The good news was that the dean had gone to college in New York, where there was an excellent chance that the newspapers maintained archives as far back as I needed.
Whenever it came up that Dean Underwood’s alma mater was in Manhattan, many of my colleagues and I wondered how she’d managed to come away from that experience with such an unimaginative, stale outlook on life. Now I entertained the idea that she was a reformed hippie and, like many from that era, rued her reckless youth. I considered it my job to find evidence of any chinks in her straightlaced armor.
I clicked away and found newspaper archives back to the eighteen hundreds. I smiled. “She’s not that old,” I said to my computer screen.
I asked for a range of dates between nineteen sixty-five and nineteen seventy for starters. The dean never married. It was hard for any of us to think she’d even dated, so Phyllis Underwood would have been her name then also. Unless of course she was in the witness protection program. As fascinating as that would be, I hoped it wasn’t true.
At the top of the list delivered by my search engine was an obituary for a Phyllis L. Underwood in nineteen thirtythree. A great aunt? Not important.
The Internet was a major source of diversion for me. I’d often start out looking for one item, say, casual shoes, click over to an article listed in the margin on how footwear has affected the progress of women’s rights, and then stop to read statistics on clothing manufactured in the U.S. vs. in China. What should have taken ten minutes often took an hour. I’d once sat down to order plane tickets to Philadelphia for a conference and ended up a half hour later with new bedding for the guest room.
Today I tried to stay focused to meet my self-imposed deadline of three o’clock. I didn’t know exactly when Bruce would come by, and there was always a chance Ariana would drop in. She’d been very solicitous through this ordeal, dropping sweet-smelling bath products and healthy baked goods at my doorstep several times.
Searching for the dean’s name didn’t get me far. Phyllis Underwood had apparently done nothing worthy of newspaper reporting in the range of years I’d plugged in. Typing her name in the general search engine, on the other hand, got too many hits. I’d have to open link after link to determine if any of the thousands of hits applied to the dean.
I needed a new tactic. My best guess was that like the majority of her peers during that era, the dean had experimented with marijuana. My not-very-vast knowledge of harder drugs told me that there would be more lasting effects and those users would have a much harder time entering the mainstream.
Good thing no student in my applied statistics class was looking over my shoulder and copying down my methods today.
I entered “marijuana” followed by the dean’s alma mater and the date range.
Much better. The first hit was a link to an article on a survey taken at the school in nineteen sixty-nine. An overwhelming eighty-one percent of students had tried marijuana at least once. The profile was of a twenty-one-year-old social sciences major at the college. The dean had majored in sociology. So far so good.
I tried not to get caught up in all the graphs, a weakness of mine. I did stop to read the caption of a cartoon depicting a cop arresting a student. His partner says, “If pot gets legalized, we’ll have to start chasing real criminals again.” Not that the magazine was left-leaning at all.
I skipped down to an article on marijuana arrests and read an article excerpted from a nineteen sixty-seven issue of a liberal magazine. The editors decried the excessive number of “pot busts” as they were called and the travesty of smearing the records of respected professionals. The article specified, without naming them, an English professor in New York, a NATO diplomat’s son, and a theology instructor in Illinois. I didn’t see a mention of “a future college dean.”
Rrring. Rrring.
For a moment, I thought I’d reached a file with sound. I’d moved to a photo search and it seemed one of the students being dragged away from a protest rally was screaming out at me.
I’d gone past my two-hour Internet limit and it showed.
I shook my head, rubbed my eyes, and clicked my phone on to talk to Ariana.
“What’s new on the handwriting front?” she asked.
How rude of me. I should have called Ariana immediately after my handwriting meeting with Virgil. I excused myself on the basis that the probable result-that Hal Bartholomew was a murderer-was too hard to bear.
I gave Ariana a rundown without naming names. In case the FBI was listening. I promised details when we were together in person.
“Virgil said he’d give the project to their specialist.”
I heard something like a “humph” and then, “Whatever.”
“Right now I’m buried in my computer investigating my dean,” I said.
Ariana listened through a briefing on my latest thoughts on why Dean Underwood was so anxious to have the material in Keith’s office.
“You think she was arrested for something?”
“Yes,” I said, in a voice weakened by the lack of evidence to support my theory. “It’s just a guess. I don’t think she posed for a centerfold, or anything like that.”
Ariana laughed. “You mean she didn’t make Miss January Nineteen Seventy?”
“Ha.”
“Maybe she was a ‘working girl’,” Ariana said, prompting a burst of schoolgirl giggles on both ends of the call.
Ariana let me whine for a couple of minutes, about how arrest records were not available to the public, the search engines had been no help, and I didn’t have time or energy to hire a PI to track down all of Phyllis Underwood’s college friends. Whine, whine.
“Bluff it,” Ariana said.
“Excuse me? How do I do that?”
“I do it all the time. Not with you, of course. Tell her you know what she did in college and see how she reacts.”
“It sounds like a horror movie.” Bruce would have been able to give me the title.
“Why don’t you come over? Mondays are always slow. We can role-play.”
It was the best offer I’d had today.
On the way to A Hill of Beads, I queried myself. What would I do with information on the dean’s past even if I had it? Confront her with it? Why? I no longer saw her strange behavior around the boxes as evidence of her guilt as Keith’s murderer. To my distress, Hal seemed to have the lock on that. I was simply curious.
On the other hand, what if I could use the information to my advantage? I needed all the leverage I could get when negotiating with the dean.
This train of thought was beginning to sound like a reverberating blackmail scenario. The dean had said she’d hold up my promotion if I continued to investigate. Now I might say, if you don’t hold up my promotion, I won’t tell everyone about your sordid past.
It seemed I was taking over one of Keith’s projects-find dirt on everyone and use it against them. I wasn’t happy about it.
CHAPTER 23
Ariana was with a customer when I arrived at her bright, attractive place of business. I stepped into the back to wait for her and noticed she’d changed the beaded curtain that divided the sales room from the rest of the shop. Today, if you took the long view, you could make out a large stem of purple irises springing from a background of many shades of green. I thought of the staggering number of small beads it must have taken to make up the design.
And Ariana thought it took patience when I worked through a mere six pages of mathematical proof.
Ariana’s customer was an older woman in shorts that would have looked better on Lucy. She carried a small tray around the shop while Ariana helped her add selections to it.
“I need five small blue ones,” the woman was saying as Ariana smiled “hello” to me.
“Five small blue ones,” Ariana echoed, setting the beads in the woman’s felt-lined tray.