The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  Stopping in meant going way the hell out of my way, clear down to Springfield, but I did it. A person whose name appears to be the final written word of a murdered man gets real cooperative with the police.

  The car radio blared as I turned the ignition:—homicide of the eminent Professor Corbin! More details at ten! WENF, Enfield Public Radio, was as electrified by Elliot’s death as public radio could possibly be.

  At the station, the lieutenant met me at the door of a grungy green evidence room. He shook my hand solemnly. “Thanks, Dr. Pelletier. It’s good of you to come by so prompt.” He led me to the battered table and pulled out a chair. Then he sat and regarded me solemnly. I took it for several long seconds.

  “You have something to show me, Lieutenant?” I prompted.

  “Yeah. I do. But first—since earlier, when I talked to you on the phone, Sergeant Schultz … you remember Sergeant Schultz?…”

  Schultz was Piotrowski’s partner, and until the magic moment last summer when I’d helped her apprehend a killer, she’d made very obvious her contempt for someone in my wimpy profession. I nodded.

  “Well, as you can imagine, Schultz has been talking to a few people at the college today, and she’s just brought in a fresh piece of information.” He gave me another enigmatic look.

  I nodded, again. It seemed the best response: I had no idea what he was getting at, and I didn’t want to risk incriminating myself in any way.

  “I understand that you and the victim had a bit of an altercation the other day.…”

  “We did?”

  “And what I don’t understand is why you didn’t inform me of that fact.”

  “What altercation? There was no altercation. I’ve never had an altercation with Elliot Corbin.”

  “In front of your office? Last Friday? Something about you disturbing him?”

  “Huh? Oh, you mean when he accused me of talking too loudly? No … chattering. Chattering was what he said. Lieutenant, that was nothing. He was just being his usual obnoxious self.”

  “Umm,” Piotrowski replied.

  “And who told you about that anyhow? No one was around.”

  “Can’t reveal sources, Doctor. You know that.”

  “Monica!” I exclaimed. “It must have been Monica! Of all the—”

  “Okay, Doctor, calm down. So you say it was nothing?”

  “Damn right, it was nothing!”

  “Okay, then, relax. See, I’m writing it down: nothing. Look, here it is: nothing. See?” He turned his notebook toward me. An entire page was scrawled over with the single word, nothing.

  I gave him fish eyes.

  “Now, can we get on with why you’re here?” Piotrowski slid a plastic-sheathed notepad in my direction. “Okay, Doctor, have you seen this tablet before?” The yellow pad looked familiar only because all yellow lined pads look exactly the same. Except for the blood spatters. I must admit, with all the faculty battles I’d been involved in, I’d never seen a blood-speckled notepad before. The facing page of this pad, as the lieutenant had told me, featured my name, underlined with three bold scores of a black ballpoint pen. The final stroke of the underscoring had been inscribed with such force that the pen had ripped a hole through the paper. I glanced up at Piotrowski, mystified. He motioned me back to the page. Including my name, the jottings read as follows:

  Karen Pelletier

  Northbury Center

  $10,000,000!

  Int. Lib. Epistem. St!!!

  Harriet P Mat Fem

  Jewell Pur Inst

  and, way down at the bottom of the page, in smaller, fainter letters: Emmeline Foster $$$———??? Rust-colored droplets spattered the page lightly.

  “Well,” I mused, looking up at the lieutenant again, “I haven’t actually seen this page before—especially not the blood!—but I’m quite certain I know what it is.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Notes from a meeting.” I studied the jottings again. “Yes, it must be. Tuesday evening a study group I’m in met at Elliot’s house, and I gave a report on Edith Hart’s bequest to the college—”

  The big cop grunted. He knew all about that bequest. “That explains some of what’s here: the Northbury Center, the ten million dollars. But what is this Int. Lib. Epistem. St?”

  “Elliot was interested in epistemology.”

  “Epistem—?”

  “It’s a term from philosophy, having to do with the nature of knowledge, its instability and relativity. Very central to postmodernist thinking—”

  “What knowledge?”

  “All knowledge. But, in literary studies, especially issues such as authority, evaluation, methodology, interpretation …” My eyes fixed on the spatters. The pad had not been soaked in blood but, rather, sprinkled, so that the droplets formed an enigmatic free-flung design. If you were to take a pen, I thought, and connect the dots of gore, you might come up with some meaningful pattern. I tilted my head first one way, then the next, attempting to decipher the figure, but just as I thought I began to perceive some sort of configuration, Piotrowski spoke.

  “There’s only one kind of knowledge I’m interested in right now, Dr. Pelletier, and that’s who killed your colleague.”

  “Well, yes … that does … er … seem to take precedence over philosophical problems. So, then—I think I understand why everything on this sheet is here. I even remember Elliot taking the notes. As I told you yesterday, Elliot was very ambitious. At the meeting I began to sense that he was scheming to take over the Northbury Center and its funds for some kind of a prestigious institute he himself could direct. That would bring him power, money, acclaim, and—he’d never have to enter a classroom again if he didn’t want to.” I glanced back at Elliot’s notes—and the dried spatters. Could those connecta-dot bloodstains possibly form the outline of a bird—a crow, maybe? But surely I was being fanciful. Piotrowski was waiting for solid information from me, not Rorschach-test hallucinations. “The other names on the sheet are Harriet Person and Miles Jewell, and it seemed to me at the meeting that both Harriet and Miles also had self-interested ambitions for the Institute, so it makes sense that their names should be there. But I don’t understand why Emmeline Foster’s name is here—or why it’s followed by dollar signs.”

  “Who’s Emmeline Foster?”

  “She’s nobody—now. But a hundred and fifty years ago she committed suicide because of unrequited love for Edgar Allan Poe.” I paused, and the urge for scholarly accuracy overcame the urge to tell a dramatic story. “Well, that’s the myth, anyhow. I don’t know how true it is.”

  Piotrowski slumped back with an exasperated little crash. His chair shuddered. “Shit!”

  I said nothing. The lieutenant was usually extremely careful about not using crude language around “ladies.”

  He sat up again, folded his hands in front of him. “Excuse my French, Doctor, but don’t tell me this homicide is going to turn into another one of your literary mysteries.”

  “My literary mysteries, Lieutenant?” I turned the pad in its plastic sheath so that it faced him and shoved it back across the table. “You’re the one who brings these complicated conundrums to me. I’m beginning to think the state police should put me on the payroll!” From this new upside-down perspective, the blood-spatter pattern on the lined yellow page looked nothing like a crow.

  I’d reached the exit when the lieutenant caught up with me. Since I’d left him two minutes earlier, he’d pulled on a gray down jacket.

  “Sorry I had to ruin your holiday yesterday, but I needed to get some things straight. And, everything checks out—just like I knew it would.” He paused, looked cautiously around, moved closer to me, lowered his voice. “Forget about that fight with Corbin, Doctor. You got nothing to worry about. I want you to know you’re gonna be totally in the clear here.”

  “Gonna be?” That obviously sounded better to the detective than it did to me, but then I was in a profession where I was hypersensitized to the tense of verbs. I’d
much rather he had phrased that assurance solidly in the present—You are totally in the clear here—than in some kind of shaky colloquial adaptation of the future tense. Gonna be? Gonna be? There was no secure grammatical underpinning for gonna be. “God, Lieutenant, couldn’t you have just said will? As in, You will be totally in the clear here?”

  Piotrowski made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, surreptitiously flashed it at me. “And thanks for the meal last night, Doctor. It was real good. Made me think of the old days.…” He let the words trail off, pushed the door open, nodded goodbye, and headed determinedly down the sidewalk toward the center of town. Earlene was dead wrong, I thought. This man had no interest in me as a woman. And for a brief second, before rational thought came flooding back, I felt inexplicably bereft.

  When I got home, Amanda’s car was gone. A note on the kitchen table said, “Mom, I know you can take care of yourself with the Lt. I’m heading for Lowell. I’ll call when I can. Don’t worry. Love and kisses, always, Amanda.

  “P.S. You’ve had at least a dozen calls—and all before noon! Wanna bet they’re all about Professor Corbin’s death? What are you, anyhow? Gossip Central?”

  10.

  “The poet has a lonely soul.”

  —ROSE TERRY COOKE

  IT WAS 10:07 P.M. THE same evening, and I was curled up on the living room sofa, with a yellow-and-green wool afghan over my legs and the woodstove burning full blast. A frigid wind assaulted the little country house, and windows bumped and rattled in their wooden frames. Poems are alot like life, I read, and sighed. In spite of holidays, homicide, and ill-advised daughterly hegiras, the grading of freshman papers must go on. The stack of essays on the coffee table had diminished only slightly since I’d begun on them after dinner, but I was too tired to do justice to even one more. Once again, I shuffled Freddie Whitby’s paper to the bottom of the pile. I’d deal with her when I was fully conscious. Right now it was time for thermal long johns, flannel pj’s, two pairs of heavy socks, and my cozy bed. Amanda had called earlier to let me know she’d gotten to Lowell, was fine, just fine, and was looking for a motel. I didn’t know why I worried: Amanda was savvy and tough—and she had my credit card.

  I was wandering through a maze of dimly lit basement passageways in Dickinson Hall, the long-time home of the English Department and one of the oldest buildings on campus. The walls of the corridor were rough stone and I could feel a chill dampness emanating from them. Suddenly I noticed that the fluorescent light strips spaced widely along the wall had vanished, and smoky hanging lanterns had taken their place. I turned to Amanda and said, “Look at that! That must be whale oil they’re burning there!” But Amanda had inexplicably become Jane Birdwort. “Follow me,” Jane commanded, and we passed through an arched doorway into a beautifully furnished parlor where a woman in a long lavender dress sat alone at a spinet piano. I leafed through books on a small table, ornate, gilt-edged, beautiful nineteenth-century books—and brand-new! Jane attempted to talk to the melancholy woman at the piano, but Jane was no longer flesh and blood; she was merely a transparent shadow. “Can she hear you?” I questioned, urgently. All at once, I understood that Jane and I had traversed a threshold into the past—we had somehow actually penetrated directly into the solid, material past—and neither of us had any more substance there than that of a shifting shade. “She hears me,” Jane replied, “but not my words. She thinks it’s birds chirping.” I took a closer look at the woman and gasped. “That’s the poet Emmeline Foster,” I told Jane, and I was thrilled to be there with her, in her room, in her time! “Talk to her! Talk to her!” I urged Jane. And at the sound of my heartfelt tones, Emmeline Foster raised her head and looked vaguely in my direction, puzzled. Then Elliot Corbin threw open the door to my classroom. But Elliot’s dead, I thought.

  My eyes opened. I lay immobile, my heart pounding, for what seemed like an eternity. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not get myself back inside that dream.

  Saturday morning I vacuumed, dusted, folded laundry, repotted an ivy plant that had outgrown its clay pot months before—anything to avoid having to sit down again with those damn freshman papers. At noon, CNN informed me that Professor Elliot Corbin’s murder was symptomatic of a disturbing trend toward violence on our campuses nationwide. That his death did not occur on campus was evidently beside the point.

  Finally, fortified by my thick turkey-and-cranberry sandwich and strong coffee, I picked up the stack of essays, trudged over to the desk. Poems are alot like life, I read, and groaned. Not Freddie Whitby again! I always turn back the title pages of students’ essays to hide the names, so I can read each paper without knowing who wrote it. Otherwise, after the first assignment of the semester, it’s almost impossible to grade without preconceived expectations. But I knew immediately who’d written this paper; I would have had to be comatose not to. “Okay, Freddie,” I muttered, “Let’s just get it over with.” I picked up the green pen I was using for this batch of essays, scrawled a bright green Focus! in the margin—and, mercifully, the phone rang.

  Hugo Domato, a stocky, white-haired man in the navy blue parka of the Enfield College Security division, met me at my office door. “I know it’s Saturday, Professor, but I thought you’d want to check this out.” Hugo pushed the door open, and I gasped. He’d informed me that my office had been ransacked, and I’d come speeding to campus through a gray late-autumn drizzle the moment I’d gotten the call, but I’d had no idea of the extent of the devastation. Books had been pulled off their shelves. Every drawer in my filing cabinet was gaping open, and manila file folders had been flung all over the floor. The intruder had plundered the desk drawers, stacking piles of course notes, syllabi, department newsletters, and research notes chaotically on the desktop. My first thought was: Thank God I took my grade book home with me. Then I noticed that the Emmeline Foster box had been overturned, and books and papers were spread all around it on the wide oak floorboards like some kind of paper island.

  “Jesus Christ, Hugo! What happened here?”

  The security guard spread his hands wide. “George found it this way when he came in to clean this morning. The custodians were off for the holiday since Wednesday. George says your office was fine then.”

  “Yeah, it was.” I’d last been on campus Wednesday around noon, when I’d come in to pick up my mail and photocopy a book review I’d written for Signs. This break-in could have happened anytime since then. My gaze fell again on the box of Emmeline Foster’s papers. I’d been in a rush on Wednesday and hadn’t had time to unpack the box in search of the misplaced little book of verses—or to do any further reading in the journals. I looked around the chaos for the maroon-ribbon-bound copybooks and saw no sign of them. But the room was such a mess, I reassured myself, the journals could be anywhere.

  “You have any idea who woulda done this?” Hugo asked.

  I shrugged. “Did Security see anyone hanging around?” I sat down at the desk, switched on the computer, scrolled through the files listing. Everything looked fine there, thank God.

  “I dunno. I been on vacation too. Ask them in the office. You’re gonna have to stop by there and fill out a report, anyhow.”

  Great. “Was this a real break-in, do you think, Hugo?” I walked back to the door, checked out the lock. “I don’t see any damage here.”

  “No sign of forcible entry. Looks like the intruder musta had a key. Keys can be pretty easy to come by around here.”

  “Yeah, anyone who wants it can get the cookie key in this department. At least during office hours.”

  “Cookie key?”

  “The passkey; it’s on a ring with a giant plastic chocolate-chip cookie. Hangs right by Monica’s desk.” Monica? Here was Monica, again. At the scene of Elliot Corbin’s death. And with easy access to my office; Monica had keys to everything. But why would Monica—?

  Stop it, Pelletier! I admonished myself. If you start suspecting everyone, you’ll drive yourself crazy! I wondered if perhaps I shouldn�
��t call Piotrowski about the break-in. But, no, I didn’t want to overreact. How could this incident have anything to do with Elliot’s death? The intruder was probably a disgruntled student. It had happened before. Damn good thing I hadn’t left my grade book behind.

  I filled out the report at Security, returned to my office, sat in my desk chair, surveyed the debacle, and groaned aloud. Cleaning this up was going to take the rest of the day. I righted the UPS box so I could repack it before I tackled the file cabinets and bookshelves. Then I looked again for the stack of Emmeline’s copybooks; I’d better take them home for safekeeping. They were probably behind—or under—the heaps of books that had been yanked helter-skelter from the bookcase. I’d begun reshelving books, in no particular order—off the floor and onto any shelf—when I heard Jane Birdwort’s voice in the hall.

  “What in heaven’s name happened here?” Jane stood in my doorway, wearing loose-fitting khaki pants, her beige quilted jacket, and brown leather lace-up boots. A battered leather book bag hung by a wide strap from her shoulder.

  “You tell me, Jane.” I wiped my sweaty hands on my jeans, and tried to steady my breath. She’d startled me. Obviously, I was more shaken by this ugly incident than I’d thought. “Hurricane? Tornado? Pissed-off student?”

  “You think it was a student?” She stepped inside and let her bag fall to the floor. “How appalling!” She picked up a sheaf of papers from the green chair, glanced at it casually, then immediately began to study the pages more thoughtfully. Peering over her shoulder, I saw that she held a grouping of poem manuscripts in the careful, small writing with which I was fast becoming familiar.

  “That’s Emmeline Foster’s,” I said. “You remember, don’t you? She’s the poet whose papers were just donated to the Northbury Center.”

  “Interesting,” Jane replied, and sank into the nearest chair, still studying the poems. She leafed through the pages in a contemplative silence. Then she looked up at me. “These appear to be early drafts. See all the cross-outs and substitutions? Not too different from the way I work.” She read further, immersed in the verse. When she’d gone through several pages, she placed Foster’s manuscripts carefully on the edge of my desk, gave them a last, lingering look, then turned to me. “If you like, I could help you clean up this …” She gestured uncertainly around the room.