Scholar's Plot by Hilari Bell Page A

better.
    “‘D,’” he said. “And hammer, ‘A.’ But the D’s crossed out.”
    “There’s only one set of payments on this sheet,” I said. “Looks like D refused to pay. Here’s a quill pen, but the ‘PS’ has been crossed out too … and no payments at all. Professor Sevenson, by any chance?”
    “Benton didn’t say anything about … whatever this is. Scales, ‘M,’ 87? And ‘PB’… S 20, that’s a year, isn’t it? The 20th year of Stephan’s reign. Eight years ago. But what does the 87 mean?”
    “No idea.” I turned that sheet over and looked. “But you’re right, two sets of entries, and they run for just nearly eight years. It’s not the largest account, either. ‘AH’ has been paying for almost twelve years now. Though it looks like AH is just one person.”
    The A was a bit off too, with one longer leg and the cross stroke curling past the second leg. The string of numbers and letters after these initials was incomprehensible, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t hold back the words any longer.
    “You do realize what this means, don’t you?”
    “Master Hotchkiss was blackmailing these people.” Michael looked gloomy. “How sad for a brilliant man to stoop to such a thing. And why? You said yourself that any university would have hired him. This house is a fine one! He had no need to prey on other men’s secrets.”
    “It doesn’t have to be need,” I said. “Though he certainly spent the money. None of these sums are huge — not even Professor N’s, and he pays more than the 
others — but they’d add up nicely over time. At this point, I’m surprised the silverware was only plated. But blackmail is often as much about power as it is 
the money. And this demolishes your theory about 
the project being behind it. If Hotchkiss was a black-
mailer, that’s almost certainly why he was killed.”
    Which left me in charge!
    Michael looked even gloomier, but he rallied bravely. “Then why did someone plant that fake thesis, to frame Benton? The ‘PS’ was crossed out.”
    “Probably because Benton didn’t pay him,” I said. “Which might explain why he brought the forged thesis forward… It would take some nerve, to fake that dissertation, and then try to blackmail someone with it.”
    It wasn’t how blackmailers usually worked either. It was their victims’ knowledge of their own guilt that kept the money flowing.
    “If he tried to blackmail Benton, and revealed his secret when Benton wouldn’t pay, then your brother really does have a motive.”
    “But he’d have told me… No, this is Benton. Besides, he has an alibi. He was sitting with friends waiting for the lecture to start.”
    “That alibi only works if you assume Hotchkiss was on his way to the lecture when he was killed. And since he didn’t have the pass with him, we’re assuming that someone killed him earlier, and then tried to make it look like he was killed when the lecture was about to start. So they’d have an alibi.”
    “Then that lets Benton out,” Michael said firmly. “He was with me before the lecture started. We came onto the campus together, and he went into the lecture hall while I headed for the library. But even if he didn’t, Benton would no more murder a man than … than I would. In fact, I’d be more likely to kill than Benton.”
    For all his faults — and he had them — Michael wouldn’t kill anyone, even a blackmailer. On the other hand, one of those faults was to see the best in people, particularly people he cared about.
    Look who he’d picked to be his squire.
    “If he was with you, then he’s got an alibi for the time before the lecture as well,” I said. We didn’t know how long before the lecture Hotchkiss had been killed, but it wasn’t likely Benton could have sneaked away from Michael and Kathy long enough to commit a murder. And only a monster could have then gone back and pretended nothing had happened so well neither of them would suspect