Cold Case

I’m prepared. I keep a box of latex examining-room gloves in a desk drawer. Before tilting the contents of the manila envelope onto the blotter, I donned a pair. I’d expected loose pages. Instead, a notebook emerged, the color of milk chocolate with “Strathmore Calligraphy” printed on the cover below an elaborate “S” that could have been part of a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript. The notebook was eight and a half by eleven inches, bound on the shorter side with a strip of stuff that looked like grosgrain ribbon. Nothing bent, frayed, or aged, as far as I could see.

I lifted it to my face and sniffed. Cigarette smoke. Opened it to the first page. Blank. The off-white paper was not what I’d call cream. When I held it to the light, each sheet seemed divided into six vertical columns with tiny horizontal lines rushing across, like waves on a sandy beach. Fifty sheets, the cover declared in plain print.

The writer had worked with the binding to the left, treating it like a bound book instead of a collection of removable pages. The second page was also blank. The third had a tiny numeral one circled in the upper-right-hand corner. The fourth was the title page: Two words surrounded by blank space. Callused Bone.

The fifth page was covered with the kind of elegant script used on fancy wedding invitations, with skinny downstrokes and fat T-crosses. After a hasty riffle, I got up, yanked the gloves off my sweaty hands, and went in search of my ancient copy of Nightmare’s Dawn.

I found it in the attic along with the eighteen neatly boxed and unopened cartons of “mementos” my aunt Bea left when she died.

I always promise myself I’ll cull through them. I never get around to it. My aunt was such a private woman; she guarded her secrets so diligently I never realized she had any till she died. The locket she always wore, even in bed with her high-necked nightgowns, has two sepia photographs inside. Two gentlemen in stiff collars and stiffer poses. As far as I know, Aunt Bea never married. I have no idea who those two men are, or what they meant to her.

Knopf had published Nightmare’s Dawn in a handsome navy edition with a simple jacket. The title’s words, in flowing twisted strokes, set in cream against a swirling midnight blue, like lightning in a storm. Had Thea, the calligrapher, suggested the format?

I suffer from insomnia. Sometimes I benefit from it, depending on your point of view. It wasn’t hard for me to stay up late into the steamy night, rereading Thea’s brilliant first novel, tackling her “new” chapter.

I can read a forensics report and tell you if the same revolver fired two bullets; I can’t read two poems written more than twenty years apart and tell you if the same author wrote both.

The new chapter, like the published book, was a hybrid, poetry mixed with prose. It read like a journal, like notes a woman might write to herself. Nothing seemed quite polished enough for publication, but I enjoyed what I read. The author had used initials in place of names. The locale Adam Mayhew had mentioned was a made-up resort town somewhere on Cape Ann, a haven for painters and yachtsmen. Tension seethed between the year-round folk—fishermen, shopkeepers—and the well-heeled vacationers, who considered the town their private playground. A fictionalized version of Rockport, possibly Marblehead?

Not a single landmark to fix on. I wouldn’t mind hanging out on Cape Ann if I had a real lead. But a single chapter of fiction, after twenty-four years …

Two restaurants were mentioned by name. I punched the buttons for NYNEX information, requested each eatery in Rockport, then in Marblehead. Nothing. Restaurants are always in the city phone directory. Either Thea’d changed the names to protect the chefs or she’d created the places in her head.

Maybe I’d guessed the wrong towns. Maybe it was a conglomeration of towns. Whatever, Thea was using it as the backdrop for a family drama.

The family in question was rich, prominent in politics and the arts. Their fabulous wealth stemmed from the unhappy union of a burly sea captain and a delicate heiress of China trade millions.

The girl in the opening pages of the story seemed about the same age as Thea when she’d disappeared. She was referred to as “d.” “d” for Dorothy? Was the journal a memoir? An autobiography? A roman à clef?

I’m no expert on modern poetry although the names of poets, especially women poets, Rich and Lorde and Plath, are not strangers to me. My aunt owned an extensive modern poetry collection. During her last year, I read to her.

I remember disjointed phrases, lines. June Jordan’s poem about a boy who died: “So Brooklyn has become a holy place.” That was one of my aunt’s favorites. She said that Jordan’s bitter words gave her peace. I don’t know why, but Thea’s words gave me peace as well. I found myself picking up my old National Steel guitar, trying to find an accompaniment that might do them justice.

the mind remembers lonely

long after

in dark places of memory

as a pit of blankness

of black

of cold

and cries at night the name

with questioning thought

are you there are you there

remembers

and cannot forget

as a taste of bitterness

and shiver

and fear

I couldn’t sing it, but I could almost hear someone chant it, a vaguely Chasidic melody wafting from the bema, the pulpit of a synagogue.

I wondered what kind of music Thea’d enjoyed. Sixties protest? Folk? The stuff she’d danced to at Avon Hill’s Friday night socials?

After so many earlier questions and fears, now solid answers, like blocks of stone. “the mind remembers … the mind can destroy.”

To whom was she speaking? To whom had she cried, “are you there are you there”? Who stood before her now in “dusty armour”?

Why she’d written the first poem was no clearer to me than why she’d written the second.

The absence of capital letters, the random placement of words on lines, the use of commas, seemed similar in both pieces. That was all I could say, except that I liked her work enough to read it aloud. To wonder what Aunt Bea would have said if she sat rocking in her needlepoint-cushioned chair, listening.

My attempt to set Thea’s verses to music failed. I play Delta blues. The old stuff, written by slaves and sharecroppers, people with names like Blind Blake, Smilin’ Cora, Robert L.

I got a new pair of surgical gloves from the box, slid them on my hands, working the fingers down into the finger holes till my hands were clasped like I was praying. First I shook the manila envelope, then gently squeezed it open, peered inside. Nothing. No hint of where it had come from, whether it had been protected in plastic or stacked on a shelf. I grasped the chocolate notebook by the binding, using thumb and index finger to dangle it over my desk. A loose sheet drifted to the floor like a spent paper airplane.

It was Mayhew’s cited proof: “berlin, now, without a wall.” Must have been written in or after 1989. The glorious penmanship seemed the same, the paper identical. Why was this one sheet detached? Had Mayhew added it, separating it from a later notebook, part of a series that made up the complete manuscript?

Thirty-five pages of the notebook had been used to write Chapter One. Fifteen remained blank. The Berlin page was extra, an addition. Was a single poem sufficient to pinpoint a year? Couldn’t the young Thea have visualized Berlin without a wall?

I replaced the page in the notebook, the notebook in the envelope, locked the whole shebang in my desk drawer. Peeled off the gloves and tossed them in the trash.

Before I went to sleep, I called a Web-connected friend on the coast and got a home listing for Thurman W. Vandenburg. I dialed his number, just for the pleasure of waking him, breathing heavily, and hanging up.

Whoops, shouldn’t do that, I thought, replacing the receiver as though my hand were on fire. DEA might have a bug on his phone, a high-tech trace. Vandenburg might have a phone that flashed the caller’s number. If I boasted a clientele like Vandenburg’s, I’d get myself every available gadget; cost—no object.

I’d have to find another method to get information on Carlos Roldan Gonzales, another way to convince his attorney to share.