The Square Root of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles)

century ago when I took general college chemistry, but this made it in-your-face real.
    Bruce had said Keith had been injected. “Did they find the needle?”
    “No, nothing like that. They’re still doing fingerprint matching from the furniture, et cetera, but they doubt there will be any that can’t be accounted for from the people who regularly came and went in his office.
    “It sounds like the police are kind of stuck.”
    “Well, they don’t have much more.”
    “How fragile we are,” I said, by way of nothing.
    Bruce led me to the den where we sat on the couch for a long time, leaning against each other. I assumed Bruce’s thoughts were, like mine, about the tiny line between life and death, sometimes an atom or a pinprick away.

CHAPTER 16
     
    “Did you ever figure out what all those hang-ups were on your answering machine yesterday?” Bruce asked when we were ready to resume our lives.
    “Haven’t given it any more thought.”
    “Did you say there was no caller ID?”
    “No name came up, but it was a Mansfield area code. A lot of faculty live there.” I stopped a second. “Come to think of it, that’s where Fran Emerson lives. I’d forgotten. I don’t know why she wouldn’t have left a message, but I’ll check with her tomorrow. I’ll see her at two meetings.”
    “Did you try using the reverse directory online?”
    “I made one pass. For a few bucks I could have taken it another step but it’s not a big deal.”
    “I don’t like it, especially the timing, probably right before the break-in, to make sure you weren’t home.”
    “But that’s good, right? That means they weren’t out to harm me; they wanted the boxes is all.”
    “I still don’t like it.”
    I smiled. “You’re just trying to make a case for staying here.”
    “Do I need a case?”
    Thus ended our briefing for the time being.
     
     
    I was strangely unafraid of being alone on Sunday night after Bruce left for work. Maybe because I had a pseudo plan, meaning the will but no actual appointment, to tell all to the police on Monday. I knew I’d feel hugely relieved once I talked to Virgil. I hoped it was Archie’s day off.
    It also helped that Bruce called or texted every hour before midnight and wanted me to do the same every hour after that if I was awake.
    “No way. I want you to get some sleep,” I told him. “Let’s just have a code. If your phone rings and no one’s there, it’s me, and I need help.”
    “Not funny.”
    I worked for a while on what I called the Unpopular Puzzle but couldn’t seem to simplify it and still keep it interesting. Maybe I’d ask its only fan, Gil Bartholomew, if she had any ideas.
    At some time during my fitful sleep, I found myself being pelted with frosted cake wrapped in yellow sheets of paper. The sheets were overwritten with crosswords that had no order or design. A nightmare.
     
     
    No one liked faculty meetings. Whenever you were at a meeting of any committee, it was time away from your students, your research, your class preparation. And so few meetings were actually productive except when you walked away with yet another chore you’d “volunteered” for. I noticed more and more hands on laps these days, as texting and surfing the ’net became the best tactic for surviving the surfeit of meetings.
    All-hands meetings were a little different in that you seldom came away with more work to do. Today, roughly one hundred of us, full- and part-time faculty plus another twenty or so staff members, spread ourselves out in the auditorium on the first floor of the administration building. The auditorium was pretty cool and comfortable. The room held rows of blue leather-covered seats, all on one level, enough for five hundred people, with a stage at the front end. It was the original assembly place for the college when the total enrollment was little more than four hundred young ladies of the early to mid part of the twentieth century.
    The story went that all students were required to gather here one day a week while the academic dean read to them from one of the discourses in John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University . Each student had an assigned seat and attendance was taken. There would follow a short lecture on a topic from Newman’s book. No Q and A, no discussion, no voicing of opinions. And, need we mention, no talking before, during, or immediately after the hour. I pictured the girls filing silently to their next class, like a line of nuns on