Death by Dissertation (29 page)

Dunbar’s application for graduate work had received high recommendations from every member of the history department’s graduate studies committee, and his record after his entrance into the program was a list of one success after another. No wonder Whitelock had been intimidated by his graduate student. Dunbar certainly made me feel a little on the inadequate side.

Finally I found what I needed. I had thought someone as bright as Dunbar might have published something that would hint at the subject of his dissertation before he completed his graduate work. He had published two articles in 1987. One article, judging by its title, was apparently something he had written for a medieval literature class. I doubted that a paper entitled “The Education of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Revisionist View” would be helpful in my present quest, even though the subject interested me. His second article, published in the

Medieval Quarterly, sounded promising. Its title, “Asser’s Life of Alfred: A Step Toward Reassessing a Primary Source,” certainly fit within the scope of his proposed dissertation topic.

I sat there a moment, irresolute. Then I closed the file, stood up, and let myself out of the stall. No one had come into the bathroom during the few minutes I had been reading.

I hurried back to the department office. Peeking cautiously inside, I was relieved to find only Thelma, engrossed in her typing. I went in and slipped the file on the desk while she pretended not to notice me. My whispered “Thanks!” went unacknowledged except for a quick wink, as she continued the steady rhythm of her typing.

My stomach churned as I contemplated the next step in my campaign. Before I lost my nerve, I walked quickly to Ruth’s office. Without glancing around, I opened the door, which she usually left unlocked during the day. There was enough illumination from the open windows for me to complete my task. No need to advertise my guilty presence with a light.

I stood before Ruth’s desk and contemplated what I was about to do. Ordinarily I would never have considered snooping through the papers on someone else’s desk, but I needed desperately to know something about Margaret’s dissertation. Looking at Ruth’s copy without her knowledge, as distasteful as the idea was, seemed to be the most expedient solution to my dilemma.

The manuscript lay on her desk, where she had left it earlier. I despaired at the size of it. There must have been between three and four hundred pages! I’d never be able to find what I wanted before Ruth and Margaret returned from lunch. Besides the stack in the middle, I could see several other piles of manuscripts on another table in the corner of Ruth’s office. I’d never manage to get through enough of them to be certain about anything. Well, maybe my luck would hold, and this pile of papers on her desk would be what I needed.

I picked up the stack of pages that Ruth had turned face down, hoping to find the beginning of the dissertation. Maybe Margaret had included a contents page that would give me some help.

No such luck. There wasn’t even a title page or an acknowledgement page. In his journal, Charlie had seemed so certain that something was fishy about Margaret’s dissertation, and he knew Whitelock’s older doctoral students better than I did. So I’d be willing to bet that this was Margaret’s dissertation. I scanned the first couple of pages in the stack, numbered 15 and 16.

Yes, this had to be it. The two pages discussed the long-held views of Alfred the Great, led by Sir Frank Stenton’s interpretations of key Anglo-Saxon historical documents. Shuffling through the manuscript, I looked for the beginnings of chapters. Each one of them had a title. I scanned faster, looking for some hint.

Finally! My luck was holding, after all. Chapter Five was entitled “A Critical Reassessment of Asser’s Life of Alfred.” I skimmed this chapter as quickly as possible, skipping over narrative passages, looking for points of interpretation which I could compare with Dunbar’s published article. I had always been able to read and digest material swiftly, an ability which had stood me in good stead in graduate school. This worked in my favor now, since this chapter was a long one.

For nearly fifteen minutes I read, listening anxiously for the sound of foot-steps out in the hall as I turned each page. With great relief I came upon the final page of the chapter and returned it to the pile.

Margaret wasn’t much of a stylist. Her work read remarkably like White-lock’s leaden prose. Like master, like student, I thought. Hurriedly putting the manuscript back as I had found it, I mulled over what I’d learned from my rapid reading.

I slipped unnoticed into the hallway, then quickly made my way to the first floor, where I looked up the Medieval Quarterly in the online catalog. My luck still held. The university library possessed a complete run of the journal.

Now for the next step in the chase. I took the elevator to the third floor, where I hunted through the stacks until I found the shelf that contained the journal.

I pulled out the bound volume of 1987 and thumbed through the first few pages until I came to a table of contents. Finding the beginning page number of Dunbar’s article, I turned to it and began to read.

Fifteen minutes later, I was convinced that Margaret Wilford had stolen her dead friend’s work.

Chapter Twenty-Six

I replaced the volume on the shelf, convinced that Margaret was a plagiarist. She had taken some slight pains to alter Dunbar’s writing style. His work had flowed beautifully, and I admired how he wrote clearly and vividly. Margaret’s version had been less colorful, flatter in tone—in other words, typical historian’s prose. The arguments which he had used to make his points about the reliability of Asser’s Life of Alfred were repeated with no change. As well as I could remember from my hasty—and guilty—perusal of the chapter in her dissertation, Margaret offered the same interpretation, point by point, of the evidence which I found in Dunbar’s article.

He had argued for a major reassessment of the reign of Alfred the Great by calling into question what had been, heretofore, a source considered almost sacrosanct by the world’s Anglo-Saxonists. Dunbar had had balls, that was for sure. If his work had gotten wider attention, he would have definitely caused a stir. As would Margaret’s work, if it ever got published in book form.

One chapter did not necessarily make a charge of plagiarism stick, I reasoned. Margaret could possibly claim that she had been influenced in her ideas by Dunbar’s article—she might even have cited it, for all I knew, since I hadn’t looked over her bibliography—but this radical reinterpretation of one of the key sources of Alfredian scholarship had to have influenced her whole dissertation. I was willing to bet that the rest of it went hand in hand with what I found in this article. It must have been all Dunbar’s work, to be consistent to the theory proposed in the article. Otherwise, Margaret was one hell of a historian.

How did this all tie in with the murders, though? My mind slipped relentlessly to the most pressing question. Had Charlie run across Dunbar’s article, then made the connection with Margaret’s dissertation? Surely he must have. He was in and out of Whitelock’s office frequently, and he could have seen a copy of Margaret’s dissertation lying on the professor’s desk. Charlie would certainly have had few scruples about reading the manuscript without permission.

The point that bothered me most was Whitelock’s compliance with Margaret’s plagiarism. He had stooped to plagiarism himself, but that was a slightly different case, since Charlie had never published any of the results of his research, whereas Dunbar had, even though it hadn’t been in one of the more prominent medieval historical journals. And even if Whitelock had been little involved in Dunbar’s dissertation, he surely must have known the subject of an article published by his star student.

Margaret must have had something on Whitelock, something she could use to force his compliance. She must have been one of his many “companions,” because she fit the physical type that he seemed to prefer. Otherwise, why would he go along with this gross academic fraud?

If that was the situation, then Margaret had evidence of Whitelock’s sexual indiscretions and could have threatened to expose him if he didn’t allow her to call Dunbar’s work her own. Of course, betraying him meant incriminating herself, as well. If she hadn’t been convincing enough to make Whitelock believe she would go through with it, she might have been desperate enough to murder him, after getting Charlie out of the way first. She might have had to kill Charlie because he wouldn’t lose anything by exposing her. He would have looked like a hero for bringing to light one of the worst of academic sins, plagiarism.

I had a lot to think about. Margaret had shaped up—in my mind, at least— as the prime suspect in both murders, but the evidence was all circumstantial. I needed to think things through. I decided to go up to my carrel, where I could sit in relative quiet and gather my wits. I was pretty certain that I had the answer to the murders, but the question remained of what to do with that knowledge.

On the way up the stairs to the fourth floor, I thought about the fact that Anthony Logan was Margaret Wilford’s father. Could that have any bearing on the whole situation? Surely not, I argued to myself. I simply couldn’t see that courtly, amiable man involved in this. But something niggled at the back of my mind. Something I had just heard. What was it?

I had barely gotten comfortable in my carrel before the inevitable happened. Whenever I wanted some quiet time there, Bella always seemed to appear, Bruce tagging along right behind. Damn! Just like the drive-through window at my bank—I invariably got in line behind someone who had a complicated, protracted transaction. Bella was the main reason I ended up doing most of my studying at home.

“Hi, Andy!” she said brightly, echoed by Bruce. They stood, almost on top of me, hemming me in; Bella leaned up against the side of the desk, while Bruce leaned against the shelves behind my head.

“What’s up, you two?” I asked. This crowding made me nervous, but that was the kind of thing Bella ignored.

She gave me the benefit of the smile that had dazzled the New York and Paris photographers for four years. “I ought to be asking you that, you rascal,” she said, her dimple peeking out to chastise me.

What was going on? Surely she knew I was immune to any kind of vamping from her. Now, from Bruce, I might be tempted. I grinned at that thought.

“We should have been pooling our efforts right from the start,” she continued, as ever oblivious to the look on my face.

Since I couldn’t see Bruce without craning my neck backwards, I concentrated on Bella. “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you,” I said, truly in the dark.

That smile blazed at me again. “Playing detective, you fathead,” she replied, smiling affectionately to take the sting out of the epithet. “Bruce and I have been trying to solve the murders to keep your bony little ass—and Rob’s—out of the fire. What did you think I was talking about?”

When it hit me, I couldn’t help myself. Only the hurt look on Bella’s face finally stopped my laughter. I had to take my glasses off to wipe my streaming eyes. All that time, we had thought Bella had been involved with Whitelock, but she and Bruce were playing detective.

“Lord, Bella,” I wheezed at her, “you can’t be serious.”

Wounded Dignity at her most condescending, Bella nodded.

“Look,” I said, my laughter under control, “you just caught me off guard. I didn’t realize Nancy and Ned were on the case.” She looked puzzled at the reference, and I almost burst out laughing again. She had to be the one person in America who’d never read Nancy Drew.

“You don’t seem very grateful,” she hissed.

“Sorry,” I apologized. That cryptic entry in Charlie’s journal made sense now. Bella hadn’t been one of Whitelock’s companions after all—she had been trying to play detective, and of course, Bruce had to go along with it to keep her out of trouble.

Taking my apology at face value, Bella settled down on the edge of the desk again. I strained my neck to look up at Bruce, and he winked at me with his left eye, which Bella couldn’t see.

Frankly, I was relieved. Despite everything, I did like Bella, and I hadn’t wanted to believe her capable of murder, or guilty of any involvement of the kinky sort with Whitelock.

“What have you found out then?” I asked.

“Precious little,” she replied, disgusted. “You certainly weren’t any help, the times we talked to you and Rob. I wanted to be subtle and not let you realize what we were doing, because I didn’t want to alarm you.” She frowned, and I thought Maggie could give her lessons on the withering look. “I never really believed that Rob killed Charlie, and I certainly didn’t think Rob killed Whitelock. I had suspected for a while that something odd was going on with Whitelock, and I wasn’t terribly surprised when something happened to Charlie.”

“On Rob’s behalf, then,” I said, “let me say thanks. I know he’ll appreciate your faith in him.” And the laugh he was going to have over this would cheer him up. “But what do you mean when you say that you suspected that something odd was going on?”

“Like I told you before, I heard things every once in a while in Whitelock’s office, and I also overheard him and Charlie a couple of times while I was waiting out in the hall for an audience with His Majesty.” Bella preened over her abilities as an eavesdropper. “Plus, I got Charlie up in a corner once, and he gave me a few hints. That was a day or two before he died.”

“What did he say?” In his journal Charlie had mentioned that he had given her a clue to keep her busy. Was it something which I would find of use?

Bella shrugged. “Well, he didn’t make much sense. You know how he was.”

I nodded sympathetically to encourage her.

“He said, ‘I’ll give you two clues, “drone” and “whale.” It’s up to you to figure out what I’m talking about.’” She frowned again. “I didn’t know what he meant, but that’s all he would tell me. I still haven’t figured it out.”

I knew what Charlie meant by those two references, or at least I thought I did, but the clues only confirmed the identities of two women I suspected of being Whitelock’s mistresses. I figured “drone” referred to Margaret, who worked a boring day job compared to the others; and “whale” had to mean that ridiculous earring that Wilda wore sometimes. Bella might guess the former, but since she was more concerned with her own clothes than with those anyone else wore, I doubt she had ever paid attention to Wilda’s jewelry.