Cold and Pure and Very Dead (15 page)

“Lover,”
I mused.

I hadn’t thought about that.

A
utumn was
more advanced in New Hampshire than in Massachusetts: along mountainous I-91, maples, oaks, and birches blazed scarlet and gold against a backdrop of giddy sunshine and sober evergreens. I pulled the Subaru up in front of the Stallmouth College campus, across from the elegant Stallmouth Inn. The austere college buildings, cut stone with granite pillars, stood back from the street behind a meticulously tended lawn. Students sat cross-legged on the grass or wandered across the main street of town, oblivious to traffic. A gray-haired runner laughingly dodged a young skateboarder. The runner looked familiar: wildly curly shoulder-length hair, broad shoulders, extremely fit physique, long muscular legs, all set off to perfection by a threadbare blue Princeton T and black cotton-knit running shorts. I’ve seen that guy somewhere, I thought briefly, but couldn’t put a name to him. I frowned at him for a second, then turned my attention back to the purpose at hand.

I’d been to Stallmouth before, for an academic conference on Civil War writers, but this time I was in Mildred Deakin’s town to take a walk on the town side of the town/gown divide. This was the side instinctively familiar to me, the working-class side of the tracks where Bernice and Lorraine Lapierre, Mildred Deakin’s foster mother and sister, had lived.
Oblivion Falls
had been
based on the scandal of Lorraine’s pregnancy and death, or at least I assumed it had, but now it seemed that Mildred Deakin had been involved in an illicit sexual affair of her own. Her lover could have been from anywhere, I supposed, Stallmouth or Manhattan—or any nook or cranny in between. But small towns have longer memories than major metropolitan areas, and it would be useful to ask a few questions of the people who had known her back then. And in New England towns, working-class people tended to stay put. If the roots of Marty Katz’s murder did go back as far as the birth of Mildred Deakin’s child—or even to the death of Lorraine Lapierre—I might be able to dig them up here.

Sophia Warzek was with me. At dinner Thursday night, I’d told her Mildred Deakin’s story—to distract her from her own woes. Sophia had been fascinated, and she knew the New England small-town turf even better than I did. Besides, I wanted the company. The downside of my semester’s research leave was that I was spending far too much time alone—except, that is, when I was hanging out with suspected murderers and homicide cops.

Across from the wide campus common, on the sidewalk in front of the white brick Stallmouth Inn with its wide old-fashioned porches, a reggae band played Bob Marley tunes. The band was composed of one African American girl and four white wannabee-African American girls, all in scruffy dreds, multiple earrings, midriff-baring halters, and ragged pants. I looked over at Sophia. “How many of those Jamaican lassies do you suppose hail from Scarsdale?”

“All but the one from Beverley Hills.” She crinkled her face up into a mock-sour expression, and I laughed. Getting away from Enfield seemed to be good for her.

“So, my dear Watson,” I asked, “what do we do now?”

“Just cruise,” she answered. “We’ll know the neighborhood we want when we see it.” I drove slowly up and down the residential streets until, after four or five blocks, dignified white Victorian and Greek Revival homes belonging to college administrators and tenured professors gave way to small frame houses, asphalt-shingled in tones of pale green and blue. These modest places with their fifteen-by-twenty lawns were most likely the homes of college custodians, groundskeepers, secretaries—and assistant professors. On a farther street, where the houses met the sidewalks without even the pretense of a yard (cafeteria workers), a neighborhood coffee shop caught my eye.
GRACIE’S
. I glanced at my companion again and raised my eyebrows questioningly. She nodded. I pulled over to the curb and parked. Perhaps the clientele of a coffee shop in Stallmouth, New Hampshire, would be more forthcoming than their peers in upstate New York. Besides, a two-and-a-half-hour drive on a crisp autumn Sunday morning had left us both with appetites.

The luncheonette smelled of bacon, onion, and potatoes. It was long and narrow, featuring on one side a counter with a dozen or so red vinyl-topped stools, and, on the other, six small tables covered in a red plastic that almost, but not quite, matched the stools. A stout elderly woman with sparse white hair tugged back tightly in a bun sat alone at the back table nursing a coffee and reading the Boston
Herald
. Other than her, we were the only customers. We sat at the counter, and I smiled at the waitress: just another happy tourist a little out of my element.

“Coffee?” She slapped menus in front of us.

“Sure.”

She filled two brown mugs at a stainless-steel urn behind the counter and slid a hinged-top metal cream
pitcher and a glass sugar shaker in our direction. It had been years since a restaurant had offered me sugar in any form other than a paper packet.

The waitress was small and wiry, the muscles in her thin arms ropy, her frizzy hair the monochromatic black that comes only with a color job done at home. “What can I get you?” she asked.

History
, I thought.
Local history. The past and all its sorrows
. But I ordered a three-egg western omelet instead, and Sophia asked for a short stack with bacon. No chocolate croissants on this side of town.

“Are you Gracie?” I asked when the waitress delivered the omelet.

“Nah. I’m Anna Mae. Gracie’s gone. Died in ’83. Gallstones.” I had a feeling I wasn’t the first customer to ask this question, or the first to get the story that followed. “Gallbladder so full of stones, it split like a rotten plum, Doc Samuels said. I was here when it happened. She was frying burgers at the grill just like always, and then she squeals like a sow with her throat slit, goes down like a ton of bricks, hits her head on the grill, and passes, right there in front of where you two are sitting now.” With the pancake turner, she pointed to the worn brown tiles. Since Anna Mae seemed to expect it, Sophia and I leaned over the counter and respectfully noted the precise spot of Gracie’s expiration. I nodded gravely, not daring to glance at Sophia, and the waitress, perceiving that she had an enthralled audience, continued. “I dropped the coffeepot right in Billy Doyle’s lap—there at table three.” The pancake turner came into play again as she pointed to an empty table. “Old Billy never darkened our door again. According to his wife, he never could … well, you know …” The turner jerked itself into a forty-five-degree angle with the pink Formica countertop.

“Tsk,” I said. Sophia cleared her throat.

Anna Mae went on with her tale. “By the time I got to Gracie, she was gone, poor thing. And her only forty-seven. That family never had no luck.”

“That’s too bad,” I commiserated.

“Nope—no luck at all. Gracie’s old man got croaked in Korea, back when she was about eight months gone with Lolita. She was just a kid—seventeen or so—but she never got hitched again. Never saw the sense in it, she said. Lived with her sister and
her
kid, and they were doing okay—had a sweet little place over by the trailer park. Then Lorraine—the sister’s kid, ya see—gets knocked up.” Anna Mae scratched her nose, then pushed frizzy hair back from her forehead. “This is all before Roe vee Wade, ya understand—the most important law ever passed in this country, to
my
way of thinking—and Lorraine … well … checks out.” Something wasn’t being said. “Then Bernice—that’s the sister—can’t stand it. A coupla years later she hangs herself in some professor’s office at the college. You girls want some more coffee?”

“Uh-uh. We’re fine.”

Anna Mae went on. “Nobody ever knew why she did it that way, ya know? At the college, I mean. Why not kill herself at home where she could be comfortable? Ya know?”

“Tsk,” I said again. This story was beginning to sound eerily familiar.

“Yeah. Like I said, them Lapierres never had no luck.”

“Lapierre!” I exclaimed. “I thought so!”

“You
knew
them?” The little waitress stared at me as she replaced the pancake turner on its hook by the grill.

“Yes! I mean,
no.”
I glanced helplessly at my companion.

Sophia came to the rescue, crossing her arms on the pink Formica, and leaning forward in the universal posture of feminine confidences. Her softspoken tones caused the waitress to lean in toward her. “We don’t really
know
them. It’s just that … well, you know, that writer who wrote that book about this town … that bestseller? The book that was on Oprah’s Book Club? Now what’s that author’s name?” She looked over at me, all youthful perplexity.

“You must mean Mildred Deakin,” Anna Mae said.

Sophia snapped her fingers. “That’s it—Mildred Deakin!”

The waitress shook her head disapprovingly, and so did Sophia. Without missing a beat, I followed. “Tsk. Tsk.”

“It’s just,” Sophia continued, “that we were reading about Mildred Deakin—my mother and me.” She gestured in my direction.

Her
mother!
I was scarcely old enough to be twenty-one-year-old Amanda’s mother, let alone
hers
. Sophia must be at least twenty-four by now. I would have had to be pregnant at fifteen!

“…  And the book we read said Mildred Deakin had some connection with the Lapierre family.”

“Some connection! I should say.” The waitress exploded indignantly. “Bernice practically raised that kid—Milly. Then for her to go betray Lorraine like she did, baring her shame to the world before the girl was half-cold in her grave.… No wonder Bernice did away with herself. Couldn’t stand the disgrace of it.”

“Oh,” I interjected, “you mean Bernice Lapierre didn’t commit suicide until after
Oblivion Falls
was
published?” Why didn’t I have a notebook to write all this down?

“Well, yeah. Of course. It wasn’t so bad when everyone thought Lorraine had just … well … but after that damn book come out, there was no way Bernice could hold her head up in this town.” The waitress narrowed her eyes at us. “How come you girls are so interested?”

Sophia’s eyes widened innocently in direct opposition to the narrowing of Anna Mae’s. A blue-eyed, naive, small-town girl. “Well, it’s just, like, well, you know, so
fascinating
. You know? Just like something in the
National Enquirer.”

Y
ou’re hanging around
Amanda too much,” I told Sophia when we had left Gracie’s and were walking down the sidewalk toward the car. “She’s teaching you some of her fresh tricks.
‘It’s just like, well, you know, the
National Enquirer,’ ” I mocked her.

Sophia laughed, the first real laugh I’d heard from her in weeks. “Amanda’s good for me. I’d be much too well-behaved if it wasn’t for her.”

“Hey, girlies. Slow down.” A voice from behind stopped us in our tracks.

The old woman from the luncheonette hobbled up behind us, the one who’d been reading the
Herald
at the back table, seemingly oblivious to our presence. “You two are real interested in the Lapierres, ain’t you?” In the strong sunlight of the Stallmouth sidewalk, I could catch glimpses of bare pink scalp through the tightly pulled-back strands of her white hair.

“Well, yes,” I faltered. “Because we read that novel—”

“Oblivion Falls
. Yeah, I know. Everybody’s talking
about it again. Tell ya what, girlie. My feet hurt. That your car? I’ll make you a deal. You give me a ride home, and I’ll show you where Lolita lives.”

“Lolita?”

“Yeah, Lolita, Gracie’s daughter. The last of the Lapierres.”

T
he minuscule
front yard of Lolita Lapierre’s double-wide mobile home was ablaze with old-fashioned blooms: climbing roses, black-eyed Susans, salvia, larkspur, bee balm, cone flowers. At the far side of the trailer, sunflowers dwarfed the silver-painted propane tank. We’d dropped off our white-haired guide at the first unit in the Edgemont Trailer Park, and had proceeded according to directions to “the place with all the flowers,” pulling the car up in front of this neat, white, green-shuttered home.