I went to bed with a headache. My organic jade mist tea, a present from Ariana, smelled more like bitter almonds. The power of suggestion: Cyanide was more familiar to me than the poison Virgil mentioned in connection with Keith’s murder. I’d read somewhere that cyanide had an almond smell, but that not everyone had the gene to detect the odor. Apparently I was one of those lucky ones who possessed the gene, and could smell cyanide even when there was none within miles.
I woke up with the same headache, but the aroma filling the room had changed to that of dark French roast. I sniffed again. Ah, cinnamon buns, too. The pleasant odors and the rattling sounds in my kitchen told me that Bruce had arrived. Or that Keith’s killer had come to do me in, too, after serving me my favorite breakfast in bed. I turned over and put my pillow over my head. I was so beat I didn’t care who was in my house.
Sniff. The aroma of coffee wouldn’t quit. I lifted myself from my cocoon and shambled into the kitchen.
Bruce was ready with a steaming mug of coffee. “Here’s a little something to get you started,” he said, kissing my cheek. “It must have been a tough night for you.”
“You could say that.”
“Breakfast awaits in the main dining area.” He took a little bow, waiter-like.
Maybe life was worth living after all. I accepted the mug, making a huge effort to smile in gratitude. In a couple of hours I wouldn’t want to get near anything that sent a hot vapor bath to my face, but as a wake-up beverage, I’d take rich, hot coffee in any season.
I squinted. Why did Bruce look so much better than I did, even after he’d pulled his fifth all-nighter in a row? But then, I was a pushover for stubble. I ran my finger along his cheek and gave him a weak smile.
Bruce was a marvel, the way he got off a twelve-hour shift at nine in the morning, chipper and ready to start the day. He’d finally crash around two or three in the afternoon and be all set to leave for work again by eight in the evening. Then, during his seven days off, he’d snap back to a normal sleeping pattern. Granted he was often able to nap during the night on the cot in his MAstar trailer bedroom but there was that phone-the crew called it the Bat Phone-on the wall that could go off at any moment, a klaxon sound summoning them to an emergency. Flight nurse Gil Bartholomew, Hal’s wife, compared the sound to that of a tack hammer working directly on her skull.
“I was hoping the smell would wake you up,” Bruce said. “I hate to eat alone, especially in your kitchen.” He took a step back and scrutinized my face. “Did you get any sleep at all, Soph?”
“Probably as much as you did.”
He made a gesture meant to mimic a maitre d’ toward the patio doors, next to which my old white farm table was set for two. More coffee, lightly scrambled eggs, juice, and cinnamon buns from a nearby bakery. My headache faded at the sight.
I’d met Bruce in Boston five years ago at the wedding of his cousin, who married a college friend of mine. We still didn’t know for sure if Sean and Karina had put us at the same table on purpose, but it hardly mattered anymore. We’d moved from two hours of talk at the big round favorladen table to two more hours at a late-night coffee shop.
I loved hearing about the odd jobs Bruce had worked-like flying helicopter tours over the Grand Canyon and transporting CEOs through the air to golf matches. He’d let me go on and on about how mathematics was a subject of study in its own right, and not simply a tool for science, as some of our upper floor Franklin Hall faculty thought.
Over the years I’d gotten to like Bruce’s frequent movie references and he tolerated my birthday theories. At the time it was important to me that he didn’t laugh when I told him he was destined to be a pilot since his birthday, June 4, was the anniversary of the demonstration of the first hot air balloon.
We were very well suited to each other and by now I’d forgotten life before Bruce.
This morning I was the one with the trauma story. Bruce had had a quiet, fogged-in night at MAstar. No patients needing transportation from one facility to another, and no accidents.
“None that we could get to, anyway,” Bruce told me.
“I thought you had some new guidance system that let you fly lower than before.”
“You do listen,” he said, playing with my fingers for a moment. “The limit used to be a little more than eleven hundred feet, now it’s three hundred sixty, but that’s not zero, oh mathematician.”
You’d think a mathematician would have a better concept of where three hundred and sixty feet up was located, but I had a hard time visualizing it, other than picturing a thirty-six-story building, which required a mental journey to Boston or Providence, Rhode Island. The tallest structure in Henley, Massachusetts was its combination courthouse and city hall, a whole six stories high.
I filled Bruce in on Virgil’s visit and Rachel’s second call. I was still smarting from how much evidence pointed to her, and still red-faced at how I’d kept shooting the messenger, Bruce’s best friend.
“Did Virgil tell you how I was a basket case last night?” I asked.
Bruce bit into the center of his bun, the best part, where most of the gooey sugar was concentrated. I often stole that part from him. He shrugged his shoulders. The stall spoke volumes. I had to wait until he swallowed to hear his answer.
“Virge deals with a lot of people in critical situations; he’s seen a lot of different responses, all legitimate.”
I laughed, only slightly annoyed to be lumped in with “a lot of people.” “Did you learn that in your ‘How To Deal With Trauma Victims’ class?”
He took another bite of pastry, hard to do when you’re laughing. “Mmaypbe,” he said.
“Seriously, Bruce, I don’t know who could have killed Keith, but I know it wasn’t Rachel Wheeler. I’m wracking my brain”-I shook my fork at him and a tiny bit of egg fell onto the table-“but not to come up with suspects. To eliminate them. The whole population of Franklin Hall could have done it, plus the entire membership of the faculty senate.”
“Even you, huh?”
“Yes.” I chose to ignore the attempt at derailment, but his comment did remind me that I had to call Virgil’s partner to schedule an interview. “Did I tell you that Keith tried to change the bylaws for choosing a faculty member for the Aurelius Henley Distinguished Professor Award?”
“Uh-huh,” Bruce said, but that didn’t stop me.
“Do you think that’s fair? Keith wants to change the requirements from ‘twenty-five years of service’ to ‘twenty-five continuous years of service.’ He only suggested it to eliminate Fran Emerson. My department head,” I added, making it sound like a personal slight.
“She’s been there almost thirty years but she took maternity leave twice,” Bruce said.
I gave a vigorous nod and took a mouthful of perfect eggs, not dropping a morsel. “I could go on-not only a bunch of students, but even Dean Underwood has her beefs with Keith over a number of things.” I paused. “Had her beefs. I’m telling you, Rachel’s alleged motive, that Keith was giving her a hard time with her thesis-hardly even stands out in that crowd of suspects. Keith alienated almost everyone.” I took another breath and evaluated my conclusion. “Sorry, that’s a terrible thing to say about a dead colleague.”
Bruce reached for my hand and let me wallow in guilt for a few moments. He knew me well.
“Maybe it’s like Murder on the Orient Express,” he said, holding his fork like a dagger. “You know, the movie where it ends up that everyone did it.” I turned away as he mimicked stabbing motions with the fork.
“You’re not helping.” Not quite true. Both the awesome breakfast and the objectivity Bruce brought to the table helped a lot.
After Bruce left, I had about an hour to get dressed, prepare the house for Ariana’s beading group, call Archie at the police station, and get to the Henley airfield where MAstar’s base station was located and where Rachel would meet me at noon. The downside of sleeping in-the day flew by.
To make up for skipping the beading class, I set out my most prized snack, peanut butter-filled pretzels, for the more-loyal-than-me crafters and their instructor. I arranged a plate of number-shaped sugar cookies that a flunking commuter student had baked for me. The cookies were doing double duty as bribe offerings, it seemed. It hadn’t worked for the student, who flunked anyway, but there was no law that said I couldn’t give the treats another try. In a gesture toward good health, I poured out a bowl of baby carrots, and in a fit of overly cautious behavior, I tossed a bag of hickory-smoked almonds into the garbage, convinced that they had a bitter smell.
I wrote a note to Ariana telling her that my house and fridge were hers and, by the way, I’d just ordered a new book on how to make beaded napkin rings and would make her a sample set by Labor Day. Bribes, bribes, bribes. Promises, promises.
I stuffed a “best of” puzzle book in my tote and headed out to meet Rachel.
There were pluses and minuses to living in a town that was only twenty-five miles from Buzzards Bay, the north end of Cape Cod. One drawback was that there was no good route to avoid traffic on a Saturday morning in July. It was marginally better that I was heading away from the Cape, on highway 495, and not toward it. Henley Airfield was on the northwestern edge of town, the opposite direction from hot spots like Old Silver Beach in Falmouth and the quaint shops of Provincetown at the tip of the Cape.
Traveling in my direction were vacationers leaving the Cape, but with four lanes, the traffic was somewhat bearable. The common wisdom was that these drivers, having had to check out of their time-shares by eleven on Saturday, were the worst, since they were not happy to be heading back to their daily work lives. Having been cut off three times since leaving home, I believed it.
An ambulance sailed by me, sirens blaring. I’d trained myself to think positive thoughts about emergency vehicles on the road: help is on the way. Since Bruce, however, my first thought was: too slow; instead of driving you should have taken a helicopter.
As a mathematician, I tended to see everything in terms of logic diagrams and spreadsheets. I’d been mentally setting up a chart, even though it had been less than twenty-four hours since I’d learned of Keith’s murder and Rachel’s plight. I had nothing written yet, but I used the driving time to edit my lists anyway. I’d gone through possible suspects, alibis, motives, and access to the murder weapon. I’d started with everyone who attended the party, and added a few stray faculty members, plus the dean, all of whom I knew to have been at odds with Keith over one thing or another.
The mental lists were too long now, and I was having trouble driving and concentrating.
Screeeeech.
I jammed on my brakes, luckily not slamming into an SUV in front of me. Some states had a hands-free law-no cell phones for the driver without a Bluetooth. I needed a mind-free law-no thoughts of anything other than the rules of the road.
I needed to put off my diagramming task and switch to a different form of multitasking. Once I was on a back road to the airfield, I hit the Bluetooth device on the visor of my car and called Detective Archibald McConnell.
I wasn’t looking forward to the call or the interview. My discomfort didn’t make sense. Thinking rationally, I should be jumping at the chance to talk to the Henley PD. The more information I had from them, the better my chances of figuring out something that would clear Rachel unequivocally. So why was I resenting an interview with Archie? Ever since I realized that Virgil was not joking when he’d implied that I was a suspect like every other Franklin Hall resident, I’d felt uneasy.
Maybe just because, in general, cops were intimidating. I was a big fan of those whose daily jobs required putting themselves in potentially dangerous situations, just to protect and serve me and my loved ones. Bruce and the entire MAstar crew were in that number. Still, how many times had I been tooling along the turnpike at only one or two mph above the speed limit, and tapped my brakes when I saw a two-toned blue state trooper vehicle up ahead?
I could only imagine how much worse it must be for the guilty.
My Bluetooth speaker came alive. “Henley PD. McConnell here.”
I gripped the steering wheel. “Yes, this is Sophie Knowles. Virgil asked me to call you?” But by the way, my inflection said, I can’t imagine why.
“Yeah, hi, Sophie. I think we met at some shindig or other. Sorry about your friend.”
“Thanks. I think she’ll be all right.”
“Yeah, sorry about the victim, too.”
Oh no! If I could have banged my head on the wheel without going off the road or activating my airbag, I would have. Before I could utter an apology for my insensitivity, Archie continued.
“What’s a good time for you?”
“Some afternoon next week would work. Classes have been cancelled.”
“Let’s make it this afternoon, say, three o’clock?”
I gulped. “Okay.”
Archie had managed to keep a pleasant cadence in his voice, appearing to ask if the time was convenient, while issuing a nonnegotiable summons.
“Do you know where the station is?”
My first thought was to remind Archie that I’d been born and raised in Henley, a town that did not regularly move its government buildings. I recovered in time.
“Yes, but thanks for asking.” Now I was brownnosing.
“Have a nice morning,” he said.
I could hear a pompous smile in his voice. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t blame him. I had a lot to learn about dealing with cops.
I loved being at the airfield on the outskirts of Henley. It wasn’t at all like Logan in Boston, or Green International in Providence, or any major airport I’d ever been to. Henley Airport had a small control tower, only four runways, and acres of wide-open space. Rows of Cessnas and other two-to four-seaters sat parked next to hangars and on all sides of the trailers that comprised MAstar.
I got out of my car and relished the breeze, warm as it was, that swept through the landscape in all seasons. With the majestic wings of aircraft visible in every direction, I always felt I’d entered an adventurous world, as if I could simply stand beside one of the planes or under a wing and take off myself.
“Peter Pan,” Bruce said every time I shared that feeling. “The nineteen fifty-three version with Bobby Driscoll’s voice.”
“You took the words right out of my mouth.”
During one visit, Bruce let me try on his night-vision goggles. I’d seen them used often as props on TV, but it was something else to have the heavy equipment on my face and see for myself how everything turned green. Bruce took me into a windowless office in the MAstar trailer. After only a second or two, the desk, chairs, and computers came into focus, albeit with an eerie glow.
One time was enough for me once I learned that a single pair of binocular goggles cost fifteen thousand dollars. It seemed that MAstar owned the latest and best in goggle technology, previously available only to the military.
Ariana had been with me that day. When Bruce explained how the system’s optics took even the lowest available ambient light and multiplied it thousands of times, Ariana pretended to block her ears.
“I like to think they’re magic, turning darkness into daylight,” she’d said.
As a mathematician, I appreciated both the engineering and the mystical definitions. One of my favorite quotes was from John von Neumann: In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.
Night-vision goggles were a small reminder of how different Bruce’s life was from mine. The polar opposite, in fact.
After college in Boston, I’d worked in software development while I did my graduate work in differential equations. By the time I was thirty years old, I had my doctorate in mathematics but hadn’t traveled more than a few hundred miles from Henley. By then, Bruce, the same age as me, had done a stint as an air force pilot, flying helicopters over hostile deserts.
When I started teaching at Henley, Bruce was on his way to his medevac career, accumulating the necessary three thousand hours of flight time. He’d worked many commercial jobs, from carrying local broadcast photographers on a shoot, to flying oil workers to a rig in the Gulf of Mexico, to transporting the super-rich to galas and sporting events.
“The corporate world was my least favorite,” he’d told me. “Mind-numbing-chauffeuring CEOs and celebs to the airport in their private helicopters. And toting a bunch of tuna watchers was no picnic, either.”
“Back up. Celebrities? Anyone I know?” I’d asked.
“Oh, you know, the usual starlets on their way to a club or a concert.”
“Rich, young, and beautiful?”
“Yeah, but I couldn’t name one of them.”
I’d been glad to hear it.
So, not all of Bruce’s assignments had been life threatening or lifesaving in nature. And I did think I was making a contribution when I helped a student in such a way that she became a better member of society. When you added it all up, however, Bruce got the prize-providing a service that often meant the difference between life and death.
It felt good to have an in with the emergency services pool. I hoped I’d never need them. And if I continued to lead this very unexciting, no-risk life, I never would.
Rachel was waiting for me in the MAstar parking lot, outside a heavy-duty chain-link fence. We walked across the gravel lot and embraced. Or rather, Rachel threw her tiny self into my arms. When she stopped crying and had removed long, wet locks from her face, she asked, “Remember when I asked you to talk to Dr. Appleton for me?”
Strange question. Was I being criticized for not having had time to appeal to Keith on her behalf before he died?
“I do remember, and I was going to contact him right after the party,” I said, a little on the defensive.
“No, no. I mean I wouldn’t have asked you to do that, would I, if I were going to… to kill him?”
I patted her back. “No, you wouldn’t have, Rachel.”
Things were worse than I thought if that was her only defense.
With Bruce off duty these few hours, I’d called Gil Bartholomew and asked if she could let us into the MAstar trailer, secured behind the ten-foot fence.
“Oh, and I’d like to use your bedroom so Rachel and I can talk in private,” I’d added.
She’d laughed. “No one’s ever asked me that.”
Gil was the only woman in the crew at MAstar’s Henley Airport base, and therefore had her own bedroom. All the pilots were men, as were the other flight nurses. “Most of these nurses come from a military background,” she’d explained, “and regular nursing in a hospital just doesn’t have that edge. As much as they might deny it, they’re looking for the thrill of the battlefield.”
“And you?” I’d asked.
“Guilty,” she’d said, with a smile. “When I got out of the reserves I took a job as an ER nurse, but even that didn’t cut it. We flight nurses get a lot more training, especially in drugs, and we have a lot more autonomy.”
“I’m not tempted,” I’d said.
As requested, I called Gil now from my cell. She came out wearing her navy flight suit up to her waist, a sleeveless white T-shirt on top. Bruce called the outfits “extra large, fire-retardant onesies for EMS professionals.” The jacket part of Gil’s suit hung over her butt, its sleeves looking like the arms of a raggedy doll. Or a corpse, I thought, unexpectedly.
We climbed the rickety metal stairs, then entered the double-wide. Anyone’s first visit to the trailer held many surprises. Rachel seemed to be examining the unfamiliar features as if she were being sentenced to live here.
The washer/dryer combo was situated right at the front door, where you might expect a comfortable chair and reading lamp, or at least an inviting rug. A toaster and other small appliances lined the counter next to the imposing laundry set, and the kitchen stretched out a whole ten feet back.
By trailer standards, this one wasn’t all that bad. Sure, the brown paneled walls looked like they could use a good scrubbing, but the grime was hardly noticeable, with so many signs plastered all over-schedules, maps, warnings about safety, flight preparation and protocol lists, even a kitchen duty sign-up sheet, the numbered lines on which were blank except for Gil’s name. What a surprise.
The overlapping notices reminded me of the kiosk in the student center at Henley, which, of course, reminded me of the turned upside-down campus.
I glanced at the weather maps, which I always enjoyed perusing. I’d memorized the special coding to indicate flight-or not-conditions. Today’s map showed some splotches of pink, which meant dense fog, but larger areas in green. Depending on where a call came from, this afternoon’s victims and patients needing transport might not be stuck with snail’s-pace ground level conveyances.
“REMEMBER THE KEYS” was the most prominent alert today, in large letters, tacked over the door we’d just walked through. Did helicopters have ignition keys? If so, did pilots really forget to take them out the door?
“Nice party yesterday,” Gil said, bringing any small talk among us to a halt.
Except for the way it ended hung in the air, unspoken. Gil’s face indicated that she wished she could take back the words. Our throat clearings and gulps were louder than whatever was clacking around in the dryer.
“Can I get a tour?” Rachel asked.
Gil gave Rachel a look that I couldn’t interpret, but it was clear by her expression that being a docent wasn’t on Gil’s agenda. I sensed that Rachel wasn’t that interested anyway, but simply putting off our conversation.
Gil moved quickly out of her unpleasant reaction to Rachel’s request. “You bet,” she said. She rubbed her hands together, scraping away her inadvertent reminder of the murder of someone close to us, and led the way down the hall.
It was sobering to realize how easily we returned to normal.
I was dismayed to note that my headache was back.