Murder Is Academic Read online

“I didn’t know I was being so obvious.”

  “I’ve got that legal-eagle eye.”

  “X-ray vision. Superman.”

  “No, not quite.”

  “I mean, that was the verdict. Mild-mannered Clark Kent, actually.”

  “That’s more like it.”

  “Do you think of me as Lois Lane?”

  “Hardly. You never require rescuing.”

  “Superwoman?” She flexed her aim.

  He flicked on the dishwasher switch and turned to her seriously. “I think of you as you,” he said. “My bright and tough and tender lover.”

  He could do that to her, shift unexpectedly to a level of warmth and intimacy that dissolved her worries and woke her hunger for him. “That’s how I think of you too,” she confessed. They moved into each other’s arms.

  She had to get up later to read the undergraduate papers, and it was nearly two before she finally got to sleep. Roger, bless him, did not noticeably contribute to efficiency.

  IV

  5 CHEE—13 TZIKIN (March 14––22, 1968)

  “I’m sorry, Mary Beth. This just wouldn’t be enough.”

  “But I was hoping so much that I could finish by the end of summer, Professor Greene.”

  “No one can write a thesis that fast, Mary Beth. It’ll take you most of this term to transcribe your tapes and organize the data. Then the real work starts.”

  Professor Greene was in her fifties, a vigorous gray-haired woman with wise eyes sunk in dark pouches that gave her the look of a sagacious raccoon. She had made her mark in the World War II years describing American Indian languages.

  Mary Beth tried again. “But wouldn’t a straightforward description of the language be just as valuable?”

  The professor smiled. “Maybe, Mary Beth. For Bible translators and such, even more valuable. But if you want to be a linguist today, you have to go beyond your data to a theoretical discussion.”

  “I see.” Damn. Professor Greene was right, of course.

  “It would be no favor to you to grant a degree for a purely descriptive report. It would be wasted effort. You’d have no publications grow out of it, no talks. But if you do it right, you’ll be launched toward a reputation in the field. You have the potential.” Professor Greene frowned at Mary Beth’s downcast face. “What’s the problem, Mary Beth? You’ve been so depressed ever since you got back. Are you ill?”

  “No, I just want to finish. To go away. To go back.”

  “It’s easy to get attached to our field work.”

  “But not wise, you mean,” Mary Beth added after a moment.

  “I can’t make personal decisions for you. I can only advise. But yes, that’s my opinion, from an academic and career point of view.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” Mary Beth’s voice was so small she could hardly hear it herself. She picked up the modified thesis proposal that Professor Greene had just rejected and tried to sound normal. “Well, I’ll go back to the original proposal, then.”

  “It’ll be better in the long run, Mary Beth. It was a good proposal. Theoretically interesting.”

  “If I do finish it early, will you accept it early?”

  “Of course. But I don’t want you to get your hopes up in vain. Finishing by the end of next year will be speedy work indeed. The end of this summer would be nearly impossible.”

  “Okay. Thank you, Professor Greene.”

  Mary Beth made her despondent way home. Maggie was just arriving too. With a guest.

  “Hi, Mary Beth. Meet Frank Pinelli.”

  He was well built and casually dressed. A swatch of dark hair kept creeping toward his eyes and had to be tossed back frequently. “Hi,” he said shyly.

  “Hi. Are you in math too, Frank?”

  “No. French lit. I’m just in Laconia for the afternoon. To see my adviser.”

  “And to shoot a few baskets,” Maggie added. “I was down at the Y teaching my girls’ gymnastics class, and couldn’t help noticing that every time he missed he said ‘Merde!’”

  He smiled. “And then I sank one, and couldn’t help noticing that someone burst into the Marseillaise.”

  Mary Beth smiled too. “I see.”

  “He just came over to borrow a book,” said Maggie. “I’ll go get it, Frank.” But Mary Beth, watching him watch Maggie as she ran upstairs, was alarmed. He had more on his mind than a book.

  They sat on the sofa for a few minutes, turning the pages and reading to each other in French. Mary Beth, on dinner duty that day, could hear them in the background as, depressed but determined, she cut up potatoes. She was able to use the little paring knives with no trouble. Not the long ones yet.

  After a few moments she heard Jackie come in the front door.

  “Hey, Jackie, do you know Frank?” asked Maggie.

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Frank Pinelli, Jackie Edwards. You’re both grads in French. Why don’t you know each other?”

  “Big department,” explained Frank. “And I’m working in Syracuse while I finish my thesis, teaching a few classes at a prep school. I don’t get over here to Laconia often.”

  “Well, glad to meet you,” said Jackie. “What brings you here today?”

  “Mostly reminding my adviser I’m alive. But I also learned that Maggie here owns a book I need for my thesis, so I’m buttering her up.”

  They talked a few minutes, then Jackie went upstairs. Soon Frank and Maggie appeared at the kitchen door.

  “Mary Beth, Frank and I thought we’d go out for a quick dinner somewhere.”

  “There’s plenty here,” said Mary Beth, who had put in a couple of extra potatoes. “Can you stay?”

  “Well, is it really no problem?” he asked, pushing back his wayward hair.

  “None at all. Glad to have you.” But she wished he wouldn’t look at Maggie that way.

  After dinner he left promptly, promising to return Maggie’s book next week. Jackie turned to Maggie and said, “Nice guy.”

  “Yeah, I thought so.”

  “I like his eyes. But listen, Maggie, before I meet Peter tonight, I have a favor to ask. I need a statistician.”

  “My God, Jackie!” exclaimed Sue. “Are you deserting the true religion for hers?”

  “Hush, Sue. It’s about a project that a friend of mine from high school did. Sonia Michaelson. She did some work for her senior honors in education at Graham College a few years ago, on how little kids learn negatives. Reaction-time method. She tested dozens of kids. It was hours and hours of work. Everybody was very impressed, but it didn’t come out statistically. They gave her honors anyway, but Sonia was disillusioned and changed fields. She’s in international community planning now, and when I saw her over vacation she was getting ready to leave for Egypt. But she loaned me a copy of her original data. Maggie, could you look at it and tell me if it really is statistically worthless?”

  “I can tell you about the numbers. Probably not the scientific value. I’m no linguist.”

  “I’ll vouch for the science. Sonia’s good,” said Jackie. “If it’s not hopeless, then I want to do something similar with French kids. They have those ne pas and ne plus negatives to learn.”

  “Will you have to test dozens of kids too?” asked Mary Beth.

  “No, this would just be a class project for Freeman’s seminar, maybe four or five kids. I don’t want to waste my time on it if Sonia’s paper is garbage. But it might be interesting.”

  “Sure. Let’s look at it,” said Maggie.

  They sat at the dining room table to pore over the data sheets. An hour later Mary Beth, on her way to the kitchen to make coffee, saw that the slide rule was out. “Checking her arithmetic?”

  “No,” said Jackie importantly. “We’re taking the reciprocals of their reaction times.”

  “You’re what?”

  Maggie smiled at Mary Beth’s expression. “It’s a common first step in analyzing reaction-time experiments. If a kid stops to scratch or sneeze before he
answers, you’ll get a slow reaction time even if the question was easy. This technique gives you better data if you have some suspiciously slow responses.”

  “So you can fix the problem with math? That’s clever!”

  “You see why the Maya made us priests.”

  A few minutes later, with a delighted smile, Jackie announced that the new analysis had worked. “Wow!” she said, standing up to go meet Peter. “I’ve got to write Sonia! Except I can’t. I don’t know where she is in Egypt. Well, she’ll be back home in August.”

  “Funny her advisers didn’t suggest this,” said Maggie. “It’s a standard technique.”

  “Well, she said the guy in charge of the honors program was in counseling, and probably didn’t do reaction-time things. They had to get an outside reader from the psych department for her at the last minute.”

  “Still, it’s such an obvious thing to do.” Maggie frowned at the rows of numbers, then stood up and followed Mary Beth to the kitchen. “Hey, was that boiling water I heard out here?”

  “Yes. I made some coffee.”

  “Enough for me too?”

  “It’s Ixil style.” Mary Beth smiled. “Better taste it first.”

  At the first sip the blue eyes widened. “Good Lord,” said Maggie. Mary Beth laughed. Frowning, Maggie took another swallow. “What in the world is in this?”

  “Chili.”

  “Good Lord,” said Maggie again. She took another sip. “It grows on you, doesn’t it? But it’s not coffee.”

  “I like it. It reminds me of being there.”

  Maggie hoisted herself smoothly to perch on the kitchen table. “You know, you haven’t told me much about Guatemala. What’s it like there? Hot?”

  “No. The Ixil live high in the mountains, and there’s lots of rain and fog. Cold sometimes. You can see your breath.”

  “I can see why they dose their coffee with chili.”

  “Yes, that helps. And they have warm clothes. But it can be very pleasant. The mountains are beautiful, Maggie. The Cuchumatanes, they’re called. On market days all the people come in from the different villages, the women dressed in their own village designs. Red ones from Nebaj and Chajul, blue and green from San Juan Cotzal. The little babies are so cute, all wrapped up with little caps on, and tied onto their mothers’ backs.”

  Maggie smiled. She was drinking the coffee; maybe she did like it.

  “There are earthquakes—and volcanoes aren’t faraway,” Mary Beth continued. “That’s a little frightening. Living on this little thin crust over molten rock that might erupt at any minute. The whole country is like that. It’s like borrowed time.”

  “Well, we have floods and tornadoes here.”

  “Somehow it’s different. I mean, think of it, Maggie, the earth quaking, erupting. Water is supposed to move, and air. Floods and tornadoes are bad, but they’re just quantitative changes. But the earth is unmoving, solid, the reference point for the motion of other things. When you can’t depend on that basic fact, everything else seems unpredictable and arbitrary.”

  “It must make you feel helpless.”

  “No, that’s not why,” murmured Mary Beth, then came back to herself and looked up; startled. “I mean, it does, but you also feel that everything is alive. Gods everywhere. In the wind and the corn. In the mountains. In the rain. In the earth.”

  “So the Maya were right.”

  “Yes. But of course today the real threat is human. The death squads, the civil war, the poverty, the malnutrition.”

  “It must be depressing to work there.”

  “Yes. But it would be even worse not to. They are splendid people, Maggie. We should record the culture, help if we can. I’m only doing a little bit, of course, but everything we learn is helpful. Mostly to us.”

  “To us?”

  “Because we need to learn about human unity and diversity. We know so little.”

  “You think we can learn? Look at black history. Or the draft calls. Three hundred thousand gook killers at a time for Vietnam. Maybe your Maya have got off easy.”

  “Maybe,” said Mary Beth dubiously.

  “You mean bombs are at least quicker than poverty and malnutrition?”

  “Oh, I know the bombs leave the survivors poor and hungry too. But it’s so sad. One of the people I worked with—Ros—tried to give me her baby. Said I could provide for him better.”

  “Poor woman!” Maggie was shaken.

  After a glum moment Mary Beth said, “Hey, listen, it would probably be more cheerful to talk about you.”

  “I thought Sue’s quiz had pretty well covered my background.”

  “Well, I know you’re musical, and you’ve lived in France.” Mary Beth had helped her new housemate unload her old, rusty, perfectly tuned blue Ford. Maggie’s room now contained a wide-ranging record collection, a French rabbit coat, a Comédie Française poster, and bookends that looked like Notre Dame; math books and flute music filled the bookshelves, while another box of books—Shaw, Molière, and Shakespeare—had been shoved into a closet. “But,” added Mary Beth, “Sue didn’t even ask you where you’re from.”

  “Ohio, near Cincinnati. Dad’s a professor, Mom’s the mayor.”

  “The mayor! Wow.” Mary Beth paused, then added daringly, “And you sidestepped Sue’s question about men.”

  The dark blue eyes were opaque. “Yeah, okay, let’s just say I’m getting over the cliché unhappy love affair.’’

  Mary Beth considered. “Not cliché.”

  Maggie smiled a little. “Thank you. Yeah. He was remarkable.”

  “You seem okay now. Frank was impressed.”

  “Oh, I’m functioning again. I went home and cried on my mom’s shoulder, and then got myself busy.”

  “Twenty-one hours of math.”

  “Right. And now I’m in control of my life again, and I plan to stay that way. I don’t want to look back.”

  That meant it still hurt, Frank or no Frank. “Yeah,” Mary Beth said, “I don’t either. I mean, I understand that.”

  “Are you sure?” Maggie asked gently. “Sure you don’t want to talk?”

  “Me? Nothing to talk about.” She didn’t sound convincing even to herself.

  After a moment Maggie said, “Okay, I understand. Maybe later.” She hopped off the table and started washing out her mug.

  For an instant Mary Beth wondered if she should tell, but the thought brought such panic that she couldn’t face it. Forget—she must just push it away and forget.

  Frank returned on Wednesday afternoon, Maggie’s book in one hand and a Syracuse newspaper in the other.

  “How about a flick tonight?” he asked Maggie. “There’s a good one in Syracuse. Truffaut’s 400 Blows.”

  “Great! I’ll take my own car, okay?”

  “You sure? I don’t mind driving. I like it.”

  “So do I. I’ll just meet you there.”

  “You’re a free spirit.” He had a shy, slow smile, an exploratory beginning that widened into a warm grin.

  Mary Beth, waking from a dream of knives at three o’clock in the morning, went to the window and looked out at the dead March world, deeply gray but cut by jagged bars of light from the street lamps. The sun was on its way through the underworld now, the Maya would say, but it still had many trials to endure before its rebirth. Hun-Came and Vucub-Came ruled now. An oppressive time of night. Maggie’s car, she noticed, was not in its usual place in the driveway. She shouldn’t worry. Long ago she herself had spent nights with Tip. Long, long ago. She tried to remember those nights, Tip’s little jokes, his hands warm and welcome on her skin, but it was gone. Another time, another world, forever gone.

  Eventually she managed to sleep again, and at seven-thirty woke to find Maggie waiting for her, bright-eyed and ready for their usual morning run. Her car was in the driveway now. As they ran out side by side into the tentative early light, Mary Beth asked, “Did you have fun last night?”

  “Yes. Interesting film. We went t
o his place afterward and had fondue.”

  “Well, if he feeds you he can’t be all bad.”

  Maggie, used to being teased about her robust appetite, smiled and put on a burst of speed that saved her from further comment.

  The rattle and boom of heavy drums and the electric whine of a guitar split the air. Mary Beth, just sitting down at her desk after dinner that night, jumped up. She ran back into the hall to find the others there too. Sue had clapped her hands despairingly over her ears, and Jackie was the one who spoke.

  “Damn! Our ugly secret is out, Sue.”

  “Who is it?” asked Mary Beth over the pounding music.

  “Across the street. Five undergraduate business majors trying to be their own mini-frat,” said Sue. “They moved in right after you left. They don’t feel manly unless the volume is set at banshee level.”

  “They’re probably deaf,” said Jackie kindly. “Actually it’s not bad when their doors are closed. But it’s warm tonight.”

  “Okay,” said Sue, “who’s going to tell them to turn it down?”

  “I’ll go.” Maggie headed resolutely down the stairs.

  “Wait, I’ll come too,” said Mary Beth. The two of them crossed the street to the square frame house that faced them, trembling with amplified sound. Maggie gave a perfunctory knock on the open front door and sailed on in. A stocky young man starting up the stairs looked around in surprise.

  “Just a minute,” he shouted. Maggie and Mary Beth followed him to the big stereo, the major piece of furniture in the living room. Maggie watched closely as he turned down the volume.

  “Hi,” she said. “We’re from across the street.”

  “Oh God, could you hear it over there? I didn’t know it was up that loud. I’m Bill.”

  “Maggie.” She was peering admiringly at the back of the amplifier. “These big outfits sneak up on you,” she said sympathetically. “A lot of power.”

  A second young man with slick, dark hair had appeared in the doorway. The first glanced back at him and said, “This is Todd. Todd, this is Maggie from across the street.”

  “And this is Mary Beth. Hi, Todd.” Maggie gave him a bright smile, which was not returned, and looked back at Bill. “Maybe you could keep the doors and windows closed, okay?”