The Square Root of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles)

that,” Ariana said.
    “Yes, I do.”
    I pushed and pulled a very old Hoover, feeling the tension transfer from my arms and legs to the long handle of the vacuum cleaner. Now and then I heard a disturbing click that was a bead on its way into the dust bag, but I knew from other closing time visits that a certain loss of inventory by this route was normal. When I was finished, the mauve area rug in the middle of the store bore satisfying tracks from the Hoover’s wheels. I wound the cord around the back of the vacuum and tucked it in at the top.
    I swapped the vacuum cleaner for a soft, damp mop and attacked the slick linoleum that covered the rest of the sales floor and extended to the back room.
    All flooring in A Hill of Beads was now spic and span. A job well done. Almost as pleasing as ironing.
    “What else needs cleaning?” I asked.
    It was great to be in control of something, if only housework.
     
     
    When I’d spent enough physical energy to feel relaxed, we retreated to the back of the store. A tea and conversation corner was a must with Ariana and I was very comfortable here in my favorite overstuffed chair.
    Ariana assumed a yoga position, pulled a beading case onto her lap, and went to work. Not work for her, I knew, but a pacifying activity. She knew enough not to foist anything on me, however. Beading was still a distant second to puzzling as far as being a stress-free activity for me. Ariana claimed it was because I took too mathematical an approach to the craft. What was wrong with that?
    “Lose the symmetry,” Ariana had told me by way of advice after an early class. She’d laid out one of my newly crafted bracelets. “Look at this,” she’d clucked. “One large blue, three small white, three tiny gold; one large blue, three small white, three tiny gold. All the way around. It’s like an equation.”
    “Your point?” I’d asked.
    I knew what Ariana meant, but I had no confidence in anything other than a strictly ordered pattern.
    Add to that, I felt I’d never be really good at beading, no matter how much my friend encouraged and coached me. As small-boned as I was, my fingers seemed to be as big as those of a college wrestling champion when I tried to fold back the end of a fine-gauge wire and insert it into a tiny bead.
    Eventually I’d master the art of tucking wires into small places and attaching fasteners in an unobtrusive way, but my talent for design was sadly lacking. My beaded necklaces looked like something from the nearest day care center, produced by a kid who knew his colors and was just learning to count.
    Ariana had been commissioned to make jewelry for an entire wedding party—necklaces, earrings, and bracelets for the bride, maid of honor, four bridesmaids, and a flower girl.
    “I finally convinced them not to have matching sets,” she told me, working magic fingers with a magnificent set of colors. She’d assembled pale turquoise, coral, onyx, pearls, and clear crystal beads. “It’s kind of a flapper theme the bride has going, so we’re doing a choker and a long strand of button pearls for her, two strands of pearls each for the attendants, and drop earrings for all, I think. I haven’t decided on what the flower girl should have. Maybe just a bracelet with a single pearl choker.
    I was mesmerized as my friend took beads that didn’t look to me that they went together at all and wove them into a design where they seemed to have been made for each other.
    “Why did the dean want the boxes so badly?” I asked Ariana, out of the blue.
    “She’s looking for something that might make her look bad.”
    “Or a proposal she doesn’t want seeing the light of day.”
    “Or she killed your Dr. Appleton,” Ariana said, jabbing a tiny wire into the opening of a coral bead.
    I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think she has it in her. And she doesn’t know a thing about poisons. Or any science, or any scientist, living or dead. She’d have stabbed him or shot him.”
    “Nice,” Ariana said.
    “Maybe she was just peeved at me on principle. She’d wanted someone else, I still don’t know who, to pick up the boxes and I barged in and took them. That would be enough to upset her world.”
    Ariana closed up her beading box and took a three-ring binder from the small table next to her.
    “I should look at her handwriting,” she said, cruising through pages in the binder.
    “Still on that kick?”
    “I’m going to get certified to teach a