The Square Root of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles)

literally. Keith might have referred to her as simply his own age. My very last thought was that the “girl” was not part of Henley College. I could hear Ariana saying, “I told you so” about my narrow view of the world.
    I cast aside the puzzle that reminded me too much of Keith. Maybe some other year I’d be able to return to it. For now, I’d have to come up with a different theme. I’d already done one shaped like a helicopter with words and clues from aviation history, and I’d covered many other modes of transportation as well.
    I attached a clean puzzle grid to the clipboard and tapped the blank squares. Usually I could count on a last-minute inspiration, but tonight I wasn’t sure. Not even the lingering aroma of Ariana’s tea concoction was enough to inspire me.
    When the phone rang, my body twitched and the clipboard went one way and my pencil the other. At one thirty in the morning, I dreaded picking up the phone to hear a dial tone. Or worse, a threat. Or news of a second murder. The negative possibilities were endless.
    I checked the caller ID. Rachel’s cell phone number. I was almost happy to see it.
    “Hi, Dr. Knowles. I know it’s late and I shouldn’t be calling. But I can’t sleep in this bed.”
    “Where are you?” Please don’t say jail.
    “I’m home in my own room, but it feels weird not to be in the dorm.”
    “I forgot some of you were sent home.”
    “They closed my dorm. Everyone who couldn’t get home is in Paul Revere with, like, maximum security. I don’t want to be here with my mother still freaking out, but I don’t know why anyone would want to stay at the dorm either.”
    I thought of three girls who were very happy to be there, close to what they perceived as “the action.”
    “I’m sure everything’s secure on campus.”
    “Are you worried something will happen to you, Dr. Knowles? I mean what if some serial killer wants all the Franklin Hall teachers dead?”
    Nice going, my friend. “I think you’re overreacting, Rachel.”
    “Like, how can you overreact to murder?”
    Good question. Until my garage was broken into, I hadn’t seriously considered myself in any danger at home. Keith’s murder had been no threat to me and had not invaded my personal space. At the front of my mind was what if the box thief didn’t get what he wanted and was planning a middle-of-the-night return visit? Or even another middle-of-the-day visit. Hadn’t Keith been killed between noon and just before two, when Rachel found him, in extremely sunny daylight hours, in his own office?
    Until someone got to the bottom of this, no one was safe at any hour. I might as well do my share.
    “Rachel, did you tell me you did not leave the cake and soda in Dr. Appleton’s office on Friday?”
    “I did not. I put them on the floor, outside the door, so it would look like I knocked but the door was locked and I couldn’t get in.” Rachel sounded as though she were speaking to a child who didn’t get it the first time she told me, and rightly so. “That was my big lie, remember, telling the police that I never got in?”
    “Are you sure? You wouldn’t lie to me now, would you?”
    “No way! You’re scaring me, Dr. Knowles. Why are you asking me this?”
    “I’m just trying to review everything, Rachel. And I have one more question. It’s about your draft thesis. Do you have a copy?”
    “I have so many copies I can’t count them.”
    I knew how that went. Draft after draft and hardly being able to tell which version was which. “How about the ones on those yellow sheets. Do you have more than one copy of those, too?”
    “Like, a gazillion. I only use the white paper when I’m ready to show something to Dr. Appleton.”
    “So, Dr. Appleton would see only white copies?”
    “Yeah, he hated those yellow sheets. ‘If it’s not worth more than cheap paper, something’s wrong with it and I don’t want to see it,’ he’d say.” Rachel had worked her voice into a reasonable facsimile of a male’s.
    “Does anyone else have copies?”
    “Yeah, we all pass them around to whoever will review them. Not you, because you always say all you know is math, though I know that’s not true. But Dr. Bartholomew would read early versions, and Dr. Emerson, just for, you know format and stuff.”
    Fran, my own department chair, read yellow research papers. That meant I couldn’t hide behind the cloak of mathematics any longer.
    “So, lots of people had