The Professor and the Puzzle Read online

  Iris shook her head. “The professors are a bunch of peace-loving bookworms. I can’t imagine one of them doing something like this. But the students?” She shrugged. “I think it’s possible. It is a competitive school. It wouldn’t be completely crazy to think that one of them might be determined enough to try and take out the toughest grader on campus.”

  I nodded. “Okay, let’s scope out the class and see what we find.” Picking up my bag from the floor, I started making my way out of the office when a painting on the wall behind the door caught my eye. It depicted a tall woman holding a bow, her gaze fixed on a white stag in the distance. Behind her, a huge crescent moon glowed in the night sky. It was a striking image that spoke of strength and solitude. The goddess’s face reminded me of a certain other woman, who I’d seen staring thoughtfully into the night. “Isn’t that—?”

  “Artemis,” Iris completed my thought. “Goddess of the moon. She’s the one that Dr. Stone was dressed up as for the gala.”

  “I thought so,” I said. “I wonder why?”

  Iris shrugged. “It makes sense to me. Artemis was probably the most fiercely independent of all the goddesses. She was so dedicated to nature and the skill of the hunt that she made Zeus swear that she’d never have to marry. She didn’t care about what anyone else thought. She just did what she loved.”

  “Huh,” I said. “That does sound a lot like Dr. Stone.”

  As we walked back out toward the quad, I wondered about the parade of gods and goddesses I’d seen at the gala the night before. How many others dressed up as a character that reflected themselves? If only I could look at a costume and see their true intentions within it. But even if I could, the gods themselves were anything but simple—anything but just purely good or purely evil. Even the goddess of beauty had a dark side. Even the god of death wanted love. No, I didn’t need a villain; I needed to find the person who’d want to see Artemis fall.

  The goddess of the hunt was being hunted—and I needed to find out why.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Know Thyself

  THE SKY OVER ORACLE COLLEGE was a fiery collage of oranges and reds as the sun began to set. Iris and I were walking across campus to sit in on Dr. Stone’s ancient philosophy class. The air had that telltale smell of autumn, a combination of earth and smoke. On the way, we passed by Dr. Brown, who looked even more handsome in regular clothes than he did in his Apollo costume. His brown hair was swept stylishly to the side, and his tortoiseshell glasses complemented his brown vest and slacks perfectly. He was chatting animatedly with a few students, who all seemed to hang on his every word. “A B average is fine for some, I suppose,” he was saying. “But to truly be great, you must aim higher. As Heracleitus once said, ‘Big results require big ambitions.’ You must not allow obstacles to prevent you from following your path to greatness.” The wide-eyed students nodded, some of them even taking notes.

  “Yeesh,” Iris groaned as we passed by. “Those girls act like he really is a god. Give me a break. I never understood the whole hot-for-teacher thing.”

  “I bet you’d change your tune if he was talking about the difference between chambray and denim,” I said with a smirk.

  Iris raised the back of her hand to her forehead and fluttered her eyelids dramatically. “Ohh,” she swooned. “Be still my beating heart!”

  Dr. Stone’s ancient philosophy class was in a huge, curved lecture hall inside one of the academic buildings on campus. There must have been at least a hundred seats, and they were rapidly filling up by the time Iris and I arrived. We entered at the top tier and nabbed two seats on the aisle, where I had a good view of the students in front of me. Guilt has many ways of expressing itself—in body language, tone of voice, choice of words. I wanted to make sure that if guilt showed its face, I’d be there to see it.

  “Look!” Iris said, pointing. “There’s Dr. Stone.”

  I gazed down toward the front of the class to see Dr. Stone striding into the room. Unlike when I’d seen her earlier, she radiated a commanding presence that caused the people in the room to fall quiet almost immediately. Students who’d been loitering in the aisles quickly took their seats, pulling out laptops and notebooks from their bags. Dr. Stone arranged her own papers on the podium and checked her wristwatch. My phone read 5:59 p.m.—one minute until the class began. As the time clicked over to six o’clock, I saw Dr. Stone clear her throat and face the class. “Good evening,” she intoned, her rich voice filling every crevice of the hall. “Before we begin, I have an announcement to make. Sometime this afternoon, my African gray parrot escaped from his cage in my office.”

  I gasped. Sophocles? But I’d just seen him a few hours ago. Poor Dr. Stone, she must be devastated. I watched her carefully, but whatever the professor was feeling at that moment, she was hiding it well.

  “He is a very smart bird, so it’s possible he unlatched the cage himself and left through the open window,” she added. Hmm, I thought. Could the missing bird have something to do with the threat against Dr. Stone? Perhaps he didn’t just escape. Perhaps . . . someone took him. I decided I needed to return to Dr. Stone’s office to search for clues.

  “Regardless,” Dr. Stone continued, “I’m asking all of you to please keep your eyes open on campus and let me know immediately if he is located.” She paused for a moment, looking down at her pile of papers, as if she might find her beloved pet within them. “He is . . . very valuable to me. So whoever returns him will be rewarded.”

  Then the professor cleared her throat and opened her three-ring binder with a snap of finality. “All right, then. Today we’ll be discussing one of the oldest maxims in ancient philosophy—”

  Just then the slam of a door interrupted Dr. Stone’s lecture, and a hundred heads swiveled to see who it was. A pale, gangly young man slouched into the front of the room, making a beeline for a single empty seat in the corner. But Dr. Stone’s clarion voice stopped him cold.

  “Mr. Bosco, how nice of you to join us.”

  The kid’s face turned pink almost instantly, and some of the students tittered. He started to sit down, but Dr. Stone stopped him once more.

  “Wait a moment, Mr. Bosco. I think you might be able to help me. I’m trying to introduce our topic for the day.” Reluctantly, the kid stayed standing, shifting from foot to foot as he waited for Dr. Stone to continue. “As I was saying, class, we’ll be discussing the ancient maxim that was inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: ‘Know thyself.’ Two words. Seems simple, yes?” Dr. Stone glanced at the Bosco boy, who nodded. “Ah, but those two words contain multitudes, and have been attributed to a dozen Greek sages and used again and again for thousands of years. So, what does it mean? Mr. Bosco?”

  The young man’s eyebrows furrowed in thought. “I guess it means it’s important to know what kind of person you are.”

  “Very good,” Dr. Stone said. “And why should that be so?”

  Mr. Bosco looked puzzled, but after a moment, he said, “If you don’t know what kind of person you are, you won’t make good decisions for yourself. Like, if you don’t know that you’re someone who hates crowds, you might decide to move to New York City and be really unhappy there.”

  “Indeed,” Dr. Stone said, pleased. “Or if you don’t know that you’re someone who tends to be tardy, you might end up being late to class three times in one week.”

  The young man blushed again and bit his lip in embarrassment.

  “Thank you for your gracious assistance with the lesson, Mr. Bosco. You may sit now.”

  “Wow,” I whispered to Iris as the young man hurriedly took his seat. “She’s brilliant.”

  Iris nodded in agreement. “She is. But not everyone appreciates her teaching style. She doesn’t take kindly to kids trying to coast through her classes. For all we know, any one of the students in here could be our culprit.”

  As Dr. Stone delivered her lecture, I scanned the room, looking for any sign of suspicious activity. My gaze zeroed in on a couple of young me
n a few rows down from where we were sitting. They were a few seats apart and one of them was trying to inconspicuously show the other something on his phone.

  “Mr. Wilcox, Mr. Rogers,” Dr. Stone said, her eagle eyes on the two young men. “I had thought Friday’s warning not to use your phones again during my class would have been sufficient, but I see I was wrong. Please bring your phones to the front of the classroom, I will give them back to you before class on Wednesday.”

  “What?” the blond kid asked, his palms upraised. “That’s crazy, Professor!”

  “Perhaps, Mr. Wilcox,” Dr. Stone said. “But this course is only for those students who take their studies seriously. And since you are insisting on behaving like high school students, it seems I must treat you as such.”

  The two young men were still for a moment, their faces slack in disbelief, before they walked to the front of the room and handed her their phones. I overheard the blond one mutter, “She’s not going to get away with this.”

  I looked at Iris to see if she’d heard him too. Her wide-open eyes told me she had.

  Dr. Stone continued the lecture as if nothing had happened. I noticed she liked to lean into the podium to emphasize certain points. Anyone familiar with her classes could assume she would use the balcony railing during her speech, I thought.

  Later in the period, I saw the guy named Rogers try to pass a note to his friend. I nudged Iris and she rolled her eyes in response.

  Not surprisingly, Dr. Stone saw it too. “Gentlemen, I hadn’t counted on your resourcefulness in the face of actually having to pay attention. I see you’ve resorted to the old-fashioned way. Well, I have had enough of these distractions in my classroom. You may both take an unexcused absence for the day. Good evening.”

  They boys stuffed their things back into their bags and scowled at the professor. As Rogers stood, I spied the note they’d been passing sticking out of his back pocket. Thinking fast, I turned to snatch the water bottle from Iris’s purse. “Can I borrow this?” I asked.

  “Um, sure,” Iris whispered. “Does sleuthing make you thirsty?”

  I didn’t answer. I was busy watching the two guys come my way up the aisle, and trying to get my timing right.

  Just as they were passing by, I knocked the bottle of water off my desk. It hit the floor and splashed all over the Rogers kid’s shoes. “Oh my gosh!” I whispered, wary of attracting the wrath of the professor myself. “Sorry, I’m such a klutz.”

  The young man sighed, aggrieved, and bent down to pick up the bottle. As soon as his pocket was exposed, I plucked the note from it and secreted it in my lap before he stood up again. “Here you go,” he muttered, handing the bottle back to me.

  “Thanks so much,” I said quietly, flashing him a smile.

  Once they were both gone, Iris leaned over to me. “Clever girl,” she whispered. “Now what does it say?”

  I held my breath and unfolded the paper.

  “Well, fiddlesticks,” Iris said.

  “It’s all Greek to me,” I quipped, and Iris shot me a dirty look.

  “Oh, ha. Very funny, Sherlock. I was hoping for an actual clue, but instead we got somebody’s homework.”

  On the paper were a few lines of text written in Greek. Which, given where we were, wasn’t so surprising. It looked totally innocuous, just like someone’s half-completed assignment. “Is it homework, or maybe an encoded message?” I said. Could it be that those two guys were planning something? What the Wilcox kid said about Dr. Stone “not getting away with” humiliating them sounded pretty threatening. I’d have to translate the note to find out for sure.

  “That’s it for today, class,” Dr. Stone was saying. “Please read chapters four and five on the Socratic method for Wednesday. Good night.”

  The students rose almost in unison from their seats and began chatting and gathering their things. “I need to speak with Dr. Stone,” I told Iris. “Why don’t you talk to some of the other students and see what they know about Wilcox and Rogers? It doesn’t sound like this is the first time they’ve had a run-in with the professor. See if you can get a little background on them.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Iris said, saluting. “I’ll meet you back at the mansion later tonight.”

  I made my way down the aisle to the front of the lecture hall, where Dr. Stone was packing her messenger bag with notes and binders. She looked up when I approached and chuckled. “Are you writing an unauthorized biography about me, Nancy, or are you just interested in the classics?”

  “The latter,” I said with a grin. “Although I would be interested in reading the former if someone were to write one.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” Dr. Stone said with a wink. “Now, what can I do for you?”

  “I was sorry to hear about Sophocles,” I said. The sparkle left the professor’s eyes almost instantly, and she looked back down at her bag, a few of her gray-white braids falling in front of her face. “I wanted to offer my help in finding him. I’ve got a lot of experience . . . locating missing things.”

  Dr. Stone quirked one eyebrow at that. “And how, may I ask, do you propose finding my bird?”

  “I’d like to come back to your office and look around a bit, since it was the last place he was seen. I may find clues there that will point us in the right direction.” Dr. Stone looked skeptical. “If there’s a chance it could help, isn’t it worth trying?” I added.

  “Appealing to pathos, are you, Nancy?” Dr. Stone sighed. “All right. Fine. Come to my office tonight at nine. I have a few late meetings before I’m done for the day.”

  I smiled and nodded.

  “But I’m warning you, Nancy—no mumbo jumbo. If you start talking about auras and crystal balls, we’re finished.”

  “No mumbo jumbo,” I repeated. “Got it.”

  At nine o’clock on the dot, I walked up to the classics building, alone. Only the lighted windows of the classrooms and offices inside pierced the deep blue night, and I pulled my cardigan tighter around me as a chill wind crept across my neck.

  Iris, who had some kind of club commitment that evening, had pleaded with me to take an escort, but I wouldn’t hear of it. “It’s okay,” I’d told her. “I can take care of myself!”

  Iris had looked unconvinced. “Uh-huh. I’ve heard how much trouble you get yourself into.” She shook one manicured finger at me. “Don’t make me call Bess and George on you, Drew! I know how stubborn you can be, and I’ll have both of them shouting in your ear if need be.”

  “Please don’t,” I sighed. “I promise you, Iris—it’s just a quick trip to Dr. Stone’s office, and then I’ll be back before you know it. I’ll text you when I get in.”

  “Fine,” Iris agreed. “But I’m not happy about it.”

  “Obviously,” I said with a grin.

  Now, a few hours later, I was opening the door to the building and stepping inside the empty corridor. It was utterly quiet. An anxious feeling prickled up my spine as I began climbing the stairs to the second floor.

  What are you getting all jittery about? I asked myself, my footsteps echoing in the open space. It’s just an empty building. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I took a deep breath and quashed the feeling, focusing on the task at hand. Dr. Stone is in her office, waiting for me, I thought. I doubt she’s afraid.

  But Dr. Stone’s office was dark.

  I tested the doorknob, and it was unlocked. Figuring she was just running late, I opened the door and groped along the wall for a light switch. After a moment or two without success, I remembered that there had been a banker’s lamp on the desk, and I made my way through the gloom to find it and switch it on. It didn’t illuminate the whole room, but it helped drive away the shadows enough that I could start investigating Sophocles’s cage. The first thing I noticed was the number of feathers on the floor surrounding the cage. There had only been a few this morning—now, little gray feathers were scattered in a wide radius around the cage. There was a struggle, I guessed. Birds didn’t
normally lose this many feathers that quickly, even if they were molting—a fact my childhood parakeet had taught me. I wondered why the normally neat Dr. Stone hadn’t cleaned up the mess, but then again, she’d been distressed and probably not behaving normally. Sometimes when people lose something they love, they’re hesitant to move anything from where that loved one last left it.

  Next, I looked at the latch on the door of the cage and noticed something else. It looked perfectly fine. No scrapes or scratches in the rubber coating on the bars. If Sophocles had engineered his own escape, there would be evidence of his sharp beak and claws at work here. It was just as I’d feared: someone—possibly the same person who’d sabotaged the balcony—was making another plan to hurt Dr. Stone.

  Suddenly a strange, screeching noise broke the silence. It seemed to be coming from outside and sounded something like, “So sauce on! So sauce on!” A thought struck me: Could it be Sophocles? It certainly sounded like a parrot, and I had already seen Sophocles talk. Maybe I was totally wrong about his being kidnapped, and he had returned home!

  I dashed to the window—it was slightly ajar so I pushed it all the way open. It sounded like Sophocles was somewhere below. Pulling my phone out of my pocket, I switched on the flashlight and shone it outside, leaning out as far as I dared.

  “So sauce on!” I heard again.

  Cooing, I leaned out a little further in hope of luring him up to the window. I still couldn’t see him. Maybe he’s afraid and hiding in the bushes, I thought.

  Without warning, the rug beneath my feet gave out. I lurched forward, my heart in my mouth, and my hands scrabbled for purchase in the open air. But it was no use. Before I could even draw breath to scream, I was falling.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Occam’s Razor