Addressed to Kill Page 14

  “Hey,” I said, to indicate how cool I was. “I’m Cassie Miller. I was having lunch with Dr. Blake just now and she pointed you out to me.” So far, no blatant lie. They (more or less) granted me the favor of their attention. I opened my tablet and showed them the screen. “I’m helping to collect thoughts and signatures for a card in Dr. Somerville’s honor.” Not entirely false. I could conceivably send a card like this to Dennis’s son. I was sure Dyson would appreciate the tribute.

  The girls came alive with sounds of sympathy mixed with dubious looks. Should they or should they not trust me? I was glad no one challenged me openly. Exactly whom are you helping? What do you mean “in his honor”? What’s going to happen to these signatures? Aren’t you just the post office lady?

  “It was terrible, what happened,” said a chubby girl sitting behind a laptop, to my right.

  “I guess it would hit physics majors even harder,” I said.

  Chubby Girl nodded. “One of my roommates was supposed to have class with him on Monday afternoon. Now she still doesn’t know if the class is going to continue.” She looked up at me and appeared to accept my cover story. “What would you like us to do?”

  I handed her my tablet and stylus. “If you could write a few words of condolence, or whatever comes to you, and sign your name, that would be great.”

  “Sure,” she said, then, “Wow, cool tablet. Is this an N-trig stylus? I need to upgrade.”

  Young woman number four gave her a look. “Now’s not the time, Amanda.”

  I said a silent “Thank you” to Number Four for sparing me. I had no idea what kind of stylus I’d been toting. One of these days, I’d read the literature that had come with the set.

  “I know. Sorry,” said Amanda, formerly Chubby Girl.

  The screen showed a somber image of a bouquet of white lilies on one side and a large, empty text box on the other. Amanda trapped long strands of dull brown hair behind her ears and wrote a few lines.

  “I had Dr. Somerville for an intro course,” said young woman number two. She was dressed in a purple ski outfit from head to toe, except for a sliver of black or white here and there. She took the handoff from Amanda and started writing. She looked at me and added, “Everyone liked him.”

  “That’s what I hear,” I said.

  “You didn’t hear everything,” said young woman number three, whose face was mostly hidden by her laptop screen.

  My ears perked up.

  “Don’t say that, Morgan,” Amanda said.

  “Well, it’s true. He hated math majors,” Morgan said.

  “Morgan’s a transfer student,” Amanda said to me, though I wasn’t sure why. If it meant that her opinion didn’t matter as much, it wasn’t obvious from her attitude.

  Morgan handed the tablet to Number Four, without adding a sentiment or her name to the digital card. I didn’t realize college women could be so cold. But then, I’d been cold enough to plan and execute this charade. I shivered in my jacket, telling myself it was because it was chillier near the door.

  “Come on, Morgan, just because you didn’t do well on the pop quiz?” Number Four said, writing for a few seconds while I marveled at how she could hold the stylus properly, given her extremely long fuchsia nails, each sporting a decorative icon in glittery colors. I could make out a heart, an angel, and a rainbow. I couldn’t guess at what the other seven might be.

  “Stuff it,” Morgan, the transfer student, said. She stood out with her black jeans and expensive-looking sweater, compared to her friends’ worn blue jeans (which, I realized, might have been more costly) and logo sweatshirts—an out-of-season Red Sox shirt on Amanda, an in-season Bruins shirt on Number Five, and Boston College Eagles on two others.

  “I’m not a math major,” Number Five said, and giggled. A typical self-conscious reaction, from a girl with typically long, straight hair. “I just hang out with them.”

  “You shouldn’t sign,” Morgan said to the non–math major.”

  After a little teasing and chuckling that I didn’t understand, Number Five said, “I flunked out of math the first week. I’m an English major now. I guess I can sign the card anyway?”

  “You shouldn’t,” Morgan said, blowing out an exasperated breath.

  “Of course you can sign,” I said, and was pleased that she did.

  The tablet and stylus came back around to me. I smiled. I had what I wanted. One student in five was upset enough with Dennis Somerville not to sign a sympathy card on his death. Who said statistics was hard?

  I returned to my table, where I’d left my scarf and a paper notebook to mark my place, a practice usually honored at Mahican’s. Was Morgan upset enough with her physics teacher to have sent him a nasty letter? Upset enough to go to his home and shoot him? I saved the card as SomervilleProject and sat back as far as Mahican’s rickety, short-backed chairs would allow.

  I allowed myself a few seconds to bask in the idea that I’d solved Dennis’s murder. When reality hit, I had more questions than answers. How seriously would Sunni take the story? I was lucky enough to be in the coffee shop when the killer was there. I happened to think of introducing myself as the person in charge of arranging a gesture of sympathy for Dennis’s son. And, even more luck, the killer revealed herself by being unwilling to sign the card. All the chief of police had to do was go to campus and ask for a math major named Morgan.

  I could hear Sunni’s laughter bounce around the room, mixing with the conversational sounds of satisfied coffee drinkers. But regardless of the far-fetched nature of my story, I had something I hadn’t had at any time this week. A lead. I stuffed my tablet into my shoulder bag and headed for the police station.

  13

  I zigzagged through the crowded tables, skirting a couple of strollers on the way to the exit, paying more attention to the other patrons than I usually would. Were there any other groups of students who might have known Dennis, or disliked him enough to act on their feelings?

  I also wondered if the mostly math table occupants would figure out that theirs was the only klatch I approached in my alleged quest for messages of sympathy for the Somerville family. Finally, there was the question of whether Joyce would find out that I’d used her name to gain entry into the student body. If she did, I supposed, I could rule out an invitation to lecture in one of her math classes.

  I recognized several patrons as post office customers and exchanged quick greetings. I saw one or two other gatherings that might have been study groups or cliques of college students, but couldn’t think of a way to approach them without arousing suspicion and possibly being ushered out as a public nuisance. I left the shop, memories of my own school days flitting through my head, days when tablet meant a paper notebook and none of my professors had been murdered.

  * * *

  On my walk to the police station, two freezing blocks away, I tried to rebuild my case against Morgan, ignoring the taunts of reality. Morgan had an arrogant air about her, as if she were used to being pampered. What if Dennis had been the first person in her life not to give in to her sense of entitlement? She’d refused to sign a simple sympathy note, in public.

  My case fell apart before I passed Mike’s Bike Shop, on the opposite corner from the police building. As Joyce had reminded us, what college student hadn’t “hated” a professor at least once in her life? What professor hadn’t experienced the ire of a student who got a grade less than she expected or an unappreciated criticism in red ink? If those feelings always led to murder, no school would survive more than one semester. Similarly, no postmistress would survive if every complaint about mis-delivered mail led to homicide.

  As I crossed Second Street, I saw one of Sunni’s small fleet of black-and-white patrol cars with blue trim pull out of the lot. Greta was in the driver’s seat, and, if I wasn’t mistaken, it was Dyson Somerville who was slumped down in the passenger seat.

  Ha
d I overrun my time? I checked my watch. Five minutes before the early end of the range I was given, to report back “in an hour or so.” It was clearly Sunni’s intent to have Dyson on his way before I returned. Then why ask me to return? To deputize me, perhaps? I thought of turning that phrase into a skit for the Ashcots: Deputy Cassie Miller, never going to happen.

  I’d missed my chance to spend more time and talk further with Dyson. I’d planned to drive him home and perhaps invite him to dinner. I could still do that, but it would have been much smoother if I didn’t have to make a separate call, as if I were tailing him. Not that I would admit it, but I’d hoped to be seen as part of the police department. I’d hoped to get a briefing on what Sunni and Dyson had covered, as if I were a member of her force.

  At every step along the broken concrete sidewalk, I had a different guess as to what Sunni had in mind, letting Dyson go before I returned. I walked onto police department property, past the wooden bannerlike sign with a white background and NORTH ASHCOT POLICE in large black letters. I was about to find out.

  * * *

  In the warmth of the small police building reception area, I felt better. Even though I came face-to-face with Sunni, who was at Greta’s desk, on the phone.

  “You bet, Mr. Carson.” Pause. “Yes, sir.” Pause. “Consider it done.”

  She hung up and gave me a look that said I should be glad I didn’t have her job.

  “Am I late?” I asked.

  “Not at all. Come on back.” Sunni motioned for a subordinate to take over the phone while we walked back to her office.

  “Well?” she asked, indicating that I should take the chair in front of her desk. She sat back in her vintage office chair, a mismatch to her new desk, crossed her arms.

  As usual, I was to go first in our information sharing confabs.

  I started with my morning visit to the Ashcots’ rehearsal, and the news, to me, that Mercedes and Dennis had at one time been an item.

  “I don’t have any idea which one of them called it off,” I said, but, since I hadn’t asked a question, Sunni’s face remained impassive. I believed it was called a poker face. Maybe this was not news to her. I thought of stirring her to a response by mentioning that Dennis had kept a little souvenir by way of a snow globe lighthouse that I now had in my possession.

  Instead, I moved on to my indoor picnic lunch with Mercedes and Joyce at Mahican’s. All I could report was that Joyce still hadn’t gotten over the faculty meeting skirmishes. I explained as best I could how Dennis apparently ignored her right to schedule math courses for the educational benefit of her own math students and not for the convenience of his physics students. If she already knew more than I did about this issue, she didn’t mention it.

  Sunni took a note now and then but didn’t respond to me directly. Unnerving. For all I knew, she was writing out her valentines list.

  I moved on to my interaction with the students, playing down my method of introduction, emphasizing the signing of the tablet and my suspicion about the one student, Morgan, who refused to sign.

  Sunni sat up, her old chair clicking into the upright position. I’d finally got her attention.

  “You say you have signatures from a group of math majors?”

  “I have four signatures, three from math majors, one from an English major who dropped out of math.”

  “Let’s take a look,” she said.

  While I dug out my tablet and called up the greeting card app and the screen for SomervilleProject, Sunni opened a box on the floor near her desk and pulled out a stack of plastic bags containing letters and envelopes. I had no doubt they were the letters I’d shunned when Dennis tried to foist them on me, on Monday.

  The letters looked different now, each one spread open in its own plastic bag, each envelope also in its own bag, all six of the bags marked with a number I took to be related to evidence cataloging.

  I placed my tablet on the desk and turned it so we could both look at the screen. “I didn’t realize this was really evidence,” I said.

  “It is until it isn’t,” Sunni said.

  “Of course.”

  “Tell me what we have here.”

  Once again I skipped over the preliminaries of my cover story and began with describing the young women. I’d been watching while they entered their text and noticed that they wrote one underneath the other. Handy for me—I’d be able to tell which message went with which student. I pictured them as they’d sat in front of me, standing at one o’clock. Seated counterclockwise from me were Amanda (formerly Chubby Girl, with apologies), Purple Outfit, Morgan, Fancy Fingernails, and English Major.

  Sunni smoothed out the first letter, keeping it in its sleeve. I hadn’t realized how exciting it would be when the signatures on my tablet would be compared with the letters. The initial delight faded soon, when I felt I had to warn her.

  “These were written with a stylus, so even if the same person wrote the letter and tablet message, they’re not going to be an exact match.”

  “I realize that, but these signatures are finer than any I’ve ever seen on a computer screen, or whatever you call this thing. We’ve already had an analyst go through them and tell us the same person wrote all of them, so that’s a start. Now let’s see if that person is on this list.”

  How nice that my friend was sharing. “Also, remember, Morgan, the student who was so angry with Dennis, didn’t write anything,” I said.

  “True, but let’s see how the others compare. She might not have been the only one with a grudge. At the moment it’s the only lead we have on where these letters might have come from.”

  “Does this mean you think the letter writer or writers are connected to the murder?”

  Sunni took out a magnifier and moved it back and forth from the letters to the signatures on the screen, several times. By now, I was used to having my questions go unanswered. Still, I marveled every time at how effortlessly she could ignore someone who was asking a question in her face, so to speak.

  “Well, by golly. Look at this.” She turned the screen slightly and showed me what caught her interest. “I’m no expert, and I will definitely get an expert back in here, but check this out. The letters on the paper notes and the computer notes all slant to the right, and there are wide spaces between the words. Also note the correspondence between the upper case S in Somerville and the upper case S in Sampson.”

  Sunni indicated the message written by the English major, Norah Sampson, and then showed me the letters. It was the first time I’d seen the texts of the letters. I’d missed my chance when Dennis brought them to the post office and I sent him and them away. Since that time they’d been in police custody.

  I read the three anonymous letters first.

  Dr. Somerville,

  You will be remembered as the worst teacher this school has ever had. You should be fired and I’m going to see that that happens. I know people on the committee.

  Dr. Somerville,

  The handbook says the school should be a force for good in the lives of all our students. You will be remembered as a force for evil.

  Dr. Somerville,

  It is those unfair (unethical) quizzes that will be remembered long after you’re gone.

  They were all short and to the point. Could these sentiments have been the start of the real, physical attack on Dennis that had cost him his life? They certainly were nothing that should have been forwarded to a postal inspector. Or maybe they were? Was long after you’re gone a warning? My stomach acted up, reminding me of the feta cheese I’d consumed for lunch.

  Even I could tell that the same person had written the notes Dennis had received in the mail. The uppercase letters all had a certain flourish, and the three messages all had the same tone, though I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  I looked again at the condolence messages on my tablet and scrolled to
the one by the last student to sign, the English major.

  Dr. Somerville will be remembered fondly by all. Norah Sampson.

  Sunni had been waiting until I finished my inspection. “Besides the close match to the uppercase S, notice how the same phrase comes up in all of them. Some form of ‘Will be remembered.’ We all have certain words that we use more often than others, especially when we’re expressing something laced with emotion. In the notes to Dennis, the tone indicates a certain superiority, knowing someone on a committee, for example, and in the sympathy note, it’s passive, meaning she herself will not necessarily remember him fondly.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked.

  Sunni shrugged. “Strictly amateur. From one of those obligatory training sessions in forensics. I thought it was going to be one of those woo-woo courses.”

  “Woo-woo?”

  “You know, like astrology. If you were born under a certain sign, you’re likely to be a caring and supportive person. If your handwriting is upright, it means you’re independent; if it’s slanted to the right, you’re open to new ideas. Et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Intriguing.”

  “Yes, and there is more to it than I thought, as long as you don’t give it more credit than it’s due.” She tapped the six envelopes, now piled on her desk. “In this case, I’m not trying to use it to determine personality or trustworthiness or anything like that. I’m just comparing handwriting styles to see if they match.”

  I thought back over the time I’d known Sunni. Had I ever handwritten a note to her? I hoped not.

  “Are you going to question Norah Sampson?”