Free The Quotient of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles) by Ada Madison Page A

now.
    Thanks for checking in, Kenny. Please do not send the copy to press until we talk.
    I hit send, hard enough to break my fingernail. Now I really was ready to call it a night.

I didn’t expect my Friday to begin so early. When my phone rang at four in the morning, I’d just gotten to sleep. At least that’s how it felt.
    I was barely able to make out Fran’s voice from across the Atlantic, due in some part to the winds rattling my windows. “Sophie, I got the news about Jenn Marshall. Poor kid. I hope she makes it.”
    “Me, too,” I managed.
    “You must be crazy upset. Why didn’t you call me?”
    In spite of my sleepy fog, I laughed. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
    I heard a quick intake of breath, followed by a chuckle. “Omigod, Sophie. It’s the middle of the night for you. I miscalculated. Don’t tell anyone I can’t subtract. It’s ten o’clock here; don’t ask me why I thought you’d be just getting up.”
    “No problem,” I said.
    I envisioned Fran slamming her hand against her head. “Last night I called my sister in Chicago and got that wrong, too. I need to make myself a cheat sheet with all the time zones.”
    “It’s great to hear your voice,” I said, now fully awake. “I’ve been dying to talk to you. Never mind the time.”
    I knew I should ask first about how she and Gene were doing with the challenges of a different culture, whether they missed their grandkids, what it was like to teach on another continent, whether Fran’s wardrobe of flowing, colorful pants outfits was suitable overseas. I hadn’t talked to her since our Christmas call, nearly three weeks ago. She’d just arrived at KIST, the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology, and was eager to tell the world about today’s Rwanda and the impressive economic gains it had made. Since then, with both of us so busy, there had been only quick emails back and forth. But rather than ask how differential equations came across in another language, the first question out of my mouth this morning was, “How did you find out about Jenn?”
    “Randy Stephens is friends with Jim Hollister, the new guy in Henley’s Budget Office, and Jim knows Gene from the business network in town,” Fran answered. “He called Gene this morning. Or last night.” She paused and laughed. “Or tomorrow.”
    “Good one.”
    I might have known. Henley was a small town-and-gown community. News of Jenn’s attack had gone from one academic department to another and then out to the business world that Fran’s husband was part of. It was the kind of chain I was seldom included in, however, because as Judy advised me, I can’t be trusted to keep the chain alive. Maybe I didn’t have enough friends. As I filled Fran in on the meager details I had of Jenn’s status and the progress of the investigation, I was surprised she didn’t already know more than I did.
    When we’d sufficiently expressed our horror and disgust at what had happened to Jenn, and our sympathies for her parents, I turned the conversation to an earlier blemish on Henley College campus life.
    “Do you remember an event on campus twenty-five years ago? A sophomore named Kirsten Packard?”
    “Of course. The suicide from the tower.”
    I’d already decided it wouldn’t be useful to ask Fran why it had never come up between us. “What do you remember about it?” I asked.
    “Well, the whole thing, actually. She jumped from the Admin tower one morning. Very sad.”
    “I’d never heard about it.” Neutral enough.
    “There was quite an effort to keep it all quiet. For a while we felt the administration had installed bugs everywhere, ready to fire a faculty member or expel any student caught talking about it. They closed off the stairway in the tower right away. Put a wall up, actually, so there was no access. That’s when they installed the electronic chimes to strike the quarter hours. Then, after a generation”—I knew Fran meant not twenty-five years, but four