A Function of Murder (15 page)

As soon as Woody turned the corner in the L-shaped hallway, I was back in my office,
checking for anything added. Or subtracted. Or multiplied. Just because Mayor Graves
told Woody he wanted to leave something for me didn’t mean his mission wasn’t to take
something away or manipulate an existing entity.

At first glance, my office always seemed fairly neat. I did my best to keep my physical
files and books organized. I liked the look of an efficient place to work. And there
wasn’t time in my day to shuffle through stacks of paper looking for the one sheet
I needed, such as the 3-D analysis problem I’d spent an hour working out. In the end,
organization saved time.

My mother, who gave me my puzzle-maker pen name, Margaret Stone, and was quite familiar
with both my home and school offices, called me a covert clutter-bug—neat on the outside,
messy on the inside. Mom was probably referring to the fact that I still had copies
of problem sets from
my first year teaching and all the term papers submitted by the class of Y2K.

My computer desktop was another story. I allowed myself a busy desktop image with
a collage of Cape photos going back to a young Margaret and a tiny Sophie frolicking
in the sand, all the way up to a mature Sophie and Bruce watching the sun set on Cape
Cod Bay. My screen itself was cluttered with color-coded sticky notes—the software
kind—and the icons for at least two dozen files, for easy access.

I ran my hands around my equipment, searching for something different since the mayor’s
entry. I checked the computer, DVD player, printers, scanner, electric pencil sharpener,
electric stapler, and—my favorite—my paper cutter with a laser beam for alignment,
a romantic gift from Bruce one Valentine’s Day. I came up dusty, but otherwise empty.
I checked my bookcases. Nothing had been disturbed as far as I could tell. No extra
books had been slipped in between
Multivariate Methods
by Tyler and
Combinatorials
by Wilson. I shook out an afghan Margaret made for me in shades of Monet blues and
lavenders. Maybe Mayor Graves had tucked a slip of paper in its folds. Nothing. I
searched smaller nooks for a disk or a flash drive. More nothing.

I opened my file drawers. My shoulders sagged as I contemplated row after row of hanging
folders, holding smaller folders, holding sheaves of papers. It would be an impossible
task to sift through every single sheet of paper in one four-drawer and three two-drawer
file cabinets. It seemed unlikely also that the mayor would have chosen that method
of leaving me a message. Unless he intended to tell me where to look.
In the meantime
came back to bug me again.
In the meantime, look in the folder marked “Grades Spring 2002” in the third drawer
of the large file cabinet.
But there was no such detail available to me, which sent me into a major funk. If
the mayor had arbitrarily opened one
of my ten file drawers and stuck a piece of paper, or any other small item, in one
of the folders, there was no hope of finding it, short of a miracle.

I had to switch gears.

Since Woody hadn’t seen anything on the mayor’s person, whatever he’d left me was
smaller than a breadbox. Look who was adopting qualitative measures. In the phone
message, the mayor had been specific that he wanted to talk about trouble at the Zeeman
Academy charter school. I was convinced he’d left a clue to that trouble, and that
trouble had gotten him killed.

I sat at my desk in front of my computer again and glanced over at my robes and briefcase
on the rocking chair in the corner, where I’d dumped them after reentering my office.
I’d been wearing my robes, which had no pockets anyway, when the mayor was in here,
but my briefcase had been in my office from when I arrived on campus around noon yesterday
until just a few minutes ago.

I rushed over, grabbed it, and emptied the contents onto a clear section of my desk.
Out came notebooks, class folders, a pad of graph paper, math textbooks, puzzle books,
tissues, and an embarrassing assortment of pens, pencils, binder clips, chocolate
kisses, and cough drops. No secret code ring or piece of microfiche. I consoled myself
that there was no bomb, either.

I went back to my desk and tried to imagine what Mayor Graves had been doing in my
office for ten or fifteen minutes. Probably not trying to work the countless puzzles
scattered around the various surfaces, or admiring my poster with the timeline of
women in the history of mathematics. The somber look of Maria and her “witch of Agnesi,”
matched my mood right now. Poor Maria, born May 16, 1718, just missed a Franklin Hall
party this year, since commencement weekend intervened. I doubted the mayor noted
the piece of historical trivia.

Maybe he changed his mind after he entered my office
and kept the item to himself. Maybe the mayor did simply want to make a private call,
or have a few quiet moments in my rocking chair, which begged the question of why
he’d lie to Woody. It wasn’t as if my office was the most convenient place for a break.
He’d had to walk across campus, past the tennis courts and the parking lot, to get
here. The college library and the back wings of the Administration Building were much
closer to the stage and would satisfy any ordinary need.

And where was Nora Graves while all this was going on?

At some point, I needed to pay a visit to the grieving widow, whether Virgil liked
it or not.

Before I packed up, I gave one more thought to logging on to Facebook to read Elysse’s
posts and see what her Friends were saying about me.

I chucked the idea. One thing at a time was enough.

I took my robes and briefcase and left my office.

I knew barely enough physics to pass the required courses for my degrees in mathematics,
but I could have sworn the fountain at the center of campus had magnetic properties.
I left Franklin Hall by the front door, facing the campus, drawn first to glance at
the fountain, still wrapped in crime scene tape, then to walk toward it.

I stepped along the pathway in front of the tennis courts, keeping my eyes on the
low concrete wall where Bruce and I had enjoyed our ice cream for a few minutes. I
felt a shiver and imagined that I heard the mayor call out for me.

As the awful scene came back to me, the strangest, most unimportant details were vivid,
like how I’d tossed my chocolate shake aside. I wondered where it was now. Where was
Bruce’s waffle cone? I knew he hadn’t finished it before the mayor came stumbling
toward us. Had the crime scene techs taken the ice cream for evidence? Of what? And
would I ever get my white sweater back? As if I would
touch it again, let alone wear it. Another shiver ran up my back.

I looked over at the faculty offices wing at the back of Admin, where humanities and
assorted other disciplines were housed. I recalled that on Saturday night, a window
was lit, on the ground floor. It seemed to blink at me now, like a faulty neon light.
Whose office was that? If it had been Woody in there, or any of the other maintenance
crew, the main lights in the whole wing would have been on until he was finished.

It hadn’t hit me squarely on the night of the murder, but what if the mayor and the
person who occupied that office had been in there, arguing, for example? Could it
be that simple? Someone in humanities, unhappy with the mayor, reached into his pencil
holder, pulled out a letter opener, and stabbed him?

I squinted, the better to count the windows from the end. I’d constructed puzzles
like this. Now I pretended this was the same task. A brainteaser exercise: Match the
outside window of the building to the correct interior office.

The window in question was second from the corner, which meant it belonged to the
second office in from the eastern end of the building. I committed the location to
memory, as if I had just left my car in a large parking structure. Ground floor, east
end, second office.

I visited the faculty wing often enough. I should know the seating chart without marching
up there with my briefcase and robes on a Sunday. I closed my eyes, traveling in my
mind. Enter the building across from the fountain. Turn left on the cracked, worn
marble floor, pass the large music room, pass the half flight of steps that led up
to a corridor of classrooms, arrive at the faculty section. Oops, it would have been
easier to count backward from the end of the hallway. I should have gone in the entrance
on the east side of campus. It’s a good thing I hadn’t expended any physical energy
on this puzzle.

In my mind, I saw the corner office, which belonged to Jack Peterson, chair of the
English Department. Jack’s office had only one window facing the fountain. It was
the office next to Jack’s that had been lit up on Saturday night, and it belonged
to…I felt my whole body slump…Beverly Eaton, English prof, who’d taken off early,
before graduation, for several weeks in Oxford with a few of her majors. Her office
would have been locked with a key that fit all the offices in the wing. In other words,
anyone on the faculty or staff could have been in Beverly’s office on Saturday night,
certain that she wouldn’t show up and surprise them.

I felt like I’d run up and down the hallway getting to this dead end. Plus, my spirit
was exhausted.

My walk back to Bruce’s car was happily uneventful, except for the constant stirring
of my mind, first in the direction of Mayor Graves’s visit to my office, then to his
murder, and then to the potential drama of a grievance petition on the part of Elysse
Hutchins.

At home, I resorted to eating as a solution to my anxiety and built the tallest sandwich
I could put together, with tomato, cucumber, avocado, lettuce, and three kinds of
cheese. With Ariana away, I was out of her homemade cookies, but I had an emergency
supply of store-bought chocolate cookies and opened a new package. It was a good thing
I had the metabolism of my skinny father and the Knowles side of the family; the Stones
had to count calories, which I’d always thought must be a great hardship, not to say
boring. I had to be very careful when visiting a Stone relative not to inadvertently
pick up a fat-free something from the fridge.

I carried my sandwich, garnished with the chocolate snaps, and a bottle of water past
my den and into my office, ready to face Elysse head-on, cyber-wise.

Rring, rring. Rring, rring.

I fished my cell out of my purse and clicked on to take Fran’s call.

“Log on to Facebook,” she said, with no preamble.

“I was just about to.”

“You’ve heard, though?”

“I’ve heard. I’ll call you after I’ve read it all.” I longed to talk to Fran about
the mayor’s visit to my office, but I decided to check out the Facebook posts and
call her later, when I needed advice on two issues, not one.

“Let me know if you want me to flunk Elysse,” Fran said. “Because I could, you know.
She’s kind of on the edge in linear algebra.”

“Very sweet, if unethical.” I laughed, hoping no one was listening in on this conversation.
It was a prosecuting attorney’s dream. “I’m logging on now,” I said, clicking off.

I took an unladylike bite of my sandwich and a long swig of water, followed soon by
a deep breath.

I went to Elysse’s profile page and saw her photo. Somehow the candid of a tall, smiling
blond in cutoffs, lounging at the beach, did not win me over. I might have been more
inclined to sympathize with her current plight if she’d uploaded a photograph of herself
reading a math book as her profile picture.

I read her original post:

Wrong!
I wanted to shout. She did not get zero points as her term math grade; she simply
got zero points for the one question that she blew on the final exam. Why didn’t Facebook
have a
Don’t Like
button? Or a
Don’t Believe This
button?