Cold and Pure and Very Dead (8 page)

We were pulled over on Granite Quarry Road, on a low hill overlooking the Finch place—one of the few functioning family dairy farms, Wendy informed me crisply, remaining in the Berkshire foothills. When we’d
left her office, I’d asked a few wide-eyed, titillated questions about the Nelson Corners homicide, and the realtor—not averse to dishing the dirt—had brought me straight to the scene of the crime. The Finches’ sprawling white farmhouse sat back a hundred and fifty feet from the road at the end of an unpaved driveway. To the left of the house stood two well-kept red barns and a tall royal-blue silo, to the right, a smaller barn and a compound of fenced-in sheds. A herd of Holsteins graced the sloping fields, whimsical black and white against verdant hills.

“I still can’t believe it.” Wendy shook her head, baffled. “No one could ever have predicted that Milly would do such a violent thing. She was so quiet and privatelike.” I noticed that the realtor was referring to Milly Finch in the past tense, as if she had already been tried, convicted, executed, and buried. “And she didn’t even
know
the man—whatshisname …?”

“Marty Katz,” I replied without thinking, then hoped the realtor wouldn’t wonder how I knew.

“Katz—yeah, that’s it. A reporter, someone said he was. But what the heck was he doing all the way up here at the Finches’ place? Must of got lost, and was asking for directions. Tsk. Tsk.”
What’s the world coming to?

“Must of,” I repeated. “Must of got lost. Tsk. Tsk.” So the news about Milly’s literary fame wasn’t out yet. If it had been, Wendy Vandenberg would have told me instantly.

There was a moment’s contemplation as we sat, looking over at the peaceful farmyard scene. “Those are Milly’s goat pens, those sheds over there,” the realtor informed me, breaking the silence. “She sold goat milk to some gourmet-cheese maker down county. Did pretty well, too, at least according to my husband, Fred,” the realtor said, pulling her vehicle back on the road and
accelerating past the Finches’ well-kept acreage. “Fred’s a fireman. He knows everything that goes on around here.”

“I can imagine.”

“Jimmy Finch is in the department, too. One night when the boys were out for a few,” she bent her elbow, flexed her thick wrist twice, “Jimmy told Fred quite a story.…” She let it trail off, tantalizing me.

“Oh, yeah?” Maybe
this
was what I’d come to Nelson Corners for.

“Yeah. About how he met Milly.” She shifted down as we climbed a steep hill between a hayfield on one side of the road and a half-built housing development on the other. “It was maybe thirty-five, forty years ago—late one Saturday afternoon—and Jimmy was driving home from the cattle auction. I think Fred said it was November, cold and getting dark. Two miles out of Chatham, he sees something strange on the side of the road. He pulls the pickup over—Fred says it was a big old blue Ford F-150—Jim’s truck, that is, not the thing on the side of the road … like it matters what kind of a
truck
it was! Men! Anyhow, Jimmy pulls over, gets out of the truck and finds a suitcase. Nice monogrammed leather piece with a good bronze lock—initials, M.D.”

M.D.?
I was paying heightened attention now. “Really?”

“Yeah. So Jimmy figures maybe it fell off a car, and he tosses the thing in the cab. He’ll take it to the police station next time he’s in town. Then he goes along another couple of miles, and there’s something else on the side of the road—smaller. So he pulls over—and it’s a portable typewriter. You remember the kind? In a case? With a little handle? Kind of like a laptop, only bigger? Anyhow, Jimmy picks the typewriter up, and says to himself,
What the hell is this?
He throws it in the cab,
gets back in the pickup, starts up, then jams the brake—there’s a body lying in the middle of the road. Well, Jimmy’s freaking out—he’s just a kid at this point, maybe eighteen, nineteen, and he jumps out of the truck again. There’s this beautiful girl lying unconscious in the road. He doesn’t know what to do. There’s no traffic, so he can’t flag someone down and get help, and of course he can’t leave her there. So he picks her up and puts her in the cab of the truck with the suitcase and the typewriter and takes her home to Mama. And the rest is history. They get old Doc Daniels in—he wasn’t old then, of course—and Betsy Finch nurses the girl back to health, and she’s got nowhere to go, so she stays with the Finches. A couple years later Jimmy married her.” Wendy paused as she cut a tight right onto a narrow dirt road. Then she glanced over at me, with a wistful smile. “Isn’t that the most romantic thing you ever heard in your entire life?”

“Right out of a storybook,” I agreed. “But who was she? Where’d she come from?”

“She never told him, he says—not very talkative, our Milly. But the station master—this is back when Chatham was a big railroad town—the station master says she got off an express out of New York—Chatham was the end of the line then—picked up her bags and just started walking. He figured she knew someone in town, was going to their house. But it looks like she had no idea where she was going, just decided to walk—until she dropped.” Wendy pulled the LandCruiser into a secluded driveway and suddenly got professional. “Okay, Mrs. Pelletier, here’s the home we’re showing. Nice four-bedroom Cape, two and a half baths, six acres …”

I don’t remember a thing about the house. I was so entranced by Milly Finch’s story, it was as if I’d been
transported to another time. Forty years earlier Mildred Deakin had stepped out of her life of fame and fortune and onto a north-bound train. She’d traveled to the end of the line, then, on a raw November afternoon, she’d gotten off the train and, lugging her suitcase and typewriter, she’d trudged through the darkness until she’d fallen in her tracks.

J
ake Fenton
was a born storyteller; I sipped my vodka martini, mesmerized—by his words and by his intense gray gaze. It was 11:52 the evening of the day after my visit to Nelson Corners. I’d wanted to share Mildred Deakin Finch’s poignant tale with Jake—he’d been so interested when he’d seen the writer’s picture in the
Times
a couple of months earlier—but I couldn’t seem to get a word in edgewise.

We sat at the battered oak bar at Ernie’s Grill in Greenfield. I worked on my martini and listened to Jake spin tales of heroic adventure. Jake was on his third Crown Royal—double, straight up—and heading for the fourth. How he could handle that much booze without slurring so much as a single consonant of his kayaking-the-rapids-of-Tibet story mystified me. My eyes were drawn to the biceps straining the sleeves of his close-fitting black T-shirt. Must have something to do with muscle mass.

From its posters of “college girls” in pasties to the rich fug of beer and cigarettes and the lethal thunk of stiff, whizzing darts, Ernie’s Grill was a testosterone-powered, down-and-dirty kind of place. Aside from the bartender in her seam-stretched jeans and midriff-tied white blouse, I was the only woman in the bar. If there was a guy in the place who didn’t have lingerie shreds dangling from his eyeballs when he looked at me, he
wasn’t letting their absence show. The leering contest was less about me—or any woman—than it was about the other guys at the bar, less about my body than about the perceived prowess of their own: competitive
cojones
.

After a few minutes in Jake’s presence, I forgot all about Milly Finch. The man knew how to tell a tale. The lead kayak on the Tibetan whitewater expedition had just capsized and vanished beneath the waves, and my companion turned his relation of this fatal incident into a nuanced disquisition on the fragility of the human soul embarked on its perilous journey from zygote to coffin. “The boats battle the rapids,” he mused, “but the man inside the boat, his spirit, the muscle of the man, determines the fate of the craft.” He paused for a slug of Crown Royal, then continued. “It’s ironic, but I’ve never felt so alive as I did when that kayak went over. For poor Saunders, it was ending; for me, the quest was at its most intense.”

“And you couldn’t rescue him?” I was horrified.

“Nope. Didn’t even try.” His gray eyes were murky in the smoky dimness of the bar. “The current was too strong—would’ve taken us all.” Jake slugged back his drink and raised a finger to the bartender. Rescuing Saunders wasn’t the point; the point was the profound impact of Saunders’s demise on the Alpha male seated next to me. The murk in Jake’s eyes, I decided admiringly, was a brave attempt to mask this strong man’s pain. Then I thought again—and sighed. The murk in Jake’s eyes was most likely pure unadulterated murk.

T
hat afternoon
, twenty minutes late for our three o’clock tour of the town, Jake had come striding into my office. “Page proofs,” he announced, thunking
a thick overnight-express envelope on my desk. “I’m going to have to beg off that tour we were planning and spend the rest of the afternoon going over these.” He shuddered in mock horror.

“That’s too bad,” I said, and meant it. I’d been looking forward to his company.

“So, how about maybe this evening?” Jake asked.

“This evening? A town tour?”

“No tour; I can find my own way around. Always have.” He perched on the edge of my desk and flashed me a smile. “How about a late supper and a few drinks? About ten?”

My heart went
dum, dum, dum
, but I hesitated a cautious five seconds: That was a very late date. Was he trying to set me up? There was something about Jake Fenton that made a woman ask herself a question like that. But, hey, what the hell, I’m a big girl now. I could always say no. Or
yes
. I
could
say yes—if I wanted to. It was not an unprovocative thought. “Sure. I’m free this evening.”

“Great,” he said, fiddling with the pencils in my pencil cup, caressing one gently between his fingers. “Where do I pick you up?” He plucked the pencil from the cup and scribbled directions to my house. Then he winked at me. “See you around ten.”

“Sure.” To mask my unsophisticated excitement at this serendipitous date with the world-famous novelist, I hefted his UPS envelope from the desk. The thing must have weighed five pounds. “So, Jake, what’s the new book called?”

“Birds of Prey,”
he replied, immediately retrieving the envelope from my hands. “But keep that to yourself. This baby’s slated for a huge promotional blitz, and the title’s part of the tease. We’re not gonna reveal it until the very last second.”

“Really?” Most of the writers I read are dead—Shakespeare, Dickinson, T. S. Eliot—and the live ones are lucky to get a cup of cappuccino from their publicists, let alone a
huge promotional blitz
. “What’s the novel about?”

“A kid and his sister, lost in the woods.”

“Sounds like ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ” I’ve always been such a smart-mouth.

“It’s
nothing
like ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ ” Jake replied sharply.

T
he fourth
Crown Royal double was proving to be the proverbial straw for Jake. Having wound up his tale of the recovery of poor Saunders’s body and the perilous journey with the funeral litter down the Tibetan mountainside guided by a single lonely but loyal native boy, the adventurer abruptly ceased his tale.

Two hours and counting of Jake Fenton’s company was beginning to disabuse me of romantic fantasies I might have entertained about the man. Jake Fenton wasn’t about Romance. Jake Fenton was all about Jake Fenton: the Fenton wit, the Fenton charm, the Fenton brilliance, the Fenton sex appeal—the Fenton
cojones
. This masculine self-absorption would ordinarily have put me—a staunch feminist—off my feed, but the difference between garden-variety narcissism and literary genius was epitomized by the difference between the drunken blather of the other guys at Ernie’s and the world-class word-spinning of the man beside me. As long as I accepted the evening on Jake’s terms, I could enjoy the Fenton take on the blood sport of life—and the ephemeral catch in my breath every time Jake stopped talking and granted me another shot of his sexy little smile.

Eventually Jake’s hand found a casual perch on my thigh. The catch in my breath was no longer ephemeral, but this man was a little too slick for me. Just as casually, I removed the hand, replacing it on his own thigh. As if I had pushed a button or switched a lever, Jake ceased talking. Suddenly he concentrated on smashing bar snacks. One by one, tiny goldfish, sesame sticks, pretzels, met their fate, crushed to crumbs between the oak bar top and Jake’s broad thumb. Then he buried his gaze in the booze, and kept it there, despite my earnest attempts to resuscitate the conversation.

Great. Just great!
I thought. My evening in the presence of literary genius was going downhill a good deal faster than Jake, his native guide, and poor Saunders’s corpse. And my heroic escort was looped, obviously in no shape to drive the big brown Range Rover he’d picked me up in.
How in hell am I going to get home?
I wondered.