Cold Case

by Linda Barnes

  “Such as?”

  “Gym class,” he said. “Pep rallies. Foreign languages. Thea spoke fluent Italian, but they wouldn’t accept it as a substitute for French, German, or Russian. Dramatics. They insisted she attend Friday evening social dances. For a girl who’d been allowed to do exactly what she chose exactly when she chose to do it, the schedule at Avon Hill was onerous.”

  Avon Hill is as ritzy as Cambridge private schools get. Most local academies reflect the area’s left-wing political makeup, but not Avon Hill, where uniforms are required to this day. The kids stick out in Harvard Square, where jeans and tie-dye war with slinky black and studded heavy metal. Pristine white shirts. Navy blue slacks, skirts, sweaters, and jackets. Ties. I had no idea what Avon Hill’s headmaster or headmistress might consider appropriate attire for “social dances.”

  “So once upon a time a young girl ran away from Avon Hill and didn’t contact a soul for twenty-four years,” I said. “That’s your story?”

  He bit his lip. “It’s possible,” he said with great dignity.

  “But improbable,” I said.

  “She did call home,” he offered.

  “When?”

  “The last day. April 8, 1971.”

  He seemed to have no trouble recalling the date.

  “The cruelest month,” he murmured, staring at his glossy shoes. “‘April is the cruellest month.’ T. S. Eliot …”

  “What did Thea say? On the phone.”

  “Nothing portentous. That she’d be spending the night with a girlfriend who lived near school.”

  “That’s all?”

  “She’d never stayed away before.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “I never saw her again.”

  I glanced at the manila envelope. “Why break the silence now?” I asked.

  “Money?” he said, with a slight shrug of his shoulders.

  “Tired of supporting herself?”

  “Money is freedom to write.”

  Among other things.

  “If she’s been gone for twenty-four years,” I said, “what makes you think she wants you to find her?”

  “Please listen to me, Miss Carlyle—Carlotta. I have waited to hear from Thea for twenty-four years. Twenty-four years,” he repeated forcefully. “And now—mercifully, magically—I have. If she doesn’t want to see her family, fine. If she does, fine. I—we only want to know that she’s all right.”

  He seemed utterly sincere. I tapped the fingers of my left hand on my blotter. My right hand went automatically to a strand of red hair, twisting it into a fat candlestick. Habits die hard. Like using a favorite calligraphy pen, paper of a certain weight and texture.

  I needed the work. I liked the man. I considered my caseload, my financial status. I live rent-free courtesy of my aunt Bea, who willed me the oversized Cambridge Victorian I call home as well as office.

  Taxes must be paid.

  I was under no illusion that Mr. Adam Mayhew was telling me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. On the other hand, my living room-cum-office does not resemble a courthouse. And everybody lies.

  “I see two ways to track her,” I said. “Through the new work, or through the past.”

  “Through the work,” he said decisively.

  “How was it delivered?”

  “What?”

  I tapped the precious manila envelope with the eraser end of a pencil. “This didn’t travel through the mail.”

  No response.

  “Mice leave it on your doorstep?”

  “No. And I don’t appreciate your tone.”

  My headache hammered. “Is the mailing envelope inside?”

  “No.”

  “Where is it?”

  “There is a secretary who opens the family correspondence. She, being unaware of the envelope’s value, threw it away.”

  “Surely someone went through the trash,” I said reasonably, “in the hope of finding Thea’s address.”

  “The envelope could not be located.”

  “Is there a return address inside the envelope? A cover page?”

  “No.” Another quick glance at the ground. Another lie?

  “Is this all there is? A single chapter?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “There’s an entire novel, a whole new book.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “Parts of it.”

  “Where?”

  He bit his lip. “I can’t say.”

  “Is this some kind of publicity stunt? ‘PI searches for missing manuscript? Press hot on the trail?’”

  “No. No. I assure you. The first chapter is all I can show you at this time. You have my word that the novel exists.”

  His word. He peered at me solemnly from behind his protective lenses.

  “I always thought they made a mistake,” he said quietly.

  “What kind of mistake?” I asked.

  “A mistake … Never mind. It’s getting late. What was I saying?”

  “I was saying that with no address for Thea, I’d have to consider the writing a dead end. I’d have to start at the beginning.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’d need to go back to her disappearance. And I’m not going to kid you: It would be practically impossible. By now, if she’s alive, she’s established another name, another identity, another life. She could be anyone. She’s had time to establish a whole new set of bona fides.”

  “The rest of the family might object to reopening the investigation,” he said pensively. “Old wounds …”

  “Where would you suggest I start?” I asked.

  He stared at me. “You could begin by authenticating the chapter, I suppose. I can get you a sample of Thea’s handwriting …”

  “I’m not a graphologist,” I said. “I’m not a forensic archivist.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “First you say you know she’s alive. Now you’re asking me to make sure the work is genuine. Am I being hired to locate a missing person? To prove Thea’s alive? Dead? What?”

  He threw up his hands. “I don’t know! I don’t know the whys and wherefores. I only—I feel that Thea is out there. Possibly desperate—”

  “Did you bring a photo?”

  “Yes, but it’s so old—”

  “I’ll need it.”

  The aged briefcase creaked as it opened. Mayhew hesitated, then passed over a large leather folder with a mute glance of appeal, as though he wanted to beg me not to lose Thea’s photo. I wondered if it was his only copy.

  “What’s the setting for the new novel?” I asked. “Is it local?”

  “Yes,” he said eagerly. “A small town, not far from here.”

  “Which town?”

  “She’s changed the details—creative license—but it’s probably recognizable.”

  If I could nail the locale, I thought, I might visit, hang out in the places mentioned.

  “Will you, at least, try to find her?” Mayhew demanded. “Can you find her?”

  First he hit me in the pride. Can you find her? Then he appealed to my pocketbook. With ten hundred-dollar bills that he peeled off a fat roll.

  “I’d prefer a check,” I said. A check with his name printed on it, his address.

  “But wouldn’t that slow things down?” he said. “I stopped at my bank to get cash, so you could begin immediately.”

  “Which bank?” I inquired.

  His posture didn’t alter but his chin seemed suddenly firmer. “BayBank, my dear,” he said, his voice calm and level. “I imagine it is your business to mistrust. I’m glad it isn’t mine.”

  I felt shamed by his clear blue eyes. But I didn’t take his cash. I said I’d think it over. Missing persons work is dicey at best. Finding someone who’s had better than a twenty-year head start and may not want to be found … I tried to make it clear that I felt he was asking the impossible.

  “Improbable, my dear,” he said disarmingly. “Not impossible. And I will pay for your time. Generously.
It is—it could be—so very important.”

  “I’ll need to keep the chapter,” I said.

  “We’ll copy it,” he said immediately. “Have you got a machine?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll zip into the Square. Those places stay open all hours.”

  “Mr. Mayhew, if you want me to establish the work’s authenticity, I’ll have to use the original. It could have fingerprints on it, prints that match Thea’s.”

  Or don’t.

  For a minute I assumed the deal was off. Then he fixed me with a glance that seemed to see through me and beyond.

  “I’ll need a receipt,” he said.

  “No problem.”

  “I’ll write one.”

  I said, “I’ll sign it.”

  He removed pen and paper from his briefcase in record time. As long as he was in the mood, and since his stationery bore no inscribed return address, I had him print his name, address, and phone number on a Rolodex card. He didn’t offer a printed business card, but he happily accepted one of mine.

  He practically shook my arm off before he left, his puppy enthusiasm fully restored.

  4

  I’m prepared. I keep a box of latex examining-room gloves in a desk drawer. Before tilting the contents of the manila envelope onto the blotter, I donned a pair. I’d expected loose pages. Instead, a notebook emerged, the color of milk chocolate with “Strathmore Calligraphy” printed on the cover below an elaborate “S” that could have been part of a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript. The notebook was eight and a half by eleven inches, bound on the shorter side with a strip of stuff that looked like grosgrain ribbon. Nothing bent, frayed, or aged, as far as I could see.

  I lifted it to my face and sniffed. Cigarette smoke. Opened it to the first page. Blank. The off-white paper was not what I’d call cream. When I held it to the light, each sheet seemed divided into six vertical columns with tiny horizontal lines rushing across, like waves on a sandy beach. Fifty sheets, the cover declared in plain print.

  The writer had worked with the binding to the left, treating it like a bound book instead of a collection of removable pages. The second page was also blank. The third had a tiny numeral one circled in the upper-right-hand corner. The fourth was the title page: Two words surrounded by blank space. Callused Bone.

  The fifth page was covered with the kind of elegant script used on fancy wedding invitations, with skinny downstrokes and fat T-crosses. After a hasty riffle, I got up, yanked the gloves off my sweaty hands, and went in search of my ancient copy of Nightmare’s Dawn.

  I found it in the attic along with the eighteen neatly boxed and unopened cartons of “mementos” my aunt Bea left when she died.

  I always promise myself I’ll cull through them. I never get around to it. My aunt was such a private woman; she guarded her secrets so diligently I never realized she had any till she died. The locket she always wore, even in bed with her high-necked nightgowns, has two sepia photographs inside. Two gentlemen in stiff collars and stiffer poses. As far as I know, Aunt Bea never married. I have no idea who those two men are, or what they meant to her.

  I’m not sure I want to know.

  I fled the musty attic, clasping the dusty book. Returned to Thea’s world.

  Knopf had published Nightmare’s Dawn in a handsome navy edition with a simple jacket. The title’s words, in flowing twisted strokes, set in cream against a swirling midnight blue, like lightning in a storm. Had Thea, the calligrapher, suggested the format?

  Gloves on.

  I suffer from insomnia. Sometimes I benefit from it, depending on your point of view. It wasn’t hard for me to stay up late into the steamy night, rereading Thea’s brilliant first novel, tackling her “new” chapter.

  I can read a forensics report and tell you if the same revolver fired two bullets; I can’t read two poems written more than twenty years apart and tell you if the same author wrote both.

  The new chapter, like the published book, was a hybrid, poetry mixed with prose. It read like a journal, like notes a woman might write to herself. Nothing seemed quite polished enough for publication, but I enjoyed what I read. The author had used initials in place of names. The locale Adam Mayhew had mentioned was a made-up resort town somewhere on Cape Ann, a haven for painters and yachtsmen. Tension seethed between the year-round folk—fishermen, shopkeepers—and the well-heeled vacationers, who considered the town their private playground. A fictionalized version of Rockport, possibly Marblehead?

  Not a single landmark to fix on. I wouldn’t mind hanging out on Cape Ann if I had a real lead. But a single chapter of fiction, after twenty-four years …

  Two restaurants were mentioned by name. I punched the buttons for NYNEX information, requested each eatery in Rockport, then in Marblehead. Nothing. Restaurants are always in the city phone directory. Either Thea’d changed the names to protect the chefs or she’d created the places in her head.

  Maybe I’d guessed the wrong towns. Maybe it was a conglomeration of towns. Whatever, Thea was using it as the backdrop for a family drama.

  The family in question was rich, prominent in politics and the arts. Their fabulous wealth stemmed from the unhappy union of a burly sea captain and a delicate heiress of China trade millions.

  How had the Camerons earned their pile?

  The girl in the opening pages of the story seemed about the same age as Thea when she’d disappeared. She was referred to as “d.” “d” for Dorothy? Was the journal a memoir? An autobiography? A roman à clef?

  I’m no expert on modern poetry although the names of poets, especially women poets, Rich and Lorde and Plath, are not strangers to me. My aunt owned an extensive modern poetry collection. During her last year, I read to her.

  I remember disjointed phrases, lines. June Jordan’s poem about a boy who died: “So Brooklyn has become a holy place.” That was one of my aunt’s favorites. She said that Jordan’s bitter words gave her peace. I don’t know why, but Thea’s words gave me peace as well. I found myself picking up my old National Steel guitar, trying to find an accompaniment that might do them justice.

  Thea’s words awoke in me a demon curiosity. At fourteen she’d written:

  the mind remembers lonely

  long after

  in dark places of memory

  as a pit of blankness

  of black

  of cold

  and cries at night the name

  with questioning thought

  are you there are you there

  remembers

  and cannot forget

  as a taste of bitterness

  and shiver

  and fear

  I couldn’t sing it, but I could almost hear someone chant it, a vaguely Chasidic melody wafting from the bema, the pulpit of a synagogue.

  I wondered what kind of music Thea’d enjoyed. Sixties protest? Folk? The stuff she’d danced to at Avon Hill’s Friday night socials?

  I spoke the poem out loud.

  Jazz.

  In her new chapter she wrote, or might have written:

  the mind can destroy what the mind possesses:

  and you are there

  before me,

  in dusty armour and tarnished silver,

  away from the wars,

  undestroyed

  (you must not be mine).

  After so many earlier questions and fears, now solid answers, like blocks of stone. “the mind remembers … the mind can destroy.”

  To whom was she speaking? To whom had she cried, “are you there are you there”? Who stood before her now in “dusty armour”?

  Why she’d written the first poem was no clearer to me than why she’d written the second.

  If she had …

  The absence of capital letters, the random placement of words on lines, the use of commas, seemed similar in both pieces. That was all I could say, except that I liked her work enough to read it aloud. To wonder what Aunt Bea would have said if she sat rocking in her needle
point-cushioned chair, listening.

  My attempt to set Thea’s verses to music failed. I play Delta blues. The old stuff, written by slaves and sharecroppers, people with names like Blind Blake, Smilin’ Cora, Robert L.

  I got a new pair of surgical gloves from the box, slid them on my hands, working the fingers down into the finger holes till my hands were clasped like I was praying. First I shook the manila envelope, then gently squeezed it open, peered inside. Nothing. No hint of where it had come from, whether it had been protected in plastic or stacked on a shelf. I grasped the chocolate notebook by the binding, using thumb and index finger to dangle it over my desk. A loose sheet drifted to the floor like a spent paper airplane.

  More poetry, a brief verse.

  berlin, now

  without a wall

  can

  you break down

  the glistening gates?

  always

  keep the western wall,

  the body cries

  for wailing walls

  (not in jerusalem)

  It was Mayhew’s cited proof: “berlin, now, without a wall.” Must have been written in or after 1989. The glorious penmanship seemed the same, the paper identical. Why was this one sheet detached? Had Mayhew added it, separating it from a later notebook, part of a series that made up the complete manuscript?

  Thirty-five pages of the notebook had been used to write Chapter One. Fifteen remained blank. The Berlin page was extra, an addition. Was a single poem sufficient to pinpoint a year? Couldn’t the young Thea have visualized Berlin without a wall?

  “berlin, now”

  I replaced the page in the notebook, the notebook in the envelope, locked the whole shebang in my desk drawer. Peeled off the gloves and tossed them in the trash.

  Before I went to sleep, I called a Web-connected friend on the coast and got a home listing for Thurman W. Vandenburg. I dialed his number, just for the pleasure of waking him, breathing heavily, and hanging up.

  Whoops, shouldn’t do that, I thought, replacing the receiver as though my hand were on fire. DEA might have a bug on his phone, a high-tech trace. Vandenburg might have a phone that flashed the caller’s number. If I boasted a clientele like Vandenburg’s, I’d get myself every available gadget; cost—no object.