A Fugitive Truth (15 page)

“That’s quite an evaluation,” I said idly. I needed to be thinking about my day’s work on Madam Chandler’s diary, not the quirks of my colleagues as assessed by friends.

“That’s her job, she’s in the field and she was reviewing the book for the
Times Literary Supplement
,” Harry answered.

I looked up, surprised.

Harry continued, polishing his glasses carefully. “Danielle was so unsettled, she asked not to do the work on it. The guy who finally did the review loved it, though. Still. Personalities differ in person and print, don’t they?”

They certainly do, I thought.

Harry continued. “Anything I can get for you?”

“Just the diary, thanks. Let’s see what surprises Madam Margaret has for me today, though frankly, after the morning I’ve had, I don’t know how much more I can take!”

“Sorry, Dr. Fielding, time!”

I was so engrossed I could barely remember where I was. Sasha had bustled in to collect Margaret’s web of intrigue from me at the end of the day. I glanced up at the clock and was startled to see that it was four forty-five.

“Oh, you can’t!” I pleaded. “I’m right in the middle of the trial!”

“Trial? Who was on trial? You make it sound like you’re reading a romantic thriller!”

“Madam Chandler! And get this, she was accused of murdering the Reverend Blanchard! I flipped through the Stone Harbor town history this morning and found a brief reference to it. It turns out that the dates of the most heavily encoded entries correspond with the dates of the trial!
Her
trial! All I know so far was that she was eventually acquitted, but before that, some townspeople were even hinting that there was witchcraft involved!”

Sasha gasped in astonishment. “But wasn’t her husband…?”

I nodded. “One of the presiding judges. He apparently had such a reputation for honesty that the people refused to allow him to step down when he asked. He was afraid of not being impartial enough. They’d only been married a few months.”

“How horrible,” she said. “But it’s exciting too! I’ll have her letters ready for you by the end of the week—maybe they will help. Thing is, I didn’t see anything in them about a trial,” she added apologetically.

“Well, at this point, anything would be a help. Jeez, I know so little of what was going on with her! Besides the work I’ve already done at home—which didn’t mention any of this—I’ve only got this poky town history to work with.” I gestured to a frayed reference book next to the diary. “It’s one of those town bicentennial things, from about 1850, and it’s heavily biased—you know, Stone Harbor firsts and hoary ancestor worship. What’s more important is this other diary, from about a century later. The writer records an anecdote that her grandmother told her about the trial. It seems the records of the trial were suppressed, though. Is there any way I can get hold of the court records to check?”

“Massachusetts Docket for the Exeter County Court District, 1700 to 1750,” Sasha said promptly. “We’ve been trying to acquire one for years, but the supplemental copies, like the one you need, are very hard to come by. Harry’s been driven to distraction trying to find a copy of the original edition, but we can get one through interlibrary loan for you. If I call right now, it’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Great, thanks. I’m just surprised you haven’t got it, you’ve got everything else.”

She laughed. “Harry treats it like a personal affront; last time one was available, we didn’t have the funds for it. And since we got the Whitlow endowment—”

“Ah,” I said. “As in Director Whitlow?” Suddenly, a lot of things were making sense.

“That’s right. His brother.” Sasha looked around as though the mere mention of the name would bring the man himself. “Since we got that money, there’s not been one to be seen: If you ever want to see fireworks, just mention it—Harry becomes a bear at the very mention of it. You just keep plugging away with the diary and the letters, and the court records will be here before you know it.”

I began to back up my work for the day and shut down my computer. “It’s difficult, to keep calm and work methodically, even though I already know the outcome. I had no idea about the trial,” I said. “There are only hints in this book, and until I crack the code, there’s no way of knowing what Margaret was going through. I can tell her handwriting is changing, the quotidian descriptions are shorter and shorter, as though she had only the strength to conceal her feelings so far, and no further. She was in big trouble, I think.”

Sasha frowned, and I imagined that a similar frown sent all the warriors of Greece loading into their ships for Troy. “But why write a
diary
in code?”

“They weren’t necessarily private, the way we think of them today,” I explained. “They could have been records of historical events, they might have been more an ongoing soul-search. Some parents kept them to show their children how to live a virtuous life, some kept them to record a history of the family. And Justice Chandler would have been well within his rights to demand to see his wife’s journal.”

Sasha shuddered. “I’ve always heard that he had a reputation for being cold and heartless. That his was a stony sort of justice.”

I shook my head. “I get that too, Sasha, but from the town history, not the diary. Margaret doesn’t write much about him, but when she does, it’s as though she’s learning about a respectable stranger. She’s in awe at first, then later you start to see moments of fondness occasionally, and then some very sentimental language—Margaret was clearly falling in love with her husband. But when the trial starts, all references to Matthew disappear. Into the code, I guess.”

“Imagine sharing a bed with the man who might hang you!” she breathed, then crooked her finger. “I hate to do this, but it’s past time for closing.”

“You’re such a stickler,” I teased. I regretfully handed her the book.

Sasha took the book and sighed mournfully. “You’re not the only one who thinks so.” She seemed to get caught up in a fog of melancholy.

I prompted her. “Sasha?”

“Oh.” She sighed again, coming back to the present. “Harry and I had a disagreement this morning—”

I remembered their argument ending with Sasha slamming the car door down by the gate.

“—and well, you know we’ve been having trouble over the records from the last librarian—things sold and not recorded in the accessions. Well, I say call up the former librarian and ask him what his system was so we can find the missing books and papers. Check the accounts against what he says. Makes sense, right?”

I nodded.

Sasha threw her hands into the air. “Harry won’t bother; he says that it will all get sorted out with a little more time. I can’t blame him for being reticent, really. The former librarian was friends with Mr. Whitlow and no one wants to bother
his
friends. Jobs like this are scarce as hen’s teeth, and there are rumors of cutbacks, you know?”

I did know, I thought; Director Whitlow had told me so himself.

“I know I want to keep my head down; and I’m in no financial state to try and buck the system. But it’s such a little question.” Sasha shook herself. “You know, I believe you’re trying to distract me so you can have more time with Madam Chandler, but it won’t work! Shoo, Dr. Fielding, you can come back tomorrow morning!”

When I got back to the house, Kobrinksi’s unmarked car was parked out front, and Detective Kobrinski was just about to ring the bell.

“Good timing,” she said. “You can let me in, and we’ll start solving mysteries. Is Jack Miner in yet?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We can have a look.”

Jack wasn’t watching television in the parlor, so we went to knock on his door. As we climbed the stairs, I decided it was time for me to get some answers.

“Did Faith drown?”

“Yes.” The detective paused, one hand on the railing. “But not in the Shrewsbury stream.”

I stopped in mid-step. “So she was moved there after? Was there any evidence by the stream?”

“Hard to say. There was a lot of disturbance from everyone traipsing down the bank—”

I bridled, but kept my mouth shut.

“—and you said that Gary Conner moved the deceased, that didn’t help either.” A thought struck Detective Kobrinski. “Could you see for sure that he removed anything from the crime scene?”

“I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like it. He was being pretty rough with the…with Faith.”

She thought it over. “Her handkerchief was inside her pocket, but it was muddy, like someone had pulled it out and then stuffed it back in. And I think there’s something missing from her room. And I’m not really certain why her body was moved to the stream.”

“Maybe the murderer was trying to hide it?”

“Didn’t do a very good job, did they?” the detective said with a flash of black humor. “You found her less than eighteen hours after she died. That’s a guess, by the way, based on degree of rigor mortis; we can’t be any more accurate because of the cold temperature of the air and water. But why not dump her in the woods in back of the library? No one ever goes there. Why not remove her from the premises altogether?”

“Not enough time?” I suggested.

Detective Sergeant Kobrinski furrowed her dark brow. “Could be. The way I figure it, either the perp was trying to dump the body in the stream to wash away any trace evidence—very efficient, by the way—or he or she was trying to make it look like Ms. Morgan drowned there in the stream. That’s a possibility. But why not throw her whole body in?”

I thought over my newly acquired, grotesque insight into death by drowning. “Did you find anything in her lungs?”

“I’m not at liberty to say at the moment,” she said abruptly as we reached the top of the stairs. “Which is Jack’s room?”

I led the way, but there was no answer to our repeated knocking. The detective looked frustrated, but I pointed out that it was still early yet and maybe Jack had gone into town to meet her.

“I’ll call and check,” she said. “But just so’s not to waste the trip, let’s take a look in Ms. Morgan’s room. You knew her the best of anyone—”

“I knew absolutely nothing at all about her,” I answered resentfully.

The detective frowned again, but took a key and opened Faith’s room across the hall. “It’s been processed, so you don’t need to worry about disturbing anything. I’m looking for something in particular; let’s see if you notice what I did.”

Smothering my annoyance with the policewoman’s games, I looked around the room, not furnished too much differently from mine. Clothes, tailored to an extreme degree, still expensively perfumed, hung in the closet, with shoes lined up as if for military review beneath them. Books organized by subject were in ranks on the bookcase, all of the bindings exactly one inch from the edge of the shelf, just like the ones Faith had kept on the top of a Victorian drop-front desk. The papers on the work were all lined up at right angles to the edges of the desk.

Unlike my room, however, there were no comforting piles of papers and books and scraps of notes left hither and yon for discovery and inspiration. No heaps of clothing on the floor and all of Faith’s underthings were carefully folded and put away according to type. She had been a person with a high degree of interest in order. A fine layer of dust had settled over everything, only noticeable because of the uniformity of the blanket, presumably only accumulated since last Wednesday night. My room had little patches cleared away where I needed a clean surface, leaving everything unevenly coated.

Something prompted me, and I moved over to the old desk and opened the drop front.

“There’s nothing in there,” Kobrinski said, leaning against the closet door. “Just some Shrewsbury stationery. All of her work was sorted into the files and on her desk.”

Looking at the books, I recognized only the Foucault among the secondary sources, and aside from battered annotated copies of the works of Cooper, Rowson, and Irving, there was no modern or recreational fiction to be found anywhere. There was a gap quite noticeably left on one side.

“That’s where her diaries were,” the detective supplied when she saw me pause. “We’ve taken them to the lab and have been going through them. Absolutely religious about keeping them, every day. They end about two months ago.”

“What are they about?”

“Everything. I wish she had written one during her stay here,” Kobrinski grumbled. “That would clear up a lot for us, the way she wrote. I get the impression that the person who wrote them was a different one than the person all of you knew. It’s…” She shook her head. “cold—”

I thought that assessment was spot on, myself.

“—but you’ll have to look at them and tell me.” She traced a pattern going through the carpet with a toe.

“So why did she stop?” I asked. I closed the desk.

She shrugged. “Most of it was about her recovery, after her suicide attempt. You wouldn’t think that someone would be quite as…analytical…about themselves. Almost like it was about someone else. I don’t know. Maybe she figured she’d done all the work she could and was moving on.”

I arched a disbelieving eyebrow and Kobrinski shrugged again. “The last entry is on the last page of the last notebook,” she said. “Sort of makes me think that there should be another one.”

I nodded. “Yeah, just look at this room. You’d think she’d keep on with something as disciplined as a diary, especially since she brought the others with her. Did you look for another volume?”

The detective nodded and reached for a Tums. “All the usual places, between the mattress and boxspring,
in
the mattress and boxspring, in the grate, all over. I tried to think like her, I tried to think paranoid, I tried to think scared—perhaps she was already afraid for her life before she was murdered. But we found nothing. I wondered if it wasn’t taken from her the night she was murdered.”

“Well, we’ll never find that out until we get the murderer, or at least know who it is,” I said. Who would want her dead? I asked myself. I didn’t know enough yet.

“There’s only so many places in this room a book like that could be, and be hidden,” Kobrinski muttered. “It must have been taken from her.”