The Probability of Murder (33 page)

I took advantage of the opportunity to rush out of Franklin Hall and into my car.

Where was the normal Tuesday I’d been hoping for?

More important, where was the normal Sophie Saint Germain Knowles, supremely logical thinker who didn’t jump to conclusions? Or jump when a sophomore ran into her?

I’d even had a fleeting thought to tell Virgil about the note and my suspicions. As if a couple in Nebraska could never make a mistake about a date or a time.

I hoped I’d be myself again soon.

Since I needed supplies more than food, I’d decided to skip the grocery store and stop at the enormous multipurpose store at the edge of Henley’s main retail area.

There was nothing like a general discount store to put things in perspective. Aisles full of the most ordinary things, like soap and pencils and underwear, served the purpose of making everything else seem superfluous, or at least back burner material.

I remembered that my mother’s favorite thing to wear had been a kangaroo-pouch sweatshirt that let her carry a myriad of essentials right in front of her without burdening her arthritic hands or requiring strapping on, as a fanny pack would. The pouch arrangement was also perfect for use with crutches.

I headed for the clothing department, following huge signs that led me to the back of the store. It took no more than a half hour to find three sweat suits that would work well for my patient, plus odds and ends for his convenience in every room in the house.

As Bruce’s everyday needs came to the fore, Chelsea’s possible involvement in Charlotte’s murder receded.

As I exited through the giant sliding doors, I looked forward to delivering my packages and having lunch with Bruce and Kevin.

There was still a chance for a normal day.

*     *     *

I turned into my driveway and pushed the square gray button on my garage door opener. The nicely painted white door didn’t budge. I stopped in front of the door, shifted to park, and tried again. Nothing. Maybe a loose connection. I slapped the opener against my palm and pushed the button again. Nothing.

A nuisance that had happened before. It was probably time for a battery change. I thought of calling Bruce and having him push the button inside, next to the entry to the house, but even that trip might be a hassle for him. I’d do what I always did when I was alone, enter through the side door of the garage and push the opener on the wall myself.

I left my car in park and traipsed down the side walkway, digging in my purse for my house key. I couldn’t help thinking of how Garrett Paulsen had taken this same route on Saturday when he’d broken in, hoping for a small fortune.

It seemed weird to me that I’d never met or talked directly to Garrett. He was the phantom to whom Marty owed money; the guy I’d tracked all the way to Bailey’s Landing and gossiped about with a convenience store clerk; the thief who’d entered the door I was about to unlock and had grabbed my duffel, full of socks and travel sundries.

Garrett was in jail now for a crime of fraud completely unrelated to me and to all of Charlotte’s capers. I wondered if I should visit him just to have a closer look at the man who’d rummaged around my garage and sullied my good duffel. Maybe I could thank him for tripping the alarm when he tried to enter my house, and thus sending Daryl packing.

My mind was so focused on Garrett, his dreadlocks, and the baseball cap he’d been wearing in the photograph Virgil had shown me, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find him pilfering through the files in my garage when I opened the door. With all of that, it didn’t register in time
that I hadn’t really needed my key to unlock the door. It had been closed, but not locked.

What greeted me was not a thief going through my things, but a student. Chelsea Derbin stood under my disabled door opener, holding its unplugged cord in one hand and a gun in the other.

“Ha,” she said, in a voice louder than I’d ever heard from her.

The cry was at once a strange laugh and an
aha
, as if she was as surprised as I was to find us together in my garage.

My instinct was to turn and run out the side door, but if what was trained on me was a real, loaded gun, I didn’t stand a chance.

“Chelsea,” I said, as if she’d come to review the homogeneous equations of this morning’s lesson. “What are you doing?”

It was as good a question as any while I wondered if I’d live to hear an answer.

Chelsea’s gun hand waved back and forth in a wide arc, in sync with her hopping from right foot to left and back again. I could almost have escaped between one end of the swing and the other.

If I hadn’t been too scared to move.

“I don’t want to do this, Dr. Knowles,” Chelsea said. “I really don’t.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” I said, with surprising steadiness in my voice. It occurred to me that I wasn’t shocked after all. Not after reading her parents’ note and not after getting thrown against the wall in Franklin Hall.

“It was never supposed to happen. I just wanted to talk to her. Charlotte. You know she told me I could call her Charlotte that last night?”

I was grateful for the warning:
Don’t try to coddle Chelsea by letting her call you Sophie. It won’t work.

I became more frightened by the minute, and more determined not to let it show. I tried to recall any tips I’d
heard about negotiating, but none of the ones that came to me were pertinent to this situation.

“I know you’d never deliberately hurt anyone, Chelsea. You weren’t brought up that way.”

A strange smile came over her, like many new expressions I’d seen on her face today.

“You know what’s funny? I
was
brought up that way. I was brought up with guns. My dad taught all of us how to shoot, my brothers and me. And when I came to Henley, the first thing he did was get me my own handgun, so I could protect myself in the big city.”

She turned the gun and looked down its barrel, as if wondering how and when she should use this gift from her father.

Thunk.

I heard a noise from inside the house.

Bruce! Bruce and possibly Kevin were in the house. How had I forgotten?

Did Chelsea know I had guests? What would Chelsea do about it if she knew? I closed my eyes against the possibility that she’d already done something. But the noise meant someone was alive in there.

Did my guests know my situation out here? Of all times for two strapping, fit men to be incapacitated.

I dropped my keys on the floor to distract Chelsea, in case she’d heard the sound. She’d moved from the center of the garage closer to me, her back to the door to the house.

I saw that she’d gone to some other world, hardly reacting to either disturbance. I made a move to flee. But the gun was back quickly, pointed at me again, and I returned to a stock-still position.

“Your dad wouldn’t want you to be here now, Chelsea.”

“I took the gun with me to the library that night. Only to scare Charlotte. I didn’t use it, did I? I’m not a bad person, am I?”

“No, not at all. You wanted Charlotte to be reasonable and talk to you. You didn’t want to hurt her.”

“That’s right. She wasn’t even afraid of the gun. I put it in my pocket to show her all I wanted to do was talk. But we argued, and then we started pushing each other and knocking things over. How stupid was that? Then she just turned and went up the ladder like I didn’t matter. Do you know what she said?”

“What did she say to you, Chelsea?”

“‘It’s for your own good.’ That’s what I’ve been hearing all my life, and I couldn’t stand it. She was going to talk to my parents. I couldn’t let her do that. I shook the ladder so she’d come down and talk to me.”

“I understand that. And the police will understand that. You just have to explain it to them the way you’re explaining it to me.”

“No, I can’t do that, Dr. Knowles.” She threw back her shoulders. “I knew what I had to do when I saw you in class, Dr. Knowles. My mom told me she sent you a note and I knew, I knew.” Chelsea pounded at her head. “I made a mistake on the phone that morning, and I hoped no one would ever figure it out, but now what else can I do? It’s all Charlotte’s fault. Why didn’t she just promise she wouldn’t tell?”

“Wouldn’t tell what?”

Chelsea looked down reflexively, toward her abdomen.

If I felt I had freedom of movement, I’d have slapped the side of my head or pounded the front of it as Chelsea did, off and on.

How had I missed this?

Chelsea had been wearing coverall sweaters every day. She stood in front of me now, her face pale, in a down coat that might have fit Virgil. She’d been nauseous since midsemester, a malady I’d attributed to all manner of causes, from presentation jitters to the smells of the Mortarboard Café.

“Ms. Crocker knew you were pregnant.”

Chelsea screwed up her face and nodded. “Like an idiot, I told her. I thought she’d be happy for me because she supposedly cared about me. She should have been glad, because Daryl and I were going to get married.”

No you weren’t, I thought. Poor Chelsea.

Poor me! Was I experiencing Stockholm syndrome, feeling sympathy for my captor, a frail, pregnant teenager?

“She was going to tell my parents.”

“They would have found out eventually, Chelsea.”

“Not before we were married. We were going home together at Thanksgiving. My parents would have met him and seen what a great guy he is. So smart and worldly. They would have been thrilled. But Charlotte ruined it, telling me all these lies, and she was going to tell the lies to my parents.”

“What lies did she tell you?”

“All of a sudden, last week, she started to rave against Daryl. She was all over him, how he wasn’t good enough for me. She said he wouldn’t stay around, baby or no baby.”

Chelsea drew in a deep breath and held it. Her face turned red and her body shook. I thought she was going to faint. I hoped she’d faint, and stay unconscious just long enough for me to grab her gun.

She let out the breath. It wasn’t going to be that easy.

I listened for movement inside the house, but heard nothing. Did Bruce even know I was home? Ordinarily he’d have heard the car in the driveway and come out to greet me. But if he was stashed away at the back of the house, essentially immobile, all bets were off.

Chelsea’s breathing was heavy and labored as she continued, talking as much to herself as to anyone in the real world outside of her.

“Then she told me this story about how she’d taken Daryl’s father’s money and he killed himself and Daryl found her and”—Chelsea threw up her hands, gun included—“I can’t believe it. Ms. Crocker a criminal? Daryl using me to get to her?”

“It’s all true, Chelsea,” I said, risking further stress to the already frail girl, but I didn’t have many options.

“Don’t say that,” Chelsea screamed.

Nothing like a screaming murderer to cause shaking all
over one’s body. My body. I knew I couldn’t keep this civil conversation going forever. I had to do something.

But what?

I snuck a look around my garage. What could I use to defend myself against a gun? My treadmill, on the left, took up a lot of space and was useless to me now. So was my rack of file boxes near the door, dating back to my first year at Henley. What about the garden tools? A rake, a shovel, pruning shears, hedge clippers. But they were too far away, near the disabled roll-up door.

To my immediate right, however, was Bruce’s wall, full of potential weapons. Extra crampons, ice axes, and sharp, curved picks.

He’d hate that I thought of his equipment that way, but right now a long-handled ax spelled not sport, but survival for me.

I started to maneuver myself closer to the wall.

“Don’t tell me Charlotte was right. I know that,” Chelsea said, seeming unaware of my plotting. She pulled at her long hair. I was sure it hurt, but maybe that’s what she wanted. “Look around. Where’s Daryl? Do you see Daryl? He never cared about me. It was all about him and his dad and the money.”

“If you stop now, Chelsea, your baby won’t have to be born in prison.”

I had no idea if that was true, but these were desperate times, and I allowed myself a rash promise.

I heard my voice as if it were someone else’s, someone not standing a few feet from a woman with a gun. The look in Chelsea’s eyes was foreign to me. Where was the docile sophomore math major I’d known for more than a year, who always handed in her problem sets on time, who was the first one to volunteer to set up for a meeting, the last one to leave when there was cleanup to do?

“I can’t do that. I can’t go to the police. My parents—”

Whack!

“Hey, Sophie, what’s up?”

Bruce’s voice, from the other side of the door that he’d managed to open a crack with the end of his crutch.

Did Bruce know what was happening out here? Did I want him to know?

Chelsea started, but not enough to drop her gun. She slunk back against the wall and put her finger to her lips.

I nodded.
I’ll never tell.

Relief flooded me that she hadn’t known about the disabled occupants of my house. I shuddered at the thought of what she would have been willing to do to cover her tracks.