Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

The Philosopher by Helen Tucker

The author of sixteen novels and dozens of short stories, Helen Tucker was once a print journalist and a writer for radio. She lives with her husband in Raleigh, North Carolina. She describes the situation depicted in her latest story for us as “fairly common in schools and colleges” but adds “the ending is not that common... at least, not that I’ve heard!”

He cleared his throat.

In the beginning, when he first started teaching, he had done it consciously to alert the students that he was about to say something important or clever. Now it was a completely unconscious habit, but still just as effective.

“Had it not been for Mrs. Soc-rates, the world would never have heard of Socrates or, in-deed, Plato either.”

He paused to let that earth-shaking statement break new ground in their minuscule minds.

“Mrs. Socrates — Xanthieppe — was such a shrew, such an impossible nag, that Socrates couldn’t stand to stay in the house with her. She was peevish, quarrelsome, and had a temper that would frighten a pit bull. So from sunup to late at night, Socrates roamed the streets of Athens spouting his philosophy, with Plato, his number-one disciple, right beside him scribbling it all down on his tablet.”

Unfortunately the bell rang at that dramatic moment and twenty books were closed with the sound of a small explosion and twenty young ladies scraped the parquet floor as they pushed their chairs back and stood up.

He frowned. They cared almost as much about philosophy and the Early Thinkers as they did about sitting through a four-hour chamber music concert or being in a bubonic plague epidemic.

But wait... one student was staying after class. Vivian Dalroy — he might have known — came up to his desk, smiling. He stood and returned the smile. If it could be said that there was a “teacher’s pet,” she was it. She was bright, seemed to be more interested than most in the class, and she was pretty — in fact, just missed being beautiful with her huge brown eyes, reddish-brown hair, and perfect complexion. She was tall and slim, and unlike most of the girls, who wore cutoff jeans or slacks, she always came to class in a dress or skirt. And she was interested in Greek philosophy. Sometimes he got the impression that she might even be a little interested in him, though she had done nothing overt to put that idea in his head. She was not one of the boarding students, but lived in town with her mother.

“Professor Penley, I was wondering...” Shyly, she stopped and looked down at the floor.

“Yes, Vivian?”

“Could Xanthieppe be the reason Socrates drank the hemlock so willingly?” She was standing so close to him that he caught whiffs of her perfume.

“I don’t know if he was willing,” he said, “but we are given to understand that he put up no argument. Just drank it right down while continuing to pace around in his cell asserting his ideology and theories.”

“Then we are indebted to Xanthieppe for the Socratic method of inquiry, aren’t we?”

She reached out and touched his shoulder, sliding her hand down his arm, then jerked her hand away as though she had caught herself in a reflexive action.

“I suppose we are,” he said. Even through his jacket, he felt her touch.

“Apparently you do think so, because you said, ‘If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Socrates...’ ” She broke off and gave him one of her appealing smiles. “Thank you for making philosophy so interesting, and the philosophers so... so human.” She touched his hand fleetingly and was out the door before he could utter a word.

Well, at least one student found his class impressive. He supposed he should be thankful for that. He hadn’t wanted to teach in this kind of school anyway — last two years of high school, and two years of college preparatory for “young ladies.” Years ago he had dreamed of teaching at the university and someday having a chair of philosophy named for him. But he only had a master’s degree and without a Ph.D. could never get tenure at the university. Back then, he couldn’t afford the time or the money to get the higher degree. So he had taken what he could get. Now he was too old to start over. At fifty-two — gray hair, slight paunch — he couldn’t imagine himself a student again.

He put his book and lecture notes in his briefcase and erased the next assignment from the blackboard.

The young daydream of what will be, and the old daydream of what might have been.

He closed the door of the classroom and went home to his own Xanthieppe.

As usual, Reva met him at the door with her recital of everything that had gone wrong during the day. The neighbor’s dog had turned over the garbage can again and she’d spent a good half-hour cleaning up the mess, the phone had rung four times with “those terrible telemarketers trying to scam me into buying some worthless doodad or contribute to some nonexistent cause,” and the disposal wasn’t working right and the kitchen sink was backed up with mess.

“Did you call a repairman?” he asked.

“Why should I?” she demanded. “You know they come quicker when a man calls. For a woman, they take their own sweet time.”

“I’ll call first thing in the morning,” he said wearily, putting his hat on the hall table and heading for the living room, where he hoped to spend a quiet time reading the newspaper while whatever frozen thing she had in the oven cooked for his dinner. He had become an authority on baked boxes and boiled bags.

He sank into his favorite chair and decided he was too tired even to pick up the paper.

Had it always been like this? he wondered. Had he always felt like the zenith of failure? In college, he had been considered a scholar, a deep thinker who graduated in the top ten percent of a class of two thousand. He had always known he wanted to teach and to write, so he went on for a master’s, and planned to go for a Ph.D. following that. But halfway through the master’s course, he met Reva. She was a cute little thing, shining black hair, dark eyes that almost looked black, and a smile that showed two fetching dimples. He had dated off and on during college, but never seriously, because he was as short of small talk as he was money. What he knew most about was philosophy, and unfortunately, the girls he dated were not philosophers. But Reva was different. She yakked on like the current fad of chatty dolls. She was a junior, but hadn’t decided on a major. “I like the social side of college,” she said. “The rest is just high school all over again.” No scholar she, but she had something his other dates didn’t have: a desire to be with him.

And so one cold night in early December, they ended up in the backseat of his ancient Chevrolet.

The second week of January, only a few days after the Christmas holiday, she told him she was pregnant. He smiled, thinking she was making a silly little joke. When she didn’t return the smile, he was stunned, shocked into total silence.

“We’ll have to get married,” she said. “Right away. And we’ll have to tell my folks we’ve been married since before Christmas.”

“But — but I’m right in the middle of my master’s.” It was all he could think of to say. His father had paid part of his college tuition and he had worked odd jobs, but once he had the diploma, he was on his own. His advanced degrees would have to be paid for by him and him alone.

“So get the bloody master’s,” she said. “I’ll drop out and use this semester’s tuition for a place to live.”

Back in those days, he mused, if you got a girl pregnant, you married her. Abortion wasn’t an option, because it wasn’t legal. So they were married by a J.P. in Maryland, and three weeks later Reva told him she wasn’t pregnant after all. False alarm. Nor had she become pregnant in the thirty years since.

He got the master’s and that was the end of his formal education. For a couple of years he was an assistant to an associate professor of philosophy at the university, but it hardly paid a living wage. Next, he went to a private high school, where the pay was better, but he had to teach history because there were no philosophy classes. Then Reva told him about Miss Painter’s School, where her best friend’s two daughters were enrolled. It was a junior college and the pay was the best he’d had. And he taught philosophy. Six years later, the school went bankrupt because of limited enrollment, and once again, he was looking. His choices were few; universities wanted Ph.D.s and even small colleges preferred them. In the classifieds of an educational journal he found an ad for Barclay, answered, and had been teaching there ever since. Girls from fourteen to eighteen. Not what he had visualized when he had been young and idealistic.

From the time he entered the university as a freshman, he had wanted to be a teacher, a professor. He had dreamed of standing before a class of eager young men and women, telling them of the capacity of thought, the deep and marvelous conclusions of the Early Thinkers. He remembered fragments of a poem he had once read, by Sara Teasdale, he thought, something about “children’s faces looking up, / Holding wonder like a cup.” That’s the way his students’ faces would be: holding the wonder of the new knowledge being given to them.

But no, life had dealt him a lousy, losing hand and he was getting tired of trying to play it.

“Travis, come to dinner.” Reva stood in the doorway scowling at him. “This is the second time I’ve called you. Were you asleep?”

“I wish,” he said, getting up and following her to the dining room.

Dinner over, he sank into his lounge chair, which Reva constantly threatened to throw out with the trash because it was old and worn. (He suspected the real reason was that the chair held his firm imprint.) He skimmed through the newspaper, reading about the wars and rumors of wars, murders, murder-suicides, rapes, and robberies, and decided those men in long white robes topped with sandwich boards predicting the end of the world probably had the inside scoop. Why would a God want to rule over such as this? He threw the newspaper aside and picked up Great Dialogues of Plato.

Are good people good by nature or by learning? If virtue is knowledge, can it be taught? Questions of Socrates, reported by Plato.

But he, himself, had a question he had hoped for years some student would ask, but so far, none had. Did Plato himself ever have an original thought, or should every profundity be attributed to Socrates, pirated by Plato? For several years he had thought about writing a book on the subject, but somehow just never got around to doing it.

Time which once had meandered by in a slow walk now sped like a racer headed for the finish line.

He dozed...

Reva was shaking his shoulder. “Wake up, Travis. There’s a woman on the porch to see you. Didn’t you hear the doorbell?”

“Who?” he asked.

“Never saw her before. Said her name is Dalroy.”

Vivian! he thought. Had his best student found something puzzling in the assignment that she wanted to talk over with him? He hurried to the porch.

Standing under the porch light was not his favorite student, but an older version of her. The woman had the same reddish-brown hair, though on closer scrutiny, her color did not look quite real. She stared back at him through pink tortoiseshell glasses.

“Professor Penley, I am Miriam Dalroy, Vivian’s mother.”

She did not return his smile and when he held out his hand, she ignored it.

“Vivian?” he asked, concerned. “Is she all right? Has something happened?”

“I imagine you know what’s happened better than I do.”

If looks could kill, he would now be on his way to the under-taker’s. What was it with this woman?

“Won’t you come in?” He stepped back from the door, holding it ajar.

“What I have to say is better said right here, unless you want your wife to know.”

He closed the door. “What are you talking about?” His pulse had sped up some; he could feel it beating in his temples.

“Don’t be coy with me, you old letch. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Do you hit on all your students, or is my daughter the only one to be given this singular honor?”

It took him a minute to comprehend fully what she was saying. Then, “Are you crazy? Have you completely lost your mind? I never hit on anyone in my life.”

It came to him that they were both speaking in italics. But how else could one talk about something as insane as this?

“Don’t deny it!” The woman’s mouth curled up, but in a sneer rather than a smile. “Vivi has told me all about it. How you keep her after class and fondle her, put your hands all over her, make obscene propositions to her. If I were a man, I’d shoot you. Or, if not that, turn you over to the police. Instead, because I don’t want my daughter traumatized by dirty publicity, I am merely going to report you to Miss Barclay and see that you lose your job.”

He leaned against the wall, unable to stand upright. “No!” he exploded. “It’s a lie, a terrible lie. I never touched your daughter! I never propositioned her. I’ve never spoken to her about anything but the philosophy class.”

“Some philosophy! The head of the school is going to be surprised to find out just what your philosophy is.”

“No! You can’t do this. It’s not true. None of it is true. I swear to you I’ve never touched your daughter.”

He would be fired instantly. Eugenia Barclay gave a talk at the beginning of every school year about what would happen to any male teacher who got too friendly with the girls. At his age, with that blight on his record, the only job he’d be able to find would be flipping hamburgers. “You’ve got to believe me,” he pleaded. “It simply isn’t true.”

She stared at him, saying nothing. He could feel perspiration forming on his forehead, and his palms were wet. His right hand trembled slightly as he brushed it across his forehead. “Believe me,” he whispered. “I am telling you the truth.”

She continued to stare at him, her eyes narrowing, while he grew more and more desperate. “I can’t believe Vivian would tell you something like that. Why, she’s the best student in that class. It doesn’t make any sense that she would tell lies about me.”

“All right,” the woman said finally. “I’ll make a deal with you. Obviously, I can’t leave Vivi in this school, and I can’t get the tuition back if I take her out. Another school will be just as expensive, if not more so.” She paused as though she expected him to make a suggestion, then she said, “Here’s what I’ll do. I won’t say a word to anyone, and neither will Vivi, if you’ll give me one hundred thousand dollars so I can enter her in another school.”

Now he was totally incapable of speaking.

“It’s only fair,” she continued. “You’ve ruined this school for her. I’m just a poor widow, trying to live on half of what my husband’s Social Security was, so I can’t afford anywhere else. Either you give me the money or I’m going straight to Miss Barclay. I probably should do that anyway, let her know what kind of teacher she hired.”

“Please,” he said, trying not to whimper. “I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Then hello, Miss Barclay; goodbye, Professor Penley.” For the first time she really smiled. “I’ll give you until tomorrow night at this time to get the money. I’ll be back here for it.”

She left the porch so quickly that he wasn’t aware of what she was doing until she was halfway down the front walk. He continued to lean against the wall, too weak to move.

When Miriam returned to the apartment, she found Vivian in the Bentley rocker, her feet propped on the Turkish hassock, poring over a book entitled The Age of Reason.

Miriam hated this apartment, as she had hated all the rented places in which they’d lived in the past few years. Nothing in the place matched anything else, the wallpaper peeled in places, and there was always something wrong with the plumbing. But neither she nor Vivi complained too much, because they both knew they would put up with these living arrangements until they made their second million. When they had first started their business, they said retirement would come with the first million. But a million dollars today wouldn’t last very long, even wisely invested, so two million was now the goal.

Vivi was so smart that it seemed a crime they weren’t taking in money faster. That thought brought a smile. A crime, indeed.

The girl looked up from her book:. “How’d it go?”

“Good news and bad news,” Miriam said.

“Damn it all, there shouldn’t be any bad news.” Vivi threw the book aside. “I did everything exactly right.”

“The good news is we’ll get a hundred large. The bad news is that it won’t be one-fifty. You see,” she felt she had to explain her sudden generosity, “the house, the section he lives in, it all made me think that he couldn’t get his hands on one-fifty, at least not in a hurry. So we’ll settle for a hundred.”

“That’ll make only four hundred for the whole year.”

“Well, the good news is that the IRS will never know about it. That’s the same as money in the bank.” She sat on the sunken-in sofa across from her daughter and shared the hassock. “Listen, Vivi, we’ve got to do some serious thinking. You’re twenty-five years old, almost twenty-six. You can’t keep convincing people that you’re a seventeen-year-old girl. We’ve got to find a different type of school.”

“Maybe an all-girl college instead of these la-de-da finishing schools,” Vivi said. “A college that has a professor I can have a good time with. Old Penley’s nothing but a nerd, straight from Dullsville. Bored the bejesus out of me.”

“Even so,” Miriam said, “one hundred thousand in three months isn’t bad. That’s a little over thirty-three thousand a month.”

“Chicken feed,” Vivi said. “CEo’s make a million or two a month, some of them even more.”

“Then why in hell aren’t you a CEO? You’re smart enough.”

“This is easier and more fun. Have you given any thought to where we’ll go next?”

“Of course. There’s a college prep in Virginia, Leescroft Hall, that charges a frightful tuition. Looks like a good prospect. I get Penley’s money Friday night. By Monday we should be packed up and out of here.”

“Could we please get a decent apartment? I’m tired of these crappy places.”

Miriam smiled. “When we get that second million we’ll also get all the luxuries we’ve been denying ourselves. Beautiful condos, expensive cars, furs, jewelry... say, maybe I can hit Penley up for that extra fifty after all. Tell him I’ll go to his wife as well as the school head. She was the one who came to the door when I rang the bell, and she looks like a real piece of work. So, Vivi, only a couple more schools and we’ll have our retirement fund.”

“Then what will we do for fun, amusement, and profit?”

Miriam smiled. “You’ll come up with something, just as you did our current little game.”

He didn’t move for the longest time, just kept leaning against the wall feeling weak and sick. It was like being kicked in the stomach at the same time as being hit in the head with a hammer. He couldn’t let her go to Eugenia Barclay. Barclay would fire him without letting him say so much as a word. And words wouldn’t matter anyway; she had made that point perfectly clear. No male teacher was to have anything whatsoever to do with the girls outside of class. “I’ll not have one spark of scandal catching into a flame at this school.”

With something like that on his record, he wouldn’t even be able to get a job teaching in a public high school.

One hundred thousand dollars! All of the money in the world to him. All of the money he had in the world. After all these years teaching, that was the amount he had saved and put into a CD. There was maybe as much as seven or eight thousand in a money market account, and his checking account was less than four hundred dollars. And, of course, Reva was totally dependent upon him; she had only what he gave her for household expenses and clothes.

Reva! My God, suppose that woman went to Reva! If his wife didn’t kill him outright, she’d make the rest of his life unlivable. He inhaled sharply. His head was killing him. If he lost his job, Reva would know why anyway. Everyone at school would know why. He was caught like a mouse in a trap without even the advantage of having been lured there by cheese.

There was only one way out. He would have to go to the bank tomorrow and cash in the CD and give his life’s savings to Miriam Dalroy.

He crept back inside like an invalid, hoping Reva, who was crocheting, wouldn’t notice him.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked immediately. “What did that woman want?”

“She wanted to talk to me about her daughter’s grades,” he said. “She doesn’t think they’re high enough.”

“Humph!” was the only answer.

By three A.M. he realized he wasn’t going to sleep at all, so he got up and went to the kitchen, made coffee, and sat at the table drinking it until Reva came downstairs to start breakfast.

She took one look at him and said, “You sick?”

“I don’t feel too well,” he answered, and that was the end of their conversation.

His first class was not until eleven, so he went to the bank. In all those wakeful hours, he hadn’t been able to think of a way out of his traumatizing situation.

It was a small bank and he knew all the tellers by sight, most of them by name. “Thelma,” he said to the lanky girl with horn-rims and straight black hair, “I want to cash in my CD.” He handed her the certificate.

She looked at it. “But, Professor Penley, you’ll lose the interest. It doesn’t come due for another four months.”

“I want cash. A thousand one-hundred-dollar bills.”

Her eyes widened behind the horn-rims, and her mouth opened then closed. Finally, she said, “I’m sure we don’t have that many hundreds on hand. We’ll have to get them.”

“I need them by this afternoon. It’s Friday,” he explained. “I can’t wait till Monday.”

Suddenly she smiled, making a joke. “What is this, a kidnapping?”

Yes, he thought, that’s exactly what it is. They’re kidnapping my future. He said, “I’ll come back around three. Please have the money ready.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk to Mr. Herley first?”

But he was already on his way out of the bank. Talking to the manager wouldn’t change anything.

A day of stumbling through his classes — but alert enough to notice that Vivian Dalroy was conspicuously absent — another stop at the bank to pick up the money, another thawed dinner that left him queasy, and then it was almost time...

He had put the money in a huge book mailer that he’d found in the department supply room, and he had hidden it behind the blinds on the front porch. Reva must not see the package and ask questions. He went out on the porch early, not wanting the Dalroy woman to ring the bell and have Reva answer the door again.

Miriam Dalroy came up on the porch, smiling at him. “Well, Professor, do you have something for me?”

“Please don’t do this,” he said, hating himself for having to beg, but thinking he had to give it one more try.

“Think of it this way,” she said. “You’re saving your job and your marriage. Isn’t that worth a few dollars to you?”

Without another word, he reached behind the blinds and pulled out the package.

“I trust it’s all here, so I won’t count it until I get home. By the way, Vivi has told me some other things you did to her, and I think that’s worth another fifty thousand.”

“You get the hell off my porch right this minute!” He had never yelled or cursed at another human being in his life, but now it seemed to come naturally. “You’ve already taken every cent I’ve managed to save in thirty years of teaching and the money from my father’s estate as well.”

She gave him another of her maddening smiles. “All right, Professor, I’ll let you off easy. We’ll try to make do with this.” She clutched the package to her chest, holding it with both hands as she left the porch.

Back inside the house, he went straight to the bathroom and was very sick.

That night, from sheer exhaustion, he slept. He awoke late in the morning feeling heavy-headed, disoriented, and still tired. Thank God he didn’t have Saturday classes. He would have had to call in sick. Surprisingly, Reva had not awakened him when she left the room, so he just lay there wondering if there would ever be any reason for him to get up again.

He had been robbed. Grand theft. They had committed a felony and there was nothing he could do about it. They might as well have held a gun to his head. He wished he could shoot them.

Shoot them! Wait a minute... they held him up, why couldn’t he do the same to them and get his money back? There was a gun somewhere in the back of a drawer in his desk that he had bought when there were several robberies in the neighborhood about ten years ago. When the robber was caught, he had put the gun away and never thought of it again.

Now he had a purpose for getting up. He rushed into the bathroom, shaved, showered, and dressed, then went to the desk in his study. He opened three drawers and fished around in the back before he found the little pistol. He knew nothing about guns, so he couldn’t even have told what caliber it was, but he had made the man in the gun store show him how to load it, cock it, aim, and... he had never shot it. He had put it away loaded, so it was still ready to fire.

“You don’t look so good,” was Reva’s greeting to him when he went into the kitchen. “I hope whatever you have isn’t contagious.”

“I’m on the mend now,” he said almost cheerfully. “I’m going to be all right.”

After plowing through a bowl of cereal, he went to his office on campus to look up the home address of Vivian Dalroy in the student directory. He was very much conscious of the little gun in his coat pocket.

The Dalroys lived in a run-down apartment building on the east side, neither the best nor the worst neighborhood in town. The building had been red brick, painted white, but now the white was peeling off and blotches of red showed through. Inside a musty-smelling hallway, he found their name on a mailbox, 2-C, and went up the not-quite-dark stairway. They must have been running their scam for years, he thought, so why didn’t they live better?

He knocked at the door and it was opened immediately by Miriam. “You can put the extra boxes...” she began, then recognized her visitor. “What do you want?”

He pushed the door open and stepped inside before she could slam it in his face. The room was crowded with boxes on the floor, several suitcases, and hanging bags. Obviously, now that they had his money, they were getting out as fast as they could.

“Who was that?” Vivian asked, coming in from another room, then, seeing him, she took a step back and said, “Oh!”

“What do you want?” Miriam asked again.

“I want my money back. Now.”

Miriam laughed. “Don’t be silly. You got what you paid for. You’re home free with your wife and your job.”

He pulled the gun out of his pocket and pointed it at her. “I said I want my money, and if you value your life, you’ll give it to me.”

Vivian screamed and Miriam turned pale, then recovered somewhat. “Put the damn gun away, you idiot, before I call the cops.”

“Call them,” he said. “I’ll tell them how you robbed me.”

“And I’ll tell them what you did to me,” Vivian said.

“And you’ll be lying. If you don’t give me back my money right now I’m going to shoot you both.” He put his finger on the trigger to show he meant business.

“We don’t have the money,” Miriam said. “It’s already transferred to a bank miles away.”

He held his arms straight out, grasping the gun in both hands as he’d seen cops on TV do. “I don’t believe you. I mean what I say.”

Now Vivian laughed. “Professor, you wouldn’t shoot a damn jackrabbit. You certainly wouldn’t shoot two women.”

He cocked the pistol and held it straight out for another couple of minutes, then dropped his arms to his side. She was right; he couldn’t shoot them. They had won again. He felt like crying, but not in front of them. He backed to the door, turned, and left, almost tripping as he ran down the stairs. Outside, he looked up at the apartment. The two of them were framed in the window, laughing at him.

Driving home, he beat the steering wheel with his fists in rage and frustration. Never had he been so furious; never had he felt so depressed and defeated. He was sure his money had not been sent off anywhere between nine o’clock last night and ten o’clock this morning, yet he had been unable to get it back. He really should have shot those harpies and searched the premises. But no, if he’d fired the little gun, others in the building undoubtedly would have heard and come to investigate.

Damn them! Damn the whole world! Damn his life since he married Reva. Not one thing had gone right since then, not one plan or dream. His truncated education had kept him from getting a decent job, he would never have a chair of philosophy named for him, or be surrounded by a large, happy family, or... No need to go any further. Neither child nor chair. All because Reva had tricked him into marrying her. She was the one he should shoot for lousing up his life.

Hey, now! Hey, now!

The dream is parent to the desire and the desire is parent to the action.

He pulled over to the curb in front of a row of small starter houses. He didn’t dare drive while his mind was speeding so far ahead of him. The teller at the bank had said something about kid-napping when he withdrew the hundred thousand. She would remember that. What if Reva disappeared and he reported that she had been kidnapped and that he’d paid two women ransom money to get her back? They could deny it until hell went subzero, but there was the teller to prove...

Would it work? Could he get away with it?

He would have to kill Reva, of course. He could shoot her, or strangle her, or give her poison — no, not that, because he’d have to buy the poison and some clerk would remember him. Anyway, the means of killing her was not the main problem. What would he do with her body? He didn’t think getting rid of a body was as easy as some mystery writers assumed. If he buried her in the backyard, there would be freshly turned earth. If he dumped her out in the woods or alongside a country road, there was the danger of being seen. And if he put her body in the trunk of his car, even in a plastic bag, there would be fibers or some damn thing that would give it away, technology being what it is today. And, could he trust himself when questioned by the police about her disappearance, as he surely would be, to play the convincing role of distraught husband? He thought that over for a minute or two and then decided, yes, he could manage that. To get rid of Reva he could manage anything. The thought of life without her was very enticing. Peace, perfect peace... at home, in his mind, in his soul. Solitude and serenity after all these years of trial and torment.

But how would he murder her? If he couldn’t shoot two comparative strangers, would he be able to shoot his wife of thirty years? He imagined her sitting on the three-legged stool in the kitchen, doing some mundane task like opening frozen stuffed peppers. With the little gun in hand, barefoot so as not to startle her, he would get close enough so he couldn’t possibly miss, and he would fire. He visualized her jumping as the bullet hit, then falling off the stool. The expression on her face would be one of shock...

But no, somehow that didn’t seem to be the way to go about it.

Socrates was a savvy old sage. What would be the Socratic method of murder?

Then it came to him, almost as though his idol had reached down from some celestial sphere and planted it in his head. He would put the body in the car, not in the trunk, not in a bag in the backseat, but sitting up on the passenger side of the car. That’s where Reva rode when he was driving, so it would not be unusual to find strands of hair, fingerprints, fabric from her clothes, whatever, right there. As for the method, there couldn’t be any blood. All he had to do now was decide how two women would go about killing another woman.

The killing part wasn’t nearly as hard as he had expected. While she was bending over the oven to remove two frozen dinners, he slipped the noose over her head and pulled and pulled and pulled. He didn’t even have to look at her face as he did it. It was not a pleasant ordeal for him, but he managed to get through it, scarcely glancing at her when she was prone on the floor, tongue hanging out, face blue. He picked her up, took her to the garage, and put her in the car. At eleven P.M. he drove out into the country and dumped her body in a ditch beside a dirt road.

He waited until early Sunday morning before calling the police. He told the woman who answered his 911 call, “My wife has been kidnapped.” The police were at his house in exactly eight minutes. There was a detective lieutenant named Sidney Miller and another cop named Thomas Salter.

Their first question was: “If your wife was kidnapped Friday, why did you wait until today to call the police?”

“I was told not to call anyone, that she’d be returned last night.”

“Are you sure she didn’t leave home of her own volition?” Lieutenant Miller asked.

“No, no!” Travis didn’t have to pretend to be upset; he was. He had to make these men believe him. “She was taken by two women, a mother and daughter. I can give you their names and address. They asked for ransom of one hundred thousand dollars and said if I paid by yesterday they would have her home by last night. I waited up all night and then called you this morning.”

The two cops gave each other a fleeting glance. “You paid them the hundred thousand?” the younger one said.

“I went to First Bank on Friday and got the money out. The teller, Thelma something, asked me if there was a kidnapping. She thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t. If you don’t believe me, ask Thelma. I took it to the woman yesterday morning and I’ve waited ever since...” He broke off and bowed his head and let his hands tremble a little.

“Give me the names and address of the women. Did anyone see you when you took the money to them?” Miller asked

“I don’t know. They live in that run-down apartment building on Boxler Street. It’s possible someone saw me go in or come out.”

“We’ll also check the bank teller,” Salter said.

Travis felt that right now he was their number-one suspect. Or maybe it was just their manner of questioning.

“Why would these two want to kidnap your wife?” Miller asked. “Any reason other than money? Do you know them?”

“The daughter was in my philosophy class at Miss Barclay’s School. She wants to transfer to another school and doesn’t have enough money. I guess her credit’s not good enough that she can borrow a large sum. That’s the only reason I can think of.” It was as close to the truth as he’d been yet. He looked straight in the eyes of first one and then the other cop. “Please find my wife. Those two women are crazy. There’s no telling what they might do... what they’ve done already.” They stayed another ten or fifteen minutes, asking questions about where Travis worked, what he taught, what his wife did, then went back to the alleged (their word) kidnapping: Where was your wife when she was taken? Was she in the house by herself? Why didn’t he get in touch with the police as soon as the Dalroys asked for ransom?

Travis thought he put just enough hesitancy in his answers to show that he was both stunned and worried sick. Finally they left, telling him they would let him know as soon as they found out anything.

Travis waited the rest of the morning, spending a great deal of time pacing the floor. In the middle of the afternoon he had a call from Lieutenant Miller. “Mr. Penley, we’ve talked to the Dalroys and they say they know nothing of any kidnapping. Mrs. Dalroy said you were hitting on her daughter at school and when she told you she was going to the headmistress, you offered her a hundred thousand to keep quiet.”

“That’s a damn lie!” Travis exploded. This time his emotion was real. The idea of that woman saying he offered the money. “It happened exactly as I told you. They took my wife and said I’d get her back after I paid the money.”

“We’re looking into it further,” the lieutenant said.

Travis spent a sleepless night, continually turning to find a cool side of the bed.

On Monday afternoon he received another call from Lieutenant Miller. “Mr. Penley, the body of a woman has been found just off a rural road south of town. The woman was wearing a pin with the initials R. P. on it. We think it may be your wife. Can you come down for identification?”

“Ye-es,” he choked out the word. “I’ll be right there.”

There was a makeshift morgue in the basement of the building beneath the police station. Lieutenant Miller took him down on the elevator and he stood behind a glass partition while a white-coated man on the other side pulled the sheet off Reva’s face.

Travis took one quick look, then put both hands over his face. “That’s my wife,” he said brokenly. “That’s Reva.”

Lieutenant Miller helped him back upstairs and asked, “Would you like for someone to drive you home?”

“No, I can drive. I have to make arrangements. When can I get... get her?”

“Probably not for a couple of days. There will be an autopsy.”

On his way home he stopped at a grocery store and bought a beef roast and fresh vegetables. This was one night he was going to eat real food. No more boiled bags or baked boxes. He enjoyed the cooking almost as much as he did the eating. There was roast beef, mashed potatoes with real gravy, and fresh asparagus with butter sauce. He hadn’t had a better meal since... he couldn’t remember when. Tomorrow he’d bake an apple pie.

The phone rang just as he was getting ready for bed. “This is Lieutenant Miller. I hate to bother you so late, but there is news I thought would interest you. We’ve done some background checking on the Dalroys and found out they’ve lived in seven different towns in the past two years. The girl was enrolled in schools in each town, and although she seemed to be doing well, she dropped out for no apparent reason. It seems pretty obvious that the two of them were running some kind of scam, though there was nothing about any kidnappings. Maybe the victims of the scam were too embarrassed at being taken to report it. There were no deaths reported, though, so if they ever tried kidnapping before, there must have been different circumstances than in the case of your wife.”

“Reva would certainly have put up a struggle,” he said, “even if they held a gun on her.”

“Yes, well... We’ll charge them with everything possible,” the lieutenant said, and hung up.

Travis was ecstatic. Everything was being resolved in the best conceivable way and in very little time. His whole life was going to be just the way he had dreamed it might years ago. Instead of going to bed, he went inside his study and sat at his desk. He was going to write that book he’d always wanted to write: showing that Plato was just a copycat, and Socrates was the real brains behind all that wisdom. It was apparent that Plato had written down every word Socrates uttered and then passed much of it off as his own. Travis’s book would open the eyes of the scholars of the world and he would be famous. Indeed, he’d probably be asked to lecture at the university. And maybe, after all, he’d have that chair in philosophy named for him.

Finally, he went to bed and his last conscious thought before dropping off into a deep, untroubled sleep was: Just when you think never-ending darkness has descended on your whole world, the sun comes out and you discover that life can be beautiful.

The next morning he felt like skipping as he parked his car in the faculty lot and went to his ten o’clock. “Good morning,” he said cheerfully to the young ladies, something he’d never done before. “This morning we’ll forgo today’s assignment, because I want to tell you about a very important book that will shake up the world of philosophy.”

He had just begun talking when there was a knock at the door, another unusual occurrence. He opened the door, unhappy about the interruption, and there stood Salter, the younger of the cops.

“Yes?” he said abruptly. “I’m in the middle of a class.”

“Sorry, sir, but Lieutenant Miller wants to see you downtown.”

“I’m sure he can wait until the end of the class.”

“No, sir, he said for me to bring you back with me now.”

Well... best not to push it. He turned toward the class. “We’ll continue this tomorrow. Class excused for today.”

Once inside the blue and white cop car, he began to wonder what this was all about. Previously when the lieutenant had something to tell him, he either came to the house or called. Travis hadn’t been called downtown before except to identify the body. Probably it was nothing but more questions about the Dalroys or Reva.

But why couldn’t Miller have waited an hour or so? Travis began to feel just a wee bit edgy. “What is this about?” he asked Salter. “And why is it so urgent?”

“I think it’s about where your wife was found.”

“As I understand it, it was out in the country somewhere.”

“Yes, on a rural road ten miles south of town.”

“But why does the lieutenant want to see me?”

“Because, sir,” Salter said, “the Dalroys don’t own a car.”

Copyright (c); 2005 by Helen Tucker.