The Square Root of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles)

forward to talking to Keith Appleton either. He was my age, midforties, yet he had a way of making me feel unimportant and inexperienced. There was no telling whether my interceding on Rachel’s behalf would help or hurt her chances of gaining his approval of her thesis.
    My fondest hope was that somehow the situation would resolve itself before I had a chance to contact him.
     
     
    Fifteen minutes late for my beading class, I tried to sneak in through the back door of A Hill of Beads, the shop owned by my best friend since high school, Ariana Volens. She and I had gone off to different colleges, on the west coast and in Boston, respectively, but reunited as soon as we moved back to town.
    I breathed in the scent of Tibetan incense. Sweet jasmine this time, Ariana’s latest favorite for calming the mind. I tiptoed to a seat at the end of a long table where six other women had gathered, but I should have known Ariana wouldn’t let me get away with a quiet entrance.
    She stopped mid-demonstration and swung her long, graceful arm in my direction. “And, finally, our eminent Dr. Sophie Knowles joins us,” Ariana said, a big smile on her face. She knew she’d pay later for this drama.
    Ariana’s platinum blond hair was streaked with strands of red and blue, her eye-catching, patriotic design of choice for the summer. My hair, on the other hand, won compliments without my even trying. My short dark locks were graying in a design of their own choosing—a jagged stripe of white hair about an inch wide had grown out on one side of my head. I’d learned to simply say, “Thank you” when people complimented me on my artistry.
    I’d been talked into beading by Ariana.
    “You need a hobby,” she’d told me a month ago.
    “I already have one.”
    “Making up puzzles and brainteasers doesn’t count. It’s too much like math,” she’d said. “You might as well be talking square roots.”
    “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
    Ariana had rolled her eyes.
    I agreed to try a hobby, partly to keep Ariana quiet. It came down to beading or handwriting analysis, Ariana’s new passion, and the latter seemed a bit too woo-woo for me. I couldn’t see myself making judgments about someone’s personality based on how she drew a capital S. I, myself, wrote it differently every time, no matter what Ariana claimed.
    Beading seemed innocuous and apolitical enough.
    I had to admit, Ariana had a point in wanting me to expand my horizons by meeting Henley townsfolk who weren’t part of the college community. With a full load of classes, plus office hours, faculty meetings, and research, sometimes it was hard to get off campus until late in the evening. Bruce Granville, my dark-eyed boyfriend, kept even stranger hours. A former Air Force pilot, now flying a medevac helicopter, he worked seven days on, from nine to nine, and then had seven days off. We’d settled into a routine that excluded nearly everyone except my students, a few colleagues, and Ariana.
    “Your world is too small,” Ariana often told me. On those occasions, invariably, she’d form a circle—a planet, I figured—with her arms. “You need to get out more. And even if you don’t fall in love with everyone in the beading class, you’ll end up with something useful,” she’d added, appealing to my multitasking, goal-oriented personality. She’d held up, in turn, a beaded basket, a bead-fringed bookmark, and a ballpoint pen covered with multicolored seed beads. I thought it was a stretch to call them all useful .
    After a couple of classes I found I liked the craft and the crafters more than I’d expected. All the other stresses in my life disappeared when our conversation focused on the best gauge wire to use for each kind of bead. Or when I had to concentrate on picking up tiny beads with a needle and thread and keeping them from rolling off the other end. I was a novice at the hobby, however, and doubted I’d ever be as good at it as I was at making and solving puzzles.
    Ariana wasn’t finished with me this afternoon. As the six other women, all more advanced beaders than I was, turned in my direction, Ariana asked, “Were you engaged in some high-level mathematics, Professor? Or were you tied up in the backseat of a helicopter with a Colin Farrell lookalike?”
    I felt my face turn red, in spite of the comfortably air-conditioned shop. I was consoled by the fact that Bruce wasn’t around to hear the innuendo, though he was unlikely to