Cold and Pure and Very Dead (17 page)

Very slowly, things got better for the Lapierre family. Gracie bought the luncheonette, and worked hard. Eventually they got a new mobile home. There was money for Lolita to attend the University of New Hampshire. The day of her daughter’s graduation with a B.S. in business, Gracie sat her down at the same kitchen table and showed her the ancient letter and a bank-check stub. The New York lawyer had said only that an anonymous benefactor wanted them to have this twenty-five thousand dollars “to make their lives a little easier.” The letter had come sometime after Mildred Deakin’s disappearance in 1959, and Gracie had never had any doubt who her benefactor was.

After college, Lolita had come back to Stallmouth to live with her mother, and when Gracie died, she’d stayed on. Now she made “decent money,” she said, in an administrative position in the Stallmouth College Bursar’s Office. “People always ask me why I don’t sell this trailer and get a house,” she’d told us, “but I like it here. It was my mother’s home, now it’s mine. What would I want with a big house? I’ve got no husband, no
kids. This way I’m free to travel—just pop the cat in a kennel for a month and take off. I love it. I’ve been all over—Italy, Greece, Australia, even China. And,” she raised her eyebrows and smiled slyly at me, “I don’t always travel alone—if you know what I mean.” I’d nodded; I knew what she meant. “Plus, I’ve got money in the bank. That matters to me.”

“Sounds like a great life,” I’d said. Then I thought—
but she doesn’t have Amanda
.

T
he September sun
was low on the horizon as Sophia and I parked the Subaru in the Stallmouth College visitors’ lot and crossed the campus to Stowe Hall where the English Department was housed. Call it morbid, but we were both so into the Lapierre story that—what the heck, we’d decided—since we were already in Stallmouth anyhow, we wanted to see the building where Bernice Lapierre had hung herself. As we approached Stowe Hall, late sunlight caught the tall windows, turning the glass opaque with gold.

“Do you really think we should go in there?” Sophia whispered, as we navigated around a touch football game on the lawn, and I pushed open the front door. “It’s the weekend—and it’s late.”

As we’d come closer to the building, I’d begun to have qualms myself. Not only was this a morbid venture, it also felt a bit like trespassing. But, bulldozing ahead as usual, I brushed my misgivings away. “Department offices are always open,” I said. “I work in mine at all hours of the day and night. And no one—”

“May I help you?” I started as the cultured male voice queried us from the recesses of the English Department office. An exotic figure stood outlined in the doorway of the darkened office, backlit by the light
from an inner room, tall, slender, and wild-haired like some medieval wizard. Then he pressed the wall switch, and turned into the gray-haired jogger from earlier in the day.

“I … I …” Why couldn’t I come up with a plausible reason for skulking in the Stallmouth College English Department at six
P.M
. on a Sunday afternoon?

Then Sophia spoke; she was beginning to show a real knack for getting me out of trouble. “Isn’t this the dorm?” she asked, disingenuously. “My friend, ah, Gracie, said to meet her—”

“Sorry.” The Merlin look-alike took off his gold-rimmed glasses and smiled at her in a manner that somehow managed quite inoffensively to acknowledge his appreciation of her fragile blonde beauty. How old was this guy anyhow? I wondered idly. The unruly head of gray hair threw me off. Was this theatrical-looking English-Department sorcerer in his forties? Sixty-five? Immortal? “The residence halls are on the back campus,” he told us, pointing with the glasses. “Let me show you.” He walked us out of the building and gave us meticulous directions. We thanked him and strolled in the direction of the dorms. When I turned around again to take a final look at Stowe Hall, the scene of Bernice Lapierre’s suicide, the wild-haired wizard man had vanished. His image lingered in my mind. Where had I seen that man before?

O
n the trip home
, a huge cinematic moon floated luminous and full behind snowdrift clouds. Sophia was silent, lost in thought. I was brooding over what I’d learned about Mildred Deakin and the Lapierre family. Lolita hadn’t been able to tell me anything about the man in Mildred’s life; she didn’t even know who’d fathered
her own cousin’s baby. She’d been too young at the time to take notice of anything having to do with sex or romance. If Bernice and Gracie had known who Lorraine’s lover was, they, like Lorraine, had taken the secret to their graves. Lolita had heard that there’d been a real hullabaloo in town at the time of the publication of
Oblivion Falls
about just who was who in the book. In particular, there’d always been a great deal of speculation about who the original was of the novel’s Andrew Prentiss, the seductive young professor who despoils the fictional Sara Todd. And, since the novel’s recent republication, that speculation had revived, to the discomfort of several distinguished professors emeriti. But, Lolita concluded, the scandal had happened so long ago, memories were hazy, people had died—and many professors had come and gone from the college over the decades. When it came right down to it, all she knew was the idle gossip of a few small-town layabouts, and she couldn’t be bothered to repeat that.

Small-town layabouts:
As I flipped the turn indicator for the Greenfield exit, I suddenly remembered the elderly ride-cadging woman. Someone like that—someone who was perhaps even a contemporary of Mildred and Lorraine—might prove to be a gold mine of information about the author’s life. If you could believe a word she said, I thought, recalling the woman’s nasty slurs against Lolita. But I’d keep her in mind if another visit to Stallmouth was warranted.

Oddly enough, I felt protective of Lolita. She was the Lapierre family member who’d had the least to do with the Deakin story, but she’d made a real impact on me—and for reasons that had nothing to do with Mildred Deakin. Here was a woman who’d come from a background similar to mine, and rather than cutting herself off from home and family, as I’d done, she’d
settled into her hometown and made a success of her life.
But she’d had her mother on her side
, my prickly little superego argued.
Your mother was just as much a victim of your father as you were
, my wobbly little ego responded.
Yeah, but she should have been stronger and braver and more supportive
, shot back the prickly one.
Then she would have been another person entirely
, ventured the wobbly one.
Yeah. And that would have been a damn good thing
. Then I remembered the expression of regret and longing on my mother’s face when she’d seen me last winter for the first time in fifteen years. A squishy feeling arose suddenly, somewhere in the region of my heart.

Sophia broke into my pained thoughts. “I really liked Lolita,” she said.

“Yeah. Me, too.” I pulled myself back to the present.

“And I
admire
her, on her own, like that, living her life. Not being ashamed of who she is or where she comes from. That’s what really got to me. She’s”—she gave me a sidelong look—“a lot like you.”

“Oh, yeah?” There was that Mother Teresa look again. “Believe me, sweetie, I’m nothing like Lolita Lapierre; I got as far away from home as I could, as fast as possible, and I stayed.”

“But Lowell isn’t so far—”

“That’s
not
what I meant.”

Sophia glanced over at me, knowingly, her fine features bizarrely illuminated by the pink and orange lights from a Dunkin’ Donuts sign. “Well, anyhow, I’m really glad I came today. Now I have
two
good role models.”

T
he visit to Lolita
left me restless. I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother. That night I called my
sister’s number. Connie didn’t bother to hide her astonishment. “Karen. What do
you
want?”

“How
are
you, Connie?”

“Fine. What are you calling about?”

“I’m fine, too. Can I talk to Mom?”

“Karen? Honey? What’s the matter? Why are you calling?”

“I just want to talk, Mom. How are things with you?”

T
he last thing
in the world I expected to find in my Department mailbox on Monday afternoon was another letter from Mildred Deakin Finch. This time I recognized it immediately—the pinched handwriting and Hudson postmark. I snatched the letter up, took it into my office, and sat at the desk with the cheap envelope, still unopened, centered squarely in front of me.
Whaatheheck?
I hadn’t responded to Milly’s first letter because in it she’d ordered me to leave her alone. Now here she was, breaking her silence without even being asked to. I’d just slipped a long yellow pencil under the envelope’s flap to rip it open, when Monica poked her head around my half-closed door.

“Karen,” she announced in her stentorian tones, “you have a fax coming in. Eleven pages. From the New York State Police.”

“The police?” I abandoned the letter and hastened into the main office before Monica could read the entire fax.

“The police?” Jake Fenton stood by the department information rack, leafing through the course offerings list. He grinned at me wickedly, gray eyes crinkling. “Karen, you naughty girl, what have you been up to?” Then he did the gun thing with his index finger, and I gave him a wan smile. How had I ever, I wondered, even for the most infinitesimal jot and tittle of time,
found this womanizing narcissist attractive? My attention was drawn to his deep gray eyes, the square line of his jaw, the set of his broad shoulders. Well … maybe it was understandable.

“The police?” George Gilman’s query was sober. “Is everything all right, Karen?” I nodded distractedly. I had no idea what George, a history professor, was doing in the English office, but was too preoccupied with my fax to ask. Brushing past Monica, I snatched up the three pages that had already printed out. A discreetly worded cover letter from Lieutenant Syverson asked me to look over
“the appended notes from the evidentiary records of a recent case
”—she was certain I would recognize their source—and
“communicate your findings to me as soon as feasible.”
The faxed letter went on to say that the voice-mail message she’d left at my office number would tell me more. Page two of the fax consisted of a reproduction of a tall skinny page from a reporter’s notebook, covered with cryptic journalistic shorthand. So did pages three, and four, and what had arrived so far of five. My God, I thought, these were Marty Katz’s notes about his search for the missing Mildred Deakin! I rifled through the sheets and the words
Nelson Corners
jumped out at me from an otherwise illegible block of squiggles. I was so excited I could feel my heart thump. I was about to discover just exactly how the reporter had located Milly Finch. If I could decipher his shorthand, that is.

The Department’s fax machine was transmitting very slowly, and, as I waited, tapping my foot impatiently, I fended off questions from George and Jake. Finally my curious colleagues left me alone in the office with the incoming fax, and I sat at Monica’s desk, attempting to read the first pages of the dead reporter’s notes. No sooner had I made out what looked like
stlmth
, no,
stllmth
—could it possibly be—
Stallmouth?
—than a sudden deathbed rattle from the machine let me know that all was not well in faxville. “Monica,” I yelled, jumping up from the secretary’s desk and speeding into the hall, but she was nowhere to be seen. Only Jake Fenton and George Gilman were visible—Jake entering his office next to the back stairs, and George exiting the Dickinson Hall main door carrying a massive book. Where the hell was Monica?

Back in the office, I hovered over the now-dead machine.
PAPER JAMMED
, the electronic readout informed me.
Unh-huh
, I replied, and punched at the
HELP
button. Something chirped, and words rearranged themselves. Before I could decipher the new readout, Monica hustled into the office with a stack of photocopies.

“What are you doing?” she snapped. “I just spent the best part of an hour straightening that damn thing out, and now you go and screw it up again.” She dropped her load on the desk, slammed out the fax paper cassette, then yanked a sheet from the innards of the machine and thrust it at me. “Now I’m gonna have to take this all apart again.”

I glanced at the crinkled sheet in my hand: page eleven. “But this is only half-printed, Monica. Can you get the rest?—”

“Don’t hold your breath, Karen. If you hadn’t screwed around with—” Her mouth was pursed like a prissy schoolteacher.

“I didn’t touch your damn machine, Monica!” Then I heard myself—shrilling like a spoiled duchess. But this nosy, bad-tempered secretary had that effect on me. I really should speak to Miles about her, I thought. The department needed someone more congenial than Monica Cassale. But right now, I’d have to work this out on my own. I took a deep breath. “Monica, I’m sorry I
yelled like that. We must both be really stressed. Look, if the machine is giving you so much trouble, maybe you should call the service company. We do have a service contract, right?”

“Yeah.” She seemed a little mollified. “But the technician they send is such a pain in the ass. He hates women. He’s one of these guys who thinks that if it wasn’t for affirmative action he’d be CEO of his company. And he can be real nasty.” She twisted her lips, and it struck me how little power Monica had over her life. I happened to know that this low-paying, no-future job was just about all that kept her, her mother, and her young son, Joey, in food and shelter. Okay—so I wouldn’t say anything to Miles. But
I needed the rest of my fax
. And I needed it
now!

“Monica, listen. Why don’t you call the service company and … and … let
me
talk to them.”

“You? Talk to the service guys?” She squinted at me suspiciously. “Why?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I can help.”