An Act of Murder Read online

  “Yes?” Sarah said questioningly.

  “Perhaps you were angry at Austin for partying with the fraternity. Maybe you had heard about his leaving the party with a mystery girl, a girl he seemed to be spending more and more time with.”

  “Professor Prather, you know that’s not true!” she said, shocked by my line of reasoning. “I wasn’t his girlfriend! I’m Sean’s girlfriend.” She pointed to Sean, who sat rigid beside her. “Tell them, Sean!”

  Sean frowned, probably angry with her for pulling him into her predicament.

  “Yes, tell us, Sean, how jealous you had become of Austin for taking your girlfriend on all sorts of excursions—poetry readings, for instance. Not something likely to interest a chemistry major.”

  “I knew they were just friends. She wasn’t into him.” He crossed his arms.

  “Being a chemistry major, you probably knew a little something about the poison that killed him. ”

  A couple of girls standing behind him backed away.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Sean. “I’m just a sophomore. I’ve hardly had any chemistry yet.”

  My eyes moved to the next table. “But sophomores aren’t that stupid, are they, Jared?” Jared, looking dapper in his black Polo shirt, attempted to hide behind another student, but he was too tall. I walked several steps in his direction. “You knew that Austin was smart, and what’s more, he was charismatic. Students were charmed by his easy ways. And that bothered you, didn’t it? It bothered you that a nobody from a farm challenged your popularity in the fraternity.”

  “Nah. It wasn’t like that,” said Jared, shifting in his seat. “I was just giving him a hard time.”

  “And did giving him a hard time include murdering him?” I asked.

  “No way! Do you think I’m stupid?”

  I didn’t answer that question; instead I moved toward the faculty, gathered on the left side of the room. Most of them had been leaning forward but now leaned back as I approached. “We’re not stupid, are we? We’re pretty smart—we have our PhDs, our MBAs, our MFAs. But is one of us smart enough to pull off a murder?” I paused and shook my head. “It appears not.”

  “I don’t appreciate having accusations thrown at us as if we were common street criminals!” boomed Alex.

  I smiled. “I bet you don’t, considering the murder took place in your department. How exactly did Austin come in contact with ethylene chlorohydrin? Tell us, Alex, how do you use it in the theater?”

  Alex drew his palms together, tapping his index fingers. “Look, you’re right. We sometimes use it in the theater to make dye, but Photography also uses it as a solvent. Either way, Austin could not have come into contact with it. He was a volunteer, for christ’s sake!”

  I nodded. My guess had paid off. I knew he had access to either the chemical or something similar. “But you couldn’t be sure. That’s why you hid the gloves Austin wore under Fantine’s bed. You recognized the ether smell when you discovered the body. You knew how bad it looked for the theater, so rather than calling the police, you simply left Austin for the janitor to discover.”

  “Is that true?” asked Dan, leaning across the table. Martha Church, who also sat at his table, was waiting patiently for his answer.

  Alex looked around the room. All eyes were on him, including Beamer’s.

  “It is true—but just wait a minute! Wait a minute!” he continued through the sudden increase in noise. “She didn’t say I killed him. She said I found him. As in, found him already dead.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “Alex might have done a deplorable act by leaving Austin lying there, but he did not commit the crime. No, that was done by someone Austin knew more intimately, someone he had been pressuring for weeks.”

  I walked in between the tables, searching for one person in particular, hoping she had made it back in time for my plan to work. Finding her, I continued, “There was something that puzzled me from the start, something I could not fit into Austin’s last day on campus. I say on campus because he was not in class that day, but he was in Harriman Hall. In fact, I myself talked to him. He was near my office, and I thought he was coming to talk to me about the poem he had chosen to read for class. When he left, I noticed he was not wearing his backpack and was not, indeed, on his way to class. So why, then, come to Harriman Hall? Then it came to me. He was not in Harriman Hall at all. He was cutting through it on his way to Windsor Hall. He was on his way to see you, Ann, wasn’t he?”

  It wasn’t Ann’s face I noticed but Owen’s. It registered both shock and grief, and I knew he’d guessed what I was about to say. Ann showed no such forethought.

  “Em! Are you serious?” She attempted a laugh. “What do I have to do with any of this?”

  I shook my head, a bit disappointed at her antics. “You have everything to do with this, Ann. You were the first person Austin met when he came to the university. You were his advisor.”

  “So?” she glared. “I have lots of students to advise. Jeez, I just told you, I’m the overflow for other departments!”

  “You had the unique opportunity to hear Austin’s real reason for attending this university, his mission, as one student put it. He was here to meet his biological father.”

  “Just wait a minute now, just wait,” she said, her voice fraught.

  But I didn’t wait. I advanced toward her. “I bet Austin thought it was a real coincidence that your own last name matched the one he was looking for; it must have been the perfect opportunity for him to gather information about his father and how to go about telling him who he was. Little did he know you hadn’t been able to conceive a child, despite your and Owen’s desire for one, and that you found his intrusion on your lives a threat to your marriage.”

  “That’s a lie!” Ann said.

  Owen stared at her openly. “Austin was my son? I mean, did you know he was my son? I figured at the memorial that that could have been the case, but I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Patricia and I were going to talk afterward ….” The rest of the sentence trailed off.

  Ann refocused on Owen. “I didn’t do anything, Owen. You have to believe me. Emmeline is crazy—certifiably insane to say these sorts of things.”

  I continued on, “When you noticed Austin had signed up for your husband’s class, you realized you needed a plan and quick. You stalled him in every way you could, telling him perhaps that Owen didn’t want children, that you were prepping him to hear the unwelcome news. You became his confidante, his conspirator.”

  Owen looked pale. “How can you say these things about Ann? She’s your friend.”

  I shrugged. “Because they’re true. I overheard her conversation with Austin the night of the English Department’s potluck. I just didn’t realize it. She in fact is the woman Austin had been spending so much time with—the woman Sarah became suspicious of.”

  “I knew it! I knew it was a teacher!” interjected Sarah. “You were the one who was with him the night of the frat party. I asked him if he needed a ride, and he said he already had a faculty escort back to the dorms. I knew there was something weird about his joke.”

  I nodded in Sarah’s direction. “Owen’s trip to Minneapolis gave Ann the perfect opportunity for one last-ditch effort to persuade Austin that she needed more time. But,” I turned to Ann, “even your threats couldn’t keep Austin quiet. He became involved in everything you were active in: the poetry reading, the theater. He was relentless in his pursuit. Despite your pleas for more time, he made an appointment with Owen. It was then he was to tell Owen the happy news. Desperate now, you knew you had to get out of Copper Bluff. You scheduled the interview for Owen and called your friend in Women’s Studies. When your efforts had no effect on Austin Friday night, you called upon another friend of yours, Martha Church, Saturday. Isn’t that true, Martha?”

  “It is,” exclaimed Martha. “We only met for a moment, though. She needed the code to get into the shop to see the costumes for Les Mis �
�.” I could see Martha connecting the dots that formed a snapshot of Austin’s murder.

  I nodded in Alex’s direction. “So you see, your intuition was right. Austin might not have had access to the poison, but Martha certainly did—and thus so did her friend, Ann Jorgenson.” I turned back toward Ann. “It was that day you decided to poison Austin, to kill the only son Owen would have ever known.”

  Now tears began to form in Ann’s eyes. “No, no. I didn’t mean to kill him. You’re wrong.” She turned toward Owen, looking much like a young child about to be scolded. “You have to believe me. I only wanted him to get sick so that he couldn’t meet with you on Monday. I just needed a little more time ….”

  “How? How could you do this?” whispered Owen.

  “I didn’t know it was toxic; I swear. When I found it in the costume shop, I figured it was pretty common and that it would cause some skin irritation at most, enough to make him miss the meeting he had scheduled with you. It’s not like he swallowed it or anything. I just put it in his gloves.”

  Martha shook her frizzy head vigorously. “It doesn’t cause any noticeable irritation; that’s why it’s so dangerous. He wouldn’t have even known it was there.”

  “She’s right,” whispered Owen.

  “But you use it!” Ann pleaded to Martha. “I saw you using it in the studio.”

  “I might work in the Art Department, but that doesn’t mean I’m a moron. I work around hundreds of dangerous paints and chemicals—and know how to use them without endangering someone’s life!” Anger and disgust filled Martha’s eyes.

  Hundreds was a stretch, but I didn’t argue.

  Losing her quarrel with Martha, Ann returned to Owen. “I was going to check on him. Please believe me. That’s why I went back to the theater. But you were there,” she hissed, turning in Sarah’s direction, “And Austin seemed just fine. Tell them.”

  “He wasn’t fine,” Sarah shot back. “He was sick and dizzy and … and sick!”

  “You might have even killed him yourself,” Ann continued desperately. “How do we know it was even the gloves that killed him?”

  I immediately interceded. “Ann, you yourself knew it was the gloves that killed Austin. You broke into my house Friday night after I mentioned being a close friend of Austin’s in our committee meeting. You thought that I had met with Austin and that I had the gloves. Knowing my schedule, you knew you could retrieve the evidence of what you had done. That’s why you went back to the theater in the first place. Not to check on him.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Ann said. The tears that had been forming in her eyes now ran down her cheeks. “None of it. You’re twisting it all around.”

  “You also knew that, given enough time with my fraternity students, I would have realized Austin wanted to join because his biological father had lived in the same house.” I turned to Owen. “I saw your picture, Owen, the day I went to the fraternity to see Jared about a paper.”

  “That’s right. I belonged to the fraternity,” said Owen, but he never took his small eyes off of Ann.

  “See, Ann, it makes sense. That’s why you pushed soon-to-be divorced Patricia Oliver down the stairwell just now. You saw Mrs. Oliver and Owen talking, saw their mutual shock. You couldn’t risk the college sweethearts rekindling their relationship or Mrs. Oliver revealing to Owen that Austin was the son she had never told him about. Rather than telling him about Austin years ago and ruining his chances of becoming a famous paleontologist—something he said in his yearbook he dreamed about—Patricia broke off the relationship and dropped out of college. You knew if his birth didn’t bring them together, his death certainly would have.”

  “I know nothing about that!” she said. She sounded truly insulted, and one had to admire her acting skills. “I didn’t go to school in this … this Podunk little town. I wanted to get out of here from the moment I stepped foot in this place. I stayed here for you, Owen, at the cost of everything I loved. Even my career.”

  Owen looked truly baffled now. “You tried to kill her too?”

  She turned her angry eyes on me. “They have no evidence of that.”

  I looked at the floor. A small puddle of water marked where she sat. “But Ann, after all that’s been said, wouldn’t you agree your wet shoes are evidence enough?”

  Epilogue

  As Detective Beamer handcuffed Ann and led her out of the room, I approached the table where Lenny sat. Most of the other English faculty members were there, too, and I felt a bit like a contestant on The Price is Right as their eyes followed me toward the vacant spot.

  “Well, Emmeline, that was quite a thing you did there,” said Giles, folding his napkin in tiny squares. “I’m still not sure exactly what you did, and when, but I’m pretty sure it was at the detriment of your English students.”

  “On the contrary, I’m all caught up on grading papers.”

  “Nonetheless, there’s a rumor going around that your English students might not be your first priority anymore. Could it be that your French students are taking precedence?”

  “Score one for the little guy in the beret,” said Lenny, holding his Styrofoam cup in the air.

  “I haven’t had a chance to talk to André yet, but it sounds promising,” I said, crossing my legs and deciding my new heels were just as versatile as the Home Shopping Network had promised.

  “You’ve been too busy with what seems to be your new off-campus course: Murder 101,” said Giles.

  I attempted to raise one eyebrow. “I like the sound of that. I bet enrollment would be phenomenal.”

  “It still just looks like you have an eyelash,” smirked Lenny.

  “I have a feeling enrollment is about to skyrocket as it is. Who knows?” Giles hypothesized. “Perhaps this will be the beginning of a new trend in academia, the return of the English major?”

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” said Lenny. “One look at Em’s syllabus and they’ll go running back to hallowed halls of computer science.”

  I shrugged, taking one of Lenny’s uneaten cookies. “Oh well. No one ever said college was for the faint of heart.”

  * * *

  Julie Prairie Photography

  Mary Angela is the author of An Act of Murder, the debut novel in the new Professor Prather mystery series. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime and enjoys reading mysteries as much as writing them. Currently, she teaches English for the University of South Dakota and lives in Sioux Falls with her husband and two young daughters.

  For more information, go to maryangelabooks.com.