Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript (19 page)

“About ten miles. But we’ve got this dinner…” I’d thought about that, too, tracking Peggy down at home. But between teaching, the conference, and incidentals such as murder and a house full of stolen books, I hadn’t had a moment to do anything more about my student than simply worry.

“A Women’s Studies dinner. Oh, joy,” Sunnye intoned. “The things I do for money. So? What time is it now, five o’clock? The dinner’s at seven, right? We’ll be back in time. We can’t just let this student of yours vanish.”

Sunnye’s take-charge attitude began to rankle. “I don’t know that Peggy’s
vanished
. It’s just that no one at the college seems to have seen her in a couple of days. And the man who answers the phone at her house is a real jerk. He won’t talk to me.”

“When did you call?”

“I’ve been trying off and on all day. The last time was a few minutes ago, right after class. He recognized my voice and slammed the phone down.”

“He’ll talk to
me
,” Sunnye said. “Pick me up in front of the Inn.”

“When?” I replied automatically. Once again Sunnye was barking out orders, and I was obeying. Who did she think she was? Kit Danger?

“How about right now?” Yeah, she did. And I was her sidekick, Karen the Wimp.

I sighed. She was right. We could whip over to Durham Mills, talk to Peggy if she was home, and be back in town in time for the Women’s Studies dinner. And I had a compelling reason to control my irritation with Sunnye. It wouldn’t hurt to have Trouble at my back when I talked to Peggy’s nasty stepfather.

Any other student’s absence from school wouldn’t have concerned me so much, but Peggy Briggs was compulsively conscientious in a manner known only to those who were studying, like her, to change the course of lives otherwise predestined to poverty. She was as motivated as hell. It made me extremely uneasy that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be when she was supposed to be there. It also alarmed me that she was leaving personal belongings, her backpack, with her books and notebooks, I assumed, in places where she had no reason to be.

“Right now is fine,” I agreed.

***

It was rush hour in Enfield, as much as Enfield ever has a rush hour: As I edged along Field Street, I passed professors on their way home from office hours, parents car-pooling eight-year-olds from ballet lessons to soccer practice, students out for pizza prior to the weekend booze fest. A faint mist hung in the dusk, diffusing the illumination from headlights and street lamps, glamorizing storefronts and purifying piled-up mounds of filthy snow. It all seemed picturesque and exceedingly quaint, yet down the street, at the red-brick college drowsing in its Friday-evening lassitude, a man had just met his death, and a student seemed to have mysteriously vanished.

At Field and Main, the traffic signal turned red, and I braked the Subaru. Making a left turn, a sleek pea-green BMW passed me, its driver hunched over the wheel, oblivious to the world outside the trajectory of her vehicle. I did a double-take as I recognized Rachel Thompson. For as long as I’d known her, the librarian had been driving a superannuated white Nissan. What was she doing tooling around in such an expensive car?

***

Sunnye waited by the cut-granite curb in front of the Enfield Inn, Trouble at her side.
Christ, she looks tough
, I thought, struck once again by how closely the novelist resembled her own protagonist. In jeans, leather jacket, and thick-soled boots, she was stripped down, ready for action. In my own teaching clothes and long wool coat I felt encumbered, and—god help me—more than a little bourgeois.
I’m going to get a dog
, I thought, though I’ve never wanted one.
Not a Rottweiler like Trouble, but something just as edgy, just as fierce. A canine fashion statement. A Great Dane, maybe. Maybe a Doberman.
Then I pondered feeding such an animal on an assistant professor’s salary.
A miniature Bulldog? A Schnauzer? Maybe a scrawny little mutt from the pound?

***

We headed out of town to the address in Durham Mills I’d found in the college directory. Trouble slobbered over a dried pig’s ear in the back seat. Leaving the village and its precious little shops behind, we plunged into the miracle-mile chaos just outside of town where the primary commercial activity of the area occurs. Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Super Stop ‘N’ Shop, McDonalds: where anything you could ever possibly desire to purchase was available except for the truly unique, lovely, and delectable.

“Tell me about Peggy,” Sunnye demanded.

I took my eyes off the road to glance over at her. I’d had just about enough of Sunnye Hardcastle, Alpha female. I shook my head slowly. “I don’t get it, Sunnye.”

“You don’t get
what
?” She scrabbled in her bag and came out with a couple of foil-wrapped bars.

“I don’t get
you
.” I pulled into the left lane and passed a Volvo station wagon carrying a half-dozen thirteen-year-olds and their hockey sticks. “I don’t get what we’re doing here: you, me, and Trouble on our way to Peggy Briggs’ house. Yeah, she’s my student, and I should be—I am—concerned about her. But what is she to you that you should bother? You’ve never even met this girl…woman.”

She tipped one of the foil-wrapped rectangles in my direction. “Want a nutrition bar?”

A nutrition bar? Yuck. “No, thank you.”

She peeled a wrapper and held the sesame-seed-studded concoction back over her shoulder. Trouble mouthed it gently from her hand, then wolfed it down as if people food was a familiar treat. “But I think I have met Peggy. Isn’t she the one who freaked out the day I came to your class?”

“Oh…” I recalled the first day of the semester. “I’m surprised you remember that.” We stopped at a red light, and the Volvo pulled up next to us. I recognized a harried colleague behind the wheel. In the back seat one of the adolescent passengers, a girl with a blond pony tail, flashed us a rude hand sign. Without seeming to have noticed, Sunnye flipped an infinitely more obscene gesture. The wide-eyed girls consulted but couldn’t come up with anything to top it. Then they noticed Trouble glowering at them from the back seat, still chomping toothily on his goody, and their eyes swerved forward, suddenly intent on the back of the driver’s head.

“But, Sunnye,” I said, “that doesn’t tell me what you’re doing out here on a Friday evening.” I slid another glance at her, and couldn’t resist a dig. “Especially when you’ve got a dozen adoring Women’s Studies scholars waiting for you back in Enfield.”

She gave a short laugh. It sounded like one of Trouble’s barks. “Karen, I’ve gotten used to getting what I want when I want it and
doing
what I want when I want to. Right now I want to talk to Peggy Briggs about undertaking that research for me.”

“Uh huh,” I replied. “And finding a research assistant is urgent enough to warrant facing down a hostile stepfather, in a strange town, before dinner?”

She concentrated on peeling the foil wrapper off the second bar. “Well, I have to admit it, Karen, I’m curious. I’m a mystery writer, and it’s a bit of a mystery, isn’t it, Peggy’s disappearance?”

I consulted my years of teaching experience. “It is, and it isn’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She took a bite.

“It’s a stressful and unsettled period, the college years. Every once in a while a student self-destructs and goes AWOL. Professors tend not to get involved—the deans handle it. But I wouldn’t expect that kind of behavior from Peggy. She’s older than the typical student, and more motivated. She knows this is her big chance. And…there’s Triste….” Concern for my student nagged at me.

Sunnye seemed to be more involved with her own thoughts than with my apprehensions. We cruised by the massive blue-grey facade of the Wal-Mart. “Besides, I’m ready for some action,” she mused.

Ah! That was it. Kit Danger, girl detective. I was worried sick that something horrific had happened to Peggy, but Sunnye was simply bored. Ready for some action.

“That back there at the college…that conference…” She waved a strong, slim dismissive hand. “That’s just…
words
. Nothing is really
happening
.”

“My colleagues would disagree with you, of course. The current mantra of literary studies is that
discourse makes things happen
. But I agree, what we’ve heard so far at this conference is largely derivative, mediated not only through language but through codified politico-linguistic theories.”

She gave me a condescending look. “Just when I start to think you might be a stand-up kind of gal, you go ahead and blather out bullshit like that. You sound
just
like a professor, you know.”

“I
am
a professor. That doesn’t make me a mushy-headed pedant, you know. That doesn’t make me an effete intellectual snob. That doesn’t make me a…wimp.”

“Of course not,” she replied, without conviction. “But I’m interested in the real world—not in ‘codified politico-linguistic’ theories about the real world. I might even get a
story
out of this visit to Peggy. God knows, I won’t at a dinner with English scholars.”

“Women’s Studies scholars,” I said. “Not English.”

The look she cast me made it clear that one set of academics was just as bad as the other.

I glared at her. “And are you saying that a story—a fiction—is
real
? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”

Abruptly Sunnye Hardcastle laughed. This time it was less like a growl and more like a genuine expression of amusement. “You
are
a fighter, aren’t you, Karen? I do like that in a person.” She scarfed down the final bite of her nutrition bar and winked at me. “Even if she is an effete intellectual snob.”

***

A half-dozen miles later, I turned west on Federal Road, past a row of abandoned brick mills, into a neighborhood of aging frame duplexes. Peggy’s mother’s house was shingled in green with two cream-painted front doors set off to one side on a narrow green-scalloped porch. A hot-pink child’s bicycle leaned against the railing. I parked in front of the house. Sunny and I got out of the car, leaving open a window for Trouble.

It was supper time and various cooking odors competed for our attention. “Liver and bacon,” Sunnye said, as we strode up the concrete walk to the front steps. “God, I haven’t had that in thirty years—maybe forty.” She pressed the doorbell, but I didn’t hear a ring. Sunny sniffed the air again. “And haven’t wanted it, either. What’s that other smell?”

I took a deep discerning whiff. “Meatloaf,” I replied. “The kind made with Campbell’s tomato soup.” The conversation in the car had altered something between us. Now we were a couple of working-class girls talking about dinner.

“Oh, yeah,” Sunnye said, “I remember that. You serve it with canned peas and instant mashed potatoes.”

I laughed. “And chocolate pudding made from a box.”

When no one answered the bell, my companion pressed it again. No discernible ding-a-ling. She pounded on the door. It opened immediately. “Yeah?”

He wasn’t particularly tall, and what was left of his hair had gone grey, but he was a powerful man, broad through the shoulders, thick rather than flabby in the gut, and fit in the way a middle-aged man gets only when he works at it.

“Hi,” I said, “we’re looking for—”

But Sunnye overrode me. “Officers of the court.” She flashed her wallet open, then shut. “We’re here for a Ms. Briggs.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What’s this about?”

She gave him an enigmatic look. “That’s between us and Ms. Briggs, sir. Tell her we’re here, please.”

“I won’t tell that bitch nothing.”

“Sir,” Sunnye barked, “ask Ms. Briggs to come to the door.”

“Fuck you,” he snarled, and gave the door a vicious shove, but Sunnye’s heavy boot kept it from slamming shut.

“Sir, that kind of attitude will only get you trouble—”

From somewhere behind the man came a woman’s querulous voice. “Are they here about Peggy?”

Without turning to look at her, he ordered, “Stay out of this, Cath.”

“But it’s been almost two days—”

“Shaddup!” He raised a threatening fist.

“Watch out!” I shouted. “Here comes Trouble.”

Sunnye must have signaled to the dog. Suddenly he was bounding down the walk toward us.

The man’s eyes widened. His fist unclenched, transformed itself into a hand outstretched to ward off the dog’s attack.

“Please stand aside, sir,” Sunnye ordered, “and let us talk to the lady.”

The muscles in his face tightened, as if he considered resisting, but then, abruptly, he pivoted, shoved past the woman, and disappeared into the rear of the house.

***

Peggy’s mother was a smaller, plumper, more harried version of her daughter. Not only was she willing to talk, she was eager to talk. Someone had picked up Peggy and Triste the previous morning for school. Who? Some friend; she didn’t know who. Why? Something wrong with Peggy’s car; she wasn’t sure what. Neither of the girls had come home last night. She’d called Triste’s school. They told her that Peggy had come to get the child before bus time. That was it. No phone call. No nothing. She was worried half out of her skin.