A Fugitive Truth

by Dana Cameron

  Au voir, Daphne, and With all wishes for God’s Blessings from

  Your devoted and grateful Cousin,

  Margaret

  Post scriptus: Do you remember our Wager? I may have News for you soon…

  I sat stunned for a moment: there was not a scrap about the trial. I hurried on to the next, shorter, letter, not in Margaret’s hand; the writing was not as well formed, but was still readily readable. Maybe there would be some reference there.

  September 30, 1723, London,

  My chere Margareta,

  I was pleased to perform the office of Nurse to your pore Mother, who was so distress’d at your news, that she fainted away and could not be revived without several glasses of French Brandy, in which I was forced to share, to lead her in a good example. Had I known that your letter to her had been delayed leavin London, I shouldn’t have announced (thinkin as I did, that I brot the best of news), “Margaret is saved from Hangin!” Really, you sho’d take grater care in your corespondence. I was obliged to recount the whole tale, instead of retirin, as you know I prefer, to a quiet corner to observe the Company at hand, so that I was quite the focal point of interest and was begged to tell the tale again and again. I am happy to take this trouble for you, but I hope that in future you will not be so thotless. I make this a present of advise (not so very stern a rebuke) to you, from your older, more experienc’d couzin. I was pleazed to hear that Matthew was so much a part of the relief of your distress, for Caroline Denbigh ust to call him “that grate, lumberin mute” (much aginst my protests, for I knew your warm feelings for him), and he has never been much outspoken, at least in polite company, but I knew myself that he had hidden qualities.

  I have dispatched the beding and the Napkins for you, and have encluded a few trifels more, though what use they can be to you in that Howlin Wilderness, I cannot imagine. Who is there to pleaze? Though, of course, you will want to keep as much with the Times as possible, against your Returne (I hope soon?) to England. Also, I’ve sent patterns of this years silkes, if you wish to be o current in matters of dress as well. If you can send me more of that Barbadoes Rumm, I would be thankfull. It is a soveraine remedie for female weaknesses, which you remember have been a burthen to me as long as I can recall. Not the New Englande rumm, which is harsh and fit only for dosin servants. You had very much better send two barrels, for Mr. Jack Mainwaring sometimes likes to make a Rumm punch. I am afraid he will go all to excess, mixin limes and oranges and hot water with it (which increaseth the potentcy), and often advise him to take it in some less excitin form, neate and unmixed, as I do. When I am ill.

  I do not remember a wager between us; you know I never take wagers, unless they be verry small and not even then, savin as a jest. You write of news, but I cannot think why you did not tell me in your last letter; tell me plainly what your news is. You must learn to carry yourself as a Woman, and leave off Girls games and foolin and you won’t find yourselfe in such troubles.

  I keep this short, and not start another sheet, to prevent you payin much postage. I must go visitin now, and then plan our ball for the opening of the Season. I am a slave to my duties, as you know, and if you do not come home soon, you may not see me alive again, I am so troubled with them. But I undertake all, as cheerefully as any woman in the world, and do my Christian work.

  Your ever-lovin couzin, Daphne

  The last letter was from Margaret, and while I was let down that it did not have any news about the trial, I should have remembered that nothing ever works out the way you expect in historical research. I’d had so much luck so far, it seemed greedy to want more—but it was the only really crucial part of the mystery I didn’t yet understand.

  22 November 1723, Stone Harbor

  My Dear Daphne,

  I am disappointed that you do not recall our Wager, for I believe I sh’ll be the Winner. A Shame for I sho’d have taken Delighte in choosing the bolt of silk, but no matter: I will not hold you to it as the Object itselfe is too important. My Newes is this: An it pleases God, there will be an Heir to our House in the early spring. The Justice behaved like a Man at my telling him soe, that is to say, cut an Antick Caper and made the Parlour ring with Shouting, then was very meeke and bid me sit, to rest myself, then stand, that I might not crush the Babe, then sit again. He then decided that I must not come to Travaille here but return to England post haste and was in an extasy of Worrie about the Winter Storms for a Crossing and so in a space of two Moments determined I must remain here and you must send a Woman to me, for my time comes in April, I believe and I sho’d not attempt the voyage then. I wish you wo’d too, send me someone, for I know as much as any One about common or domestick Physick, but it wo’d be a Comfort to know that there was Another to help me.

  I am sorry to say that since my announcement, my dearest friend Matthew has beene a sore tryall to his Clerks and me, much distrackted unlesse he sits in Sessions, where he is much like himselfe, but away from there he forgets his Hat or rends it in thinking and planning, but I will forgive him the Repairs. He is only anxious for my Sake. I am well enough now, and sho’d continue so. Mother is kind to remind me that my Healthe is rude enough for a Shepherdesse, and I am content to leave my Fate and Soule in the Hands of the Almightie, but sometimes must battle an excess of Melancholie, which is the Babe making me humourous. You must send what is needeful for the little Stranger to come among us and I inclose a Bill against Morgan’s for the Expence. It is too bad of you not to recall our Wager, for I wo’d have prefered a Rose silke Satin…

  Write more if you like, I do not mind that Coste, but I think you are rather more busy than worried for my Accompts. I want your Letters more now, than ever, and remain, dear Cousin,

  Yr. faithful Loving Cousin,

  Margaret Amalie Chase Chandler

  I flipped back and forth through the letters. There was no way to get around it: I wasn’t going to find out about the trial from anything here at Shrewsbury. As disappointed as I was about the trial, I had to admit that what I found instead was a little jewel. Madam Chandler announced the imminent arrival of her first child with a mixture of pride and playful triumph, but I noticed a little nervousness worked in amongst her remarks about Justice Chandler’s reaction and her careless mention of her good health. Besides death by fire, mostly suffered from working stooped over in an open hearth with long skirts, childbirth was the leading cause of death for women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Faced with that knowledge, I might have been a little skittish myself. That reminded me that I should call Marty to see how she was doing.

  I checked my genealogical notes and found that she had been safely delivered of this child, and had seven more who survived to adulthood—quite an impressive feat for the time. Again I was struck by the irony of already knowing all the answers to the questions Margaret would have had about her life even as I was trying to piece together the shape of the quotidian existence she knew so well. For a moment I wished there was some way that I could reassure her that everything would turn out well, but then suffered a pang when I realized that Margaret had been dead for more than two hundred years and I would never get to meet her. It was difficult, at times, to remember that this research was a journey that I would make on my own, with no one to greet me at the end and confirm my conclusions. I alone was responsible for breathing life back into Margaret’s story.

  At the same time, I knew that I was coming to a kind of crossroads in my own life and wished someone might give me a few answers to that story too. I shook myself and returned to my work.

  Her cousin Daphne seems to have been a central character in that story—her name showed up often enough in the diary and her own hand revealed much of the truth at which Margaret hinted in her journal. Daphne Mainwaring obviously fancied herself the coming family matriarch and was what P. G. Wodehouse might have described as “acutely alive to the existence of class distinctions.” For all her bluster and her posturing, however, I got the impression that she was goodhearted,
though, and her remarks about the “trifels” she sent to Margaret and her wish for her return almost balanced her obvious desire to be the center of attention and the bearer of any news. Almost. That line about Margaret’s “thotlessness” was a pip. It was possible too that she wrote in jest—for all of her refusals about their wager, I noticed that Margaret still told her what she wanted for a prize; there might well be something more between them than the light tone of her letters suggested. And there must have been something in Daphne to have attracted such a series of husbands. Good grief, I had enough trouble just keeping up with one, never mind four in a row. She certainly didn’t have any of the stereotypical widow’s troubles in remarrying. I’d have to look into Daphne’s life a little further.

  It was that thought about historical realities that reminded me that I needed to get to work on my presentation for Monday—just five days away, now, and I would have to work through the coming weekend. I gathered up my computer and notes and carefully replaced the letters in the folder, set them on Sasha’s desk, and returned to the house.

  Michael was nowhere to be seen: good. It made it that much easier to ignore my growing concerns about him—for the moment. I made a couple of sandwiches, grabbed a carton of orange juice, and headed upstairs to get to work.

  I started sketching out an outline for the talk. Sasha had said about fifty minutes, so that meant about twenty pages if I read formally, or about five outlined pages if I were more casual about it. A little bit about my work on the archaeology of the Chandler house, which presumably was their new one, a little about other famous diarists—better throw in a little about Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and her work on Martha Ballard, to get the point across about the importance of scrutinizing even seemingly banal details as well as the relevance of women’s lives.

  The sound of the ringing phone scared the hell out of me. I thought about ignoring it, but habit got the better of me. It was Pam Kobrinski, and she didn’t have good news.

  “I have to release Gary Conner,” she announced briefly. “I thought you should know.”

  My heart sank. I hadn’t realized until just then how much I had been counting on his being guilty, even though I didn’t think much of him as a suspect. “Why?”

  “His fingerprints were found only on one of the books in his locker.”

  “The encyclopedia,” I said.

  “Right. How did you know that?” Kobrinski asked.

  “I couldn’t see Gary digging into the Puritan theories of praxis. What about other people’s prints?”

  “Not any we can identify. Some old ones of Harry Saunders, but that’s to be expected.”

  “No one else’s?” I asked, then made myself say what I was thinking. “Were there any of, y’know, Michael Glass-cock’s?”

  “No, why? Ah, because he was the one who happened to observe all this,” the detective answered her own question. “No, none of his. The others, the religious ones, had blurs and partials, and none of them looked too fresh. Gary maintains he’s innocent, and we couldn’t find a damned thing in his apartment to suggest that he’s not. He finally admitted that he did take something off the victim’s body—”

  “What was it?

  “Two twenty dollar bills.” She shrugged. “I think I believe him, he’s real scared now, but there’s not a lot I can do to prove that now. Constantino isn’t interested in prosecuting on the strength of an encyclopedia—hell, he’s taking Gary’s side, saying he was just looking something up. I called because…because I thought you’d want to know.”

  The way she said that reminded me of the rage that possessed Gary on his way out of the library. A little shiver ran down my spine, and I decided that I wouldn’t want to bump into him on a dark street. “Thanks for the warning.”

  There was a longish pause. “That’s not the only bad news. Legally, I’m also about three seconds away from having to release Paul Burnes. He’ll probably go this afternoon.”

  I gasped and she continued, angrily. “There’s not much I can do. At this point, it looks like he was on the plane at the time when his wife was murdered. I’ve got him until I can get a definite statement from the airline and from our ME, Dr. Bambury, but that’s it. Damn it, every time I get close to something in this case, it evaporates into nothing. People were killed, I’ve got leads—then—nothing!”

  I had to agree, thinking about Paul’s disturbing behavior in the interrogation room and my own sensation of being Alice in an overturned world. “Everything looks like the opposite of what it is. Smoke and mirrors.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. “Like the first time in history the guy who beats his wife isn’t the best suspect for killing her. And it happens on my watch. Any defense lawyer in the country would eat it up with a spoon, anyone else I bring in for this. I don’t know what else to do and I’m running out of options.”

  She sounded so frustrated that it was more out of a sense of pity than having any real solution that I made the offer. “Why not meet with me tomorrow? We can talk about other options.”

  I could hear paper ripping on the other end of the line and presently heard the munch of Tums as the detective mulled it over. “What other options? There are no other options.”

  “I’ll try to dredge up some other ideas. Just blue-sky. What can it hurt?”

  She sounded resigned and unconvinced. “Why not? I’m not getting anywhere fast at the moment. Make it breakfast early tomorrow?”

  I shuddered. “Make it lunch. I had a late night last night. And the night before.”

  “What are you working on there, anyway?” she asked. “I mean, officially?”

  “Journal of an eighteenth-century woman. Actually, she was caught up in a murder too, and when it was all over, she said, ‘The truth is more than a sum of facts.’”

  “Smart lady,” the detective said.

  I barely heard her. Suddenly, there was a roaring in my ears, brought on by the force of the idea that I’d just had. If I’d been a Zen student getting whacked in the head by an irritated monk, the impact couldn’t have been any more sharp or illuminating. Unfortunately, the notion that just occurred to me was as terrifying as it was sudden and irresistible.

  “Why don’t you come hear my presentation on Monday? I’m suddenly struck by a number of parallels between my research and this case that I think you’ll find interesting. I’m also betting that there’ll be one other person in the audience who’ll be impressed by the similarities as well. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow, but for now, I may have a plan to flush out the killer!”

  Chapter 17

  I RESOLUTELY WENT BACK TO MY ROOM, DETERMINED to continue framing my paper for the presentation on Monday, but despite my resolution it wouldn’t happen. Not a damned word. I stared at the screen. I thought about making another sandwich. I considered going for a run. Nothing. My heart just wasn’t in my lecture notes now, and my brain was entirely elsewhere.

  I realized that I’d been landlocked for too long. As much as I loved the library, I needed to see some landscape a little more lively than that on the estate. Water, if possible, deeper than wading depth. I needed to get out of there altogether, truth be told. I’d already told some friends at a local historical society that I’d be by for a visit at some point, and that trip would expand my horizons for the afternoon, at least. I left a note on the table, the phone rang; it was Sasha asking if I was okay, because I hadn’t shown up. I told her my plans and got into the car.

  As I drove farther away from the complex, losing myself on the highway, I felt as though a weight was falling from me; not only had my horizons been limited by the trees and buildings of Shrewsbury, but my spirit had been bound up by the place as well. It was almost as though I hadn’t taken a good deep breath in weeks, something that felt too much like distress, as opposed to plain old common or garden variety stress.

  And speaking of stress…Ol’ Bessy made an uncomfortable grinding sound as I shifted gears going up another foothill. It wasn’t so bad the next
time, but it persisted nonetheless. All of this gearwork was taking its toll on her, and this time I was convinced that there wasn’t going to be a nice, cheap quick fix for whatever was making that noise. It sounded terminal. I didn’t see any lights go on, and I had checked all the fluids repeatedly since I’d come out here, but I got the impression that if I made it through this trip, I’d be lucky.

  It was fortunate that the last unkind hill had brought me within level distance of my destination, the Redfield County Historic District. My friends Nell and Chris were in charge there; having started out years ago as the archaeological component of the visitor center’s crew of six, dwindling funds and increasing cutbacks insured that they now covered everything including geology, history, natural history, and, occasionally, archaeological fieldwork. Still, they were happy about it; the schools who perennially dropped off thousands of students from all over the state were happy about it, and they just kept crossing their fingers every time budget time came around.

  The visitor center was an ugly, squat concrete building that was meant to look exciting and modern but only managed to look like a bunker, stark and hideously out of place against its wooded location. The last hopeful gasp before the funds dried up in the 1980s, the building was just one story tall, with long banks of windows that afforded good views of the outside.

  I pulled into the parking lot, recently repaved to repair the damage from the frost heaves. It was a patchwork quilt of filled-in potholes, the tar stained with salt like the edge of a margarita glass. I found myself noticing, out of habit, which ones overlay others and were therefore later repairs. At one point, I was so busy following one long patch of purplish asphalt that I found myself observing that a break in the surface resembled two fragments of broken pottery that would mend together. I shook my head and thought, I need to get out more often. Really.