Cold and Pure and Very Dead (18 page)

“Well, okay …” She started punching numbers with a stubby finger, then handed me the phone.

“Hello? Yes. Professor Karen A. Pelletier of the Enfield College English Department here.” I swear I don’t know how the British public-school accent crept into my voice. “It has come to our attention in this office that a representative of your company has been harassing our staff in violation of our institution-wide gender-equity policies. Now I imagine you have a fairly lucrative contract with the college, and that if I spoke to your president he would tell me he’d like to keep that contract.…”

Monica listened, bug-eyed, as I arranged for a different technician to be sent—and pronto.

“Thanks, Karen,” she said, when I handed her back the phone. Then, reluctantly, “You’re a pal.”

I wouldn’t, myself, have gone quite that far, but it’s always nice to have the secretary on your side. “No problem, Monica. Now, about the rest of that fax?”

Nothing doing. The last half page of fax was digesting somewhere in the bowels of the constipated machine.

T
hen when I
went back to my desk with the ten and a half faxed pages, the letter from Milly Finch was gone. I did a stunned double take. No letter. The yellow number-two pencil with which I’d been about to open the envelope was still lying slantwise across the desk pad, but—no letter. I looked everywhere: under the blotter, under the desk, in my briefcase, even under the edge of the green needlepoint rug. No. Letter.

Gone. Kaput. Dematerialized. Vanished.

M
onica?” I
could hear the anxious edge in my voice.

“What now?” She was at her desk, engrossed in something on the computer monitor far more momentous than any faculty inquiry. I peeked over her shoulder: a game of draw-three solitaire.

“A letter came for me this afternoon …”

“Yeah?” Monica clicked on the ten of spades, sending it flying home.

“And it disappeared off my desk before I could open it.”

“Yeah?” She was on a roll now—jacks, queens, kings. Click. Click. Click.

“Have you seen it, by any chance? A small white envelope with a handwritten address—”

“You kidding? You have any idea how many letters
come into this office every day? You think I have time to notice when you lose one? Ah!” She topped the queen of spades with the king, and the entire orderly rank of cards exploded.

S
omeone had taken
Milly Finch’s letter. That’s what it came down to: I had not
lost
the letter; it had not been swallowed by any hostile machine; it had been
stolen
. But by whom? When I’d gone for the fax, I’d left my door open as usual. There’s nothing worth stealing in my office. Except, it now seemed, letters from imprisoned novelists. I stood in the English Department hallway looking down at an impenetrable phalanx of paneled oak: All the office doors on the first floor were shut tight. Light spilled out from the transom above the door to Ralph Brooke’s choice corner office. It was 3:35; other professors were either in the classroom or working at home. Jake, George, and Monica were the only people I remembered seeing after I’d left the letter alone on my desk, and each of them had been wandering around the building while I’d waited for that damned slow fax. I tapped at Jake’s door. No response. Shoot. Like everyone else, he’d left for the afternoon. I clutched the thick fax to my chest, feeling that blank, uncomprehending emptiness that comes with losing something special, something serendipitous, something that, in the first place, you’d never expected to have.

Curled up in my green office armchair a half hour later, I struggled through Syverson’s fax. Marty Katz’s notes were basically incomprehensible: hooks, circles, squiggles, crosses. On the first page only
mdeakin
came across with any clarity. The second page offered
stllmth
, thereafter abbreviated as
stmth, lapierre
,
abbreviated as
lp, edgemont tp
, something that looked like
tonicroft
, and an intriguing
prbrooke
. Brooke? As in Ralph Emerson Brooke, the POP Chair of Literary Studies? But before I had time to think that over, my attention was grabbed by an anomalous capitalized notation at the very bottom of the page:
LOLITA LAPIERRE!!!
, with a heavy arrow pointing back to
edgemont tp
. Huh! The reporter had found Mildred Deakin’s foster sister … cousin … whatever. That didn’t surprise me, of course. Marty must have visited Mildred Deakin’s hometown—an obvious step on his part. What perplexed me was that Lolita hadn’t mentioned seeing the reporter, and I didn’t understand why not. Was she hiding something from me? If so, what was it? And would she tell me if I asked?

T
he crabbed shorthand
of Marty’s notes, the stale office air, and the unanswered questions had brought on a headache. I put the fax down and reread Syverson’s cover letter. Then I went to my desk, picked up the phone and retrieved my voice-mail messages.
“Professor,”
said the New York cop’s wooden tones,
“since you are so interested in the Katz case, I’m faxing you Mr. Katz’s notes. They were found in a notebook in the decedent’s briefcase. We’d appreciate any input you might be able to give us.”

Don’t hold your breath, Lieutenant
, I mused.
I’m no expert in ancient Sumerian encryption
.

I pushed open the casement windows. The cool air refreshed me, and I stood a moment, looking out at the activity on the common. A white panel truck was parked on the path by the front door of Dickinson Hall. Two overly thin women students leaned against it, smoking cigarettes and laughing at the sallies of a
young man with straight blond hair parted in the middle and flopping down over his forehead. At the far end of the common, among a cluster of dark green oaks, a huge maple flaunted a single crimson-edged branch. I ran my hand over my forehead, then tucked a lock of hair behind my ear.
It’s a beautiful day out there in the world, Karen. Such a day may never come again. Why are you sitting in this stuffy place, ruining your eyes over a dead man’s scrawls?

No sooner had I settled myself back in the vinyl chair with the fax, than there erupted from the Department office, a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard—the high, rusty screech of an out-of-control female voice.
Ohmigod!
I leaped up, dropped Syverson’s fax on my desk, and raced across the hall to deal with whatever horrendous event had just occurred in the Enfield College English Department office. Hostage taker? Suicidal student? Mad gunman? As it turned out, there was no dire emergency. The screecher was Monica. She was talking to a dark chunky man in the striped shirt and navy pants of a service technician. She was laughing.

M
y office phone rang
. Monica was on the line. I was in her good books now. Victor Perez, the new fax guy, was an absolute
doll
. And she didn’t think he was married. At least, he wasn’t wearing a ring. And, by the way, did I remember the last half page of that long fax? The page that hadn’t finished printing out? That nice Victor had managed to retrieve it. Did I still want it?

Did I still want it?
“Yes, please, Monica. Thank you.”

I strolled across the hall to the Department office. Classes had let out, and things had picked up a bit in Dickinson Hall as students grabbed their last chance for the day to consult with professors. Mike Vitale, a sophomore now, gave me a jaunty little salute as I passed. I smiled at him; he was so adorable with his curly ponytail, little goatee, and general air of being too cool to live. I wondered who was fortunate enough to have Mike in class this semester, and almost wished I was teaching so it could be me. Stolen letters, unintelligible faxes, the pervasive sense of guilt over my inadvertent precipitation of the Katz murder and Millie Deakin Finch’s arrest, all might be at least momentarily lightened by one of Mike’s zany quips in the classroom.

I hated to admit it, even to myself, but this sabbatical thing had its downside. I felt isolated. I missed my students. I missed the teaching. I even missed the damn Department meetings—and I’d
gone
to one of them.

Closing my office door, I took the newly retrieved fax page to my desk. From the solid block of almost indecipherable notes at the bottom, one word instantly leapt out at me—a name:
Fenton
. Fenton? Yes,
thos & jnt fenton 13 elm kndhk ny
. Then a date
8/11/59
. Fenton?

Fenton?

How likely was it that Marty Katz would have uncovered a connection between Mildred Deakin and the only Fenton I personally knew—Jake Fenton? Not very likely, I decided, almost reluctantly. At least that would have given me some kind of solid lead to follow. Let’s see what other info Marty had transcribed on this final page.
Scribble. Scribble. Scribble. Scribble
. Ah, here—just above the Fenton names—was something else legible—well, half-legible:
wldwd adptnag mnhttn
. I furrowed my brow as I stared at the cryptic abbreviations:
mnhttn
was easy—Manhattan. I scribbled it down on a yellow pad. For the first word
—wldwd
—world-wide seemed obvious, and I wrote it next to Manhattan; I was pretty damn good at this code-breaking thing.

Then my brain snagged hopelessly on
adptnag
. What could that possibly be? The name of some ancient Norse goddess, perhaps: Thor and Adptanaag? Not likely. Adopt a nag? Some kind of placement service for old horses? Hardly. I was focusing so hard, my eyes crossed. Then, suddenly, they uncrossed: adoption agency! That was it! Worldwide Adoption Agency, Manhattan! I grabbed the phone, dialed New York City Information. No Worldwide Adoption Agency listed, the Latina operator told me.
Oh
. I hung up. Wild goose chase. I stared at the faxed notes reproachfully. They stared back at me. Then
wldwd
reconfigured itself, and Wildwood sprang out at me. Worth a try. I pressed redial, and, unbelievably, got the same information operator.
“How about Wildwood?” I asked, “Wildwood Adoption Agency?”

“Can’t read your handwriting, no?” Then an electronic voice recited the phone number of Wildwood Family Adoption Services.

I wrote the number down, not quite certain why. I knew, of course, that all information about adoptions was, by law, strictly confidential. There was no way I could call Wildwood Family Adoption Services and ask them about
thos & jnt fenton
and the date August 11, 1959. I didn’t even know if the agency had been in business that long ago.

And besides, how could I be certain that the two separate entries in Marty’s notes had anything to do with each other? The
wldwd
agency note and the
fenton
note might simply have been juxtaposed by happenstance.

All the while, in spite of its wild improbability, a dark supposition was beginning to take root in my mind. Fenton. Fenton. Jake Fenton: forty-something year-old Jake Fenton, who could easily have been born—or adopted—in 1959.

No, Pelletier
, I scolded myself.
That’s simply too much of a stretch. You’re letting your imagination roar down the track like a high-speed train
.

I called the Wildwood number. At least I could find out if the agency had been in business in 1959. In my most diffident telephone voice, I ventured, “Hello? This is Mary Smith? I’m a grad student in History at Columbia? Could you answer a question for me? I’m doing a paper on the history of adoption in New York, and I’m wondering … could you tell me, please, how long Wildwood has been in operation?”

The receptionist had been trained to answer in a reassuring and confident manner whatever anxious
questions were thrown at her—and I’d bet she got a ton of them. “Wildwood is one of the oldest and most established of the city’s adoption agencies. We’ve been helping happy families and children find each other for over eighty years. Now,” her voice lowered solicitously, “is there anything I can do to help
you …
Mary?” This woman thought I was checking the place out for my own personal use!

“No, thank you,” I said in my most demure graduate student manner and hung up.