Quieter than Sleep

by Joanne Dobson

  I’d arrived at two P.M. for that meeting, and was ushered in immediately. Part of Avery’s charm, I’d heard, was that he made an effort never to keep anyone waiting, no matter how lowly. If he did keep you waiting, I was told, it was for a purpose. And you knew it. I had evidently been allotted a half hour, because until precisely two-thirty we had a delightful and very cultivated chat by a softly crackling wood fire, a conversation ranging from Emily Dickinson to the new cultural criticism to New York City performance artists. Then, without having addressed any of the issues for which I had so assiduously prepared, I was ushered out, a little bedazzled and totally bewildered as to the purpose of the meeting. Whatever it was, evidently I passed, because the call offering me the job came the next day. Passed as what? Cultured and elite, I guess.

  If only they knew.

  Now I was standing in the doorway of Avery’s empty office wondering if I had hallucinated his call. It was a beautiful room, richly furnished with Persian rugs and maroon leather chairs and sofas. A polished mahogany desk featured a gold picture frame and matching pen holder. Other than a green blotter with tooled leather corners, nothing but a small stack of neatly arranged file folders—the folders he had taken from Randy’s office? I wondered—indicated that an important educational institution was run from this very room.

  It was difficult to tell whether the elegant furnishings reflected Avert’s taste, or whether they were standard ambience for Enfield administrators. The Hudson River landscapes that covered the walls probably belonged to the college. But the dozen or so stark black-and-white nature photographs dominating the alcove by the desk must have been Avery’s; they were just a little out of sync with the rest of the decor. I recognized three or four Ansel Adamses and an Eliot Porter and walked over to look at them more closely. Absorbed in contemplation of a Grand Canyon scene, I heard nothing when Avery entered the room, the sound of his footsteps muted by the thick rugs. When he placed a hand on the back of my neck, I jumped, a little wildly. Not only had he startled me, but his hand was ice cold.

  “Karen, I’m sorry.” He stepped back from me, biting his lower lip and looking contrite. Charming, as usual. “I shouldn’t have surprised you like that. You’ve been through a great deal these past two weeks. No wonder you’re jumpy.”

  “I am not jumpy.” My reply was given with some asperity. “But when a person comes up behind another person in a totally empty room, he should be a little more considerate than to grab her by the neck!”

  “Okay. Okay. Mea culpa. Mea culpa.” He backed farther away, laughing a little and raising his hands placatingly.

  Why was I so attracted to this condescending son of a—patrician?

  Avery motioned me to the love seat by the cold fireplace and sat in one of the matching armchairs across from me. He even sat gracefully, I thought resentfully, his long, lean body sideways in the chair, his left arm resting on his crossed knees, his chin resting on his right hand, forefinger at his lips. I wasn’t used to seeing him in jeans and a sweater—but it occurred to me I wouldn’t mind getting used to it. The jeans fitted him well and emphasized the long, slender lines of his legs. A very nice-looking man, some still-objective part of my consciousness summed him up.

  Okay. So I was attracted. But I’d be damned if I’d ever let this—this—genteel lady-killer know how he’d gotten to me. I sat up a little straighter, not an easy feat on the soft leather couch, and initiated the conversation.

  “So, Avery, just what did you wish to discuss?”

  His wry smile flashed fleetingly. “With two murders discovered at the college within ten days, what do you think I want to discuss?” Then he raised a hand to ward off a response. His blue eyes grew clouded and his face suddenly seemed drawn. “Karen, I don’t exactly know why I asked you to come in. But you seem to be so, ah—embroiled in this situation I thought maybe you might find it helpful to talk openly to someone about it, and I certainly would. I’ve been doing nothing all day but spouting bullshit: to the press, to trustees, to parents, to alumns. I’m very good at that. It’s my job. They pay me well.”

  His voice lowered to a self-mocking mellifluous bass: “Yes, it certainly is a tragic situation, but we are cooperating fully with the police. They have it well in hand, following every possible lead. Well—yes, a student has died. But there is nothing to fear. Everything is under complete control. Students need have no concern about returning in three weeks. Blah, blah, blah.”

  He paused and studied me, I wasn’t certain what it was he wanted. Sympathy? If so, he wasn’t about to get it. In spite of the fact that he looked so tired and strained. So truly drained and exhausted …

  He went on, “Then I had a little visit from Lieutenant Piotrowski. You remember Piotrowski?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Yes, of course. Well, it was a sobering little discussion, and what hit home to me most was that there’s a good deal more at stake here than the usual crap that falls to my lot: preparing a pretty face to show to the world, pacifying the trustees, appeasing the alumns, securing a diverse financial base, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

  At this point the phone on the table by his chair rang. His hand instinctively moved toward it and then stopped. “I’m not answering that damn thing again today. The press is relentless, and I can’t be rude to them because I have public relations to think about.”

  When the ringing continued unabated, I rose from the couch and picked up the receiver. Avery looked at me, surprised. I raised my eyebrows at him. Then, in a gross approximation of the clipped public school accent of his English administrative assistant, I intoned, “Enfield College here, president’s office.”

  It was the New York Times. They had a reporter on her way to Enfield and would like to speak to someone about setting up an interview with President Mitchell.

  “President Mitchell is out of the office for the rest of the day. He is not granting interviews. He will have a prepared statement for the press within a day or two. Thank you so much. Good-bye.”

  As I put the receiver down Avery began to laugh, and I could see some of the strain leave his face. When the phone began to ring again, almost immediately, we both began to howl.

  But when it finally stopped, we sobered up. I rooted in my bag for tissues to mop my teary eyes. Avery wiped his with the knuckle of his left forefinger. Then we sat back and gazed assessingly at each other for a moment, apparently on a new footing.

  “Avery, it’s very difficult for me to know what to say to you. I seem to be caught in the middle of something about which I haven’t got a clue. I could moan and groan to you about my anxieties and my sleepless nights, but you’re my boss and I’m not about to do that. Otherwise I have nothing to say that you don’t already know. So maybe it’s you who should do the talking.”

  “Well—you really do dispense with the bullshit, don’t you? Good. I’ll be frank with you. I’m worried sick about what’s going on here. When Astin-Berger was killed it was easy to see his death as an anomaly, something that happened to him alone, something personal to him. Oh, it occurred at the college, all right, but it could have happened anywhere, at the airport, at the Modern Language Association convention. But now, with a student dead, too, it seems like a much more dangerous situation, clearly connected to the college. Clearly unresolved. Maybe even unfinished.”

  Avery reached over to a wooden rack on the table next to him and selected a pipe. He filled the bowl with tobacco and without lighting the pipe put its stem in his mouth. He sat in silence for a minute or two, sucking on the pipe stem, then removed the pipe from his mouth and put it down on the table. I watched the whole procedure closely, fascinated. Then, having given himself some time for thought, he spoke again.

  “You were unfortunate enough to be on the scene for the first, ah—body, and doubly unfortunate to be the person Piotrowski settled on to identify the second. You’ve suffered from this more than anyone—except the victims, of course—and I’m extremely sorry about that.”

&n
bsp; I bit my upper lip, torn between self-pity and wariness. I still had no idea what he wanted from me.

  “But what I am, even more than sorry, is concerned.” By the time I’d untangled his syntax, he’d gone on. “Karen, you are just a little too close to all this, and I’m worried about you. I don’t want a third corpse showing up at Enfield College, and I especially don’t want it to be you.” He leaned forward and touched my hand lightly. Then he sat back again.

  How very sweet, I thought, but the sarcasm couldn’t mask the chill that passed through my body.

  “Do you have any idea at all what this is about? Any inkling?” He was leaning forward in his chair now, hands clasped at his knees, paying close attention to my words and looking at me with what truly did seem to be concern.

  “If I did, Avery, I’d tell Piotrowski, not you. That’s his job. He’s a smart guy. He knows what’s what.” Then I snorted a little as I remembered what the lieutenant had said to me the previous evening.

  “What?” Avery’s gaze was intent. He seemed deeply interested.

  “Oh, nothing. Just that our stalwart investigator is thinking things through in a very sophisticated manner.” And I related Piotrowski’s comment about the case no longer “smelling like sex.”

  “Intriguing.” Avery sat back with a grin, one long slender finger tapping at his lips. A fleeting expression of relief crossed his elegant features, and I remembered Jill’s tidbit of college gossip: something about Randy and Avery’s wife. Smoothly, he went on to turn what had started as a serious conversation into a kind of witty tête-à-tête. “I wonder how many ‘smells’ murder could have. Rudimentary motives, I mean, such as, well, say, sex.”

  “Well,” I responded, “anger, envy, greed …”

  “Self-advancement, self-aggrandizement.”

  “Pride, shame.”

  “Whew.” Avery shook his head with a mock professorial sagacity. I remembered that in his teaching days he had been a medievalist, a historian I thought. “Add sloth and gluttony and you’d have the seven deadly sins.” He laughed softly. “With all those possibilities, it’s a wonder anyone at Enfield College is still alive. Anger, envy, vanity, greed, lust, sloth, gluttony.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “This place is a hotbed.”

  We talked awhile longer, about the murders, about Randy, Bonnie, Piotrowski. We speculated about how it would be possible to live for any length of time with the knowledge that you were associating with a killer, perhaps even on a daily basis. That someone you nodded to in the hall or sat next to in committee meetings was so alienated from the implicit contracts of human community that he or she could choke the life from a fellow being.

  “It would almost be comforting,” Avery mused, “if we had a crack epidemic or something like that going on here, and we could blame the murders on that. Massive social problems, human beings gone mad under the influence of the drug, personal responsibility somehow suspended. But …” He spread his hands wide in bafflement.

  When the light from the windows began to fade and Avery reached over to turn on the table lamp, I remembered the girls, who would probably be waiting for me in my office by now. I said good-bye with a handshake. Maybe I was closer to trusting this blue-blooded scion of the American aristocracy. Just maybe. But I was a good deal further than ever from trusting my own feelings about him.

  Avery’s comment about Enfield being a potential “hotbed” of murder motives ran through my mind as I walked by Randy’s office windows in the gathering darkness and noticed a light. Assuming the police had returned, I passed his door on tiptoe and entered my own office. The building, indeed the entire campus, was deserted and quiet to the point that it gave me a sort of comfort to think the minions of the law were so very close by. Amanda and Sophia showed up shortly thereafter, and I took them for burgers—tofu, in Amanda’s case—and drove home. It wasn’t until the next day that I learned from Miles Jewell, our erstwhile department chair, always on the job, especially where scandal was concerned, that Randy’s office had been entered sometime the previous day and thoroughly rifled. Odder still, all the files on his computer had been systematically erased.

  Fifteen

  ISTOOD in the doorway of Randy Astin-Berger’s office and stared. It was a disaster. Randy’s office always had been a disaster, but this was a disaster of catastrophic proportions: Every book had been pulled from the shelves; every file cabinet had been rifled, its contents strewn across the thick beige carpet. His beautiful leather jacket had been pulled off its hook with such vehemence that the coatrack had fallen across Randy’s desk. The jacket lay in a heap in the corner where it had been flung, pockets and sleeves pulled inside out. The Styrofoam cup that had teetered on a pile of journals during my last visit had been toppled, splashing coffee over the contents of the desktop and the open drawers. The computer monitor was on. Its cursor blinked on a nearly blank screen.

  It was a scholar’s nightmare: a life’s work trashed.

  Piotrowski, of course, had picked on me as the world authority on Randy Astin-Berger. As I’d hung up from Miles’s call, the phone had rung with his.

  “Dr. Pelletier? I’m at the college. I just overheard Professor Jewell informing you of events here, so I’m aware you know about the break-in.”

  “Yes?” I said warily.

  “Since you seem to be familiar with Professor Astin-Berger’s work, I wonder if you would mind coming down and looking over the scene? You might be able to give us some real useful insider stuff on what the intruder was searching for.”

  “Piotrowski, what is this? Am I on a per diem contract with the state police or something? I do have a life outside your investigation, you know. And I’ve got work to do.”

  That gave him only momentary pause. “Dr. Pelletier, it’s no fault of mine that you’re mixed up in this situation, so please don’t take your frustrations out on me. This is no frivolous request I’m making. The sooner we can clear these homicides up, the sooner you’ll be …” He hesitated, but I could swear he had been about to say “safe.” “Er … uninvolved. So, I should think you would be happy to give what help you can.”

  “Right.” My reply was subdued. “I’ll be down as soon as I can get there, Lieutenant.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.” He hung up without saying good-bye.

  I threw on jeans and a maroon Georgetown sweatshirt of Amanda’s, pulled my hair back in a loose bun, told the girls something had come up at work, and headed out into the cold.

  The road into Enfield was clear for the most part, but covered with glare ice in places where the wind had whipped snow across it during the night. I drove cautiously; if I was going to be a fatality, I didn’t want it to be through my own carelessness.

  Piotrowski, wearing his rumpled gray suit, stood by the bookcase on the window wall, taking notes in what I assumed was an evidence book. His expression when he saw me was impassive. “Thanks for coming in, Dr. Pelletier. Look around, will you, and give me your impressions. Anything not here that should be? Anything here that shouldn’t be? Whatever strikes you. The technicians have just finished up, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t move anything. I want you to see it exactly as we found it. Just eyeball what you can. If you need to see something close up, let me know.”

  With his large hand he made an expansive gesture, indicating that the entire disgusting mess was all mine.

  I shook my head, hopelessly, then walked over to the computer, trying to place my feet on islands of oak floorboards in the ocean of paper. The computer monitor—dusted, even on the screen, with fine, dark fingerprint powder—displayed Randy’s work directory, which indicated the date and the time, and listed zero files.

  “Where are the backup disks?”

  “Gone.” Piotrowski’s tone was acerbic.

  “Had you copied anything when you were here before?”

  “Yeah, bits and pieces. But we were working with different assumptions.”

  I knew what his assumptions were then, but didn’t have a cl
ue as to what they were now.

  I wandered around the room, noting folders pulled from the file cabinets and strewn on the desk, chairs, and floor without any seeming pattern. Carbon copies of library call slips, photocopies of letter and sermon manuscripts, three-by-five note cards, handwritten notes on lined yellow sheets, and printouts of essay drafts traced Randy’s work through various stages.

  Glancing at Piotrowski for permission, I picked up a yellow call slip carbon, handling it by the edges. It was from the Houghton Library at Harvard. I looked at it closely, but all the slip told me was that Randy had requested manuscripts of sermons by a number of nineteenth-century divines. And I already knew that. I asked Piotrowski if I could sit at the desk. From there the view looked no different; the search had clearly been indiscriminate.

  “Well, Lieutenant,” I said finally, “I don’t think I can help you at all. What I see in this chaos is just exactly what I would have expected to see. Astin-Berger was doing research into nineteenth-century American sermons. He’d visited research libraries in the Northeast on a regular basis, and a few at a greater distance. There are call slips here from—”

  “Call slips?”

  “The forms you fill out to request a book or personal papers.”

  Piotrowski nodded.

  “And he’s got them here from a number of libraries: Yale’s Beinecke, the New York Public, the Stowe Center in Hartford, the Houghton at Harvard, the Alderman Library at Virginia, the BPL, the AAS. These are all major scholarly collections, archives of manuscripts. If you needed to see letters, sermons, or personal papers of important nineteenth-century clerics, these are the places you would go.”

  This all seemed obvious to me, but Piotrowski was writing everything down in his little notebook, as if it were relevant information. Could it be evidence?