“Now, Karen, you do remember that at six o’clock promptly you are to escort our guest to dinner at the president’s house?”
“Yes, Claudia.”
“And make certain that she arrives at the Emerson Hall auditorium at 7:50 precisely….”
“Yes, Claudia.” At eight Sunnye was to speak to the conference on the topic of Crime Writing and the Moral Health of the Nation.
“And, you do recall, don’t you, that after Sunnye’s speech, a few distinguished guests will gather for drinks at Rudolph’s.”
“Yes, Claudia.”
“You may, of course, feel free to join us.”
I bit my lip. “Thank you, Claudia.”
The evening threatened to go on forever. If the snow kept up, my trip home would be late and long and hellish. Then I would have to scurry back to campus first thing in the morning to give my own talk.
“See you at dinner, Claudia.”
I rejoined Sunnye. The crowd around her was thinning. The novelist seemed to be holding her own in a contest of wits with Professor Sally Chenille. Sally was loquacious. No, loquacious was too generous a word; Sally suffered from terminal logorrhea. She was blathering on about Kit Danger’s “incrimination of patriarchal social practices.” The encounter was good for at least ten more minutes.
I still needed a drink. Slipping away to the bar once again, I waited patiently in line. “Vodka and tonic,” I told the pony-tailed bartender. “Better make it a double.”
“That kind of day?” he asked.
“That kind of day,” I agreed. When I turned back, libation in hand, to resume my post at Sunnye Hardcastle’s side, the writer and her dog were nowhere in sight.
***
“Sally, where’s Sunnye Hardcastle?” A sudden irrational burst of alarm at Sunnye’s disappearance had caused my heart to speed up.
Sally Chenille pivoted toward me, always a tricky move when you’re wearing purple suede stiletto heels. “Why ask me?” As usual she was made up in the hues of domestic violence, eyes shadowed in contusion plum, cheeks blushed in blister brown, her stubble of hair a rich infection green. She wore a short skirt and tight jersey in tones of black and blue. The clothes hugged a bone-thin body; I’d once overheard the custodians complaining that the bathroom next to Sally’s office “reeked of puke.”
“I’m asking you because you’re the last person I saw talking to her,” I replied. Then I couldn’t resist a dig. “You were, I believe, encouraging her to persevere in her decades-long interrogation of patriarchal social practices.”
“That woman!” Sally twisted her bruise-colored lips into what she seemed to think of as seductive petulance. “She’s impossible. She just stood there like a lump. No political consciousness. No conversation. You’d think a writer of her sophistication—”
“I need to find Sunnye right away. Do you have any idea where she went?” In my experience, it was difficult for anyone to have any conversation when Professor Sally Chenille was in the room.
“Probably off somewhere to take a leak.” She pouted at me. “How should I know?” Her gaze slid away from me, and fixed on a spot over my shoulder. I turned, curious about the object of Sally’s sudden raptor-like attention. Dennis O’Hanlon, a.k.a. Professor Slade, stood in the corner of the foyer by the concealed door, a wine glass in one hand, the fingers of the other idly tracing the joins in the paneling. Even in his academic-nerd getup, Dennis was all man, and Sally had taken note of that.
“Thanks, Sally,” I said. For nothing. “I’ll look for Sunnye in the bathroom.” Of course, that’s where she must be. My momentary panic was for nothing. But now it was time to get the conference star on her way to Avery’s dinner party.
“Wait! I remember now.” My colleague’s attention had returned to me. Dennis must have vanished in the crowd. “She went off with some little prick I never saw before. Face like a potato. Body like a toad. What a hot-looking chick like Hardcastle would want with a limp-dick like that…” She let it trail off, predator eyes scanning the room. For Sally, everything was about sex. My colleague was a talk-show-famous advocate of what she called “unplugged” sexuality: indiscriminate erotic activity without regard to genders or numbers. In public. The “public pubic,” she famously explained. Professor Chenille fancied herself to be a naughty girl, the Mae West of postmodernist literary criticism. At a recent gathering of the Modern Literature Association, Sally had renounced feminism as sexually repressive and had allied herself with “material fetishism.” Her next book would be a study of the garter as it formally normalizes a discourse of invagination in twentieth-century world literature and film.
Hmm. Face like a potato? Body like a toad? Sounded like someone I’d met. “Was Potato-face wearing a bad suit?”
“Seventies polyester, big lapels. Must have been from the Goodwill. He was too young to have worn something that god-awful first time round—”
“Thanks for the fashion note, Sally. I’m sure I’ll recognize him when I see him.”
My gaze swept the library’s foyer. Bob Tooey was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Sunnye. No sign of Trouble. It would be easy to overlook either human in this crowd, but you’d think there’d be a visible empty space around the trained attack dog.
I edged past the green-plush chains into the main part of the library. A line of conferees extended out the door of the first-floor women’s room, but no one had seen the novelist. I checked the reading room with its twenty-foot ceilings, high, wide windows and massive tables laid out in parallel rows. Sunnye wasn’t there. The periodicals room held periodicals and a half-dozen sleepy-eyed readers. I peered into the reference room. Students hunched over computer monitors. No Sunnye.
Claudia jumped me when I re-entered the foyer. She seemed close to hysterics. “Karen, for God’s sake, what are you doing here? Sunnye’s supposed to be at the president’s house in five minutes, and it’s way the hell across campus!” The twitch in her right eye had gone into hyperdrive.
I held up a hand. “Take it easy, Claudia. I’ll find her.”
“You’ll find her? She’s lost?” People were getting ready to leave the reception now, shrugging into coats, tugging on gloves, pulling wool scarves tight against the cold and snow. “Sunnye Hardcastle’s lost?” Claudia’s wail brought a momentary halt to all activity.
I smiled reassuringly at colleagues and conferees, clasped Claudia by the elbow, and pushed through double glass doors into a darkened library office, turning on the overhead lights at the switch. “For God’s sake, Claudia, settle down!” My hand still on her arm, I could feel my charge begin to quiver. The quiver turned into a full-blown shaking.
“Lost,” Claudia whimpered. “Sunnye Hardcastle is lost. Our guest speaker—”
“Claudia, stop that!” I had to resist the urge to shake her. I’d never seen anyone in quite this shape. She needed help, but could I leave her alone while I went to get it?
Rachel Thompson shoved open the door. “Karen? Claudia? How’d you get in here? This room is supposed to be locked.”
“Rachel,” I said, thrilled to see her, “Claudia is a little… ah…stressed. Could you get a glass of water?”
Rachel took in the situation at a glance. “Water’s not gonna do it.” She leaned over the conference director. “Claudia,” she said, sharply.
Claudia looked at her blankly. “Lost….” Her breaths had begun to come in thick, short gasps.
Rachel slid her gaze over to me. I spread my hands. She turned back, speaking in slow, distinct tones. “Claudia, do you have any medication for this…this…er…stress?”
The empty look again. The flutter, catch, fixed stare.
Rachel shrugged, reached into the macramé bag she carried slung across her chest, pulled out a prescription bottle, and shook out a couple of salmon-colored pills. “Xanax,” she said. “Don’t leave home without it.”
It was a full twenty minutes before Claudia stopped shaking. Then Rachel took her to the librarian’s lounge to lie down. Und
er a cloud of doom, I resumed my search for Sunnye. A missing novelist, a colleague with a panic attack. What next?
The reception was all but over. A few conferees—most likely grad students on limited budgets—lingered at the hors d’oeuvres table, making a full meal out of the remnants of the feast. As I passed, a tall young woman in a fringed black silk shawl, her dark gold hair clasped back with a scarlet clip, systematically worked her way through the remaining spanakopita as she lectured her rib-chewing male companion on the feminist politics of meat. A skinny guy in black munching contentedly on a chicken wing fingered the speaker’s silk wrap slyly. “What about this shawl, Dara? Wouldn’t you say it implicates you in a particularly egregious form of speciesism, the imperialist appropriation of silkworm production?”
Then I heard Sunnye Hardcastle’s voice. “Karen,” she called.
I turned sharply. Sunnye entered through the sequestered door in the foyer’s paneling, Trouble at her heels.
“Sunnye, where have you been?” I inquired. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
“Oh, I had to…to use the bathroom,” she said, with an un-Hardcastle-like delicacy. “There was a line at the one on this floor, so I…looked around.”
I checked my watch. It had been over a half hour since I’d last seen her.
She raised her chin, tightened her lips. “Something didn’t agree with me.”
“Ah,” I said, light dawning. “Too bad.” Must have been the mussels. “I hope you’re all right now. We’re more than fashionably late for the president’s dinner.”
Chapter Ten
All through the rack of lamb, polenta, and asparagus, which we ate off gold-monogrammed china in the president’s dining room, I kept checking the door for Claudia, but she remained absent. Under ordinary circumstances even an angry mob couldn’t have kept Claudia Nestor away from dinner at the president’s house. Where was she? Who would run the conference if she had a total breakdown?
The room was elegant, as befitted the occupant of the house: high-ceilinged, wallpapered in a vaguely colonial print, furnished with Chippendale table and chairs. An arrangement of iris and white forsythia defied the wintry message of the snowstorm that raged outside. Neither the elegant decor nor the bright flowers served to salve the uneasiness Claudia’s continued absence caused me.
At the head of the table, Avery, as usual, was charming, but tonight he hosted the party alone. According to the college buzz, his wife Liz hadn’t been seen around town for a couple of weeks. For eleven days, to be precise, but who’s counting? She may simply have been indulging herself in a solo winter cruise; I know nothing about the vacation practices of the rich.
Sunnye, at his side, laughed at Avery’s witticisms and ate heartily, which surprised me, given her usual dour demeanor and her earlier indisposition. Trouble gnawed on a lamb rib. Once or twice Avery glanced down at the big animal by his feet, concerned either about his ankles or his antique Persian rug.
Aside from Sunnye, the literary guests included Amelia Smith, who wrote cozy murder mysteries with embroidery themes—the Stitch in Crime series—and Eloise Pickwick, who composed academic novels so arch and erudite I was amazed she had more than a dozen readers to her name.
Women’s Studies was represented by Harriet Person, the Chair, and Rex Hunter, newest member of the department. Rex was qualified for the women’s studies position because he was a lesbian trapped in a male body. At least so he’d informed us during his job interview. I’d laughed, thinking he was joking, then quickly had to turn the guffaw into a hacking cough when I realized he was dead serious. Since Rex’s unique sexual orientation mandated that he sleep with women, I had difficulty thinking of him as anything other than heterosexual. Or, perhaps, opportunistic, since Sally Chenille, who had chaired the hiring committee, was a noted theorist of male lesbianism.
Harriet sat next to Avery, on the other side from Sunnye. She was tall, slender and austere, her thick dark hair with its widening silver streak cut in a severe, almost geometric wedge. Tonight she wore a black leather suit with a straight short skirt, black stockings and black-laced pumps with clunky heels. Heavy silver parrots dangled from her earlobes. She sipped her pinot noir and addressed Sunnye. “As a woman author suppressed by the cultural strictures of patriarchal capitalism, do you find murder provides you with a transgressive symbol system for an anti-essentialist social critique?”
Sunnye stared at her. “Murder?” she queried. “Are you asking me if I condone murder?”
“Only as a mode of hermeneutical rhetoric.”
The novelist turned abruptly to me. “What’s she talking about?”
I translated. “I believe she’s asking if you write about murder in order to protest the male-dominated power structures of modern life.”
She pursed her lips, annoyed. “Why doesn’t she say that?”
I shrugged.
“No,” she said to the Women’s Studies chair. “I write about murder in order to tell a good story. Oh, and to make some money. Patriarchal capitalism has been very generous to me.”
Harriet, ever-vigilant in ferreting out political deviance, narrowed her eyes. “Are you claiming complicity in oppressive social practices?”
Sunnye’s dark eyes glinted in the light from the chandelier. “I’m claiming that I tell stories people want to hear, and they pay me well for it.”
You go, girl, I thought, then glanced over at Avery. He was sitting back in his chair with a half-smile on his patrician face, enjoying the skirmish.
To diffuse the escalating antagonism, I turned to Amelia Smith, our “cozy” author. “And you, Ms. Smith? Why do you write murder mysteries?”
Amelia Smith was in her sixties and pretty, with grey hair frizzed out in a wild halo around her cherubic face. “Do call me Amelia, Karen. Oh, my. Now let’s see? Why do I write mysteries? I guess I’d have to agree with Sunnye. I write mysteries in order to tell a good story and make some money.” She glanced across the table at Eloise Pickwick. “How about you, Eloise?”
Eloise frowned, professorially. She was tall, thin, and precise, and accentuated her remarks with emphatic hand gestures. “The narrative momentum of the mystery genre with its focus on moral violation, secrecy, disclosure, and ultimate justice provides a compelling readerly experience that demands repetitive satisfaction.”
“In other words,” Avery said, blue eyes crinkled with amusement, “you write to tell a good story and make some money.”
“Precisely,” Eloise Pickwick agreed, making a neat little tent with her fingertips.
Harriet Person devoted herself to deconstructing her rack of lamb.
***
Dinner had been served efficiently by Stephanie Abrams, who proved as capable a waitress as she was a student. Seated facing the kitchen, I half consciously followed her movements. Briefly my attention was captured by a tableau in the kitchen doorway: Stephanie in her server’s whites, about to enter the dining room with a tray of crème brulée, was halted by a hand grasping her arm. She disappeared back into the kitchen with the tray, but not before I caught a glimpse of Peggy Briggs speaking to her urgently. How’d Peggy get there? She must have come in through the back door. Then a phone rang, and in a moment Stephanie returned, bent over me, and whispered.
“Professor Pelletier, you have a call. It’s from Ms. Thompson. You know, that librarian.”
I followed Stephanie into the large yellow kitchen with its restaurant-size gas and wood-burning stove and huge Sub-Zero refrigerator, and picked up the cordless phone on the counter. No sign of Peggy.
“Karen,” Rachel’s voice said, broken up on what must have been a cell phone, “Claudia went home. She wanted me to ask you to make her apologies to Sunnye and Avery.”
“How was she?”
A brief silence. “Not good.”
“Should we expect her in the morning?”
Another silence. “I couldn’t say, Karen. But I wouldn’t count on it.”
***
&nbs
p; I left most of my dessert on the plate, and got Sunnye to Emerson Hall with seconds to spare. She spoke well, as I knew she would. The audience’s response was enthusiastic. Afterwards the distinguished company at Rudolph’s was witty and articulate. The drinks were potent. Time flew by. Claudia did not show up. Neither did she answer her phone the four times I called.
Halfway through the party I felt a hand on my arm, and Dennis slid onto the barstool beside me as smoothly as if he hadn’t just bullied me in the library. His ginger-blond curls were damp with melting snowflakes. “Karen, sweetheart, can we get out of here? Go someplace where we can talk?”
I gave him slit eyes. “Sweetheart?”
He smiled like a repentant Satan. “My way of apologizing, Karen. I was rude, but I had my reasons. Listen, we can’t talk here. These people have gotta keep thinking I’m just another conference-goer.”
I took a ten from my wallet and slid it over the bar. All right. He wanted to get away from academic conferees. I’d take him to Moccio’s, where the hardcore student boozers drink. The scumbag should feel right at home there.
“Listen, Karen, I understand you’re pissed, and I don’t blame you,” Dennis said, as we walked down Field Street, deserted now in the falling snow. “Let me explain. I’m used to working on my own. Sometimes my…my people skills are a little lacking. When I saw that girl with that thick envelope, I thought immediately about the stolen manuscript. I had to go after her. I had to. Never did find her, but it turns out she was a library worker. Student aide or something like that. So, no big deal after all.”
“She’s my student. She has it rough. I didn’t want you to…hassle her.”
“Sorry about that. And sorry about growling at you before. Just write it off to me being a crude mill-town kinda guy.” There was the fallen-angel smile again. Crude mill-town guy, my foot. But my irritation was waning. Dennis’s charm was irresistible. I began looking forward to our tête-à-tête, even at the lowest dive in town.
It was only a three-minute walk from Rudolph’s, but Moccio’s was a different world. The place stank of cigarettes and stale beer. Neon signs threw ghastly hues on already ghastly faces. While Dennis ordered drinks at the bar, I sat at a table as far away from it as I could get. The stained-oak surface was sticky with the residue of last week’s drinks. I swiped at it with a napkin. The thin paper bonded to the gunk.
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