Scholar's Plot by Hilari Bell Page A

invented it? What a terrible waste. Now I want to catch the killer even more.”
    Her mouth tightened. “You, and all the others who didn’t actually know… Well, a brilliant mind doesn’t have much to do with a pleasant personality, and that’s a fact.”
    “Working around here, you’d know that better than anyone,” Fisk agreed.
    “Hotchkiss wasn’t always brilliant, either,” she said. “He was originally a history scholar, like your brother, but he struggled to find a thesis. There was even doubt he’d graduate, but then…”
    “People often come up with interesting ideas in a field adjacent to their own,” Fisk said. “I remember my father saying…”
    Fisk, who almost never speaks of his father stopped, but she picked up the thread for him.
    “Professor Dayless, whose study is the mind, she says that not knowing anything about a subject lets you come at it from a fresh direction. But Hotchkiss… He also came up with the notion of getting third and fourth year scholars to write up summaries of books as part of their coursework — at least ten books per scholar per year, and credit if they did more. It let him catalog most of one of the largest libraries in the Realm in less than fifteen years, and other libraries are copying that, too. He’d finished with most of the collection, and was working on the stuff no one’s really interested in, like unpublished dissertations. That’s how he found … ah…”
    “This document my brother is said to have copied,” I supplied. “But Benton says he did no such thing. And if he didn’t, someone must have planted it for the librarian to find.”
    “And now he’s dead,” Fisk said. “Mistress Peebles, we’d like to take a look around Hotchkiss’ house. Do you have a second key, by any chance?”
    “Yes,” she said. “And no, I’m not giving it to you.”
    “Not even for Benton’s sake?” I said. “This university, ’tis my brother’s life. If he loses it, he has nothing.”
    “My Seymour was the same. But if I lose this job, then I have nothing.”
    “But what difference does it make if we look around the house?” Fisk persisted. “Captain Chaldon said the law already searched the place. And the servants will have to go in soon and clean up … everything.”
    “I should be so lucky. The maids are all saying they won’t go near the place, much less be scrubbing up anyone’s life blood. It’ll be days, maybe weeks … but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you in.”

    “Cheer up,” I said as I led Fisk down the hall. “’Twas not likely anyone would give up those keys. Besides, if there was something to be found in Hotchkiss’ house the law would have found it already.”
    And besides that, there was nothing left to do now except examine the forged thesis. Which should count as part of Fisk’s investigation, instead of mine.
    “I am cheerful,” Fisk said. “I learned what I wanted to know.”
    Before our quarrel, I’d have obliged and asked him what that was. As things stood I simply waited, and soon his need to boast won out.
    “Mistress Peebles has the keys we need.” He spoke softly, as we were still in the hallway surrounded by offices. “And a three-year-old could pick the lock on her door. All we have to do is wait till she goes home, pick up the keys, and we can let ourselves into Hotchkiss’s house while it’s still light enough to see. If we walk in openly, acting like we’ve got permission, there’s a good chance no one will question us. And if they do we’ve got the key. We’d probably have time to skin off before they find out we don’t actually have permission.”
    I’ve been involved with too many of Fisk’s plans to think things would go as smoothly as he assumed. But on these summer days the light lingered late, and 
besides…
    “If we’ve nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon, then you won’t have any objection to checking out that thesis, in the library.”
     

When he really