The Square Root of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles)

newspaper articles?
    One part of me admonished: The dean is right; this obsession with the kind of investigating best left to the police was distracting me from what it took to be a full professor. Nonsense, said the other part of me, you’re smart; you can do it all. And what if the dean wants you off the trail of Keith’s killer so you won’t find her own involvement under the next rock?
    I pulled out into traffic and headed home, stopping on the way for a veggie sandwich to go at a deli. The tantalizing smells distracted me and I spent a couple of minutes shopping for a good aroma to take with me for dinner. A container of mushroom sauce and a package of handmade pasta seemed perfect for a non-cook to create a special meal for Bruce tonight. Last night’s pizza feast with Virgil, while an information windfall for me, interrupted our tradition of a nice dinner on Bruce’s first night off shift.
    I’d made my decision about the afternoon. I’d spend two hours on the Internet looking through archives to see what I could unearth about the dean’s past. If nothing surfaced, I’d drop that line of inquiry.
    Arguments were so much easier to settle when it was Sophie vs. Sophie.
     
     
    While I chewed on cucumber slices, sprouts, avocado, Monterey jack cheese, and very thick wheat bread, I finished the police-themed children’s crosswords I’d started in the PD waiting room. Later I’d print out my standard cover letter and send them off to New York.
    I brushed crumbs from my shirt and headed for the computer in my office.
    I was about to vet our dean. I blinked away the vision of her pinched face and forties hairstyle, and her reproachful eyes. I knew why she was wagging her finger at me.
    The good news was that the dean had gone to college in New York, where there was an excellent chance that the newspapers maintained archives as far back as I needed.
    Whenever it came up that Dean Underwood’s alma mater was in Manhattan, many of my colleagues and I wondered how she’d managed to come away from that experience with such an unimaginative, stale outlook on life. Now I entertained the idea that she was a reformed hippie and, like many from that era, rued her reckless youth. I considered it my job to find evidence of any chinks in her straightlaced armor.
    I clicked away and found newspaper archives back to the eighteen hundreds. I smiled. “She’s not that old,” I said to my computer screen.
    I asked for a range of dates between nineteen sixty-five and nineteen seventy for starters. The dean never married. It was hard for any of us to think she’d even dated, so Phyllis Underwood would have been her name then also. Unless of course she was in the witness protection program. As fascinating as that would be, I hoped it wasn’t true.
    At the top of the list delivered by my search engine was an obituary for a Phyllis L. Underwood in nineteen thirtythree. A great aunt? Not important.
    The Internet was a major source of diversion for me. I’d often start out looking for one item, say, casual shoes, click over to an article listed in the margin on how footwear has affected the progress of women’s rights, and then stop to read statistics on clothing manufactured in the U.S. vs. in China. What should have taken ten minutes often took an hour. I’d once sat down to order plane tickets to Philadelphia for a conference and ended up a half hour later with new bedding for the guest room.
    Today I tried to stay focused to meet my self-imposed deadline of three o’clock. I didn’t know exactly when Bruce would come by, and there was always a chance Ariana would drop in. She’d been very solicitous through this ordeal, dropping sweet-smelling bath products and healthy baked goods at my doorstep several times.
    Searching for the dean’s name didn’t get me far. Phyllis Underwood had apparently done nothing worthy of newspaper reporting in the range of years I’d plugged in. Typing her name in the general search engine, on the other hand, got too many hits. I’d have to open link after link to determine if any of the thousands of hits applied to the dean.
    I needed a new tactic. My best guess was that like the majority of her peers during that era, the dean had experimented with marijuana. My not-very-vast knowledge of harder drugs told me that there would be more lasting effects and those users would have a much harder time entering the mainstream.
    Good thing no student in my applied statistics class was