A Fugitive Truth

by Dana Cameron

  I couldn’t help myself, I didn’t mean to be dramatic, but I was dying of thirst and I paused to take a sip of water. You could have heard a pin drop in that room.

  “A few conjectures? My impressions are, based on the documents that describe the situation obliquely, the diary and the records that do survive, that it was someone close to the reverend, possibly even in his household. As far as motive, I don’t know for sure, but I get the impression from some of her hints that the reverend saw something he shouldn’t have. Perhaps it was town politics.

  “Perhaps”—I was reaching here, leaving my prepared text but following as the thought occurred to me—“he had something someone else wanted—position, security, wealth? Something that provoked his murderer to speedy, vicious action.”

  I was really working the nerves of the audience now, and I noticed Pam shaking her head. I was pushing it. I had to bring it back to my research.

  “All I know for certain—now—is that Margaret Chandler knew who the guilty party was and ultimately convinced Matthew Chandler to look in the right place for the real murderer. But because she left her diary”—I stressed that word emphatically—“as a clue, we are that much closer to learning the truth of what happened the day she believed she would be hanged. We know that she was acquitted, but I am still hot on the trail of why.

  “Dr. Maya Angelou once wrote that we, all of us, owe a tremendous debt to the past, that we must make an account of ourselves to those who came before us and struggled to make us what we are, what we can be. In this case, she was referring to our own personal antecedents, but I think that as archaeologists, historians, and others interested in the past, that idea holds a special message for us. It is an adjuration to look beyond the obvious, the easy, the comfortable, to consider all of the possibilities. In the case of Madam Chandler, there was simply a confluence of unrelated events that led to one innocent person being unjustly accused.

  “Margaret Chandler was right, things aren’t always what they seem, even when the facts are fitted into a sensible pattern. As the evidence accumulates, we are liberated to think the unthinkable, in the name of justice. We owe it to the past to learn the lesson that Margaret Chandler lived and taught, that the truth is more than a sum of facts. We must dedicate ourselves to that notion if we are to do good history, because that simple statement, a simple remark made in a private document, inexorably moves us to truth. Thank you.”

  There was a slight delay before the audience applauded, and there was something subdued about their response. I couldn’t blame them, I was feeling a little wrung out myself. Luckily Harry was there to rescue me.

  “I’m sure that Dr. Fielding would be happy to answer any questions you might have.”

  I didn’t know about happy, but after a moment, a few brave souls stuck their hands up and hazarded questions about my proposed archaeological work, a few about the role of women in the eighteenth century. Knowing that a good lecture begets good questions, I was able to calm myself down as I settled in and answered them.

  With a decent pause after the last hand was raised, Harry thanked everyone, and the room started to empty out, save for the folks who wanted to shake my hand, touch the hand that touched the hand, so to speak, in a private audience. I saw that the director, Evert Whitlow, left in a hurry, his lips pursed and his eyes narrowed. Seeing this, Harry excused himself, wanting to speak to me but obviously pressed for time. “Be in tomorrow?” he mouthed.

  I nodded and turned back to the last woman in line, who was explaining how much land her important Revolutionary-period ancestors had. After what seemed like an eternity, she left, and I was alone in the room, save for Detective Kobrinski, who was talking to Sasha, and Mr. Constantino, who, surprisingly, was waiting for me.

  “I don’t know what kind of game you are playing here, but I think we’d all be much happier if you left Shrewsbury immediately.” It was clear that he was not happy, his temper controlled by the slimmest of margins. I swear I saw him trembling in the half light.

  I kept my voice calm. “I’m not leaving. I haven’t done anything.”

  “You’ve been nothing but trouble since you came here, and now, this…garbage. In front of an audience. Board members, even. This is going to stop, right now.”

  “It’s going to take more than your wishing, for me to leave,” I said. “If you’re that concerned about it, take it up with the board. Let them ask me to leave. If you’ll excuse me…”

  I quite deliberately turned my back on him and started to pack up my slides and notes.

  “This isn’t over, not yet,” Constantino growled.

  “You’re right about that,” I said, watching him march out of the auditorium.

  The other two women were still in conversation as I started to leave. “Ms. Fielding, I’ll stop back by the house on my way out,” Pam Kobrinski called, interrupting her conversation with Sasha.

  I was so jazzed with adrenaline and the thought of what I’d just tried to do that it took me nearly the entire walk home to calm down. The cold air outside the house must have made me particularly sensitive, because the moment I opened the front door of the residence, the smell hit me. Something was burning. The smell increased in intensity as I quickly moved into the foyer, and I realized that now I could hear crackling coming from the residence’s library.

  I hurried in and saw that there was a small fire in the fireplace, and that whoever had started it hadn’t properly opened the flue, for smoke was slowly accumulating near the ceiling. Coughing and cursing, I cranked the flue all the way open, but when I looked down, I saw that there was a book burning in the fireplace.

  My heart stopped. Not the journal. It couldn’t be Madam Chandler’s journal…

  I lost another precious moment fumbling with the fire screen, but finally wrenched the doors apart. Grabbing the poker, I tried to knock the burning book out of the fireplace and only succeeded in bouncing it against the inside of the screen, sending up a shower of sparks. I swore and threw the poker aside.

  There was nothing else to do. I reached in and grabbed the corner that seemed least touched by the tongues of flame and flung the book onto the hearth. I faltered and lost another precious second when I dropped it again, before I seized it once more, determined to rescue it. I felt the heat of the fire on the tender skin between the top of my leather gloves and the hems of my coat sleeves. Finally I whipped off my gloves and began beating the book with them, until I began to believe I would be able to save it.

  Although I now recognized that the book was in fact not Madam Chandler’s journal, I still worked feverishly to extinguish the blaze. I slapped at it repeatedly, glad my gloves seemed to be holding out against the fire, for I now recognized that I was trying to rescue Faith’s missing diary.

  Chapter 19

  MY FACE WAS GETTING HOT FROM MY PROXIMITY TO the fire and the added fear that I might be too late to save Faith’s diary. There were smuts of burning paper flying up around me as I slapped at the flames consuming the diary, and I had to trust that they were not igniting the carpet when they fell. By the time I’d completely extinguished the small blaze, my leather gloves were a lost cause. I coughed as I determined whether anything had been preserved of the diary.

  There was almost nothing left but a handful of feathery soot and tatters of burnt paper that clung delicately to the brittle bound spine of the notebook. The cardboard cover was virtually destroyed, as were most of the pages. Painstakingly, I removed the fragments that were completely burnt. Every time I moved the diary more of it disintegrated, but eventually I reached a thin core of pages that had partially survived. They were stuck together with soot around the edges, and I realized that Faith had not completely filled up her journal: a number of the lined pages were blank at their unburned centers. Suppressing all impatience, I worked back from the unburned parts, trying not to disturb those that were more badly damaged. Finally, I bent one of the blank sheets over, and pried off a scrap of a page with some writing on it. By gettin
g so close that my nose was practically touching the sheet, I could make out handwriting, faintly seen through the scorch marks.

  It was the last page of the diary and the only one that was still partially legible. What I saw were partial lines at the center of the page, and as I read, I struggled to re-create the complete sentence that would have encapsulated the surviving phrases:

  e might become an engaging obsessi

  possessed by such a grand one himself. Who’

  ere such demons behind that mask, so d

  ious. Which will prevail when I tel

  know all his secrets? I think I can trust the

  y control in this. Such a wee sleekit c

  ut a diversion until

  ust choose between them b

  The smoke and ash irritated my throat as I puzzled over the words. They were the last words, perhaps, that Faith had ever written in her journal, for the entry, such as it was, ended halfway down the remnant page. A shiver crawled across my back, and I hunched closer over the scrap. She had a mind like a razor and the soul to match; her words chilled me. The way she calculated her emotions was inhuman. It seemed to me that Faith wrote about confronting someone, a man—obsessed by something—with her knowledge of him. Faith seemed to have been trying to decide how long to amuse herself before she had to decide about…what?

  Whoever this man was, she obviously believed she was in control of the situation. Ultimately, the candidate for her obsession must have surprised her. I recognized a line from Burns: “Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous, beastie.” Had the mousie turned on Faith to bite? And had he been the one to steal, and then immolate, the diary?

  I phoned the library, but the guard told me that the detective had already left. I got up slowly, and tried to decide what to do with the remaining fragment of the notebook. It was much too fragile to move, and I didn’t want to just leave it lying around, so I put it into the cabinet by the fireplace, just in case someone decided to get curious about my room again. I went upstairs, kicked off my pumps and changed into jeans and sneakers, swapping my wool coat for a thick fisherman’s sweater. The weather was warmer today with more teasing hints of spring to come, but I felt a cold no number of layers could thaw.

  I followed the road back to the library, figuring to catch Kobrinski on her way to see me. I didn’t like where all of this was leading, I thought grimly, namely, straight to Michael’s doorstep. He had more of a mask than almost anyone I knew and all that attitude had to be covering something. The only thing that kept me from just going up to my room and hiding under my blankets was the fact that it wasn’t up to me to decide. I was glad of that, because it just didn’t feel right to me—I didn’t want to like someone who was a killer—but with such damning evidence, I had to tell Pam Kobrinski.

  I’d almost reached the library when I stopped. Hairs prickled down the back of my neck. Not knowing why I did so, I turned around just in time to see the flapping tails of a dark overcoat disappear into the woods. I moved a few steps farther, wondering what in hell Michael, a purely urban creature, was doing walking off the road, much less heading into the woods. After all, the trees would certainly impair any dramatic entrance, I thought wryly, catching at that great billowing coat.

  My heart caught in mid-beat and my blood seemed to freeze solid in my veins. Flapping. Billowing. Billowing. Jack had described seeing Faith’s jumper billowing, when it never could have.

  Oh shit.

  It was Michael out there, the night Faith was murdered, I thought, my stomach dropping away. And now Michael had tried to destroy the evidence that might connect him with her. Michael was the murderer.

  “Oh. There you are.”

  The quiet voice at my shoulder startled me so violently that I pivoted around, throwing a perfectly focused, unthinking elbow strike to the speaker’s head. It was the sort of reaction that my coach Nolan has been trying to coax out of me forever. The only problem was that Nolan has always urged me to know precisely what my target was. It wasn’t until I’d swung around that I saw to my horror that it was Pam Kobrinski’s head I was trying to knock off her shoulders.

  I didn’t have enough control to stop the strike, but my good luck loitered: My elbow whizzed past her, three inches shy of actual contact. She flinched backward, and deflected the blow as she went into a defensive stance. I stumbled, then froze as best I could, lest the good detective shoot me, just on principle.

  We eyed each other warily for a second, me panting with panic at what I’d almost done, she watching to see what I’d do next. I put my hands over my mouth, then over my eyes, trying to figure out how to start apologizing.

  “Hiding like that isn’t a real good followup to an aggressive move. Makes you a real good target,” Pam murmured, never taking her eyes off me as she slowly rose up from her crouch. She swallowed, licked her lips, then cracked her neck. “Makes me want to hit you.”

  I peeled my hands away from my face. “Oh God, you scared me…I am so sorry.” Great; my two best strikes had come first when I was asleep, and then against someone on my side. On top of that, if Nolan ever found out that I’d backed off an attack, he’d nail my hide to the barn wall. Good job, Em.

  “You jumpy for some good reason?” The detective finally relaxed, shaking out tensed muscles. The thoughts that had been engulfing me came flooding back.

  “Just now, right now, it was…I saw Michael going into the woods,” I stammered. I told her briefly about what Jack had said about billowy skirts and my discovery of the burning stolen diary. “He must have got panicked from my talk and tried to get rid of the evidence.”

  She suddenly was all business. “How far down?”

  I pointed to the place, about a city block from where we stood.

  She nodded briefly. “Here’s what you do. First, you go to the library. You stay near people. You follow me and I swear to God, I’ll shoot you myself.” Her finger came within an inch of my nose. “I don’t need any more heroics from you, Wonder Woman. Capisce?”

  I nodded, my throat tightening. She didn’t need heroics and I didn’t need to be anywhere near this confrontation. Michael, how could you?

  “Second”—she knelt down to check that her shoelaces were tied tightly—“You call every cop that Monroe’s got. You tell them an officer needs assistance. Got that?”

  “Got it,” I said. “I go to the library, I call the cops. You be careful.” Pam nodded and started running quietly along the verge, toward the point in the woods where I’d seen Michael disappear, moving with the confident grace of a big predator. I tried my cell phone: no signal. I went inside and headed for the security office. Locked tight. There was a phone in the hall near the library. Even when it occurred to me that Detective Kobrinski had to have a radio to call for backup, that she was trying to get me out of the way, I was more than happy to be gone and play the part of the chorus hollering for help. I was just digging a quarter out of my pocket when the library doors swung open.

  Michael stood in the doorway, staring at me fixedly. Without thinking, I backed up a step or two. A brief flare of guilt—Michael, I’ve just betrayed you!—followed and was quenched by a strong flood of fear and anger that surged through me. I backed up, shaking my head, trying to understand what was happening.

  Michael cleared his throat. “You’ve got to tell me, Emma.”

  I could barely think of what I should do, but settled for backing away another step. “What?”

  “I’m not a bad-looking guy, am I?”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “I mean, if you shut off your overactive superego, you’d be on me in a heartbeat, right?”

  “H—how did you get here?” I stuttered. My mind raced. He looked like he’d just woken up from my lecture, not like he’d been out tramping in the woods…there must be a back door. But I knew there was no back door from the room he’d emerged from.

  “How did I get here?” He sighed heavily. “Okay, when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, and they’re
married—somehow state approval’s always required in these talks—” he muttered to himself.

  “Michael! Where were you just now?” I demanded, closing the space between us. I was going to get some answers now, come hell or high water.

  Michael paused, shaking his head, and backed away from me, now realizing that I was serious but not understanding why. “The library, trying to decide whether Sasha likes me. All those cute outfits, the little girlish confidences? She does, she wants me bad. And who can blame her, how can she even think of that bookworm geek when I’m in the room? Oh, Harry’s all right, but he’s just too subdued for me. More importantly, too subdued for Sasha. He’s just dull, quiet as a—”

  “‘Wee, sleekit mousie,’” I finished, shaking my head disbelievingly. It couldn’t be. But it suddenly made a whole world of sense.

  “Burns wrote ‘beastie,’” Michael corrected. “But it would be boring of me to point that out. I’m just thinking of Sasha. She needs someone with a life. Harry’s just got his books. I like books too, but frankly, I bet Harry’s got paper cuts on his dick—”

  “Michael, shut up for a second! Harry’s the killer! I just sent Pam Kobrinski after him, I thought it was you—”

  “Me? Oh, Emma!” He sounded disappointed and disapproving. Then seeming to hear what I was saying, he took the receiver out of my hand and dialed 911, without using the coin I tried to press on him. “Don’t need it for 911,” he said, impatiently.

  “Right. Call the cops, tell them what’s happened,” I said, backing down the hallway. “Tell them an officer needs assistance.”

  He covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to warn Pam Kobrinski!” I called over my shoulder, as I opened the door. “She’s looking for you. She won’t expect Harry!”

  “You can’t go back out there! You’ll be killed!” Michael’s fear was one of the few undisguised emotions I’d ever seen him show.