A Novel Death (27 page)

"They preserve them?"

"Yeah"

"You mean she could-" I didn't want Margaret dead, drowned. But I didn't want her vengeful and at large either. And I still had the book.

"They done on the beach?"

"Yeah. Packed up tighter than a bloody tick."

What? I pushed myself out of the plastic chair. "Can I go?"

Marselli remembered again that I was there. "Can you go? You mean get in your car and drive home? No, you can't go! You're in shock. You'd run that van right off the road!"

I stared at him hopelessly.

"I've already saved your life once tonight. I'll drive you. In your van. George will follow us."

George Reilly glared at me.

On the ride home from Montauk, I tried to stay awake. But the darkness was seductive, a velvet pillow urging sleep. I kept dozing off, waking to blackness. Most of the time, I didn't see any other cars. Around Shoreham, I jerked awake and told Frank Marselli, "She was really frightened of someone."

"Of the police. Getting arrested. There are things about her you don't know."

But I did. Becca Pym's husband, a top Hollywood cameraman, had been found dead in his garage from carbon monoxide poisoning eleven years earlier. She said he had been depressed and threatening to kill himself. His assistant claimed he had been about to leave her for a young actress. And he had strychnine in his system. The case had been headed for a Grand Jury with probable arrest when Becca disappeared.

But I said, "What doesn't make sense is her sawing through the ladder step. Margaret would never have ruined her own property; she was still paying for it. Did you find the saw in the trash? And if Margaret had done it, she would have at least chosen the right step."

He kept his eyes on the road.

Finally we were passing through the quiet streets of my neighborhood. Except for a yellow bug light mounted near a garage, everything was dark. People feeling calm and safe were sleeping in these houses.

Frank Marselli pulled the van into my driveway and we both climbed out. Reilly revved the navy Ford Taurus impatiently at the curb. But I held Frank with my eyes. There was something else I had to tell him, but my mind refused to disclose what it was.

"You okay?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"You have someone to call?"

"Sure." But I knew I wouldn't. I started to yawn, interrupted myself, and asked, "What time is it?"

He checked. "Three forty-two."

The Taurus engine raced angrily.

He put his hand on my arm. "Listen to me. If your friend did survive-which I doubt-and she contacts you, let me know. Immediately." He must have seen my overwhelming agreement, because he added, "Did she have a knife in there?"

"No. She was strangling me. If you hadn't broken down the door..." I wasn't ready to go there.

"When you started kicking, it seemed like a signal."

Thank God. "Just tell me one thing: If you didn't think someone else was involved in the bookstore, why were you giving Margaret police protection?"

"Police protection?"

"You were guarding her in the hospital."

A trace of a smile that I could just see from the streetlight. "That wasn't protection; that was surveillance. We had her prints from California. We needed to question her about Lily Carlyle and Mr. Singh."

George gave a long horn honk, exactly what you didn't do in my neighborhood in the middle of the night.

Frank dropped his arm, turned, and walked down the driveway. He climbed into the Taurus and it careened away, dislodging a sheaf of stones.

Rubbing my goose-bumped arms, I started up the gravel driveway. First I would take a hot bath. Then I would pour a glass of medicinal red wine and read something soothing-Remembrance of Things Past or the Bible. Then I remembered the package with the threatening doll.

Somehow I made it up the porch steps and collapsed across the cushions of the wicker settee. In retrospect, that sounds crazy. I was afraid of what I would find in the house, but was lying outside any safer? Perhaps I thought nothing else could happen. But dozing on and off, my cheek against the rough cushion, I kept replaying the events of the night. If I hadn't gone out there ... but Margaret already had her escape route planned. She knew the police might arrive any time. Except that then it wouldn't have been my fault.

Would she really have pressed the life out of me? She had accused me of being a spy for the police. And people under pressure did unthinkable things.

When I woke for the last time in early daylight, I was shocked by the night before all over again. But I was no longer afraid to go inside my house. Daylight shrinks fear into scraps. Now I was more worried about dog walkers and runners seeing me. They might think I had had a heart attack and rush to help. More likely they would think I had passed out in a drunken stupor. Poor thing, she hasn't been the same since he left.

But it actually took the voice of my next-door neighbor, Sam, talking cheerfully to their golden retriever, to make me push up dizzily from the settee and search for my keys. Locking the front door behind me, I climbed the stairs and started running a bath, and then came back down and made coffee. I poured it into the largest mug that I could find, a Laurel Burch creation of two brilliantly colored cats that Margaret had given me. Margaret. Then I went upstairs and submerged myself.

A kaleidoscope of images: Margaret listening sympathetically to my wails about Colin moving out, never confiding that she had faced the same thing. Margaret and her beautiful ordered life had floated slightly above other mortals. She could have admitted that she was still learning about books too instead of letting me believe she had been doing it all her life. It would have changed our friendship, made it richer and more equal. But she hadn't wanted that.

By the time the water cooled off and my coffee cup was empty, I had focused on four questions. What had happened during the time Margaret and I were having coffee to make Amil so angry? Who had attacked me in the bookshop, sent the e-mail messages, and left the mutilated doll? Who had killed Amil and stuffed him in the basement closet, and then posed Margaret under the ladder? Where had Little Black Sambo come from?

Big questions. All I knew for certain when I went in search of clean clothes was that Margaret and Amil had not been physically involved. Her uneasiness at seeing Amil talking to me in the bookshop had not been about jealousy. She was no pathetic spinster seduced by his charm. She had been married, for God's sake-and maybe even murdered her husband.

Dressing in striped capri pants and a plain navy T-shirt, I wove my hair into a single braid. My black flowered dress lay like a dead animal on the floor. I knew I would never wear it again.

Start with Shara Patterson, my instinct told me. But when I reached the student house and rang the bell, no one came to the door. I had a flash of fear that she had disappeared back into the vastness of India, taking some answers with her. The idea of Amil rising from the dead and spiriting her away did not seem much stranger than the staid Margaret Weller plunging into the ocean to escape from the police.

Shara had to be home. Finally I walked along a cement side path to the backyard and looked over the edge of a white picket fence. A flash of movement. Shara was standing at an old-fashioned rotary clothes hanger pinning up multiple pairs of men's jockey shorts. Americanized today, she had on a plain white T-shirt and navy shorts. Billy was playing with a stack of plastic blocks on the neat, uninspired cement patio. When she saw me, I couldn't tell what she was feeling. But she moved to open the gate latch.

We faced off on the benches of a redwood picnic table.

"Russell has a lot of underwear."

"Oh, that isn't Russell's only. It is Devin's too. And the others."

"You do everyone's laundry?"

She lowered her eyes primly. "They work very hard."

Give me a break.

"I guess you do all the cleaning too."

Shara nodded.

"But aren't you a graduate student too?"

"Me?" She looked incredulous.

"But how did you get here then?"

"Russell brought me."

For a dizzying moment I thought she had said Russell bought me.

"Oh. Did you meet in India?"

She traced her fingernail in one of the table's ridges.

I didn't have time to be tactful. "Don't tell me it was one of those Internet sites!" A colleague of Colin's, unpleasant as a scrappy little terrier, had imported a bride from Vietnam-with the understanding that she would keep house, pleasure him unceasingly, and never answer back. As far as I knew, she did.

Shara glared at me. "What do you know about it? They hate girls in Bangalore! They put girls in those houses; they sell them to farmers. Because they killed the girl babies, there are no brides for men."

"I wasn't criticizing you. But a girl as beautiful as you ..."

She waved that away. "My family had no money! So I came here. And now I'm an American slave."

"But was Russell always such a bully? Or did it start when he found out you were going to leave him?"

She stared at me, mouth open, as if I had morphed into some kind of fortune-teller. And then tears began to run down her face and onto the table, darkening the cedar. She lowered her head on her arms and sobbed.

I let her cry.

Finally she raised her head. She brought her heavy braid around to the front, clutching it with both hands. "Why did Amil have to die? He was going to take me home, me and Billy."

"But-" I looked down at the beautiful little boy, now squatting and patting the grass energetically with a summer-tanned arm, stared at the reddish-gold glints in his hair. Russell would never have let him go.

"Amil had to go back; he lost his student visa when he wasn't in school. But it was okay, his family is rich. They live in Lahore."

Lahore? And then I was seeing the shape of another truth. A lesson from Colin, a memory of the early days when he still brought slides home from digs. There would be a terra-cotta glaze on the screen at first, other unidentifiable colors, blurred nonsense. Then as he turned the focus knob the picture would straighten into recognizable shapes. You knew what you were seeing and where you were.

"Little Black Sambo," I said. "It was Anvil's book."

She reared back.

"You know about that?" I pressed.

"No! He said never to tell. A silly story, about tigers" But she put her chin in her hand, her fingers over her mouth, demonstrating that she would not say another word.

But there were things I needed to know. "You don't have to talk about it. Just shake your head yes or no, okay?"

Her eyes stared back at me, beautiful and lost.

"Did Amil give it to Margaret, the woman in the bookstore?"

She shook her head.

"But-did he sell it to her?"

Now she nodded.

So that was that.

"But he had to get it back, or he couldn't go home!" Shara blurted out. "She gave him money for it, four hundred dollars to fix his car. She said she would hold it for him. But then his father sent him money, a lot of money, and she wouldn't give it back!" The words would not stay inside. "She said she didn't have it anymore. But it was a family treasure, a, a-"

"Heirloom?"

"Yes! It was from his grandmother's mother; she knew the woman who wrote the story. Perhaps she worked for her."

No wonder Margaret had not mentioned her find to me.

I looked across the perfect square of backyard, a lawn that would have met with Colin's approval. So the book did have a provenance. Margaret had recognized it as a first edition and of value, especially as it was signed, and stamped as a rare author's proof. But then, using her skill as an artist, she decided to gild the lily a bit, dress the book up to increase its value.

No real bookseller would ever do that.

More words tumbled out. "When the lady left the shop, Amil found the book right in her purse-all ruined! She wrote other things in it, so the book was not for his great-grandmother anymore. He was so upset, he came home and said, `How can we go back?' And I told him he should buy the book anyway. But Russell heard. And then he knew. And Amil had been his best friend. They started screaming!" She put her hand to her mouth as if she could not speak about that either.

"That's when they ran out and got in their cars?"

No answer.

We sat in the early summer morning, Shara looking beyond me to the brightly colored underwear on the line, hanging as limply as the dispirited flags of many countries. Was she seeing her future?

And what was I seeing? Another young woman, also pretty, who had miscalculated too. I had been less innocent, a thousand times more privileged, when I thought it was adventure calling to me.

"Russell says he's going to take Billy away," she wept. "He says I'll never see him again."

Reaching across the table, I stroked her arm. "He can't. We'll think of something. I have to do something now, but we'll figure it out."

She looked at me with the hopefulness of the young.

I drove back home and went to my answering machine. Pushing the PLAY button, I listened to and deleted several old messages. Then I opened the plastic lid to remove the tape, hesitated, and then closed it. Unplugging the entire machine, I put it in a white plastic Stop & Shop bag.