“Gorgeous,” Jill pronounced, as if that settled it. “I could really go for all that muscle.”
“We know,” Earlene replied, dryly. “How’s Kenny?” Kenny Halvorsen, the college soccer coach, was something more than merely Jill’s next-door neighbor.
Jill shrugged. “He couldn’t watch Eloise tonight. I had to get a babysitter.” There was something wrong here. We waited, but our young friend had been struck by a rare case of discretion.
Earlene sat back and regarded me owlishly over the red rims of her glasses. “God, it’s good to see you happy, Karen. You just about glow with it.”
“Yeah, I am. But, if only…” I frowned, pulled the menu toward me.
“If only what?” Jill plucked the oversize parchment sheet from my hand.
“If only he would let well enough alone.” I focused on the evening’s specials printed on a blackboard in magenta chalk: linguine with chanterelles, shiitake risotto with smoked chicken, polenta with black bean sauce.
“What does that mean—well enough alone?” Earlene passed me the bread basket.
I snapped a bread stick in half and muttered, “He wants me to marry him.”
“Hallelujah! We’ll have the wedding this summer. I’ll bake the cake. I make this fabulous Grand Marnier orange cake—”
Jill waved down the waitress. “Champagne, please. We’re celebrating.”
“I’m not getting married!”
The waitress was an Enfield student with short blond hair and a pewter stud in the center of her chin. Her brown eyes slid from me to Jill to Earlene, then back to me. Enfield is a fishbowl.
“Why not?” Jill seemed to have recovered from her discretion. She picked up Earlene’s red-framed glasses, settled them on the tip of her nose, and adopted a shrinky expression most likely learned from her psychiatrist father. “Do I detect an inability to commit?”
I scowled at her, then turned to the waitress. “No champagne,” I said. “I’ll have a glass of the merlot.”
“Me, too,” Earlene said. “But bring us a bottle. We’ll share.” The waitress headed for the bar.
“Sorry about that,” Jill apologized in lowered tones. “But it’s just that I think Charlie’s the perfect guy for you. You said it yourself. Smart. Strong. Dependable.”
“You two,” I allowed my voice to rise for emphasis, “I’ve told you before—I won’t marry a cop. It’s a terrible life. I don’t know why we can’t simply keep on as we are. You know, no entanglements. Just seeing each other, sleeping together. It’s perfect.”
Rudolph’s service was unbelievably efficient that evening: The waitress stepped up from directly behind me with the wine.
I took a deep gulp of the California red and groaned. It would be all over the dorms before bedtime: Pelletier was sleeping with a cop.
Chapter Six
“Whaddaya know…it’s Karen Pelletier. And all grown up.” The handsome stranger materialized next to me at the Lowell High School Reunion buffet table. Ruth Ann Bouchard Napolitano, rhapsodizing about her three adolescent soccer-star sons, faltered in mid-paean.
Alumni were gathered at round tables in the large balloon-decorated banquet room of the Lowell Doubletree Hotel. The color motif was pink and purple. On the bandstand, a pianist, drummer, and guitarist launched into a rocking-chair version of “Motorcycle Mama” to the accompaniment of joyous shrieks from people who hadn’t seen each other in decades—and hadn’t wanted to. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing there. The crime fiction conference was only a few days away, and I could have been at home, polishing my talk, comfortable in sweatshirt and jeans, feet up in front of a cherrywood fire.
Bored pie-eyed by Ruth Ann’s heroic-soccer-mom tales, I’d been thinking about skipping out. The hell with the two hours it had taken me to drive here. The hell with the fifty dollars I’d plopped down for the ticket. I was still deep into Tough Times and had left Kit Danger teetering on the edge of a construction girder hundreds of feet up in a half-built skyscraper. Reading at home would be a lot more fun than this reunion.
But suddenly there was this intriguing man.
He was forty, gingery Irish, six feet tall, broad of shoulder, with eyes of such a light green they appeared empty. He wore a well-made brown suit and charcoal-grey dress shirt with a Jerry Garcia tie in deep reds and blues. He looked muscular, masculine, intelligent, capable of swift movement and decisive action—and oddly incongruous in this reunion crowd.
“Denny?” Ruth Ann queried. She was round-faced, pudgy, and fluttery, and the newcomer’s unsmiling gaze seemed to fluster her.
The man had a stranger’s face but vaguely familiar features. I squinted in the dim party light. Take one skinny, undersized Irish kid with bad acne and worse attitude; add three or four inches to the height, more to the shoulders, sandpaper the complexion, readjust the aesthetic scale of the facial features, once ludicrously outsized, now rough-cut and angular: come up with square jaw, thin lips, long nose, high cheekbones. And those cool green eyes.
“Dennis O’Hanlon? Is it really you?” The last I knew of this classmate, he was a cocky, red-headed runt, always in trouble, suspended during junior year for selling marijuana to the daughter of the local Episcopal priest.
“It’s me.” He shrugged. “I grew up, too.”
“I’ll say,” I replied, trying not to stare. “You look great.”
“Thanks. Same back atcha.” He gave me a long, slow smile. “Can I buy you another one of whatever poison it is you’re drinking. For old time’s sake.” I glanced around. Susie Leblanc was headed in our direction clutching a puffy pink photo album.
“Sure can,” I said. “Scotch rocks.” I followed him off to the bar. Ruth Ann, fortunately, had been struck immobile, as well as mute, by Dennis O’Hanlon’s miraculous transformation.
When I was a kid, the O’Hanlons had lived down the hill one street over on an Irish block that abutted our French-Canadian neighborhood. The only difference between our sagging frame row house and theirs was the number of people crammed into the five miserable rooms. Counting my grandmother, there were six of us, but Dennis was the youngest in a brood of thirteen. While we Pelletiers weren’t exactly solid citizens, at least my father worked when he wasn’t on a tearing drunk, and my mother somehow managed to put three squares a day on our chipped enamel kitchen table. Nobody knew what went on at Denny’s house, but the O’Hanlon kids ate wherever they could grab a mouthful, and come five o’clock my mother more than once had set a place for the grubby little Denny. My dominant memory of the young Dennis O’Hanlon was that he was a troublemaker, always on the run from somebody—and always hungry.
Now here was once-scrawny Denny O’Hanlon bulking out the shoulders of what I could have sworn was a custom-made suit.
The Doubletree cocktail lounge bustled with highly made-up women wearing pastels. It was either an evangelical women’s gathering, a convention of politician’s wives, or a Mary Kay conference. Dennis and I bellied up, ordered two Dewar’s, and took them to a glass-topped table in a back corner, out of the sight-line of any classmates who might decide to forgo the inferior libations available in the ballroom.
“To old times.” Dennis raised his glass and touched it to mine. “May they never return.”
“Skoal,” I replied.
The green eyes studied me. They were clear, like arctic ice. “I always did like the way you wore your hair, Karen,” he said, finally. “All loose and shiny like that. Unpretentious. And, tonight, that simple, flowing dress, not fussy like the rest of these girls.” He motioned toward the ballroom with his drinking hand. “You know…” he gave me a cock-eyed grin, “all these years later, you still look damn good.”
“Thanks.” I swallowed hard. Graciousness in the face of praise does not come naturally.
That simple, flowing dress had cost me a full weekend’s shopping time and three hundred dollars at an Enfield boutique whose doors I hadn’t previously darkened in the entire four years I’d worked at the colleg
e, and most likely would never darken again. But once I’d made my impulsive decision to attend the Lowell High reunion, I’d been determined to appear naturally, and effortlessly, elegant. Dennis O’Hanlon’s appreciative gaze confirmed that the effort had been worth it.
“You look like life has been kind to you,” Dennis pronounced. He said it as if he were used to making complex evaluations given minimal evidence. And used to being right.
Poker-faced, I tipped my head in acknowledgment of the remark, if not necessarily of its truth. The grown-up Dennis O’Hanlon was an intriguing guy, and I was titillated by this serendipitous encounter.
He registered my demurral. “I didn’t say life had been easy. Believe me, if anyone knows what your childhood was like, it’s me. I said life had been kind. It’s not the same thing.”
I contemplated the distinction, shrugged, then nodded. Life had walloped me hard at the start, but now I had my wonderful daughter, Amanda. I had work I loved. I had Charlie Piotrowski, who wasn’t with me tonight only because I’d refused to let him come. If I was going to face my teenage demons, I’d wanted to do it alone. Now, sitting here drinking with this adult version of Denny O’Hanlon, I was wickedly grateful not to have Charlie tagging along like a chaperone. Or like a husband. In my tame life this encounter felt deliciously—almost dangerously—like adventure.
“Do you remember the fish?” Dennis leaned back in his molded plastic chair and regarded me with a faint smile.
“Fish?” This wasn’t what I expected from adventure—fish talk.
“Your father took us fishing one afternoon. Remember? First we got some frogs in the marsh.” He said maash, like a good Lowellian. “God, those things were ugly little fuckers, freaked me out to touch them. Then we went down to the river. I caught an enormous bass. Your mother filleted the fish, battered the frog legs, cooked it all up and served it with French fries.” He was smiling into his Dewar’s. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anything I enjoyed as much as that meal, and, believe me, I’ve eaten in some classy restaurants over the years.”
I remembered then. We must have been about seven, and we’d trekked along the Merrimack until we’d come to a marshy spot outside of town. My father wielded the net, and it was Denny’s job to drop the frogs into the pail and slam the lid down. When my father flipped him the first huge warty bullfrog, Denny screeched and dropped it. My father curled his lip in derision, and called the panicked boy “Frogface.” Denny burst into tears, and Daddy hooted in derisive laughter. Then Denny caught the bass, and my father taunted him for thinking he was a hot shot. Even now, thirty years later, I wanted to apologize to Dennis for my father’s nastiness that afternoon—but all he seemed to recall was the good meal.
Before I could respond, Dennis abruptly changed the subject. “I see you’re not wearing a wedding ring.”
I glanced down at my left hand. He was right. I wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “Neither are you,” I replied.
“Not anymore.”
We looked each other over. It was a frank appraisal, on both sides. Then he asked, again abruptly, “So…what are you up to these days?”
Behind him, one of the pastel women glided by, clutching a Manhattan in a rocks glass. Not an evangelical gathering. From the ballroom came a mangled medley of John Denver tunes.
“I’m an English professor.” I sipped my Dewar’s.
“No kidding. A professor, huh? Impressive.” There was a reflective pause while my companion processed the information. “Well, you always were a brain.”
“Ha!” I sipped more Dewar’s. “Among other things, you mean. What are you up to, Dennis?”
He paused again before he responded. “Oh, a little of this, a little of that.” Cagey. I didn’t let it go, tilting my head in inquiry. He tapped his fingers on the glass tabletop. “Nothing as fancy as a college professor, I’ll tell you that.”
“Give me a break, Dennis. I’m not about to buy the rube act. Look at you.” I swept a hand in his direction. Fifty-dollar haircut. Hundred-dollar shirt. Million-dollar attitude. “Obviously you’re doing well at something.”
His broad shoulders moved up and down easily in the beautiful jacket. “I’m an investigator.”
“Really? A cop?” I’d known a number of cops in my life, but they didn’t run to bespoke suits.
“No. Private.”
“Private!” I stared at him, then grinned. “Well, that makes sense, I guess. Once you hit high school, you became a hard-ass troublemaker.”
He laughed. “That I did. But it’s standing me in good stead these days. And you…” Dennis evaded the topic of himself as if he made a habit of it. “You’re a professor,” he repeated. “Where do you teach?”
“Enfield College.”
“Enfield!” Pale lashes blinked over startled eyes. It was worth the entire fifty-dollar admission fee to see Dennis O’Hanlon’s taken-aback reaction. Then he set his drink down on the table and sat up straight. “Enfield College. Well, I’ll be damned.” The eyes squinted, as if in speculation. He gave me a slow, thin smile. “Lowell High is doing itself proud. But, like I said, you always were a brain. Kind of a prig—but a brain.”
“Ha!” He surprised another laugh out of me. Prig was the last label I’d ever have expected from one of my high-school classmates. He was right of course. I had been a prig. I’d read all those doom-laden nineteenth-century novels where the virtuous young woman is seduced by an experienced older man, becomes pregnant after a single act of sexual intercourse, gives birth to a virtuous daughter, and dies. But, in the end, the lesson hadn’t taken. And I hadn’t died, just submitted myself to marriage, in my particular case a fate worse than death, given birth to Amanda, and lived on to untangle myself from everything about the whole sordid mess. From everything, that is, but my wonderful daughter.
“And you always did have…” He eased into silence, as if his words were leading him into an unexpected train of thought. I had the impression of strong muscles under pale skin, and, oddly enough, a still-hungry expression in the cool-green eyes.
“Dennis?” I queried after a silent minute.
He shook his head. “Sorry, Karen. I was woolgathering. Hazard of the profession. I was about to say, you…always did have your nose in a book.” He leaned toward me, elbows on table, chin on hands. “So. Karen. Here we are, twenty years later. Tell me about your life. Tell me about your job. Tell me about Enfield College….”
We chatted our way through another round of Dewar’s, then I turned down an invitation for a post-reunion drink in his room. He walked me to the parking lot and saw me safe into the Subaru. “Be seein’ ya, Karen,” he said, smiling crookedly.
Be seeing me? I reflected as I drove away, and wondered just exactly what I’d do if the boy from Lowell ever called.
Chapter Seven
Avery Mitchell took my hand in both of his. “Karen, how are you?” His clear blue gaze gave me the usual flutter in the gut.
I detached my hand. “I’m fine, Avery.” It was hothouse warm in the president’s office, and a scent of roses wafted from the arrangement on the long table by the bookcase. “What’s up?” I knew I sounded rude, but I wanted to get this—whatever it was—over with.
“What’s up? Let’s see…ah, what time is it, Karen? 4:13? Would you like a drink? Scotch, maybe?” He motioned me to a maroon leather chair and walked over to the liquor cabinet across from the fireplace. Avery was tall, sandy-haired, fine-boned, with the thin lips and long nose of the true New England WASP. Today must have been a dress-down day; he was wearing khakis and a bright green sweater over a blue chambray shirt. “I have Glenfiddich, Black Label…”
“Coffee,” I said. “If you have any.” I hadn’t quite recovered from my overindulgence at the reunion Saturday night. Now, after an intense Pop Fiction seminar, I felt drained. It didn’t help when I returned from class and found the message on my office voicemail from Lonnie, Avery’s administrative assistant. President Mitchell would appreciate it if
I could free up a few minutes in my busy day to speak with him in person—at my earliest convenience, of course—about a matter that must remain confidential.
“Lonnie,” Avery called into the outer office, “coffee, please. For two.” We talked about the Braque exhibit at the college art museum until Lonnie came in with a tray holding an insulated carafe and a monogrammed bone china coffee service. A fire crackled in the fireplace, its light reflected in the gold rims of the cups. I could have sat there for hours in that elegant room with its jewel-toned Persian rugs and its muted Hudson River landscapes, discussing art with Avery, but that wasn’t the purpose of the summons, and it wouldn’t have been a good idea, anyhow. Again I asked, “What’s up?”
“What’s up?” he echoed, and tightened his fine lips. “Well, Karen, we find ourselves in a situation…by we, I mean the college, of course…we find ourselves in an unanticipated difficulty into the midst of which I understand you have been inadvertently interjected.” He measured sugar into his cup.
I translated from administratese: The college has gotten itself into some kind of shit, and I’m involved. “Ah,” I said.
He waited for more, then smiled. “Never one to waste words, are you, Karen?”
“Well…” I replied, playing for time. Next year I would petition Enfield College for tenure. If I had been “inadvertently interjected” into something so serious the president had to handle it personally, I’d just keep my mouth shut until I found out what it was.
“I heard, of course,” Avery said, “about your unfortunate encounter with that intruder in the library last month, and now I understand Rachel Thompson has acquainted you with our recent loss of an entire set of nineteenth-century books. Baffling! Absolutely baffling!”
I nodded, and replaced my cup in its saucer. He was finally getting to the point.
“But there have been further developments I don’t believe you know about.” A phone rang in the outer office. Through the heavy mahogany door Lonnie’s greeting was nothing more than a murmur. Avery slid his gaze toward the door and waited. When it was clear that Lonnie wasn’t about to put the call through to him, he turned back to me and let out his breath in a big huff. “Rough day,” he said. “But I’m going to try to relax. Listen, Karen, there’s more stuff missing from the library, but right now I’m not in a position to tell you precisely what. After Rachel found out that the entire dime-book collection had been stolen, the library staff conducted an in-depth inventory. They discovered additional losses.” He looked very sober. “Over the past few months the library has lost at least five hundred thousand dollars in rare books and manuscripts.”
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