Cold and Pure and Very Dead (27 page)

By the office door, a student in jeans and a black cotton crewneck ran a finger down a list of professors’ office hours taped to the wall. Tall, thin, and stringy-haired, the boy looked wasted, as if he hadn’t slept in a week. That did not bode well for his semester; it was still only September. A compact blonde in khaki shorts and hiking boots searched frantically through the course offerings booklet. If she was looking to transfer into a new course, she was out of luck; the offerings listed there were now three weeks underway, well beyond the tolerance of any professor for the admission of a new student. In the recessed window seat Ralph Brooke paged through the latest issue of
The Chronicle of Higher Education
. He had switched from seersucker
to tweed, and today had augmented his gray jacket with a black turtleneck. Through the tall windows, the midday sun cast a luminous glow on his freckled pate, then passed over him, and bathed desks, file cabinets, computers, and Monica’s uncannily lush begonias with a buttery yellow light.

Harriet Person bustled into the office, then halted in the doorway and gaped at me. She seemed transfixed by the sight of Jake Fenton’s designated mourner bravely undertaking such a mundane task as collecting the daily mail. Anything so petty as sexual jealousy was forgotten. “Karen,” she breathed, “I am so sorry about your … friend’s … untimely demise.”

I sighed, shoved the letter from Milly Finch deep into my jacket pocket, and headed for my office.

I
wanted to live
beyond words …
the epistle began. I had locked, then bolted, my door. Then I had slit the envelope open with a nail file. As she often did, Emily Dickinson provided apt words for my experience:
The Way I read a Letter’s—this—/’Tis first—I lock the Door
. What, I wondered, could I expect to find behind the locked door of Milly Finch’s life?

   
I had no more story to tell
[Milly wrote].
But I was wearing my “authorship” like a too-tight skin. I wrote one book and it was what they call a success. I was trapped in it, that success. Everyone expected a second novel, but the words simply were not there. I was so young. Everywhere I went, the smiles, the adulation. The men. The booze. Flashbulbs!
Oblivion Falls
made so much money, made me so visible. It was as if I were living in a skin of words. My editor, my agent, my readers—everyone expected a second book, and I
expected to write it. Being a writer was my only purpose in life, my only identity, but I couldn’t get anything on paper. My brain was dry. I tried to escape. The sex. The gin. I lied about another book. I lied and lied. Then I got pregnant. I went away for a few months. Saw how easy it was to slip out of my skin. Saw I could slip out of my life just the way that child slipped out of my body. It was easy. Easy. I never had to see the child again. I never had to see my life again. So—I went away. And you know the rest. Jim Finch and his family saved me, and little by little I slipped into their life. It was easy. So easy. And I’ve never been sorry. Ever
.

   A postscript was appended:
This is all I have to tell you. Don’t come snooping around here again
.

The missive wasn’t signed. It was as if the writing of it were signature enough.

My hand went immediately to the telephone, but I sat for a long minute before I lifted the receiver. What exactly was I going to tell Piotrowski? That I had received a third letter from the novelist? That it brought us no closer to a motive for the two murders? I’d been working on the assumptions that the homicides stemmed either from someone’s monetary self-interest or from some deep dark secret in Milly’s writing life that I could convince her to tell me. But it seemed as if we were dealing with nothing more criminal than writer’s block here. How could writer’s block provide a motive for murder? Could what was
not
written be worth killing for? Should I ask her?

M
onica,”
I said, after a brief telephone conversation with the lieutenant, “if another letter like this …” I showed her the envelope, pointing out the pinched
handwriting, the Hudson postmark, “comes for me, would you do me a favor?”

“Sure thing, sweetheart,” she replied, with a beatific smile.

“Would you lock it up in your desk and give me a call? I can’t tell you why right now, but I wouldn’t want it sitting around in my mailbox.”

“Okay.” She patted my hand.

“Thank you,” I said, uncertainly, not quite knowing how to deal with this new, nicer, Monica. “I really appreciate your help.”

She beamed at me. “It is
so
not a problem.”

I
kept thinking
about Mildred Deakin’s typewriter. The typewriter that she had held on to so assiduously in spite of her desperate flight from a life of words. The typewriter that I now knew concealed no book manuscript in its blue leather case. When I got home that evening with Milly’s letter, I called directory assistance and asked for Jim Finch’s phone number.

“Funny, I was just thinking about you,” he said.

“Oh, yes?”

“Yeah. I got to considering about whether, like you said, there might be another book kicking around that Milly wrote before she came here. So I been looking for that old typewriter I told you about, but I couldn’t find hide nor hair of it. Was afraid maybe she’d got shet of it. Then I went up in the attic and found it stuck way back under the eaves.”

“Really?”

“No book—whaddya call it,
manuscript
?—in the typewriter case, though.” It sounded as if Jim was talking around a mouthful of potatoes. I must have interrupted his dinner.

“Umm.” I already knew that.

“Nothing but that old machine. Still works. Sitting there for forty years, and the keys just as quick to the finger as if it was brand new. Funny thing, though. It’s not her typewriter.”

“No?”
Not her typewriter?

“No. Got a slot inside for the owner’s name. Doesn’t say Mildred Deakin at all. Name card in there, though. Handwritten. Owner was a guy named Brooke. You know anybody by that name? Ralph Waldo Emerson Brooke?”

T
he name Ralph Brooke
mean anything to you?” Piotrowski and I sat face-to-face with Mildred Deakin Finch across a long metal table in a Columbia County jail interview room. Milly Finch cringed at the lieutenant’s abrupt query, and I glanced pleadingly at her interrogator.
Take it easy on her
, I wanted to say, but I knew I couldn’t, and I knew he didn’t intend to.

I
’d called Piotrowski
again as soon as I got off the phone with Jim Finch. Ralph had been Jake Fenton’s colleague only briefly, but the long-ago connection of his name to Milly Finch raised some intriguing questions—such as, given the nature of human nature, might Ralph Brooke possibly be Jake’s father? Might that relationship have been the occasion for the odd vignette I’d observed during the Department meeting, when Jake had whispered something to Ralph, and Ralph had turned pale? Rank speculation, but, because I had “developed a rapport”—as the lieutenant phrased it—with Milly, he’d brusquely asked me to accompany him to his interview with her.
Some rapport!
I thought.
She writes me letters telling me she never wants to see me again!

Piotrowski picked me up at the college at 8
A.M.
, and on the trip across the Mass Pike he’d cued me in advance that he intended to press Milly Finch hard.
“It’s for her own good, Doctor. If she didn’t do the Katz killing, she shouldn’t go down for it. And you—God knows what kind of a game she’s playing with you. Jerking you around. Teasing you with bits and pieces, then putting you off. She’s got something preying on her mind, something she wants to tell you, but she’s kept it quiet for so long she can’t get it out. If it involves this Professor Brooke of yours, there might be some connection to the … er … Fenton homicide.” He sounded as if he still wasn’t convinced that Jake and I had not been involved. “You did say there was bad blood between Fenton and Brooke?”

I nodded. “It looked that way. But he’s not
my
Professor Brooke.” I shuddered. “The man makes my skin crawl.”

“Now
that’s
interesting.” He gave me a brief glance. “You don’t strike me as a lady who’s easily creeped out.”

“No?” I’d been
creeped out
ever since Marty Katz was killed. “It’s just that I’ve never met anyone who was as concerned with—I don’t know—with reputation, I guess … as Ralph Waldo Emerson Brooke is. He’s constantly putting himself forward as some kind of heavy-duty fifties intellectual. But when it comes right down to it, I suspect there’s not a heck of a lot underneath that facade.”

“Except maybe another facade,” Piotrowski suggested.

I laughed. He was so good at getting right to the point.

“I’m serious,” he continued. “That’s usually the case with these blowhards—whether they’re high-watt intellects or low-life gangsters.” We were in the early stages of the trip, just zooming past the big green sign for the Westfield exit. “You know, Doctor, what you said to Syverson
a while back? Something about this Finch woman having some deep, dark secret? I think you might be right about that. And I think she’s got
you
marked as the one she’s gotta tell—the mother confessor. Only, when it comes right down to the telling, she can’t do it. She just can’t get it out. Ya gotta feel sorry for the poor old thing, so confused she don’t know her ass from her elbow—if you’ll pardon my language. So, we’ll go in there together. I’ll be the heavy. Right? And you’ll be the confessor.”

“Piotrowski,” I’d queried, after a few moments’ reflection, “do you think it’s possible that Milly Finch’s writer’s block is what’s been keeping her alive all these years? I mean, if she knows something that someone will kill to keep from having revealed.…” I couldn’t bear to take the thought to its logical conclusion.

But Piotrowski had no problem with that. “Could be. She could be the next victim. Maybe prison’s the best place for Mrs. Finch. She’s safe there. Maybe now she’s surfaced, someone’s afraid she’s gonna get loquacious.”

“Loquacious?”
I grinned at him.

“What?” His expression stiffened. “It’s a perfectly good word.”

“I know,” I teased him.

“Then don’t patronize me,” he snapped abruptly, and tightened his very nice lips. A broad hand flashed out and clicked the radio on to an all-sports station.
Fordham tops UMass, 56–47
.

His words stunned me. I stared at the big man next to me, his eyes hooded, mine wide with hurt. “I … I didn’t mean to …” I reached over and touched his hand. “I was only—”

But he turned the radio’s volume up and ceased to acknowledge my existence.
UConn over …
After thirty or so interminable seconds, I removed my hand; an angry Piotrowski was a formidable sight. We passed over
the Pike, the staticky sports show fading in and out, reception blocked by the increasingly impenetrable mountains. He drove very fast, but it was a long, long trip to New York State.

M
rs. Finch
, you’ll feel better if you tell us.” The lieutenant and I had been talking to—or, more accurately, talking
at
—Milly Finch for over thirty minutes. She had relinquished the right to have her lawyer present, so it was just the three of us at the table. The more Piotrowski pressured Milly or I cajoled her, the more she withdrew into some emotional locked ward—some psychological cellblock—where she could protect herself from whatever menace she was threatened with by the utterance of her own knowledge.

“Mrs. Finch,” I pleaded with her, “I … uh … we … know you’re hiding something that could help us find the murderer of Marty Katz. And the lieutenant’s right. You’d feel a lot better if you’d only share it with us.”

Her eyes grew even more inwardly focused. Her resistance seemed palpable, a solid field of invisible unyieldingness that felt almost as if it could be weighed and measured, chopped and stacked like cordwood.

Then, after a long, agonizing, period of silence, Piotrowski abruptly sat back in his plastic chair, sighed mightily, and turned to me. “All right, Doctor, I didn’t want to have to do it this way, but I guess we’ll have to tell her.”

“Tell her?” This wasn’t part of the scenario, and I wasn’t certain what he had in mind.

“About the Fenton homicide.”

“Oh.” I felt myself blanch. The police had not yet informed Milly Finch that a second murder had been connected to the killing of Marty Katz, and that the victim
of that homicide was her long-ago relinquished child. “I don’t think you sh—”

But he did. Mildred Deakin Finch’s eyes grew wider and wider as he spoke. She sat, dead white and unresponsive, for perhaps fifteen seconds. Then, suddenly, she slumped in her chair, leaned slowly to one side, and before either of us could reach her, toppled unconscious to the hard tile floor.

“Shit,” Piotrowski muttered, as he knelt beside her. “I never meant—Guard! Guard! Get a doctor in here
now!”

I
t was a quiet ride
back to Enfield. On the trip out, Piotrowski hadn’t been talking to me. On the trip back, I wasn’t talking to him—at least not after I’d finished giving him hell for psychologically brutalizing Milly Finch. Our parting was so cold, I had no idea whether or not Piotrowski wanted me to keep looking into Milly’s past, but I didn’t care. I’d continue to investigate for the writer’s sake. In the college parking lot, I slammed out of the Jeep without saying good-bye. Then the sight of the big man’s face in profile, staring straight ahead as if he were a bus driver letting off an anonymous passenger on a particularly troublesome stretch of road, gave me pause. “Wait—”

But the red Jeep kicked up gravel as it roared away. I didn’t know if he’d heard me.

A bad night’s sleep—waking, staring at the ceiling, pacing, drowning myself in camomile, dreaming short, intense, restless dreams—left me in a correspondingly bad mood, restless like my dreams. How had I gotten myself in such a mess? And why did I give a damn what Lieutenant Charlie Piotrowski did—or what he thought of me? And what
was
it that had happened in New Hampshire some forty-odd-years ago that could, only
today—yesterday?—cause Mildred Deakin Finch to collapse in a state of shock?