The Square Root of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles)

myself off the hook a tad, recalling that I’d never sensed that Lucy needed anything. Students talked favorably about her. I’d heard that she’d landed a small research grant that would employ a half dozen chemistry majors during their free hours, doing calculations related to some kind of reactions. She seemed to be doing well.
    I hadn’t realized how well. Dating Keith Appleton! I was now convinced she was the woman Keith had spoken of to his cousin Elteen. In her short tenure, Lucy had achieved something no longtime faculty member could claim.
    Lucy had arrived first at the small café where I’d met with Pam, Liz, and Casey a couple of days ago. If the baristas were listening in on my recent appearances here, I hoped they wouldn’t think I was setting up shop. I ordered an iced cappuccino and a raspberry scone and left a big tip.
    Lucy seemed forlorn, and not that much older than the freshmen she’d be teaching in a few weeks. She wore a knit sweater and hugged a mug of what looked like hot chocolate with a pile of whipped cream. To look at her you’d think we were in the kind of cold wave we’d had after Christmas, that had set teeth chattering and lasted for weeks. In truth, it was sweltering and all we had now was the weak fan of the coffee shop, barely adequate even at eight in the morning.
    She half rose when she saw me. I felt old, and to confirm it, my knees creaked as I sat down.
    I looked around the shop, relatively empty this Tuesday morning. I recognized some Henley dorm students whom I didn’t have in class, group studying, it seemed. I certainly understood why they might seek a change of scenery from the desolate campus.
    It was clear that if Lucy and I were going to have a conversation, I was the one who’d have to go first.
    “Thanks so much for coming, Lucy. I noticed how upset you were at the faculty meeting and I figured all those negative comments about Keith got to you.”
    Lucy bit her lip and nodded. “I knew he wasn’t popular on campus. But he really was the coolest guy, you know.”
    “You two had something special, didn’t you?”
    Lucy’s eyes widened and I sensed she was about to deny it. Then I saw a tiny shrug, as if she realized there was no point. “We just hit it off right away. It didn’t matter that he’s a little older.”
    What’s twenty years? I thought. “I’m sorry you had to hear all that at the meeting yesterday. There’s a lot of history you’re not aware of.”
    “I know that, Dr. Knowles.”
    “Sophie, please.”
    “I’m just saying there was another side to him,” Lucy said.
    “I know.”
    Lucy smiled at last. “Keith had such a sense of humor. He’d find a cartoon on the ’net or in a magazine almost every day, something related to science or to school, and he’d leave it on my desk, so I’d start the day with a laugh. But mostly he had this sense of, I don’t know, I guess you’d call it a duty to maintain high standards. Especially for premed students. He claimed he didn’t want to be operated on by someone who barely got by in med school and he didn’t want anyone to be taken care of by a C student.”
    Not a bad point. But I was here to see for myself whether I thought this sweet young woman was capable of killing her new boyfriend. The more we talked, however, the more the probability of Lucy as killer approached zero.
    I was ready for another iced cappuccino. Lucy was fine with her hot chocolate, so I went to the counter myself. Only once did I look over my shoulder to be sure she hadn’t fled.
    As I waited for my iced drink, a jumble of boxes on the other side of the counter prompted a new thought. The cartons were labeled “filters,” “napkins,” and “lids,” but they might as well have said, “Keith’s Stuff.”
    “Did Dean Underwood ask you to clean out Keith’s office?” I asked Lucy as soon as I could reasonably broach the subject.
    “Uh-huh, but someone else got there before me.”
    Imagine that. I tried to second-guess the dean’s reasoning in asking Lucy to collect the material. Probably of all the faculty in Franklin Hall, the dean thought Lucy would be the least likely to be curious as to why the dean wanted the files in such a hurry. That would mean she didn’t know about the special relationship between Keith and Lucy. Not that it mattered, since there was no rule against faculty dating each other. In fact, during my tenure at Henley I’d seen two full-blown courtships that ended in