Freaky Math Girl, Mr. Ribbons, and the Blood-Stained Bedspread

After the bodies had been removed, it was, once again, just a bedroom. The purple irises sat elegantly in their tall clear vase on the side table, towels were folded neatly on the writing desk, and the curtains were drawn in perfect pleats to let in the natural light.

But the stains on the bedspread gave it all away that this room had been used. Crimson red streaks, browning by the minute, stood out on the white sheets like blazes, upstaging the grand, gilded oval mirror on the far wall from the door that the matron of the house had taken careful efforts to plant as the room’s artistic focal point. She, herself, was now being toted away on a stretcher under similarly crisp white covers as those on the bed that used to be hers; There her slim, wispy body next to her husband’s stockier one; her long face next to his mustachioed one; their eyelids closed and faces covered for decency. They drew a procession behind them of just one: their maid, Matilda, whose face, buried in a black lace handkerchief, was reddened with rushes of tears and ghosts of horrible memories painted across her features.

Back in the deserted room, by the blood-spattered bed, the little town’s police captain watched the retreat of the ambulance, and the chaos unfolding in its wake, from the spotless windows with his hat in his hands. He ran a hand over his chin thoughtfully, and turned back to the cleanest bedroom there had ever been a murder. It must have been a murder, he was thinking. It must have. As wrong and as unnatural as it felt to accept it, if it were to be ruled suicide or anything else, he would have to start digging for evidence hard. In fact, this case was fairly open and shut. The trouble was, he didn’t want to believe it.

——— 

Because, at that moment, a little girl from Mrs. Struthers’ 5th grade was sitting in the back of a police van alone. She had only her teddy bear with her, Mr. Ribbons — because he wore two dashing ribbons, one red, one blue, around his neck like high fashion scarves. Clutching her bear, in her pinafore dress, and in almost all other respects, she looked like what she was: a 10-year-old child. In all respects, that is, but for her face, which, as it had been pushed into the shadows of the van under flashlight beams, the captain could suddenly see how adult it looked. How tired and wan — dark circles suggesting decades of fatigue, eyes dripping with deep-set sadness, and a mouth sat in a quietly mournful resting shape.

Now, as the van rattled along pothole-ridden Main Street, the girl was dreaming in numbers, as she often did. Her toes might tap out patterns in her sleep, or she might wake up with sums in her head. Faint traces of the first quadrant on a cartesian plane would sometimes linger in the air in front of her, like sunspots in her eyes.

She wasn’t such a genius or such a mastermind that this phenomenon was a symptom of something greater. No, rather, she just enjoyed her arithmetic lessons the best — especially when she had already, in ten minutes, scratched out the answers to the problems written on the board on the corner of her notepaper, and she could zone out for the rest of class.

As she sat in the van’s sterile, empty carriage, her left shoe was now tapping out a rhythm on the floor. When she was told — by a loud smacking through the thin metal wall that separated her from the driver’s and passenger’s seats — that she couldn’t do that, she began reciting the prime numbers in a low droning voice, her mind drifting.

When she was told she couldn’t do that, she discovered a patch of dust in a corner in which, she learned, she could trace equations with a wet finger. She carried on doing that, as no one could know what she was doing until well after she’d left because, just like at school, it was quiet enough that she could get away with it.

———— 

Back in the guest room, the captain realized, looking shamefully for ways to complicate the case with evidence to the contrary to the rumored, almost officially testified story, that there actually was something to explore. Why was he standing in the guest room?, he wondered. Or, he re-phrased it for the benefit of the more rigidly literal voice in his head, why was the murder in the guest room?

He strode across the hall, opening doors until he found the master bedroom. Where the victims should have been. Unless he was missing something. Perhaps, renovations were needed or being done, or… well, he was saved from coming up with any more ideas when, upon his dramatic, door-flinging entrance, he found the room plastered with poster paper covered in multicolored scribbles. Recovering from the immediate shock, the captain recognized the advanced arithmetic that was drawn in these rainbow hues and ridiculously uncoordinated fonts. His comprehension wasn’t fluent, but it was reliable enough. It was as if a unicorn’s sparkly math bomb had gone off and he was standing amongst the remains.

——— 

So it was true. And all the stories lined up. The only end left loose — and the little girl’s saving grace — was the question of motive. But to those inquiries, like to most of the events at the trial in the small, one-room courthouse, the girl said nothing but clutched Mr. Ribbons under one arm and doodled on a napkin. When she left the witness stand for the last time and the court and its audience, adjourned, were filing out the peeling double doors, the judge picked up the napkin she had left behind. He peered at it for a few moments from behind a pair of fragile reading glasses, before summoning the police captain with a bend of a finger.

“Does this mean anything to you?” Said the judge, when the captain arrived at the stand. Hand in his pockets, the captain stared down at the napkin, finding a messy string of equations in a girlish pink pen.