Majoring In Murder

Table of Contents

 

 

“In a tornado, everything gets whipped around,” the lieutenant said. “It could have been anything flying in the air that knocked him down.”

“But that’s precisely what I mean,” Jessica said. “All those pieces may have been swirling around the room upstairs, but when the floor gave way, they fell straight down through the hole.”

“What are you suggesting, Mrs. Fletcher?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just wondering what exactly hit him.”

“I think your imagination is getting the better of you, Mrs. Fletcher. Wes Newmark’s head was cracked open like an egg, and half a house was sitting on top of him. The bottom line is that if he’d taken shelter, he’d be alive today.”

“Why do you think he didn’t take shelter?”

“I have no idea. Maybe he was a stubborn son of a gun. Maybe there’s no logical explanation. Why do you think he didn’t take shelter?”

“I think he may already have been dead.”

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First Printing, April 2003

Copyright © 2003 Universal Studios Licensing LLLP. Murder She Wrote is a trademark and copyright of Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.

eISBN : 978-1-440-67353-5

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“Watch out, Mrs. Fletcher,” a voice called to me as a Frisbee came sailing toward my head. I ducked quickly, the books I’d been carrying spilling to the ground. The red disk passed overhead, bounced on the grass, and rolled on its edge another twenty feet away.

A young man, in a baseball cap with the brim to the back and a navy blue sweatshirt with SCHOOLMAN COLLEGE in bright yellow letters across his chest, ran to assist me. “Are you all right?” he asked, picking up the books that had fallen and returning them to my arms.

“If I’d had one hand free,” I said, lifting my briefcase in my right hand and cradling the books in my left, “I might have caught that thing.”

“You’re welcome to join our game, Professor,” he said, sprinting to retrieve the Frisbee and tossing it to a girl who was waving her arms in the air. “We’re just killing time till the buses leave.”

Across the road, in front of the new gymnasium, four coach buses idled, their front doors open. A banner proclaiming GO, TIGERS was draped on the windshield of one. A large crowd, mostly students, milled about, many wearing blue-and-yellow sweatshirts and holding matching pom-poms and foam tiger heads mounted on sticks.

“What’s happening over there?” I asked.

“We’ve got a scrimmage in Wabash today.”

“You get that big a crowd for a scrimmage?”

“Sure. That’s Indiana basketball. The season doesn’t officially start till next month. But we got into the play-offs last year and we’re gonna do even better this year.” He leaped into the air to snag the Frisbee his friend had thrown back.

“Well, good luck,” I called over my shoulder as I crossed the road that separated the athletic fields from the rest of the college campus. Behind me, the Frisbee game continued on a section of grass leading to the black oval where Schoolman’s track-and-field team was practicing sprints. From beyond the track and the baseball diamond that adjoined it, I could hear the whine of a combine as it moved along the field, threshing grain in neat straight lines.

This part of Indiana was flat, the perfect geographical configuration for farming. Fields of corn, soybeans, and wheat, as far as the eye could see, surrounded the small college. The only relief to the horizontal plane was an occasional line of scraggly trees marking the junction where one crop ended and another began, and the college itself, a cluster of two-story limestone buildings and Victorian houses, down the road from a small village.

I’d come to Schoolman College to teach a course on writing murder mysteries. Harriet Schoolman Bennett, dean of students and the granddaughter of the founder, was an old friend. We’d served together on the mayor’s committee to combat illiteracy when I’d taught at Manhattan University in New York City and she’d been earning her Ph.D. at Columbia. That was before Schoolman suffered the financial consequences of declining enrollment, and Harriet had come home to rescue what she’d wryly called “the family business.”

Schoolman was a small liberal-arts college in a state that boasted large universities. Situated midway between Purdue and Notre Dame, it struggled in the shadow of its larger and more sophisticated rivals. Recently, however, its fortunes had begun turning around, thanks to its writing curriculum. Harriet had instituted the program five years ago to gain much-needed publicity and to shore up the student base. Contacting her connections in the academic world and buttonholing old friends to help out, she’d attracted a series of bestselling authors to come to Indiana to teach. Each semester, a different well-known novelist led a course in creative writing. And she planned to expand the “famous names” program to include journalists, poets, playwrights, and biographers. My course was entitled “The Mystery Genre in Publishing Today,” and Harriet had promised that I’d find the bucolic college campus a stimulating environment, both for teaching and for working on my own manuscript.

I’d been here for less than a month, and so far had found it just as promised, an idyllic and peaceful setting, all the problems of the world miles away, out of sight beyond Indiana’s amber waves of grain. I was looking forward to a semester of teaching and writing, to soaking in the academic atmosphere, debating with students, sitting in on my colleagues’ classes, attending the guest lectures, musicales, and impromptu events that constituted small-college life, and, of course, rooting for Schoolman’s basketball team.

But it was not to be. The ivory tower was not the sanctuary it seemed. Beneath the tranquil surface, there was a storm brewing.

I’d seen a green sky before, but nothing like this. The color was not the green you picture when you think of grass and trees. It wasn’t mint green or hospital green or even olive green. It was more like the color of the ocean when it pushes into the bay and up the river, when the bottom is murky and an oar dipped in the water roils up the particles of silt into a muddy cloud. It was that color green.