Cold and Pure and Very Dead (22 page)

Y
ou’re messing
in my life again.”

Milly Deakin Finch looked perceptibly older than when I’d visited her two weeks earlier, and even thinner. Lines radiated from the corners of her eyes and across the soft weathered skin above her cheekbones. In the glare from the fluorescent lights overhead, the vertical grooves between her eyebrows seemed etched by a satiric artist’s engraving tool. The high, barred windows, the hefty blond prison guard slouched by the door of the visitor’s reception room, both seemed absurd in the face of this sparrowlike woman in her oversize prison drabs.

“I … I …”

“Don’t deny it, Miss Pelletier. Lolita Lapierre came to visit me.” Milly’s attempt to eradicate all emotion from the announcement lasted only until her voice quavered on the final syllables.

“Oh.” I
had
been messing in her life, and I was here to do more messing. But I was surprised at Lolita’s visit. She’d given no indication that she intended to get in touch with Milly. “Well, then you know I’ve been to Stallmouth.”

“Yes!” She spat it at me.

“I’m only trying to help you, Mrs. Finch.” In actuality I wasn’t here on my own initiative, but at the request of Lieutenants Syverson and Piotrowski. And just
as when I’d misled Lolita at her home, I felt terrible about misrepresenting myself to this woman.

But Milly wasn’t interested in assuaging my feelings. “Last time I saw Lolita, she was just a little girl,” she mused. “But now …”

I waited for more, but when it wasn’t forthcoming, I asked. “What did she want?”

A stone-wall stare.

“Ah, well, she seems to have done quite well for herself.” I paused. “Thanks to you.”

Milly’s head shot up. Her dark eyes bored into mine. “I don’t deserve any gratitude. For anything. Do you understand, Miss Pelletier? And,
you
, didn’t I tell you I never wanted to see you again?”

“When I received two letters from you, Mrs. Finch,” I responded drily, “I thought you might have changed your mind.”

“Both letters stated explicitly that you were to leave me alone.”

“Did they?” A single unprovoked demand for solitude might strike me as convincing; two sounded a bit more like an invitation to the dance.

“You read them, of course.” She shot me an anxious little glance from the corner of her eye. She wanted me to have read them.

“Well …” I glanced back to where Lieutenant Syverson was waiting unseen, outside the door. “Actually, that’s why I’m here. Your second letter went missing before I—”

“Went missing? What do you mean,
went missing?”
One small sallow hand fluttered to the other, squeezed, the fingers paled.

“Someone took it off my desk.” I followed Syverson’s instructions precisely: that I attempt to find out what was in the second letter without mentioning to
Milly Finch anything about Jake Fenton, either his putative relationship to Milly, the probability that he had been interested enough in her to run the risk of stealing her letter, or his death. “And,” I continued, “I thought I’d better talk to you, just in case you had something urgent you wanted to tell me.”

“Urgent? I have nothing urgent in my life anymore except getting out of this place and back to my goats.” The hands had a life of their own, like nervous, etiolated birds. “Jim takes good care of the goats, but he doesn’t pay them the kind of attention I do. They’re sensitive little creatures, you know,” she asserted, challenging me to deny it.

“I’m sure they are,” I acquiesced.
Sensitive? Goats?

“And affectionate.”

“Right.”

“And they miss me.” Her eyes seemed suddenly wider, refracted by contained tears. “They don’t understand why I’m not there.”

If I thought she would have tolerated it, I would have taken her hands, soothed them into … quietude. “How many do you have?” If she wanted to talk goats, we’d talk goats.

“Twenty doe—they’re the dairy goats—and two bucks. Daisy and Petunia are both with kid, and …” The tears overflowed. “…  I won’t be there for the births.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it.

She blinked, and the tears vanished. “But you didn’t come all the way from Enfield, Massachusetts, to talk about goats.” She controlled her fluttering hands, pushed her glasses down on her nose, and peered at me over the rims. “I don’t know why you
are
here, unless it’s about that biography.”

“I’m not writing a—”

“Because if it is, don’t think you’re going to pry any deep, dark secrets out of me.”

“That’s not it. Really. I’m merely curious about what you told me in the letter you wrote this week.”

“I didn’t reveal any deep, dark secrets, that’s for sure.” She was lying. I could tell by the way her anxious hands went perfectly still until she finished speaking.

“I understand. Now, Ms. Deakin—”

“Mrs. Finch!”

“I’m sorry. Mrs. Finch. I was extremely touched by your first letter, which I
did
read, and with great interest. What you said about the wild strawberries struck such a … a resonant note with me—
the sweet stains … the tart intensity … the glory of each bright jar on the shelf.”
I paused, searching for the right words to express my empathy. “To experience the physical world like that, genuinely through the senses,
gloriously
, unmediated by intellect or language, that’s a pleasure most people are denied.” The words sounded stuffy, exactly like something an English professor would come up with.
Unmediated by intellect. Jeez!
But how
do
you get the physical world into language?

“Humph.” The glasses went back to the bridge of her nose.

I kept trying. “I know exactly what you mean about the glory.” And I did. “One day last fall I was shopping at a green market in Northampton, when I turned a corner and … and I was stunned. There, right in front of me, was the most beautiful thing.…” I let the words trail off, feeling foolish.

“What was it?” Her tone was skeptical, but curious.

“Potatoes.”

“Potatoes?”

“Potatoes. A whole heap of
glorious
potatoes—firm, brown, plump. It almost blew me away—the way
they looked and smelled of the earth. The way they filled out their skins. The plentifulness of them. The … the
thingness
of them.”

Her gaze traveled inward, it seemed, through a dimension compounded of memory without words, into the long-ago past when language had dominated her life.
“Thingness,”
she mused. “What James Joyce calls
quidditas.”
Her voice was hesitant, as if it were no longer accustomed to articulating abstract nouns.

“Yes!” I said,
“Quidditas!
Of course. From Latin.” And we had moved already from talking about potatoes to talking about language.

I’d first read
Portrait of an Artist
in my freshman literature course at North Adams State. I was working nights at the truck stop and taking classes during the day. I’d come home after midnight from the late shift at the diner and picked up the novel, which was scheduled for the next morning. At six
A.M.
, when four-year-old Amanda padded into my bedroom in her Dr. Denton’s, I’d just closed the book, stunned by the awareness of having finally found my spiritual home—the capacious, welcoming world of the written word.

“I haven’t read Joyce,” Milly said softly, “in almost fifty years.” She was silent then, toying with the gold band on her ring finger. Then, “I don’t read much at all anymore.”

“Mrs. Finch,” I inquired, after a long minute’s wait, “what did you tell me in your letter?” I sensed her conflict. There was something she wanted me to understand, but fear … or pride … or decades of reticence … kept her from communicating it to me in person. “I’d truly like to know.”

She snapped back from wherever she had gone in her reverie. “Next time, take better care of your mail.”

If I’d forged a momentary connection with this
woman, I’d lost it now. But I didn’t give up. “Could we talk about
Oblivion Falls
, Mrs. Finch? I’ve read it twice. I truly enjoyed it.”

“Did you?” she said, in her dry, unpracticed voice. “That’s why I’m in this mess, isn’t it? Your enjoyment. I don’t want you here anymore.” She stood up. “Guard! This person is leaving now.”

O
n my way back
over local roads to the Massachusetts Turnpike, I stopped at the Homestead Restaurant in Chatham for supper, and was startled to walk into the busy restaurant and find Professor Sean Small there. The plump scholar, his balding head anchored by its long, reddish ponytail, was sitting in a window booth conversing intently with a burly, white-haired man, while an entire high-school football team crowded the tables around them. The minute I walked in the door, Sean recognized me and popped up from his seat. “Karen Pelletier,” he exclaimed, “good God, what are you doing here?”

“Getting something to eat. How about you? You’re pretty far from home, yourself.”

At the sound of my name, Sean’s companion had turned around, as if curious, and I recognized the man I’d seen during my first visit to the Homestead—the hunky white-haired man who’d been flirting with the young waitress. “Jim Finch,” he said now, rising and studying me through slitted eyes. “So you’re Karen Pelletier? Care to sit and have some supper with us?”

I
t was just
after seven
P.M.
, and the sun had already begun to set. From Milly Finch’s goat yard, the view to the west was … well … glorious: a series of rippling
hills and valleys, wooded inclines and smooth green dales. In the far distance loomed a hazy blue mountain range that Milly’s husband informed me was the Catskills. As the red sun approached the horizon, dense layers of crimson and peach alternated with ridges of puffy gray cloud to cast a magical pink glow over the distant mountains—and over this storybook setting of red barns, green goat pens, and pristine white farmhouse. Jim Finch, the man I had earlier that day, in the presence of four police officers, denounced as the killer of two men in two states, showed Sean Small and me around the prosperous dairy farm where Milly had spent the last forty years.

Sean was in Columbia County for a tour of the Finch farm, he’d told me at the restaurant, background for the biography of Mildred Deakin Finch he was planning. I’d cast a glance at Jim Finch: Why, when Milly was adamant against anything to do with publicity, was her husband allowing a biographer to traipse all over his farm? I couldn’t come up with an answer, but decided I might as well take advantage of his hospitality. As casually as possible, I asked if I could go along on the tour. Sean’s lips formed an immediate
no
. “Sure,” Jim Finch replied. It sounded like
shurr
. “The more the merrier.” The
merriment
of a visit to this place that so recently had seen bloodshed eluded me. But I thought if I could learn just one thing about Milly’s reclusion—and the secret history behind it—perhaps I could help the police investigators identify the real killer, perhaps I could begin to right the wrong I’d done to her and help bring Milly Finch back home to her goats. Jim’s blue Ford pickup traversed the hilly road I’d previously driven with the loquacious realtor. In a mini caravan, the Skidmore professor’s red Ford Escort and my maroon Subaru followed him.

From the moment I set foot on the sunset-drenched farm, I was in love: in love with the sprawling white house, with the neat, well-maintained barns, with the black-and-white cows, with the goats, with the green rolling hills, with the idea of a simple life close to the land. Even—for a moment or two—with Milly’s husband, Jim Finch, a solid, sixty-year-old man of medium height whose muscular body and tanned, weathered features spoke of heavy work done daily in direct proximity to the sun, wind, and rain. Bucolic bliss, agricultural ecstasy, uncomplicated harmony with the land and the elements: for a moment I bought the beautiful myth, even though I knew it was nothing more than that. As with any other romance, I knew the infatuation would wear off with direct exposure to its object, in this case, long hours, hard physical labor, financial uncertainty, mud, sweat, tears, and animal excrement. But following Jim around his farm and listening to him talk about Milly’s dedication to the rural life, I found it all too easy to get carried away with the notion of myself as some sort of idealized milkmaid out of eighteenth-century pastoral poetry.

“We’re mostly a dairy-cow operation,” the farmer said. “Holsteins. But Milly has her goats. She sells the milk to a dairy-goat farm down county that supplies cheese to the city markets.
Artisanal
cheese, they call it,” he said sarcastically, with the countryman’s disdain for city pretensions. The farmer yanked off his Blue Goose Feed cap and rubbed his head. In spite of his sixty years, this man radiated physical strength and energy. Freed from the cap, his thick hair, bleached white by age and by exposure to the same sun that had darkened his skin, sprang up with a raw vitality of its own. “With only twenty goats, Milly don’t bring in a heck of a lot of money, but it makes her happy.” He shrugged. “As long as she’s happy, it’s okay with me.”

Sean and I were trailing Jim through a small, exquisitely clean barn where brown-and-white goats with funny little beards and wattles were kneeling on straw, ready for their night’s rest. The curious animals followed us with amber eyes. What did this unexpected human intrusion into their usual routine portend? An extra mouthful or two of hay?

“Can I touch one?” I asked, enticed by the small, oddly deerlike creatures.

“Sure.”
Shurr
.

I reached down tentatively and stroked a white head. The goat bumped against my hand:
More. More
. I scratched her under the chin, joggling her wattles. She nipped my fingers playfully.

By the time I caught up with the men, Jim was standing by the barn door with his hand on the light switch. Sean and I followed him back to our cars, parked next to each other in the ell formed by the driveways to the house and the barn.

“Has Milly been farming goats ever since she arrived in Nelson Corners?” I asked, as I reached for the Subaru’s door handle.