Our meeting preparation session took over an hour. We did it in a sort of outline form—with Roman numerals and all. It felt a little high schoolish, but as my librarian aunt pointed out, it still is a truly efficient way to put thoughts in order. I said good night to my aunt and left via her kitchen door. I carried my outline copy upstairs with the cat darting ahead of me on the narrow, spiral-like back stairway that opens onto my living room.
O’Ryan entered through his cat door while I used the old-fashioned, knob-turning way. When I stepped inside, he was already curled up on his favorite zebra-print wing chair, pretending he’d fallen asleep waiting for me. He gets a kick out of doing that. I went along with the gag, tiptoeing past him and down a short hall into the kitchen. I tossed my copy of the outline onto the table, next to my grocery-list notepad and the laptop. Kit-Cat showed eight-forty-five. Plenty of snoop time left in the day. It was even still a little bit light outside.
I ducked into my bedroom, pulled a pair of red satin pj’s from a bureau drawer, and headed down the hall to the bathroom. The pj’s were loose and comfortable, and if Pete happened to drop by after his shift was over, they were kind of glamourous looking too. About twenty minutes later, showered, shampooed, makeup-free, and satin clad, I slid into a Lucite chair and prepared to get to work.
The cat was under the table, maybe asleep and maybe still faking it. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference. I’m not sure, even as smart as he is, that O’Ryan realizes I can see him through the clear tabletop. I looked at the notes I’d made on the grocery pad. Not fancy, not efficient, but as a matter of fact the words lined up nicely with Roman numerals I, II, III, IV. And V. I decided to start with I: Cody McGinnis.
I put his name into the laptop. What popped up was a serious case of TMI, most of it repetitive rehashes from newspaper articles. Not particularly useful. I decided to use Aunt Ibby’s pitch to the girlfriends. “Think outside the box.”
I typed in “Tabitha Trumbull Academy of the Arts—Salem History.” Bingo. Up came the course description and requirements for attendance. The Tabby doesn’t have a lot of requirements and doesn’t give degrees. But it does give folks an opportunity to study dance, or music, or literature, or painting, or animation, or acting—or any number of other artistic pursuits. Many of the students are retirees, like the Temple twins, who’ve had to work at a regular job most of their adult lives, but always yearned for something else. Some are young working people who attend evening and weekend classes to broaden their personal horizons. Some of my television production students, like Roger and Ray, have gone on to work in the TV industry, and one young woman who studied acting at the Tabby is in Hollywood making movies.
Cody McGinnis had labeled his course Salem’s Rich History—It’s a Lot More Than Witches! Intriguing, I thought, and so true. He’d broken it up into semesters. Early Settlers; The Maritime Trade; Artists, Architects, and Adventurers. Samuel Bond’s untimely passing had occurred immediately after Cody had completed teaching a course he’d called “I Love a Mystery—Salem’s Most Famous Murder.” McGinnis had apparently spiced up each of his courses by including field trips in the itinerary. The Early Settlers segment included a tour of the Pioneer Village in Forest River Park, where visitors saw what Salem might have looked like back in 1630. Maritime Trade students had a trip to the Salem Maritime National Historic Site with its historic wharves and buildings, along with the reconstructed tall ship Friendship, telling the stories of Salem’s sailors, privateers, and merchants. Those interested in Artists, Architects, and Adventurers had museum visits and a walking tour of Chestnut Street, reputed to be the most architecturally perfect street in America. But the field trip that drew my interest most was the candlelight tour of the mansion on Essex Street where Captain Joseph White had been murdered—it’s known now as the Gardner-Pingree House, and it’s open for tours. Here the young associate professor had given his students a close-up look at the scene of the gory 1830 killing, including a step-by-step description of how the assassin had entered the old man’s room, via a window.
Pete had dropped a hint or two that Cody McGinnis and the professor had had some differences. He’d not been specific about it, and the newspapers had barely touched the subject. During a standup outside the courthouse, I’d managed a shouted question at one of McGinnis’s lawyers. “What was the argument between Cody and the professor about?” I’d yelled.
Much to my surprise, he’d answered me. “A simple disagreement between colleagues. No big deal.”
I added the word “disagreement” to my grocery list notepad, giving it a Roman numeral VI, then frowned. It was a good thing the twins were paying for Cody’s defense lawyers. I doubted that he could afford them, since he was working at the Tabby because he needed the money. How well were his parents set? I had no idea. Some of these questions would have to wait until the twins arrived.
I went back to the outline, put a capital letter A under Salem History, and printed “Captain Joseph Smith’s murder,” then put the same words onto the subject line in the laptop. Plenty of information there. It’s a good story, after all. Some literary scholars believe that both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe used aspects of the White murder. Hawthorne wrote about the murder of Judge Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables: “an old bachelor, and possessed of great wealth.” Poe, in his 1843 “The Tell-Tale Heart” has his fictional murder boast “how wisely” and “with what caution” he killed an old man in his bedchamber.
My concentration on this historical carnage was interrupted by my buzzing phone. Text from Pete. “Feel like ice cream?”
I texted back, “Chocolate chip,” then put the laptop, notebook, and notes in my room, replacing them with ice cream scoop, bowls, and spoons. About twenty minutes later O’Ryan scooted out from under the table and dashed for the living room. That meant Pete had pulled his Crown Vic into the driveway. I heard the cat door flap. That meant O’Ryan would meet him on the back steps. I headed down the hall to the living room too, pulling the door open and waiting for both of them.
I hadn’t seen Pete for a couple of days, and his kiss told me he’d missed me too. We eventually made it to the kitchen without melting the ice cream. Pete put his jacket in one end of my bedroom closet where he keeps a few things for when he stays overnight. He stashed his gun in one of the secret drawers in the bureau while O’Ryan climbed onto the bed, turned around three times and lay down, his usual nighttime ritual.
I put a scoop of vanilla into Pete’s bowl and a scoop of chocolate chip into mine. “Are you extra busy with the McGinnis case?” I asked.
He smiled. “Not exactly extra busy. Normally busy. Why do you ask, Nancy Drew?” He always thinks it’s funny when I say “case” and compares me to that famous girl detective.
“As a matter of fact, I do have a reason,” I told him. “Did you know that Cody is Roger and Ray Temple’s nephew?”
He looked surprised. “I didn’t know that.”
It was my turn to smile. I love it when I know something that he doesn’t. I told him about the phone call from Roger, without mentioning the part about my snooping, of course. “The twins are coming to Salem in a few days. They’re convinced that Cody’s innocent. I guess they’re planning to prove it somehow.”
“I wish them good luck with that,” Pete said. “It doesn’t look too good for the guy right now.”
“Got any other suspects?”
He shook his head. “Nope.”
“Most everyone seems to think the old professor had no enemies at all. Is it true?”
Pete frowned. He could tell I was snooping. “Obviously he had at least one,” he said. “Are you being WICH-TV-reporter curious? Or friend-of-the-suspect’s-twin-uncles curious?”
“Maybe a little of both,” I admitted. “Come on. Nobody is that nice. He must have ticked off more than one person. He taught college kids, for goodness’ sake. Most anybody with a bad mark blames the professor.”
“Sure. But would that be enough reason to fracture somebody’s skull, then stab