The Perfect Body, page 19
part #8 of Professor Molly Mysteries Series
“It is her,” I said. “I remember she was wearing a light blue shirt, because that’s the same color I was wearing that day.”
“I remember the blue shirt,” Emma said. “Yours, Molly, not hers. Cause the milk stains, ah?”
“Pat,” I asked. “what was the time of death? Bee’s death?”
“How would I know?” Pat protested. “They haven’t released any official—”
“We know you know,” Emma interrupted him. “Just tell us.”
Pat sighed.
“Fine. But don’t tell anyone I told you.”
“Yeah, yeah, Ida B. Wells,” Emma said. “We know. You gotta protect your sources.”
“Time of death was estimated between 6:30 and 10:30am,” Pat said.
“So it could have been Margaret,” I said. “If this really is her in the video. She could have killed Bee and then come over…”
“To watch your baby,” Pat finished the thought for me.
“I don’t like the way you put that,” I said.
“So are you gonna tell Detective Medeiros about this?” Emma asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like I should ask Margaret about it first.”
“Seriously?” Emma demanded. “Tell the murderer you figured out she’s a murderer and then ask her if she thinks you should tell anyone else?”
“But Emma, it’s Margaret Adams. She’s not a murderer. She’s an accounting major for crying out loud.”
Pat’s phone made a “plink” noise, and he swiped to see the message.
“Got it,” he said. “Mystery solved.”
“The murder?” Emma asked.
“No. Not the murder. The mystery of what your little ski is for. It’s an absinthe spoon.”
“Oh!” I picked it up and took another look.
“A what spoon?” Emma asked.
“Absinthe is a liqueur distilled from wormwood and flavored with herbs,” I said. “You put a lump of sugar on the spoon and pour the liquid through.”
“Why not just mix in the sugar the regular way?” Emma asked.
“I don’t know. Tradition.”
“Oh, Molly, I almost forgot,” Pat said. “I found something out about your office. I think you’ll be interested.”
“Haunted?” Emma asked eagerly.
“Kind of. I was looking through some of the old local papers, and there’s a pretty good chance that this was Constance Brigham’s office.”
“Constance Brigham. The Brighams? Son of a missionary marries the daughter of a chief, family amasses incredible wealth and influence? The ones with the house on Russian Road?”
“Yup, that’s the family,” Pat said.
“And whose office did you say this was?”
“Constance Brigham. She was the supervisor of the Inebriates Asylum. The whole thing was her project.”
“Really? I got the boss’s office?”
“Yeah, she was pretty unconventional,” Pat said. “She didn’t have to work at all, much less devote herself to running a rehab facility. She was supposed to get married off and become a society lady. But she drove off all her suitors and dedicated her life to this.”
“Why have I never heard of her?” I asked.
“Because no one’s written her biography,” Pat said.
“Maybe you should do it,” Emma suggested.
“I was actually thinking of doing a series on her,” Pat said. “For Island Confidential. There’s a pretty credible story about her early career, where she caught one of the doctors, old married guy, being inappropriate with a young patient. She confronted him about it, and the next day he was found dead on the hospital grounds. He’d thrown himself from the top floor. Or someone threw him.”
“Wow.” I said. “I can’t say I feel too sorry for the guy, though. Is that callous of me, do you think?”
“Wait. Constance?” Emma asked. “Like Miss Constance? The avenging Miss Constance?”
“Maybe Constance was a common name back then,” I said.
“Oh yeah, that’s kind of a funny story,” Pat said. “The legend of Miss Constance. I looked into it.”
“And?” Emma and I asked in unison.
“It’s from a book of Hawaiian ghost stories that was published in the early seventies. There’s no written record of the legend before then that I can find. It seems like the author took the one incident from Constance Brigham’s life and ran with it.”
“Nah!” Emma objected. “Cannot be. The nineteen seventies?”
“That’s right,” Pat said.
“But me and all my friends—”
“Did you ever hear your parents ever talk about Miss Constance?” I asked.
“No, but…aw, man.”
“There was a real Constance,” Pat said. “But she wasn’t a patient here, she ran the place. And she never had a husband.”
“If Constance Brigham devoted her life to running the Inebriates Asylum,” I said, “I’d have to assume she was a temperance advocate, right? How do you explain the absinthe paraphernalia?”
Pat picked up the spoon and examined it.
“Maybe she confiscated it from a patient,” he said.
“Nah. I bet she was drinking it in her secret office,” Emma said. “And now you can continue the noble tradition, Molly. Don’t worry, I’ll help you. So you don’t have to drink alone. It’ll help you get your mind off thinking about Bee Corcoran anyway. I don’t have to remind you how dangerous it is to go poking around unsolved murders.”
“Please don’t bring up the lava tube episode,” I said. “But you’re right, I should stop obsessing about it. Bee’s death was ruled a suicide, Margaret is on the mainland, and most importantly, Donnie’s off the hook. I’m through with murder investigations.”
“That’s more like it,” Emma said.
Chapter Forty-Seven
As soon as Pat left, Emma asked,
“You think Constance Brigham and Miss Constance are the same person? Like Pat said?”
“Probably,” I said. “Pat’s good at researching that stuff. I hope he does write up something about her life. I’d read it.”
“I like the avenging ghost version better.”
“Well, someone already wrote that book. In the seventies.”
“So speaking of innocent-seeming young women who go around slaughtering people,” Emma said, “you gonna call Margaret or what?”
“Call Margaret? Weren’t you just telling me how dangerous it would be—”
“Aw, come on, Molly. I was just saying that cause Pat was here and he’s such a worry wart. Besides, I know you want to call her and ask her how come she’s on Pat’s surveillance tape.”
“What makes you so sure about that?”
“Am I wrong?”
“I just can’t reconcile it in my mind. Margaret was so conscientious. That’s why we were comfortable having her watch the baby.”
“And now you’re dying to talk to her because you have to reassure yourself that you didn’t leave your baby with a crazy murderer. Plus she’s thousands of miles away so she can’t hurt you.”
Rather than continue to argue with Emma, I called Margaret’s cell number. I had no clear plan of what I would say to her.
She sounded glad to hear from me.
“How’s Francesca?” she asked. “Oh, I miss her so much! How’s that little bottom tooth?”
“Extremely sharp, thanks for asking. Margaret, listen. I’m really sorry to bother you with this. But your boyfriend, Keola—”
“Husband,” she said.
“Whoa, what? You got married?”
I felt a little stung that I hadn’t been invited to the wedding, forgetting for a moment that I suspected Margaret of murder.
“We kind of eloped,” she said.
“Did Honey Akiona know that? She called you, right, and talked to Keola about Bee’s rat experiment and why he left her lab?”
“Oh yes, Honey knows.”
“Wow. Congratulations. I guess everyone knows but me. Anyway, here’s why I called. Did you know about Bee Corcoran passing away? She was found dead the day you left the island.”
“I…yes.”
I looked at Emma for some kind of nonverbal moral support, but she was playing a game on her phone.
“Margaret, the police have video of you going into the hospital building the morning of Bee Corcoran’s death.”
It was true. The police did have the tape, even if they didn’t know who was on it.
Margaret made a little squeak.
“And you’re on the video leaving a few minutes later. You’re wearing the same cornflower blue top you were wearing when you showed up to my house to watch Francesca that day.”
Margaret was quiet.
“Margaret, is someone there with you?”
“No. No, he’s at work.”
“Margaret,” I persisted, “Did you kill Bee Corcoran, and then come over to my house and spend the day with my daughter? I’m not taping this conversation or anything, I just have to know.”
“No, Professor, it wasn’t like that. I would never hurt Dr. Corcoran. Or Francesca, if that’s what you’re thinking. I would never hurt anyone!”
But she wasn’t denying having been at the hospital building when Bee died.
I remembered a phrase that I’d heard from an executive coach. When you want to grab someone by the shoulders and shake them, say this instead: Help me understand.
“Margaret, help me understand. What happened?”
“Professor, I don’t know what happened. I mean, I do know, but I don’t…”
“Can you tell me what you remember? Please?”
Emma looked up from her phone, interested.
“Did you go to Bee’s lab?” I asked. “Dr. Corcoran’s lab?”
“Yes. Professor, we only left Mahina because Keola couldn’t find another job that paid as well as being Dr. Corcoran’s lab assistant. If she’d hired him back, we could have stayed. So it was our last day, and I just wanted to talk to her myself. That’s all. I just went to talk to her.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“The door was open so I let myself in. Dr. Corcoran was standing over by the window, you know, at the end of that long counter? She looked like she was writing something in a book. I guess I was pretty quiet, so she didn’t notice me come in.”
Emma was now leaning into my phone and listening, wide-eyed.
“I walked over to her, but she didn’t look up, and I didn’t want to interrupt her. So I waited until she was finished writing and she closed the notebook and put it away, and then she looked up and saw me, and before I could even say anything…”
Margaret took some time to compose herself before she continued. “I guess I startled her. It was like, she kind of screamed a little bit when she saw me? And then she stumbled and went backwards out the window. It was open, I think to let some air in, because it was kind of hot and stuffy. Anyway, it was so fast. One minute she was there, and then next thing I knew she was gone…I started to go out after her but I saw the railing was broken and I knew it wasn’t safe to go out on the balcony. I’d left my phone in the car because I’d been charging it. I tried to call for help from the landline but it didn’t work.”
“You tried to call for help? Did you call for help?”
“The phone was dead. There was no dial tone. Then I saw a cardboard box sitting in front of the window, which I think was what she’d tripped over. I hope this wasn’t wrong of me, Professor, but I saw Keola’s lab coat sitting on top of it. I realized it was Keola’s box. He’d been packing his things to leave, and he’d left his stuff there where he thought it would be out of the way, but it wasn’t really, he’d left it in the worst possible place, because Dr. Corcoran…I moved the box away from the window. I hope Keola’s not in trouble because of me.”
“Does Keola know any of this?” I asked.
“No,” she sniffled. “He doesn’t know I went in that morning. I don’t think he even knows about Dr. Corcoran being dead. We’ve both been so busy, you know I haven’t told anyone about—”
“What did you do then?” I asked. “After you realized the lab phone wasn’t hooked up?”
“I ran to the one open door on the hallway. It was the department office. The only person in there was a student worker. I told her to call nine one one, that Dr. Corcoran was hurt.”
“Did she?”
“She looked around kind of confused, like someone had to give her permission, so I told her, hurry, and she said okay, and started looking around the desk for the phone. I left but I assumed she made the call.”
“Why didn’t you stay and wait for someone to show up, so you could explain what happened?” I asked. “It would have saved a lot of people a lot of grief.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said quietly. “If I could go back and do it over…I guess I wasn’t thinking. All I was thinking was I couldn’t be late.”
“Late for what?”
“To watch Francesca.”
“You’d just watched someone fall out a fourth-floor window and you were worried about being late? Margaret, I would have understood. Really.”
“What’s that sound?”
“Coffee machine.” I glared at Emma, who was noisily brewing herself another cup.
She gave me a “what am I supposed to do?” shrug.
“Professor, what’s going to happen now? I understand if you have to report us.”
Margaret’s story added up (if you will). I had found a notebook in the drawer at the end of that long counter. Now that I knew its contents, I understood why Bee wanted to keep it hidden. We had found the lab phone off the hook, which was consistent with Margaret having tried to make a call. It hadn’t been hooked up, so she didn’t get a dial tone. Margaret said she’d moved Keola’s box away from the window, which was why the young man had asked us whether we’d moved his stuff.
It seemed clear to me that Bee’s death had been an accident. Margaret couldn’t have staged it if she’d tried. No one knew how fragile the railing was. Neither Margaret nor Keola (and probably not even both of them together) seemed capable of overpowering the athletic Bee and pushing her to her death.
And thanks to my own experience with student workers, I knew it was entirely plausible that the ball had been dropped on the 9-1-1 call, leaving the security guard to discover Bee’s body.
“I don’t think it’s my place to report anything,” I said. “If you want to pursue it, I think you should get legal advice. I recommend Honey Akiona. But they’ve already put it down to suicide. So maybe it’s best to just let things be.”
“Oh, thank you so much, professor.”
“Okay, well, thank you for letting me know what happened. It’s—”
“Professor? Wait, don’t hang up. There was something I wanted to talk to you about. I was thinking about calling you, in fact. And now that you called me, I think it’s kind of like a sign.”
“Really? Okay. What is it?”
“It’s about the Arts and Sciences dean. Geoffrey Gunderson.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
It turned out Margaret’s new husband Keola had been sitting on a lot more information than we knew.
Bee Corcoran’s lab was supposed to have been upgraded to Biosafety Level 2, but the money for the improvements hadn’t come through. Geoffrey Gunderson, it turns out, had been skimming money from the NIH grant that had been funding Bee Corcoran’s lab.
Most of the funds had been diverted to Ray Pang’s re-election fund. So Pang, in misdirecting Stephen’s parents’ lawsuit, wasn’t just trying to bank a future favor with the university. He had been doing the bidding of a major campaign donor.
Gunderson wasn’t the hapless messenger boy of some higher up; the plan, it seemed, was entirely his. The lawsuit from Stephen’s parents, focusing on code violations in the old hospital building, would have brought unwelcome scrutiny, and risked exposing Gunderson’s illegal activities.
Gunderson was not in cahoots with Bee Corcoran. She didn’t know he’d been diverting money from her existing NIH grant, nor that he was planning to do the same with her system research award. Dean Gunderson, in turn, had no idea Dr. Corcoran was fudging her research results. He’d picked her research for the system life sciences award simply because he thought it had a good chance of winning. And he was right.
An investigation confirmed Keola’s claims. Mahina State University had to pay back Bee’s grant. Keola and Margaret got a whistleblower payout of thirty percent of the total, which was a big help to the young couple. As for Geoffrey Gunderson, he incurred the usual penalty meted out to administrators in such situations: A large severance payout and a quiet move to a higher-paying job at another institution.
I’m not sorry I squirted him with breast milk.
Chapter Forty-Nine
I’d had enough of university events, but we couldn’t really get out of attending the blessing ceremony for the official opening of the old Mahina Memorial Hospital building. Donnie, Francesca, and I found an empty table near the back of the dining hall. The place looked less glamorous in the daytime than it had at the donor dinner. The sun shone through the tall windows, highlighting every mismatched paint patch and missing ceiling tile. I texted Pat and Emma to let them know where we were, then took the seat closest to the wall and popped the baby under my top. Donnie went to get me a glass of water.
“Molly!” I heard a familiar voice behind me. It took me a moment to place it. I turned around to see Stephen Park’s mother, Tiffany Schwartz. She wore a floor-length gown encrusted in flashing red sequins. It was a little dressy for Mahina, especially for an afternoon event.
“Tiffany! Hi! Sorry, I can’t get up right now.”
Francesca was vacuuming milk out of me with a vengeance. And I was so thirsty it was painful. Where was Donnie with that water?
“Oh, did you hurt yourself?” Tiffany asked.
“No, I just…” I glanced down at Francesca’s little pink toes, curling and uncurling.
“Never mind,” she said, “there’s Angus. Angus! Over here, sweetheart!”
