The Probability of Murder Read online

  Unfortunately the Ben Franklin lounge windows faced away from the campus, so we didn’t have a line of sight to the alleged emergency scene outside the Emily Dickinson Library.

  Bruce and I fell in with the flow of people streaming toward the front door.

  “We’re out of here soon, no matter what, right, Sophie?” Bruce asked me.

  As much sympathy as I felt for whoever was on the gurney, I hoped nothing would interfere with the getaway in Boston that we’d planned.

  “To Boston, the home of the bean and the cod.”

  “Where the Cabots speak only to Lodges,” Bruce responded.

  “And the Lodges speak only to God,” I finished.

  “Ten minutes, tops, and we’re on our way,” Bruce said, squeezing my hand.

  I squeezed back. “What’s to keep us here?”

  My mind was more on Boston than the Henley campus as Bruce and I filed out the front door with a dozen or so people. The rest of the crowd took the elevator to the basement, presumably to use the exit closest to the library. We stepped out into a chilly, darkening afternoon with just the right amount of fall snap in the air. My favorite season, with classes in full swing and the taste of pumpkin and cranberries always close at hand.

  Bruce and I had both been out of town at conferences lately, which ate into our time together, above and beyond Bruce’s tricky seven days on/seven days off schedule at Henley’s airfield.

  “After dinner tonight there’s that midnight showing of The Eiger Sanction in Cambridge,” Bruce reminded me as we made our way toward the library, where it seemed the entire Henley College population had gathered.

  “A seventies movie. Can’t wait,” I said, in that way that he knew meant, “If you insist.”

  Bruce was also scheduled to leave on Sunday morning for a climbing trip to New Hampshire. He’d be available only through spotty cell phone reception and maybe through the park rangers when the visibility allowed. Not my favorite arrangement, but he was passionate about his mountaineering hobby. With an exciting, risky job piloting helicopters into accident scenes on the ground, you’d think he’d take up chess to relax, but not my guy. Hanging off the side of a mountain was his way of unwinding.

  The next twenty-four hours, give or take, were ours, however. We were headed north for an excursion in which we’d be roughing it at a four-star hotel overlooking Boston Common. My duffel bag was in my campus office, packed and ready to be transferred to Bruce’s SUV.

  I couldn’t wait for a dose of special togetherness before Bruce left to scale the heights with two of his buddies. The fair-weather summer and early fall tourists would be long gone and we’d have the north shore’s beautiful wharf areas to ourselves.

  In return for watching that nearly forty-year-old Clint Eastwood climbing movie, I’d made Bruce promise to spend an hour with me at the Museum of Science, where a new mathematics exhibit had opened. I hoped to get inspiration for the Math Department’s next turn as entertainment committee for a Franklin Hall party. As much as I was a fan of Möbius and one-surface structures, my goal was to have props that were more titillating than strips of paper.

  The closer we got to the library, the more jarring the scene in front of us became. An unsettling feeling came over me as we watched the ambulance take off, shooting out of the main campus driveway, patrol cars blaring behind it. I could hardly believe the number of cell phones that were raised high to document the event. Did anyone really want a photograph of another person’s misfortune?

  “It’s going to take forever to get to the hospital by the roads,” Bruce said. His standard half-joking plug for using air transport, particularly his own MAstar, for medical emergencies.

  The lights of the remaining police and campus security vehicles, about a hundred feet away, swirled red and blue as chatter from police radios and onlookers rose up and reached us.

  I looked at Bruce. Without speaking, we considered our next move. Option one was to take off as planned, immediately, without a backward glance. Our curiosity could be satisfied later tonight or tomorrow by a phone call to Fran or any other member of the Henley College community. Or we could even wait until Monday morning. Option two—

  “We should at least find out who’s in the ambulance,” I said, knowing Bruce would agree. It was his life’s work after all. And my campus.

  “Sure, just a quick Q and A,” he said.

  I nodded. “And then we’re out of here.”

  “It’s probably no one related to the campus,” Bruce said.

  “Yeah, some walk-in off Henley Boulevard,” I said. “It happens a lot.”

  “You don’t have the tightest security at that entry point.”

  “Retired cops. What can you expect?” I asked with a smile.

  “I won’t tell Virgil you said that,” Bruce teased.

  “Anyway, he’ll never know. There’s nothing here that a homicide detective would care about.”

  “Nah.”

  We sounded convincing.

  As we approached the building, I saw the faces of the students and staff closest to the police tape, which wound its way to the open library doors and inside the main lobby area as far as I could see. I guessed most of the onlookers had been in the library for the start of this drama. I could tell from their reactions that it was no stranger who’d been carted off campus with such ceremony.

  “Since when does a medical emergency require crime scene tape?” I asked Bruce, nervousness coming to the fore.

  He shook his head slowly, processing the scene in his mind.

  “Dr. Knowles, do you know what’s happening?” Daryl Farmer, the most vocal boy at the party—they were too young for me to think of them as men—came rushing up to me. “It’s Ms. Crocker. I heard someone say she was shot or something. I think she might be dead.”

  “Charlotte Crocker? The librarian?” Bruce asked.

  Charlotte Crocker, the librarian. Charlotte Crocker, my friend. I stopped short, unable to move. Charlotte Crocker shot? Dead? It wasn’t possible. I pushed the absurd phrases out of my head.

  Charlotte and I were gym partners, lunch partners, shopping partners. She’d been Henley’s reference librarian only two years, but had made her mark on students and faculty.

  I’d finally met her only family less than a week ago. Charlotte and I had taken her nephew to tour the MAstar medevac facility where Bruce worked. Noah, a senior at a Boston college, was interested in being a helicopter pilot. Charlotte was excited about the day, seeming every bit as curious about what was going on at the airfield as Noah was. It was clear she doted on him.

  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.

&nbs
p; 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.