Cold and Pure and Very Dead (3 page)

G
ood for you, Karen!”
Greg Samoorian pulled out the chair opposite me at Bread & Roses Bakery and Cafe a week after my interview with Marty Katz, and plunked himself down. Banana-nut muffins were the Monday-morning special at the cafe just across Field Street from campus, and the air was redolent with banana and nutmeg. I’d just finished my muffin and started on a second coffee.

I lowered the international news section of the
Times
. During the teaching-free summer months I read the newspaper in one long, slow, uninterrupted stretch before I start my research or writing, but Greg’s a pal, and for him I’d tear myself away from war and famine anytime.

“Hi, Greg.” Something was up: the voltage generated by Greg’s devilish grin might have lit the entire town of Enfield. “So, what have I done now?”

“What have you
done?”
He smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. Greg was stocky, dark, and bearded. Today, like me, he was in summer dress-down mode—cotton T-shirt, denim shorts. He was freshly barbered for a change, and the impact of his hand against his brow did not disarrange the habitually unruly curls. “You mean you really don’t know? Well, sweetheart, let me be the first to tell you—you’ve just been quoted in
The New York Times!
I thought you
were sitting there, hunched over the paper, gloating about it.”

“Quoted in the
Times?”
I folded the first section of the paper in neat quarters and ceased breathing. Greg fished around in my stack of newsprint and retrieved the still untouched arts section. He flipped pages, found what he was looking for, slid the newspaper across the table. Over Marty Katz’s byline, the two-column headline queried:
IS BESTSELLER BEST NOVEL OF CENTURY?
The subhead continued:
Professor Nominates Banned Book for Great-Books List
.

I sucked in a deep breath, then glanced hastily around the sparsely populated cafe. Good thing it was summer vacation. Two work-study Economics students hunkered bleary-eyed over scones and coffee, and Michael Mastrangello from the Political Science faculty was lost in the sports section of the
Boston Herald
. No literary types, thank God. It wouldn’t do for the Enfield English Department to observe me going into psychotic meltdown.

“Read it,” Greg commanded, and went in search of sustenance. Reluctantly, I turned my attention to the narrow columns.

Greg returned with a muffin and a white ceramic mug brimming with cappuccino. I glanced up at him and groaned. “Did I really say ‘juicy’?”

“You said it, girlie. And in the pages of
The New York Times.”

“The little twerp caught me at a weak moment. Oh, God. I’ll never get tenure now!”

“Keep reading. I think you come across fine.”

“Ummn.” I began to read out loud.

I raised my head again. “I did not say ‘cusp of the millennium.’ ”

“Good.”

“Nor did I say ‘lusty potboiler of a novel.’ ”

“I didn’t think so.”

I sipped coffee, then set the cup precisely in the center of my empty muffin plate. “Well, he
did
call me an ‘accomplished scholar.’ And at least I put my eccentric nomination for ‘great book’ into some respectable theoretical framework. Maybe I don’t look like a
complete
fool.” I spread the newspaper on the table and began to smooth it back into its original folds.

A hand swooped down from above and plucked the paper from my grasp. It was a large hand, brown, and masculine, with wide, flat fingernails clipped extremely short.

“Mildred Deakin,” said deep, vaguely familiar, tones, “well, what d’ya know?”

I glanced up.
Jake Fenton:
The name slipped easily into my consciousness, as if it had never slipped out in the first place. Even with the five o’clock shadow—five
A.M.
, that is, as if he couldn’t be bothered to shave first thing in the morning—Jake was eye candy. After I’d met him at Miles’s party, I’d reread
Endurance
. As I’d recalled, it was everything the cover blurbs had promised:
stripped-down … masculine … urgent
. The claim of
universal
, however, gave me a bit of a problem; I, myself—personally, that is—had never eaten bear, bloody and steaming, raw from the fresh-killed carcass. Jake Fenton’s universals were different from mine.

The novelist squeezed my arm and smiled at me. Then he slipped into the seat beside me, tapping his forefinger against the portrait of Mildred Deakin I’d failed to notice in my self-absorbed perusal of the Katz article. “This is a face I never expected to see in the pages of the
Times,”
he mused. I, too, studied the black-and-white photo. In the 1950s when this picture was taken, Mildred Deakin had been a fragile beauty.
The dark hair was short and sleek. Enormous eyes dominated the small oval face with its charmingly pointed nose and sensitive, dark-lipsticked mouth.

I glanced at Jake, bemused by his avid attention to the fifties image. “You couldn’t possibly have
known
Mildred Deakin,” I said. “You’re far too young.”

“No—of course I didn’t.” He dropped the paper abruptly, as if, really, he’d had only a passing interest in the article, and turned to Greg. “Don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Jake Fenton.” The writer gripped Greg’s hand in that firm “see—no weapons” clasp that constitutes male greeting. “And, Karen, good to see you again. I’ve been meaning to call about that tour of the town. Wish I could stay, but right now I’ve got a … an obligation.” The words trailed off as he smiled apologetically, rose and moved toward the counter. When he had secured his coffee-to-go, winked at me for the second time in our short acquaintance, and exited the small cafe, a certain kinetic energy went out with him, as if all the particles of oxygen circulating in the room had for a brief second been stilled.

Greg watched me watch Jake leave. When I turned back to my friend, he maintained the assessing gaze.

“What?”

“Careful with that guy, Karen.” He hefted the ceramic mug, eyes serious over the rim.

I bridled. “Don’t be stupid, Greg; I have no interest in Jake Fenton.” I gave him my most forbidding look, the obsidian glint between lashes. “And, besides, even if I did, it’s none of your business.”

Greg laughed then, and wisely let it drop.

I closed the
Times
arts section and slid the paper into my bookbag. Greg downed the last of his cappuccino. “Aren’t you going to finish that article?” he asked. “Your fifteen minutes of fame.”

“I’ll read it later.” My fingertips were black with printer’s ink. I wiped them on a paper napkin, then stuffed it in my empty cup. “Right now I can’t take any more notoriety.” I nodded at Sophia Warzek, who’d just delivered a pan of fresh muffins from the kitchen. The enticing scent of ripe banana wafted anew across the light-filled room. Sophia paused at the counter and smiled at me. She’s my protégée and former student—and my daughter Amanda’s best friend. I reached across the marble tabletop and broke off a small chunk of Greg’s muffin. “Tell me, what other stupid things did I say in
The New York Times
for all the world to read?”

“Nothing. Really. The reporter just goes on to quote from the novel and recount a bit about Mildred Deakin’s life. Did she really vanish without a trace?”

I swallowed the muffin bite. “Yeah, she did. It was very strange.
Oblivion Falls
made Deakin an overnight sensation, and it didn’t hurt that she was young and attractive, as you can tell by that photo—only twenty-five when the novel was published. For a couple of years pretty Milly was everywhere, giving talks at women’s clubs and public libraries, frequenting literary soirees and nightclubs. Living pretty high, from what I’ve heard. Her picture showed up in
Time
magazine, in the society columns of major newspapers, in scandal sheets. Then, abruptly, she dropped out of sight, and no one’s seen or heard anything from her since, I think, 1959. Not her family; not her friends; not her publisher. At the time of her disappearance, the New York City police investigated Mildred Deakin as a missing person, but they never did find her.”

“What do you think happened? Was she abducted? Or murdered? Or did she simply have a breakdown and wander off?”

“I don’t know anything about Mildred Deakin’s
mental state, Greg. As a matter of fact, I don’t know much about fifties literature, at all—the 1950s, that is. I only mentioned
Oblivion Falls
to the
Times
reporter because I’d just finished reading it. I picked the book up a couple of months ago at a conference; some feminist press had just reprinted it.” I glommed another chunk of Greg’s muffin.

“Was it any good?” He curved an arm around his plate, guarding what was left of his breakfast from further predations.

People kept asking me that question. I didn’t know the answer. “I needed some light summer reading, and it was a great read—downright steamy in places, and the class tensions were just as hot as the sex. The book kept me up half the night.”

“Steamy, huh?” He waggled his dark eyebrows. “According to Jill, you need some of that.”

“Greg!” What on earth was my friend Jill saying about me?

“But, like I said, Karen, watch out for that Fenton guy. There’s something about him.… He looks like he could be bad news.”

“Back off, Greg.” I raised both hands, palms out. Is there no private life in this town?

“Okay, okay! Well, anyhow, Karen—looks like you’re into another literary mystery here.”

George Gilman from the History Department passed by in his usual disorganized rush. Loaded down with a briefcase and a large coffee, our short, pudgy, bespectacled colleague wagged fingers at us around the paper coffee cup. I wagged back. George pushed the door open with his shoulder and vanished through it.

“You mean Mildred Deakin? Pu-leez,” I responded, and snagged the last morsel of Greg’s muffin. “Really, I have no interest in what happened to Mildred Deakin—
where she went, or why.” I licked crumbs off my fingertips. Then I thought about it for a minute. “Wouldn’t it be terrific, though, if the Northbury Center could acquire Deakin’s papers? I wonder where they are?
Oblivion Falls
was hot stuff, and the correspondence about it must be fascinating. Not too many erotic novels circulating in the fifties.”

“Peyton Place, Forever Amber, Naked Came the Stranger.”
Greg tallied them on his fingers.

“How do you know this stuff?” Greg is an anthropologist, not an English professor, but the breadth of his literary knowledge is mind boggling.

He gave me a good-natured leer. “Sweetheart, when it comes to smut—”

“Give me a break, Greg! You’re the most smut-free guy I know! So …” I waved the subject away. Mildred Deakin wasn’t in my period of literary specialization, the American nineteenth century. With any luck this short newspaper article on a Monday morning would be overlooked by my friends and colleagues in the academic world, and I wouldn’t hear any more about it. “I’m on vacation; I don’t want to talk about literature. How are the babies? And Irena, of course.”

“Everyone’s great.” Greg’s brown eyes gleamed with paternal pride. “Did I tell you Sally says
Da-Da
now? It’s the cutest thing! Irena says she’s just babbling … you know,
ga ga ga …
but I swear …” And he was off on his favorite topic, Jane and Sally, the twin daughters who had turned this cynical postmodernist scholar into a squidgy ball of marshmallow fluff.

I
had no luck at all
, as it turned out. Some producer on the
Oprah
show read the
Times
article, and located a reprint copy of
Oblivion Falls
. By mid-August,
Mildred Deakin’s years-out-of-print novel had made it into Oprah’s Book Club, then onto
The New York Times
Best-seller List, into the
Amazon.com
top ten, and onto the paperback racks of Starbucks’ coffee houses across the nation. Usherwood Imprints, the feminist small-press publishing house that had dutifully reprinted the book earlier that year, rushed to print and distribute the multitude of copies necessary to meet the clamor for this “lost woman’s masterpiece.” And I—Professor Karen Pelletier of the Enfield College English Department—for a few brief unwilling days, became the world’s reigning expert in the work of the “lost” Mildred Deakin.