Cold and Pure and Very Dead (7 page)

“Really? I’m surprised. This homicide obviously has causative factors rooted in the literary world, and you’re a literary investigator.” She was already talking like a police detective. “No cop knows the literary world the way you do.”

“You’re right,” I said, sighing. Sometimes my daughter’s unyielding faith in me feels like a burden. “If I don’t look into it, there’s a lot the cops might miss. Also, to tell the truth, I feel responsible. I initiated the chain of events that led to the reporter’s death. I have an obligation at least to look into Mildred Deakin’s background. She was a writer, after all.”

“Good for you, Mom!” My daughter jumped up from the table and hugged me. Then she held me out at arm’s length and studied my insomniac face. “Somehow I don’t think that’s all that’s eating you. And if it’s not the thought of me maybe going into law enforcement that’s keeping you awake, what is it? The folks in Lowell?”

“No!”

“Jeez, Mom. You don’t have to bite my head off! It wasn’t so bad having your family here for that picnic, was it?”

My mother had been silent most of the rainy August day we’d finally gotten the family together. Connie had turned her nose up at the enchiladas and nachos I’d slaved over, saying, “I don’t eat Mexican.” Her husband, Ed, had gone around tapping the walls of my rooms for soundness. Finally he said, “You must make
pretty good money at that college of yours. Why do you live in such a cheap house?”

“Amanda, I’m
not
thinking about the family. You’re the one who keeps harping on them.”

“I’m just trying to make sure that you won’t be all alone—”

“Amanda—cease and desist!” What had I been thinking:
unyielding faith!

“All right.” She held up her hands, palms out. “Chill, okay. Just—chill.” She yanked open the refrigerator door. “And speaking of
chill
, is there any of that chili left from the other night?” She rummaged around. “Oh—cool,” she said, retrieving the blue pottery bowl from the bottom shelf. “All that beer sloshing around in my empty stomach—”

“All that
beer!”
I shrieked. “Amanda, you haven’t been drinking and driving …”

M
assive rock ledges
blurred past on the Massachusetts Turnpike as I crossed the Connecticut River Bridge, keeping to the slow lane. Since they’ve raised the speed limit on the Pike to sixty-five, traffic has speeded up accordingly. I was doing a steady seventy, but, then, I’ve always been an overly cautious driver. Tractor trailers whipped past me, effortlessly accelerating up the endless hills that constitute the westbound lane at this point. SUVs going eighty-five or ninety left me eating their dust.

I was headed for New York State, for the small town of Nelson Corners in Columbia County, where, according to the New York investigators, Mildred Deakin Finch had spent the forty most recent of her sixty-seven years. What did I intend to do there? I really didn’t know. Drive by the scene of the crime, maybe.
Buy the local paper. Drink coffee in the local luncheonette. Loiter in the local grocery store. Keep my eyes and ears open. Try to get the scuttlebutt on Mrs. Milly Deakin Finch. Try to find some clue as to why she would panic at the unexpected intrusion into her country life of a big-city news reporter. Across the blur of highway and horizon, I projected an image of the novelist—the only picture I knew—black and white, young and beautiful, poised for her book-jacket photo, cigarette held gracefully in a long, thin hand. Then I added forty years to that image: black and white, mature and beautiful, cigarette held gracefully in a long, thin hand. Then I added goats.

When I arrived in Nelson Corners, having left the Pike at the first New York exit and navigated a labyrinth of winding roads, my plans to stake out local establishments promptly evaporated. There were no local establishments in Nelson Corners. There was no
town
. Along the main road, Route 295, long driveways led back to derelict barns and farmhouses in dire need of fresh paint. I slowed as I came to the intersection of 295 and County Route Three, which on the New York State road map pinpointed the town’s name. Sure enough, here was a green rectangular road sign announcing
NELSON CORNERS
. The intersection offered a white post office, converted from what had once been a small house, a shuttered brick church with a sign that promised
ANTIQUE EMPORIUM—COMING SOON
, and two houses, one a run-down Gothic Revival with peeling yellow paint, and the other a spiffed-up gray Colonial sporting a dried-flower wreath on its plum-colored front door. Beyond that—more long driveways leading back to more derelict barns, and a road sign directing me to
CHATHAM
8
MI
. What on earth could have brought a Manhattan sophisticate like Mildred Deakin
to this forsaken speck on the map? Whatever connections Nelson Corners might possibly have in this age of cyberspace to the larger world of life and literature would not even have been dreamed of in 1959.

I must have missed something
, I thought. Turning the Subaru in a narrow lane, I headed back. As I slowed again at the Nelson Corners intersection, a heavy woman in orange stretch pants and a sleeveless beige shell stepped out of the post office with a broom and began sweeping the small porch.
Good. Someone I can ask for directions
. I pulled into the three-car parking lot and rolled my window down. The woman stopped sweeping, but remained where she was. I stuck my head out of the car window. “Could you tell me …” Then I hesitated. Did I really want to begin my acquaintance with this hamlet by asking directions to a house where a sensational murder had just taken place? The locals would think I was nothing but a sensation-hungry ghoul. There must be more subtle ways I could get the information I needed. The sweeper waited for me to complete my question, dark eyes neutral in a round, ruddy face. “Can you tell me … uh … where I could get a good cup of coffee?”

She leaned her broom against the porch railing and ambled down the steps, over to the car. “Coffee, huh? Well, turn around and head back for Chatham.” She eyed me speculatively. “Don’t know how
good
you’ll think it is—won’t be none of your
ex
-pressos or lat
-tees
. But it’s coffee. Best bet’s at the Homestead, just off Main Street.”

My informant watched me steadily as I turned the car. When I pulled out onto 295, I glanced into the rearview mirror. The dark eyes were fixed on the Subaru. Obviously not much happened on a Wednesday
morning in Nelson Corners; the postmistress would know me again if I ever came back to town.

A
s far as
its central business district went, Chatham was a two-block town, one block of Main Street and one block of Church. The Homestead Restaurant was just across the railroad tracks from the intersection of those two streets, adjacent to an elegant old stone train station that had been restored as an elegant new bank. At 12:37 on a September Wednesday the Homestead was doing what my mother would have called a land-office business—the parking lot so jammed you would have thought they were giving the food away for free. As I opened the restaurant door, my appetite was instantly aroused by the heavenly aroma of frying bacon. A tray of sandwiches floated past, carried at shoulder height by a slim young woman in tight black pants and a pink uniform blouse. I tracked her progress toward a section of tables at the rear of the restaurant.
HOT TURKEY. HAM AND SWISS. GRILLED CHEESE
. Each sandwich was plunked on a thick china platter and anchored with a mound of potato salad or a raft of slab fries; there wasn’t a portobello mushroom or a radicchio leaf in sight. I felt as if I had traveled from a far country and arrived unexpectedly at my gastronomic home. Commandeering the remaining counter stool, I grabbed a menu.
ALL SANDWICHES SERVED ON
HOMEMADE
BREAD
, announced a banner positioned kitty-corner across the cover.
That’s what I want
, I thought,
all sandwiches. Oh, and serve them on HOMEMADE bread
.

The counter waitress—Betty Anne, according to the white letters on her shiny black name tag—was sixty and
skinny, with that run-half-off-her-feet look career waitresses get. Her gray hair was tight to her head in prim curls, and her pink open-neck uniform blouse revealed more wrinkled skin than I would have cared to show. With my eye on the mirrored pie rack behind the counter—HOMEMADE! announced the hand-lettered sign—I ordered coffee and a grilled cheese, bacon, and tomato sandwich. Then I turned my attention to my fellow diners; after all, I’d come to town to schmooze the locals. The men crowding the long counter with me didn’t look like talkers. Hardworking men, I thought, with hard-looking hands. Farmers, carpenters, plumbers. None of these people were going to give any information about their neighbors to a nosy woman from God-knows-where. My intrusion into the life of this community suddenly seemed presumptuous. The reality of the lives lived in this town by these laboring men and women made me feel silly playing detective—silly and a little frightened. But then Amanda’s words came back to me:
You’re a literary detective and this is definitely a literary crime
.

I gave myself a pep talk in a silent hard-boiled snarl:
Someone in this joint’s gotta know this Milly Finch broad, and I’m the dick that’s gonna make ’em squeal
. Sometimes I think I only know my life through the books I read.

The Homestead’s clientele was a mix of locals and exurbanites. At tables toward the rear of the restaurant, young women in pressed Gap khakis and pastel jerseys tended distractedly to preschoolers. I ignored them; they were not old enough or local enough to tell me anything useful about Milly Deakin Finch.

Other diners looked more promising, grizzled dark-clad men and hefty women in double-knit pantsuits who addressed themselves seriously to the business of refueling their bodies. These people looked battered by
life—by sun and soil and decades of a declining rural economy. At a corner booth one mature man—in his late fifties, maybe sixty—good-looking with a shock of thick white hair and a tanned weathered face, flirted with the floor waitress. As she delivered his burger and fries, he grabbed her wrist lightly and muttered something that made her laugh. I was too far away to hear the words, but the brief tableau was striking: the bulky, well-muscled man, bone-white hair startling against the dark skin, and the slender, pale young woman silhouetted against the large plate-glass window, united momentarily in laughter.

“So, Betty Anne,” I ventured to the waitress as she set the heaping china platter in front of me, “anything exciting ever happen in this town?”

“You kidding?” she replied. “Ya want more coffee?”

“Sure.” I nibbled a fry while she poured. “Thought I read about a murder around here somewhere,” I said casually, and bit into the sandwich.

“Oh, that.” Her lips tightened, turning down at the corners. “That crazy Milly Finch.” A scrawny man next to me shifted uneasily on his stool, then cleared his throat. The waitress glanced at him. He touched the brim of his green Caterpillar gimme cap, then jerked his head backward. Betty Anne’s dun-colored eyes flicked in the direction of the window booth, where the white-haired man now joked with one of the young mothers. Suddenly the counter waitress got busy, hustling the coffeepot back to its burner, then wiping down the counter at its far end.
Strike One
, I thought. My neighbors on either side, the scrawny man and a young freckled guy in a feed store uniform, were strikes two and three. They weren’t even interested in talking about the weather.

I devoted myself to the apple pie—two inches of thick sliced apples in a flaky crust sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, worth a three-and-a-half-hour round trip any day. When I went to pay my bill, a rack of newspapers by the register caught my attention. The
Chatham Courier
headline read
LOCAL WOMAN ARRESTED ON HOMICIDE CHARGE
. I grabbed the paper and, standing there with the check and a ten-dollar bill tight in my hand, I read the brief article:

I glanced at the masthead. The
Courier
was a weekly, dated last Saturday. Not much to be learned there. Gossip was still my best bet. But where to find a good reliable gossip monger?

T
hat’s where
the body was found, right there in the driveway, by the woodpile, next to the porch,” the realtor said. On my way out of Chatham, I’d passed the Country Estates Realty Office, spiffy white and charming behind a picket fence and rows of fresh-faced purple pansies. I’d slammed down my brake pedal, and on the spot invented a software-executive husband, three school-aged kids, and a Frisbee-playing golden retriever, all crammed into a two-bedroom New York City co-op and panting for a spacious, peaceful home in the unspoiled countryside.

I lucked out; Wendy Vandenberg seemed to be the
single most talkative person in town—maybe the
only
talkative person in town. But then, Wendy wasn’t really local. The realtor had moved to Columbia County from Queens a mere thirty-five years earlier, she said—when property was a steal. And it was the best move she could have made. New Yorkers had been snapping up houses ever since—like they were candy—and prices had skyrocketed. Then she glanced over to where I sat in the passenger seat of her safari-green LandCruiser. “Not that there aren’t plenty of bargains left,” she hastened to add, in a voice that still held outer-borough intonations, “for smart purchasers willing to put a little honest elbow-grease into a charming, untouched country original.”
Untouched country original
, I thought.
Well, okay, but, I’ve always been partial to indoor plumbing
.

“I’m not certain this is
precisely
the area we wish to invest in,” I said, in that superbly informed, all-options-open Manhattan manner that I’d found so grating during the six years I’d lived in the city. “A number of factors will come into play, of course, including tax base, school district, health-care availability.…” The realtor nodded; she’d heard it all before. When push came to shove—or when contract came to mortgage—her clients would purchase with their hearts, not their heads. The green slope of a hill, the rugged texture of a wood-shingled roof, the warm slant of morning sun on old brick, an accidental lilac, and they’d be lost hopelessly in a dream of the one perfect life available in the one perfect, unique—gotta-have-it-at-any-cost—country home.