Cold and Pure and Very Dead (32 page)
Read Cold and Pure and Very Dead Online
Authors: Joanne Dobson
“He taught here last year, didn’t he?” I sprinkled hot pepper flakes on top of the Parmesan that oozed over my meatballs. Yum.
She nodded. “And he taught
me
a few things, too, if you know what I mean. I’d just broken up with my regular guy—over something really stupid, it turns out. We’ve worked it out now, and we’re back together. But I was on my own then, and in the spring Jake and I had some good weeks together. Even planned a trip. Then
that damn reporter comes nosing around, asking Jake questions about his birth.”
“Oh,” I said, carefully returning the dripping sub to my plate. “When was that?”
Lolita cast me a quizzical glance. “Sometime in June. Why?”
I shrugged. June. That must have been why Jake was so interested in the
Times
article about Mildred Deakin.
Lolita went on. “So, that reporter—Katz—told Jake there was a possibility Milly Deakin was his mother. Got him so upset, he brooded all summer. Like after forty years he should give a shit about someone who never gave a shit about him! So I tell him about my connection to Milly, and he asks me tons of questions about her—her disappearance. Everything. Then he reads
Oblivion Falls
and starts going on and on about my cousin Lorraine. Then we go to Greece. What a bummer. He just wants to be back in Stallmouth, and I keep thinking about Richard. So we come home, and Jake starts hanging around the old folks, picking up gossip. Tells me one night he thinks he knows just exactly what happened to Lorraine. Me, I thought she’d killed herself. That’s what people always said. The shame, you know. These narrow-minded little towns can be hell. But Jake said some codger who taught at Enfield got rid of her—well, he wouldn’t have been a codger in the fifties, of course. Seems Lorraine was threatening to tell the whole town he’d knocked her up, Jake said. Jake said it would serve the bastard right if he blew his cover. But … he was so plastered that night, I didn’t pay much attention to him.” She shrugged. “I should of. That’s what got him killed.”
“You can’t second-guess these things,” I said, more to myself than to her. I drank beer. The restaurant’s
clientele had gotten noisy as more students joined their friends. A waitress passed with a huge pizza on a pedestal tray. It was loaded with pepperoni and sausage. A tableful of guys greeted it with cheers.
“Sorry I’m late, Lolly,” said a male voice from behind us. Richard Graves pulled out the chair next to Lolita, bent down and kissed her on the cheek. He wore Day-Glo-orange-and-black spandex bicycling gear, and his gray hair was secured in its usual ponytail. “We’ve met, of course, Karen,” he said, placing a manila file folder on the table and slipping into his seat. I gaped at him. He turned to Sophia. “And you, you must be Sophia. Haven’t I met you, too?” He squinted at her, puzzled, as I recalled her innocent-student act the night we’d attempted to scope out the Stallmouth English Department offices. Then he shrugged, extracted glasses from a pack at his waist, and checked out the menu board over the counter. “I’m starved. How are the subs?”
I glanced over at Lolita. “This is Richard,” she said. “My boyfriend.”
“Oh.” Richard. Her boyfriend. Lolly’s regular guy. Now the quarrel between Monsieur Ponytail and Jake the night of the book signing made sense.
After he’d placed his order, the Stallmouth College English Department Chairman turned to me. “When Lolita said you were taking her to dinner, Karen,” he said, “I wanted to come along. I have something to show you. You remember the day you dropped by the office asking questions about the Department’s faculty back in the fifties?”
I nodded.
“You got me curious about Ralph Brooke’s association with Stallmouth. Then when, well.…” He checked Lolita out with a sideways glance. “When Brooke was accused of murder, I had a student assistant
go through the Department records from the 1950s. Hell of a job, but she turned up a number of … er … intriguing artifacts. Here, take a look at this.” He opened the file folder and handed me a mimeographed sheet, purple lettering on cheap white paper.
English Department Notes
Stallmouth College
April 1953
“Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote.…”
Like all Aprils from time immemorial, this is a month of beginnings and endings. For the Stallmouth English Department and its denizens, here are a few events of note.
Promising young novelist, Mr. J. D. Salinger, will read from his work on the twenty-fourth of this month. Following the reading, the author will be honored by the Department with a cocktail party at the home of Professor D. Whitely Manley. As the immortal Emerson wrote to the young Walt Whitman, we “greet you at the beginning of a great career.” We anticipate a long writing life and many distinguished works from Mr. Salinger.
Professor Austin Deakin’s long-awaited monograph,
The Great Poem and its Organic Principles
, has just been released by Harvard University Press. The study has been more than a decade in the making, but our esteemed chairman’s dedication to the men of the department, both colleagues and students, has been preeminent among his concerns. “ ’Tis education forms the common mind: / Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.”
Our young colleague Professor Ralph Brooke has heard the call of the wider world and has chosen to leave the groves of academe and go on the road for a year or so with a few literary pals. Our loss will prove the gain of the literary enclaves of San Francisco where he has determined to head at the end of this academic year.
Carpe Diem
, young friend. “Had we but world enough and time.…”
JOANNE DOBSON
is the author of three previous Karen Pelletier mysteries,
The Raven and the Nightingale, The Northbury Papers
, and
Quieter than Sleep
, which was nominated for an Agatha Award. An associate professor of English at Fordham University, she lives in Westchester County, New York.
