A Fugitive Truth

by Dana Cameron

  Sasha gasped in astonishment. “But wasn’t her husband…?”

  I nodded. “One of the presiding judges. He apparently had such a reputation for honesty that the people refused to allow him to step down when he asked. He was afraid of not being impartial enough. They’d only been married a few months.”

  “How horrible,” she said. “But it’s exciting too! I’ll have her letters ready for you by the end of the week—maybe they will help. Thing is, I didn’t see anything in them about a trial,” she added apologetically.

  “Well, at this point, anything would be a help. Jeez, I know so little of what was going on with her! Besides the work I’ve already done at home—which didn’t mention any of this—I’ve only got this poky town history to work with.” I gestured to a frayed reference book next to the diary. “It’s one of those town bicentennial things, from about 1850, and it’s heavily biased—you know, Stone Harbor firsts and hoary ancestor worship. What’s more important is this other diary, from about a century later. The writer records an anecdote that her grandmother told her about the trial. It seems the records of the trial were suppressed, though. Is there any way I can get hold of the court records to check?”

  “Massachusetts Docket for the Exeter County Court District, 1700 to 1750,” Sasha said promptly. “We’ve been trying to acquire one for years, but the supplemental copies, like the one you need, are very hard to come by. Harry’s been driven to distraction trying to find a copy of the original edition, but we can get one through interlibrary loan for you. If I call right now, it’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “Great, thanks. I’m just surprised you haven’t got it, you’ve got everything else.”

  She laughed. “Harry treats it like a personal affront; last time one was available, we didn’t have the funds for it. And since we got the Whitlow endowment—”

  “Ah,” I said. “As in Director Whitlow?” Suddenly, a lot of things were making sense.

  “That’s right. His brother.” Sasha looked around as though the mere mention of the name would bring the man himself. “Since we got that money, there’s not been one to be seen: If you ever want to see fireworks, just mention it—Harry becomes a bear at the very mention of it. You just keep plugging away with the diary and the letters, and the court records will be here before you know it.”

  I began to back up my work for the day and shut down my computer. “It’s difficult, to keep calm and work methodically, even though I already know the outcome. I had no idea about the trial,” I said. “There are only hints in this book, and until I crack the code, there’s no way of knowing what Margaret was going through. I can tell her handwriting is changing, the quotidian descriptions are shorter and shorter, as though she had only the strength to conceal her feelings so far, and no further. She was in big trouble, I think.”

  Sasha frowned, and I imagined that a similar frown sent all the warriors of Greece loading into their ships for Troy. “But why write a diary in code?”

  “They weren’t necessarily private, the way we think of them today,” I explained. “They could have been records of historical events, they might have been more an ongoing soul-search. Some parents kept them to show their children how to live a virtuous life, some kept them to record a history of the family. And Justice Chandler would have been well within his rights to demand to see his wife’s journal.”

  Sasha shuddered. “I’ve always heard that he had a reputation for being cold and heartless. That his was a stony sort of justice.”

  I shook my head. “I get that too, Sasha, but from the town history, not the diary. Margaret doesn’t write much about him, but when she does, it’s as though she’s learning about a respectable stranger. She’s in awe at first, then later you start to see moments of fondness occasionally, and then some very sentimental language—Margaret was clearly falling in love with her husband. But when the trial starts, all references to Matthew disappear. Into the code, I guess.”

  “Imagine sharing a bed with the man who might hang you!” she breathed, then crooked her finger. “I hate to do this, but it’s past time for closing.”

  “You’re such a stickler,” I teased. I regretfully handed her the book.

  Sasha took the book and sighed mournfully. “You’re not the only one who thinks so.” She seemed to get caught up in a fog of melancholy.

  I prompted her. “Sasha?”

  “Oh.” She sighed again, coming back to the present. “Harry and I had a disagreement this morning—”

  I remembered their argument ending with Sasha slamming the car door down by the gate.

  “—and well, you know we’ve been having trouble over the records from the last librarian—things sold and not recorded in the accessions. Well, I say call up the former librarian and ask him what his system was so we can find the missing books and papers. Check the accounts against what he says. Makes sense, right?”

  I nodded.

  Sasha threw her hands into the air. “Harry won’t bother; he says that it will all get sorted out with a little more time. I can’t blame him for being reticent, really. The former librarian was friends with Mr. Whitlow and no one wants to bother his friends. Jobs like this are scarce as hen’s teeth, and there are rumors of cutbacks, you know?”

  I did know, I thought; Director Whitlow had told me so himself.

  “I know I want to keep my head down; and I’m in no financial state to try and buck the system. But it’s such a little question.” Sasha shook herself. “You know, I believe you’re trying to distract me so you can have more time with Madam Chandler, but it won’t work! Shoo, Dr. Fielding, you can come back tomorrow morning!”

  When I got back to the house, Kobrinksi’s unmarked car was parked out front, and Detective Kobrinski was just about to ring the bell.

  “Good timing,” she said. “You can let me in, and we’ll start solving mysteries. Is Jack Miner in yet?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We can have a look.”

  Jack wasn’t watching television in the parlor, so we went to knock on his door. As we climbed the stairs, I decided it was time for me to get some answers.

  “Did Faith drown?”

  “Yes.” The detective paused, one hand on the railing. “But not in the Shrewsbury stream.”

  I stopped in mid-step. “So she was moved there after? Was there any evidence by the stream?”

  “Hard to say. There was a lot of disturbance from everyone traipsing down the bank—”

  I bridled, but kept my mouth shut.

  “—and you said that Gary Conner moved the deceased, that didn’t help either.” A thought struck Detective Kobrinski. “Could you see for sure that he removed anything from the crime scene?”

  “I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like it. He was being pretty rough with the…with Faith.”

  She thought it over. “Her handkerchief was inside her pocket, but it was muddy, like someone had pulled it out and then stuffed it back in. And I think there’s something missing from her room. And I’m not really certain why her body was moved to the stream.”

  “Maybe the murderer was trying to hide it?”

  “Didn’t do a very good job, did they?” the detective said with a flash of black humor. “You found her less than eighteen hours after she died. That’s a guess, by the way, based on degree of rigor mortis; we can’t be any more accurate because of the cold temperature of the air and water. But why not dump her in the woods in back of the library? No one ever goes there. Why not remove her from the premises altogether?”

  “Not enough time?” I suggested.

  Detective Sergeant Kobrinski furrowed her dark brow. “Could be. The way I figure it, either the perp was trying to dump the body in the stream to wash away any trace evidence—very efficient, by the way—or he or she was trying to make it look like Ms. Morgan drowned there in the stream. That’s a possibility. But why not throw her whole body in?”

  I thought over my newly acquired, grotesque insight into death by drownin
g. “Did you find anything in her lungs?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say at the moment,” she said abruptly as we reached the top of the stairs. “Which is Jack’s room?”

  I led the way, but there was no answer to our repeated knocking. The detective looked frustrated, but I pointed out that it was still early yet and maybe Jack had gone into town to meet her.

  “I’ll call and check,” she said. “But just so’s not to waste the trip, let’s take a look in Ms. Morgan’s room. You knew her the best of anyone—”

  “I knew absolutely nothing at all about her,” I answered resentfully.

  The detective frowned again, but took a key and opened Faith’s room across the hall. “It’s been processed, so you don’t need to worry about disturbing anything. I’m looking for something in particular; let’s see if you notice what I did.”

  Smothering my annoyance with the policewoman’s games, I looked around the room, not furnished too much differently from mine. Clothes, tailored to an extreme degree, still expensively perfumed, hung in the closet, with shoes lined up as if for military review beneath them. Books organized by subject were in ranks on the bookcase, all of the bindings exactly one inch from the edge of the shelf, just like the ones Faith had kept on the top of a Victorian drop-front desk. The papers on the work were all lined up at right angles to the edges of the desk.

  Unlike my room, however, there were no comforting piles of papers and books and scraps of notes left hither and yon for discovery and inspiration. No heaps of clothing on the floor and all of Faith’s underthings were carefully folded and put away according to type. She had been a person with a high degree of interest in order. A fine layer of dust had settled over everything, only noticeable because of the uniformity of the blanket, presumably only accumulated since last Wednesday night. My room had little patches cleared away where I needed a clean surface, leaving everything unevenly coated.

  Something prompted me, and I moved over to the old desk and opened the drop front.

  “There’s nothing in there,” Kobrinski said, leaning against the closet door. “Just some Shrewsbury stationery. All of her work was sorted into the files and on her desk.”

  Looking at the books, I recognized only the Foucault among the secondary sources, and aside from battered annotated copies of the works of Cooper, Rowson, and Irving, there was no modern or recreational fiction to be found anywhere. There was a gap quite noticeably left on one side.

  “That’s where her diaries were,” the detective supplied when she saw me pause. “We’ve taken them to the lab and have been going through them. Absolutely religious about keeping them, every day. They end about two months ago.”

  “What are they about?”

  “Everything. I wish she had written one during her stay here,” Kobrinski grumbled. “That would clear up a lot for us, the way she wrote. I get the impression that the person who wrote them was a different one than the person all of you knew. It’s…” She shook her head. “cold—”

  I thought that assessment was spot on, myself.

  “—but you’ll have to look at them and tell me.” She traced a pattern going through the carpet with a toe.

  “So why did she stop?” I asked. I closed the desk.

  She shrugged. “Most of it was about her recovery, after her suicide attempt. You wouldn’t think that someone would be quite as…analytical…about themselves. Almost like it was about someone else. I don’t know. Maybe she figured she’d done all the work she could and was moving on.”

  I arched a disbelieving eyebrow and Kobrinski shrugged again. “The last entry is on the last page of the last notebook,” she said. “Sort of makes me think that there should be another one.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, just look at this room. You’d think she’d keep on with something as disciplined as a diary, especially since she brought the others with her. Did you look for another volume?”

  The detective nodded and reached for a Tums. “All the usual places, between the mattress and boxspring, in the mattress and boxspring, in the grate, all over. I tried to think like her, I tried to think paranoid, I tried to think scared—perhaps she was already afraid for her life before she was murdered. But we found nothing. I wondered if it wasn’t taken from her the night she was murdered.”

  “Well, we’ll never find that out until we get the murderer, or at least know who it is,” I said. Who would want her dead? I asked myself. I didn’t know enough yet.

  “There’s only so many places in this room a book like that could be, and be hidden,” Kobrinski muttered. “It must have been taken from her.”

  A thought, an incredibly distressing one, hit me between the eyes. “Oh, my God. The library!”

  She looked doubtful. “Hide the diary in the library? Wouldn’t that be dangerous?”

  “It would blend right in,” I said. “What better place to hide a needle than in a haystack?”

  We both slumped; she knew as well as I did that going through all those shelves could easily take days and that we’d be cross-eyed at the end of it. “All right, we’ll go have a look around the reference room,” Pam Kobrinski conceded reluctantly. “You have to admit though, it takes balls to hide something in plain sight.”

  I had been staring right at the Victorian desk when the detective said that, and a second brainwave, stronger and truer than the first, hit. “What did you say?”

  The detective misunderstood me. “Okay, guts, it takes a lot of guts to hide something in plain sight. That better? This political correctness thing is a real pain in the—”

  “No, no not—” I shook my head; she’d misunderstood me. “Just hang on a minute. The diary’s not in the library. I know where it is.” I crossed the room.

  The detective folded her arms across her chest, clearly annoyed by my changeability. “Well?”

  “It’s just when you said, ‘hiding in plain sight,’ you reminded me of something I heard in a class a long time ago,” I murmured, almost to myself, as I gazed at the old desk. “A class about decorative arts. In particular, the lecture on nineteenth-century furniture.”

  “Huh? There’s nothing in the desk, I already looked,” she said impatiently. “I even looked under the drawers, behind the damn thing. It’s not there. We don’t even know if another diary exists.”

  “Yes we do, and I know where it is. Faith wouldn’t let her diary get too far away from her, particularly not if it had something important in it.” I pulled down the drop front again and tried pushing one ornate panel at the back of the desk. Nothing happened. “You see, the Victorians loved tricks, secrets, hidden meanings.” I tried poking a beautifully carved section of vine. Nothing there. “‘Springes to catch woodcocks.’”

  “You think there’s a secret panel,” the detective sergeant said, doubtful.

  “I know there is.” I opened the door to a little cubbyhole in the center of the desk and pressed the back, but to no avail. “At one point, I had a pretty good idea of where the secret compartment was located in most of these old desks. That was a long time ago, though. I could have sworn it would be at the back of that cubby. That’s what’s speaking to me.” I peered at some ornate tracery, trying to distinguish a crack or a hinge. “Come on, where are you?”

  Stepping back, I tried to look for the obvious that wasn’t obvious. I kept coming back to that little door. And then I smiled triumphantly, reached forward, and pulled at the decorative wooden pilaster on the right side of the door. It slid out easily, the linear decoration concealing the fact that the column was just the front of a tall, narrow drawer. It was empty, but as the detective stepped forward eagerly, I pulled out the left column and inside was a small, modern exercise book with the date January 15, 2003 written on the front of it.

  “Faith took that class too,” I said.

  I handed the detective the diary feeling distinctly smug; she hadn’t been able to find it. But to my amazement, she only put the diary in a plastic evidence bag.

  “Hey, aren’t
you even going to take a look at it?” How would you feel if you handed someone a light blue box from Tiffany’s and they just chucked it into a closet?

  “It’s got to go through the lab first,” she said. “Then we’ll both—”

  She was interrupted when we heard someone pounding up the stairs and a crash out in the hall. We started out of the room to investigate, when Michael stumbled into the doorway.

  “I…I found him. I found Jack,” he gasped. He was sweating, pale, and breathing heavily, obviously distressed.

  “Where?” we asked simultaneously.

  But I almost knew the answer even as he said it. A prickle ran down my spine and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

  Michael looked like he was ready to faint. “In the gazebo. I think he’s dead.”

  Chapter 11

  THERE WAS JACK, LYING SLUMPED AGAINST THE latticework railing of the gazebo, just as Michael had described. The three of us drove over in Detective Kobrinski’s car after she called for the EMTs and crime scene squad. We paused a moment after we arrived, all for different reasons, I suppose. I faltered at the stairs because I was waiting for the joke to be exposed, waiting for Jack to jump up and shout “Gotcha!” and for him to congratulate Michael on a well-executed gag, even though I knew that would never happen, no matter how much I wished it would. I saw Detective Kobrinski hesitate to glance quickly over the weathered wooden floor before she walked on it, presumably for any clues as to the cause of Jack’s death, because it seemed to me that anyone could tell just from looking that he was dead. Michael, for his part, never even climbed the stairs leading up to the gazebo. He just waited at the foot, looking in any direction but ours, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat. It looked like he was trying to keep his face blank, but I noticed the strain of queasiness across his features.