“Tears are our birth-right …”
—LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY
AT AMAZING CHINESE, LIEUTENANT PIOTROWSKI sat at a table near the door, deploying chopsticks with grace and skill on a heaping platter of General Tso’s Chicken. He rose from his seat as I stopped in at the restaurant to pick up a carton of Mu Shu Pork. “Dr. Pelletier. Glad I ran into you. Now I don’t have to bother you at home.” He motioned me to a chair. “You weren’t going anywhere important, were you?”
“Home,” I said, wistfully.
“Well. Then.” His meaty hand flapped dismissively. “Why don’t you join me?” It wasn’t really a question. “You like General Tso’s?” Without waiting for a response, Piotrowski beckoned the waiter. “Another order of the chicken, please. And bring the professor a cup of wonton and a spring roll while she’s waiting.”
“Piotrowski, you’re shanghaiing me!” I picked up a fork, reached over to the platter, and speared a chunk of chicken.
He grunted and gestured around the room with a chopstick. “Well, this is the right place for it.”
Some inhabitants of Enfield would have considered that to be a derisive ethnic slur. I laughed. Piotrowski could be good company. I might as well relax and enjoy myself; I wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
A thin waiter in a white shirt and a black vest embroidered with green metallic thread brought the soup, and, while I scooped up a wonton, the lieutenant got to his questions. “Doctor—”
“Piotrowski,” I interrupted, “you don’t have to call me Doctor all the time. Why don’t you call me Karen? Everyone else does—even some of my students.”
He gave me his most inscrutable look. With no more than a second’s contemplation, he replied, “No, I don’t think so. Now, what I wanted to ask you, Doctor, is—how well do you know Ms. Cassale?”
“Monica?” An image of little Joey sporting Elliot’s curls flashed into my mind. Did Piotrowski know the truth about Joey’s parentage? Should I tell him? “Not well at all, Lieutenant. Monica’s been with the department for, let’s see, maybe four months, but she’s not exactly the friendly kind. Why do you ask? Because of the knife?”
“Hmm.” That wasn’t really a response, but what did I expect from the man? He was expert at asking questions—and at evading answers. “Do you know anything about Ms. Cassale’s beliefs?”
“Beliefs? You mean … as in politics, or as in what church she belongs to?”
“Well, not exactly a church.…”
“Huh?”
The lieutenant lowered his chopsticks. I picked up the crisp spring roll the waiter had set in front of me and was about to chomp into it, when Piotrowski asked, “What do you know about Wicca?”
I paused, spring roll halfway to my lips. “Wicca?”
“Ms. Cassale claims to be a follower of a … religion … called Wicca.”
The spring roll thudded onto my plate. “Monica is a witch?”
“She prefers the term neopagan.”
“Neopagan! Monica?”
“I said so, didn’t I?” He was beginning to sound irritated.
Then I recalled the pendant Monica had been wearing the night I ran into her at the supermarket: a five-pointed star enclosed in a circle. I’d seen it again in her purse the morning she was rooting around in there, looking for her knife.
“The pentagram! She was wearing a pentagram! I should have recognized it.” The pentagram is a symbol of Wicca. I knew, because Jill Greenberg—trend-hopper that she is—had worn a pentagram devoutly when she’d first come to Enfield. Devoutly, that is, for about two weeks.
“The pentagram supposedly represents the perfected human,” Piotrowski informed me through tightened lips. No one is more leery of occult religions than a lapsed Polish Catholic.
“Oh? Then you know something about Wiccan beliefs?”
“Schultz has done a little research,” he replied cryptically.
Undercover, I translated mentally, and grinned at the image of the hardheaded sergeant sitting around a consecrated coven circle sharing experiences with astral powers.
The lieutenant filled my porcelain cup with jasmine tea from the bamboo-handled pot, then topped off his own. “But tell me, Doctor, what I wanna know is … well, you seem to be up on everything kinda strange that goes on around here—”
“Thanks.”
“—what do you think about this … witchcraft … stuff?”
I consulted my vast stores of ignorance on the subject. “It seems pretty benign. Witches have a bad rep, of course, because of all the fairy tales and—you know—centuries of patriarchal persecution, and all—but, really, for the most part Wicca is a type of … ah … alternative spirituality stemming—I think—from a belief in the beneficent powers of nature. My sense is that there’s a good bit of Wiccan activity around here, especially out in the hill country—both covens and solitary practitioners.”
“A neopagan subculture, huh?”
“Well, all the colleges and the hippie holdovers lend themselves to a certain kind of back-to-nature feminist spirituality—you know, herbal-based health practices, alternative religions …”
“I never ran into any of these people in my investigations.”
“That in itself should tell you Wiccans are a fairly benign bunch.” I didn’t remember eating the spring roll, but it had vanished from my plate. “Listen, Piotrowski,” I pointed my chicken-laden fork at him before I popped the morsel in my mouth. “Why are you asking me questions about Monica, and her … ah … spiritual inclinations? Do you really suspect she might have something to do with Elliot’s death?”
“It’s just that, well … this witchcraft stuff seems pretty wacko. Ms. Cassale might of been using her … er …‘powers,’ ya think, to get revenge on Corbin for … well … whatever?”
“Joey,” I blurted. “Maybe she—” Then I caught myself. “Well, Jeez, Lieutenant, don’t go persecuting Monica just because she practices an … an alternative religion!”
“Yeah, yeah, I know: Pagans have rites, too.” I laughed, but the big cop regarded me soberly. “Ms. Cassale has denied to us all along that Corbin was her son’s father. Has she confided otherwise in you?”
“No! It’s just, you know, the dark curly hair … and his ears!”
“Yep,” he said, aligning the chopsticks across his empty plate, “I think so, too. But she won’t admit it, and there’s no father’s name on the birth certificate.” He made a spinsterly tsking sound strangely at odds with his tough-guy appearance and shook his head. “What a jerk that Corbin guy must have been.”
Leaving the restaurant, I turned back toward campus—the Jetta was still in the college lot. As I passed Bread and Roses a glimpse at the display of fancy breads in the darkened window reminded me of Sophia Warzek, and set me pivoting on my boot heel. Lieutenant Piotrowski was already out of sight. Damn! I’d wanted to ask him about Sophia, if she’d ever contacted him about Jane Birdwort. What was it she had said? Jane couldn’t have killed Elliot on Thanksgiving? And she could prove it? But it was too late; Piotrowski was gone.
The red VW Rabbit was parked by the kitchen door when I pulled into the driveway. “Yessss!” I exclaimed, and gleefully smacked the steering wheel with the flat of my hand. I hadn’t expected Amanda for at least another two days.
“Mom!” My daughter threw the door open and enveloped me in a bear hug. “My Statistics exam got canceled, so I thought I’d surprise you. Where’ve you been? Is there anything to eat?”
I held up the bag with the untouched carton of Mu Shu Pork, and she grabbed it from me. “Chinese. Yum!” She headed for the table.
“Hi, Sweetie,” I said, grinning. “I’m so glad to see you. I love you so very much.”
“Yeah,” she replied, spreading the little Chinese pancake with plum sauce, “me, too. All of that.” She heaped the shredded pork and vegetables on the pancake, rolled it up deftly and ate it cold. It looked good, and, really, it had been a while since my General Tso’s. I grabbed a plate and peeled a pancake from the stack, spread plum sauce, caught up on all the news.
Forty-five minutes later, as I cleared the table, Amanda abruptly became serious. “You know, Mom, we haven’t talked about my visit to Lowell.”
“Oh?” The cold Mu Shu sat in my stomach like a lead baseball. I pushed the faucet handle to its hottest setting, and plunged a plate under the scalding stream.
Amanda picked up a dish towel. “I know you’re still furious at your family, but I didn’t think they were so bad. I saw Aunt Connie and her kids—I have cousins, you know—and … Grandma.”
I sat down at the round oak table with the dish towel still in my hands. “How is … Grandma?”
“Well, she’s sort of a sad old lady.”
Old lady? My plump, energetic mother had become an old lady? For years I’ve sent monthly checks to help out with her support, but I haven’t seen my mother since my father’s funeral. In a letter to a friend Emily Dickinson had written I never had a mother, and when I’d first seen those haunting words, they were as familiar as if I’d penned them myself. Like my own mother, Dickinson’s had been a shadow presence in a family dominated by an overbearing man. Like my mother, she had left her daughter with a powerful sense of having been … un-mothered.
“You know, Mom,” Amanda continued, “there’s always only just been you and me. And then Tony, of course. I never had any other family. But all of a sudden there’s aunts and cousins—and a grandmother. You really should have told me about them.”
I handed her the second dripping plate. She didn’t seem to notice that I hadn’t responded.
“When I was in Lowell, I was really angry that you’d kept all this family from me. I was … well … gonna give you hell about it—depriving me like that. But then you told me your story, and I didn’t know what to think. What they did to you, they did to me, too, right?”
I nodded. Sure did, Baby.
“But that was so long ago, and it was all your father’s fault and now he’s dead. And you, you’ve made it. You’ve survived. Do you think maybe we could give them another chance?” When I opened my mouth to protest, she raised a hand to stop me. “I’m not just being sentimental, you know. After all, it’s our … well … gene pool we’re talking about here. That’s important. My cousin Courtney looks enough like me to be my sister.”
Another Amanda walking around in the world without me knowing her. The thought gave me pause—but not for long. “Honey, of course I understand. And if you want to go back to Lowell, it’s fine with me. But don’t expect me to go with you. I know my origins, and I’ve worked damn hard to get away from them. I have absolutely no desire to go back.” Was it heartburn, that hard little knot in my chest?
She shook her head. The mother’s feet of clay. “Mom, can’t you forgive them? Just a little? You know, Christmas is coming. Couldn’t we—”
Christmas! Our Christmas! “No! Nothing doing! Absolutely not!”
I might as well have snarled, bah humbug. Amanda raised both hands, palms out. “Okay! Okay! Just thought I’d ask.”
At a few minutes before ten, Amanda left for a club date with Sophia. I knew she’d be gone for hours; the music scene around Enfield was hot. The night, however, was cold, the kind of dry New England cold that continues to radiate from objects in a room long after the air has been warmed. I needed to stop brooding about my daughter and her importunate demands. I built up the fire in the woodstove, pulled a rocking chair close so I could take full advantage of the heat crackling from the open doors, and began to page through the recovered volume of Emmeline Foster’s journal. Maybe the nineteenth-century would offer a much-needed respite from the anxieties of my own very-late-twentieth-century life.