The Northbury Papers

by Joanne Dobson

  Piotrowski removed the first packet of envelopes from the battered hatbox, and untied the string. A dozen small, cream-colored envelopes slid across the scarred table. They were addressed in Serena Northbury’s rounded handwriting to Mrs. Henry Linwood, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The lieutenant and Sergeant Schultz had met me at BCI headquarters at nine A.M., and we’d proceeded immediately to the evidence room.

  “I don’t get it.” Piotrowski shook his head. “How could this Northbury woman be in possession of a bunch of letters she sent to someone else?”

  “It was a custom,” I said, my eyes sliding past him toward the first envelope, trying to burn a hole through it with my gaze so I could begin to read the letter. “When somebody died, you sent any letters you’d received from them back to their family. As a kind of remembrance, I imagine. This—” I glanced at the envelope, “—this Mrs. Linwood—or her family—would have returned Mrs. Northbury’s letters to her daughters when she heard about Northbury’s death.”

  “Whatdaya know?” The big cop’s expression turned from puzzled to sentimental. “That’s kinda nice.” He pondered the idea, then said, “But, Jeez, I don’t know if I’d want my kids to get ahold of any letters I ever wrote.”

  “I didn’t know you had kids, Lieutenant.” For a moment my attention was diverted from the letters.

  “Oh, yeah. Two boys—well, men now; they’re both in their early twenties. Nice kids.”

  “Really?” I was so intrigued by the notion of the lieutenant as a family man—a father, sons—that I almost forgot why I was there. “Where do they—?”

  “Humph.” Sergeant Schultz interrupted our schmoozing with an irritated clearing of her throat. “The letters, Professor?”

  Piotrowski placed both square hands flat on the table and pushed his chair back. “I’ll leave you with the sergeant, Doctor. Just read through these letters; anything strikes you that could possibly relate to the homicides, let her know.”

  “It might take awhile.” I gestured at the half dozen string-tied packets of letters. At the other end of the table, Schultz sighed.

  “That’s all right, Doctor,” Piotrowski said, directing his comments to me but chastising his subordinate with a slit-eyed look. “I’m sure the sergeant’s got plenty of reports to write.”

  “Humph.” Schultz yanked a manila file folder from the canvas briefcase beside her chair, slapped it on the table in front of her, and proceeded ostentatiously to ignore my existence.

  As the heavy door closed behind Piotrowski, I recalled that I’d intended to tell him about Wiggett’s call to my editor. Too late now—he was gone. And I wasn’t about to volunteer any information at all to this obnoxious little sergeant. I slipped the first letter out of its envelope. Earl Wiggett could wait.

  The letter was dated 17 April 1856, and had been mailed to Mrs. Linwood in Philadelphia from Serena Northbury’s Fifth Avenue home. My Dear Evelyn, I read, I did so rejoice to hear your joyful news. Another woman-child! And a Lucretia, to join sisters Elizabeth and Susan! I anticipate a new age of woman’s rights to spring forth in Philadelphia—and all from under your roof! It is remarkable what a wondrous home can be built upon a clear envisioning of the right relationship of man and woman. Dear Henry! Would that I were equally blessed!

  Interesting, I thought. The supposedly conservative Mrs. Northbury was talking like an advocate of women’s rights. I read on.

  But, alas, as you know, I must keep my views hidden in order to maintain the calm and order of my own home, such a lack of sympathy here abides. But I dare say no more.

  Aha! Maybe not so conservative, after all. Maybe in telling such conventional love stories—masterful heroes, submissive heroines—Serena Northbury had merely been prudent. I scribbled a note to that effect on my yellow pad.

  “What?” Schultz raised her eyes from her report writing.

  “Nothing,” I replied. “Just an idea for my biography.”

  “You’re not here to do research for your biography, Dr. Pelletier.” The officer’s gaze was stern under the straight reddish bangs.

  I sighed. This woman was really too much. “Sergeant, I’m a professional researcher. It’s my job to gather the information I need to reconstruct Serena Northbury’s life. And I have a feeling this material is going to be tied up for a long, long time. I may not have a chance to look at these letters again for years—”

  “Forget the book,” Schultz snapped. “You’re here to look for anything that might provide a motive for murder, and that’s all. Got that?” Schultz’s eyes goose-stepped back to her report. She mumbled, “Not that you’re going to find anything.…”

  “What was that, Sergeant?” Schultz really knew how to get on my nerves. “Did you say something, Sergeant?” I used the tired old teacher’s ploy as if she were a sullen student. “I couldn’t quite hear you.”

  She gave me a fish-eyed look. “You might as well admit it, Doctor: This boondoggle is nothing but a waste of time. God knows what the lieutenant has in mind; I sure don’t. And I’ve got a heck of a lot better things I could be doing right now, instead of babysitting you. So I’d appreciate it if you’d just stop having ideas for your biography and get through this bunch of letters quick, so I can get lunch at a decent hour.”

  The thick paper felt stiff between my fingers as I glared at the truculent woman on the far end of the table. “You’ve got an attitude problem, Sergeant.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, talk about attitude—”

  I sighed. “Look, let’s not get into this, okay?” I had neither the time nor the energy for a juvenile confrontation with this obnoxious cop. “We both want me to get through these letters, right? So we can both get out of here. Let’s just leave it alone. Okay?”

  Felicity Schultz pursed her lips with contempt, then turned back to the stack of forms she was filling in. Scribble. Scribble. Scribble. Busy. Busy.

  I gave her my best professorial glower, but it was wasted; she didn’t glance up once. I returned to Mrs. Northbury’s letter.

  Have you heard from our mutual friend? Does Canada East yet welcome the small band of intrepid travelers? Forgive me if I am importunate, but I have none else to ask. I fear I will lie awake each night until I receive word of a safe arrival. Of one brave heart in particular—as you well know. Oh, dear friend, without your beneficent and large understanding, I should surely find myself driven to madness.

  Canada East? Isn’t that what Quebec Province was called prior to Canadian confederation? A special friend of Mrs. Northbury’s was traveling to Quebec? Okay. But why the fear of “madness”? And why does she refer to Mrs. Linwood’s “beneficent and large understanding”? This passage puzzled me. I read it over again. Quebec?

  I must have said the word aloud, because Schultz demanded, “What about Quebec?”

  “Oh, nothing,” I replied, startled by her question. “It’s just floating around in my head. Northbury mentions it in this letter, and I seem to link her in some other way with Quebec.” I wiggled my fingers. “I just can’t recall—”

  “Child of the North Star, page four hundred thirty-two,” Schultz recited.

  “What?”

  “One of the pages we found at the scene? Okay? The part where the little girl is dying? In the cottage? Mrs. Northbury talks about the mountains of old Quebec.”

  “So she does, Sergeant,” I said, wonderingly. I was beginning to recall it now: something about the green mountains of old Quebec. “So she does.” I stared at Schultz. “But how on earth did you come to remember that?”

  “It’s my job to remember things, Doctor Pelletier. I’m a professional investigator. You’re not the only professional in the world, you know.”

  On campus, a voice-mail message from my Oxbridge editor awaited me. “Karen, Tess Holmes here. This Northbury manuscript thing just gets curiouser and curiouser. Do you know Sally Chenille? Call me.”

  I did. Immediately. “Sally Chenille?” I queried, incredulously. “What connection could La Chenille possibl
y have with Serena Northbury?”

  “You tell me, Karen. All I know is, I got another call from that Wiggett guy. He said a ‘big name’ cultural theorist was ‘chomping at the bit’ to co-edit this mysterious novel he’s got a line on. He wasn’t going to let me know who that was, but I’m pretty foxy; I got it out of him.”

  “You’re pretty foxy, and he’s pretty dense.” I aimed for cool, but my teeth were clamped together so tight I felt my ears pop: No wacked-out intellectual-trend-slave like Sally Chenille was going to get her hands on my Mrs. Northbury’s manuscript. Not if I could help it. “So tell me, Tess, are you interested?”

  “In working with the notorious Sally Chenille? Not on your life! Sally only looks out for number one, and if that means backing out on publishing contracts, no problem. She screwed us that way once already, and I understand Oxbridge isn’t the only press she’s left holding the bag.” She paused, then continued, hesitantly, “I would be interested in seeing that novel manuscript, though. But that puts me in a kind of a bind, which is why I called you. You’re one of our authors, and I don’t know this Wiggett at all, but it seems to me that if anyone should be editing a Northbury novel, it should be you.”

  I unclenched my teeth. Breathed again. “Seems that way to me, too, Tess. Look, did Wiggett tell you he’s actually got the novel?” I knew the state police had at least six pages of it, but the whereabouts of the rest was still a mystery.

  “No. He was very hush-hush about it. Big secret. He’s ‘got a line on it,’ that’s as much as he’d say, and, oh yes, he said he knew Sally from grad school, and that she—now, I wrote this down word for word, so I know I’ve got it right—he said Sally was ‘enticed by yet a further opportunity to violate the self-perpetuating power structure of the bourgeois academic literary establishment.’ Does that make sense to you?”

  “Hah!” I blurted out. “She’s ‘enticed’ by yet a further opportunity to make a buck and get her skinny little tattooed butt in the limelight.”

  “Karen! Really!” Tess’s mock horror was followed by a shared hearty laugh.

  I hung up, determined to do whatever I had to in order to locate Serena Northbury’s unpublished tale of interracial love and loss.

  “Greg,” I asked, between sips of chardonnay, “how would you feel about you and I having a little adventure?” Irena was visiting her parents in Greenwich for the week, and Greg was cozily settled with me at a corner table in the back room at Rudolph’s as we awaited our orders of polenta and shrimp with cream sauce. Rudolph’s had a new chef, and the menu was even more outrageous than ever.

  “A little adventure?” Greg’s face went pale. “But … but … what about Irena?”

  I chortled. “Silly! That’s not what I meant!” I slapped him on the hand.

  “Only joking,” he replied, with a small, embarrassed laugh.

  Oh, yeah? I thought, but decided to let it go. “What I have in mind isn’t anything quite so dangerous as what you’re thinking.”

  A split second’s hesitation was followed by a bawdy wink. “Too bad,” he said.

  Riiight! I thought. Greg was the most thoroughly married person I’d ever met. “Listen, here’s the deal. I spent most of the day reading through a bunch of hundred-and-fifty-year-old letters.…” I went on to explain about the cache of Northbury epistles in the old blue hatbox now in police custody.

  From reading those letters, I’d learned a great deal about Serena Northbury, her life, and her interests. She’d surprised me. In spite of the conventional men and women in her novels, this woman had been an early feminist. Comments to friends revealed her staunch belief in equal rights for women, and, further, a passionate interest in the abolition of slavery. The hatbox had held letters to and from women’s rights leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, and noted abolitionists such as Lydia Maria Child and Frederick Douglass. Evidently Mrs. Northbury contributed generously to both the women’s rights movement and the abolitionist movement. But her contributions had been surreptitious. Because she did not wish, as she told Douglass, a former slave, “to incur the displeasure of the unhappy tyrant in my own home.”

  As the result of his “furious driving” on Broadway, Mrs. Northbury’s husband Howard had been crippled in a carriage accident early in their marriage. Aha! I thought. That explains why she had three children in the first five years, and then no more. Left without income, the young wife had turned to writing novels to support her children and supply her invalid husband’s needs. Reading between the lines of her letters, particularly those to her college friend Evelyn Linwood, I determined that Howard Northbury had soon become a soured, twisted domestic tyrant, playing on his wife’s pity and guilt to create a repressive atmosphere in their Manhattan home. Meadowbrook seemed to have been her refuge from him, and she and her daughters had spent increasingly long periods at their country estate. Poor Serena Northbury, I thought, from a sour father to a sour husband. Despite her phenomenal success as a popular author, Northbury’s life had been lonely and filled with recrimination.

  I’d finished reading the last letter with a sigh, handed it over to Sergeant Schultz, and watched her bundle it with the others and slap the battered cover back on the blue hatbox. This brief immersion in Serena Northbury’s life had only whetted my appetite. Then my editor’s phone call had galvanized me into action. Before I’d pushed through the heavy English Department door, I’d made up my mind to scoot up to Eastbrook that very night. I had to try to get into Gerry Novak’s ramshackle cottage with its treasure trove of old papers and magazines. After all, who would it hurt? And, besides, if I played by the rules, I could miss out on vital information that might help me locate the missing manuscript, and that would certainly help make this fascinating writer’s story come alive for a whole new generation of readers.

  Greg sat silent as I finished my tale, then nodded at the waiter as he slid the outlandish concoction of seafood and cornmeal mush in front of us. I stared at my plate and groaned. “Cholesterol city!” I exclaimed and grabbed for my fork. Greg speared a hush puppy.

  Halfway through the meal, Greg resurfaced. “This guy … Novak,” he mused, “wasn’t he Jill Greenberg’s … ah, you know … inamorato?”

  “How’d you know that?” I laid my fork across the still-laden plate. “She told me their relationship was a secret.”

  Greg shrugged. “It may have started out as a secret, but since Novak’s death, everyone seems to know. Jill’s pregnancy makes it an especially juicy piece of gossip, you know. Everyone’s been trying to figure out who the baby’s father is. Let’s see, Miles Jewell told me first. You know what an old gossip he is. Then I heard it again from Sally Chenille.”

  Sally Chenille! That woman’s name kept popping up! “Huh. Whatdaya know? Here I am, faithfully keeping confidence, and all Enfield is in on Jill’s secret!”

  “You know what it means, don’t you, Karen?”

  “What?”

  “If Gerry Novak is the father of Jill’s baby, then the kid—excuse me—Eloise, inherits anything he owned.”

  I laughed. “So, you mean, I don’t have to break into the Novak cottage tonight. I can just wait until Eloise turns twenty-one and gives me permission to go through the moidering ruins? Let’s see, that would be sometime in the twenty-teens.…”

  “Anyone ever tell you you’ve got a one-track mind?”

  “All the time. So,” I laid my hand on his arm, “will you come up to Meadowbrook with me?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” He laughed, and patted his stomach. “If I can still move after this meal.”

  Pushing my plate away, I signaled to the waiter. “Two coffees, please, not decaf.”

  “For dessert tonight we have New Orleans bread pudding with bourbon sauce,” the ponytailed young waiter announced. “And—”

  “Stop right there,” Greg responded. “Two orders of the bread pudding—and make my coffee a double espresso.”

  “Greg,” I moaned, “what are you trying to do to me?”
But somehow the waiter got away before I could cancel my share of the dessert.

  “You seen Avery lately?” Greg asked, far too casually, running the sliver of lemon rind around the rim of his espresso cup.

  “No.” I gulped, and tried to pass it off as a reaction to the strong coffee. “Why do you ask?” Surely Greg wasn’t about to badger me again about Avery Mitchell?

  “Well, because a funny thing happened when I was in his office the other day. We were talking about the curriculum revision, when he got a phone call, went white as snow, then asked me if we could continue our conversation later. In other words, get the hell out of here. So I left, and when I tried to get back to him, he’d taken off for a few days, and Lonnie couldn’t tell me when he’d return.”

  “Hmm,” I said, recalling the voice-mail message Avery had left me saying he had to leave town unexpectedly.

  “So—I wondered if you had any idea what’s going on with Avery? He’s usually so conscientious.”

  “Greg, what makes you think I would know anything at all about Avery Mitchell’s private business?” I gave him a straight, dispassionate stare.

  “No reason.” He shrugged, hands spread wide. “Just wondered. That’s all.”

  The Novak cottage was easy to access. The door was locked, but Greg trained my flashlight on it as I slid a thin supermarket savings card into the jamb. Life with Tony had taught me a few useful skills: how to shoot a handgun, how to jimmy a window, how to pick a lock.

  In the warm darkness of the late-June evening, Meadowbrook was deserted. Beyond the barn and the carriage house, the big house hulked silent in the near distance. “This is perfect,” I whispered to my accomplice. “If I’d waited much longer, they’d have hired a new caretaker, and we wouldn’t have been able to get in here.”