A Fugitive Truth

by Dana Cameron

  When I finally walked around the gazebo, I could see that Jack was wearing his usual dark blue janitor pants and his gray duffel coat, which was unbuttoned, exposing a frayed pale blue dress shirt and a couple of sweaters. His headphones on his head, the tape player almost falling out of his coat pocket, just the way I’d always seen it when he was alive, and Jack looked for all the world like he’d just decided to hang out in the gazebo and listen to his tapes. In one hand, he still clutched an empty whiskey bottle, and based on the faint smell coming from the body, not much of it had been emptied by spilling or evaporation. Jack had been on a world-class bender.

  I looked at his face even before I could decide whether I really wanted to. It was now trapped in a permanent grimace, the sort of face he had made before when I spoke of exercise or archaeology. One difference was that there was a distinct bluish tinge to his exposed skin and particularly to his lips that I couldn’t attribute to the dying light of the afternoon. The other was that a thick rope of dark vomit had crusted down his chin from the corner of his mouth. I looked away hurriedly.

  “Looks like he froze to death, or maybe he choked,” Detective Kobrinski said, echoing my own thoughts as she squatted down beside him. She was looking intently, but still didn’t touch anything.

  I had a quick flashback to last Thursday, when she was looking at Faith just the same way. That thought reminded me of just how much was happening around me, and I quickly shoved it aside. “I don’t think he could have been out here since Friday or Saturday, though, could he?”

  Kobrinski looked at me and frowned in a “Who the hell invited you?” fashion, before she answered, more politely than I expected. “You would have seen him before, wouldn’t you, when you came by here since then, right? Hey,” she called to Michael, who was shuffling through the pebbles around the base of the gazebo, “when was the last time you saw Mr. Miner here alive?”

  “Friday, I guess,” he said slowly, as he traced a pattern with his toe. “No, wait, maybe it was Saturday?”

  “But Saturday was the day you went into Boston early,” I pointed out. “I heard him in the bathroom. Did you see him before you left?”

  “Maybe it was Friday,” Michael corrected himself hurriedly. “I didn’t see him all weekend after that.”

  “Well, do you if know if he was gone the whole time?” I persisted. “I couldn’t tell if he was just avoiding me because of our little to-do.”

  “I said”—he scuffed out his pebble lines impatiently—“I haven’t seen him all weekend.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?” Even though I could tell I was irritating him, I just couldn’t stop asking the questions that popped unbidden into my head. “Hey, wait a second! I didn’t hear him slamming around in the bathroom this morning! Did you?”

  Michael finally looked up at me. “What kind of ghoul are you?” He stared in revulsion. “I mean, how can you ask if I heard Jack taking a piss this morning, when he’s lying there like…like…fuck it! Like a piece of meat!”

  “Hey Michael, come on! There’s no need to be like that,” I said. “I’m just trying—”

  But Michael just scowled, batted a hand dismissively at me, and stalked off across the field, following the stream road back toward the house. His overcoat flapped around his heels like a faithful dog.

  I stared after him and called, “Hey, wait a minute!”

  “Umm, Emma—”

  “Where’s he going?” I asked, turning to Pam Kobrinski, who was watching the exchange. “We need to figure out—”

  “Say, here’s an idea,” the detective offered lightly. “How about you ask me your questions, and I’ll deal with everyone else?”

  “What do you mean?” Her mild criticism on top of Michael’s stung more than I expected. “I was just—”

  “I know you were just.” Kobrinski sat back on her heels. “I think things will work out better if you focus on observing and I’ll do the interrogating.”

  “I wasn’t interrogating,” I insisted. “I was just asking Michael some questions.”

  “Still.” She paused to hook her bangs out of her eyes with a pinkie. “We’ll start at the beginning. Let’s have a look at Mr. Miner here and try to decide just how he died.”

  The discussion was closed. She’d let me off very gently, but it didn’t help much.

  I took a deep breath. “Well, he could have been drinking and then passed out and froze to death, right?”

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “Seems to be lots of alcohol flowing around this place. There was a high, but not legally intoxicating, amount of alcohol present in Ms. Morgan’s blood.”

  “Jack was worse than most, though,” I pointed out. “He’d been drinking steadily and more heavily ever since I found Faith, and he was pretty much in the bag every night before that, according to Michael. As far as I could tell, it was a regular ritual.”

  “So this isn’t inconsistent with previous behavior.”

  “But the fact that he’s outdoors,” I said. “That is.”

  Detective Kobrinski grunted. “And we need to know how long he was here.”

  “Won’t the autopsy help with that?” I couldn’t help shivering, not only because the sun was going down and the wind was picking up, but also because I thought of the glee with which a certain medical examiner would have tackled the problem.

  “Maybe. Might even tell us if it was alcohol poisoning and not the cold, if he drank enough. But again, as with Ms. Morgan, it’s going to be difficult to determine the time of death with the cold weather the way it is, altering rigor.” Detective Kobrinski gently prodded Jack’s arm. “You didn’t notice him this morning or this afternoon, right?”

  “Right. You know, I can’t imagine what would have brought Jack out here. He hated the cold, he hated the idea of exercise, and his car’s back at the residence.”

  Kobrinski looked up. “Interesting.”

  The dying light reflected off Jack’s Walkman in a peculiar fashion, giving me another idea. “What about the batteries? He used the rechargeable sort, there was always a set charging in the kitchen. That might help with time of death.”

  “Maybe. Hang on a second.” The detective took the pencil out of her little spiral-bound notebook. “He used these all the time?”

  “Between that and the scotch, it was like Jack was trying to block out as much of the world as possible,” I said. Suddenly I couldn’t look at the face of the sad little man and focused on the Walkman.

  “The radio?” She moved the portable stereo a little with the pencil, to better look at it.

  “No. It was almost always tapes. Fake jazz, that sort of thing. Always cranked way up. Why?”

  “The tapes would use up the batteries faster.”

  “Oh. Of course.” The odd light attracted my attention again and this time I knew why. “Could I borrow that a second?”

  She handed me the pencil and I reached over and pressed the eject button with the pencil eraser.

  We could both see it then. Jack was wearing his headphones, but there was no tape in the cassette player.

  “Still, it doesn’t mean it was murder…” the detective mused.

  “Huh? Who would want to murder Jack?” I stammered, not thinking.

  Pam Kobrinski sighed and looked about a million years old. “Who’d want to murder anyone? You’d be surprised at what would prompt someone to kill someone else. It doesn’t take much, I’m sorry to say. But you gave me a motive yourself this morning.”

  “Me?” My mind raced back to our breakfast meeting and screened the possibilities, until one hit me right between the eyes. “Oh, my God. The note.”

  “Right. The note that Jack left for you in the library. Where, as far as I can tell, almost anyone could have seen it. It said that Jack knew something and was going to tell.” She stood up and stretched casually, but looked tense.

  “But…but…the note. The note was on my desk. What if…what if…?” My words trailed off even as my imagination,
as overfed as it had been in the last week, took off like a greyhound, haring after the worst possible conclusion.

  “What if whoever saw the note, if someone saw the note, thinks Jack also spoke to you?” The detective had trouble concealing her unease. “I’m afraid we can’t rule out that possibility.”

  Everyone was remarkably tolerant of me, not asking me to move off the bottom step where I had sunk down until they actually had to. They finally removed Jack’s body, hauling it off in the bag on the gurney forty minutes later. At the news that he might have been murdered and that now it might be a good idea for me to be worried too, I’d sort of collapsed in on myself, head on my knees, arms wrapped over my head, willing everything to just go away. Flashbulbs flared, notes were taken, the surrounding ground searched, little puffs of breath hanging in the air around Pam Kobrinski and a State Police officer and the ambulance EMTs who showed up promptly. But I was oblivious to it all. While it was still possible that Jack hadn’t been murdered, that he’d just forgotten a tape in his drunken stupor and succumbed to the cold, I didn’t think so. It was too big a coincidence after Faith’s death. Something horrible was going on at Shrewsbury, and I was no longer just on the edge of it all; it was moving closer and closer, threatening to envelop me.

  “I think we’re done here, for tonight,” Kobrinski said. She was rubbing her hands together trying to warm up. “C’mon, I’ll give you a lift back. I’m going back to the house to have a look at his room now.”

  The thought of being cooped up in the car even for the half a minute it would take to get back to the house was utterly abhorrent to me. I shook my head. “No thanks, I need to stretch a bit, warm up. I’ll walk back, see you in a minute.”

  “You sure?” she asked impatiently; she didn’t really have time to mess with me. “It’s getting pretty cold out here.”

  “Yeah.” I didn’t tell her I wasn’t certain I could even face being back in the house, closed up alone with my thoughts. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

  “Okay.” She looked doubtful. “I’ll need the note, if you’ve still got it.”

  “I think it’s in my wool jacket. I’ll check.”

  The detective peered at me. “You sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Don’t dawdle. It’s going to be a long night for us all.”

  I nodded and watched her pull down the road, headlights on even though there was still a little light left in the deepening dusk. And as soon as her car pulled around the bend, out of sight, I knew I should have accepted the ride.

  I was overwhelmed with the most extraordinary sensation of isolation. I felt exposed, on the edge of the woods at the foot of the mountains in the middle of nowhere, with nothing for miles around but me and spiraling catastrophe. I could see the glow of ambient light from Monroe blinking on against the pinkish blue and black of the gloaming, and it only increased the profound pall of loneliness. The dark obliterated any trace of the emerging spring, and all I could see were the ghostly branches that rocked in the cold wind. A single star appeared, winking palely, watching with a distant chilly light.

  I want to go home, I thought miserably. I want Brian. I want to hide under the blankets until this all goes away. Thoughts of familiar things and the security of them sent a pang of longing through me. Even Quasi, the feline Prince of Darkness, would be a welcome sight.

  But it was the thought of the cat’s disinterested malevolence that actually changed my mind and bucked me up. I got up from the gazebo steps to think it through. If I was being completely honest, it was impossible for me to leave now. I simply couldn’t desert Madam Chandler. It was though I had a physical craving to find out what happened during the trial to save her from being hanged. There was no way I could abandon the diary, not with the letters about to be released from conservation, not with the transcript of the trial about to arrive at any moment. I’d be throwing away half of my evidence by leaving the diary itself unstudied. Who knew what information would be revealed in the fabric of the diary itself? Perhaps by a closer examination of the pages and binding, something would be revealed to me. I needed all of the diary’s clues to crack the code. I started to walk.

  Brian might categorize this decision—and I realized in that instant, it was a decision to stay—as “exciting,” or worse. I wasn’t too sure how bright it was myself. I just knew that I was as close as anyone had been to finding out the truth about her journal and the trial. Call it instinct or call it conceit, I needed to stick it out for Margaret.

  There was another thing, too. I couldn’t do anything about what had happened to Faith or Jack, but I could sure as hell try and help find out what had gotten them both killed. Kobrinski was right: I had access.

  I hadn’t changed a thing except myself, but it was surprising what a difference that made. I was still only dealing with speculation, there was no real reason yet to think that Jack had been murdered. And if he hadn’t been, then I had nothing to worry about, really. And we’d find out what happened to Faith, I was willing to bet, now that we had her diary.

  As I came around the bend to the final stretch of the road leading to the front of the house, I realized that someone—not Detective Kobrinski—was leaning in to the front seat of her car. It took a moment before I realized that this wasn’t right.

  “Hey,” I whispered, suddenly self-conscious, then again, much louder, as I realized that something was very wrong. The figure straightened as I began to hurry forward. “Hey! Stop! What are you doing?”

  The figure didn’t bother to turn to me but began to sprint across the open ground, heading for the library and the woods at the back of the estate.

  It was like a spring that had been wound too tight finally let go, and I took off after the figure. I hadn’t been for a proper, long run in what felt like weeks, but so far from feeling out of shape, I was nearly ecstatic—I could finally do something.

  Channeling every ounce of frustration, fear, worry, and anger into forward motion, I tore across the back field and had made it to the top of the grassy slope before I even knew I’d started up the steep hill. Adrenaline and endorphins flooded my system, and I now understood why you should never run on painkillers. It felt too good. You ran too fast. I ignored prudence and let the sensation of speed consume me, wipe my mind clear of every thought but the chase.

  But even at this speed, the figure eluded me. I could make out a bulky form I presumed to be male, though the clothing could have easily concealed a woman. Whoever it was was in good shape and had come prepared to leave quickly; with the light from the house I saw the white soles of running shoes showing up against the dark of the evening.

  The figure left the road and entered the lightly wooded area on the way to the library, and we both had to slow somewhat. There were no clearly marked paths, and the increasing dark forced us to dart more carefully through the underbrush and low branches. I was at a disadvantage here, not knowing the terrain as well as did the other runner, but I never lost sight of my quarry.

  I was able to keep up but not close the gap between us and was beginning to wonder what I would do if I did catch up when suddenly a dark blur streaked past me. I was running as fast as I ever had in my life, but Detective Kobrinski was moving like Diana on the hunt and in complete control of her every movement. I had just a moment to watch her go with awestruck fascination before a charley horse abruptly immobilized the muscle in my right thigh and sent me tripping across a thick root.

  With a cry, I stumbled and fell to the ground, and it seemed like I skidded for the entire length of a football field, but in reality it was only a yard or so. Somewhere past all the pain, I heard the tinny ring of clanking metal and looked up to see whoever I had been chasing clambering up a section of chainlink fence that formed the rear boundary of Shrewsbury.

  “Freeze! Police!” the detective shouted. She was nearly at the fence herself by the time the figure had made it over the chainlink, hesitating briefly to untangle his foot from the bent w
ires at the top.

  She didn’t stop but seemed to fly up the front of the fence herself. If she touched the links with hand or foot, I couldn’t see it.

  Kobrinski too got tangled at the top, her bulky jacket slowing her down. She landed at the bottom on the other side and shouted her order again, but the figure had by this time made it around the bend, presumably to a waiting car, and roared off without turning on the headlights.

  “Damn, damn, damn!” she roared, kicking the fence angrily. “Ahh, damn it all to hell!”

  She climbed back over the fence, but this time I could hear the effort she took in scaling it. She paused, straddling the top, taking care to remove something from the top link without touching it too much herself. By the time she reached me, I was up and limping around in small circles, using every curse that Grandpa Oscar had taught me and a few that would have made him blush. I was trying to get my thigh to loosen up. If it had been wrapped around a walnut instead of my femur, the nut would have cracked in a second.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Cramped up,” I half gasped, half groaned, massaging my leg. “God, it hurts!”

  “Dehydration, probably, and oxygen deprivation in the muscle. Keep moving, keep rubbing it, and make sure to drink a lot of water when we get back,” she advised. “Let me give you a hand.” Sweat beaded on her forehead and I could feel the heat the two of us were both radiating in the chilly air.

  “Huh—how in the world did…did you do that?” I was just starting to get my wind back. “You were in the h…house when I took off!”

  She nodded, catching her breath now that the moment of pursuit was past. “I heard you shout and booked it.”

  “Booked it! That was nearly supersonic!”

  “I wouldn’t have made it this far if I didn’t have you to follow. You kept up pretty good there. Not bad at all.”

  “Pretty good?” I sputtered. “Not bad? I ran my heart out! I’ll never run that fast again, never in a month of Sundays! I nearly cripple myself and you—!”

  Kobrinski was laughing, silently, showing all those little pointed, catty teeth. She’d regained her wind in no time, while I was still huffing and puffing. “You’ll be fine.”