“I heard a voice that said,
Death was among us.”
—LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY
LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT, Dr. Pelletier. You’re calling me—at home, on a Saturday morning—to report a death that maybe was a homicide and maybe it wasn’t, and even if it was, it occurred more than a hundred fifty years ago?” You couldn’t have fit dental floss between Piotrowski’s words, his voice was so tight. It was seven-thirty A.M.; I’d been waiting hours for the first possible non-boorish moment to call. It looked as if I hadn’t found it.
“But … don’t you see, Lieutenant? This may well have been a precipitating factor in Elliot Corbin’s murder!”
“A precipitating factor?”
“That means—”
“I know what it means, Doctor. But just tell me how. That’s all I wanna know. How could a hundred-and-fifty-year-old homicide suddenly become a precipitating factor in a last-month’s murder? Give me the benefit of your scholarly speculations, Doctor.”
“Don’t be snide, Piotrowski! You asked me to bring my literary expertise to bear on this crime, and I’m doing my best.”
“I’m not being snide. I really wanna know. A good imagination is part of being a good investigator, but I need some fodder for my imagination; I do appreciate any … er … expert hypothesizing you bring to the case. If I sound bummed about your call, it’s just that it’s … what time?”
“Early. And you haven’t had your coffee yet. I’m sorry.” I tried to sound contrite, but I’d been brooding all night over the possible implications of Emmeline Foster’s story, and was dying to get this off my chest.
“I’m pouring the first cup now. So, okay, I’m gonna get comfortable here, and you’re gonna tell me how you think a homicide from the 1800’s might impact enough on a … er … modern individual to incite them to murder.”
“I said, a possible homicide, remember. It might have been suicide. I suppose it might even have been an accident—but I don’t see how. She wasn’t exactly the type of woman who hung out around the docks.” And I told the lieutenant about Emmeline Foster’s plight—the stolen inheritance, the purloined poem. “The odd thing is, Piotrowski, that everyone always thought Foster’s death was a suicide, committed out of unrequited love for Poe. But the journal makes it very clear that love didn’t have anything to do with it. She died either for money or for poetry. Her stepfather was a greedy bastard: Maybe he killed her to get the last of her fortune. Or, on the other hand—if Poe refused to acknowledge he’d used her poem as the basis for ‘The Raven’—maybe she became despondent and jumped in the river. Or—maybe—and here is where it gets really shaky—just maybe Edgar Allan Poe was so terrified by her threats to expose him as a plagiarist that he … that he—”
“That he pushed her in the Hudson.” His words were totally without inflection.
“Don’t mock me!” I yanked the old plaid bathrobe closed over my gray thermal pj’s, then had a sudden—and totally irrelevant—twinge of gratitude that videoconferencing hadn’t yet come to the home phone.
“Don’t be so defensive-like, Doctor; I’m not mocking you. It’s just that … I don’t know what you want from me. How is this information relevant? You expect me to solve this crime, maybe? And after … let’s see, you said 1845, so it would be—”
“Almost one hundred and fifty-five years. Yeah, yeah, I know. The statute of limitations would’ve run out by now.”
Maybe the caffeine was beginning to stimulate his neural synapses; he picked up on my little joke. “There is no statute of limitations on capital crimes, but finding witnesses is gonna be iffy. And trying the perp in a court of law?… Forget about it!” I heard him slurp deli-ciously from his cup.
“Yeah.” Now I craved coffee, too; I should have called him from the phone in the kitchen.
“But, seriously, Doctor, maybe you’re right. Maybe we gotta concentrate on possible implications of these … er … historical findings, for Elliot Corbin and his killer. Tell me where ya wanna go with this. I’m listening.” On his end of the line, I could hear more slurping.
Suddenly the smell of coffee was so strong in my living room, I actually thought the aroma of his brew was seeping through the wires. Then Amanda plopped an overfull mug of black Colombian on the table by my elbow. Hallelujah! I mouthed my thanks at her. She mouthed, guppy-like, back at me, mocking my spaced-out condition; I’d been concentrating so hard on my conversation with the police officer that I hadn’t even noticed my sleep-tousled daughter pass by on the way from her bedroom to the kitchen.
I hoisted my cup; now I could slurp back at Piotrowski. Where did I want to go with this? I thought about Elliot and his work on Poe. I thought about Elliot and his professional ambitions. I thought about Elliot and his unconscionable exploitation of other people. A damp and feeble idea was beginning to peck its way out of the shell of my ignorance.
“Honey,” I asked, over my second coffee, as I sat at the kitchen table and watched Amanda down a bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar and milk, “last night, when you were out with Sophia, did she say anything to you about the poet Jane Birdwort?” I was still concerned that Sophia may have done something impulsive and rash, like, maybe, lie to Piotrowski to provide an alibi for Jane. The right moment had not yet arisen to ask the lieutenant about what Sophia had told him—or even if Sophia had spoken to him at all.
Amanda tilted her head in inquiry. “Why do you want to know?”
“I’m worried about her—Sophia, I mean. She seems so … well, wrought up … when it comes to Jane. I don’t understand it. I know she admires Jane’s poems, but last time I talked to her, I was concerned she was somehow … overinvested in Jane. I mean, as a person.”
“Hmm.” Amanda rose from her chair and refilled her bowl from the pot on the stove. “You want some?” I shook my head, and she dumped the remaining oatmeal in the bowl, crumbled sugar between her fingers, topped it all off with milk, and sat down again. “She does seem really worried—about something. The only thing she said, though, was that Jane Birdwort had submitted a group of her … Sophia’s … poems to an editor she knew at some alternative press. He publishes those little books of poems … What d’ya call them?…” “Chapbooks?”
“Yeah. Sophia’s never had a poem published—outside of a college magazine. She’s all wound up about seeing her name in print. You know—lurks around, waiting for the mailman.”
“I used to do that.” I chortled, remembering. “When I first sent essays out to scholarly journals. I was convinced that once my name was in print, my life would take on a whole different character, would have a whole different substance. The very air I breathed would be more rarefied. That I would somehow be more real.…” I peered at the coffee remaining in my mug; it had passed the point of palatability. I drank it anyhow. “It was all a delusion, of course; everything stayed just the same.”
“But you’ve got your job because of that, and your scholarly reputation.”
“Yeah, I know. But the air is the same, and the touch of the breeze on my skin, and the—”
“The taste of the coffee.”
“Yeah, that, too.” How badly, I mused, did Sophia want to be published, need to be published? Badly enough that she’d lie for her mentor?
Earlene called that day at noon, as I was mushing canned tuna into a mixture of minced onion and mayonnaise. “I’ve talked to Mike’s roommate and three of his friends, Karen, and no one seems to have any idea where Mike has gone. Scott Duhan, the roommate, says that Mike left the dorm with a backpack last Saturday. Scott thought he was going home for the weekend, but he hasn’t seen him or heard from him since.”
“Oh.” The niggling little Mike Vitale worryache started up again.
“When I asked Scott why he didn’t let the R.A. know Mike was missing, he claims he didn’t want to butt into Mike’s business.”
“Kids!”
“Then I called his home, but his mother hasn’t seen him since Thanksgiving. Now I’ve got her freaked out; she says he’s never done anything like this before.”
“What are you going to do now, Earlene? Call the police?”
“I’ve talked to Security, and they’re going to ask around among the students. If they don’t turn him up, they’ll call the Enfield police. It has, after all, been a week since anyone’s seen Mike. And …” Her voice faltered. “… if the worst has happened, the police would be the ones to know.”
Walking into the English Department lounge Wednesday afternoon was like walking into the heart of an iceberg. In actual temperature, the room was warm, but the decor was so austere that it always felt frigid: ice-blue walls, ice-gray carpeting, ice-green draperies. On the pale ash table against the wall, a huge, multifaceted crystal vase refracted the watery beams of the winter sun. With their greeny-white flowers, even the seasonal plants chosen for the windowsills were pale—etiolated poinsettias utterly alien to the vivid tropical longings at the heart of the Christmas holidays.
As I entered the room, Amber Nichols grabbed me by the arm. Evidently we were buddies now, after our little talk in the library and our recent midnight chat on the phone. “Karen, do you know anyone at Duke?” I’d never seen Amber quite so lively. On the shawl collar of her fawn-brown cashmere sweater she wore a plastic Rudolph pin. Rudolph the Nose, my daughter used to call him when she was three, and we were living in half of a ramshackle farmhouse in the woods. At twilight she’d stand on the couch and watch reverently for Rudolph to emerge from the trees. Of course I knew Amber was sporting the pin with a huge dose of ironic postmodernist self-mockery, but to me it brought back festive holiday memories.
“Duke?” I replied to her question. “No. Why?”
“Well, listen. The department chair there called me. They’re interested in some, ah, new developments in my work, and they want to talk to me about a job. I’ve got an interview at MLA.”
“Great,” I said. The Modern Language Association Convention, heartlessly scheduled each year for the week between Christmas and New Year’s, is where most initial hiring interviews for college English teachers are held. Given the brutal job market for Ph.D.’s in English, Amber was fortunate indeed to have snagged even one interview. I racked my brain, trying to remember what her dissertation was about. Something in the nineteenth century, wasn’t it … Gothic conventions?… sensation literature?… or was it one of those trendy death-of-the-author things? I couldn’t recall. But before I could ask, Jane Birdwort showed up at her side, and Amber’s brown eyes unexpectedly grew wide and spooked, like those of a startled palomino pony. With a twisted smile, Jane watched Amber sidle hastily away, “to, ah, talk to Miles about my syllabus for next semester.”
“So she doesn’t want to be seen with a suspected murderer?” In her pink brocade dress and satin shoes, chewing on a cherry pecan meringue, Jane couldn’t have looked any less like a violent killer. “That makes three so-called colleagues who’ve skittered away from me so far at this feeble excuse for a party. You’re not going to suddenly remember an urgent appointment, are you, Karen?”
My covert investigation into Elliot’s death demanded, among other things, a good long conversation with Jane. “Don’t worry, Jane, I’m here for the duration. And, by the way, this isn’t the real Enfield Christmas party. Avery gives that next week—at the President’s House—and it’s a blowout: champagne, caviar, petits fours—a string quartet. This is just Miles’s little cookies-and-punch bow to Tradition. Do you think there’s anything in that punch besides punch?”
My plan was to inform each of the colleagues who’d been in my office for the opening of the Foster box that I’d found Emmeline Foster’s last journal. From the start, someone in that room had had a particular interest in the contents of the box. The little blue book of poems had been swiped immediately, and then the thief had come back for the journal copybooks. Did these thefts have anything to do with Elliot’s death? Could I “shake someone’s tree,” to borrow Piotrowski’s apt phrase, by casually admitting to possession of the final copybook? The department party provided the perfect opportunity to chat with the surviving members of the Emmeline Foster Box-Opening-Club: Amber Nichols, Harriet Person, Jane Birdwort, and Monica Cassale. I’d drop the information about my discovery of the journal volume and see if anyone’s tree had gotten shook. Shaken? Shaked? Then maybe I’d have some solid information for the lieutenant.
In green wool slacks and a festive red silk shirt, Monica—presiding at the punch bowl—was the brightest seasonal note in the pallid room. As she poured the lurid cranberry beverage into my plastic glass and refilled Jane’s, she suddenly scowled and blurted out, “Dammit!”
I laughed. “Why don’t you just say ‘Bah, humbug,’ Monica?”
“I forgot the mistletoe.” Monica frowned as she handed me the cup of punch. Then she glanced around the room and lowered her voice. “Not that there’s anyone here worth kissing. It’s just that Miles’ll have my butt.”
“Yeah,” I said, recalling last year’s party: Miles did appreciate the opportunity for a little smooch. I glanced around at my colleagues, surveying them for the first time with their kissability in mind. Miles, with his perpetually tight, disapproving lips, seemed deep in conversation with Harriet, who, for some reason, had slathered her lips with a ‘50’s fire-engine-red lipstick. Ned Hilton’s depressed frown rendered his already thin lips almost invisible as he lectured Amber Nichols on the evils of the post-Colonialist literary mentality. Amber’s lips were set in their customary smug pout. Joe Gagliardi, visiting from Comp Lit, had a gold stud adorning his pendulous lower lip. Ouch! Michael Dunkerling—Oh, it was too discouraging to go on.
“If Monica had anything to do with making this punch,” Jane muttered as I handed her the second glass, “it could have something a wee bit more exotic in it than the usual Christmas rum.” She raised a snarky brow. “Like maybe eye of newt, or—if newts are scarce on the ground around Enfield, then at least some powdered toe of frog.”
I carefully set my unsipped-from punch glass on the acrylic end table next to the ice-blue chair and wiped my hands on the mistletoe-patterned paper cocktail napkin: Wasn’t mistletoe some kind of ancient druidic poison? “Tell me, Jane, am I the only one around here who wasn’t aware of Monica’s Wiccan affiliation?”
“I wouldn’t know about that. But my first day on campus I noticed that pentagram she wears around her neck, and I knew right away what it was. I used to be into that stuff.” She shuddered. “But that was a long time ago—in a different life.”
I thought I knew which life, and decided on impulse to push her a bit. “Really? Is that where the red shoes come from?”
“The red shoes?” She glanced hastily down at her feet, as if maybe bloody sandals had somehow magically replaced her staid pink pumps.
“I’ve been reading your poems.”
“Oh, those red shoes.” She looked relieved.
“I just wondered about them, that’s all. How does the poem go? Here I come again, with my stiletto heels, my third breast, the snake that coils on my own split tongue.… Sounds pretty witchy to me.” I softened my words with a smile.
“Well, yes, of course,” Jane said impatiently, as if to a particularly dense freshman, “that’s the whole point of the poem, isn’t it? The incongruous—even violent—elements of every woman’s life.” Every woman? I immediately flashed on my early marriage to Amanda’s father, then pushed the memory away. What had Jane’s experience with Elliot been like?
“Umm. Speaking of poetry, Jane. I just found something extremely interesting. Remember the poet Emmeline Foster and the stuff in that box we opened?…”
But to my disappointment, nothing in Jane’s expression suggested anything more than polite interest in my find.
“I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am about this job interview.” And indeed, Amber was so animated that for a moment I found myself almost able to tolerate her. We were seated in the blue chairs by the window, and I was on my second cherry meringue. “These’re good,” Amber said, picking up her own meringue. “Monica made them.”
I set the unfinished confection next to the unsipped-from punch glass. The half-chewed sweetness in my mouth had turned to powdered newt eye. I swallowed hastily. “Yeah. Well, it’s really great that you got an interview—with the job market the way it is.”
“Being an English professor is the most important thing in the world to me.” The punch was definitely spiked with something: Amber was downright chatty. “What more noble career could a learned person want?”
“Umm.” I could think of at least a dozen.
“You know,” she leaned toward me confidingly, “I grew up in a house with no books.”
“Umm.” I could relate to that.
She took a gulp from her glass. “They called me a loser—I read all the time. I’d have to go sit on the toilet with my book, because the bathroom was the only place in the house where you couldn’t hear the TV blaring.”
“Umm.” I’d had a rough childhood, too, but hadn’t drunk nearly enough tonight to begin confiding my youthful deprivations to Amber.
“As soon as I could, I got out of there, and I’ve paid my own way ever since—through college and grad school. It’s been damn hard.” She narrowed her eyes at me, assessingly. “But then, of course, you wouldn’t understand about that.”
“Umm.” Just exactly what was in that punch?
“But I’ll show them who the losers are.” Amber yanked down the sleeves of her fawn-colored pullover. “I’ll show them all.” Something in the ferocity of her expression diffused any empathy I might otherwise have felt.
“So, Amber,” I said, more than ready to change the subject. “You know that box we opened? The one with the Emmeline Foster papers?…”
But her condescending manner had returned, and Amber showed little interest in the journal’s recovery.
I snagged Harriet as the party was beginning to break up. “About the Palaver Chair,” I asked, for lack of any other credible topic for an opener, “I wondered—have you heard how the search is going?”
Harriet frowned. In spite of her bright red lips, there was no holiday spirit in her expression. “Miles refuses to talk about the search until after MLA. And Monica keeps those damned applications locked up tighter than Walpole Correctional Facility. I don’t know a thing.”
I walked down the stairs with her to the first floor. As she glanced at the closed door of the department office, I saw something flicker in Harriet’s eyes—something like a comic-strip lightbulb. Both Monica and Miles were busy upstairs, and—she turned the brass knob—the office door was unlocked. She stood there with her hand nonchalantly on the knob while I told her about the recovered Emmeline Foster copybook. She, too, didn’t seem the least bit interested.
“Monica,” I said, as I helped the secretary pick up crumbled napkins and sticky punch glasses, “do you remember that box? The one with all the old papers and books?” And I informed her of the reappearance of the final journal copybook.
Monica slam-dunked a fistful of soggy cocktail napkins into a tall trash basket the custodian had dragged into the lounge. “Well, whoop-di-doo,” she said.