“Because, Dr. Pelletier, when I come across an unregistered gun with serial numbers filed off and no identifying characteristics that belongs to a woman that has had a close relationship with a member of the law enforcement profession, I begin to wonder—well—where it comes from. You know. Guys sometimes have throw-downs—”
“It’s mine,” I said immediately. “Tony doesn’t even know I have it.”
“You’re a rotten liar, Doctor. Captain Gorman admits to the gun. In my conversation with him there was a—a lot of discussion—some, you know, general—er, speculation—about how disappearable this gun might be. But it doesn’t look real disappearable now that there’s a shooting charge. But”—he paused and looked over at me for emphasis—”we might be able to forget that he found it at your place….”
“You’d do that, Piotrowski?” I filed away the word disappearable for future contemplation.
“What would I have to do? The bastard’s lying through his teeth. You never saw the gun. What would a nice lady like you be doing with a handgun? And Captain Gorman woulda known if you had a weapon, but he never heard anything about it. Is that clear?”
“Yeah. But you can’t just do that, can you? What about fingerprints? Mine must be all over it. Tony’s too. He was the last one who cleaned it.”
“Well—there was some kind of stupid foul-up last night. Maybe because it was late and the guys were so tired. Anyhow, somehow the weapon got smudged up—wiped almost clean. Damned shame. No one knows how it happened.”
“Piotrowski, don’t get yourself in trouble.”
“I know what I’m doing. And you know, don’t you, that we never had this—er—little discussion.”
“Yes. I understand. Thanks.” Tears spilled out of my eyes again, embarrassing me. In spite of the pain in my shoulder, I leaned over and kissed his cheek. Now he looked embarrassed, too. The road must have been demanding all his attention; he didn’t take his eyes off it. He switched on his turn signal for the ramp to I-91.
“You’ve had enough,” he said gruffly. “Besides … I owe you.”
“Yes, you do. Damn right! And then—there’s the brotherhood of the badge, isn’t there?”
“Well …” There really was nothing more to say.
My head ached and I was getting confused again. I knew I was going to have to think seriously about the implications of all this. Warzek hated me. He wouldn’t forget it. He knew where I lived. He’d be out of prison sooner than he should be. Both Piotrowski and I knew that. Maybe when Sophia moved into the dorm … Maybe if I moved into college housing … Maybe … Oh, God. Maybe I’d be safe someday.
Epilogue
IWAS ON temporary disability leave. The college got someone to teach my courses for a month or so until my head stopped aching and the confusion abated. Amanda was persuaded to go back to school only after I accepted Greg’s offer to stay with Irena and him for as long as I needed to. Since I was forbidden to drive for at least six weeks, I had little choice. Besides, I didn’t want to go back home. I’d decided to look for a house in Enfield. I wanted to live where there were people around. Where I had some friends.
Speaking of friends, Earlene Johnson and Jill Greenfield must have made a pact to keep me occupied. When she got back from Cleveland, Earlene took me shopping and out to dinner, and encouraged me to talk about the nightmare encounter with Margaret and the specter of an intruder in my home. Jill took me shopping and out to dinner and encouraged me to listen to her agonize over her tangled feelings for Ned Hilton. Both kept me up to date on college gossip. Ned had decided to bring his tenure decision before the Tenure and Renewal Committee. It would be a prolonged and complicated procedure, but Earlene thought TRAC would look favorably on Ned’s appeal. Miles was steadfastly blocking Avery’s proposed college-wide curriculum revision initiative. I remembered Avery leaving Randy’s office just before Christmas with the curriculum revision folders; then I flashed on an image of Randy’s distinctive handwriting as I’d seen it on the yellow, lined pages on Miles’s desk. Avery hadn’t been the only one interested in Randy’s curriculum jottings; Miles had been attempting to check out the opposition. Magda’s attempts at securing herself a future at Enfield had fallen through, and she was heading back to Budapest in September. Presumably Randy’s jacket would go with her; “Chust a little keepsake,” she told Jill when my intrepid colleague asked about the jacket.
Most of my coworkers seemed to feel pretty awkward around me. What do you say to someone who has been shot, knocked on the head, and almost burned to death? My colleagues tended to send a lot of flowers. When the dozen long-stemmed white roses arrived with the note on the stationery of the Enfield College president’s office, even Amanda was impressed.
“Classy,” she said. “Who is this guy?”
I gave the roses a sour look. “My boss,” I replied.
I saw Piotrowski a few times. He came by with Margaret’s book manuscript, which insisted, with fevered incoherence, that Emily Dickinson was the Bride of Christ. He came by with information about Stan Warzek’s trial dates and about Trooper Johansson’s progress. He came by with a check from the BCI. It was stupendously large. He said I’d earned every penny of it, and more. He said that with some feeling. I had to agree.
I still have bad dreams. Dreams that wake me in the middle of the night with my heart pounding and my body sticky with sweat. But I think at least I’m safe from Warzek now. Against my ardent counsel, Sophia dropped out of school to live at home and take care of her mother. That should satisfy him. She got a full-time job working in the Bread and Roses Bakery and Café and registered for only one course at Enfield.
“Sweetie.” I spoke with as much vehemence as I could muster with my throbbing head. “Sweetie, you’ve only got one semester to go. You’ve got to finish. Don’t get trapped now.”
“Karen.” She seemed disconcertingly more resolute now that she was the head of a family. “There’s no money.” She paused, and then went on. “Maybe you know how that is.”
“Yes.” I nodded only for a microsecond. Nodding was always a mistake. “Yes, I do know how that is.”
“And you made it.”
“No one should have it so hard, sweetie. Think of your own life. Your mother’s a grown-up woman. Surely she can take care of herself.”
But she wasn’t listening.
And, oh, yes. Once I’d been out of the hospital for a few weeks and was becoming bored and very restless, I decided to walk over to campus and get some notes from my office. I might as well use the time to begin work on my new book. The English Department secretaries hovered around me with motherly concern. “You can’t really write now, can you?” Shirley cautioned. “Won’t that be too hard on you? Sitting in front of the computer like that? You’ve got to be careful.”
“You know,” advised Elaine, “you should really use the laptop. You could take it to bed with you and lay it right out on your stomach. That would make things so much easier.”
“I don’t have a laptop. And it doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to afford one soon.” Piotrowski’s money had been handy, but it had vanished into the black hole of my personal debt. There was nothing left over for self-indulgences.
“I meant the department laptop.” Elaine took a key out of her desk drawer.
“I didn’t know the department had a laptop.”
“Oh, yeah. People use it all the time for research.” She walked over to a closet, unlocked it, and took out a flat, gray laptop computer, about the size of a portable typewriter. “Poor Randy was the last to use it.”
Randy. I swallowed hard, took the proffered computer, and carried it to my office. I closed the door. I placed the computer on my desk, plugged it in, opened it and pushed the on button. When it had booted up, I keyed in the files listing. All sorts of incomprehensible file names appeared. I scrolled through them until I came to one that said: “ED.ltr.” Holding my breath, I pushed the “retrieve” key. In front of my eyes in little impulses of light
I read:
Mr. Beecher, Sir—Angels are few….
Permissions
Excerpts from poems #45, #281, #311, #322 and #502 from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Excerpts from letter #248 and letter #283 from The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Reprinted by permission of the publishers from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1958, 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Warner Bros. Publications for permission to reprint song lyrics from torn by Glen Phillip, Todd Nichols, Randy Guss and Dean Dinning © 1990 WB Music Corp. (ASCAP), Wet Sprocket Songs (ASCAP). All Rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by Permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 22014.
About the Author
JOANNE DOBSON is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University. She is a former editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and the author of The Northbury Papers, The Raven and the Nightingale, and Cold and Pure and Very Dead, as well as Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America. She lives in the New York City area.
If you enjoyed Joanne Dobson’s debut
mystery, QUIETER THAN SLEEP, you
won’t want to miss the next tantalizing
novel in this series of literary mysteries,
THE NORTHBURY PAPERS.
Look for THE NORTHBURY PAPERS at
your favorite bookseller’s.
Turn the page for an exciting preview.
THE NORTHBURY PAPERS
by Joanne Dobson
The bookplate was ornate in the nineteenth-century manner, a rich cream-colored rectangle with a wide border of morning glories and tangled vines. In Gothic lettering it read EX LIBRIS MRS. SERENA NORTHBURY. I closed the book and turned it over to look at the title. Mrs. Northbury’s bookplate was affixed to the inside front cover of a well-preserved, half-morocco-bound copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
“Wow,” I said to Jill, “where’d you get this?”
Jill Greenberg slid her tray across the Faculty Dining Commons table, pushed the unruly red hair back from her forehead, and sat down next to me. “You know that antiquarian bookstore in Pittsfield, the one on North Street?”
I nodded, fanning lightly through the pages in search of any possible Northbury artifacts; you never know what you’ll find preserved between the pages of an old book.
“Well, I was browsing there with … well, I was browsing, and the cover caught my eye. Then I saw Serena Northbury’s bookplate and knew you’d be interested. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, they really knew how to make books in those days.” The title was stamped in gold on the leather-bound spine of this one, and the dark blue covers were speckled in green. “A lot of the time it didn’t much matter what was inside, but the book itself had to be a work of art.” Finding no treasures between the ragged-edged pages, I handed the volume to Jill.
“Keep it, Karen,” she said, pushing it back toward me with both hands. She picked up her ham and Swiss on rye and nibbled. “You’re probably the only person left in the entire universe who cares about Northbury.”
“Jill, I can’t take this.” I wanted the book. It had been owned—been touched, been read—by a nineteenth-century American novelist with whom I was becoming increasingly fascinated. But I couldn’t afford to indulge myself in luxuries. On the scale of professional salaries, English professors rank just slightly above church mice, and the average church mouse isn’t paying tuition for a daughter studying pre-med at Georgetown. “This must have cost a fortune.”
“Nah.” Money was never an object with Jill. It had never had to be; she was the daughter of a Park Avenue psychiatrist. A psychopharmacologist, yet. The streets of the Upper East Side are paved almost entirely in Prozac, and Papa had a great deal of money in his pocket. At the age of twenty-five, Jill had no education debts and no one but herself to lavish her salary on.
“It wasn’t that much. The book dealer said the book wasn’t a first edition or a particularly valuable one, so basically he was just charging for the binding.”
“Well,” I said. “If you’re sure …” I turned the handsome volume around and ran my forefinger over the gilt lettering of the title. “I’m a little surprised to find that Northbury read Jane Eyre. Her own novels are nothing like it. They’re really quite—well—sentimental. But they’re so interesting. …” I drizzled oil and vinegar over my chef’s salad and tucked into it.
“‘Interesting,’ my foot. Why don’t you just admit you like trash.”
“It’s not trash.” I felt defensive; the grip Serena Northbury had on my imagination wasn’t easily explained by any of the usual literary or feminist rationales. Northbury wasn’t a great prose stylist, and she certainly wasn’t a flamboyant feminist rebel. Her forty bestselling novels were conventional tales of young girls who face hardship and moral danger, but through unassailable virtue and mind-boggling diligence win out in the end.
I could relate to that; it sounded like my own life. Well … maybe not unassailable virtue.
“I know she’s no Brontë,” I admitted, “but there’s something quirky in her stories. I don’t know how to describe it, but I think I’m addicted.”
Jill laughed and took a second bite of her sandwich. “A Ph.D. in lit, huh? A professor at Enfield, one of New England’s most respected colleges? Karen Pelletier, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
“Come on, Jill. You of all people should know popular literature is a perfectly legitimate field of study.” Jill is a sociologist, and literary studies are becoming more like a branch of the social sciences every day. “I’m simply reconstructing cultural conditions of literary reception.” Yeah. Right. I had read every one of Serena Northbury’s books I could get my hands on. Her popular novels enthralled me in the same way they must have captivated her multitudes of nineteenth-century readers.
“Lighten up, Karen. Face it; you’re reading garbage!” Jill was joking; with a tattoo just above her left ankle and a gold ring where she didn’t talk about it, Jill was a pop-culture nut.
I lightened up. “Yeah, Jill, you’re right. I’m a lowbrow.” I stroked the well-preserved copy of Jane Eyre as if it were still warm from Mrs. Northbury’s hands, and set it down next to my plate. “Thanks for this. I owe you.”
Jill made a dismissive motion with a hand that wore a half dozen silver rings and took another nibble of the sandwich. I picked up my mug of black coffee—I needed a jump start before I went into the classroom—and glanced at Jill over the rim.
My young colleague wasn’t looking her best. I was used to the untamable red hair and the funky clothes—today a short, sleeveless cotton shift in a turquoise-and-lime flying-toasters print worn with black Converse basketball sneakers and one dangling garnet earring—but the mouselike appetite and the listless expression were something new. Jill Greenberg usually had the appetite—and the brute energy—of an adolescent hockey player.
“You okay, Jill?” I buttered my crusty whole-wheat roll and took a bite.
“I’m fine.” Her tone was abrupt. “I’m just a little tired is all.” She put the nibbled sandwich half back on her plate, aligned it with its untouched mate, and pushed the plate away. “And the food here gets worse every day.”
The food in the Enfield College faculty dining room is okay. It’s more than okay. It’s downright good. And most days Jill proved that by putting away a full dinner entrée at noon and then topping it off with a sundae from the self-serve ice-cream bar. For a college professor—even for the child prodigy she was—Jill usually ate
, well, prodigiously. I narrowed my eyes at her. Something was definitely wrong. Could Jill be having boyfriend trouble? As far as I knew, she hadn’t been seeing anyone lately. Come to think of it, though, with Jill, that in itself was worth notice.
“Jill?” I ventured.
But she was gazing past me. “Karen, don’t look now, but something weird is going on over at the Round Table.”
I immediately swiveled around and stared.
The large round table in the far corner of the Faculty Commons is reserved for group luncheon meetings. On Thursdays, for instance, it’s the women’s studies table; once or twice a month black studies has dibs on it. Today it was crowded with college administrators and department heads. From where I sat I couldn’t see everyone, but it would have been impossible to miss Miles Jewell, English Department chair. Miles was holding forth in a voice that had begun to rise beyond a decorous decibel level. He was ignoring President Avery Mitchell’s attempts to quiet him. His round face was even more flushed than usual, and a cowlick of thick white hair had flopped down boyishly over the ragged white eyebrows. Halfway across the large dining room I could hear the outraged tones of Miles’s protest—something about insupportable assault on traditional standards.
“Karen, don’t gape.”
Jill was right; I was gawking with prurient curiosity as my department head made a public spectacle of himself. I turned back to my tablemate. “That’s a pretty high-powered bunch there, and they don’t look like happy campers.”
“Sure don’t. I wonder what’s going on. Look—I mean, don’t you look, for God’s sake; you’re too obvious. I’ll tell you what’s happening. Now Avery’s got the floor. The voice of sweet reason, as usual. God, he’s a beautiful man. Those hands—like a concert pianist’s. Oh, baby—he can play me anytime. Now Miles is sulking. You know how pink his face usually is? Well, now it looks like a humongous strawberry. Geez, I hope he doesn’t have a coronary. Sally Chenille is jabbering on now, probably ‘interrogating the erotic subtext’ of something or other.” Jill’s voice suddenly twisted. “I really detest that woman!”
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