Killing Cassidy (20 page)

“Aha!”

“You understand my interest. In his account, it transpired that a squirrel had chewed through part of the telephone cable. One of the two wires was damaged. The problem was intermittent because the wire would maintain contact so long as the wind did not blow. When it did, the phone would not function. The damage couldn't easily be seen.”

“You think a squirrel …?”

“Possibly. I am more inclined to think that someone saw that column, someone who had tried at least twice to cause Kevin's death. That someone got an idea.”

“And frayed Kevin's telephone wire! Someplace where it couldn't be easily seen or repaired.”

“Or, just possibly, a place where it
could
be easily repaired—just before Kevin phoned for repairs.”

“Oh, that's brilliant, Alan! Diabolical, but brilliant. So not only would the repairmen be unable to find anything wrong, they'd begin to think Kevin was some sort of crank and be slower and slower to respond. AND they'd charge him an arm and a leg.”

“Charge? For no work?”

“We have a weird phone system in this country. If you call the phone company and the problem is in their lines, they fix it for nothing. If it isn't, though, not only do they not fix it, they hit you with a hefty charge for a service call.”

Alan shook his head sadly. “Someone is very clever, Dorothy.
But
—do you want to know what else I read in the newspaper?”

“I can't wait. So far, you've come up trumps every time.”

“You'll not like this one so well, I fear, but I believe you'll agree it's interesting information. It was simply a very small news item on the business page, listing the names of area physicians who had attended a seminar on various rare diseases. One of those listed was Dr. Boland.”

“Oh, I already knew he was conscientious about keeping informed. Let me tell you what
I
found out today.”

“Wait, let me finish. The date of the seminar was the day Kevin's tricycle was stolen.”

“But—but—”

“Yes, indeed. Dr. Boland could not have been responsible for that incident. And if we assume it to have been one of a series …”

“But then
why
did he leave town?”

We were right back where we'd been three days before, with a fugitive and no explanation for his flight.

I
had trouble sleeping that night. For once Alan's warm presence beside me offered little comfort. I punched my pillow into a more satisfactory shape, rolled over to my right side, and recited the multiplication table in my head.

My knee hurt, and my foot was trying to cramp. I rolled onto my stomach and tried reciting the Twenty-third Psalm.

Sleeping on my stomach was very bad for my back. I rolled onto my left side.

My nightgown was wound around my waist like a tourniquet. I heaved and tugged, hitting Alan with my elbow. He grunted once and continued snoring.

I was seized with the irrational resentment of the sleeper that possesses the sleepless. It was all very well for him, him in his comfortable oblivion. What did he care if I was awake and restless and miserable?

I sighed—loudly—and punched the pillow once more—hard.

No reaction.

You would
think
, with all the walking you've done in the past few days, that you'd be too tired for this, I told myself crossly. You would
think
you'd fall asleep as soon as your head hit the pillow. But no, all the exercise has done is make your knees ache more.

The pillow was still the wrong shape. Exasperated, I got up and went to the bathroom for a glass of tepid hotel water.

The fact was, of course, that my restlessness had nothing to do with the pillow, nothing to do with the hard mattress or the minor aches and pains that were always with me now. The trouble was in my mind. I was annoyed with myself, and no amount of tossing and turning and pillow-punching was going to help that.

It was all very well for Alan to say we were making progress, but it was all so
slow
. I wanted things to come to a head. I wanted something to
happen.
I wanted to find out something definitive, something that would get us somewhere. So far we'd uncovered absolutely nothing that would lead us to Kevin's killer. All we had done, Alan and I, was to place ourselves under police suspicion and restrict our ability to accomplish anything useful.

True, we were both convinced that Kevin had not died a natural death. And what good did that do? I thought bitterly. We couldn't prove anything about his death. We didn't
know
anything about Jerry's death, which was certainly related.

Or was it? I was at that dark stage of self-doubt that flourishes, rank and weedy, at midnight of a sleepless night. Maybe Darryl Lacey was right. Maybe Jerry had been killed in the aftermath of a drunken brawl. Maybe Kevin had been imagining things. Maybe Alan and I should go back home where people knew us and believed us.

That thought set me to pacing the floor. Home. I
was
home, wasn't I?

Not anymore
, said the horrid little voice that loves to torment me from time to time.
This isn't home anymore. Do you even have a home anymore
?

The room was warm. Too warm. I opened the window, but no breath of air was stirring. Oh, wonderful. We were in for a spell of the kind of weather Hillsburg occasionally gets in October. Not Indian summer, with the pleasant warmth that implied, but stormy July, three months late. Hot, humid, unsettling.

Maybe if I went for a walk? There might be some air I could breathe outside, maybe a breeze that would blow the cobwebs out of my head.

I dressed as quietly as I could, put a note on my pillow in case Alan woke and worried—
not that he will
, the nasty inner voice sneered—and stole out of the room.

A little common sense began to assert itself once I was actually outside. The air, muggy and still, was really no more refreshing than inside the hotel. It was after midnight. Was this a stupid thing to do? I wouldn't hesitate to take a midnight stroll back at home—back in Sherebury, I firmly corrected myself. But this was America, with a crime rate, even in little Hillsburg, that would send Sherebury into shock.

Oh, for Pete's sake! I
was
in a bad mood, and it was making me silly. The campus was well lighted and well patrolled. The hour was not late, not for students. There would be people around, and none of them would be interested in a middle-aged lady—all right, verging on old—going about her business.

I crossed the street.

By night, the campus seemed far more familiar than by day. The basic layout was still the same, and darkness hid most of the recent changes. The lovely old oak and maple trees were in the same places, and so were the old buildings, empty now of the teeming energy that enlivened them during the day, slumbering in their creaky dustiness.

They were impervious to change, those ivied halls. The students might come and go, their dress changing over the generations, the forms of their rebellion. The faculty, more slowly, changed from wing collars to tweed jackets with leather patches to blue jeans and T-shirts, and they, too, rang new changes on the old academic ideals. All of them left their faint impressions on the fabric of the buildings: the worn stair treads, the floors scraped by hundreds of chairs. The bricks, though, the stone and glass and wood, these endured essentially changeless, except for the intangible atmosphere of learning, of academic endeavor, that had been absorbed over the years and would continue to linger and radiate until the buildings themselves were dust.

I rambled along my favorite paths, now and then encountering a couple locked in an embrace. None of them noticed me at all.

Gradually, almost insensibly, I began to relax.

What, after all, did my worries matter in the eternal scheme of things? Was this place another Oxford, like Dorothy Sayers's in
Gaudy Night
, where learning was the only important thing? Where human passions were of far less concern than additions, however obscure, to the sum total of human knowledge?

Well, perhaps. In the eternal scheme of things. But that idea had not kept Harriet Vane from working very hard to solve the nasty problem besetting her Oxford college. And it wasn't going to keep me from doing my damnedest to solve Kevin Cassidy's murder.

I had wandered aimlessly. Now I looked up to get my bearings. I had gone right across the campus, my feet automatically following their old direction, and found myself in front of the Biological Sciences Building.

I allowed myself a tear or two. Dear old Kevin. And dear, dear Frank. What impression had they left on that building? Did the classrooms and laboratories, in some dim, inarticulate way, remember those two exemplary men? Did their friendly ghosts haunt the halls, inspiring those who came after them?

Those who came after them! Those who worked there now, doing their research, adding to the sum total of human knowledge. Something stirred in my mind. Was I about to get an idea?

I was. Eureka! Those current seekers after wisdom included, I remembered with excitement, an entomologist I knew very well, whose odd specialty was the study of maggots. An unattractive subject, one would think, but he—Stan Harrington—had contributed greatly to forensic science. He knew exactly how the life cycles of the nasty little creatures could help determine when someone died.

When, for example, Jerry died.

I couldn't get that information from the police, but I was willing to bet I could get it from Stan. If he wasn't the “bug man” Darryl had called in, he'd know who was, and he'd get me the information.

Relieved, and suddenly exhausted, I took the shortest route back to the hotel, curled up gratefully against Alan's back, and went instantly to sleep.

I didn't wake until midmorning, and then I talked Alan into going to lunch with me and Sharon. “Sharon's dying to meet you. And we need something to talk about, now that the Boland lead doesn't look at all promising.”

Neither of us, truth to tell, went into the Administration Building with much enthusiasm. Square one is not a pleasant place to remain, nor a place to which one enjoys returning. I had told Alan about my ploy to gain information about Boland, though it now seemed likely to be pointless. My eagerness to talk to Stan Harrington had also ebbed. I'd also told Alan all about that, of course. But now, on a muggy, unseasonable morning with a thunderstorm threatening at any moment, my spirits had sagged again, and it didn't seem like such a hot idea.

“He probably won't know anything, either. Or he'll refuse to help. Or he'll have retired.”

“You're cross because you didn't get enough sleep,” Alan observed. “A walk will do you good.”

“We have to take the car; we're taking Sharon to a place across town. And I am not cross!”

He was wise enough not to smile.

Sharon was waiting for us when we got to her office. She shook hands with Alan. “I can't wait to get to know you better, and I'll be right with you. If you'll just have a seat for a minute, I have to take these reports across the hall,” she said. She gave me a broad wink and sailed briskly out the door with a pile of computer printouts.

“I suppose I might as well,” I said in answer to Alan's raised eyebrow. “I'm here.”

Sharon had considerately left Boland's file on top of the small stack on her desk. I opened it and flipped through quickly.

His transcript from undergraduate school. An excellent record, almost straight A's. His transcript from Johns Hopkins. Also excellent. I frowned. “There's nothing here to lead to anything at all. He was an almost perfect student.”

Alan made a noncommittal noise.

“Wait, how did this get in here? It's a vitae. He must have applied for a job with the university—the health center, I suppose—and somehow this got in his student file, instead. The great bureaucracy at work.”

“May I see?”

“Sure. This stuff isn't even confidential, though the student records are supposed to be.”

Alan skimmed the document and then looked more closely at the second page. “Hmmm.” He ran a hand down the back of his head.

“What? Something interesting?”

“I think so.” He pointed.

It took me a moment to see it, and when I did, I looked up, puzzled. “There's a gap, isn't there? You don't notice it at first, but he left the hospital in Virginia in '94 and didn't start at the Ohio one until '95. That could be a matter of a month or two, or—”

“Or almost two whole years, depending on which month in each year. All the other dates are contiguous.”

“That might be worth checking, then. Let me just copy down the names of those hospitals, and maybe I can find out—”

“Hurry!”

I made a very quick note and was just slipping the vitae back into the folder when Sharon returned to the office. She carefully kept her back to us, fussing over a file cabinet, until I'd had time to align the folder neatly on her desk and stand up.

“Good. Ready to go? I ought to warn you I'm starving. I hope you brought lots of money.”

We enjoyed our lunch, but the tiny hint of mystery had revived my interest, and I was glad when we dropped Sharon back at her office, or as close as we could come in the car. “This was fun; thank you. You must keep in touch, Dorothy, especially if anything exciting turns up in your life.” She grinned conspiratorially and walked away, brisk as ever.

“Nice woman,” Alan commented.

“The registrar's office—or whatever they're calling it now—would fall down without her. I always thought so, and one of her underlings said just that yesterday.”

“I trust she won't get into trouble for helping us.”

“She was very careful not to help us. It's not her fault if a couple of visitors who might be expected to behave just happen to snoop in a file when she's out of the office. But she'll want to know all about it if it turns out the information was a help. Myself, I can't figure out if it means anything or not.”