Cold and Pure and Very Dead (21 page)

“Really?” she replied. Her eyes were slitted. “That surprises me. Word at Enfield College this
A.M
. is that you two were an item.”

“Monica! That bitch!”

“Monica? She’s your Department secretary, right? She wasn’t around when I was on campus. Too early. I got that information from … someone else.”

“Who?”

“Now, Ms. Pelletier, you know I can’t—”

“God”—I dropped my head onto my folded arms—“it’s all over campus!”

“So, there’s some truth—”

“Goddamnit, no!” And I told her the story of my disastrous night on the town with Jake Fenton.

W
hen Schultz and I
walked into the anemic green conference room at the Western Massachusetts B.C.I. headquarters, Lieutenant Piotrowski met my eyes only briefly—probably, I thought, because of the way I’d clung to him the night before. I gave him a hedged look—that damn dream wouldn’t trot itself off to wherever it is inappropriate dreams go to die—and returned his curt nod. Was I never going to be able to meet this man again without wondering what it would be like to go to bed with him?

It was 2:34 in the afternoon, and five of us sat around the long table: the New York visitors, Lieutenant Paula Syverson and Sergeant Rudolpho Williams; the home team, Piotrowski and Schultz; and the football—me. Except for Schultz, who was virtuous with some no-name bottled water, we all sipped from plastic coffee cups.

Syverson was doing the talking. The soulless white fluorescent lighting rendered her thin lips the hue of peeled cucumber. “You seem to be the linchpin for this entire sequence of events,” she said. “Can you tell us why?” Sergeant Williams and Sergeant Schultz each wrote a single word in his or her respective notebook. Probably
linchpin
.

S
chultz’s
second directive from Piotrowski that morning had been to roust me out of my coma and
get me down to the B.C.I. meeting. I’d showered, washed my hair, donned a teal-colored wool pantsuit in deference to my dignity. If I was going to be interrogated by cops, I wanted to look like someone they should think twice about before threatening with truncheons. Whatever truncheons were. On the way out of the living room, I pressed the button next to the telephone answering machine’s blinking light. The readout window now noted fourteen messages. The first call was from George Gilman. I didn’t get beyond his first shocked words—
“Karen, I just heard the most appalling thing about Jake Fenton. Are you all right?”—
when the sergeant barked, “No time for that, Ms. Pelletier, we gotta hit the road.”

So here I sat, at the business end of a battered conference table, sweaty in my too-hot wool suit, my too-thick hair damp and frizzy, my too-taxed brain reluctant to slip into gear. The table was inscribed with the historical record of the room—coffee stains, mug rings, ragged gouges, tight, nervous doodles. This table had seen so much horror that misery practically shrieked from its surface. Except for an elaborate penciled maze toward the foot, complete with princess and fire-breathing dragon, nothing resembling the transcendence of the human spirit was in evidence here.

Syverson’s comment had sent me into a tailspin. She was right; I was a jinx. A linchpin and a jinx. I wanted to go home, and crawl into bed, and never get up again. The New York cop snagged me with her cold blue gaze. Or, maybe, crawl
under
the bed. I shivered.

“She didn’t mean that the way it sounded, Doctor.” They were the first words Piotrowski had spoken since the interview began. “Nobody thinks you actually caused any of this.” He cast a reproachful look at the New York lieutenant.

Good cop; bad cop
, I thought, cynically. But I knew Piotrowski was sincere, and his empathy unsettled me.

“Except me,” I squelched the tears before they started. “I can’t get out from under the guilt. If only I’d kept my mouth shut in the first place.”

I’d already told the investigative team the entire story—everything I could conceive of as being relevant to either Marty Katz’s or Jake Fenton’s murder: my casual comment to the reporter about
Oblivion Falls;
my casual date with Jake and the way in which it had been misconstrued by all and sundry (I gave Piotrowski a level look); my not-so-casual trip to Nelson Corners, and what I’d learned about Mildred Deakin Finch’s mysterious arrival there forty years ago; my visit to the novelist in jail; what Sean Small had told me about the birth of a child out of wedlock; the two letters from Milly Finch, only one of which I’d gotten to read; my call to the Wildwood Adoption agency; even my visit to Stallmouth, and meeting the niece of Mildred Deakin Finch’s girlhood housekeeper. “And if that isn’t a stretch,” I’d concluded, “I don’t know what is.”

Now I repeated my
mea culpa:
“If only I could learn to keep my mouth shut.”

“So,” Syverson said, ignoring the self-pity, “in a nutshell, this is what we got. The article in the
Times
revives the popularity of this
Oblivion Falls
book. It starts selling like hotcakes. Marty Katz plays investigative journalist and tracks down the author, who we know as Milly Finch. She’s pissed at being located. She shoots him—”

I protested. “We don’t know that for sure! Doesn’t this second killing throw her guilt into doubt? After all, she was in custody when it happened.”

Piotrowski exchanged glances with Syverson. I wasn’t the first to come up with that idea.

Syverson shrugged. “Katz
gets shot
. Okay? We finger Finch for the killing. Okay? She claims innocence. Then—outta the clear blue ozone—this Jake Fenton gets nailed. And now, according to your speculations about the significance of the reporter’s notes, he turns out maybe to be Milly Finch’s son—”

Piotrowski interrupted his colleague brusquely, sliding a Xeroxed sheet across the table at me. “What can you tell us about this?” I glanced at the paper: a page from a date book:
Tuesday, August 31, NYT——Katz
.

“What
is
it?”

“A page from Jake Fenton’s appointment book.”

“My God! You mean,
he’d
met Katz? They’d talked?”

“Seems so. Whaddaya make of it?”

“Nothing. I’m baffled.”

“You think maybe Katz confronted Fenton with being Deakin’s son?”

“Could be. Do we … do you … know that for sure?
Was
Jake the child Mildred Deakin gave up for adoption?”

Syverson snatched the photocopy from my hand and gave it a close perusal. It seemed this was the first she’d heard about this particular piece of evidence, and she didn’t look happy. Interstate cooperation was not going quite as smoothly as the New York investigator would have liked. “We’re following up on adoption records right now,” she said, absently, staring at the Xerox. “That can take a while.” She frowned over at Piotrowski, then abruptly turned back to me, resuming charge of the interview. “Okay, now, Professor, let me ask you this, in literary terms—right?—after all, that’s why
you’re
here—right?—for your
literary expertise.…”
She glowered at Piotrowski. “So, then,
literarily
speaking, what connections might you possibly posit between these two homicides?”

“Literary terms?” I mused. Then I sat straight up in my hard wooden chair. “Money! Jake Fenton was killed for money! Find out who gets the royalties from
Oblivion Falls
and you’ll find the killer!”

Piotrowski leaned forward, his meaty hands clasped on the table in front of him. “Run that by me in a little more detail, Doctor.”

“It’s obvious. Anything published since about 1925 is still in copyright. And as Lieutenant Syverson says,
Oblivion Falls
, which appeared in 1957, is selling like hotcakes. The royalties must be enormous. Somebody is going to come into a great deal of money.”

Syverson, erect and watchful, was leaving the interview to Piotrowski now. “But wouldn’t that be Mildred Finch?” he asked. “After all, she’s the author.”

“Yes,” I said, my hot theory colliding with cold reality. “Yes. But … well, what if she doesn’t
want
the royalties. After all, she walked away from the novel in 1959. And she’s leading a very simple life—by choice.” I produced Milly Finch’s initial letter, which I’d had the foresight to snatch from my desk at home as Schultz hustled me out the door. Evading Syverson’s outstretched hand, I passed it over to Piotrowski. Perhaps I imagined it, but for the millisecond the envelope remained in both our hands, it was transformed into a conduit for some vital force—electrical? emotional? sexual? I released the thin paper instantly, as if it were radioactive. The lieutenant fussed with the envelope, clumsily extracting the folded letter. Sergeant Schultz, seated next to him, looked up from her notetaking and glanced from Piotrowski to me, then back to Piotrowski again. A glare from him caused Schultz to lower her eyes immediately.

Without comment the officers read Milly Finch’s words.
There is nothing to do in this place from sunrise to sunset except to think
.… “Well, Professor,” Syverson said when she’d finished, “this is all very … ah … touching … the bit about the goats is especially nice. But it’s been my experience that nobody but a saint says
no
to a shitload of money. And there ain’t no saints. If there’s a monetary motive behind these killings—and if Milly Finch isn’t the perpetrator—then she’s the individual whose safety I’d be most concerned about.”

That was a sobering thought.

On a yellow pad, Piotrowski was doodling a pattern of vines and flowers so elaborate he couldn’t take his eyes off it. “Tell us more about this, Doctor. Who stands to benefit most from the success of this book?”

As an academic, I’d had only the most illusory brush with literary profits. “The author, of course, her heirs, if she’s deceased—”

“—or if her whereabouts have been unknown for forty years,” Piotrowski added, “and she’s presumed dead.”

“Well, of course. Then, let’s see, um, her agent would receive a percentage and the publisher would profit. This is a reprint edition, of course; I don’t know if the original publisher would have a claim to anything, but the reprint house would have.” I watched Piotrowski add a trellis to his vines. “That’s all I can think of. I don’t know much about commercial publishing.”

Syverson jumped in; she’d had enough of sitting on the bench. “Let’s begin with the obvious. Who are Milly Finch’s heirs?”

“Jake Fenton, possibly. Or do children not inherit if they’re given up for adoption?” I glanced around the table. All four cops shrugged.

“Does she have other children?” I asked.

“Not that I know of,” Syverson replied. “But there’s her husband—”

“Her
husband!
Of course!” I was jolted by a flash of inspiration so palpable that it practically knocked me off my chair. “Listen,
this
is how it happened. Gotta be. Mildred Deakin left Manhattan soon after the birth of her child, the baby boy who became Jake Fenton. Fleeing from a disastrous love affair, racked with guilt and remorse, Deakin boards a northbound train and rides to the end of the line. Blind with grief, she stumbles off the train in a remote upstate New York village, struggles through an autumnal storm, collapses on a winding country road, is rescued by a handsome young farmer, marries him, renounces her fame, fortune, and superficial life in the city, and settles down to live happily ever after with her doting husband and a herd of dairy goats. Forty years later, a reporter sniffs her out, encounters the husband, reveals Millie’s true identity and the existence of a previously unknown child. Threatened with the loss of his idyllic marriage, the husband shoots Marty Katz down in cold blood, then seeks out Millie’s son and guns him down in order to protect his wife’s spotless reputation. That’s it! Don’t you see? It all fits.”

Piotrowski looked straight at me for the first time that afternoon. He grinned, his brown eyes warm. “I always enjoy it when you do that.”

“Do what?” I frowned.

“Make up these wild stories from the flimsiest bits of evidence.” He shook his head admiringly.
“Guns him down
. Whoa!”

Syverson watched this byplay with pursed lips and cold eyes. “Only one problem with that scenario, Professor.”

“Yeah,” Piotrowski agreed. “It’s fiction.”

The New York cop laughed. “Damn right. And if Jim Finch was so concerned about his wife’s reputation, why’d he let Milly go to jail for a homicide he committed in order to protect her?”

“Oh.” I really
should
learn to keep my mouth shut.

Syverson glanced over at Piotrowski and raised her eyebrows inquiringly. He stared at her, then nodded. She turned back to me, intertwined her thin, bloodless fingers, reversed her hands, stretched her long arms in front of her, rolled her head on her neck. Then she centered her folded hands on the table in front of her. “Ms. Pelletier, we been thinking—there may be something you could do to help us out, after all.”