Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript (34 page)

“Me, too,” I replied, and swallowed. My throat was very dry.

“Yeah?” He smiled at me, but he had that far-away look he gets when he’s thinking hard. Absently, he fingered the cell phone in his pocket. “You know, I just got an idea… maybe some way to let you know how sorry I am. Big-time. But I need a couple of days. I gotta get things cleared up here. Karen, babe, can you give me, say, the weekend to work it out? And then…after that…then we’ll really talk about us.”

***

I barely made it home, showered, donned clean clothes, and ate a tuna sandwich Amanda threw together, before it was time to rush back to campus and teach. When I returned to my office after class, Peggy Briggs was waiting for me in the hallway, holding Triste by the hand. Peggy had had her hair cut extremely short by someone who knew how to do it right. She and the little girl wore matching pale-green sweaters. They looked well-fed and relaxed. They did not look like people who had at any time been in mortal danger.

I gawked at her. “Where the hell have you been, Peggy?”

She gave me a newly confident smile. “May I come in, Professor?” I opened the door, and she stepped into the room. Triste bounded over to the green vinyl chair, her blond curls flying. Her slight body was nearly swallowed up by the soft cushions, but she bounced twice, then settled down in the big chair with dignity. “Stephie said you were looking all over for me. I’m sorry if I worried you.”

I motioned Peggy to the Enfield-crest-embossed captain’s chair. “Are you okay?” Somehow Peggy’s self-assurance made me feel presumptuous about ever having been concerned.

“I’m more than okay. I’m…wonderful.”

“Really?”

“We’ve been in Manhattan, Triste and I, staying with Stephie’s parents. Did you know her mother is a literary agent?”

I thought back to a conversation with Earlene. “I knew she did something in publishing.”

“Yeah, well, she’s great. I wrote this book?…about my sister?…”

“I know.”

“You do?” She frowned.

I nodded. I wasn’t about to let her know Earlene had told me.

“Well, Stephie sent her the manuscript, and she actually read it. Then she called Steph and told her to get me down there—to New York. She thought the book was a…a hot property. She was going to auction it off, and she wanted to meet me. And I just, well, I just stayed.…I didn’t tell anyone where I was, because I couldn’t really believe it was all going to work out.”

I stared at her. I could feel a grin begin to curve my lips. “She sold your book, didn’t she?”

Peggy grinned back. Triste bounced on the chair. “It’s going to be published next year.”

“Wonderful!”

“I got a big advance. We’re going to move out of my mother’s place. I’ve already found a new apartment. Triste can have her own room. I can quit my job in the library and concentrate on my studies. But…” She glanced at me sideways. “I’m afraid I’m going to fail your course. I missed two classes.”

“Three, I think.” I furrowed my brow. “But maybe we could call your visit to Manhattan a field trip, or ‘distance-learning.’”

“Seriously?” She was fumbling in a big, bright canvas bag.

I nodded. “Seriously.”

“That would be wonderful, if it could all work out. You know, it’s so funny—at the hospital when my sister.… Well, some preacher started quoting scripture at me. He was this little thin wizened-up guy with a sour puss on him like you wouldn’t believe. So he comes into the ER waiting room right behind the doctor. The doctor tells me Megan’s dead. I’m screaming and wailing, and the parson starts mealymouthing at me. “‘Miss Briggs,’ he says. ‘You must remember that the Good Book tells us that all things work together for good to those who love the Lord.’ I wanted to rip his head off!”

“Of course you did. I would have, too.” I could feel the ripping impulse in my own fingers.

“But you know, Professor, I think in a way that preacher turned out to be right. If I hadn’t gone into such a black funk…what the shrink called a
clinical depression
…after Megan died, I would never have ended up in counseling, would never have signed up at GCC, would never have gotten the scholarship to this fancy school. Would never have written this book. So for me and for Triste things are going to be much better because she died. In an…ironic way, I guess ‘all things do work together for good to those who—’”

“To those who
make
them work together for good,” I interrupted. “Give yourself some credit, Peggy.
You
made this all happen.”

She looked at me, slant-eyed, as if she suspected that might be true but was afraid to quite believe it. Then she retrieved a bulky manuscript from her bag and held it out to me. “Would you like to read this?”

“Oh, yes.” I took it from her.

On a cold Thursday afternoon in November, when the air was so damp she could feel it in her bones, a young woman—no more than a girl, really—slid back three brass bolts and opened the side door of a women’s shelter in Framingham, Massachusetts. The shelter was in a large wood-frame house that had recently been painted a creamy white and fitted with new green shutters. The young woman peered out into the street, saw no evidence of danger, and took a tentative step. The bullet hit her cleanly in the chest, severing her aorta, sending a vivid red spray onto the grey cement of the sidewalk, spattering the frosted late-autumn grass with crimson blood.

She was my sister.…

***

On Saturday night Sunnye, Amanda, and I indulged in one last retro meal, spaghetti and meatballs. In the morning I would drive Amanda back to school and probably not see her again until graduation. We hadn’t talked at all about what she would do then. She was twenty-two, a grown-up, as she kept insisting; I had to learn to keep my mouth shut about her life. Sunnye was going with us as far as Bradley International Airport, where she would catch a flight home to Colorado.

When we finished eating, Sunnye stacked dishes and carried them into the kitchen; she could be surprisingly domestic when she wanted to be. On the far side of the pass-through window she stood at the sink, scrubbing her hands like a surgeon about to pick up a scalpel. Then she fetched her capacious bag to the table and reached into it.

“Karen,” she said, her dark grey glance not quite meeting my eyes, “I’ve never been very good at asking for help, or very gracious about accepting it. But I want you to know I appreciate what you’ve done for me—braving those reporters, providing a refuge, interceding with the cops. So, here—” With a mock flourish she pulled out a hardcover book in a hot-pink dust jacket, a copy of her first novel,
Rough Cut
. “This is for you, Karen. It’s a first edition,” she said. “I’ll sign it if you like.”

I was stunned. “Sunnye, I can’t take this.” Hadn’t she said these things went for three thousand dollars?

“Why not? You told me you lost yours.”

“But this is much too valuable.” My head was spinning.

“Nonsense. Look, I’m signing it.
From Trouble—with Love.
” At the sound of his name, Trouble raised his head and adored Sunnye with his very best doggie gaze. “Now, don’t go and give this copy to the Salvation Army.”

“But, but, Sunnye, I can’t—” I was itching to get my hands on the gaudy volume.

“Mom, shut up,” Amanda interjected. “Take the book, and say
thank you very much
to the nice lady.”

***

It was late Sunday afternoon before I heard from Charlie again. In a quick, hushed call he told me to dress rough and warm and meet him at the Blue Dolphin. And not to ask questions. When I bridled at his officiousness, he suggested in the gentlest of manners that I might be forever sorry if I didn’t do as he asked. So I shut up, pulled on jeans, an Enfield sweatshirt, an old denim jacket, and the ubiquitous Springtime-in-New-England mud boots.

“So, what’s up?” I asked as I slid into the diner’s narrow booth across from him.

“Hello, babe,” he said. “I missed you.”

“Did you? I’m glad. Me, too. You.” But I attempted to read his eyes, looking for signs of trouble. Something lurked there. Not trouble, though. Could it be—mischief?

“Good. Let’s get something to eat. Then we’re gonna take a little ride.”

“Where to?”

“You’ll find out.” He gave me a crooked smile, and said, cryptically, “You should be able to figure it out, anyhow. You seem to know everything.”

Even when we’d finished hot roast beef sandwiches, and were on our way…somewhere…in his Jeep, Charlie wouldn’t tell me where we were going. “Just call it a little mystery trip,” he said, and chortled. We didn’t travel far. He pulled to a halt in a weedy field adjacent to a secluded old house on the outskirts of Enfield. A patrol car and two plain grey vans were parked in the dry, overgrown field. The vans just about broadcast themselves as government issue. The house was stone and stucco with a portico and two turrets. At one time the residence had aspired to a welcoming elegance, but the overgrown hard-pan-dirt driveway with its narrow parallel ruts suggested that its days of hospitality had expired with the demise of the carriage trade.

I sat in the Jeep, transfixed by the sight of the building in front of me. “Christ Almighty, Charlie. Is that what I think it is?”

“Depends on what you think it is.”

“The second Book House, of course.”

“Yep.” He was grinning at me. His little surprise. “Thanks to you and your hunch. Remember that call I got on the cell the other morning? That was Agent Mathes of the FBI team that’s handling the Chesterfield site. I’d told Mathes what you said about another house. She confronted O’Hanlon with it, and he gave it up right away. Seemed to think cooperating with the Feds is gonna make things go easy for him.” He laughed. “Must have helped that, somehow, he got the idea he was in the frame for Munro’s death.”

“My God, the place is enormous.” This impressive dwelling was three or four times the size of the little white house in Chesterfield. “You think they’re going to let me in there?”

“Damn well better.” He spoke with feeling. “Without you we would never have found it. Would’ve sat here moldering until O’Hanlon served his time and came back to plunder it.”

I paused with my hand on the Jeep’s door handle. “What’s going to happen to him?”

He gazed at me quizzically. “He should go away for a good long time. It seems he’s been nothing but trouble his whole life, your old classmate. And, now, add grand theft, breaking and entering, menacing, assault with a firearm.” He gave me an intent look. “Do you care?”

“Hell, no. I don’t think he intended it to happen, but in the end he probably would have killed us all. And, for what? The greedy bastard!” I sat for a few seconds, still gripping the door handle. Maybe it wasn’t quite true that I didn’t care. “But, Charlie, the hell of it is, I really did want to believe in him. He played the macho private-eye so…beautifully. And, besides, we were kids together. He ate at my mother’s table. We were in the same Goddamned home-room! I wanted to believe he’d made it out of the cesspool we were born into through hard work and smarts—and honesty. Like I did.” I gave an abrupt laugh as the irony hit me. “God, I’m so stupid. He told me nothing’s ever what it seems to be, but I wanted to think he was…the real thing.”

“The real thing?”

“You know. Like a character in a book.”

Charlie’s brow furrowed, as if there was something contradictory about what I’d just said.

I went on. “A tough-guy P.I. A…shamus with a hard-boiled code of honor.”

“A male Kit Danger?” Charlie laughed.

“Yeah. I guess.”

He still had the quizzical expression. “That’s all, huh? You sure? He’s a damn good-looking son-of-a-bitch, that O’Hanlon. Women must—”

My eyes grew wide with indignation. “What do you think I am, Charlie Piotrowski?”

He just continued to look at me.

Okay. I was a woman. Nuff said. I glanced over at the conspicuously inconspicuous government vans. “You really think the FBI will let me—”

His hand sliced the air straight across. “Don’t worry about the Fibbies. I fixed it. You’re not really here. Okay? Get out of the car. We have two hours.”

***

Twelve rooms full of books, but the crown jewel for me was the collection of British detective fiction that filled the mahogany-paneled library. I walked into the room wearing latex gloves, gawking and gaping like a bibliophilic tourist. It was a grand, if threadbare, space, strikingly different from the modest farmhouse parlor that held Munro’s American collection: fourteen-foot paneled ceilings, wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with sliding ladders, recessed leaded windows with worn red-velvet cushions on the window seats, a crystal chandelier, begrimed and dripping with cobwebs, a Persian rug the size of the New York Public Library. And books, of course. Row upon row of books. From nineteenth-century triple-decker classics bound in lustrous morocco to lurid 1950’s paperbacks.

Here was an original set in green wrappers of
Oliver Twist; or the Parish Boy’s Progress
by Charles Dickens, 1838. I was in such awe, I didn’t dare touch it. On the same rank of shelves stood rows of flimsy yellowbacks, cheap nineteenth-century editions published to be sold in railroad stations. Carefully I plucked out a thin saffron-colored volume:
Recollections of a Detective Police Officer
, by someone who called himself “Waters.” Eighteen pence. It was in immaculate shape, still in its paper wrapper. A cheap read, all right, but somehow preserved for fifteen decades. A cherrywood bookstand boasted a first edition of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
by Arthur Conan Doyle. Its bright red cover with a silhouette in black of a massive dog hunched dramatically against a rising moon highlighted a full shelf of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Early twentieth-century editions in hues of orange, blue, green, and yellow were shelved against the end wall:
Gaudy Night
by Dorothy Sayers,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
by Agatha Christie,
The Body in the Library
, also by Christie. The adventures of Lord Peter Wimsey, Monsieur Hercule Poirot, and Miss Jane Marple. Further down the shelves I pulled out an Ian Fleming first edition,
Goldfinger
, its paper dust-jacket featuring a skull with golden coins in its eyes and a red rose in its mouth. Bond. James Bond.