The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(262)

                “Are you sure it wasn’t this sweatshirt?” I said.

                The room went very quiet.

                There was a rattle from the kitchen as the automatic icemaker in Professor Farmer’s freezer dropped a tray of new cubes into its bin.

                “She—may have been,” he said. “Where did you find that?”

                “It was in your hamper. Along with her jeans, her underwear, her shoes. Why did you take her clothes, Professor? Why did you keep them? Why didn’t you just get rid of them?”

                Somewhere, a clock was ticking. I hadn’t noticed it before.



                             Professor Farmer took a slow sip from his bottle. He wiped the back of his hand across his mustache. The ticking now seemed deafening.

                “I handed back the group’s final papers last night,” he said. “I’d given her a B+, which I thought was actually generous. She was obviously disappointed, though. She left here in a huff, early, maybe around 10:30. That was the last time I saw her. I don’t know what happened to her after that.”

                “Her clothes are in your hamper, Professor. Was she naked when she left here?”

                He shook his head, disgusted at his own sloppy thinking. “Her clothes,” he repeated slowly. “Her clothes were in my hamper.”

                He drank again, finished the beer and set the bottle down clumsily on the coffee table. He dry-washed his hands nervously—I remembered seeing him make the exact same gesture in the seminar, whenever he was asked a question he couldn’t answer—and then he seemed to come to a decision.

                “She came back,” he told the table, his voice low and dull, “about 1 AM. Everyone else had gone. I was sleeping, but she pounded on the front door and woke me up. I put on my bathrobe and went to the door and let her in.”

                He picked up the bottle and looked at it, sighed and banged it back onto the table.

                “She was drunk,” he said. “I think she’d gone to the party at Ross. She was angry about her grade. She didn’t have the paper with her, but she insisted she’d deserved an A. I told her to come to my office Monday morning, to bring the paper, and I’d go over it with her—but she wouldn’t listen. I tried to calm her down, but she took a swing at me.”

                He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “I pushed her away,” he said, eyes still closed. “She fell. She hit her head on—on this table, right here.”

                I swallowed the lump in my throat. “And that killed her?” I said.



                             He opened his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure. There was blood on the floor. I tried to clean it up, this afternoon, but—” He waved a hand at the throw rug I hadn’t recognized.

                I swallowed. “What happened after she fell?” I prompted him.

                At last he raised his head to face me. “I felt for a pulse, but I couldn’t tell if there was one or not. I’m not a doctor, I—” He twitched involuntarily and a breath rushed out of him. “I picked up the phone to call 911,” he said. “I punched the 9 and the 1—and, and then—I hung up.”

                “You hung up? Why?”

                He licked his lips. “Two years ago, Max, a girl in my freshman seminar filed a sexual-harassment charge against me. You remember that, don’t you?” He smiled at me ruefully. “I remember. There was an investigation, the charge was eventually dropped, but still. Mud sticks, you know? I couldn’t afford another—I mean, here this girl was, at my house, obviously drunk. Dead or alive, I was in for it, either way.”