A Fugitive Truth

by Dana Cameron

  The thing was gone, and I was licking the crumbs from my fingers before I knew what happened. “Thanks,” I said. “I guess I really did need that.”

  “Hey, I think I’ve got some Fritos in the glove, if you want…” she offered.

  “No, no thanks,” I said, embarrassed by my sudden gluttony. “I feel much better now.” I looked over to the little scene by the bank and pulled my rustly silver blanket closer around me, drawing my knees up onto the inside of the door of the ambulance.

  Detective Kobrinski had led Gary Conner over to one side, far enough away to be out of everyone’s hearing—I could see Constantino straining to hear what was going on, while the other cops made sure he did nothing more than try to eavesdrop. In a vivid pantomime, I saw her go on perfectly calmly while Gary grew increasingly more agitated. He never moved from the spot he stood on, but the shifting of his weight, the flood of color to his face, and the hunching in his shoulders all indicated that he was seething. He didn’t hand anything over to the detective.

  Finally, she turned and left him standing behind her, when I saw him say something very briefly. She stopped, slowly turned, and even more slowly walked back to face Gary again. She didn’t say anything that I could see for the longest time, just stared at him with those dark laser eyes of hers. Finally she responded just as briefly to him and returned to her car where she spoke for some time on the radio. Gary walked back over to where Constantino was standing, but I noticed he never turned his back on Detective Kobrinski as he passed her.

  I never thought I’d envy Constantino for anything, but I knew that he’d find out what they’d said to each other long before I did.

  The Detective Sergeant moved carefully down the hill to take a look at Faith. She squatted carefully and then reached down towards Faith’s skirt. She hesitated and pulled her hand back, and I realized she’d just successfully resisted the urge to twitch Faith’s skirt modestly down over the bare skin of her exposed legs. Suddenly within the melee of emotion, I was overwhelmed with gratitude: Someone was finally paying respectful attention to Faith. Kobrinski got up and surveyed the surroundings briefly. She nodded to herself and returned to speak to the other officers, then went to her car, where she spent some time on her radio. I moved closer to the main knot of activity, the better to observe what was transpiring.

  One of the cops went to the trunk of his cruiser and without a word, began to fasten a bright line of yellow flagging around a tree on the top of the slope about ten yards above where Faith lay. The other spoke into his radio.

  “How long is this area going to be cordoned off?” Mr. Constantino demanded. “There’s a fund-raiser next week and I’ve got the landscapers coming. Mr. Whitlow wants it all—”

  Detective Kobrinski arrived just in time to hear that last; she looked at him with something close to humor and said, “Mr. Constantino, straight to hell with your landscapers. I’m blocking off this half of the road to traffic for just as long as it takes me to get done investigating.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Constantino protested. “We certainly can’t have—”

  “I’m sorry that this woman’s death is going to ruffle the quality of life here at Shrewsbury for a while,” the detective broke in coldly, “but that’s the way it’s going to be. I promise I won’t take any longer than necessary. But I can’t speak for the State Police detectives or the medical examiner’s people.” She grinned wickedly. “Honest.” She walked along the top of the slope, conferred with the patrol officers, and gave orders, apparently unaware or unconcerned that Constantino looked like he was longing to shove her down the side of the gully.

  “Look, it seems pretty clear to me that you’re making a federal case of an accident—”

  “No, not a federal case, not yet,” Kobrinski called. “Not unless you know of something that would indicate that this is a felony.” She moved a little closer to Mr. Constantino, as if to include him in on a little secret, but she didn’t lower her voice. “You know, as much as I love the fact that my being here is crawling right up your ass, I’m not going to need to take any more advantage of it than necessary. But rest assured, Mr. Constantino: I am enjoying this.” Detective Kobrinski smiled and I saw little pointy teeth bared.

  Constantino looked as though he were going to burst a blood vessel. Truth be told, I was amazed at the way Kobrinski was standing up to this supercilious windbag. But of course, she was trained to do just that. I relished her enjoyment of the situation—you go, girl!

  She turned back to me, and I smiled to express my approval and our sisterly solidarity. The detective, however, wasn’t interested.

  “Let’s start from the beginning. I want you to tell me precisely what you saw,” she said, without a trace of recognition that we shared anything—even our distrust of Constantino—in common. “I want to know everything you did and thought from the moment you noticed Ms. Morgan down there. Don’t leave anything out.”

  For the next half hour I repeated my every step, my every breath, what I touched, what I thought about thinking. She went back over every point to clarify and expand on every detail. By the time that I finished, I was convinced that she must know everything I did. I was starting to feel slightly ill, from the stress and muscle cramps, when she asked one last, surprising question.

  “Okay, ma’am, what do you think happened?”

  I answered before I had time to think about it—some of my best thoughts come without invitation. “I…I think someone drowned her.” My own words startled me.

  “You think she was murdered.” Detective Kobrinski arched one eyebrow.

  I continued, explaining my opinions to myself as much as to her. “She has no coat on, and it was freezing last night. No way would anyone choose to go outside without a coat. Even if she just wanted a breath of air—what would she be doing nearly a half mile away from the house unless she had a damned good reason?”

  “Hmm.” Kobrinski was no more encouraging than that. “What else?”

  “And she didn’t have any tights on,” I said. “Faith was wearing them with that dress yesterday. And,” I said, relieved to finally identify what had been bothering me, “her shoes are really clean. There’s no dirt on the heels or bottoms of them, at least, not enough to indicate to me that she walked down the hill by herself. Not with the mud.” I showed her my own caked sneaker.

  “Why do you say last night?”

  “Faith, she would have never worn the same dress two days in a row, and like I said, she was wearing that one last night.”

  “What time did you last see her? What were you doing?”

  “I’m not sure, maybe midnight.” Here I paused out of an instinct to preserve the secrets that came out during our talk. I shook myself—nothing could hurt Faith anymore, and now the truth was important. I took a deep breath and said it. “We talked about her leaving an abusive marriage, starting over in her work.”

  “Did you know her ex-husband?”

  There was something about the way she said that, like she knew something but was too polite to let me know she knew it. “No, not at all. I met Paul a handful of times a long time ago. I’m afraid I wasn’t as charmed or impressed by him as other folks were. I barely knew Faith, really. We were just in some of the same graduate classes together.”

  Detective Kobrinski nodded and asked equably, “Did you get along well?”

  “Not particularly well, but you have to understand,” I hurriedly added, aware that this wasn’t coming out the way I wanted, “our personalities clashed and we were just happier avoiding each other. She was…I don’t know…controlling, you know, or she could be a little haughty. We actually had a fairly pleasant chat last night, before she told me…about leaving Paul.”

  “Hmmm,” was all she said again. “So you met up with an old…what—competitor? rival?—for the first time in years last night—”

  “Hey, I didn’t say—”

  “Oh, what, you were friends then?”

  “Hang on there,”
I said, finally determined to set her straight. “We weren’t enemies, we just didn’t care for each other. I’m just trying to be honest and you’re twisting my words around—”

  Detective Kobrinski brushed my concerns aside. “Okay. What happened after you two finished talking?”

  “I went to bed, I was very tired—”

  “Oh?”

  There was that damned provoking skepticism again. Was she determined to believe nothing I said?

  I tried again. “Well, she kept me up late, and I’d had a few drinks—”

  “Drinks.” A whole ocean of implication soaked the word, but I let her imply away. She wasn’t going to get my goat; I just nodded.

  “And then you went to bed. Can anyone verify that? Were you alone?”

  “Yes, I was bloody alone!” I said, abandoning my good intentions. “Look, you are making a lot of unfair assumptions here—”

  Kobrinski looked at me with maddening calm. “You’re telling me a bunch of facts, I’m just trying to see how they might fit the truth.”

  “I’m telling you the truth!” I nearly laughed in frustration.

  That seemed to prick her more than anything I’d said so far, but her anger was a hot, quiet burn. “Do you understand why I’m asking you these questions? This looks like it’s a murder investigation! I’m going to find out what happened here. Are you aware that the murderer is usually the first one on the scene?”

  It was almost as though she was taking this personally, and the fact that she was showing genuine emotion drove away the thousand smart-aleck retorts that sprang to my mind. “Yes, I did know that,” I answered. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked about a murder.” I gave her Sheriff Dave Stannard’s name and number at the Fordham County Sheriff’s Office, the place we’d first met several years ago, when he was investigating the death of a friend of mine, in which I’d been implicated. “He’ll tell you. I’m really just trying to tell you what I know.”

  Just like that, the utterly professional facade slipped back into place. She noted down the number and said, “Thank you, Ms. Fielding. I think I’ve got everything I need for now. Just don’t make any plans to leave Shrewsbury for a while, okay?”

  Chapter 7

  “ARE YOU GOING TO BE SAFE?” BRIAN SOUNDED AS though he wanted to climb through the phone line late that evening. “I thought that place was supposed to have tons of security! I think I want you to come home now.”

  I didn’t tell him I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. “I’m fine. There are cops all over the place, and besides, we don’t know that it wasn’t an accident—”

  “You just said you don’t think it was!” he protested.

  “Well, what do I know about anything?”

  A pregnant pause hung between us for a minute.

  “Brian, trust me. I’m all right. You know how cautious I am.”

  I was not reassured by the length of time it took him to answer. “Lock your door at night, sweetie,” he sighed. “Don’t do anything exciting.”

  “Exciting” was a compromise word by which Brian meant “stupid,” “rash,” or “dangerous” for the situations I might have described as “expedient” or “necessary.” He and I both knew what he meant.

  “Relax, I’m just here to get some research done. Other folks are looking into the matter, don’t worry.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Really,” I said. “Everything’s cool.”

  Brian didn’t say anything, and I felt the need to convince him of my coolness.

  “It’s just a little weird around here. That’s all. The cops were asking questions in the library. People whispering to each other, after. And they were looking at me, like they think I caused all this trouble just by finding Faith.”

  “They’re just scared, Em,” he said quietly. “Something bad happened near them and they’re just trying to make sense of it.”

  “But when do we get a normal life?” I asked suddenly. “Work, the house, then something like this? All this drama, all the time, is a little much. It’s starting to wear on me, you know?”

  “Hey, it’s okay, sweetie! It sounds like you’ve got some other stuff going on in your head too. Want to talk about it?”

  I wasn’t sure I really wanted to, but it seemed like a good idea. “I was just thinking. For years, we’ve been struggling, for our degrees, our jobs. Getting a house, and now working to make it habitable. Us against the rest of the world, and that’s fine, but it’s been…years. And for a while now, all I seem to hear about is how people are starting to think…you know. About themselves. About life, not just work. Marty and Kam. Hell, even Jane is going to take some time off, and you know what she’s like.”

  There was a long pause at the other end. “Emma…are you telling me you want to have kids?”

  My jaw fell open. Was that what I was saying? The thought was so large, so important, I needed time to give it more careful thought. “I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t want to have that conversation right this minute. But we haven’t discussed that in a while, and well, shit, if we’re going to talk about it, we should do it soon.” I licked my lips and tried to take up the thread of my present worries. “Like I said, it seems that all we do these days is for something else, it’s always work, and I think maybe I need to make some time for some other things too. I just get so tired, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, I know it’s important to do what we’re doing. The last push on the tenure grind was this year. We need to work on the house, and it’s too easy to lose momentum. But I just…need to do something with you that isn’t about everything else. For a while.”

  “I can get behind that. What if—?”

  “And as for this thing with Faith? Well, it was weird to see her again. It was okay, at first, and then it went horrible. It just seems like that’s on top of me too, and I don’t like it.”

  “Okay, first thing? That has nothing to do with you,” Brian said firmly, once I paused to take breath. “Absolutely nothing. It’s just bad luck, it’s…”

  He paused and I was surprised by how anxious I was to hear his reasoning.

  “…It’s just a matter of distance. Everyone has lots of weirdness happen near them in the course of their lives, but most of the time, it happens to someone they know, you know, someone who knows someone who knew someone—friends of friends. You’ve just been unlucky, a couple of times, because…you’re at the center of a karmic vortex,” he said confidently. “Not your fault.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, willing to be convinced. “Is that some kind of Chinese philosophy?”

  “I think I got it off Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he said. “Or does it sound more an old Bowie lyric? I can’t remember.”

  “What a rip-off!” I laughed. “Here I thought I’d married into a five-thousand-year-old tradition of wisdom and I get—”

  “The all-American boy. Trust me babe, I’m the best thing that could have happened to you. You’re laughing, you sound better. Do you want me to come out there?”

  “I do feel better,” I admitted. “Just come Saturday, like we planned. I’ll pick out a nice restaurant, so bring a clean shirt and some shoes. Real shoes, I mean, not sneaks.”

  We dawdled over good-byes and I didn’t even realize I’d been so depressed until I hung up feeling better. Brian fixes me when I don’t even know I’m broken.

  The next day, Friday, stumbled by in a disorienting blend of the ordinary and the surreal. While things at the library were shaken up by the ongoing investigations—there were police cars by the road in the morning, when I went up to the library—there was a tacit understanding that work and life should continue. And oddly, the inhabitants of Shrewsbury were confused and uneasy, but nobody really seemed to be mourning Faith. It was more like they were trying to cover up the bad opinions they held of her in life.

  It was a little unnerving for me to see the alterations that death had wrought on Faith’s memory as it was collectively held by t
he staff. Day readers, interns, and administrators who ordinarily blended in with the background were suddenly jarred into visibility, as they shamefacedly transformed Faith into a kind of heroine by using words like tragic and remote. Before her death, Jack and Sasha had hinted and fumbled, trying not to use obvious adjectives; Michael had spoken outright about the difficulty that one could expect in living and working with her. Now Jack spoke seldom, just scurried about and kept his head down and Sasha went through the motions of her job with pursed lips and brusque motions. Harry was purely morose. Michael seemed much the same as usual, which is not to say normal.

  And as if reflecting the emotional chaos around me, Madam Chandler was continuing to provide a few puzzles of her own. The text was starting to change and more and more of the encoded passages were appearing, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph, sometimes for a page or so near the end of an entry. I was trying to transcribe the words faithfully, but it was clear that something was not right in Margaret’s life, so I recorded my own feelings along with her words to keep track of those all-important first impressions. I grew less and less comfortable even as she herself seemed to become wary:

  Jul 16—(Truth stumbles in the Market-place and Honesty is kept out.)

  There is an Increase of Concern over Rev. Blanch’d’s sudden passing. Matthew has been pressed beyond all Fairnesse to quiet Dame Rumor, and Rev’d Affleck e’en went so fr as to preach a Sermon that signified his support of my Parte. His Text, Isaiah LIX, was much spoke upon, but more for its Ambiguity than its Direct’n and Succor to the Congrega’n (24 11 8 9 5 10 2 5 19 5 2 22 2 10 10 5 16 10 9). The Weather is evilly oppressive, but has bro’t forth the most remarkable Blooms, poss. the only thinge of Merit in this superstitous Wildernesse is its heath’nish Hues and monstr’s Flowers. The Herbs and Foxglove thrive, as does the Nicotiana virginiana and the wild, thorny Roses. This leads me to consider the Goodnesse of the Creator—perhaps He offers Comfort thus, though I cannot but think that His choice of Messengr mocks me(24 5 5 16 1 12 3 16 7 8 2 1 8 3 1 6 11 17 19 2 3 20 11 5 17 5)