An Act of Murder Read online

  She tapped her pen several times.

  “A man. Yes, I think it was a man.”

  “Was it anyone you’d recognize?” I asked.

  “Oh heavens no. If he had that sort of talent, I would have recruited him for my drawing classes. But as I said, he didn’t care too much for art.”

  “And what about theater? Did he have a talent for that?”

  “I think so. He was a hard worker and good at making things for the set. And you know? I think he really liked the play. He was always coming around asking questions about production. Of course, I told him I had nothing to do with the play itself. I only design the costumes.”

  It was hard to believe Austin inquired about any piece of literature, let alone a French musical based on a classic novel. From what I had seen, he completed my assignments only because he cared about his grade-point average. In fact, I had the feeling that he believed literature—and perhaps art as well—was a flat out waste of his time. I concluded Austin’s reason for inquiring about the play had to do with one person—Sarah Sorenson.

  I nodded and glanced at my watch. It was eleven thirty, and I was ravenous. “You’ve been so helpful.”

  “Have I? I don’t know.”

  I smiled. “You have.” Then I stood up.

  “Emmeline?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did anything happen in your class that was … peculiar? Is that why you’re here?”

  “Peculiar? No, not at all. He was just your average, ordinary student.”

  She stretched out her long fingers and tapped their tips together. “So why all the questions?”

  I cleared my voice. “He didn’t attend my Friday class either, and I started wondering if it was my assignment that kept him away. Actually, I’m glad to hear he missed your class as well. It makes me feel a great deal better.”

  “Death by truancy?” Her falsetto laughter echoed through the tiny room.

  I attempted to laugh also. “More or less,” I managed. “Thanks again,” I said and waved goodbye.

  Something about the woman bothered me, and I decided it was her long fingers. The way they were always stretching and folding—it was distracting at best, creepy at worst. Despite her finger calisthenics, however, the appointment had been successful. I’d found out that Austin didn’t attend her class and consequently hadn’t skipped mine because of the poetry assignment. This gave me a small amount of satisfaction, knowing that Austin might have participated had he not had other plans that morning. Those other plans were paramount to finding out what kept him from attending class Friday morning yet brought him to campus.

  With my mind on the case, I nearly bumped into Officer Sophie Barnes, who was standing near the entrance.

  “I’m sorry. Excuse me … Sophie!” I said. “I’m so sorry. I nearly knocked you down.”

  “That’s okay, Professor Prather. It’s a bad place to stop.” She tucked something into her pocket.

  “I’m glad I ran into you again—not literally, of course—but I wanted to talk to you the other day. I knew you were busy, though.”

  She wore a neat brown ponytail that bobbed up and down as she talked. Her brown eyes, too, revealed her excitement as she leaned in so close that I could smell her strawberry shampoo. “This case,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, “it’s the most exhilarating thing I’ve ever worked on. It’s all I can think about.”

  “I’m so happy for you.”

  “I think it’s going to change things around there for me, you know? Instead of being the new college kid, I’m going to be a real cop.”

  “The next great detective, perhaps?”

  At this, she turned sheepish and curbed her enthusiasm. “Oh, Professor Prather, nothing like that. But it is the chance I’ve been looking for. You know what I mean? They just don’t take you seriously down there until you prove yourself somehow.”

  I nodded. “I know what you mean. The entire department thought I was a kook until I was accepted for a conference at Harvard last spring to present my paper on Female Empowerment and the Romantic novel. They thought I’d read all those Harlequins in vain.”

  She giggled like a young girl.

  “You know, I was on my way to lunch just now. Would you like to join me?” I asked.

  She turned serious. “Oh, I don’t think I should. Beamer wouldn’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well … I don’t know.” I could see she was looking for a way to tell me without offending me. “The investigation and all. It might not look proper.”

  “Of course. I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble. Just walk with me to my car, then.”

  Although clouds still populated most of the sky, a ray of mild sunshine peeked through momentarily, like an old friend. I stood for a moment, completely still, feeling the sun soak through my jacket. It felt glorious.

  I resumed walking. After a few steps, I asked, “How is the case going? Any news?”

  Sophie’s lips turned up ever so slightly.

  “There is …” I said.

  “There might be,” she replied.

  “You know Austin was my student,” I said.

  She nodded. “I know. Wow! Is this your car?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s cool. What is it?”

  “Thank you. It’s a ’69 Mustang. The news—is it about how Austin died?”

  “It’s nothing official, Professor Prather. A tox screen can take six weeks to come back.”

  “But you do know something?” I asked.

  “It’s a chemical—”

  “A poison,” I broke in.

  She looked around to see if I’d been overheard, but I knew I hadn’t been. We were alone in the parking lot.

  “I don’t know if I should really be telling you this.”

  “Well, I should think it’s a matter of some public importance. And besides, he was my student. That makes it more of my concern.”

  “I know, but it also makes you a suspect,” she whispered.

  “A suspect.” The word hung in the air. “Was he murdered, then?”

  She stood there, biting her bottom lip.

  “Listen, Sophie, I don’t want you to get in trouble. My students mean a lot to me, and you’re one of my former students, too. I just want to know the truth about Austin.”

  “Here’s the deal …” she started.

  I knew her Midwestern sensibility would come through in the end.

  “The coroner found a chemical in the vic’s—sorry, Austin’s—body called ethylene chlorohydrin. I guess it’s used for all sorts of things and also as a pesticide. The thing is, we’re not sure how Austin came into contact with it.”

  “A pesticide?” I raised my eyebrows. “I imagine every farmer this side of the state has access to it.”

  She shook her head. “It makes it difficult; that’s for sure.”

  I began to feel warm, standing in the sun, and very hungry. It was time to get something to eat and let Sophie go on her way.

  “Professor Prather, you’re not going to tell anyone, are you? You know, it could be nothing. It’s not official.”

  I opened my car door. “You know me, Sophie—always the soul of discretion.”

  Now it was her turn to raise her eyebrows. “Just keep it between us, okay?”

  I got into my Mustang and started it with a rumble. “I promise, Sophie. I would never let you down. You keep yourself safe. It could be that we have a murderer on the loose.”

  “It doesn’t seem possible, does it?” said Sophie, looking around at the quiet town that surrounded us.

  As I drove away, I thought it was not only possible but probable. In fact, I was certain now that Austin had been murdered. How else would he have come in contact with such a chemical? There was no doubt in my mind that someone had poisoned him—but how and why? The answers seemed as elusive as Austin himself.

  Chapter Fourteen

  After grabbing a quick lunch, I stopped by Lenny’s hous
e to report what Sophie had told me. I needed to tell someone, soul of discretion or not, and I knew he would not repeat what I said. I had been to his house a couple of times over the last year. In the backyard was an extraordinary willow tree, which hovered over the small ranch house like an overprotective mother.

  Like most of the houses on Park Street, his was built in the 1970s. It was olive green and rectangular and very similar in design to the ones surrounding it. Their coherence made the street look neat and organized and gave the impression that nothing out of the ordinary ever happened here. It was a comforting feeling, I reflected as I parked in the single-lane driveway, to stand at one end of the street and see nothing out of place.

  From the door, I could hear “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” playing loudly, and I assumed Lenny was grading papers. He told me once that playing music helped keep his mind off all the run-on sentences and that he wouldn’t be able to get through a set of papers without John Lennon. Everyone had their methods, I supposed. Mine were altogether different. I preferred to grade papers in absolute silence. And I enjoyed the process of making corrections. I marked each grammatical error with a different color highlighter. Students were expected to memorize the color code at the beginning of the semester: red for comma splices, yellow for run-ons, orange for fragments, and green for misplaced modifiers. Lenny thought they were my replacement for crayons, but I assured him they were not. Indeed, I’d never enjoyed coloring as a child as I didn’t have the patience to stay within the lines. In fact, while other girls honed their skills by completing complex coloring books of Strawberry Shortcake, I was busy writing thinly veiled stories about the working families in my neighborhood.

  I waited for quite a while before the music stopped and Lenny appeared at the door in lounge pants and a Pepsi t-shirt.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “I thought you were Mrs. Baker. I was trying to come up with a good excuse.”

  I liked this about Lenny. He never seemed surprised by anything I did, even coming by his house unannounced in the middle of the afternoon.

  He held open the door, and I walked in.

  “She lives next door. But I’m pretty sure today is Laundromat day.”

  I wondered how he knew it was laundry day but didn’t ask. Instead, I said, “Can I move these?” and after he nodded, took a stack of papers from his recliner and moved them to his keyboard bench so that I could sit down. Lenny not only played keyboard, he also played electric guitar. In fact, he moonlighted with several area bands and was a well-respected musician within the community.

  “She hates loud music,” he said, “even in the middle of the afternoon.” He sat down on his black couch, moving aside the piles of folders and miniature candy wrappers. “So what’s up? Austin, right? I can tell by your skyrocketing eyebrows.”

  I nonchalantly relaxed my face. “I talked to Sophie, the police officer who used to be my student.”

  “What about Sarah? What happened with her?”

  I gestured impatiently. “I’ll get back to her.”

  “It’s important that I keep these things in my head chronologically,” he said.

  “Oh good god Sarah was at the poetry reading that night!” This I spewed out in one long breath, trying to continue before he could stop me.

  “Ah ha! He was with a girl,” he said, slapping his leg.

  “We knew that already.”

  “Yeah, well, we didn’t know it was Sarah.”

  “In fact, she was probably the last one to see him alive before he was murdered,” I stressed.

  “I thought we were ordered to use that word more cautiously.”

  “After talking to Sophie,” I said, “I’m guessing it’s a word we’ll hear a lot more of.”

  “I think the term you’re looking for is ‘involuntary manslaughter.’ When that guy in Iowa—”

  “Can I just tell you what Sophie said?”

  He shrugged. “I can see that you’re going to anyway.”

  “Sophie said that the coroner found a chemical in Austin’s body called ethylene chlorohydrin—a poison.” I leaned back in the chair, satisfied to have revealed my news.

  “No wonder. That is a nugget,” said Lenny, putting his hands behind his head. “How is it used?”

  “I don’t know anything about it, really.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair until it came to a nearly perfect point at the top of his head. “Does all this really mean Austin was murdered?”

  “Come on, Lenny. He couldn’t have accidentally come in contact with something like that, could he? Somebody had to poison him with it.”

  The word hung in the air, and neither of us said anything for a moment.

  “Well … there it is,” said Lenny.

  I nodded silently.

  “So what now?” he asked.

  I moved to a cross-legged position as I tried to sort out my thoughts. “How would he have come in contact with the chemical? Sophie Barnes said it could be used as a pesticide. I know he told me he lived on a farm, but that was before he came to campus.”

  “The kid was into everything, as far as I can tell. Theater, ROTC. What about the fraternity? Could some cruel hoax have gone wrong that weekend—a hazing thing?”

  I jumped up. “Of course! Where’s your laptop?”

  “It’s right here. Why?”

  It was lying on top of another stack of papers. I squeezed in beside him on the couch, opening the computer.

  “It’s just something you said.” I pulled up Google and searched for the chemical. “I want to see if we can find a description on the Internet.”

  “Look at you. Going all non-academic on me.”

  I shook my head. “Do you think I have the nerve to search the science databases? I could not begin to decipher that gobbledygook.”

  After a few misspelled searches, I found a federal poison control website that described ethylene chlorohydrin’s properties briefly. I told Lenny, “It’s used as all sorts of things: a pesticide, solvent, fabric dye—a degreaser. It smells faintly of ether. It’s almost completely undetectable when absorbed by the skin. And listen to this: it has a sweet taste!”

  I gave him a good shove as I relayed this fact, but he still looked puzzled. “The fraternity?” I said. “Rush week? Shots of the alcoholic variety?”

  “Makes sense. Damn I’m good.” He stroked his stubbly chin whiskers.

  I shut the laptop. “You are good. I’m completely impressed.”

  He smiled widely, and I suddenly realized how close to him I was sitting. I could smell his musky cologne. I moved back to my chair, returning the laptop to its appropriate pile.

  “I think it’s time to pay a call on the fraternity,” I said. “Find out what really went on that weekend.”

  His smile turned into a smirk. How well I knew the difference. “Pay a call on the fraternity. What do you mean? Like, just stop in?”

  “I see what you mean. I would certainly need a reason for stopping by, wouldn’t I? They are a members-only sort of thing, I suppose. You didn’t happen to be—”

  “A frat boy? Hell no.” He seemed truly disgusted by the notion.

  “Well, two frat brothers are in my 101 class. I should be able to ask them a few questions—discreetly, of course.”

  Now his smirk turned into laughter. “Have you looked up your definition of ‘discreet’ lately? It has a picture of a lady with a bomb—”

  “Ha ha, very funny. I’ll have you know that I can be surreptitious when I want to be,” I said.

  He looked at me quizzically. “Are you trying to raise one eyebrow again? Because it just looks like you got a stray lash in your eye.”

  I stood up. “I’ll keep working on it. In the meantime, I’m going to find a way to get to those fraternity guys. See what really happened that weekend. I’ll let you know if I find anything out.”

  “I’ll be waiting on pins and needles.”

  I reached for the doorknob.

  “Hey,
be careful though, Em. Promise?”

  I looked over my shoulder and crossed my heart. As I walked down the concrete steps, just before I reached my car, I heard “Sergeant Pepper” resume. A small smile escaped my lips. There were many reasons I liked Lenny, and this was one of them: for him, life moved. And he always moved with it. He did not overthink situations, even this one; he was someone who got things done.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The more I learned about Austin, and the more preoccupied I became with his murder, the more I allowed the obligations of my day-to-day routine to slip. I found myself petting Dickinson and staring out the window a good deal now, allowing my unfinished research and unwashed dishes to pile up like the leaves outside my window. The difference was that a nice big wind wouldn’t come and blow my obligations away. I would need to do the work. Thinking, however hard, about the murder did not constitute work. I should have been writing a chapter on the French lovers Abelard and Heloise, examining how letter writing allowed Heloise a creative outlet in the twelfth century. It was to be part of a larger book that examined early alternative spaces for female authors, a book that might bring me closer to tenure. But now the completion of that book seemed as far away as the warm days of summer.

  I stood up and put down the cat. As I glanced through the neat stacks of research in my study, I was still thinking about the murder. I barely knew Austin, yet somehow I felt responsible. I needed to find out the truth about his death and finish this story, his story. It was the only one that mattered to me right now.

  I went to the kitchen, poured myself another cup of coffee, and then left it on the counter. It was almost eight o’clock Friday morning, and I needed to get ready for my composition class. It had been two days, and I still hadn’t thought of an excuse to visit the fraternity. Maybe something would occur to me in lecture. At the very least, I could ask one or both of the fraternity boys about initiation. I was headed for the shower when a sudden recollection of my meeting with the arts committee made me pause and return for my coffee. The meeting would give me the perfect opportunity to ask questions without appearing nosy. Encouraged, I stepped into the shower. Today wasn’t going to be that bad after all.