“Lionel.”
“Graves?” Liam frowned. “How? Will that even work?”
“I guess we’ll find out.” She’d heard Gabe. She should be able to hear Lionel too. And if she couldn’t she’d just have to get Gabe to help.
“Okay, next question. Why are we calling Graves?” Liam asked.
“I need to ask him why this former student hates him enough to want to kill him. And if he can think of any reason why this boy would accuse him of being a thief. It could be the motive. In fact, I know it is. I can feel it.”
Liam’s brows rose. “All right. Go ahead. Make the call. This should be interesting.”
Natalie sniffed out a laugh. He wasn’t wrong.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Natalie learned one thing on the phone call…two things, actually.
First, she could hear other ghosts on the phone besides Gabe, which was really nice to know. And second, a person should never even mention the word plagiarism to a published professor.
Not even when posed as a question.
All she had done was ask Lionel if there was any reason his TA’s boyfriend would accuse him of plagiarism when he exploded.
“What do you mean? Who is this person?” Lionel demanded.
“Your teaching assistant Mia’s boyfriend. Peter something. He’s graduated now, but he was one of your students recently. Last year maybe?”
The line went quiet for long enough Natalie said, “Lionel?”
“I don’t know if he’s still here, but the call didn’t drop if that’s what you’re worried about,” Harper, acting as Lionel’s living assistant, told her.
“He’s still here,” Gabe said.
It had taken a bit of coordinating to set up this phone call. A text to Harper, followed by a call back from her where Natalie explained she needed to get Lionel on the phone. That required Harper enlisting Gabe and Millie’s help, the only two ghosts who would be able to communicate to Harper that they’d found Lionel and he was there and ready for the call.
The whole convoluted process was overwhelming and amazing all at once. Natalie was speaking to the dead in New York from Connecticut. Thank you, iPhone.
She heard Lionel clear his throat. “I’m still here. I was thinking.”
“And?” Natalie prompted.
“I do remember this boy. I don’t think he was in my class last year. It was two years ago, I believe. He submitted his end of term paper, which would count for twenty-five percent of his grade for the semester. It was beyond a shadow of a doubt not his own work. It was written like nothing he had ever submitted before. I strongly suspected he’d purchased the paper. Possibly from a past student of mine. Or stolen it directly from a publication he found in the library. He denied it, of course. Vehemently. Swore it was his original idea. His words. But I knew better.”
“Really? How?” Natalie asked.
“Because it was a topic I had taught in my class years ago. A subject I’d written a paper on a decade ago. It was published in a lesser known publication, but I recognized it immediately as my own. Right down to some of the turns of phrase. Not the entire thing, of course. There were some changes, but a good portion of it were my words, almost exactly. And I can say that with confidence because I’d reviewed that paper more than once recently as part of my research for Graves’ Guide to the Prominent Founding Families of Upstate New York,” Lionel explained.
“Your newest book release,” Natalie breathed. “Lionel, this could be it. The motive for murder we’ve been looking for.”
She spun to look at Liam, sitting in the driver’s seat, watching and waiting more or less patiently for her to catch him up on the other side of the conversation that he couldn’t hear. She supposed Harper felt the same. For both of their benefits, she recapped Lionel’s revelation.
“Lionel says the final paper Peter submitted for Lionel’s class was plagiarized from an article he published ten years ago.”
Liam frowned. “I don’t know. I mean think about it. If you knowingly steal something from someone and they call you on it, would you really plot to murder them a year later? Something doesn’t feel right.”
Harper said via speaker phone. “The boy obviously needs help. Should we really be looking for a logical motive?”
“The police and the district attorney will be looking for one,” Liam reminded.
