A Rare Murder In Princeton (3 page)

“You’ve had fun furnishing this house, haven’t you?”

“I’ m not near through,” said George. “I moved at break-neck speed after you said you’d stay here, and got the guest room finished, but everything else is still in a mess. Come see my room.”

George’s bedroom, which overlooked the backyard, was as bare as the study, with a bed, chest of drawers, and another full complement of unpacked cartons.

“It’s a perfect house,” said McLeod, ignoring the disarray.

 

THE NEXT WEEK passed in a whirl of getting settled. George left for work every morning before McLeod was up, and usually worked late. She seldom saw him, but she had plenty to do—finish unpacking at home, settle into her office at the university, and get reacquainted with the Princeton campus.

In the office of the Humanities Council in Joseph Henry House, Frieda, the administrator, welcomed her for her third visit to teach the class on writing about people.

“It’s good to be back,” said McLeod. “I love it that I get to return now and then.”

“ ‘Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return that we may look upon thee,’ ” said Frieda. “That’s from the Song of Solomon.”

McLeod had forgotten Frieda’s skill at producing a quotation for nearly every occasion.

“And now, I’ll take you upstairs,” said Frieda. The “offices” for visiting writer/teachers on the third floor of Joseph Henry House were not really offices, but cubicles with a work surface, shelves, a few drawers, and a file cabinet.

“We’ve given you the choice cubicle this time,” said Frieda.

It was indeed the choice cubicle, located by the window overlooking what one architect had called the “kaleidoscopic octagonals” of Chancellor Green Hall, once the Princeton University library, a remarkable building designed by a nineteen-year-old architect.

During the next few days, she got familiar with the university computer system and obtained a decal for her car from the parking office so she could park in the garage down near the hockey rink.

As she walked all over the campus, she admired the old buildings she knew from past visits and stood stock-still, amazed, before the new sculpture in front of the Art Museum. The sculpture consisted of twenty very tall—at least nine feet—headless, armless men standing on a low concrete platform. Walking up to her office from the garage, she had come upon the sculpture, Picasso’s
Head of a Woman,
which used to be in front of the museum. Now it stood below the I. M. Pei-designed Spelman dormitory.

Well, she thought, we had
Head of a Woman
and now we have twenty headless men. Why not?

One cold afternoon, she walked down to the brand-new Ellipse dormitory to see the Sol LeWitt painting on the arched ceiling of a tall passageway—and admired it wholeheartedly.

The cold weather made her think of knitting again, and she went out to the shopping center to buy yarn. She decided to knit George a sweater—she had made enough sweaters for her children, Rosie and Harry—and she picked out a beautiful gray wool and then selected a dark blue for doing some figures across the front. She would go all out, she decided. Surely, he would like a hand-knit sweater? The sales-woman assured her she could return the yarn if George didn’t like it. When George saw it, he did like it and was obviously pleased that she would knit him a sweater.

She asked George about the sculpture in front of the Art Museum. “Do people like it?” she asked.

“Older alumni hate it,” he said. “Young people like it. A Polish woman named Magdalena Abakanowicz is the sculptor. It doesn’t belong to the university—it’s on long-term loan from the parents of three alumni.”

“And the Sol LeWitt?” she asked. “Did he come out and do it personally?”

“It seems he doesn’t do any of the finished work anymore. He designs it and he has workers who actually produce the finished product.”

“It’s a very beautiful ceiling,” she said.

“Everybody likes that one,” George said.

She met her first class on Thursday and marveled again at how astonishingly bright Princeton students were—and at how they seemed impervious to the cold. While she bundled up in a shearling coat, a knitted cap that came down over her ears, a heavy muffler, and warm mittens, most of them drifted about in jackets and jeans as though it were Indian summer. If it got above freezing, a few wore shorts and one lad appeared one day in flip-flops.

She ran into people on campus she knew from her previous teaching stints and made dates for lunch and accepted invitations to dinner.

When she came home at night to the little house on Edgehill —nearly always empty—she thought of Jill Murray and her murder. She put off doing her laundry—the washing machine and dryer were in the basement where Jill’s body had lain for—how long? Days? Eventually she had to have clean clothes, so she went down the steps to the basement. She saw no stains on the concrete floor, and thought, Well, that’s one hurdle passed, and put her first load in the machine.

SHE DID NOT forget Nat Ledbetter. The first time she was in Firestone Library with time to spare, she went to the Rare Books and Special Collections rooms on the first floor. To get to the collections, you pass through an exhibition gallery, and McLeod paused at a permanent exhibit, behind a store-front kind of window, which looked like a stage set. It was a replica of the office of Jonathan Belcher, CAPTAIN-GENERAL AND GOVERNOR-IN-CHIEF OF THE PROVINCE OF NEW JERSEY FROM 1747 TO 1757, when it was a colony of Great Britain, according to a nearby plaque. The governor had given his entire personal library of 474 books to the little new College of New Jersey, along with two terrestrial globes and his portrait. Now the books that had survived the ravages of fire and time were lined up behind an eighteenth-century desk; his portrait (red faced and wearing a magnificently curled gray wig) hung on the wall beside the desk and one of the globes stood some distance from it. McLeod stared at this permanent exhibit, wondering what Governor Belcher would think if he knew that the tiny College of New Jersey had metamorphosed into the august institution known as Princeton University. Then she went past the gallery’s current exhibition, material drawn from George F. Kennan’s papers. Kennan, a Princeton alumnus, had designed the containment policy for the Soviet Union.

Finally, she found the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections and was eventually ushered into Nat Ledbetter’s office, where the splendor astounded her. The room was vast, lined with bookshelves full of books—they must be very “rare,” she thought—set in dark oak paneling, with heavy brocade curtains at the windows.

Nat stood up behind his big desk and greeted her warmly. “I’m so glad to see you. Sit down. I’d offer you some coffee, but drinks are not allowed in Rare Books.”

He still looked gray today, except that he had on a red tie, and beside that he just looked rosier. When Nat asked her if she had come to see a Trollope manuscript, she said yes, indeed she had.

“Let me see if Philip Sheridan is here,” he said. “I know he’d love to meet you. The Trollopes are part of the Sheridan collection . . .” He disappeared through a small door in the inner wall of his office and came back a moment later, beckoning to her.

“Philip is here and wants to meet you,” Nat said. McLeod followed him through another paneled room lined with bookshelves, into still a third book-lined room with two desks. A white-haired, beaked-nosed man in a pin-striped suit rose from behind the big desk and smiled at McLeod. He had the rosy cheeks of old age, but he was tall and straight. McLeod thought he must have been blond before his hair turned gray because aside from the rosy cheeks, his skin was pale and his eyes were blue.

“McLeod, this is Philip Sheridan,” said Nat. “He’s a great collector. And this is McLeod Dulaney—I told you about her. She’s a real Trollope fan.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” said Sheridan. “I’m a Trollopian, too.” He came around from behind the desk to shake hands. “This is Chester”—he waved at the young man at the smaller desk—“my assistant and the curator of the collection.” Chester stood up and smiled shyly. “Do sit down, Mrs. Dulaney,” Sheridan said. He ushered her to a large wing chair, and pointed to a smaller chair for Nat. “Which is your favorite Trollope?”

“I used to think it was the Parliamentary novels—all of them,” said McLeod. “But I’m reading
The Vicar of Bullhampton
now and it’s wonderful. I believe it’s my all-time favorite. I really do.”

“Oh, yes, that’s the one where the vicar tries to rescue the ‘fallen woman,’ ” said Sheridan.

“That’s right. And there are all these plots and subplots —the love affair between the squire and Mary, the murder of the farmer—it’s wonderful.”

“What edition are you reading?”

“What edition? Oh, you’re a book collector, so you
care
about the edition. It’s just a paperback I bought secondhand at Micawber.”

“I see. Then you’re not interested in books except for their content?”

“Some books are quite beautiful—I appreciate that. But I guess I do care mostly about the content. I wish I knew more about books as books. Are you interested only in first editions?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Some first editions are unobtainable. Shakespeare’s quartos, for instance, are no longer in private hands. But a first edition makes you feel closer to the author.”

“And a manuscript still closer?” said McLeod.

“Exactly. And you want to see a manuscript.” He spoke to the young man at the smaller desk. “Chester, would you fetch the manuscript of
The Eustace Diamonds,
please.”

“Oh, good, that’s one of the Parliamentary novels,” said McLeod. “I love them, because I covered the legislature in Florida and that gave me a taste of the parliamentary process.”

Chester disappeared through still another door and returned to lay a gray carton gently on the big desk. Sheridan moved the carton to a small table that he pulled up in front of McLeod’s chair. He opened the carton and looked tenderly at its contents. McLeod stood up as Sheridan lifted another box, this one dark leather, out of the carton; he opened the leather box, slid out the manuscript, and laid it in front of her. It was an enormous pile of paper, at least three inches thick. She lifted the first page—good, heavy, slightly textured ivory-colored paper, on which Trollope had written the novel’s title,
The Eustace Diamonds,
and below it, “Chapter 1.”

The rest of the page—both sides—was covered with Trollope’s handwriting in brown ink. McLeod sighed in admiration. She knew that Trollope had written ten pages a day, relentlessly, two hundred and fifty words to the page, none of it ever rewritten and all of it fully legible a hundred and thirty years later, with only an occasional word crossed out, an ink blot here and there, a smudge now and then.

She admired the manuscript silently and then looked up, smiled at Philip Sheridan, and said, “I find it strangely moving. Thank you so much. It’s an amazing experience—to look at what Anthony Trollope actually wrote.”

“We’ll make a collector out of you yet,” said Sheridan.

“I’m very grateful,” McLeod said. “To both of you.”

“Thanks, Philip,” Nat said and steered McLeod back to his office.

“That was so interesting, Nat. Tell me about the Sheridan collection. Who is he? Do the books and manuscripts belong to Princeton or to Philip Sheridan?”

“Philip Sheridan is from a tremendously wealthy old Princeton family. He went to Princeton and he’s always been a loyal alumnus. His father was something of a collector of Americana—he’s the one who bought the
Bay Psalm Book.
That’s the jewel of the Sheridan Collection.”

“What’s that?” asked McLeod.

“It’s the first book printed in America and it is extremely rare,” said Natty. “Philip is interested in Americana but he’s more of an Anglophile and he put together this incredible accumulation of British books and manuscripts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was my predecessor who got him to promise his books and manuscripts to Princeton. The books still technically belong to Sheridan, but in his will he leaves the collection to Princeton, along with a trust fund to pay for a curator and cataloger. In return, we house his collection for him now—it’s quite safe here, safer than it was in his home. And he paid for building those two rooms—they’re replicas of his own library. Everything in it is included in our catalog, and researchers have access to the collection. Researchers don’t work in his rooms, of course, but in the Dulles Reading Room, and staff members bring them the books they call for, just as they do for other books and manuscripts. The Sheridan Collection is heavily used by researchers, as a matter of fact.” He paused for breath. “Now for van Dyke. You can look in the Finding Guide for the van Dyke papers—it’s a kind of index.” He handed it to her.

McLeod, realizing she had to pay the price of holding a Trollope manuscript in her hands, dutifully looked at the Finding Guide, a large loose-leaf notebook that listed the contents of the collection box by box. Hmmm, she thought when she saw that the collection contained 179 boxes of the papers of three generations of the van Dyke family. Subject headings included things like CLERGY—UNITED STATES—19TH CENTURY—CORRESPONDENCE. It looked dismal.