3

Twenty-four years …

Guess I could have given myself an extra ten minutes, circled the block to make sure no DEA agent was tailing me, taken evasive action if necessary. Stopped at another drugstore and bought some Extra-Strength Tylenol for the headache gripping the base of my skull.

I sucked air, blew it out in a sigh.

“Twenty-four years,” I repeated, tempted to add a pungent curse, the way I would have when I was a cop. A mere glance at the silver-haired man with his grave expression and hopeful eyes kept my language pure.

“Yes,” he said.

“So why the rush?” I asked quietly, leaning my elbows on the desk, my chin on clasped and ringless hands. “Why the eager-beaver phone call, the immediate appointment?”

“Thea Janis is back,” the man said vehemently, stepping on the tail of my question.

“And you’ve seen her,” I said matter-of-factly.

I could feel my eyebrows creeping up my forehead, registering disbelief. I tried to force them down. I was totally prepared for a positive response. Everybody looks like somebody. He’d spotted Thea’s double, her sister, her distant cousin, waiting at a bus stop. He’d squealed his brakes a moment too late; his vision had taken wing.

“I have not seen her.”

The man had a way of surprising me.

Memories of Thea Janis, of her disappearance—wait just a minute, her death—floated through my mind like half-forgotten song lyrics. I was pretty certain there was more to this business than a runaway teen genius.

Death.

“Wasn’t it suicide?” I asked harshly, because I was hot and sweaty from my quick march home, because I was growing more irritated by the second. Finding the dead is not my forte. They tend not to reappear, even after twenty-four years. Unless we’re talking Elvis. “Didn’t someone find her clothes on a beach?”

“There may have been clothing on some beach,” he said angrily, “but no one ever proved it was Thea’s, not absolutely. Not to my satisfaction.” He slid his rump to the edge of his chair, assuming a defensive posture.

I smiled and made nice, kept my voice low. “You haven’t seen her in over twenty years. Right? So what makes you think I can find her?” I asked gently. “Now? After a lifetime?”

“Look for yourself.” He opened the caramel briefcase, shuffled papers, extracted a manila envelope, and placed it on my desk, carefully aligning it with the edge of the blotter. I’ve seen priests handle the Host with less reverence.

“Tell me about it,” I said, keeping my hands tightly folded. Some lessons, once learned, become automatic: Don’t touch anything that might retain fingerprints.

“Do you have a copy of Nightmare’s Dawn?”

Thea’s book. Thank God he’d named it, or I’d have been up all night obsessing about the title. Haunting images. Prose blended with poetry. A brilliant and unpopular girl’s vision of prep school hell. Angry. Upsetting. Unsettling. The Bell Jar of her generation. Was it because Sylvia Plath had stuck her head in the oven and turned on the gas that Thea and death were so firmly linked in my mind?

“Somewhere,” I said. “In the attic …”

“I should have brought my copy.” His smile was endearing, an elderly baby’s glee. “My treasure. I keep it plastic-wrapped, in a glass display case. She wrote in it, inscribed a first edition, a very special dedication. I’ve been offered over five thousand dollars for that book.”

“You’ve received something,” I reminded him, indicating the envelope. “A written communication—from someone purporting to be Thea.”

I don’t use words like “purporting.” Honestly, I don’t. Haven’t since I gave up the badge. The twisted linguistics of cop-speak came out of my mouth unwelcome and unbidden. The wretched police vocabulary—“perpetrator” for “thief,” “incident” for “rape,” “missing” for “stolen”—has some merit. It grants a certain immunity. Distance might be a better way to put it … primarily distance … distance from pain. I found myself slipping into the lingo because the man seated across from me appeared so transparent, so easily hurt. And he desperately wanted to believe he’d heard from a woman whose scoured bones had probably decorated the ocean floor for two decades.

Why was I so certain she’d drowned? I hadn’t lived in Boston any twenty-four years. Had Thea Janis’s death made national news?

“I’m not a doddering fool,” Mayhew stated firmly, as if he could read my thoughts. “I am sixty-two years old. I am gainfully employed. I am not hallucinating, nor do I take drugs.”

“Twenty-four years is a long time,” I said. “What exactly would I find in that envelope?”

“Chapter One,” he said, trying and failing to keep a beatific smile off his face. “The beginning of the book, the new book. Written by Thea and no one else. It’s proof, absolute proof. In spite of everything, I could never bring myself to believe she was dead. She was so—vibrant, so real. But then the … the silence, the silence almost made me believe. A talent like Thea’s—you couldn’t keep her from pen and paper. It was the way she related to the world. Her way of talking. And that voice, that voice. If she were alive, no one could quiet that amazing voice. And she is alive. She is.”

“In spite of everything,” I repeated slowly. “Would you care to expand on that, Mr. Mayhew?” I continued, borrowing his words. “I’d hate to take this case if there’s proof, absolute proof that Thea Janis is dead.”

“Just look at what I’ve brought you, Miss Carlyle. Use your eyes.”

“Right, Mr. Mayhew,” I said with a curt nod in his direction. Dammit, I hate to give potential paying clients the heave-ho. Our abrupt return to formality knifed through the air. I modulated my tone and my words, trying to get back to friendly if not trusting ground. “Adam, let’s say that whatever you have is Thea’s. It could be something she wrote before she disappeared. It could be a find, a major discovery of an old unpublished work—”

“No!” he insisted. “It looks almost new. A cream-colored sketch pad, like she always used. Her handwriting …”

“Well preserved,” I said. “A library archive—”

“All of Thea’s work was donated to Boston University’s Twentieth Century Collection.”

“Something may have escaped their attention. It’s possible.”

“Twenty-four years ago, would Thea have written about the destruction of the Berlin Wall?”

“Not unless she was psychic,” I admitted.

In addition to being a prodigy and a genius.

He nodded his satisfaction. “Find her,” he said.

I made another attempt to dissuade him. “Someone’s imitating her style, as in ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.’”

“Someone who knows Thea wrote in longhand on a particular kind of paper, using a calligrapher’s pen? Someone with Thea’s handwriting? Someone with—”

“Okay,” I said, holding up both hands, palms outward, in surrender. “Have you gone to the police? Missing Persons would be my first recommendation—”

“No,” he said flatly.

“Why?”

“The police have hundreds of cases. Do you?”

“Not hundreds,” I said.

“It’s worth a try,” he said firmly. “If only you’d known her. Thea was … no, Thea is indescribable. In my whole life, I never met anyone like her. She was quick, bright, but there was so much more to her than that. She was determined. She’d tunnel through a mountain with a nail file if what she wanted was on the other side. She could—”

During an initial interview I generally grant a potential client plenty of space, enough rope to hang himself if he’s not on the level. It was time to crack down, to narrow the focus on this bird.

“Who exactly are you?” My voice took on an edge and I let it. Twenty-four years is twenty-four years. If the woman was alive and wanted to be found, she’d had ample opportunity to come in from the cold. My headache was building into a doozy.

“Adam Mayhew. I introduced myself—”

“And who is Adam Mayhew? Of all the people in the world, why would Thea Janis choose you as her reentry point? Are you a publisher?”

“I’m her uncle, her mother’s half-brother,” he said, showing little reaction to my sarcasm, just a mild attitude of apology. “I should have explained. I’m here to represent the family.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why not her mother? Her father? What does ‘represent’ mean? Are you a lawyer?”

His lips tightened as he pondered his response. “Franklin, Thea’s father, died almost twenty years ago. He’d … accepted his daughter’s death. Thea’s mother … has come to rely on me.”

I leaned over and stared at the manila envelope. It was lying face-up. Bare. No address. No stamp. No postmark.

“How did you get this?”

“It was mailed to Thea’s home. To the family home.”

“You live there?”

“It’s a big place. Rambling,” he murmured, staring at the floor.

It could have been his first direct lie. Or his first avoidance of a direct lie.

“The Janis house,” I said, urging him on.

“Thea’s surname was never Janis. That was her literary persona, her nom de plume.” He certainly felt more comfortable talking about Thea than talking about her home.

“I’d need her real name.”

“Cameron.” He flinched, as though flashbulbs might pop when he mentioned the name.

It took effort to keep my eyebrows from hitting my hairline. “As in the Cameron running for governor? As in ‘The Man Who Would Be King’?”

He nodded. “Garnet Cameron is Thea’s brother. That title was ill-chosen,” he said ruefully. “Garnet’s not like that at all.”

Memory came flooding back, a deluge, a tsunami. “Start from the beginning,” I said. “I remember bits and pieces, a lot of tempting little bits and pieces, Mr. Mayhew.”

“I may be going about this all wrong,” he said helplessly.

“I’ve got time,” I said.

“Thea was born Dorothy Cameron.”

“Cameron,” I repeated.

“Yes,” he said wearily. “The Myopia Polo Club Camerons, the political Camerons, the literary Camerons. Her mother, Tessa—my half-sister—is Italian. Raised in Florence. Minor royalty, no less. She always called Dorothy ‘Dorothea.’” He pronounced it with no “th” sound. Do-ro-tay-ah. “Hence Thea.”

“And Janis?”

“Thea’s contribution.”

“The connection to the Cameron family came out.”

“Almost immediately. No one could believe the author was so young. And some snip of a publicist, determined to make hay from Thea’s youth, discovered which school she attended. Avon Hill had no idea they were going against the family’s wishes.”

“Were they?” My tone must have inched back into the skeptical range because he jumped on my question.

“The Camerons have never sought publicity unless it was clearly for political ends. Thea’s talent had nothing to do with politics. She’d already told her mother and father about the book; she couldn’t contain her joy when the first reviews appeared. They were so positive.… Her parents decided, helped her decide, that she should keep silent as to her true identity.”

“How did Thea feel about that?”

“All she wanted was freedom to write.”

“Freedom to write. That’s an odd choice of words.”

“Is it?” He stared at his manicured nails, smoothed a sliver of cuticle. “She may have been under some pressure. She’d been schooled at home, along with her brother and sister. She’d hated her first year at Avon Hill; felt that their requirements frittered away her time with extraneous trivia, endeavors that detracted from her writing.”

“Such as?”

“Gym class,” he said. “Pep rallies. Foreign languages. Thea spoke fluent Italian, but they wouldn’t accept it as a substitute for French, German, or Russian. Dramatics. They insisted she attend Friday evening social dances. For a girl who’d been allowed to do exactly what she chose exactly when she chose to do it, the schedule at Avon Hill was onerous.”

Avon Hill is as ritzy as Cambridge private schools get. Most local academies reflect the area’s left-wing political makeup, but not Avon Hill, where uniforms are required to this day. The kids stick out in Harvard Square, where jeans and tie-dye war with slinky black and studded heavy metal. Pristine white shirts. Navy blue slacks, skirts, sweaters, and jackets. Ties. I had no idea what Avon Hill’s headmaster or headmistress might consider appropriate attire for “social dances.”

“So once upon a time a young girl ran away from Avon Hill and didn’t contact a soul for twenty-four years,” I said. “That’s your story?”

He bit his lip. “It’s possible,” he said with great dignity.

“But improbable,” I said.

“She did call home,” he offered.

“When?”

“The last day. April 8, 1971.”

He seemed to have no trouble recalling the date.

“The cruelest month,” he murmured, staring at his glossy shoes. “‘April is the cruellest month.’ T. S. Eliot …”

“What did Thea say? On the phone.”

“Nothing portentous. That she’d be spending the night with a girlfriend who lived near school.”

“That’s all?”

“She’d never stayed away before.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “I never saw her again.”

I glanced at the manila envelope. “Why break the silence now?” I asked.

“Money?” he said, with a slight shrug of his shoulders.

“Tired of supporting herself?”

“Money is freedom to write.”

Among other things.

“If she’s been gone for twenty-four years,” I said, “what makes you think she wants you to find her?”

“Please listen to me, Miss Carlyle—Carlotta. I have waited to hear from Thea for twenty-four years. Twenty-four years,” he repeated forcefully. “And now—mercifully, magically—I have. If she doesn’t want to see her family, fine. If she does, fine. I—we only want to know that she’s all right.”

He seemed utterly sincere. I tapped the fingers of my left hand on my blotter. My right hand went automatically to a strand of red hair, twisting it into a fat candlestick. Habits die hard. Like using a favorite calligraphy pen, paper of a certain weight and texture.

I needed the work. I liked the man. I considered my caseload, my financial status. I live rent-free courtesy of my aunt Bea, who willed me the oversized Cambridge Victorian I call home as well as office.

Taxes must be paid.

I was under no illusion that Mr. Adam Mayhew was telling me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. On the other hand, my living room-cum-office does not resemble a courthouse. And everybody lies.

“I see two ways to track her,” I said. “Through the new work, or through the past.”

“Through the work,” he said decisively.

“How was it delivered?”

“What?”

I tapped the precious manila envelope with the eraser end of a pencil. “This didn’t travel through the mail.”

No response.

“Mice leave it on your doorstep?”

“No. And I don’t appreciate your tone.”

My headache hammered. “Is the mailing envelope inside?”

“No.”

“Where is it?”

“There is a secretary who opens the family correspondence. She, being unaware of the envelope’s value, threw it away.”

“Surely someone went through the trash,” I said reasonably, “in the hope of finding Thea’s address.”

“The envelope could not be located.”

“Is there a return address inside the envelope? A cover page?”

“No.” Another quick glance at the ground. Another lie?

“Is this all there is? A single chapter?”

“No,” he said quickly. “There’s an entire novel, a whole new book.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“Parts of it.”

“Where?”

He bit his lip. “I can’t say.”

“Is this some kind of publicity stunt? ‘PI searches for missing manuscript? Press hot on the trail?’”

“No. No. I assure you. The first chapter is all I can show you at this time. You have my word that the novel exists.”

His word. He peered at me solemnly from behind his protective lenses.

“I always thought they made a mistake,” he said quietly.

“What kind of mistake?” I asked.

“A mistake … Never mind. It’s getting late. What was I saying?”

“I was saying that with no address for Thea, I’d have to consider the writing a dead end. I’d have to start at the beginning.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d need to go back to her disappearance. And I’m not going to kid you: It would be practically impossible. By now, if she’s alive, she’s established another name, another identity, another life. She could be anyone. She’s had time to establish a whole new set of bona fides.”

“The rest of the family might object to reopening the investigation,” he said pensively. “Old wounds …”

“Where would you suggest I start?” I asked.

He stared at me. “You could begin by authenticating the chapter, I suppose. I can get you a sample of Thea’s handwriting …”

“I’m not a graphologist,” I said. “I’m not a forensic archivist.”

“I know, I know.”

“First you say you know she’s alive. Now you’re asking me to make sure the work is genuine. Am I being hired to locate a missing person? To prove Thea’s alive? Dead? What?”

He threw up his hands. “I don’t know! I don’t know the whys and wherefores. I only—I feel that Thea is out there. Possibly desperate—”

“Did you bring a photo?”

“Yes, but it’s so old—”

“I’ll need it.”

The aged briefcase creaked as it opened. Mayhew hesitated, then passed over a large leather folder with a mute glance of appeal, as though he wanted to beg me not to lose Thea’s photo. I wondered if it was his only copy.

“What’s the setting for the new novel?” I asked. “Is it local?”

“Yes,” he said eagerly. “A small town, not far from here.”

“Which town?”

“She’s changed the details—creative license—but it’s probably recognizable.”

If I could nail the locale, I thought, I might visit, hang out in the places mentioned.

“Will you, at least, try to find her?” Mayhew demanded. “Can you find her?”

First he hit me in the pride. Can you find her? Then he appealed to my pocketbook. With ten hundred-dollar bills that he peeled off a fat roll.

“I’d prefer a check,” I said. A check with his name printed on it, his address.

“But wouldn’t that slow things down?” he said. “I stopped at my bank to get cash, so you could begin immediately.”

“Which bank?” I inquired.

His posture didn’t alter but his chin seemed suddenly firmer. “BayBank, my dear,” he said, his voice calm and level. “I imagine it is your business to mistrust. I’m glad it isn’t mine.”

I felt shamed by his clear blue eyes. But I didn’t take his cash. I said I’d think it over. Missing persons work is dicey at best. Finding someone who’s had better than a twenty-year head start and may not want to be found … I tried to make it clear that I felt he was asking the impossible.

“Improbable, my dear,” he said disarmingly. “Not impossible. And I will pay for your time. Generously. It is—it could be—so very important.”

“I’ll need to keep the chapter,” I said.

“We’ll copy it,” he said immediately. “Have you got a machine?”

“No.”

“I’ll zip into the Square. Those places stay open all hours.”

“Mr. Mayhew, if you want me to establish the work’s authenticity, I’ll have to use the original. It could have fingerprints on it, prints that match Thea’s.”

Or don’t.

For a minute I assumed the deal was off. Then he fixed me with a glance that seemed to see through me and beyond.

“I’ll need a receipt,” he said.

“No problem.”

“I’ll write one.”

I said, “I’ll sign it.”

He removed pen and paper from his briefcase in record time. As long as he was in the mood, and since his stationery bore no inscribed return address, I had him print his name, address, and phone number on a Rolodex card. He didn’t offer a printed business card, but he happily accepted one of mine.

He practically shook my arm off before he left, his puppy enthusiasm fully restored.