The Probability of Murder (34 page)

Chelsea turned to face me directly, gun at the ready. I could tell she was having a now-or-never moment, possibly thinking of finishing me off, then shooting Bruce.

“Is everything okay?” Bruce, stalling, while he worked his crutch like a crow bar around the struts of the metal rack closest to the interior door.

I looked past her at the opening he’d made. The bottom end of his crutch crept through, higher and higher, until it reached a point behind the rack.

I got it. Bruce knew. He was going to provide a distraction by overturning the rack.

The rest was up to me.

I waited, my body gearing up for the coming avalanche, this one welcome.

The crutch wiggled into position. I pictured Bruce on the other side of the door, finding the right leverage to tip it over.

I held my breath, watching the rack sway.

Crash. Thump. Crash.

The rack fell over, dumping its contents in a heap on the floor directly behind Chelsea. Fifteen years worth of Henley College Mathematics Department files. Tax records. Games and puzzles. Boxes of decorations.

A ceramic Santa rolled out from a Christmas carton and stopped at Chelsea’s feet as she turned to face the inventory of things I’d thought worth saving.

As she swiveled and sidestepped to avoid slipping on a tennis ball, I reached back and yanked the lowest ice ax
from its metal hook and swung it over and onto Chelsea’s arm. Her gun arm. The curved pick with the jagged teeth on its underside hooked around her wrist, tearing through her thick down coat.

Chelsea screamed and dropped the gun.

Bruce, in his chair, still using the crutch as a lever, pulled the door open all the way. Kevin hopped out on his one good leg, stumbled through the mess on the floor, and threw himself, cast and all, on top of Chelsea.

They both screamed in pain.

After that, Chelsea never had a chance.

The small television set in my kitchen was tuned to the morning news. We’d had a few days of normal life, and now Bruce and I sat at breakfast listening to the reporter’s version of the successful conclusion of the Charlotte Crocker murder investigation. Brief mention was made of the altercation in my garage, though I never intended for that part of the story to be made public.

“How about that?” Bruce said. “See, if I didn’t climb ice, I wouldn’t have had a small fortune in axes on your garage wall, and you would have been up a creek.”

“Is this the conversation we’re supposed to have about how you did or did not learn your lesson last weekend?” I asked.

“I thought it could be.”

“Not a chance,” I said.

He pointed to his leg, still encased in plaster.

“Can we wait until I can at least walk around while you rail at me?”

He and his climbing buddy had saved my life.

It was the least I could do. “I guess so.”

“Then we can talk about how I worry about you, too.”

“You mean in case there’s a fire in Benjamin Franklin Hall?”

“And I suppose that’s all you’ve done since I left on Friday. Hang around home and campus, nice and safe.”

“Hmmm.”

“I suppose also that you left all the police work to the cops and didn’t take any chances that you might be aggravating a murderer.”

Had Bruce been talking to Virgil? There was a lot more Bruce could have brought up, like how I’d had a gun in my face.

“You have a point,” I said.

He smiled and saluted, like the retired air force man that he was.

The embrace that followed was the best kind of truce.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the beaded bookmark Ariana and I had made and handed it to Bruce.

“Ariana and I made it while you were missing.”

Bruce looked closely at the beading. “Here’s Ariana’s section,” he said, fingering the most neatly tied knots.

I faked a blow to his knee, then turned serious. “We did it so the universe would know we expected you home.”

“I know,” he said.

Were those tears in my boyfriend’s eyes?

Plans for Thanksgiving dinner with Bruce’s cousins had to be scrapped. They understood that a road trip was too hard an undertaking in his condition. Since it wasn’t feasible to move the party, with the other fifteen guests, to Henley, we’d all make up for it with a Christmas reunion instead.

Ariana was sorry we had to pass up a holiday in Connecticut, but delighted at the new arrangement: dinner in my cottage with our nearest and dearest.

“You can invite Luke,” I said.

“Luke is so last month,” she said, shaking her head. “Let’s just have one turkey at the table.”

“Clear enough.”

When I called Virgil to invite him to squeeze a little Thanksgiving dinner with us into his workday, I did a little business also.

“If it’s not too late, I’d like to take care of Charlotte’s remains,” I told him.

“Not too late. I’ve been waiting.”

“Of course you have. The president had a moment of silent prayer for her at an assembly, but I think she deserves more than that. She really did try to go straight, and she made a huge effort to save Chelsea from the pain of a guy who was just using her.”

Virgil agreed and added his own observation. “And although she was keeping a load of cash for contingency, we did find a considerable number of charitable donations when we combed her current financials. If that matters to you.”

“Thanks. It matters.”

I thought about the contents of the box Virgil had brought me. Things Charlotte had saved for one reason or another, known only to her. I remembered seeing the delicate beaded eyeglass chain Ariana and I had made for her. Charlotte had kept it in a special pouch.

Maybe it had made her happy to be accepted by a couple of standard, boring women without criminal records.

Maybe we’d touched her life in some way that mattered. And quite possibly, the good she’d done for the Henley community mattered also.

Even with short notice, Bruce and I were able to round up a tableful of companions for Thanksgiving dinner. Virgil came, as did Irene and Kevin, the man who’d flown into my garage and crushed my attacker. The least I could do was feed him and his mother, who was happy to join us. I felt
that all of them had contributed to the reasons I was alive and able to be grateful this holiday.

The best news was that Eduardo was out of intensive care and had been transported to a facility close to home. We promised to move the party to his rehab center across town for dessert.

The dinner conversation was what one would expect, given the stressful times we’d been through and the personalities around the table.

“I still can’t believe the library lady’s killer was a girl,” Kevin’s mother said. A lovely woman from the far reaches of Maine, I figured she didn’t know how anyone was capable of doing bodily harm to another.

Virgil was ready with statistics. My hero. “If you want numbers, I can tell you that the Henley city jail has seven cells in the basement of the building. Five are reserved for male prisoners and two for females.”

“I still feel sorry for Chelsea,” I said. “She felt trapped. And I believe her that she went there just to talk to Charlotte.” I turned to the cop in our midst. “What are the chances that Chelsea will be able to serve her time in Nebraska, for her parents’ sake?”

Virgil shook his head. “Let’s say, if her daddy was the governor of Nebraska and her mother was the attorney general of Massachusetts, maybe. And even then, she’d also have to have another relative who was the chief of staff—”

“I get it. She stays in Massachusetts.”

“What about Daryl, or whatever the real name was of that boy who disappeared?” Ariana asked.

“Nothing yet,” Virgil said. “Now that we know he didn’t kill the woman he tracked across the country, it’s up for grabs how intense the search will be. Technically, the only crime he committed was lying to his girlfriend.”

“And breaking in to my house,” I said, though I had no intention of pressing charges against him. The sooner I was done with all the crimes of the past weeks, the better.

“Crime and punishment talk. This is what happens when you invite a cop to Thanksgiving dinner,” Bruce said.

“One cop, two ice climbers. It hardly seems fair,” said Virgil, helping himself to his third piece of cornbread, contributed by Kevin’s mother.

“I have some numbers, too,” Bruce said. “Did you know that of all the rescues in state parks, less than five percent are climbing related, and only three percent are related to rope climbing and mountaineering?”

No one answered directly, but there were questions all the same.

“What was it like being stranded up there?” Ariana asked the men who had been.

“I was never really afraid,” Bruce said. “How about you, Kev?”

“I was concerned, but not scared,” Kevin said.

His mother rolled her eyes.

“I was maybe a little uneasy, but not frightened,” Bruce said.

We all rolled our eyes.

“Well, not to worry. We’re always here to transport you,” Irene said. Her comment had the desired effect, as the recently missing guys moaned.

“You had to remind us,” Kevin said.

I knew it hadn’t exactly been a triumph for them to be picked up by their own company.

“Next time…” Bruce began. He looked at me and cut himself off.

He raised his glass.

“Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.”

“You bet,” I said.

1. Make a Möbius Strip

Materials:

Hold the two ends of a strip of paper, one in each hand. Twist one end 180 degrees (a half turn) and glue the ends together.

For comparison: If you glue the ends without twisting, the result will be a typical ring, like the kind children use to make paper chains. If you have such a ring, unglue and start again! Be sure to twist one end before gluing.

Now take a marker and put the tip at any point on the glued strip of paper. Without lifting the marker off the paper, draw a line down the middle of the entire surface. You should end up with the tip of the marker back where it started. You’ve drawn a line that shows you’ve created a one-sided surface.

Bonus: A Möbius strip riddle!

Q: Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?

A: To get to the same side. Who says one-sided surfaces aren’t fun?

2. A MEASUREMENT PROBLEM

You need exactly four gallons of water, but you have only two buckets: one a five-gallon bucket, the other a seven-gallon bucket. How do you measure out four?

A
NSWER:
Fill the seven-gallon bucket with water and use it to fill the five-gallon bucket. Now you have two gallons left in the seven-gallon bucket. Dump out the water from the five-gallon bucket and pour into it the two gallons that are left in the seven-gallon bucket. Refill the seven-gallon bucket. Now fill the five-gallon bucket the rest of the way. This will take three gallons, leaving four in the seven-gallon bucket.

N
OTE:
The solution to this problem ignores water conservation!

3. THE BIRTHDAY PROBLEM

A man says, “My life is going fast. The day before yesterday, I was only forty-nine, but next year I’ll be fifty-two.”

When is the man’s birthday?

A
NSWER:
The man’s birthday is December 31 (“yesterday”), at which time he turned 50. The day before yesterday, he was only 49. He’s speaking on January 1. He’ll be 51 at the end of this year, but will turn 52 “next year,” i.e., nearly two whole years from the day that he’s speaking.

4. TWO SIMPLE RIDDLES

Q: Who is the most famous statistician?

A: George Washington. He claimed he never told a lie and got away with it.

Q: Tom’s parents have three children. One is named April, one is named May. What is the third one named?

A. Tom

5. CLASSIC TRUTH-TELLING RIDDLE

A man makes a delivery to a prison. He has to make sure it’s a guard who signs for it and not a convict. The convicts always lie and never tell the truth; the guards always tell the truth and never lie.

Three men approach the delivery truck, but they’re covered in flour, and the deliveryman can’t see their uniforms; any of them might be convicts or guards. We’ll call the men #1, #2, and #3.

The deliveryman asks man #1, “Are you a guard or a convict?”

Man #1 answers the question, but another truck rolls by and the deliveryman can’t hear the answer.

Man #2 points at man #1 and says, “He just said he’s a guard. He’s telling the truth.”

Man #3 points at man #2 and says, “Don’t believe him. He’s lying.”

The deliveryman thinks for a minute, and then hands the clipboard to a man he knows is a guard.