Murder Misread (3 page)

“
Yeah. A man after my own
heart. Now, what do we want to find out from those little flashing
lights on the screen?”

They returned to their
chore.

2

Sunlight sifted through
the trees. The creek giggled below. A little child galloped down
the path, paused to pick up a pebble from the mud, ran back to her
smiling mother. They moved on past, until their happy chatter
merged into the rustling of the leaves.

A sweet day for a
murder.

In the end, Maggie decided
to join Tal’s celebration lunch. The athletic babysitter was
getting along well with the children, Maggie reported back to
Charlie. “Liz is even willing to take them to McDonald’s. A place I
avoid whenever I can,” she explained with a disdainful wrinkling of
her nose. “And Will needs his nap afterward, so she can take them
back to my apartment. Meanwhile, if it’s okay, I’ll tag along with
you grown-ups instead.”

“
Great! Let’s go, then.
It’s about time.” He locked his office and led the way down the
stairs to the parking lot. “Tal will be glad you can come. Though
you won’t get out of meeting his wife tomorrow too. He seemed bent
on that. Did you work out a schedule with your sitter for
tomorrow?”

“
For the next week, until
Liz’s classes start, there’s no problem. And when Nick gets here
he’ll have some time too.” She smiled at him as he locked the
office door behind them. “It’s refreshing to be working in a place
where people provide for children. Most of my clients assume that
parents’ plans can be adjusted at the drop of a hat.”

“
Well, in this department
so many people are working with children it’s hard to forget.
Frankly, I’m glad my own work is with college students at this
point. It’s a hell of a lot easier to schedule.”

“
And they’re easier
subjects, statistically. They know the test-taking game, how to
play by the rules, much better than the little ones do. So you
don’t get too many squirrelly answers to skew your
data.”

They had walked past the
end of the parking lot. A deep wooded ravine cut raggedly along
this edge of the campus, separating it from the congestion of the
town. Long-legged Maggie, swinging easily along the uneven ground,
unhesitatingly chose the right path from among the several that
meandered down into the woods. “I see you still know your way
around,” Charlie observed.

“
Yeah, it comes back. It
was only seven years ago that I left.”

“
Did you ever work in this
department?”

“
No. I worked on a
neurology project out at Carroll Lab once, but mostly I hung around
the math building and the psych building at the other end of the
campus.”

“
Yeah. Education is a
little world of its own.” Charlie pushed aside a branch that
overhung the path. Norway maples had taken over the steep hillside
here; except for a few malnourished vines, other species found it
difficult to cope with the shallow, greedy maple roots and the
dense shade of the broad leaves. The rough earth, still dark from
yesterday’s rain, sported only a skimpy undergrowth of baby maples.
But the sun, sloping through the shifting leaves, dappled the
warming earth, and he felt an irrational stirring of cheerfulness.
Deanna would come back, he was sure. She had her moods, but who
didn’t? And what they shared was so special. Maybe after work
today, he would—

“
Which way do you prefer
here?” Maggie paused at a fork in the trail, where one path led to
a green-painted metal pedestrian bridge, and another wound lower
and under the bridge along the edge of the little creek that had
patiently carved out this gorge.

“
The lower one’s prettier
if you don’t mind steps. But it may be soggy still from the
thunderstorm yesterday. I generally use this upper
path.”

“
Fine, let’s be prudent.”
That warm Diane Keaton smile again as she turned toward the bridge.
“I love this walk, don’t you?”

“
Yes. I’m a hiker. You
must miss the woods, living in New York.”

“
Not as much as I
expected. We’re only a block from Prospect Park, so we’ve got
plenty of woods and meadows and ravines to explore.”

“
Aren’t those big city
parks dangerous?” He had to stretch to keep up with her athletic
strides.

“
Well, I don’t wander
through them alone at night.” She hesitated, glancing at Charlie
with an ambiguous smile. “Somebody did try to rape me once. But it
wasn’t in Prospect Park. It was only a few miles from this very
spot, when I was a student here.”

“
God!” What could he say?
What a horrible experience, to have someone forcing himself…. He
mumbled inadequately, “That must have been terrible!”

“
Yeah. Well, help arrived
fast and we sent him up for ninety-nine years. Happy ending.” She
didn’t sound happy, her shoulders hunching under the sky-blue
cotton. “Anyway, I’ve learned to stay alert. Did you notice the guy
under the bridge just now?”

Charlie looked back,
frowning, and pushed his glasses up on his nose. The ravine was a
visual crazy-quilt patched from dark earth, green leaves, splashes
of sunlight. The original camouflage design, quivering as the
breeze riffled the leaves. Below, the little creek gurgled and
glinted through the shadows; trunks and branches traced irregular
dark lines through the trembling foliage. Near them, the artificial
pea-green of the bridge shafted straight-edged across the little
chasm. “I don’t see anyone.”

“
See where the trail
widens? That muddy patch? Maybe thirty yards up the
trail?”

“
Yes. Oh!” He saw him
then: standing nearly hidden by a clump of bushy young maples, only
a bit of gray sleeve and a dark shoe visible from here. “Wonder
what he’s up to?”

“
In Prospect Park he’d
probably be a bird-watcher,” Maggie said lightly, turning back up
the path toward College Avenue. “Either that or one of the homeless
mental cases the state has so kindly liberated from institutions so
they can find their own New York apartments. A task that drives the
sanest of us batty.”

“
Yeah.” Charlie glanced
back uneasily. He could no longer see the shadowed figure. “You’ve
got sharp eyes.”

“
Yeah. Half Irish, half
eagle, that’s me.” She flapped her arms in the loose shirt
clownishly.

They emerged from the
woods into the abrupt tar and concrete world of College Avenue.
Temporarily depopulated until summer school began, it seemed
spacious today in the sunlight. Only a few blue-jeaned students
drifted along the sidewalks. Maggie pulled an envelope from her
briefcase. “Is the branch post office still up the street
there?”

“
Yes, next to the shoe
store. We could—”

“
Be right back!” Without
waiting for him, she sprinted across the street toward the
storefront post office. Charlie scuffed slowly along, enjoying the
sun after the shadows of the ravine. The street was lined with
nineteenth-century commercial buildings of brick or stone, two or
three stories high, their carved cornices still bulking proudly
against the sky but their upper windows peeling and decked with the
tacky detritus of cheap student apartments: a row of Genesee cans
on one sill, a T-shirt drying on another, an Indian cotton curtain
knotted in the center to let in some light in a third. Below the
second story the Victorian facades had disappeared completely
behind layers applied in more recent decades—storefronts of glass
and fake brick, or turquoise panels, or neo-colonial white plastic
columns supporting white pediments. Up to a level of eight feet or
so most nonglass surfaces had been sprayed with
graffiti.

After a few minutes Maggie
rejoined him. She was reading the walls too. “The messages change,
don’t they?” she observed. “When I was here it was all
anti-Vietnam, down-with-Nixon stuff.”

“
Yeah, I remember. Jimmy
Carter just doesn’t inspire the same emotion in our graffiti
artists.”

“
Yeah. Who cares about
human rights? They’ve reverted to more eternal
concerns.”

She jerked a thumb at one
elaborate message and Charlie smiled. The wall proclaimed, “Whiskey
makes you frisky, brandy makes you randy, rum makes you cum.” He
said, “There must have been a few slogans like that, even then.
There certainly were on my campus.”

“
Yeah, I have to admit.
But we extolled drugs besides alcohol. We would’ve said ‘pot makes
you hot’ or something, right?” She pushed open the door of one of
the fake-brick fronts and Charlie followed her into
Plato’s.

A wide mahogany bar ran
halfway back into the restaurant. Wooden booths lined the walls
under a trellis decked with bunches of plastic grapes. Only a few
people sat in the booths or at the tables clustered in the rear.
Plato’s did not attract the rowdier undergraduates; the plump,
dark-mustached owner purposely priced his beer high and never
featured all-you-can-eat specials as did the other College Avenue
eateries. “Sure I lose a little money,” he had once explained to
Charlie. “But I don’t have to replace the chairs those animals
break, or mop up where they’ve thrown up all over the rest rooms.
If Sal wants to do all that, let him make the profit. Besides, I
get the nice people.”

“
I don’t see Professor
Chandler,” said Maggie. “But we’re early.”

“
Yes.” Charlie squinted at
his watch, which was hard to see in the dimness. Looked like ten
of. He’d allowed more time for the walk than necessary, given
Maggie’s long-limbed energy. “Why don’t we just sit in a front
booth, so he’ll see us when he arrives?”

“
Great. I’m famished! How
about some dolmas to start now, and we’ll have something else when
the others arrive?”

Her eager appetite
reminded Charlie of Deanna, how she studied the menu with a tense
little smile of ravenous anticipation, her long lashes blinking
dark on her cheek as she puzzled over the choices. He tried to
brush the image away and looked up at the too-plump blonde student
waitress to tell her he’d wait for their friends to arrive. She
nodded pertly and went to fetch Maggie’s order. Bouzouki music
strummed through speakers high in the corners, attempting to cover
the pops and clatters from the kitchen. Maggie leaned back into the
corner of the booth, one rangy leg stretched across the seat, and
studied Charlie. The sky-colored shirt made the darker blue of her
eyes seem electric.

“
How long will it take you
to finish coding your videotapes?” she asked.

“
A couple of weeks. I’m a
little behind because one of the grads who was supposed to help
code them had to leave right after spring classes ended. Family
problems. But the other two coders are slogging away. Already have
a couple of the experiments ready for you to look at.”

“
Good.” One bony finger
poked idly at the salt shaker. “So tell me, how did you get
interested in studying reading?”

“
I wanted to help kids
learn to read. I know my stuff seems pretty far from that, working
with adults in this project, but we have to know how skilled
readers do it before we can help kids learn the skill.”

“
Makes sense. But, I mean,
why not help kids learn math? Or become an optometrist or a
statistician or some other useful thing?”

“
Well, reading is so
important! Absolutely basic to life today. If you can’t –well, I’ve
known people—” He broke off, gulped some of his ice
water.

Her blue eyes were intent
on him. “People who had trouble learning?”

He shrugged. “My Aunt
Babs. She pretty much raised me after my mother left. She was so
embarrassed about not being able to read. Always pretended she
could… you know, claimed she’d forgotten her glasses or something.
She’d bring home papers she had to sign and ask me to read them. I
was only eight or nine then. Had to share what was treated as a
filthy family secret. A couple of times I tried to teach her but
she gave up right away. And I thought, if only I knew how to teach.
She said she was stupid and that was that.” There was a blur on his
glasses, and he took them off and rubbed them with a paper napkin.
“She, uh, committed suicide. I came home from hockey practice and
found her.”

“
God, Charlie!”

“
Yeah. Well, later I
realized she wasn’t stupid at all. She’d pretty much run the
drugstore where she worked. The pharmacist was the owner and he did
the ordering and so forth. But she rang up sales and knew every box
and bottle in stock. She always talked to the salesmen. Could give
the pitches herself. Amazing woman.”

“
Yes.” Maggie
straightened, flashed a grateful smile at the plump waitress, and
greedily devoured one of the stuffed grape leaves set before her.
“Want one?” she mumbled, pushing the plate toward
Charlie.

“
Thanks.” It was good, the
savory rice filling set off by the faintly bitter stringiness of
the grape leaf.

Maggie reverted to their
conversation. “What did you mean, you realized it later? When you
were small did you believe your aunt when she said she was
stupid?”

“
Everyone in the family
said that. Her parents, her brother—my father. He always said so
too. How he hated to leave his son with…. And if I did anything he
didn’t approve of, it was because I was stupid the way she
was.”