Life is real—life is earnest—
And the grave is not its goal:
—HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
AN UNFAMILIAR CAR WAS PARKED next to Amanda’s Rabbit in my driveway, a brown Dodge Dart of some unknown vintage. Amanda! My God! I hadn’t expected her, and she must have been worried sick when she didn’t find me at home. But whose was the second car? I slammed the Jetta’s door. In the early-morning silence, the sound was as startling as a shotgun’s blast. The house looked serene enough, the curtains closed against the early light, smoke spiraling from the woodstove’s chimney.
Suddenly the front door banged open and two Amandas stood grinning in the door frame. Two Amandas! Doppelgangers once again invaded my all-too-receptive imagination. Then my daughter’s well-known voice caroled out, “Oh, Mom, I’m so glad to see you. Where’ve you been? I brought Courtney home with me.” One Amanda ran up and flung her arms around me. The other Amanda smiled at me, shyly. “You know, Courtney?” my Amanda continued. “My cousin? Your niece? And, look—look who else is here!” The girls moved aside to reveal the dumpy form of an elderly-looking woman in a yellow cotton bathrobe. I stopped dead in my tracks, struck mute by the sight of this long-unseen but indelibly familiar figure. Then I took the deepest breath of which I was capable. “M … M …?” I stuttered. “Mommy? Is that you?”
Hours later, we sat around the kitchen table with the doughnuts Amanda had insisted on making. I told the story of the “Raven” murder—or murders, if you count Emmeline Foster. My mother gave me a diffident look. It had taken Amanda three days to persuade her to come to Greenfield, and she was still skittish. So was I. “Karen … Karen, what I don’t understand is—who killed Emmeline Foster?”
I smiled at her tentatively; I didn’t remember her being so small. “Who do you think did it?”
“It was the stepfather.” The chunk of doughnut crumpled between her fingers, and she hastily swept the crumbs into a neat pile and covered them with her napkin.
Impulsively I reached out and squeezed her hand. Then I turned to my newfound niece. She didn’t look so very much like Amanda, after all. Just the thick brown hair, the slim, rangy body, and—well, yes, the long thin nose, and delicate mouth. Her eyes were different, though—blue to Amanda’s hazel. No one in the world has Amanda’s beautiful eyes. “Courtney, who do you think did it?”
“It was definitely Edgar Allan Poe. He sounds like such a loser.” She had Amanda’s clear, precise voice.
My daughter frowned as she fished three doughnuts from the bubbling oil in the cast-iron Dutch oven. With her metal tongs she dropped each into a sugar-filled paper bag. “It was suicide. Had to be. Emmeline’s poetry was all she lived for, and it had been stolen from her.” Amanda shook the bag, then held it open in front of me. “What do you think, Mom? You’re the literary detective here. In your informed opinion, who do you think murdered the poet Emmeline Foster?”
I raised my shoulders, spread my hands. “Who knows?” I replied. I peered in the bag and plucked out the largest doughnut. “It’s all a mystery to me.”