“Taught to restrain,
in cold Decorum’s school,
The step, the smile,
to glance and dance by rule …”
—FRANCES SARGENT OSGOOD
THAT NIGHT I TOOK JANE’S book to bed and read “Doing Violence.” The literary critic in me understood that these were the words of a poet musing on the situation of the modern artist. The midnight reader found it far more sinister than that.
Night and day to cruise
the streets in my high red boots
screwing all the sullen gang,
cigarette hanging from my lip,
like another fang, this is the silent me.
This one knows death,
reads the paper, thrives on rape.
But she is apocryphal …
Jane’s images gave me the creeps—just as they were meant to. But the lieutenant had asked for my help, and if these unsettling verses could yield any clues to the mystery of Elliot’s death, I was the one qualified to find them.
… Folks, this is a vicious century.
The horrendous possibility lurks in the corridor,
picking its teeth and whistling.
Are you prepared?
In the night wind, the house gave a sudden, loud, ominous creak. I half leapt out of bed, then caught myself with an embarrassed giggle. The old house always creaked in the night wind. I turned back to Jane’s poem.
The plump matron in the pink Sunday dress
is ogling the Picassos. If she could see
what I see, she would come out of here in pieces.
Like me, she would come out of here with one eye.
Blue-lipped. A hag.
Had I locked the doors? All of them? And the windows too? I jumped up and padded into the kitchen in my thick wool socks. Back door double-locked? Windows? In the living room a muted thump made me stiffen with apprehension, as logs shifted and fell in the woodstove. A flame flared up briefly behind the glass. Front door locked? Deadbolt engaged? Amanda had made me purchase the deadbolt when she’d started reading up on Criminal Science as a possible career choice. I’d always felt perfectly safe way out here in the country—until my daughter started entertaining me with serial-killer stories. Let’s see now? Living room windows? Locked solid. I padded through the bathroom, the study, Amanda’s room. No one was going to get in this house tonight without a battering ram.
Somehow that didn’t make me feel any safer. The kind of terrors Jane wrote about don’t need a battering ram.
Back under the covers I picked up the book again.
The other one, she is afraid.
She pours her coffee in a glass,
she shakes it, studies it, gives it to me to test.
She takes no risks, sipping slowly, sitting with her back
to no doors. But never mind. She is not safe.
She still has dreams. Around her she gathers
her scraps of comfort. Mozart and Donne. The green trees
that grow tall and strong. That live for years and years.
The re-occurring sun. White wine in an amber glass.
Peace. Solitude.
Peace? Solitude? Mozart and Donne? This was more like it. The fist around my heart unclenched. I began to breathe evenly. My eyelids grew heavy. I forced them open again so I could finish the poem.
Oh? I see. Forget peace and solitude. Forget sleep.
But never mind. Here I come again
with my stiletto
heels, my third breast,
the snake that coils on my own split tongue.
She is not safe. Her face splinters and turns
green. There is a small lump in her neck.
Already her feet hurt.
Where will they take her now? Dancing?
These red and vicious shoes?
And the police hadn’t locked this woman up? I slapped the book shut. Sweet dreams, I whispered to myself, and turned out the light. I lay awake in the dark for a long time. I’d been wrong: A Ph.D. in English is not the credential required to determine innocence or guilt.
The Blue Dolphin was quiet when I met Sophia there after a frantic early-morning phone call. The diner’s breakfast rush was over, and the smell of chili wafting from the kitchen foretold a hearty meal for the lunchtime crowd. Shiny metallic holiday swags in red, green, and gold decorated the laminated walls of the diner, and Alvin and the Chipmunks sang “Jingle Bells,” accompanied sotto voce by the pink-uniformed waitress who showed up instantly with a pot of coffee. Jingle Bells? I thought. Christmas is almost here. I’ve got to get started on my shopping.
Sophia had chosen a booth in the back, and was writing intently on a yellow pad when I joined her. The instant I rounded the curved end of the chrome-trimmed counter, the pad vanished into the backpack sitting next to her on the red vinyl bench.
“Thanks for coming, Karen,” Sophia began. She’d twisted her lank hair into a bun at the nape of her neck, and her tired blue eyes were rimmed with shadows. “I called you because you’re the only one I could think of who might be able to help Ms. Birdwort … Jane. I’m so worried about her, I didn’t sleep at all last night.”
“She seems to have that effect on people,” I said, dryly, and took a slurp from the mug of coffee. The woman in the booth across from us was wearing knee-high red leather boots, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off them.
“Jane didn’t have anything to do with Professor Corbin’s death,” Sophia insisted. “She couldn’t have. Poetry is her life—her entire existence. She wouldn’t hurt a … a …”—Sophia fell back on cliché, decidedly the last resort for a fledgling poet—“a flea!” she concluded haplessly.
“Sophia, I know you care about Jane, but you’ve got to relax. She hasn’t been arrested. She hasn’t even been charged with anything.”
“But why would they take her in if they didn’t think they had evidence? Why would they hold her so long? She was there for hours! I called her last night, and she said the police just kept on and on about whether or not she had an alibi for Thanksgiving Day. But she doesn’t. She was home alone all day, writing—and she didn’t go anywhere for a holiday meal. She just had a frozen turkey dinner for supper. Isn’t that sad? Frozen turkey! On Thanksgiving! Isn’t that totally tragic?” Every once in a while I was jolted into remembering just how young Sophia was. “And … why I thought you could help? I know you have connections with the police—that big lieutenant, you know, from when …”
“Yeah,” I said, “I know.”
“Anyhow, I … I want to talk to him.” Sophia drew herself up and squared her narrow shoulders. “Jane couldn’t have killed Professor Corbin on Thanksgiving Day, and I can prove it!”
Sophia wouldn’t tell me anything more, no matter how hard I pressed her. I gave her Piotrowski’s phone number, and walked her out to her car. I was worried about Sophia; she was genuinely distraught about Jane, and I feared she was on the verge of doing something rash.