Cold and Pure and Very Dead (9 page)

As Jake brooded into his whiskey, the atmosphere in the bar began to heat up. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the two guys next to us. They’d been downing draft Buds for the past hour and a half and reminiscing amiably about high-school glory days, but suddenly they struck out over who’d made the winning run in game twelve of senior year. Their voices rose, and I glanced over at them. The redhead with the shoulders unexpectedly hooked a right at the pudgy guy in the “I got shucked at Pete’s Oyster House” T-shirt, connected, and knocked him off the bar stool. He crashed into Jake. The impact jolted the writer out of his sulk. Jake caught the guy, staggering as the impact of Pudgy’s weight hit the impact of the Crown Royal. Without even pausing to think about it, he shoved him powerfully back into his assailant. Then he socked him in the stomach. The pudgy guy vomited all over the redhead—
and over every one else within range. I vaulted off my stool.

“Who do you think you’re shoving, asshole?” The pudgy guy, back on his feet, caught at Jake’s arm with a barf-spattered hand. Jake met him with a mean elbow, and Pudgy grunted and doubled over. The redhead steadied Pudge, his bosom pal again, and took a wild one-arm swing at Jake.

“Shit.” The novelist slurred even that simple integer of Anglo-Saxon verbiage. “I don’t have time for this crap.” He tossed two twenties on the bar and grabbed my arm. “Let’s get out of here.” For someone with such a heavy load on, my companion was pretty fast on his feet. He quick-stepped out the door behind me like a man who’d exited many bars in his lifetime and knew the moves.

No one showed any signs of following us out of Ernie’s, maybe because they too had gotten a good look at the Fenton biceps. As Jake aimed the car keys in the general direction of the brown Range Rover, I snatched them from his hand. “I’m driving, sport,” I announced, hoping Jake wouldn’t turn out to be a violent drunk. In my short years with Amanda’s father, I’d had more than a lifetime’s worth of experience with nasty drunks.

“Good,” Jake said, climbed into the shotgun seat, and promptly lapsed into unconsciousness.

I
took him home
with me. What else was I going to do with him? I had no idea where Jake lived. I could have called Enfield College Security to find out, but, perhaps stupidly, didn’t want to humiliate the novelist. If I reported it to Security, Jake’s bender would be all over campus by third period tomorrow—and my name would be permanently attached to that of a drunken
barfly writer.
That
would be a disaster: I wasn’t tenured yet.

Jake semirevived as we pulled into the driveway, and followed my instructions like a good boy. He stumbled out of the SUV, through my front door, and onto the couch as if he’d done it a thousand times before and knew the drill. It was almost two
A.M
. before I’d gotten the booze brushed off my breath and the puke spatters scrubbed off my arms and legs. Then I put myself, clean and relatively sober, to bed. Alone. Behind a locked door.

W
hen I woke up
at 9:28 and made my way to the living room, the afghan was folded neatly over the back of the uninhabited couch, Jake and his Range Rover had vanished, and a one-word note in bold capitals on the kitchen table was the only sign that I’d spent the night with Jake Fenton, master of the pen and sword, eloquent interpreter of post-modern masculinity, world-famous novelist. The note read:
SORRY
.

In an interpretive quandary, I read the word aloud.
Sorry?
What did Jake Fenton mean by
sorry?
Was it a curt, abrupt, pro forma sorry? Was it an abject, humiliated, repentant sorry? Or a wry, philosophical, we’re-all-in-the-same-human-condition sorry? Or an I’ll-call-you-in-a-day-or-two-and-see-if-you’re-still-speaking-to-me sorry? Or
what?
My Ph.D. in literary studies didn’t help me one bit in trying to deconstruct the meaning of
sorry
.

T
he short
, wiry woman with the cropped gray hair sat erect in her chair, torso rigidly upright, thin shoulders squared under the drab fabric of the prison uniform. Only in her eyes could I detect any resemblance at all to the chic young 1950s writer I’d seen pictured in the
Times
. Those eyes, still intensely dark, glared at me with suspicion. “What do you want from me?”

I didn’t know. Absolution, most likely. “I wanted to say I’m sorry—”

“Sorry?
Sorry?
You open your mouth, and my peaceful world is shattered, and you’re
sorry?”
It seemed that Mildred Deakin Finch wasn’t in the absolution business.

“But, Ms. Deakin, I had no intention—”

“Finch.
Mrs
. Finch.”

“Mrs. Finch—”

“You
had no intention,”
she mocked me. “You destroyed my life, but you
had no intention
. What are you doing here, anyhow? What do you want?”

“I’m not quite certain.” I could hardly tell this bitter woman that the haunting image of her younger self had kept me awake two nights running, floating in hazy black and white just below full consciousness, threatening to sink to the level of dreams. I couldn’t tell her that what I
wanted
was for that … that girl … to tell me
why
. I wanted to know what had sent a novelist at the height of literary celebrity bolting from Manhattan to seek the obscurity of the rural hinterlands. I wanted to know what placed her, decades later, on a Columbia County goat farm with a hunting rifle in her hand. I wanted to know what personal demon it was that had pulled the trigger.

I
’d spent
an afternoon that weekend in the college library researching everything I could find about Mildred Deakin. After my visit to Nelson Corners and the realtor’s compelling story about Milly Finch’s arrival in that hamlet, I’d become almost obsessed with the writer. But the scholarly world in general didn’t seem as interested as I was. Falling in some ambiguous crevasse between the scholarly categories of “literature” and “popular culture,”
Oblivion Falls
and its author had attracted precious little academic attention. A computerized MLA bibliography search turned up two essays in books on 1950s popular fiction and one biographical sketch—by Sean Small in his introduction to the reprint edition of the novel. That was all. However, Professor Small’s bibliography noted a few potentially useful primary sources—a handful of newspaper articles from the fifties and a file of Deakin’s personal papers in the archives of the New York Public Library. If I needed to look up the newspaper articles, I could probably find them on microfiche in the Enfield Library. I tucked the NYPL’s Deakin file away in my mind for possible perusal the next time I found myself in Manhattan. Then I read
Oblivion Falls
again, hoping against all odds to find some clue to Mildred Deakin’s inexplicable flight from literary fame.

The novel wasn’t half bad. It recounted—in sexual
detail that was considered explicit at the time—the love life of Sara Todd, an ambitious and talented young woman from Satan Mills, the working-class section of Beaumont, a New England college town. This story had no Cinderella ending, however; the girl dies during an illegal abortion. After all, this was the 1950s, and as far as respectable society was concerned, Sara Todd of Satan Mills was a “bad girl,” and deserved punishment. Deakin’s prose was spare and clear, and the sex scenes were effective—if somewhat more clinical than erotic. But it was
Oblivion Falls’s
subtle analyses of class aspirations, struggles, and prejudices that I found most compelling. Mildred Deakin’s fictional Satan Mills was all too familiar to me, reminding me vividly of Lowell, and the hard life and hard people of my own childhood and youth.

For the second time I read the novel’s haunting final lines:
As for Sara, she had been a particularly flamboyant specimen of the hardy summer roses that push their way into evanescent bloom in this otherwise unyielding northern soil. When Prentiss thought of her, if he thought of her at all, it was with the vague regret one feels for the passing of such a common flower
.

The tear I wiped from the corner of my eye was not simply for Mildred Deakin’s fictional Sara.

I turned back to the Introduction for another look at the author’s life. According to Professor Small, Mildred Deakin was the motherless daughter of a Stallmouth College English Professor. Born in 1932, she’d been abandoned to a life of airless intellection in the college town of Stallmouth, New Hampshire, by a mother who’d absconded to Los Angeles with a Hollywood scriptwriter. From her early years, Mildred had spent her days in the family kitchen with Bernice Lapierre, the housekeeper who raised her. Bernice had a
daughter, Lorraine, who grew up along with Mildred—“like a sister,” Deakin had told a reporter in a rare interview. That “sister” had died as a teenager in some unspecified way.
Ah
, I thought,
an illegal abortion, like Sara in the novel
. Subsequently, Bernice, Mildred’s beloved foster mother, had committed suicide, devastating the young writer. As Professor Small put it,
Oblivion Falls
was “Deakin’s poignant attempt to redress the wrongs—sexual and emotional—suffered by the unfortunate members of her family of women.”

S
o, what
was
I
doing here, in this Columbia County jail on a mid-September Monday morning? Well might Milly Finch ask. Mildred Deakin’s life story was a tragic one, and, having inadvertently brought it to a crisis through my flippant comments to the
Times
reporter, I could not simply walk away. I’d felt compelled to seek the novelist out—but to what end? In the fluorescent light of the prison reception room, Mildred Deakin—Milly—was wan, her small, oval face etched with a multitude of fine lines. Two deeply engraved vertical grooves cut between her arched eyebrows. In the large, institutional-green chamber, she looked as out of place as a deer in a goat pen. Suddenly overwhelmed by pity, I leaned toward her. “Is there anything I can do to help you, Mrs. Finch?” I asked this ghostly shadow of the passionate young woman who had written
Oblivion Falls
. She recoiled, a shudder running through her spare frame. Her eyes went perfectly opaque.

Fueled by a combination of compassion and guilt, I pressed on. “Mrs. Finch, I know you must have had powerful reasons to seek reclusion … ah, privacy … the way you have. And, I must admit, I do feel somewhat responsible for what happened with Martin Katz.
You’re absolutely right. I opened my mouth, and a man died in your driveway. I was a catalyst. But a few links were forged in that chain well before my interview with the
Times.…” Such as whatever traumatic event in your past life caused you to hide among goats for the past forty years
, I thought.
Such as why you felt the need to pick up a gun
. “I want to understand why things happened the way they did, and I want you to help me. I do realize that if I hadn’t mentioned
Oblivion Falls
to Martin Katz, he would never have written about it in the
Times
. And, if he hadn’t written about it, there wouldn’t have been any hoopla in the media about the book. And if there hadn’t been all that hoopla in the media, he would never have sought you out in Nelson Corners. And if he hadn’t sought you out, you never would have …” I paused, struggling for some delicate way of saying it.

She completed my trailed-off statement. “Never would have shot him down in cold blood. Go on, that’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it?”

I nodded. I hadn’t intended to phrase it quite so bluntly.

“Five minutes,” announced the hefty blonde in the guard’s uniform waiting by the door. Milly did not acknowledge her. Instead she stared to my left, avoiding my gaze, her dark eyes still hedged, the parallel lines between her brows deepening. I had a sudden realization that Milly Finch at this stage of her chosen life was far more comfortable consorting with goats than with human beings.

“Hah! I get it.” Her head swiveled; abruptly she focused on me. “You’re writing a biography, aren’t you?”

“No!” I responded, emphatically. Then, perhaps fatally for my purposes. “Well, I am doing a biography, but not about you—”

“Oh, yes you are!” Her eyes narrowed, and her gaze attempted to bore into my soul. “A tell-all book about Mildred Deakin and her scandalous novel and her scandalous life. That’s what you’re doing here, isn’t it? Just like that reporter, you’re digging around in the dirt for whatever tidbits you can scratch up. Well, no thank you. It’s my dirt, and I don’t want any books written about it. You writer types are all alike—jackals! It doesn’t matter whether you’re reporters or academics, you make me sick.” Her voice had sunk to a barely audible hiss. This time
she
leaned forward in her chair, and
I
shuddered, thankful, perhaps with good reason, for the hefty guard at the door.

“Well, Professor Jackal,” Milly Finch went on, tapping a forefinger on the table, “put this in your book, why don’t you? And get it right, because I’m not going to talk to you again. I did not shoot that reporter. I never saw him or heard of him until I came out of the goat barn that Friday evening and found him lying dead in the dirt with his head in a puddle of blood—ruining an otherwise perfectly beautiful sunset.”

I nodded wordlessly. According to the
Chatham Courier
’s follow-up story in this week’s issue, even though her fingerprints had appeared clearly in several places on the murder weapon, Milly Finch had pled not guilty. She’d been arrested, and was being held on suspicion of homicide, but had not yet been formally charged.

“You
need to understand
, do you?” she said. “Well, understand this. Somebody else shot Mr. Martin Katz, shot that reporter dead with my husband’s thirty-thirty. That’s all I know about his death, and that’s all I’m saying about it. Go write your
biography,”
she spit out the word as if it left a foul taste in her mouth, “about someone else, someone who’s done something evil enough to
deserve being dragged through the literary mud. Now, get out. I don’t want you here.”