Read 4 - Stranger Room: Ike Schwartz Mystery 4 for Free Online Page B

to be patient. She needed time, she’d said. She had a career to consider. And now, Ruth’s future at Callend College might be protracted or curtailed. Who knew? She had offers—some very good ones and the rumored winds of change to a coed campus might be just the thing to blow her right out of town. As for his career, he was the sheriff and he was comfortable with that, but he thought of it only as something he did, something he enjoyed, but not something he needed, not a career, not a future. He didn’t need the money or the aggravation, either. Wait and see, he thought. He imagined he heard Ruth’s clock strike the quarter. The clock tower atop the main building began to bong at the same time and drowned out any possibility of hearing anything at all.
    He always parked the cruiser near a clump of old azaleas at the end of the driveway, but there was no mistaking the obvious. The black and white paint scheme and shield on the door screamed for attention. The department was due to trade two of its oldest vehicles and he decided then that he would have one of them delivered unmarked. It wouldn’t fool everybody but it might take some of the heat off. Besides, every sheriff’s department needed at least one unmarked car.

Chapter 7
    Ruth dug her heels into the carpet and propelled her swivel chair backward onto the oak flooring and over to the window. She watched Ike stroll down the walkway toward the clump of azaleas where he parked his patrol car. Somehow, he’d arrived at the bizarre notion that if he parked it there it would be less noticeable. She sighed and rolled the chair back to her desk. Papers were strewn across its surface. She really needed to get to work. God only knew if the rumors about accepting men at Callend were true, but her faculty needed to be calmed down. What they did not know, but she’d been told, was the rumors included a possible merger with Carter Union College—an all male school short on space and long on endowments. It would be a perfect fit. Callend’s enrollment dropped dangerously after the removal of the Dillon Art collection, previously stored on the campus. As it formed the backbone of the school’s art department, students who might have enrolled at Callend drifted elsewhere. CU needed facilities; Callend needed financial security. There could be only one president of the combination. And if all the rumors were true, she might soon find herself in the job market. She kept a file of offers from other institutions in her lower right-hand drawer. One or two of them might still be available. Who knew?
    Ike hadn’t said a word about their long weekend in Toronto in January. Then, neither had she. Was all his talk about clocks just a subtle way to remind her, or maybe just a Freudian thing? Perhaps she’d read way too much into a simple conversation. She closed her eyes briefly—a long blink. He’d told her in Canada that he’d wait as long as needed and that was his last word on it. Maybe at the A-frame tonight, at his hideaway in the mountains, maybe then they could talk and…She squeezed her eyes shut, hard this time, to hold back the tears. In frustration, she hammered the desktop with her hand. In doing so, one of Agnes’ newly sharpened pencils somehow managed to stab the fat part of her palm.
    “Ow! Agnes,” she yelled, ignoring the intercom, “do we have any band-aids?”
    Now, at least, the tears wouldn’t provoke questions.
    ***
    Five miles away, Jonathan Lydell stood motionless at his desk. He pulled the clock winder from his pocket and looked at it as if for the first time. He let it fall to the desk top, then, a frown on his face, swept it into an open drawer. Had the sheriff seen anything out of the ordinary? It would take a fair intelligence to unravel a locked room murder and he doubted that the sheriff, the son of a hack Jewish politician, possessed that capacity. He hoped not. Once he established Bellmore as a tourist attraction, a second unsolved murder