The Probability of Murder (7 page)

“Well, sure.” He paused. “If you need me to stay home, say the word, Soph. Kidding aside, you know I mean it.”

I did know that he was serious. I loved that I could count on Bruce.

I glanced down at Charlotte’s bulging duffel, peeking from behind my makeshift bed. I pulled it toward me and with one hand wiggled the zipper open partway. Unfortunately, the contents hadn’t morphed into simple shredded graph paper or a few pairs of dirty socks during the night
as I’d hoped. It was still a money bag, full of wrinkled American bills.

“There’s no reason for you to stay home,” I said.

The calls started coming around ten, when every adult should be up and about on a Saturday morning.

Ariana was first. “Bruce just called and told me about Charlotte,” she said. “I’m coming right over with bagels, cookies, and other assorted baked goods from the Volens kitchen.”

“I’m okay,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t believe me, and glad that Bruce had arranged for the perfect stand-in.

“Cinnamon or sesame today?” she asked.

“Sesame with a cinnamon spread, please,” I said.

What would I have done without loyal friends who understood my subtext?

Waiting for Ariana, I fielded several calls, including one from Paula Rogers, wanting to stop by and chat about “the event” as she called it. Her behavior in the hours since Charlotte’s death, on campus and then at the police station, looked like she was jumping at the chance to replace Charlotte on my list of friends. Daryl Farmer, Chelsea’s latest, also called, just to say, yo, could he help in any way?

Sometimes I questioned whether it had been such a good idea to vote in favor of listing cell phone numbers in the Ben Franklin directory. I’d become the clearinghouse for information for students and faculty both.

Fran, my colleague in the Math Department, would have had the number anyway, since we’d been friends from my first day at Henley.

“Do you need anything, Sophie?” she asked. Besides her full teaching schedule, Fran provided part-time day care for her two grandchildren. Good pal or not, I wasn’t about to add to her load.

I lied for the umpteenth time and promised to call if I thought of anything she might do for me.

I decided the best way to avoid more calls was to tie up
my line. I extracted the slips of paper from the pocket of Charlotte’s duffel and found the one for her nephew, Noah.

I punched in the number, with its Boston area code, and asked the male who answered if I could speak to Noah.

He’d picked up right away, but I seemed to have awakened him.

“Huh? Who’re you calling for?” he asked.

“I’d like to speak with Noah,” I said again, more clearly, then quickly remembered the “Noah/Jeff” combination on Charlotte’s note. “Is this Jeff?” I asked the sleepy guy.

“Uh-huh.”

“This is Professor Sophie Knowles from Henley College. I’m a friend of Noah’s Aunt Charlotte.”

“Who?”

“I’m Noah’s Aunt Charlotte’s friend.”

I spoke each syllable deliberately this time. It must have been earlier than I thought. I should have remembered that college kids kept strange hours. I’d have done better calling him at two this morning.

“Oh, oh, yeah, hey, Aunt Charlotte.” He laughed. “Sure, this is your nephew Noah. What’s up?”

Strange. “This isn’t Aunt Charlotte. It’s Dr. Knowles. Sophie Knowles. Remember me from the visit to Henley Airfield, to the air rescue facility? My friend, Bruce Granville, is the medevac pilot.”

“The…uh…pilot?”

How many field trips had Noah been on in the last week? Maybe he’d already heard about his aunt’s death and was in shock. I tried a different tack. “Noah, have the police contacted you?”

“Uh-oh. No?”

I didn’t recall that Noah spoke principally in question marks.

“I’m sorry to say I have some bad news about your aunt.”

I did my best to gently explain what had happened, as if death by violence could be softened. I’d hoped to be able to get through this call without tearing up, but the thought of
Charlotte lying dead in her beloved library for nearly a whole day before Hannah found her was more than I could handle. I was dangerously close to crying and upsetting Noah, confusing him further.

“Wow,” he said, when I finished. Not as overwrought as I’d expected. Certainly not as overwrought as I was. Just curiously surprised, as if his favorite young rock star had died suddenly.

“I know your mother’s passed on, Noah. I’m assuming you’re Charlotte’s only relative. I can accompany you if you want, when you come to claim her body.”

I heard an unmistakable groan, and then silence.

I was afraid Noah had fainted.

“I can give the police your number instead of waiting until they find you. I’m sure they’d like to talk to you.”

In fact, I had no idea how the police went about locating relatives of murder victims. Was there a database somewhere with all known kin of everyone? My page would be pretty empty, being the only child of only children.

Another groan from Noah.

“Are you okay, Noah? I’m sorry to give you this news over the phone, but maybe it’s better than—”

A heavy sigh came over the line from Boston, loud enough to interrupt me. “Okay, look. I’m not Noah, okay? I’m Jeff.”

“You’re Noah’s roommate?” Silly question, but I was at a loss to understand why he’d let me go on so long.

“There’s no Noah, okay? My name’s Jeff Connelly. I’m a junior psych major at BC and I work in the campus snack bar. I met that lady, Charlotte? She was looking through the notices on the bulletin board and found the one I put up saying I’d do odd jobs.”

“Charlotte hired you to do a job?”

“Yeah. I put my work hours down on the ad, and she came to the counter and asked for me.”

“What did she want you to do?”

I heard a hemming and hawing. “Look, I’m sorry about this, Dr. Knowles. I can’t believe the lady’s dead.”

“Jeff, if that’s your name, it would really help if you could tell me why she hired you.”

“Okay, yeah. The lady, Charlotte, offered me two hundred bucks to pretend to be her nephew. I just had to spend the day with you and her in Henley. It wasn’t the kind of job I had in mind when I put up the ad. I was thinking more like yard work, you know, but I figured,
Hey, I’m a psych major
, right? Role-playing might make a good term paper or a research project some day.”

I’d moved to the kitchen where I’d been multitasking, putting water on for coffee and getting plates out for Ariana and me. Now I dropped onto a chair in the breakfast nook and tried to process what Noah/Jeff was telling me.

“Charlotte Crocker paid you to pretend to be her nephew? For just that day? Did you go anywhere else?” Too many questions. “Sorry, answer any of the above, Jeff.”

“Yeah, well, nowhere else. All I had to do was make like I was interested in helicopters. And I got a couple of meals and my expenses paid, too.”

I thought of how many starving students the money in Charlotte’s bag would feed. Two hundred dollars wouldn’t make a dent in the fortune I’d uncovered. I rubbed my forehead with my fist. Massaging my brain.

“Why would she do that?” I asked, resigned to the fact that an unknown college kid in Boston might know more about my deceased friend than I did.

“Why’d she need me? I asked her that. She said she wanted some information about private flights from the airfield out there. Nothing to do with that medevac facility your boyfriend toured us through. And she wanted to take someone like me, living far enough away, so no one would recognize me. And maybe she was impressed by, like, the fact I’m a psych major.”

Impressive, indeed.

But it made sense, finally. I remembered Charlotte’s showing more interest in the overall Henley Airfield facility than in MAstar. She didn’t ask how the flight nurses who flew with Bruce were trained, or how many calls a
week came to them, or any of the usual queries people had when they toured the grounds or even simply heard what Bruce did for a living.

As I thought back, neither Charlotte nor Noah had shown much interest at all in MAstar.

I pictured the sprawling airfield on the edge of the town of Henley. MAstar was only one of many aviation-related businesses. Sharing the field were both nonprofit and for-profit companies. In my five years with Bruce, I’d become familiar with pilots’ clubs and associations, civil air patrol staff, touring services, hangar rental procedures, and the equivalent of body shops for planes.

And a wealth of opportunities for private travel arrangements.

When Charlotte wandered off to check out the other airfield facilities, I’d been surprised but not suspicious. Of course, I hadn’t known she’d created a fake nephew, either.

“It seems like a complicated set-up just to book a flight,” I said.

“No kidding. She said it was some kind of confidentiality thing. This way no one would wonder why she was going out there.”

She’d used a trumped-up tour of MAstar to scope out the possibilities for a private flight. A getaway.

She’d used Bruce. And me.

A wave of anger swept over me. I forgot for a moment that Charlotte was the victim of a homicide. I felt betrayed. I didn’t expect Charlotte to have confided in me if she wasn’t comfortable doing so, but to plan and execute an elaborate hoax? I remembered how generous Bruce and his coworkers at MAstar had been to us, explaining the procedures that took a crew up into the air to a safe landing on a freeway, and a quick transport to the nearest hospital with the requisite services. They’d shown us their dorm-style rooms and their night vision goggles. They thought we were interested in their lives and work.

Generally, Bruce didn’t enjoy touring people through MAstar. He even griped when they had to clean up for their
annual Family Day, when the spouses and children of his colleagues showed up expecting balloons and soft drinks. But he’d willingly arranged the day for Charlotte. Bruce’s coworkers had treated Charlotte and Noah as special guests. Because of Bruce. Because of me.

I shook myself out of the “me” phase, though it would be a while before I’d forget the subterfuge. Maybe Noah could still help me salvage something useful from the wasted day.

“Is there anything else you remember, Noah…uh, Jeff? Did she say where she wanted to go on the private plane?”

“I didn’t ask. I mean, she was paying me, and I didn’t want her to think it mattered to me. She didn’t look like she ran a drug cartel or anything, and I didn’t figure her for an arms dealer, so…”

I pictured a shrug on the other end of the line.

“I understand.”

“Hey, I’m really sorry your friend is dead. But, uh, am I in trouble? I spent the money already. If I had to, I guess I could come up with it.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary, Jeff. But I think the police will still want to talk to you.”

“Yeah, sure. I hope I didn’t do anything wrong. I mean, I just figured she was trying to surprise somebody, you know?”

That she did.

To make a good impression on Ariana—owner of the town’s bead shop and my closest friend, who didn’t need impressing—I set out a bookmark I’d been working on for Bruce’s young niece. I added a few beads to it in case she remembered exactly what state the project was in the last time she saw it. The pattern called for a fringe of beads attached to the short end of a rectangular piece of fabric. For the past week or so, I’d been picking away at the design, trying to follow the instruction “Be creative!” instead of counting out the colors in perfectly symmetric rows.

I thought I might arrange the beads according to the Fibonacci series, starting with red, then another red, then two green, three blue, five yellow, eight purple, and so on.

Ariana had said, simply, “That sounds nice.”

Ariana arrived bearing the promised bagels and spreads, plus pastries of her own making. She was dressed in happy rainbow hues, not solely for my benefit, but a pleasant example of her usual dramatic look. I noted several layers of tank tops and a shawl over wide silk pants. I was in my customary Saturday morning gray sweats, though it was close to noon.

She pointed to the unfinished bookmark at the edge of my counter. “Do you really work on this when you’re not expecting me?” she wisely asked.

I wisely didn’t answer.

We sat at my kitchen counter with hot herbal tea for her, coffee for me, and an enormous basket of breads that Ariana had baked. She’d divided the goods into “healthy” on the right and “delicious” on the left. A dozen bagels of mixed flavors were in a separate bag.

I didn’t blink before reaching for an unhealthy éclair, one of Ariana’s specialties, and biting into it.

“Thanks,” I said, allowing myself to focus on the burst of flavor from the unbeatable combination of chocolate and cream. For a minute, my head didn’t hurt.

“Why didn’t you call me right away?” she asked. “It’s terrible to lose someone you had such a bond with.”

Not as much of a bond as I’d thought.

“It sort of just happened, and I’m still trying to figure out what to do.”

In fact, I needed to decide whether to show Ariana the money bag in my den. I hadn’t wanted to spoil Bruce’s trip by giving him further reason to worry about me and any decisions I had to make, but I did need to talk to a real person face-to-face before going to the police. I smiled as I thought of what Virge would say about my real human/cop distinction.

Fortified by the great triple threat of caffeine, sugar, and dairy, I led Ariana into the den, sat her down, and unzipped
Charlotte’s duffel bag. I opened my palms, fingers pointing to the opening, stopping short of uttering, “Ta da.”

Ariana’s eyes widened. She leaned in closer. “Mother of God.”

It took a lot for Ariana to return to her roots in Catholicism. Usually she invoked lesser deities like Airmid, the Celtic goddess of healing, or the Slavic Belobog, master of light, source of happiness and luck.

I took out the sheaf of notes in the duffel pocket, with Noah’s now on top, and explained the Noah/Jeff drama.

“Mother of God,” Ariana repeated. “She was a fugitive.”

I’d thought as much but hadn’t let myself say the word. Ariana had no such qualms.