Cold and Pure and Very Dead (19 page)

You’re twenty-one years too late, lady, to help me out
.

Amanda’s beautiful face flashed into my mind. Not that I would ever have thought about it. Not even for a millisecond.

O
n my way
to the library to look up Jake Fenton’s date of birth in
Contemporary Authors
, I ran into Ralph Brooke. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he ran into me. As I opened my office door, Ralph emerged from the Department office.

“Ah, Miss Pelletier … Karen? Am I right? It’s going to take me a while to connect all these new names with all these new faces.” Ralph gave a courtly little bow. “But in your case I don’t think it will present a problem.”

I smiled weakly. I wasn’t in the mood for smarmy compliments. I wanted to get on with my sleuthing.

“Would you be free to take a cup of coffee with me?”

“Now?” Then I cringed at the inflection of dismay in my voice.

“Well, yes.
Seize the day
, you know.” He seemed taken aback by my manner—and rightly so; I’d been rude.

I glanced at my watch, and shook my head. “Any other time … Ralph … but right now I have to go to the library.”

“Ah, yes, class preparation. How clearly I remember my early days in the profession—scurry, scurry, scurry. But then, in my case, I was so very torn between the academy and the arts. Those late nights at the Village Vanguard with Jack and Neil—that’s Kerouac and Cassady, of course.” I nodded. He granted me a world-weary smile, but his gray eyes were shrewd behind the thick lenses. “Well, I mustn’t keep you from your work.”

Had the man’s face ever been anything other than a polite mask, I wondered, as I scurried on over to the library. Thirty seconds later I’d forgotten about him.

Securing the heavy volume of
Contemporary Authors
that contained Jake’s bio, I took it to the nearest table.
Jacob Thomas Fenton
, I read,
(1959–)
.

1959?

1959!

My dark supposition blossomed into a full-flowered theory: Marty Katz must have discovered that Jake Fenton was the out-of-wedlock child of Mildred Deakin given up for adoption in the summer of 1959! August 1959 would have been shortly after Deakin’s disappearance from Manhattan, and not so many months before her mysterious autumn arrival in Nelson Corners.

All around me in the hushed Reference Room of the Enfield College Library, the business of dry academic fact-gathering was going on: the number of barrels of olive oil shipped from Roman ports to the savage British outposts in the year
A.D
. 79. The dates of the major battles of the Hundred Years War. The precise distinction between
metonymy
and
synecdoche
in figurative usage. All around me papers were being written for courses in Old English, History of Women in Ancient Greece, and Pre-Industrial Economics. All around me statistics were being gathered for scholarly monographs on the Peloponnesian Wars or colonialist
appropriation of native resources in the late-nineteenth-century Congo. And I—I had to uncover the heart-searing evidence of still-living, still-breathing, human tragedy.

Sitting at the long oak table with two unknown students, a red-haired guy in an Enfield T and an African American woman in a Muslim head covering, I wanted to tell someone about this … this
what?
Conjecture? Discovery? But
who? Whom
should I tell, I automatically corrected myself. Lieutenant Syverson? Most unsatisfactory. Like talking to a wooden bowling pin. Yes, I’d have to share my speculations with her, but Lieutenant Charlie Piotrowski? I thought, yearningly—that’s who I really wanted to tell. He was so damn good to talk to. Smart. Articulate. Willing to listen to the far-fetched theories of a wild-eyed literary scholar. Willing to take risks.

But
no
. No. Piotrowski had nothing to do with this case. Marty Katz’s death was a New York State homicide. And, maybe I’d wait before I said anything to Syverson. It wouldn’t be fair to Jake Fenton to drag him into a murder case until I had ascertained with more than 100-percent certainty that he was indeed the adopted child of the
thos & jnt fenton
referred to in Marty’s notes. Really, for all I knew, Jake might have been born to righteous missionary parents in, oh, say, Namibia, and brought up there among a dozen biological brothers and sisters. If I wanted confirmation that Jake was Mildred Deakin’s love child, I would somehow have to get it from him.

If he even knew.

M
onica?”

“What can I do for you, Karen?” The secretary flashed me a dazzling smile. I almost staggered back a
step, her welcome was so effusive. It was, I thought, as if I’d delivered Victor Perez to Monica personally—in a gigantic pink birthday cake.

“Do you have Jake Fenton’s address?” I pulled a little spiral notebook from the pocket of my khakis.

“You mean you don’t know it by heart,” she responded with a coy smile, gazing at me through slitted eyes.

Shit!
That’s right! Monica Cassale was the person spreading all those nasty rumors about me and Jake.

“Give me a break, Monica,” I snarled.

She recoiled as if I’d slapped her. “Fine!” she snapped back. So much for any detente between us. She spun through her Rolodex, scrawled an address on an index card, ignoring my proffered pad, thrust the card at me, and swiveled back to her computer.

I
pulled into
the wooded cul-de-sac where Jake lived. The neat white ranch-style house was half-hidden from the road by an overgrown lilac hedge.
Should I have called him first?
I wondered, as I shifted the gear lever into Park. But what would I have said on the phone?
Jake, if you don’t mind, please divulge to me, a virtual stranger, the dark secrets of your parentage?
For that matter, what was I going to say to him in person?

It had been five o’clock—quitting time—when I swallowed the last bite of the Snickers bar I’d purchased from a machine in the Student Commons and pulled the Subaru onto Field Street in quest of Jake Fenton. As the sugar and chocolate hit my brain, reviving my sagging energies, it struck me that if Jake was indeed Mildred Deakin’s son, that could have far wider ramifications than simply uncovering the poignant tragedy of a long ago mother-child separation.
Wouldn’t their relationship give Jake certain legal rights? Wouldn’t it possibly make him an heir to the suddenly burgeoning royalties on his birth mother’s runaway bestseller?

Two junior-high-school-age girls in matching magenta hair, corpse makeup, baggy black jeans, and lug boots, slouched into the zebra-striped crosswalk. I stopped and waved them across. The taller of the two automatically flashed me a polite, middle-class-girl thank-you smile.

I wished I could talk to Piotrowski about all this, I’d thought again, as I’d accelerated through the intersection. So many random possibilities were running through my solitary mind that I felt like a single sluggish rat in a maze. Two rats could at least go out for a beer and talk it over.

Late-afternoon sun slanted through the tall maples and oaks that isolated Jake’s house from his neighbors and from the road. The shiny brown Range Rover was in the driveway, but Jake didn’t answer my knock. I waited a good solid sixty-second minute and knocked again, five sharp raps. No response. Then I noticed a little white button secreted in the door frame. I pushed it, and a jarring three-note bell sounded so loudly that it startled even me. No answer.

Well—okay—so Jake didn’t want to answer the door. Maybe he was writing. Maybe he was taking a hike. Maybe he was napping. Maybe he … had company. Maybe he was bombed out of his mind, on his own living-room sofa for a change. None of it was any of my business.

The tall multipaned French doors of Jake’s living room were directly adjacent to the flagstone path that led back to my car. I could hardly avoid glancing in as I walked by. Jake Fenton was not lying bombed on the
living-room sofa. He was sprawled on the living-room floor directly in front of the glass door, his handsome head centered in a spreading pool of blood.

I stopped in my tracks, frozen with horror. My first impulse was to throw the door open and rush to his aid. My second impulse, following so hard on the first it was practically simultaneous, was to get the hell out of there in case Jake’s assailant was still hanging around. My third impulse, which I followed, was the most rational:
Anyone who had lost that much blood was beyond my help. Call the cops
. The Range Rover had a phone, I recalled. I threw open the driver’s-side door, jumped in, pressed the door lock, and frantically dialed 911. They’d get the cops and an ambulance here fast.

I jerked a glance in the direction of the French doors.

Not that an ambulance would matter to Jake. Not anymore.

Then, finished with the emergency dispatcher, I pulled a battered business card from my wallet and punched in Lieutenant Piotrowski’s number.
This
homicide was definitely in his jurisdiction.

Then I huddled in the oversize chocolate-hued leather driver’s seat of Jake Fenton’s beautiful Range Rover and bawled.

I was crying for Jake Fenton; I was crying for the human condition; most of all I was crying for myself. Everywhere I went, it seemed, death and destruction followed me like an evil little goat.

B
y the time
Piotrowski’s red Jeep pulled into Jake Fenton’s driveway, I was seated in the backseat of a State Police car, dry-eyed and staring like a zombie at the mango-and-persimmon sunset that flamed the New England sky over the Berkshires to the west. I’d told my story twice, first, incoherently, to the flustered young town policeman who’d responded, within seconds it seemed, to my 911 call. Then, in more detail, to the first pair of state troopers who’d shown up in what now seemed like a major assault force of cop cars. In the thickening twilight, emergency lights flashed, searchlights glared, radios blared. A bat swooped down over the scene, then veered away, confused. I knew how it felt. I was confused, too, slammed into some phantasmagorical alternate universe composed of strangely hyper-real TV police-drama images.

Piotrowski stepped out of the Jeep and queried a passing trooper. The uniformed officer pointed toward me. Before I was completely out of the patrol car, the lieutenant was at my side, a solid presence in the lurid nightmare carnival of blinding blue lights and weirdly distorted radio-transmitted voices. I was expecting him to ream me out for being here in the first place. After all, he’d ordered me to
butt out
of the Katz homicide investigation.
But
, a little still-rational voice nagged,
how could he possibly know Jake had anything to do with
Milly Finch? You just found out yourself a couple of hours ago
. And, anyhow, Piotrowski’s expression wasn’t angry. One look at the concern and compassion in his brown eyes, and I burst into tears again.

“Aww, now, Doctor,” said this hardened homicide investigator, and patted my shoulder. I threw my arms around the cop’s broad torso and hung on for dear life. He felt so solid, so strong, so—alive.

Then I deciphered the words the lieutenant was muttering in my ear. “I’m so
sorry,”
he said. “I am so terribly sorry for your loss.”

My loss?
Reluctantly I loosened my death grip and pushed back far enough so I could see his plain, honest face. “My
loss?”
I queried, choking back the sobs.

“I know how much he must have meant to you.” Piotrowski was gazing solicitously down at me. His big hands rested comfortingly on my shoulders, feeling as if they belonged there.

“Meant to me? Who?”

The policeman’s broad brow furrowed. “The victim, of course. Er, Mr. Fenton.”

“Jake? He meant nothing—” For some reason, I reached up and clasped one of Piotrowski’s hands.

He shook his head slowly. “Poor thing. You’re disoriented. Anyone would be … such a shock.”

“Shock? Well, yes, it was a shock to find a colleague like that. But it’s not as if I’ve never seen a dead person before.”

“Tsk. Tsk. Doctor, you’re clearly traumatized.” His bright brown eyes reflected some complicated emotion. Pity? Sympathy? Concern? I couldn’t tell.

Affection? Could it be
affection?

“Trooper,” he barked at a uniformed cop, one of three, I now noticed, who stood in a gawking semicircle, enjoying the spectacle of their superior officer being
mauled by an hysterical woman. Suddenly embarrassed, I let go of Piotrowski’s hand and pulled completely away. I was misreading a purely professional concern as something more personal. Even in the cool dampness of the autumn evening, I could feel heat rise into my face.

“Get this lady a cup of coffee. Black,” the lieutenant demanded, and a tall, slim Asian trooper jumped to his command. I’d drunk a good deal of coffee with Piotrowski in the past, and was absurdly touched that he should remember how I took it—black, no sugar.

“And make it sweet,” he added.

I gagged.

Then he took me by the arm, led me to his Jeep, and opened the door. “Look, Doc, I’m goin’ in …” he gestured toward the house, “to take a gander at the scene, here. Then I want … need … to talk to you. I’ll come back, get you out of here. Have you eaten?”

My stomach clenched. I felt my red face pale.

“Okay, well, maybe just toast or something.” He patted my hand. “You sit here, pull yourself together. I’ll be right back.”