I couldn’t fault Virgil for his pleasant cooperative attitude. He’d mounted the crime scene photographs on a small bulletin board that he’d propped up on the table. We sifted through card after card and note after note. Some were easy to dismiss.
I’d found only one sample of Lucy’s handwriting, on a sign-up sheet for the picnic potluck in the middle of June. Why the month-old sheet was stuck between other notes, I had no idea, except to guess that I’d scooped up and moved a pile of pages to be filed from my campus office desk to my home office desk, making the latter even messier.
What Lucy had written was: “LUCY BRONSON-MEDIUM SIZE MACARONI SALAD.” Lucy had capitalized all the words describing her offering, with great flourishes for the Ms and the Ss. Like both Casey Tremel and Liz Harrison, Lucy had used tiny circles to dot her Is. None of the three samples were even close to the red markings on Rachel’s thesis pages.
Fran Emerson had a tiny scrawl of a style. No match. Robert, Keith’s chairman, had such widely spaced words in the sample that I made a note to check with Ariana about what it meant, besides the fact that Robert Michaels hadn’t tampered with Rachel’s yellow pages.
Dean Underwood’s handwriting checked out also as “no match.” If she did have an embarrassing blot on her resume it wasn’t enough for her to kill him. But maybe enough to snatch away what was in his files about her while she had the chance.
And so it went, with biology chair Judith Donohue and student leader Pam Noonan, and others who frequented Franklin Hall on a regular basis.
Until we came to the samples from the newly anointed Dr. Hal Bartholomew. Virgil and I agreed that of all the samples, Hal’s was closest to the markings on the sheets strewn over the crime scene. Besides the overall appearance and slant to the letters, Hal’s strangely curved capital A on his postcard with “All’s well in Bermuda” looked like a perfect match to the A in “Awful Data,” written on Rachel’s thesis. This, combined with a couple of other unique strokes, caused us to set aside Hal’s samples and create a new pile. When we’d gone through every card and note, Hal’s were the only samples in the pile.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Virgil said. “Neither of us is a professional, and we might be way off base.”
I wasn’t exactly hoping that Hal was a killer. What had I been thinking anyway, isolating all my friends as potential murderers? Now that it seemed one of them might actually be guilty, I was devastated.
I forced myself to skip past the high probability that Hal might have killed Keith. Whatever it meant, I was more than ready to see an end to the investigation. No matter what Virgil had said about how long he spent on a murder investigation in Boston, four days were enough for me.
Hal’s motives were legion. Over the years, Keith had ridiculed him, voted against a bonus for him, and challenged his eligibility to take a turn as physics department chair, to name a few affronts. Even Hal’s glee over receiving his doctorate was sullied because of Keith’s constant reminder of how many times Hal had had to redo the experiments his dissertation was based on.
I breathed a long, heavy sigh. “What’s next?” I asked Virgil. I meant “for Hal.”
“I’ll get our expert to look at this. I don’t see any reason to give him the whole bag, but I’ll pick a couple out of the pile and add them, just as a kind of control.”
“It sounds very scientific,” I said.
“Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
“I’d never want to spoil your image.”
I stuffed all the “no” votes back in the grocery bag and headed out to my Fusion. I turned on the A/C and sat for a couple of minutes with my phone, checking emails and messages. The most exciting news was a “thumbs up” text from Bruce about his medical tests. I texted back, “Good 4 U. CU.”
On par with that was a text from Rachel: “Home again. THX.” Maybe the handwriting angle convinced Virgil who convinced Archie that Rachel was innocent. I was tempted to call and say THX to Virgil, too, but I didn’t want to be presumptuous. I did keep my phone on in case he called me with his expert’s results. I wondered if the turnaround time for handwriting analysis was as long as Virgil claimed it was for fingerprints and DNA evidence.
I hoped both Rachel and I had seen the last of the Henley police building.
Hal Bartholomew’s handwriting seemed to be scrawled across the heavy, humid sky over Henley, Massachusetts. I couldn’t imagine the mild-mannered physics teacher planning out a murder. And it was clear that Keith’s murder was not a spontaneous crime of passion. You didn’t just happen to have a needle with a lethal dose of poison in your pocket and use it in a moment of anger.
I thought of Hal’s family-hard-working Gillian and five-year-old Timmy, who adored his father-and the effect Hal’s conviction would have on them.
Maybe I was jumping the gun. I secretly hoped our amateur handwriting analysis was way off, like a data point on a graph that misses the average curve by orders of magnitude. It would mean back to square one, however, which might be where Rachel was standing. It seemed a no-win situation.
A few more minutes and I’d have been able to convince myself that the handwriting expert would tell Virgil he’d never seen a poorer match in all his years of experience. I stopped short of thinking what that would mean for Rachel or for finding the real killer.
What to do next?
With the afternoon free for research, a good mathematician would immerse herself immediately in her field. Follow-up papers weren’t expected sooner than eight to nine months apart, but even that schedule required steady application to the work. I told myself I could afford a short break, having mailed my latest differential equations paper so recently. And what better way to keep research skills sharp than to comb through decades-old newspaper articles?
One part of me admonished: The dean is right; this obsession with the kind of investigating best left to the police was distracting me from what it took to be a full professor. Nonsense, said the other part of me, you’re smart; you can do it all. And what if the dean wants you off the trail of Keith’s killer so you won’t find her own involvement under the next rock?
I pulled out into traffic and headed home, stopping on the way for a veggie sandwich to go at a deli. The tantalizing smells distracted me and I spent a couple of minutes shopping for a good aroma to take with me for dinner. A container of mushroom sauce and a package of handmade pasta seemed perfect for a non-cook to create a special meal for Bruce tonight. Last night’s pizza feast with Virgil, while an information windfall for me, interrupted our tradition of a nice dinner on Bruce’s first night off shift.
I’d made my decision about the afternoon. I’d spend two hours on the Internet looking through archives to see what I could unearth about the dean’s past. If nothing surfaced, I’d drop that line of inquiry.
Arguments were so much easier to settle when it was Sophie vs. Sophie.
While I chewed on cucumber slices, sprouts, avocado, Monterey jack cheese, and very thick wheat bread, I finished the police-themed children’s crosswords I’d started in the PD waiting room. Later I’d print out my standard cover letter and send them off to New York.
I brushed crumbs from my shirt and headed for the computer in my office.
I was about to vet our dean. I blinked away the vision of her pinched face and forties hairstyle, and her reproachful eyes. I knew why she was wagging her finger at me.
The good news was that the dean had gone to college in New York, where there was an excellent chance that the newspapers maintained archives as far back as I needed.
Whenever it came up that Dean Underwood’s alma mater was in Manhattan, many of my colleagues and I wondered how she’d managed to come away from that experience with such an unimaginative, stale outlook on life. Now I entertained the idea that she was a reformed hippie and, like many from that era, rued her reckless youth. I considered it my job to find evidence of any chinks in her straightlaced armor.
I clicked away and found newspaper archives back to the eighteen hundreds. I smiled. “She’s not that old,” I said to my computer screen.
I asked for a range of dates between nineteen sixty-five and nineteen seventy for starters. The dean never married. It was hard for any of us to think she’d even dated, so Phyllis Underwood would have been her name then also. Unless of course she was in the witness protection program. As fascinating as that would be, I hoped it wasn’t true.
At the top of the list delivered by my search engine was an obituary for a Phyllis L. Underwood in nineteen thirtythree. A great aunt? Not important.
The Internet was a major source of diversion for me. I’d often start out looking for one item, say, casual shoes, click over to an article listed in the margin on how footwear has affected the progress of women’s rights, and then stop to read statistics on clothing manufactured in the U.S. vs. in China. What should have taken ten minutes often took an hour. I’d once sat down to order plane tickets to Philadelphia for a conference and ended up a half hour later with new bedding for the guest room.
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.