Quieter than Sleep

by Joanne Dobson

  “I’m really glad I ran into you, Karen. Can we talk?”

  “Sure,” I replied. “I haven’t had lunch. Do you want to get something here?”

  In the coffee shop I took off my jacket and flung it over the back of a chair. Jill reached across the table and stroked the sleeve of my black sweater. “Soft. Cashmere?”

  “No. It’s probably some synthetic. I don’t think I’ve ever owned a cashmere sweater.”

  “You don’t like cashmere?”

  “Can’t afford it.”

  “Oh.” She looked slightly mystified, as if that were a concept alien to her. “Anyhow, it’s neat. Makes a person want to touch you.”

  “Well, I guess there could be advantages to that.”

  Jill grinned, and turned to the waitress. The grilled cheese and bacon on rye she requested sounded to me like certain death. I ordered it too, and added coffee. I’d drink the coffee black.

  “What’s up, Jill?” This sudden intimacy surprised me.

  “You do know people are talking about you.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes. So I surmise.”

  “Randy was so hot for you these past few weeks—”

  “Was it that obvious?”

  “He made it obvious. I really felt for you. What a creep. You know, he looked so cool. When I first saw him I thought—that’s something I could go for. So I hit on him.”

  “You what!”

  “Well, you know—I made sure I went where he’d be. Sat at his table at lunch. Said flattering things. Made myself approachable …”

  “Oh,” I said, swallowing hard. Anything further from my own response to an appealing man, I couldn’t imagine. My usual reaction to the stirrings of sexual attraction is to go undercover, do covert surveillance, check out his credentials as a human being. Is he smart? Does he have a sense of humor? Does he seem kind? And then, maybe …

  No wonder there haven’t been all that many men in my life.

  “But, anyhow,” Jill went on, “he did look great. Terrific shoulders, neat clothes, great buns. And he was a bit of a celebrity, too. But then he opened his mouth …”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “… and he never shut it. I’d imagined engaging in quirky stimulating conversations—among other quirky stimulating things—but I must have been doing something wrong. I never got a word in.”

  “You weren’t the only one.”

  “So I dropped him, and started looking at Avery Mitchell.” She grinned.

  “Jill!”

  “What’s the matter? You look horrified. You don’t think he’s attractive?”

  “Of course he’s attractive. But, my God, Jill, he’s the president.” And probably twenty years older than you, for God’s sake. Maybe more.

  “Yeah, well … Don’t worry about it. I asked him out but he turned me down.”

  I gulped. She asked him out? I had been chastising myself simply for breathing infinitesimally faster when he smiled at me, and this—this teenybopper—had asked Avery Mitchell out!

  Jill must have interpreted my appalled look to mean I couldn’t believe he had turned her down, because she elaborated on his reasons.

  “Said he was flattered”—she made a solemn face and dropped her voice to its deepest tones—“deeply,deeply flattered.” Her voice rose to normal pitch. “But he doesn’t believe it’s ethical for him to date untenured faculty members. He actually said date; can you believe that, Karen? What I had in mind was jumping his bones, and he says date! Watch out for him, Karen. I know he’s got nice bones. But watch out. I think that man is trouble. I think he’s actually—well”—she leaned toward me, confidentially—“repressed.” She brought the word out reluctantly, with a bit of a hiss over her bottom teeth, as if she were accusing him of a truly regrettable perversion. And maybe, given where she was coming from, she was.

  To me “repressed” sounded okay. Actually, it sounded fine. I was really rather comfortable with “repressed.”

  Then, without giving me a chance to respond, Jill laughed. “I know. You think I’m being indiscreet.” The ceiling light shone through her fine curly hair, causing an intriguing halo effect, a bright red aureole surrounding the delicate face with its vivacious red mouth.

  “I am, aren’t I? But, hey, I don’t care. Everyone around here’s so stuffy and uptight. You’re different. You seem so—well—cool, in a reserved, sophisticated sort of way. I hope we can be friends. And, hey—what’s the use of living if you have to watch every word out of your mouth?”

  “How old are you, Jill?” I knew it was a patronizing question, but it just popped out.

  “I’m twenty-four.” At having to admit to such extreme youth, she looked chagrined.

  “But how …?”

  “I’m a bit of a whiz kid, you know. Graduated high school at fifteen, Columbia at nineteen. Got my Ph.D. at twenty-three.”

  “And you’ll be tenured before you’re thirty.”

  “Yeah, but not here if I can help it. This place is the pits. I want to go back to New York. NYU is looking at me. I have an interview there next week.”

  She brushed off her truly impressive achievements as if they were hardly worth mentioning.

  She’s only six years older than my daughter, I thought. God, she made me feel ancient.

  And I’d be over forty before I was tenured.

  But Jill clearly didn’t want to chat about careers. She wanted to get down to the important stuff. Men. “I hope you don’t think I’m a ditz about men. It’s just that I don’t want to settle down yet. I’m too young. I just want to have fun. Is that wrong?”

  “No,” I said. “No, not at all.” A Cyndi Lauper refrain lilted through my head: Girls just want to have fu-un!

  If I get tenured, I thought.

  “But I’m getting away from what I wanted to talk to you about, Karen—I really hope you don’t think I’m a ditz—but like I said, people are talking about you. Mostly they’re talking about Ned Hilton, but a little bit about you. ‘Still waters run deep,’ that type of thing. You know. I thought I should tell you so you would know where you stood. So you’d understand if anyone was treating you weird. Do you think I’m a ditz?”

  “Thanks, Jill. No, I don’t think you’re a ditz at all.” Just younger than I ever was in my entire life. The waitress, a middle-aged hospital auxiliary volunteer with a comfortably plump body underneath her pink uniform, delivered our grilled cheese sandwiches. With fries. The fries looked great, big slab-cut things. I took one, salted it, and popped it in my mouth. Ummmmm.

  Jill bit greedily into her sandwich, and began talking again with her mouth full of bacon and cheese.“And did you hear that now there’s a student missing? Ronnie or Lonnie or Bonnie something?”

  “Bonnie Weimer. Yeah. She’s in my poetry class. I saw her Friday at lunch, but she never showed up to turn in her take-home exam that afternoon. And nobody’s seen her since.”

  “God! Now I’m starting to get nervous. No wonder I want to get back to Manhattan: It’s safer there!”

  “But you’re sitting here talking to me. So obviously, in spite of what other people are saying, you don’t think I killed Randy.”

  “Hell, no! There’s a hundred people more likely. I heard he wasn’t above banging students. Maybe one of them got angry. Or a boyfriend. Or”—again she lowered her voice—”maybe Avery Mitchell, you know.”

  I should simply have stopped the conversation right then and there, but I found myself responding.

  “I find that very difficult to believe. What on earth possible motive could Avery have to murder Randy?”

  “You haven’t heard the rumors?”

  “What rumors?”

  “That our beloved president hated Randy. Something about his wife—Avery’s, I mean. I didn’t get the details. People were being extremely discreet.” She raised her eyebrows to underscore the significance. “Or, maybe it was Ned Hilton. But I’d hate to think so. He’s really kind of nice, isn’t he? And ‘
nice’ is not a word I usually like to use about anyone. But Ned is nice, genuine, and kind of shy.” She shrugged her shoulders and stopped talking. Maybe she’d finally been overtaken by a fit of discretion.

  “He’s married,” I said.

  “I knooow!” She sounded just like Amanda.

  • • •

  Sophia was asleep when I finally got to her room. I stood in the doorway, my hand on the cool stainless steel door handle, and marveled at her paleness, the almost bloodless complexion, the pale yellow of her hair. Her thin body curled loosely under the white sheets suggested a kind of tenuous resignation. All right I’ll stay alive. If you insist For now.

  I left the paperback novel at the nurses’ station along with a brief cheerful note. As I waited for the elevator I thought about what I’d really like to say to her. Sophia, sweetheart Don’t let your life weigh so heavy on you. Dye your hair bright red. Buy purple plastic earrings. Get young. It won’t last long.

  The elevator disgorged a tall blond man in a short gray zip-up jacket. His expression was severe. Cold blue eyes passed over me without taking notice. An involuntary shudder vibrated through my body. He turned left, toward Sophia’s room. I stood, irresolute, while the elevator doors closed. Then I shrugged and pushed the button again. What could I do? He had a right to visit her. He was her father, after all.

  That night I dreamt that Randy, dressed in sober nineteenth-century clerical garb, had escaped his confinement in the heavy gilt frame on the high wall of Emerson’s central corridor. As if I were the viewer of a private film in which I was also the starring actress and the character she played, I watched him stalk the halls in search of me. It was midnight, of course, and on my knees I polished a brass doorknob. Over and over again I rubbed the brass knob with my soft cloth. Closer and closer he came on his ghastly errand. I was all too aware of his muscular body, which gleamed almost phosphorescently now with a haze of ghostly sweat. “He’s dead,” I tried to tell me—or was it Sophia? Or maybe Bonnie Weimer? Whoever I was, I paid no attention, idiotically intent on getting the blood off the doorknob. When he found me he knelt beside me. With one hand he cupped my left breast; with the other he handed me his bloodstained letter. But it was no good, of course; I couldn’t read.

  Nine

  AMANDA WAS coming home for Christmas. I was to pick her up at Bradley International in Hartford at four that afternoon, and I spent the entire day being happily domestic. I vacuumed and polished and scrubbed. For the first time in months the old wood floors felt the loving touch of a dust mop. My random collection of tag sale furniture gleamed with a patina of lemon oil. I took out holders I hardly remembered I owned and fitted them with bayberry candles. I twined princess pine stolen from the woods behind the house around the candles on the mantelpiece. Then I baked: shortbread, cherry crisps, date pinwheels, sour cream cake, and one enormous gingerbread man.

  The air was redolent with the scent of molasses and spices, and the final pan—the one with the annual gingerbread man—was just coming out of the oven when I heard a knock on the door. I turned down the volume on the Emmylou Harris Christmas carols and pulled aside the living room blind to check out my visitor.

  Lieutenant Piotrowski.

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered. “So much for Christmas.” I switched off the tape player resentfully as I went to open the door. My holiday spirit had deflated abruptly, like a punctured foil balloon.

  “I like Emmylou.” Piotrowski walked in as if he assumed he were welcome. “You didn’t have to turn her off.”

  “What can I do for you, Officer?” I was in no mood for niceties.

  “Baking, are you?” The detective craned his thick neck to get a look at the kitchen where the spicy odors were coming from. “Smells just like my mother’s house at Christmas. Gingerbread, right? And, what else? Date squares?” He looked hopeful. “I haven’t smelled anything this good since she died, oh, about ten years ago now.”

  Today over his festive red-and-green sweater Piotrowski wore an elderly royal blue down jacket. The pocket flaps were grimy, the zipper tab hung at an unnatural angle, and a few errant feathers peeped out of the seam at his left shoulder. His nose and cheeks were red with the cold. Give him a white beard and a stocking cap, I thought, and he could be Father Christmas. Well, maybe Father Christmas with a bad wardrobe and an attitude.

  I was feeling just mean enough to ignore his hints. I sat him down in the living room, facing away from the kitchen.

  He sighed.

  “So, Lieutenant,” I repeated, “how can I help you?”

  The nostalgia in his expression vanished instantly, replaced by cool detachment. He leaned forward in his chair, his large, square hands resting on his knees.

  “I think, Dr. Pelletier, that perhaps you know more about the odd goings-on on the Enfield campus than I thought you did.”

  “Just what do you mean by that, Officer?” I, too, was an expert at coolness.

  “Weeell,” he replied, leaning back in his chair and placing his hands together, fingertips at his lips. Very thoughtful. “A couple of interesting pieces of information have just filtered up to me from the town police. Very interesting.”

  He looked at me silently for a few seconds, as if waiting for a reaction. Then he nodded. “Yes, very, very interesting.”

  “Lieutenant, let’s not play cat and mouse. I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about an attempted suicide and a missing person report. You know, I always get suspicious when odd events happen in clusters. I watch for those clusters. And this is a real odd set of events, Doctor: one murder, one attempted suicide, one missing person. And all occurring to people from Enfield College. In particular, all occurring to people who have some connection to you.”

  My annoyance turned suddenly to cold terror. “What the hell are you getting at?”

  “Well, let’s look at it, okay? The last person known to have seen Randy Astin-Berger alive: you. The last person known to have seen Bonnie Weimer: you. The first person requested by Sophia Warzek after her suicide attempt: you. Odd little clump of coincidences, don’t you think?”

  I did think. Hard and fast. He’d heard those wretched campus rumors. He thought I was the killer. Oh, my God! I’d be arrested, dragged away from home in handcuffs before the cookies had time to cool. Amanda would be left stranded at the airport. She’d spend Christmas day alone in a dank green prison reception room with the families of murderers and thieves, just waiting for fifteen precious minutes with her incarcerated mother. Tears began to fill my eyes.

  “Dr. Pelletier, you look a little stunned. Didn’t you think about how odd this all was?”

  “Well—no. You see, I’ve been so … preoccupied. With grades, with housework, with Christmas …” My voice trailed off.

  Piotrowski waited for me to go on.

  “I just haven’t had time to think about anything.”

  He waited some more. I didn’t say anything. Then rationality prevailed. I wasn’t guilty, was I? No, I wasn’t. Shock turned to anger.

  “I don’t know what you’re thinking, Lieutenant.” I had my feelings back under control. “But I assure you I haven’t strangled anyone, or disappeared anyone, or driven anyone to suicide. I think you know that.”

  “Dr. Pelletier, I assure you that I wasn’t thinking anything of the sort. I merely—er—conjecture that all unconscious you may have stumbled into the middle of something you don’t know anything about. I thought if we could have a little conversation, open and honest, without you being so defensive, we might be able to get a few ideas on what’s going on here.”

  I didn’t respond. When you grow up in the neighborhood I grew up in, trusting the police runs counter to all your instincts. All right, so I slept with one for years. He was an exception.

  “Look, lady.” It seemed that Piotrowski’s patience was beginning to fray. “Let me spell it out. I don’t suspect you of anything. Your movements at the Christmas party c
heck out. You were with one or another person from the time Professor Samoorian saw the victim walk away from you until you opened the closet door. And Professor Jewell saw you do that; he saw the body fall out just as you opened the door. All right? Unless we find out something new, you are not a suspect. All right? So now can we talk? Like a real conversation? Like maybe over a cup of coffee?”

  I thought about it. “And a plate of cookies, right?”

  “A plate of cookies would be very nice,” he replied with dignity.

  As I ground the coffee, boiled the water, and placed the warm cookies on a Santa Claus platter, I wondered whether or not this could be considered police extortion.

  Or, on the other hand, maybe what I had here was merely a hungry human being, nostalgic for something that reminded him of his childhood. Was it possible that I simply needed to lighten up?

  I smiled tentatively at Piotrowski as I placed the platter of cookies and the pot of Colombian decaf on the coffee table in front of him. After all, it was Christmastime. To my surprise he returned the smile tenfold, an enormous, delighted smile that transformed his entire person. He was no longer a stolid, phlegmatic policeman but a human being with unexpected feelings. Suddenly, he was a man, almost handsome in all his bulk.

  I must have looked startled because his face shut down again immediately as he bent to pour coffee into his mug and stir in enormous helpings of milk and sugar. He swallowed about a third of the cup in one gulp and devoured a date cookie while I poured my coffee (black, no sugar) and took my first sip.

  Then he looked up at me, smiled more moderately and began to ask questions, questions about how long I’d been at Enfield, how I had happened to come there, how things were going for me. They were in nocuous queries, no doubt carefully designed to lull me into a sense of security. In spite of the fact that he was still very much the detective, something shifted between us. I began to feel that we were engaged in a joint endeavor, an endeavor to set things right.