Cold and Pure and Very Dead (31 page)

He nodded. “All charges dropped.”

“But she still wants to talk to me?”

“Seems so.” He shrugged.

“I should do it,” I mused. “I should talk to her while she’s in a talking mood.” Not that it mattered, now that the police had Brooke in custody, but there were still large holes in what I knew about Stallmouth, New Hampshire, in the 1950s. I wouldn’t call myself nosy, exactly: let’s just say it’s my fine scholarly diligence about getting the details precisely right.

Piotrowski tilted his head. “Go if you want to.” He could care less.

I gazed at him, the plain, honest face with its beautiful lips. Schultz’s words came back to me:
A couple of nice people, and both lonely
. Then a thought hit me like a bomb. “You know, Piotrowski, you really didn’t have to come all the way out here with this note. You could have read it to me over the phone.”

“I could of.” He stared at me. Big brown eyes you could drown in.

After a long, dry-throated minute, I swallowed and said, just to be saying something, “How’s your father?”

He shook his head as if to clear it. “Better. Uh, he’s better. But he’s not gonna be able to come home. He’s down in Springfield. It was a hard call, but we decided to put him into a … whaddya call it … a skilled nursing facility.”

“Sorry to hear that. Who’s
we?”

“My brother and me.” He cast me a quizzical glance. “It’s for the best. Dad hasn’t been himself for a long time.” A pause while he examined the pink and white packets in the sugar bowl. Then without looking up at me, he said, “How’s your mother?”

“Okay.” I ran my fingertips over the embossed border of a paper napkin. “I’m thinking of asking her to come stay with me for a while.”

“Oh.” The big round clock over the door ticked monotonously, as if it were chewing time without savoring it.

The coffee came, and we sipped. After a while, Piotrowski paid the bill—two coffees, a dollar-fifty plus tax, less than half of what I’d paid for
one
at the Columbus Avenue Starbucks—and walked me out to the Subaru. The sun was low over a vista of mountains and more mountains. Rows of evergreen trees fronted the two-lane road, oddly regular in shape, all about eight-feet high.
Christmas-tree farm
, I thought.

Bud’s dinner crowd was just pulling in. Two grizzled men in green work clothes climbed out of a black pickup with a smashed-in passenger door. A heavy young woman with twin toddlers hefted them one at a time out of their car seats. “Jason, stay right there while I get your brother. Jason? Jason!
Stay!”
Piotrowski scooped up the speeding toddler, lugged him back to his mother.

I unlocked my car door. I felt stupidly bereft at the thought of leaving Piotrowski and going back to my empty house. It was Friday night. We could go somewhere. Have dinner. Hear some music.

It’s for the best
, Professor Priss intoned. I turned around to say good-bye. He was right behind me. Big, strong man. Those brown eyes. Those lips.

“Goddamnit all to hell, Karen,” Charlie Piotrowski said.
“This
is why I came all the way out here.” He gathered me up in his arms and kissed me.

This is a really, really bad idea
, Prissy carped. I ignored her and kissed him back, really, really hard.

M
illy Finch’s kitchen
was green and cream. A worktable held center place, its enamel surface cream-colored with a light-green tinge at the edges. A large enamel cookstove, half wood-burning, half gas, held a fire this crisp October morning. We sat at a maple dining table by the front window overlooking the porch, the low Berkshire foothills crimson and gold in the distance.

“I don’t want you to think that since I left New York—since
Oblivion Falls
—my life has been a failure, nothing but … but epilogue,” Milly said, glaring at me in spite of my reassurances that I
still
was not planning to write her biography.

“Nobody thinks that,” I protested. Mildred Deakin Finch was a different woman in her domestic surroundings, her raddled face—so emaciated when I’d seen her in prison—beginning to fill out now, her color heightened in the warm room. She wore loose khaki slacks and a long-sleeved cotton shirt with a heather-gray sweater vest, so resolutely out of fashion she looked as if she’d come fresh from a Ralph Lauren outlet. A different woman—but she still had her crotchets.

“Ha! You intellectual types! It’s all
words
with you. You think words are more important than reality.” She waved a dismissive hand, directing our attention to the spacious kitchen with its crackling stove, the towel-covered
loaves of bread dough rising on the worktable, the glass-fronted cabinets with their rows of green dishes, the worn, but immaculate, green-and-cream linoleum. “This has been my life for the past forty years. Does it all look like … 
epilogue?
” Lieutenant Paula Syverson and I exchanged mystified glances and shook our heads simultaneously:
No, not epilogue at all
. I bit into one of the cinnamon buns Milly had taken from the oven five minutes earlier. It was still too hot, but the pungent spice was irresistible. I took another bite and burned my mouth again.

“It’s been a good life,” Milly insisted.

“A very good life,” I agreed, glancing around me. “I’m envious.” And at that moment I was. Three long nights with Charlie Piotrowski had put me in the mood to savor the physical world.

Piotrowski hadn’t come today because he knew his presence would intimidate Milly Finch, especially after he’d bullied her into a state of shock at the Hudson jail. I still couldn’t think about that episode without a sense of unease. How he could be so … unfeeling …

I was here in Milly Finch’s kitchen with Lieutenant Syverson, who’d come along in case Milly told us anything relevant to the case against Ralph Brooke. From reading
Oblivion Falls
we thought we knew the story we’d hear: Sometime in the early fifties Brooke had seduced Lorraine, gotten her pregnant, and then abandoned her in her hour of crisis. She had died following an abortion—illegal at the time—a victim of the sexual double standard and primitive medical conditions. And of Ralph Waldo Emerson Brooke’s selfish lust.

In graphic detail Milly retold the tale, focusing on Brooke’s role. “He was a cad. Wouldn’t even come up with money for the … the doctor. Vinnie Russo and I, we put together whatever we could get, and Toni Croft
got the name of a doctor over in Rutland. Then Vinnie borrowed a car from Halper’s Garage where he worked, and we all took Lorraine over there.” Milly clutched a yellow quilted potholder fiercely, as if it were all that stood between her and the chaos that was her youth. Her eyes grew wide—in
Oblivion Falls
she probably would have written
her eyes grew wide with unshed tears
.

“And she died on the way home.” Tears burned my eyes.

“Died on the way home?” Our companion jerked out of her reverie. “She did not. The … termination … went fine. It took a couple of weeks, but she recovered.”

“But … but … in
Oblivion Falls
you wrote—”

“That was Sara, the character, not Lorraine, the person. That’s your problem, you professors, always mistaking literature for life! No, what happened to Lorraine was worse.”

“Worse than death?”

“Worse than
that
death. And that’s why I wanted you over here—you and the lieutenant both. To tell you what really happened to Lorraine Lapierre.”

No storyteller could have wished for a more attentive audience. Syverson and I were riveted.

“Lorraine got better, but she didn’t go back to school. Wasn’t allowed to. Word got out about the abortion, and the school board in those days had a policy—they wouldn’t let a … bad girl … contaminate the morals of all the chaste young women of the town. You girls now—you have no idea what it was like back then. No, Lorraine stayed home and brooded over what had happened to her. Of course my father wouldn’t let me have anything to do with her after that, but I used to sneak out some nights when I was supposed to be in
bed. Sometimes, Lorraine and I, we’d go up to Oblivion Falls and just sit there. She’d cry and cry. Then, after a few months, she began to get angry. Why the hell should she be the only one to be punished. She’d had such big dreams for herself, college and everything, and now she couldn’t even finish high school—all because she’d had sex with some guy who didn’t suffer
any
consequences. Something was wrong with that. Something was goddamned wrong.

“One night she arranged for Profess … Ralph Brooke to meet her at the Falls. She was going to make him help her, help her at least to get out of town, get set up somewhere else where no one would know her, and she could get work. Maybe Providence, maybe Boston. I was worried about her being up there alone with him, but she told me not to be silly. Anyhow, when she went up, I hid down at the bottom of the path behind some bushes. Five minutes later that … that
animal
showed up. After a half-hour he came back down the hill. I waited for Lorraine. She never showed up. Three days later her body surfaced ten miles downriver—all battered.”

I was speechless. Paula Syverson’s pale eyes had gone steely. “Why didn’t you inform the authorities?” the lieutenant asked Milly.

“I did. Oh I did. I told the police and I told them and told them. I told my father, my teachers, even the minister. They said Ralph Brooke was a mature, respected member of the community, and I was a hysterical girl. They were right—I
was
a hysterical girl, and with good reason. No evidence of foul play, they said. Lorraine’s death was ruled a suicide. I stayed hysterical, and my father sent me away to a private school in Massachusetts. It was really some kind of a hospital, but he told everyone it was a boarding school. There
they half-convinced me I was crazy. Eventually I got straightened out enough to get through college, then went to New York and wrote
Oblivion Falls
. It was the only form of justice I could get for Lorraine. After that I got blocked—couldn’t write about it anymore. Couldn’t
think
about it anymore. Couldn’t write about anything. When I got pregnant myself, I went off the deep end—and, in order to survive, I just had to put everything away and start again.” She paused, then looked down at her hands. “Including the baby.”

I hesitated before I asked it. “Was Ralph Brooke the father of your child?”

She glowered at me as if I’d made an obscene suggestion. “Are you out of your mind? Of course not. I was wild in those days—wild, boozed up, and a little crazy. But not
that
crazy. Brooke was around, of course, part of the Village scene. I ran into him once in a while—small world, the Manhattan literati—but mostly I kept my distance.” Milly rose from the table and fetched a coffee pot. When she had refilled our cups, she replaced the percolator on the back of the stove, sat down again and sighed. “I don’t know for certain
who
the father of the baby was. Could have been almost anyone. But there was
one
man. He was a writer as well as a teacher.” She gazed out at the far-off hills. “I understand the boy became a writer?”

“Yes,” I replied. “And a damn good one.
Damn
good.”

She made no response.

“One thing I’m wondering about, Mrs. Finch,” the lieutenant asked, “how’d you come to have Brooke’s typewriter?”

“Ha!” Mildred Deakin Finch replied, “I stole it. I used to go up to Lillian’s in Westchester, and one weekend Dash dragged Brooke along. On Sunday, when I left
for the train to the city, that nice typewriter was sitting there by the back door, and I snatched it up. It’d serve him right, I thought, if I used his own typewriter to write a novel showing him up for the nasty killer he was. But, of course, I was blocked—couldn’t write. I took that typewriter with me wherever I went, but I never even opened the damn thing.”

The ensuing silence stretched out beyond comfort. Finally the lieutenant spoke. “Was nothing further ever done about the death of Lorraine Lapierre?”

Milly shrugged. “I’ve been incommunicado since 1959. As far as I know, until just last month when the professor here shot him, that murderous son-of-a-bitch Brooke went scot-free.”

Syverson sat ramrod straight in her ladder-back chair. Her pale eyes swept the foothill slopes as if she were reconnoitering for enemy troops. “We’ve got Brooke on two counts of first-degree homicide, of course, Mrs. Finch,” the lieutenant said, “and he’ll be put away for the rest of his life. So … So I don’t know if you even want to think about this—but the statute of limitations never runs out on murder.”

I
have two
cardinal rules,” Lolita Lapierre said, “I don’t sleep with cops, and I don’t talk to them.”

Sophia slid her eyes over at me. I tightened my lips, but I didn’t think it was a personal jibe. How would Lolita in Stallmouth, New Hampshire, know about my relationship with Piotrowski? As a matter of fact, how did Sophia know about it? I thought we’d been pretty circumspect.

Sophia and I had driven up to Stallmouth to take Lolita out for meatball subs and beer. My treat. After having pointed the police in her direction, I owed Lolita
something other than a simple rote apology, and I told her so. I’d suggested a trendy little bistro I’d spotted in the center of town, but Lolita had opted for the Italian Delight. She never could develop a taste for cassoulet, she said, and the Eye Dee had the best meatballs in New England. That was fine with me.

The restaurant was doing a good business this Friday evening. Townspeople, students, college workers, and faculty jammed the long, narrow room, lured by the seductive aroma of tomato and garlic that wafted from the kitchen behind the shiny chrome pizza ovens. A long counter stretched beneath a hanging menu offering pizzas, subs, salads, and pasta dishes. Lighted beer signs in bright reds, yellows, and greens clashed with a flamingo-and-aqua full-wall mural of Neapolitan boatmen. A dark-haired, ponytailed waitress had just delivered our meal.

“When the New York State detectives came around asking questions about Milly Deakin and that reporter that got killed, I clammed up,” she told us. “Just on principle—in my family we were never too fond of the police. Then that skinny, bleached-out cop started harping on Jake Fenton’s murder, and I lost it. I knew Jake, you see, knew him pretty damn well.” She paused, then bit into the steaming sub.