The Probability of Murder (3 page)

Childless herself, Charlotte also doted on every young person who came across her path, and our Henley College students were the beneficiaries. I hated the idea that she’d been taken away with a serious illness or injured on our campus. That she might have been shot made no sense at all.

“Yeah, she was really nice,” Daryl said, as if responding to my thoughts. “She did so much work for us, no matter how busy she was. She practically wrote our papers for us, you know? And she counseled a lot of the girls. She was your friend, too, wasn’t she, Dr. Knowles?”

Bruce looked at me. He could tell I wasn’t ready to speak.

“Thanks for letting us know,” he said to Daryl. “We’ll check it out.”

“I wonder who could have done that? Hurt Ms. Crocker,” Daryl asked, slow to take a hint.

Bruce put his arm around me, turned from Daryl, and said, softly, “I’ll call Boston.”

I reached to my shoulder and grabbed his hand, wishing his MAstar bird could sweep us back in time and take us up and away from the scene in front of me.

Under normal conditions, I’d have loved the briskness of the day, and my long-sleeved turtleneck and fleece vest, my interpretation of casual Friday dress, would have been enough. But since I’d heard Charlotte’s name in connection with the intrusive emergency vehicles that seemed to have taken over the campus, I’d become shivery cold and regretted leaving my jacket in my office. I could have used it, plus a coat, scarf, and fur-lined gloves.

After the second shiver, I found myself weighed down by Bruce’s bomber jacket.

“Thanks,” I muttered, and felt Bruce’s comforting hand through the thick leather.

“We’re going to check this out, okay?” he said. “It could be nothing. It doesn’t take much to get a rumor started in a place like this. You know that.”

Yes, it could be nothing. A college campus, essentially a closed community, was a perfect setting for creating fiction.
I’m overreacting
, I told myself.

Never mind that the roar of the fire engine’s motor, even in its idling state, and the indistinct chatter of cops and academics made it hard to stay calm.

Daryl was only a freshman. How could he be sure it was Charlotte Crocker who was hurt? He’d barely met her. And who said her injuries were that bad? I was once sent away in an ambulance after a simple fall. I’d tripped on my raincoat going up a flight of stairs at a mall a few years ago, cracking my nose and sending streams of blood over the slippery tile steps. Security had swooped down on me immediately and rushed me to the nearest hospital, sirens roaring, lights
streaking through the air. Genuine concern aside, what corporation—or school—wants a lawsuit these days?

Probably something similar had happened to Charlotte. We’d joked about how the college needed to upgrade the rickety old half-wood, half-metal ladders in the library stacks. She might have fallen while reaching for an ancient tome.

If it had even been Charlotte.

People around me kept mentioning a gunshot, but did they even know what a gunshot sounded like? And, besides, that was information-by-cell-phone. Definitely hearsay and, therefore, unreliable. Nothing I should pay attention to.

As I wished away the idea that my friend had been seriously hurt, Bruce led me closer to the Henley police cars and the detectives who had begun to talk to the onlookers. We zigzagged past uniformed cops with pens and notepads. They were pulling students and staff aside, talking one-on-one and in small groups.

Fran Emerson and many of the students who’d been at the Franklin Hall party had apparently passed us after we left the building. Fran motioned for me to join them off to the side, but I shook my head and let Bruce lead me in closer to the police tape. Bruce had never answered my question about the yellow-and-black tape. Was it used only when a crime had been committed?

When I reminded him now, he shrugged. “Probably it’s routine,” he said. “Crowd control.”

I bought the answer, gratefully. The imposing brick Administration Building, immediately to the east of the library, had emptied out. Upper management had gathered and stood together on the steps.

The academic dean and her administrative assistant stood at the top of the stone steps. Below them, as if they were posing for an overhead shot for a Henley College recruiting brochure, the levels were lined with other officers and staff members, all in professional dress, unlike the professors. In my peripheral vision I picked out Martin Melrose, our three-piece-suit financial manager, and two vice presidents.

The lower steps were populated with secretaries, cleaning service staff, and mailroom employees. It was as if someone had told them all to line up according to their salaries.

I wondered if the event rated summoning Olivia Aldridge, Henley’s president, home from her alumni tour of the west coast.

After fifteen years on campus, I knew almost everyone on the steps, but this afternoon I managed to avoid eye contact completely. No one in the administrative tableau was talking anyway; all were staring straight ahead at the drama unfolding on our beautiful fall lawns and pathways.

By now Bruce and I had reached the narrow path between the library and the Administration Building. I felt a wave of panic when I realized where Bruce was headed—toward his best friend since college, Henley PD homicide detective Virgil Mitchell, a few yards ahead.

My knees went weak. Not just an injury? A homicide?

“They took someone away in an ambulance?” I said to Bruce. “If someone is dead, they wouldn’t put her in an ambulance, right?”

“Henley sends everyone when there’s a nine-one-one call,” he said. “And we don’t have a separate coroner’s vehicle, so…” He shrugged, not wanting to state a possible conclusion, but he didn’t need to.

“Do you want to stay back here while I talk to Virge?” Bruce asked. Then, as a smile crossed his face, “Of course you don’t.”

Virgil, all two hundred fifty pounds of him, left a group to the care of a woman in uniform and approached us.

He and Bruce did a knuckle bump, which I’d never seen between them. Maybe it was code for a greeting mired in sympathy. A condolence rap.

Virgil took my hand, another first. “Sophie, I’m sorry about this. People are saying you were one of Ms. Crocker’s close friends on campus.”

My whole body seemed to buckle.
Were
. I’d heard
were
.

I felt Bruce’s arm tighten around me, holding me up,
since my spine was useless. “What happened?” I asked Virgil.

“Tell me about Ms. Crocker, Sophie. Anything you know about her that can help us?”

“Help you do what? Is she…?”

Virgil led us past the array of staff on the admin building steps, where the principals had stopped posing. Most were chatting in place as two uniformed officers headed in their direction.

Dean of Women Paula Rogers had been hired recently to assist Dean Underwood when Henley was getting ready to go coed. Paula, who had been making an effort to be my friend this fall, had broken away and came up to me. “Sophie, what’s this about? Did you expect this? I mean, to be questioned?” she asked, ignoring both my protectors, the beefy Detective Virgil Mitchell and my very fit boyfriend.

Something about Paula put me off from our first meeting. I hadn’t been eager to develop a friendship with her and I certainly wasn’t going to start now by answering her silly questions.

Virgil ignored her. Bruce gave her a charming smile and turned me away from her. I could have kissed both of them.

Virgil and I settled on a bench on the vast lawn at the center of the campus. Bruce squatted in front us. In a couple of weeks, right after Thanksgiving, an enormous Christmas tree would be erected and decorated near this spot.

With nothing new to see, students, presumably with police permission, drifted past us on the way to the campus coffee shop or to the dorms that lined the eastern edge of the property. The small clusters of students were more animated than sad or concerned, I noticed. I wanted to stop and lecture them:
This is not simply excitement for a Friday night. You can’t just go on your dates now as if nothing’s changed.

But as professors often do to gain perspective, I projected back to Sophie Knowles, college student, twenty-five years ago, understood their need to move forward, and
partly forgave them. Besides, I wasn’t completely convinced anything serious had happened.

Not for another minute, anyway.

“Sophie, you probably know.” He paused. “There’s been a homicide,” Virgil said, dispelling any lingering hope I had that the emergency vehicles had responded to a sprained ankle or a possible concussion from falling books.

I took a deep breath. “Charlotte was killed?”

“I’m afraid so.”

I looked toward the library, in the direction of the sunset. There seemed to be a sudden and drastic shift to the nighttime sky.

I had mixed feelings about leaving the campus. Part of me wanted to flee and come back later to the revelation that the entire ambulance event had been a fiction. The other part wanted to stay behind, in case the obtrusive vehicle did come back: “It was a mistake,” the EMTs would say. “This lady is fine.”

As it was, I had little choice but to comply with Virgil’s request to meet him at the police station downtown for an interview.

“Where all the recording and authenticating equipment is handy,” he’d said.

So formal. I hadn’t liked the sound of it.

I sat in the passenger seat of Bruce’s SUV as the Henley skyline came into view. Not that it was all that impressive. The golden-domed city hall, our tallest building, was in the center of town, flanked by a couple of less-than-imposing government headquarters. Within the last few months, the Henley Police Department had finally been relocated to the complex.

Entering a brand new, attractive building, the newest in town, did little to make me welcome the experience. I saw a group of mostly campus people in the hallway, all seeming less nervous than I felt. I nodded to all the secretaries and service people as I followed close behind Virgil. I acknowledged all, but made sure my look was somber enough to discourage any attempts to engage me.

My efforts fell flat on Paula Rogers, who nearly tripped me in the process of reaching me. Paula, whom I’d met first in Ariana Volens’s beading class—before she was hired as dean—had mistakenly thought I loved beading as much as she did. How could she know I’d enrolled in the class solely to keep Ariana, my best friend, happy? My long-suffering childhood gal pal, and owner of A Hill of Beads, had that much coming from me.

“You’re here, too?” Paula said to me.

I thought it was obvious, but held my tongue. “Uh-huh,” I said, and tried to put Bruce between us as we walked toward the waiting area.

“Did you notice how not everyone is here? We all gave our vitals back on campus. I wonder how they decided whom they were going to question further. Let’s get together tomorrow and compare notes. I know you have the scoop on this,” she said. “And I’ll bet you’ll need some TLC by then.”

Before Paula could close the loop on a chummy get-together, our moneyman, Martin Melrose, elbowed her out of the way.

“Do you know anything about this?” Martin asked. “Why’d they pick us to come down here?”

I had my own question: Why did Martin and Paula think I knew anything more than they did? Maybe because of the Bruce-Virgil connection, I decided. I saw Paula in town now and then, at beading classes, and my interactions with Martin had been a little more frequent now that I had the Math Department budget to worry about. But it wasn’t as if I ever sought out either one of them or socialized with them off campus.

“Do you think we’re all suspects?” Martin asked, more nervous than his usual fussy self. “I don’t really have an alibi except I was home all night and on campus all morning. I’m thinking we should get the school attorneys involved.”

Another question: Who was the scraggy young man I’d never seen before? Too old to be a student, he leaned in to Martin, appearing to be whispering in his ear, coaching him as Martin asked me questions.

Not that I cared that much, but the young man, shabbily dressed, with a significant birthmark on his neck and part of his cheek, pulled Martin away before I needed to respond. Was he a suspect? Did he have an alibi?

Did I?

The whole episode was like a confusing dream where people you know mix with complete strangers, and there’s a whole backstory you haven’t been made privy to.

“Ready, Sophie?” Virgil asked.

“Yes,” I said, but I didn’t think I’d ever be ready for the full impact of what I knew was coming.

Virgil couldn’t have been more solicitous, holding the door for me, pulling out the surprisingly new metal chair, all but patting me on the head.

“Are you warm enough?” he asked, stepping over to the thermostat by the door. “Look at this. We can adjust the temperature of each room individually.” You’d think he was demonstrating state-of-the-art technology, but I understood that he was proud of his new digs as well as concerned about me.

“I’m fine” came from a part of me I didn’t recognize.

I was always ill at ease in the police station, however. Old and run-down or shiny and new; it didn’t matter. I wished I could reach into my purse and grab a puzzle to work. I always carried a plastic or metal manipulable to twist apart and a few word puzzles of my own or someone else’s making. Solving them and creating them gave
me equal pleasure and tended to focus my energies away from anything unpleasant. I couldn’t think of when I’d needed to manipulate a puzzle cube more, or when it would have been less appropriate for me to reach into my purse and choose one to place on my lap.