Ada Madison - The Square Root of Murder

Today I tried to stay focused to meet my self-imposed deadline of three o’clock. I didn’t know exactly when Bruce would come by, and there was always a chance Ariana would drop in. She’d been very solicitous through this ordeal, dropping sweet-smelling bath products and healthy baked goods at my doorstep several times.

Searching for the dean’s name didn’t get me far. Phyllis Underwood had apparently done nothing worthy of newspaper reporting in the range of years I’d plugged in. Typing her name in the general search engine, on the other hand, got too many hits. I’d have to open link after link to determine if any of the thousands of hits applied to the dean.

I needed a new tactic. My best guess was that like the majority of her peers during that era, the dean had experimented with marijuana. My not-very-vast knowledge of harder drugs told me that there would be more lasting effects and those users would have a much harder time entering the mainstream.

Good thing no student in my applied statistics class was looking over my shoulder and copying down my methods today.

I entered “marijuana” followed by the dean’s alma mater and the date range.

Much better. The first hit was a link to an article on a survey taken at the school in nineteen sixty-nine. An overwhelming eighty-one percent of students had tried marijuana at least once. The profile was of a twenty-one-year-old social sciences major at the college. The dean had majored in sociology. So far so good.

I tried not to get caught up in all the graphs, a weakness of mine. I did stop to read the caption of a cartoon depicting a cop arresting a student. His partner says, “If pot gets legalized, we’ll have to start chasing real criminals again.” Not that the magazine was left-leaning at all.

I skipped down to an article on marijuana arrests and read an article excerpted from a nineteen sixty-seven issue of a liberal magazine. The editors decried the excessive number of “pot busts” as they were called and the travesty of smearing the records of respected professionals. The article specified, without naming them, an English professor in New York, a NATO diplomat’s son, and a theology instructor in Illinois. I didn’t see a mention of “a future college dean.”

Rrring . Rrring.

For a moment, I thought I’d reached a file with sound. I’d moved to a photo search and it seemed one of the students being dragged away from a protest rally was screaming out at me.

I’d gone past my two-hour Internet limit and it showed.

I shook my head, rubbed my eyes, and clicked my phone on to talk to Ariana.

“What’s new on the handwriting front?” she asked.

How rude of me. I should have called Ariana immediately after my handwriting meeting with Virgil. I excused myself on the basis that the probable result-that Hal Bartholomew was a murderer-was too hard to bear.

I gave Ariana a rundown without naming names. In case the FBI was listening. I promised details when we were together in person.

“Virgil said he’d give the project to their specialist.”

I heard something like a “humph” and then, “Whatever.”

“Right now I’m buried in my computer investigating my dean,” I said.

Ariana listened through a briefing on my latest thoughts on why Dean Underwood was so anxious to have the material in Keith’s office.

“You think she was arrested for something?”

“Yes,” I said, in a voice weakened by the lack of evidence to support my theory. “It’s just a guess. I don’t think she posed for a centerfold, or anything like that.”

Ariana laughed. “You mean she didn’t make Miss January Nineteen Seventy?”

“Ha.”

“Maybe she was a ‘working girl’,” Ariana said, prompting a burst of schoolgirl giggles on both ends of the call.

Ariana let me whine for a couple of minutes, about how arrest records were not available to the public, the search engines had been no help, and I didn’t have time or energy to hire a PI to track down all of Phyllis Underwood’s college friends. Whine, whine.

“Bluff it,” Ariana said.

“Excuse me? How do I do that?”

“I do it all the time. Not with you, of course. Tell her you know what she did in college and see how she reacts.”

“It sounds like a horror movie.” Bruce would have been able to give me the title.

“Why don’t you come over? Mondays are always slow. We can role-play.”

It was the best offer I’d had today.

On the way to A Hill of Beads, I queried myself. What would I do with information on the dean’s past even if I had it? Confront her with it? Why? I no longer saw her strange behavior around the boxes as evidence of her guilt as Keith’s murderer. To my distress, Hal seemed to have the lock on that. I was simply curious.

On the other hand, what if I could use the information to my advantage? I needed all the leverage I could get when negotiating with the dean.

This train of thought was beginning to sound like a reverberating blackmail scenario. The dean had said she’d hold up my promotion if I continued to investigate. Now I might say, if you don’t hold up my promotion, I won’t tell everyone about your sordid past.

It seemed I was taking over one of Keith’s projects-find dirt on everyone and use it against them. I wasn’t happy about it.

Ariana was with a customer when I arrived at her bright, attractive place of business. I stepped into the back to wait for her and noticed she’d changed the beaded curtain that divided the sales room from the rest of the shop. Today, if you took the long view, you could make out a large stem of purple irises springing from a background of many shades of green. I thought of the staggering number of small beads it must have taken to make up the design.

And Ariana thought it took patience when I worked through a mere six pages of mathematical proof.

Ariana’s customer was an older woman in shorts that would have looked better on Lucy. She carried a small tray around the shop while Ariana helped her add selections to it.

“I need five small blue ones,” the woman was saying as Ariana smiled “hello” to me.

“Five small blue ones,” Ariana echoed, setting the beads in the woman’s felt-lined tray.

“And one large purple,” the woman continued.

Ariana plucked a large purple bead from a cloth-lined organizer on a table that held a set of them in different sizes. “There you go.”

“Maybe I only need four small blue ones,” the woman said.

Ariana removed one of the blue beads. “How’s that?” she asked.

The woman frowned and shook her head. “Mmm. I’m not sure now.”

I turned away. There was a reason I wasn’t a shop owner. I’d have had choice words for this customer and sent her packing to some other bead store. Not good for business.

I did enjoy filling in for Melissa, Ariana’s part-time employee, now and then, however. But even then, I preferred stocking inventory and wiping down cases to dealing with customers, probably because I was hopeless at offering design help unless the person was trying to model an arithmetic series in a bracelet.

I amused myself by looking around the shop. Ariana had sectioned off one area with a new line of crafts products, many related to scrapbooking and stamping. I turned rotating racks of two- and three-dimensional stickers, rolls of ribbon, glue cartridges, stencils, novelty rubber stamps and pads, and small cans of spray paint. I knew it had been hard for Ariana to make the decision to move away from a beads-only shop, but the need to diversify to stay in business had taken over.

About ten minutes and nine other changes of mind later, the woman left the store with a tiny bag of beads.