she and her friends hadn’t seen Keith all day on Friday. Then Casey’s or Liz’s voice joined in, talking about the Fellow award on the wall.

Someone was lying. Either Woody put that award up the day before, or the girls had been in Keith’s office the morning he was murdered. How else could they have seen the award on the wall?

I left the scene, with the imaginary Woody and Pam and Liz and Casey arguing about who was telling the truth. My chips were on Woody.

My mind reentered the interrogation corner of the Emily Dickinson Library.

“Casey, did you change your grade?”

Casey lifted her head from the cushion of her arms on the table. Her blond hair was wet from tears that had started when the subject of organic chemistry came up. Her face was streaked with poorly applied eye makeup. She opened her mouth but no words came out.

Pam and Liz had reached us by now. Liz began stroking Casey’s back. Pam’s arms were folded across her flat chest.

“We can explain,” Pam said.

“I’m all ears.”

“Let’s go somewhere else,” Liz said. “This whole place is creeping me out.” She wrapped her arms across her thin body as if she were freezing. Or at a crime scene.

“I can’t stand this campus one more minute either,” Casey said, in a low scream, pointing toward Franklin Hall. She’d pulled herself together enough to stand up. “Can we go to, like, a coffee shop downtown?”

“I have my car,” Pam said, before I could respond. She looked at me. “Unless you’re afraid to ride with us?”

“Of course not,” I said.

How foolish was this? Was I now the same obstacle to Casey’s college funding that Keith had been? I refused to believe these young women would harm me.

Still, I hoped Bruce wouldn’t travel too far out of range of my cell.

We sat at a round table in Back to the Grind, only a few blocks from campus, an easy walk in better weather. The place wasn’t air-conditioned, but a large fan kept the room bearable. The ride over had been silent except for the sounds of an old AC/DC album in Pam’s CD player.

Now with various levels of caffeine drinks in front of us, it was still silent. Until Casey started to tear up again.

Pam put her hand on Casey’s arm and the waterworks stopped. “We just wanted to help Casey out,” Pam said.

“So you two were happy with your Cs and Ds?” I asked, addressing Pam and Liz.

“We just thought, while we were there, you know, we might as well up ours a notch, too,” Liz said.

I rolled my eyes, shook my head, and otherwise showed my extreme disapproval.

“Oh, come on. How many students does Dr. Appleton really flunk in the long run?” Pam asked in an updated version of “pshaw.” “Not that many when it comes to final grades. He likes to scare us is all. I’d have come out fine one way or the other.”

“I knew I could make it up,” Liz said. “Honestly, a C or D here or there isn’t going to ruin my life. But Casey would have had to leave school.”

“And that was worth your teacher’s life?”

The girls turned to me, eyes all wide, mouths open.

I heard the beginnings of sentences.

“Oh, no…”

“We didn’t really…”

“How could you think…”?

Their protests were intermingled; I couldn’t tell who was saying what.