The Probability of Murder (19 page)

I hoped this small-town girl didn’t realize I had no authority to march her anywhere. She could stare me down or walk out of the building, and I’d be helpless to stop her.

Chelsea made sobbing noises, wiping her eyes with her limp hands. I glanced at Nick, busy grilling. He had his back to us, fortunately for me, and missed a chance to rescue this damsel from an evil math professor.

Chelsea’s sympathy ploy didn’t faze me. I was running out of patience. The smell of melting cheese overloaded my nostrils, and not in a good way like at home with gourmet cheese.

“You can cry all you want, Chelsea. But one way or the other the police are going to find out what happened at my house. Did you and Daryl break in? Is that why you were hanging around?”

Chelsea gasped. “No, no, Dr. Knowles, I swear. Why would I do that? I would never do that.”

I believed her. Whatever she was hiding, that wasn’t it. “What about Daryl?”
Would he do that?
I meant.

A telling pause. “It was kind of a date.”

“What kind of a date?”

“Daryl has a scanner, and he hears police calls.”

Could it be that simple? Daryl was a crime junkie? An ambulance chaser in the making?

A noisy group of students entered the coffee shop,
flicking rainwater at one another. This activity was a source of great amusement to them and to Nick, who finally had some good company. He brought our drinks and set them down with a quick “Here you go.”

I had questions galore for Chelsea, but I let her go on about her dating life with Daryl.

“Daryl and I have been sort of hooking up, you know, the whole semester. Actually, I met him in August when we had that big orientation week for incoming freshman. I volunteered to tour kids, and that’s when we met.”

“And you’ve been sort of hooking up ever since?”

“Well, more than sort of.” She giggled, which was only slightly less annoying than her sobbing. “He’s such a cool guy, and he started flirting with me right off. I was surprised, because the guys? The freshmen? Well, look at the boy-girl ratio, Dr. Knowles.” She sat back and made lecturing hand gestures. “They can just about pick any girl they want. It’ll never be this good for them again.”

“Ratios. I’m glad you’re paying attention to the math,” I said. Lighten the mood, soften her up.

She smiled, relieved of her burden, thinking I was through with her. “And Daryl’s older because he traveled all around Europe before coming to college, so that gives him even more girls to choose from. Like juniors and maybe even seniors.”

At my advanced, early forties age, I’d almost forgotten what college was all about.

An uproar from the group of students, seemingly caused by a spike-haired newcomer to the table, served to bring home further the nonacademic life of my charges.

“So, did you and Daryl have a date yesterday?”
Or does he just wait for police activity?
I added to myself.

I had to raise my voice to accommodate the overflowing table two rows over. They’d become louder as they greeted the new guy and decided what to eat. Nick, taking their orders, was having a well-deserved good time. I thought we might never get our sandwiches, which would have been fine with me.

I leaned across the soda-ringed table, the better to hear Chelsea’s answer. I’d never been so eager to hear about a date my students had been on.

“We were supposed to go to a movie at eight, but around four thirty he calls and says, ‘Hey, there’s some excitement over at Professor Knowles’s house. You should come over.’”

“He knew this because of the scanner.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How did he know the address was mine?”

“I don’t know. I guess from the directory.”

Chelsea’s answer was plausible but still didn’t tell me how Daryl recognized my address right away when he heard the announcement on the scanner. I let it go for now as Chelsea continued.

“I didn’t really want to go to your house, Dr. Knowles. I wanted a real date for once, but Daryl is Daryl.” She threw up her hands, barely visible inside the sleeves of her sweater.

“Do you guys follow up on a lot of these calls?”

“Daryl knows all the police department codes, even for places like New Bedford and Fall River, even when it means the cops are on a coffee break or it’s just a dog complaint.”

“I’m asking if you go to a lot of crime scenes.”

Chelsea returned to her flustered posture. “No. I don’t know. Sometimes. I shouldn’t have let him talk me into going to your house yesterday. But he made it sound like fun. He said to grab some other kids and we’d all go out for pizza afterward.”

Fun? Going to a crime scene—
my
crime scene—was their idea of fun? It was all I could do to keep myself from reacting.

“That didn’t seem strange to you?” I said, remarkably calmly.

Chelsea shrugged. “Daryl’s a strange guy. Like I said, he’s older, and he knows stuff.”

I didn’t want to know what stuff. “Did you recruit some students to join you as Daryl asked?”

“No. I said I would, but then I didn’t. It didn’t seem right. But anyway, when I got there, there was a bunch of our friends from the dorms. I found out he called them, too.”

“I saw you leave—”

“I’m so sorry, Dr. Knowles. I didn’t even ask you. Was your house okay? Did you lose stuff?”

Chelsea and her stuff. “Everything’s fine, Chelsea. No one was hurt. That’s the important thing.”

We both seemed to realize at the same moment that someone had been hurt only a short time ago.

“You had enough to deal with, with Ms. Crocker,” Chelsea said. “I still can’t get that out of my mind.”

“Did you have a lot of contact with Ms. Crocker in the library?”

Chelsea gave a sad nod. “She counseled me on some personal stuff, too. She seemed to really care.”

If Charlotte had been smart and caring, she would have warned Chelsea about Daryl and his ilk. But that wasn’t my business, and I had more of my own than I could handle.

“Why did you and Daryl come by my house again after one o’clock this morning?”

“I don’t know. Daryl said he wanted to see if anything else was going on. When the cops stopped us, he told them he wanted to be sure you were all right. We thought it was just a parked car sitting there, or I’m sure he would have driven right by. The cops must have been slumped down or something.”

Daryl and Chelsea must have been the only two people on the street who hadn’t spotted the unmarked car receiving special delivery food and drink.

“Does Daryl know you’re talking to me?”

“No, I’m mad at him. I stayed in my friend’s room the rest of the night. He’s been calling all morning, but I haven’t picked up. What if those cops arrested us for trespassing or something? How would I explain that to my parents? They’re already worried that I’m away in a big city.”

I held back a smile at the characterization of Henley as
a big city, though it was physically close to cities bigger than Chelsea was used to. Most of our students took advantage of the fact that Boston was only about forty miles north, and Providence, Rhode Island, twenty miles south.

I knew that Chelsea talked to her parents every morning, without fail, before classes. When she’d told me about this strict monitoring of her college experience, I hadn’t been able to tell if it was okay with Chelsea. I’d been surprised to learn that the ritual had continued into her sophomore year.

I wondered how long a girl like Chelsea, with her upbringing, would stay mad at an alpha male like Daryl, with a manly swatch of blond hair on his chin. A soul patch, though Daryl didn’t exactly fit the soul profile I was familiar with.

When Nick brought what the Mortarboard Café considered grilled cheese—two pieces of warm white bread with a mustard yellow spread in between—I thought Chelsea was going to faint or worse. Her face turned as pale as the bread. I pushed both plates to the side and covered the sandwiches with paper napkins. I couldn’t do much about the greasy odor.

“Do you care if Daryl knows we’re talking?” I asked her.

Chelsea bit her lip. “He might not want you to know about the scanner. Like, is it even legal? I asked him and he said yes, as long as you don’t commit a crime with it. But I’m not sure.”

I knew I could find out with a quick call to Virgil, but I didn’t need to tell Chelsea. No need for her to get too comfortable.

“Does Daryl live in the dorms?”

“Uh-huh. He’s in Hawthorne, with all the guys. It’s a party house, for sure, but Daryl doesn’t hang out there a lot or go to their keggers.” She put her hand to her mouth. “Oops, not that they drink illegally or anything, Dr. Knowles.”

“I was young once,” I said, but Chelsea didn’t seem to
get the humor. She nodded as if I’d told her something she didn’t know.

“Anyway, I think they’re too young for him.”

Whereas Daryl was so mature.

“I have one more question, Chelsea. I need you to think back. When you met Daryl at my house on the first trip, when the crowd and all the emergency vehicles were there, was he carrying a duffel bag?”

Chelsea scrunched up her face, thinking, cooperating. “No, I’m sure he didn’t have anything with him. He had his arm around me and I would remember if he was carrying something.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Am I in trouble, Dr. Knowles?”

“Not with me.”

“Can I go?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks.”

I pointed to the sandwich, a mean thing to do. “Do you want to take your lunch to go?”

Chelsea put her hand on her stomach and breathed deeply, in and out, with her eyes closed.

“Kidding,” I said. “You can go. I’ll take care of this.”

She turned and headed out. To the restroom, I figured.

I hated that I’d taken advantage of Chelsea’s timidity, letting her think I had more authority over her than I did. What kind of teacher/mentor was I? I should have been trying to help build her confidence. Chelsea was a good student. What she needed was a challenging advanced calculus problem that she could do on her own. I could help with that.

I couldn’t wait to put the sounds and smells of the Mortarboard Café behind me. Was it always this bad, or were all my senses on alert from the strange and unsettling weekend?

Nothing seemed to bother the group at the other table, which had grown to at least ten students, who were practically on one another’s laps, sharing platters of hamburgers,
fries, unidentifiable sauces, and enormous paper cups with long straws. And, by the way, simultaneously texting.

As I hurried by them on my way out, one of them waved and shouted, “Hey, Dr. Knowles.”

I smiled and waved back, recognizing Kelli, a young woman who’d taken my class last summer, “Math for Nonmajors.” Translation: no calculus.

“Have a good weekend,” I said, extending the wave and the greeting to Nick, for whom I’d left a generous make-up tip.

I knew there’d be some cute-old-lady-teacher comments once I was out of earshot, but I figured it would take only a second or two for them to return to their other stuff, as Chelsea would have said.

I sat in my car for a few minutes, checking email. Hannah had responded that she could meet me around four o’clock in the lobby of her dorm, the Clara Barton. She wasn’t up to meeting at the library, though the building had been released by the police. I wasn’t up to it either.

The driving rain hitting my windshield made a much more pleasant sound than the Mortarboard had provided. What spoiled it for me was the thought that this moderate storm was the tail end of one ravishing the New Hampshire–Vermont border, where my adventuresome boyfriend was trying to have fun.

I didn’t know a whole lot more than I did before this meeting with Chelsea, except that I’d gleaned a little insight into my students’ extracurricular lives. Daryl Farmer had such a psychological hold on the meek sophomore, I wasn’t sure I could trust anything Chelsea had told me. I hoped my meeting with Martin Melrose tomorrow would be more fruitful.

One thing I did accomplish was an hour of not worrying about Bruce. But he was back now, in full force, in the stressed-out part of my mind. I tried to give the thought a positive spin, picturing him sitting around a campfire,
who-knew-how-many thousands of feet up, with his two buddies, talking about how mild the storm had been and how delicious the provisions were.

It didn’t matter that not even Eagle Scouts made campfires in a blizzard.

Ordinarily, with just a couple of hours between meetings, I’d go to my office in Franklin Hall and peck away at paperwork, catch up on filing, and do some leisure reading in a new math text. I hoped it wasn’t fear of being alone in the math and sciences building that motivated my decision today to make a quick trip home instead. I shoved aside the little voice that accused me of being a wimp and told myself I needed a real lunch before seeing Hannah, that eighteen minutes home and eighteen back was worth the trouble, even in the rain.

As I pulled into my driveway, I congratulated myself on being able to argue both sides of any issue. Crafty, my mother had called it, and Bruce had followed suit. Win-win, I called it.

Even leftover pizza looked better than the Mortarboard Café’s pseudo grilled cheese sandwich I’d left behind. I took a slice and a mug of good coffee to my office computer.