by Lev Raphael
Most of the conferees were silenced by his little harangue. But Grace-Dawn Vaughan slapped his face. “Beast! Two women have died and all you can think about is publicity!”
There was scattered applause in the room for her rebuke, but even in my dazed state, I could see that a scattering of the conferees looked guilty, as if they’d been planning to write about the conference themselves. Hoping to cash in on true-crime publishing bucks, I guess. To do him justice, Davenport looked abashed by his author’s denunciation, and he simmered right down.
Serena told me she had a call to make, and Stefan, Angie, and I sat together, huddled in chairs at the edge of the room like refugees.
“I don’t believe it,” I said more than once, and Stefan just nodded and agreed.
Van Deegan Jones and Verity Gallup were talking quietly in a corner and I thought with relief that this news would probably convince her that the conference had to be canceled, no matter how inconvenient that might be. Good. There was nothing I wanted more than to get out of town. It wouldn’t be so bad, would it? After all, we just had today and Sunday morning left. So it was only half a conference—wasn’t that better than none at all?
Jones and Gallup got up and walked over.
“I’m very sorry for the terrible trouble you’ve had,” Van Deegan Jones began. Verity Gallup nodded at his side. “It’s not at all what one expects at this kind of meeting.”
He made Chloe’s and Priscilla’s deaths sound like a lapse of manners at a garden party.
“It’s awful,” Verity said. “The conference has been very well run so far.”
“Yes,” Jones added. “And quite enjoyable.”
I waited for their announcement that they wanted to end the conference despite how well Serena and I had managed things, but they were clearly waiting for a response from me, and when I said “Thanks,” they just nodded.
This had to be some kind of bizarre joke. Jones and Gallup were so relaxed around each other you’d never have believed they’d been shrill and enraged at lunch yesterday. Was it simply that death had brought these enemies together? Or were they in cahoots?
“Nick,” Jones said genially, “why don’t you and your companions have your breakfast with us?” We all trooped over to their table. Every one else had settled down by now and was back to the main business of gorging themselves, and gossip.
I introduced Stefan to Jones and Gallup as SUM’s writer-in-residence, but both of them knew who he was (Stefan grinned his pleasure). I told them that Angie was a former student and Criminal Justice major.
Languidly, buttering a roll, Jones asked Angie, “What do you think about the two murders?” Jones could have been trying to get a dog to do a trick, and I saw Verity bristle at his attitude. “I say two, because suicide is murder, in a way murdering oneself, that is.” He chuckled indulgently at Angie.
Angie either didn’t pick up on his air of superiority or she ignored it. Matter-of-factly, she said, “It sure sounds like Priscilla killed Chloe and then killed herself, probably because she was afraid of being arrested. Women over forty do tend to hang themselves, but overall, guns are the primary weapon in suicide.”
Jones nodded.
“One thing’s kind of weird, though,” Angie continued, her eyes off to one side as if she were picturing the scene. “Why did she kill herself on campus, even all the way down there on the south end? Why not at home? Or someplace more secluded?”
Yes, I thought, why not?
“Are you suggesting that someone else murdered both women, or that there might even be two separate murderers?” Van Deegan Jones spoke so sharply that many conferees at other tables stopped talking.
Angie didn’t back down. “It depends—”
She didn’t get to finish what she was going to say, because Detective Valley walked into the dining room and stood where we all could see him. Instant attention.
He spoke. “I assume you’ve all heard by now that Professor Priscilla Davidoff is dead. I’m asking that no one leave the conference ahead of schedule, because the investigation of her death, and Chloe DeVore’s, is ongoing.”
“You’re not trapping me in this dump!” Devon Davenport swore.
Grace-Dawn Vaughan shushed him. “He said not to leave before the conference is over.”
“No one’s telling me what to do,” Davenport rumbled, but he must’ve known it was pointless.
There weren’t any questions for Valley, and I’m sure at that moment you would’ve had to pay most of the conferees to leave before they’d planned. Two deaths—maybe two murders! It was turning into an Agatha Christie movie.
I caught Valley’s eye as he turned to go, and he nodded, so I left with him. In the hallway—where I felt I’d spent most of my recent life—I asked, “Was it suicide?”
“Too soon to tell. No note, but it looks like suicide. Like she shot herself.” Valley paused, and I asked him if they’d found a Wharton book in her car. He grunted out a yes.
Then maybe we did have some kind of serial killer here. Someone obsessed with Edith Wharton. I could understand Jodie Foster as the object of a fixation, but Edith Wharton? Why? How? And who ever heard of a maniac being fixated on a dead writer? It didn’t bear thinking about.
I swallowed, and asked what the book was.
“A paperback of Ethan Frome. It’s got Professor Davidoff’s name written in it. We need to check her handwriting to make sure it’s her book. Does it have any significance?”
“Oh, jeez. Absolutely. Near the end of Ethan Frome, the main character tries to commit suicide—and he fails.”
“Looks like maybe Professor Davidoff did better than her inspiration.” Valley walked off without giving me any other details.
What next? Were there other Wharton books with suicide in them? And if so, were there going to be more deaths? How many more—and all before the end of the conference?
I closed my eyes as if I could visualize my entire Wharton bibliography, page by page, but I couldn’t recall any other suicide in her novels. Which left the short stories to consider, and there were over eighty of those.
Before I made any discoveries, Stefan and Angie emerged from the dining room to find me. I told them what little information Valley had shared, feeling pissed off. “We we don’t even know for sure how exactly Chloe was killed!”
Angie blurted out, “It was one of those granite tiles. She was struck once at the back of the head with the center of the tile, once with the edge. But there weren’t any fingerprints on it.”
Stefan and I rounded on her. “How do you know that?” we asked together. But she clammed up. In fact, she basically fled, and Serena appeared at the door before I could even consider anything as crazy as chasing Angie down the hallway.
I looked at Stefan, who said, “Those tiles are heavy, aren’t they? Which means the killer had to be pretty strong.”
“No. They’re only a foot square, and half an inch thick. I picked one up when I was in the hallway a few weeks ago. I was checking on how much progress they were making with the remodeling.”
“People,” Serena called out, “it’s time to move on to the panels. Well past time. We can’t let this news keep us from our work.”
Well, it wasn’t as inspiring as De Gaulle rallying the French under German occupation, but it was enough.
Stefan said he’d wait for me in the hallway. Inside, I made the appropriate announcements. This was the last full set of panels. We had other events scheduled for the afternoon and evening, and Sunday morning.
As the crowd began to scatter, Verity Gallup and Van Deegan Jones passed me. Her voice low, she was griping at Jones. “I can’t believe how sexist and condescending you are. You talked to that young woman as if she were a child.”
“She is a child,” Jones groused. “And you, you’re a menopausal bitch.”
I didn’t catch the rest of their edifying exchange.
Out in the hallway, Stefan took me aside, looking very concerned. “There’s no way Pr
iscilla killed herself.”
“How do you know?”
Stefan grabbed my arm as if he were a union boss and I was a strike breaker. “Didn’t you tell me a while back that she had a new book coming out in the summer? How could she miss the excitement of that?”
Around us, conferees were taking their notebooks, notes, programs, briefcases to various seminar rooms. Order seemed restored.
And then I was ambushed by the EAR chair, Coral Greathouse.
Wearing a drab, square-cut brown suit that made her look like a stewardess on a 1950s Iron Curtain airline, she held herself very stiffly today, as if determined not to be emotional.
“Nick, I heard about Priscilla and I am very concerned. The conference wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
With false sympathy, I said, “I know. Two deaths here make the department look bad. And now you have to find someone to take Priscilla’s classes. It’s very inconvenient.”
Coral nodded, looking aggrieved but pleased that I understood her problems as an administrator. Then she scowled, and her eyes narrowed behind those enormous red-framed glasses.
“Nick, I came here to urge you to get this conference under control.”
“By doing what?” I snapped. “Frisking everybody? Renting a metal detector?”
She seemed to be counting to ten, silently, as if to show off how patient she could be. “I think your attitude is all wrong.” She stalked off after a curt, angry nod at Stefan.
“Well, add her to the list,” I said to Stefan. “Everyone hates me. My department chair, the president of the university, and the head of the Board of Trustees. One more day and I’ll have the secretaries and the maintenance staff out on picket lines. Maybe they’ll even burn me in effigy on the steps of the Administration Building.”
“Not on the weekend,” Stefan said. “You’ll have to wait until Monday.”
I laughed. What else could I do?
THOUGH I SAT in on a session with Stefan at my side, I couldn’t concentrate at all. Coral was right. The conference was out of control, but only the Campus Police could end the chaos, and they didn’t seem anywhere near making progress.
Chloe’s death had seemed so bizarre to me, and Chloe herself so much more a figure than a real person, that I’d been able to feel a little distance. It helped me keep my balance. But I’d been getting to know Priscilla better, and I’d imagined we might have become friends down the road. I still couldn’t believe she was dead.
Sitting there in the crowded meeting room, I felt guilty about my assessment of her mystery novels. Maybe I was too harsh in privately dismissing them as second-rate. And I felt even guiltier remembering her despairing phone message the night before. Priscilla had called me, and all I did was phone her back. She’d obviously been desperate. Why didn’t I go over to her house? Priscilla might have answered the door even if she wasn’t answering the phone.
Unless she was already dead.
Then I recalled something chilling: how I’d tried to joke her out of dreading Chloe and Vivianne’s presence at the conference by making references to Fatal Attraction.
When I came out of my fog and glanced around the room, the panel was over. People were standing around and chatting. Stefan gave me a sympathetic smile as if to say that taking a mental nap was okay.
Vivianne sat near the back of the room, looking dazed herself. In fact, she looked worse now after Priscilla’s death than she had after Chloe’s.
Some people were heading off, to take advantage, I guess, of their free half hour before lunch. I asked Stefan to wait for me outside, and I moved to the back to sit by Vivianne.
She greeted me by shaking her head. “Je suis malheureuse comme les pierres, moi.”
I’d never heard that phrase before for expressing sorrow. She was as unhappy as a stone, and using more French with me because of it, I supposed.
“You know, I thought she did it for me,” Vivianne said so softly that I could barely hear her.
I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I prompted her with a quiet “You did?” No one could overhear us from the front of the room.
Vivianne nodded. “Priscilla and I, we had what you call a fling. Many summers ago back in Aix. We were both teaching. Chloe found out, and demanded we desist from all future contact. We have been out of touch, you see, for years. Donc, when she wrote me about Chloe’s engagement to speak at your university in February, I assumed she wanted an excuse to contact me.”
I was bowled over by these revelations, unsure now what was true and what was false. “Then Priscilla didn’t write anonymously to you about the President’s Lecture, and Chloe replacing Cynthia Ozick?”
Vivianne smiled wanly. “Yes, it was ‘anonymous.’ But I knew her handwriting, and the letter bore a Michigan postmark. C’est pas sorcier. Its not magic—one doesn’t have to be Hercule Poirot.” She shrugged, and I almost told her my parents were Belgian like Poirot.
Vivianne went on. “It rekindled something for me, you know? I was quite eager to see Priscilla again, but the drama of confronting Chloe, this eclipsed everything else.”
“Did she love you?”
“Who can say? I think I probably felt more for Priscilla than she ever cared about me, and it was the same with Chloe.”
“You mean Chloe and Priscilla—?”
“Oh, no. I mean that I loved Chloe more. There is always one who loves more, and one who loves less.” Looking bereft, Vivianne said, “Now they are both dead. J’ai la main malheureuse, moi. I am unlucky.”
Face to face with Vivianne’s grief, I felt utterly helpless.
LUNCH WAS A very subdued affair. If the conferees were excited after Chloe’s death, and buzzing with reactions, opinions, and gossip, now they were deflated. I think the typical conference fatigue was overlaid with exhaustion in the wake of the shouting match between Van Deegan Jones and Verity Gallup. As far as I could tell, their anger had sent their myrmidons back into opposing camps, waiting for the signal to launch total war. But the leaders were strangely absent. Had they retired to their battle tents and summoned their counselors to plan strategy?
Maybe I was tired.
Joanne and Bob Gillian were back. They were vultures, probably attracted by the trouble, like reporters sensing a politician’s downfall.
What made people like that tick? Where did Joanne’s hatred come from, and how could Bob, who had seemed so reasonable at times in our office, not only be married to her, but believe the same things she did?
Sitting with Stefan, Serena, and some Wharton Collective folks, I picked at my spinach quiche while others at the table made listless conversation. There were no complaints about the morning session, but also not much enthusiasm.
I could hear Joanne Gillian two tables away declaiming about “the wages of sin.” Her voice and her very being grated on me more than ever before. I was about to go over and upbraid her, but Stefan stopped me.
“What’s the point?” he asked wearily, and I had to agree.
But a moment later, Devon Davenport, sitting at Joanne and Bob’s table, said, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up? You’re just like those lunatics on the subway in New York. Can’t you let people eat in peace with out shoving Jesus down our throats?”
Once again, the room was silent.
Glowering, Bob Gillian said, “I should punch you in the nose.”
“You should tell your wife to put a sock in it.”
Before Gillian and Davenport could start throttling each other, Grace-Dawn Vaughan burst into tears. “This whole conference,” she lamented. “It’s been too much for my tormented nerves.”
“Amen,” I muttered, as Devon Davenport and Bob Gillian offered her handkerchiefs. She graciously accepted them both.
As lunch wound to a close and people started drifting from their tables, Bob Gillian strolled over.
“Joanne wanted me to tell you that if you’d like to come pray at our church tomorrow morning, we’d be happy to have you.”
Stefan and
I gaped at him. “We’re Jewish,” I said. “You know that.”
“And you’re practicing homosexuals,” Bob added, his face blank. Then he smiled. “But it’s never too late to find Jesus.”
He sauntered off, leaving me unsure whether to laugh or cry.
I WAS COMPLETELY off the hook for the afternoon because there weren’t any sessions. The main event was an extended horticultural tour of SUM: of the greenhouses, the vast and gloriously landscaped campus, and the many spectacular gardens. Of course it was a little early in the season, but luckily the day was sunny and warm. Since Wharton herself was a devoted gardener, most conferees had signed up for the tour. When lunch ended, people filed off to prepare for the tour, which was being led by one of the Horticulture Department professors. I heard other conferees talk about napping or reading.
With the conference lurching to its finish, I felt even more adrift. Stefan suggested we play hooky because the weather was so inviting.
“Why not drive to Holland even if it means getting back late for dinner?”
I was tempted by the image of Lake Michigan two hours west, but I saw Angie down the hall, talking on a public phone. I was about to call out that I wanted to speak with her when she started waving frantically at me and Stefan.
We walked over as she hung up, and she said, “We have to talk!”
“Why did you disappear before?” I asked.
“I had to make a phone call. I’ll explain everything, I promise. But right now we have to plan our strategy.”
“Strategy,” I repeated dully. I couldn’t imagine finding the energy to do something so exacting. “What for?”
“Because,” she said, drawing the word out. “Because there’s just as much chance Priscilla was murdered as that her death was a suicide.”
Stefan suggested we get away from campus to someplace quiet.
“I’m hungry,” Angie said, and I realized that I was, too. I’d barely been able to eat lunch. Stefan suggested the delightful small Vietnamese restaurant right across from campus on Michigan Avenue, about half a mile down from the Campus Center. Angie said she’d meet us there since her car was parked in a nearby pay lot and she was out of quarters; she’d drive to the restaurant.