A Word dropped careless on a Page
—EMILY DICKINSON
ME?” I SPUTTERED. “WHAT AM I doing here? What about you?”
Monica lowered the bat, and granted me a narrow stare. “I drove by and saw the tire tracks in the driveway.”
“Oh.”
“No one’s supposed to be here, so I thought I’d check it out. I got a little nervous when the tracks went into that old garage, so …” She swung the bat loosely, then strode toward me. In her baggy wool Red Sox jacket and thick leather gloves, she looked well prepared to wield her weapon. I took three instinctive steps backward and narrowly missed being clobbered by the dining-room door as Mike slammed it open … right into Monica’s face.
“I told her to put the car in the garage,” he said, stepping into sight. “Give me the bat.” He held out his hand.
“Who the fuck are you?” was Monica’s startled response. Then she took a good look at Mike, paled, and stared, aghast. In the dimly lit dining room, with his assured manner, Mike resembled Elliot so strongly it took even me aback. Monica’s remaining challenge—“and what the fuck are you doing here?”—trailed off from something resembling the bark of a patrolling rottweiler to a kittenlike whimper.
“This is my house.” Mike’s suddenly proprietary attitude added years to his age. “Give me the bat,” he repeated. He flexed his fing ers, as if commanding it in his direction.
“Your house?” Monica floundered. Then her eyes widened, she whispered, “Elliot?” and I realized that the broad-shouldered, tough-talking secretary literally thought she was seeing a ghost. Without hesitation she passed Mike the bat. Then her shaking hand flew to the silver pentagram at her throat, and she clutched the amulet convulsively. “How in hell?…”
For a long silent moment in the gloomy chamber, hell must have seemed all too terribly real to Monica Cassale. Then the back door crashed open again, and we all jumped. Young Joey materialized in the doorway. He was brandishing a Little League softball bat.
“Leave my mother alone!” Joey’s wide-legged stance and belligerent expression mirrored Monica’s at her most menacing, but his face with its neat features was an immature replica of Elliot Corbin’s. He saw Mike, and his jaw dropped. Mike seemed equally startled, as if he suspected the universe of matter had somehow hiccuped out a clone.
Belatedly, I remembered my manners. “Mike,” I interposed. “Meet your little brother Joey. Joey, this is Mike. You guys are going to want to get to know each other.”
“Brother!” Monica’s sharp exclamation was a knife hurled straight at Elliot Corbin’s cold, dead heart.
As I lay in bed that night, something I’d seen at Elliot’s house clamored for my attention, but, stressed by the events of the day, I couldn’t identify exactly what it was. The weather was borderline freezing. A slushy rain threatened to turn into an early winter ice storm. Before I’d gotten into bed, I’d made certain I had a flashlight and candles in reach, in the all-too-likely event of a power outage.
I was alone. Amanda had deserted me to spend a couple of precious pre-Christmas vacation days in Lowell with her newly discovered grandmother, aunt, and cousin. Was I pissed? Damn right, I was pissed. The family that had abandoned us in our hour of need twenty years earlier was now luring my daughter away from me—and at Christmas time, too. Amanda had invited me to come to Lowell with her, but I’d pleaded overwork. She’d looked at me with the narrow-eyed, untested sagacity of the twenty-year-old. “Why do I have a feeling you’ll always be too busy to go to Lowell?” she’d asked. I’d shrugged. I was having a hard enough time with my own feelings; I didn’t intend to conjecture about hers.
So, it was now eleven P.M., and I lay in bed, alone except for Emmeline Foster’s final journal. I wanted to reread the journal, but tonight the poignant entries didn’t engage my attention. I couldn’t erase from my mind the encounters with Mike and Monica at Elliot’s dilapidated mansion. For one mad moment when Monica had stood there in the doorway hefting her lethal-looking bat, I’d thought the mystery of Elliot Corbin’s murder was solved at last—that Monica Cassale, furious over Elliot’s cavalier treatment of her and Joey, had knifed him to death at his desk after she’d dished up his turkey and gravy. I’d also half-hysterically concluded that Monica—Bad Witch Monica—had followed me from my office to the Corbin house, and that I was fated to die a hideous death in a Poesque Gothic mansion at the hands of a villainess straight out of the pages of Stephen King, if not precisely of Edgar Allan Poe. But Mike’s phantasmagoric appearance and my identification of him as Elliot’s son—and Joey’s brother—had melted the murderous Monica into a puddle of resentful tears. Then I had a gloopy marshmallow witch to deal with as well as the hung-over putative heir to the house of Corbin. The evil that men do, I mused, contemplating Elliot’s selfish, careless life, may long live after them. I couldn’t think of any good that might have been interred with my departed colleague’s bones.
Sorting everyone out involved brewing strong coffee for Monica in Elliot’s dismal kitchen, then making numerous phone calls from the kitchen phone. Mike’s mother hadn’t been home when he called, and for reasons known only to himself, he hadn’t left the poor woman a message. That task was left to me as Mike got to know his new brother over a computer game Joey had retrieved from Monica’s Ford. I scratched Mike’s mother’s phone number on the back of an old Chinese-food menu I’d pulled off the cluttered little bulletin board by the Princess wall phone and started making calls: to Earlene, to the dorm R.A., to Piotrowski, and to Mike’s mother, the former Angela Vitale—now Angela McDonald—arranging for her to pick up her wayward son at my home. I wasn’t about to let Mike out of my sight until I’d personally given him over to the custody of his mother. While I made the calls, Monica huddled at the kitchen table drinking endless cups of black coffee and muttering to herself about false spiritual guides and pernicious earth-plane deceivers, and the boys bonded noisily over their game. “Die, you wicked sorcerer!” I heard Joey shriek as I climbed the back stairs to tell them it was time to leave. In the waning light, the house seemed to take on an ageless quality. It was as if those sidelit, brooding balustrades, arches, and cornices had preexisted time and would long outlast it.
Now, I was safe at home in my own cozy bungalow, snug under a down comforter. I let Emmeline Foster’s old copybook fall shut, and clicked off the light. It was dark, I was alone, and wet snow slithered down the windowpanes with a monotonous, unrelenting shush. My overburdened brain drifted into a sleepy fugue where Poesque images of beautiful revenants and hideous, hissing black felines ushered me into a dreamless abyss.
The flickering light of a long black candle alerted me to a presence in the room. I opened my eyes to see shadows dancing eerily across Harriet Person’s face as she loomed over my bed. In a thin white hand with tapered black-painted nails, she gripped a needle-sharp stiletto. The knife was pointed directly at my breast. “Where is it?” she demanded.
I was dreaming. I knew it. This was too bizarre to be real. I closed my eyes again, craving the peaceful, sleepy oblivion that usually constituted my midnight repose.
“Where is it?” Harriet’s voice persisted.
I forced my eyelids open. Oh, God! Harriet was still there! She was wearing cat-burglar clothing: black jeans, a sleek black jacket and a black knit watch cap. Her winter-pale face was streaked with something dark—she’d obviously seen the same movies I had, the ones where charcoal-smeared crooks break into heavily guarded palaces in search of the Orient’s most fabulous treasures. But what was she doing here? There was no treasure anywhere in my functional little house.
“Where is it?”
I sat up cautiously, clutching the comforter to my chest. “Where is what?”
“You know. The notebook.”
“Notebook?”
“The Emmeline Foster diary. You were obliging enough to inform me you’d found it again. Now hand it over.” Harriet had placed the pewter candlestick on the nightstand, and her face with its beak of a nose was lit flickeringly from below. Oh, God, I thought. Oh, God. I’d tried to shake someone’s tree, and look what had flown out: a vulture!
I’d never before noticed how raptorlike Harriet’s features were: narrow skull, long thin nose, practically lipless mouth, heavy brows over dark, fathomless eyes. And that livid white streak peeking out from under the skull-tight cap!
“Get up. Now!” she commanded, motioning with the long knife. She wanted me out of bed. I obliged, swinging my flannel-covered legs from under the blankets with a great show of alacrity.
“I don’t have it, Harriet,” I said, feeling with my sock-covered feet for the fleecy slippers I’d left beside the bed. “I … I took Emmeline Foster’s books and papers to the Special Collections librarian. You can find the notebook in the college archives.”
Harriet’s eyes narrowed. “You are a liar, Karen Pelletier, and an unwitting tool of the patriarchy!”
Huh? Tool of the—“No, Harriet,” I pled, abjectly. “I’m a good feminist!”
But my colleague wasn’t paying attention. From out of some fathomless corner of my bedroom, a black cat leapt and landed on her head with a hellish screech. Harriet, blinded, flailed at the needle-clawed beast. The vicious knife—or was it a pen?—or a knitting needle?—clattered to the floor. I kicked it away and bodyslammed Harriet into the book-lined alcove that had somehow inexplicably appeared behind my bed. She grunted at the impact, smashed into a nine-foot-high library shelf, crumpled to the floor, and lay there, momentarily stunned by the weight of the falling books. Without a second’s hesitation, I brained Harriet with a variorum edition of Paradise Lost, and followed the concussive attack with an American Library hardcover of Moby Dick. A massive edition of the Riverside Shakespeare followed, and then I was flinging book after book at her recumbent body: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Portrait of a Lady, Sister Carrie, Rasselas, The Rape of the Lock, The Old Man and the Sea, The Faerie Queene. When Harriet finally lay immobile under the fatal load of texts, I came to my senses, appalled at the bloody carnage. Or was it … verbiage? I wasn’t certain. The black cat eyed me with its evil yellow glare from the penultimate shelf of this vast, never-before-noticed library of massive tomes hidden away behind my bedroom wall. Ever so deliberately, I retrieved a Penguin paperback edition of The Scarlet Letter from the wheelbarrow of books placed so conveniently close to hand, laid my hand on a convenient trowel, slid it into the mortar, and began to brick up the archway, book by book by book.
When I woke, I was exhausted. Early sunlight peeked through my window, illuminating every corner of the small, bare room. Except for the copy of Emmeline Foster’s journal tangled in the bedclothes, there wasn’t a book in sight.
Evergreen swags and white fairy lights captivated me as I drove through the shopping district that morning on my way to school. Instead of heading right to my office, I parked in the college lot closest to Field Street and strolled toward the stores.
It was seven days and counting to Christmas, and the town of Enfield was in full festal mode. The night’s storm had left just enough ice on bare branches to create an otherworldly sparkle above the heads of harried shoppers. As Harriet Person passed me on the street, toting a plastic bag from Smith’s Bookshop, I felt a twinge of unease, but couldn’t put my finger on its source. I shrugged; it hadn’t been a peaceful night and I was too tired to deal with either paranoia or my colleagues. A force field of negative psychic energy was keeping me away from my office and the papers remaining to be graded. I hoped a sixteen-ounce infusion of caffeine would get me in gear for the final push. Just outside Bread and Roses, I ran into Greg Samoorian. Tucked under each of Greg’s arms was a miniature Canadian fir—one for each of his twin daughters, I supposed. With his thick beard and burly build, he resembled a youthful Santa Claus.
“Hey, Karen.” Greg greeted me by waggling each tree in turn. “Think Jane and Sally will like these?”
“You bet,” I replied. “What are they? Three months old now? Deck the boughs with a few strands of those trendy citrus-colored blinking lights, and they’ll be totally awed. How about a cup of coffee, Greg? I haven’t seen you in … millennia.”
Dark circles of sleep deprivation shadowed Greg’s eyes, but he had the relaxed appearance of a very satisfied man. “I didn’t realize being a good daddy would take up every second, but I guess that’s what parental leave is for. Yeah, sure, I could use coffee. I could also use a chat with someone who’s already cut her eyeteeth.”
Sophia was behind the counter at Bread and Roses, serving eggnog and fruitcake to a couple of indeterminate sex who wore green and red jingle bells in their earlobes. The air was redolent with cinnamon. The notion of such rich fare so early in the morning gagged me.
“Karen,” Sophia said, as I ordered my breakfast coffee and scone, “have you heard anything from Professor Birdwort?”
“Jane? No.…”
“She was in here earlier. She said she tried to find you on campus yesterday afternoon, but you weren’t around. I’m really worried about her; she seems a little … irrational. She said she wanted to talk to you about the shoes. Does that make any sense to you?”
“No.” Then I thought about my conversation with Jane at the Christmas party. I’d asked her about the red shoes in her poem. “Well, maybe.”
“She said she’d look for you in your office today.”
“Great,” I said, then hoped I didn’t sound sarcastic. But, really, that’s all I needed, a conversation with an irrational poet about red shoes. Maybe I should just abandon the office and hide in the library to finish grading my papers.
Greg and I carried our cups to a table by the window. “So,” he asked, “what’re you doing for Christmas?” For Greg, Christmas involves weeks and weeks of gleeful preparations.
“Just the usual. Me and Amanda at home. What about you?”
“We’ve got big plans. Christmas Eve we’re going to my folks’ house. It’ll be the first Christmas with the babies, and it’ll be a mob scene: Everyone wants to see them. Then for Christmas dinner we’re going to Greenwich—”
“You are? Things are better with Irena’s family, then?”
“We’ve produced grandchildren. ’Nuff said?”
“But what about you, Karen? Don’t you have family to go to for the holiday? You never talk about them, but you and Amanda must have someone …”
“You’re right, Greg, I don’t talk about them. And I have my reasons.” Suddenly the memory of my mother in a flowered apron baking the Christmas tourtière flooded me with a longing so unexpected and intense, I could all but smell the meat and spices sizzling in the iron skillet on the old gas-burning stove in the overheated kitchen. What was it with these flashbacks? Now they had my eyes watering.
“Karen?” Greg leaned forward and took my hand. “Karen, are you okay?”
“Uh-huh,” I replied, swallowing the last of my coffee. “Hey, listen, Greg, I’ve got to go. I’ve got work to do.”
The library was almost deserted as I placed my little pile—papers, grade book, grade sheets, red pencil—on the dark oak top of my favorite third-floor corner desk. I often came here, to this secluded nook in the American Literature section, when I needed some quiet time alone. No sooner had I set pencil to paper, however, than Jane Birdwort rounded the corner. She wore the regulation New England winter uniform of heavy jacket and heavy boots, and carried her battered leather book bag.
“Monica told me you’d be here,” Jane said without preamble. “She said you always hide out in the PS section when you don’t want anyone to find you.” She must have hustled from Dickinson Hall, she was so out of breath.
“Right,” I replied, pointedly, “I do. I’m trying to finish these papers. Grades are due today.”
“Oh, that.” She waved a slender hand dismissively. “I hear they don’t really bother you for the grade sheets until after New Year’s.”
Her cavalier attitude annoyed me. After all, what did Jane have to grade? A few poems? How hard could that be? And how did you grade a poem anyhow? A-plus for Emily Dickinson and her pre-modernist experimentation with oblique referentiality? C-minus for e. e. cummings and his lack of proper capitalization?
“For regular faculty,” I snapped, “the grades have to be in on time.” I immediately regretted my irritable retort, but it was too late.
Jane gave me a cool stare. “Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry. I just thought you wanted to know about Elliot and the red shoes.” Her expression was oddly intent. “But if you’re too busy …”
She turned abruptly on the chunky heel of her drab brown boot and huffed away.
“Jane …” I called apologetically, but either she didn’t hear me, or she was terminally offended, because she didn’t look back.
Frederica Whitby’s FroshHum final exam was the last essay I graded, and it was barely passable. My red pencil hovered over the bluebook’s front cover: D? Or F? I sat in my dim library nook with the pencil gone suddenly limp in my hand, unexpectedly overwhelmed by the cloud of gloom that seemed to have shadowed my life ever since Elliot Corbin’s death. Someone had killed my colleague, a man whose reverberant voice had been a neighboring presence—irritating, but undeniably alive and vibrant—in my daily interactions with students. The rituals of academic life seemed inane. D? Or F? F? Or D? What was the point? What difference did it really make? While I pondered Elliot Corbin’s murder and the broader mysteries of life, I doodled aimlessly on the cover of Freddie’s exam book. Elliot was a lopsided circle in the middle of the page and Jane and Monica appeared as ovals. As an afterthought I added a third oval: Mike’s mother, Angela Vitale McDonald. Mike and Joey took the form of second-generation triangles. Elliot’s long history of twisted, exploitative relationships with people like Monica and Jane inscribed itself on the robin’s-egg-hued paper as an indecipherable tangle of crimson pencil marks. I moistened the tip of my pencil with my tongue while I contemplated further, then added Harriet Person. Harriet was inscribed as a circle, to the bottom of which I whimsically added a little penciled cross. Then I sat back and studied my jottings: Poor Elliot. The man seemed to have outraged or alienated almost every woman he’d ever come across. I idly doodled another oval and penned in another name. Then the pencil dropped from my fingers, and I stared in stunned revelation at the suddenly meaningful scribbles on the bluebook cover. Heart racing, I scooped up Freddie’s ungraded essay, and packed it away with the others in my canvas book bag. Jane was right; I could get away with turning my grades in late. What were they going to do? Shoot me? Right now I wanted lunch and a talk, and I wanted them both with the sometimes irritating but always insightful investigator Lieutenant Piotrowski.
The lieutenant was busy until supper time, he told me over the phone. My disappointment brought me up short. But, then, who did I think I was, anyhow? A woman who snaps her fingers and police detectives jump? Piotrowski would meet me at Amazing Chinese at six P.M., or as soon thereafter as he could make it. I would have to be satisfied with that.
Back in my office, I pulled out my grade sheet, about to mark a D as Freddie Whitby’s course grade in the one remaining blank space. What good would it do to give her an F and fail her in the course? I picked up the black pen I use for recording grades, and it hovered over the grade sheet’s marking grid. Then I let it drop and sat back in my chair. Had I exhausted all avenues of research for the source of Freddie’s obviously plagiarized paper? No, I hadn’t. I hadn’t even found time to check out the university’s library. That was something I could do this afternoon, before I met Piotrowski. I sighed with frustration; the last thing I needed was a twenty-minute drive to Amherst, endless circling to find a parking space on the vast campus, a search through the shelves of the PS section, decimated at this time of semester by students writing research papers. It would surely be a futile effort, but I simply couldn’t not do it. I couldn’t bring myself to pass Freddie Whitby if I hadn’t done absolutely everything I could to find the source from which she had cribbed her paper.
I loaded my book bag, making certain Freddie’s paper was there, buttoned my long black wool coat, pulled the burgundy knitted cap down over my ears, slipped on my gloves, closed the office door behind me. From Monica’s office I could hear little Joey’s voice. “Vroom,” he vroomed. “Vrrooomm. Red Baron at three o’clock!” He was playing games on Monica’s computer again.
I stood with my gloved hand on the doorknob. Computer. Computer? Computer! The key slid back into the keyhole automatically, with no conscious direction on my part. I dropped the book bag inside the door, peeled off my gloves, and plopped down at the computer without removing my coat. Once online, I called up the net browser, pulled out Freddie’s paper one last time and set it on my lap, looked over the suspect language, and keyed in: “ ‘The Raven’ functions as surreal trope for a pre-modernist unknowing” making certain to include the quotation marks that would tell the Internet I was searching for an identical phrase. Instantly, up popped a familiar paragraph on the screen, part of a long essay:
“As a case in point, the infamous bird in Poe’s ‘The Raven’ functions as surreal trope for a pre-modernist unknowing, as emblem of an existentialist angst prescient of post-Freudian, post-Christian poesis, as enigmatic metaphor for a poetics of the abyss.”
I sat back in my chair, almost weak with victory. Gotcha, you brat! Gotcha!
After I’d called to inform Earlene of my discovery, written the formal plagiarism report—with documentation—then submitted my completed grade sheet to the Registrar, I left campus on foot, heading for Jill’s. I needed to see little Eloise and get myself a redeeming fix of sweetness and light. After all, isn’t Christmas all about children? As I rounded the corner, a green Volvo pulled up to the big Victorian house. A short, balding man and a tall, red-haired woman, both in Abercrombie country wear, strode eagerly down the walk toward Jill and Eloise, silhouetted in the doorway. Kenny stood to one side, as if he wasn’t quite certain of his role in this family scene. Neither was I.
I walked back to campus, fired up the Jetta, and spent the afternoon at the mall, Christmas shopping. Aside from three big cloth dolls for the three infants in my life, it was a bust. The feeling of accomplishment I’d had in my office had faded almost immediately: finding Freddie’s source had left me, ultimately, with nothing but a bad taste in my mouth. And, I had to admit it: I was lonely. Aside from Amanda, I had only the family I’d made for myself here in Enfield, and they all seemed to be preoccupied with families of their own. Added to this sense of isolation there were, of course, my disquieting speculations about Elliot’s violent death. I was too restless to begin any scholarly projects, too morose to do any holiday shopping, and too nervous to go home.
It was dark when I left the mall at five-thirty. The snow had melted, and the cold sky was choked with gray scrub-mop clouds through which neither moon nor stars could be discerned. A week before Christmas, and it still seemed more like Poe’s “drear November” than the holly-jolly festive season.
When I pushed open the big glass door at Amazing Chinese, Piotrowski was already settled in a booth at the rear of the restaurant. His short hair was slicked back, as if he’d just run a damp comb through it, and his gray cable-knit sweater retained ghosts of department-store folds, as if only that afternoon it had resided with its clones on the Extra Large shelf in Filene’s men’s department. His broad Slavic face with its high cheekbones shone, perhaps from the recent application of a damp towel. In other words, the lieutenant looked as if he’d prepped for this meeting. He looked good.
I, on the other hand, had done nothing to alter my countenance, hair, or black turtleneck and jeans since I’d left home that morning. Plus, I suffered from a hideous case of mall-face, the disfiguring ailment in which everything I’d ever thought even the least bit attractive about myself had been systematically obliterated by hours of relentless fluorescent-light comparison with the flawless features of department-store mannequins and makeup consultants.
I slid into the booth, thanked the lieutenant for meeting me, ordered the restaurant’s irresistible General Tso’s Chicken, then pulled out Freddie Whitby’s exam book with its crimson-scrawled blue cover. “Now, Lieutenant, I may be way off the wall here, but let me tell you what I think.”