Ada Madison - The Square Root of Murder

Ariana had been commissioned to make jewelry for an entire wedding party-necklaces, earrings, and bracelets for the bride, maid of honor, four bridesmaids, and a flower girl.

“I finally convinced them not to have matching sets,” she told me, working magic fingers with a magnificent set of colors. She’d assembled pale turquoise, coral, onyx, pearls, and clear crystal beads. “It’s kind of a flapper theme the bride has going, so we’re doing a choker and a long strand of button pearls for her, two strands of pearls each for the attendants, and drop earrings for all, I think. I haven’t decided on what the flower girl should have. Maybe just a bracelet with a single pearl choker.

I was mesmerized as my friend took beads that didn’t look to me that they went together at all and wove them into a design where they seemed to have been made for each other.

“Why did the dean want the boxes so badly?” I asked Ariana, out of the blue.

“She’s looking for something that might make her look bad.”

“Or a proposal she doesn’t want seeing the light of day.”

“Or she killed your Dr. Appleton,” Ariana said, jabbing a tiny wire into the opening of a coral bead.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think she has it in her. And she doesn’t know a thing about poisons. Or any science, or any scientist, living or dead. She’d have stabbed him or shot him.”

“Nice,” Ariana said.

“Maybe she was just peeved at me on principle. She’d wanted someone else, I still don’t know who, to pick up the boxes and I barged in and took them. That would be enough to upset her world.”

Ariana closed up her beading box and took a three-ring binder from the small table next to her.

“I should look at her handwriting,” she said, cruising through pages in the binder.

“Still on that kick?”

“I’m going to get certified to teach a class in the fall.”

“I saw the flyer.”

“Don’t sound so skeptical.”

“Me?” I asked, all innocent.

“Do you have any samples of the dean’s handwriting?”

“Probably somewhere.”

“I could look at them.”

She held up the binder and fanned the pages at me, but I couldn’t read the writing by the dim light of the blue and green lava lamp. “These are my notes. I’ve already picked up more tips from this lecture I heard last week. Did you know you can tell a lot about a person even from the pressure of the pen on the paper?”

“What if you’re using a pen that doesn’t write dark, or is running out of ink?”

Ariana ignored me as she usually did when I brought a rational explanation into a conversation.

“A slant to the right means emotionally outgoing and to the left means you’re restrained.”

“What if the person is left-handed? Bruce is a lefty and his writing is slanted way to the left. I wouldn’t call him restrained. Would you?”

“If the person writes very small it means a great ability to concentrate on small details.”

I’d long admired my friend’s ability to slide right past a question or a comment and continue with her own agenda. I couldn’t do it. Maybe it was an occupational hazard from my years of working with proofs and logic, where the requirement was to have each statement follow from the one before, without skipping a single step, even a simple one.

“Do tell,” I said. She would anyway.

“You should see a sample of Albert Einstein’s handwriting. It’s tiny, tiny, but very, very accurate as far as the shape of the letters. Charles Darwin’s, on the other hand, is all over the place, with a very wavy baseline and wide spacing between the words.”

I couldn’t resist. “Well, Einstein could have had a limited amount of paper and Darwin might have been on the ocean on his ‘Beagle’ when he was writing.”

“You’re no fun.”

“I hope you don’t still have the letters I wrote to you while we were in college,” I said.

My friend gave me a wicked smile. “I marked them up with a red pencil. I put notes in the margin-”

Ariana might as well have hit me with her red binder. Why did it take me this long to see it?

“That’s it!”

I slammed the palms of my hand together, creating one loud clap. “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. It’s been bothering me forever, but I didn’t know why. Now I do: if they were really Rachel’s yellow pages that were strewn around the crime scene, they wouldn’t have red pencil marks.”

“Should I be following this?” Ariana asked.

“Keith never looked at students’ yellow sheets. All the girls have told me that. He simply would not read drafts. They were beneath him. So there was no way Rachel would have given him a copy on the yellow paper, therefore, no way he would have read it, and therefore, no way he would have marked it up in red.” I opened my palms to signal how clearly each step followed from the one before. The conclusion wasn’t quite up to snuff mathematically, but it was obvious to me. “The yellow pages were marked up and planted by the killer.”

“This is good, right?”

I hugged my friend. “This is very, very good. I need to call the cops.”

Ariana was elated that she’d given me the key to deciphering a major piece of evidence at the Franklin Hall crime scene. She cleared her desk for me-no small task since neither neatness nor doing paperwork received a lot of her attention on a regular basis. She put piles of folders on top of other piles of folders and left me alone with my cell, a pad of paper, and a pen. I intended to take my handwritten notes immediately out of her presence as soon as I was finished.

I mentally rolled up the imaginary sleeves of my sleeveless knit top. Not a problem; I’d taught a whole course in imaginary numbers last year.

I called Virgil. He, and not Archie, answered on the second ring. So far, so good.

“I don’t want to disturb you if you’re still talking to Rachel,” I said.

Virgil chuckled. “Your friend is doing fine. We just needed to get a few more things straight.”

“She’s still there?” I wondered if anyone but a lawyer or blood relative was entitled to that information.

“She’ll be here for a while.”

“Like, all night?” I heard my voice rise and my language lapse into studentese.

“Hard to say.”

“Did you pick up-?”

“Invite in for questioning, you mean?”

“Did you invite the other three girls I mentioned, too?”

“Not yet.”

“Did you arrest Rachel?”

“Not yet.”

I gulped, unable to ask about Woody. Surely there was an age limit for this kind of thing. “Do you have new evidence?” I asked, holding my breath.

“Other than Ms. Wheeler’s and three other students of yours lying to the police? No.”

“This is my fault,” I said, not meaning to.

“They’re the ones who lied to us, Sophie. That’s the crime. You did your part, encouraging them to come forward. And then coming in yourself was a nice, cooperative gesture.”

“So I couldn’t have been charged if I hadn’t come in?”

“Nope. More’s the pity. Anything you heard from Rachel or the other girls was essentially hearsay. You had no way of knowing if they were telling you the truth. It’s not as if you witnessed a crime.”

“Archie led me to believe-”

“That’s Archie. And, for better or worse, police are allowed to lie to suspects or persons of interest or… just about anyone as long as they’re not under oath.”

It didn’t seem fair.

“Well, I have something that I think will convince you that Rachel is innocent.”

“That’s exciting. You’ve got my attention.”

I didn’t want to disappoint him. “It’s not a hair or a fiber or anything.”