Hardware (The Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries)

by Linda Barnes

  Which would be too bad, because the sixtyish gentleman currently shifting his weight from one foot to the other as though testing my wooden floorboards looked like he could donate megabucks to the worthy cause of my upkeep and not miss a single dollar. His shoes were Bally or a damned good imitation, slip-on tassle loafers with neither a too-new nor a too-used sheen. Well-maintained classics, indicating a man with more than one pair of shoes to his wardrobe. A man with quietly expensive taste and access to a good dry cleaning establishment. A formal soul, rigged out in full business attire on a shirtsleeves, sweat-hot evening.

  No wedding band. Inconclusive. A class ring, the Harvard Veritas, common enough around here, worn with casual pride.

  Hair silvering nicely, hairline receding. Height: five-nine, which made it easy for me, from my six-one vantage, to note that his crown was not yet thinning.

  Fingernails buffed and filed. Hands well cared for. Prosperous. My kind of client. A lawyer? A professor? A respected businessman? The speed from phone call to initial appointment had curtailed my research.

  “Mr. Mayhew?”

  “Yes,” he agreed cheerfully. “And you’re Miss Carlyle.”

  He’d been eyeing me as carefully as I’d been observing him. I wondered what conclusions he’d drawn from my disheveled appearance.

  If Paolina’s unexpected package of cash hadn’t arrived, if I’d skipped the Miami phone call, if said phone call hadn’t taken such a daunting chunk of time, I might have attempted to dress for success. Worn a little makeup to accent my green—well, hazel, really, almost green—eyes, and belittle my thrice-broken nose. I’d have done battle with my tangled red curls.

  I opened my mouth to utter polite excuses, realized that Mr. Mayhew didn’t seem to expect them. I liked the way his level glance concentrated on my eyes, as though the measure of a woman were not in her clothes or her curves, but hidden in a secret compartment beyond all external gifts and curses.

  I nodded him down the single step to my living room-cum-office.

  “You may call me Adam,” he said.

  “Carlotta,” I replied. I liked his lived-in, good-humored face—lines, pouches, bags, and all. His eyes were blue behind bifocal lenses, and seemed shy and oddly defenseless, as though the glass barrier were necessary for protection as well as visual acuity.

  He toted a battered monogrammed briefcase of caramel-colored leather. Forty years ago, it might have been a college graduation gift.

  “I’ve wanted to do this for so long,” he said as he settled into the upright chair next to my desk.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “You’ve wanted to do what for so long? Visit a PI’s office?”

  If the guy was a flake I wanted him out. He didn’t seem like a thrill-seeker. He seemed genuine. Sympathetic. So sympathetic I was tempted to tell him my troubles with Paolina and the drug money. I shook myself out of it.

  “On the phone—” I began.

  “Do you remember Thea Janis?” he said at the same time, glancing at me expectantly. “The writer.”

  “Writer” jogged my memory.

  “It was a long time ago,” I said, struggling to recall a faint whisper of ancient scandal relegated to some distant storage locker in my mind like so much cast-off furniture. “I remember reading her book.”

  “Not when it was published,” he said. “You’re too young.”

  “When I was fifteen, maybe sixteen.” Over half a lifetime ago. My mother had bought it for me three months before she died. Did I still have it? The title hovered tantalizingly out of reach, a ripe fruit on a high branch.

  “Thea was younger than that when she wrote it,” he said. He could have uttered the words dismissively. Or flippantly. But he spoke with longing, with fervency and desire. Triumph, as he added, “She was fourteen. Imagine. Fourteen. The critics didn’t know that, at first. Unqualified praise. When they learned the book had been penned by a child, a teenager, the bouquets turned a bit thorny, almost as if some critics felt they’d been duped, not given the real goods somehow. Jealousy. Nothing more than jealousy.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She was the goods,” he answered simply. “A prodigy. Nietzsche wrote like an adult at twelve. We find it more acceptable in music. Mozart.”

  “Thea Janis was a literary Mozart?”

  “See? You can’t keep the skepticism out of your voice. It’s automatic. Cinematic prodigies, okay. Visual arts, okay, with reservations. We prefer the paintings of a Grandma Moses. We glorify poets and authors who begin careers in their fifties, or later. I wonder if it’s endemic to the beast,” he continued softly, almost as though he were speaking to himself, “a way in which humans maintain belief in their own potential: Someday I’ll write a brilliant novel, paint a great picture … A way to keep the essential meaninglessness at bay.”

  “We seem to have wandered a bit from Thea Janis,” I said.

  “Excuse me. Please.”

  The thought washed over me like a wave of ice water.

  “She’s not the missing person you talked about on the phone, is she?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course it’s Thea.”

  “But she’s been missing for—”

  “Twenty-four years,” he said.

  “Twenty-four years!” I echoed.

  “Yes,” he said, quite calmly. Twenty-four years, as if it were the same as twenty-four hours.

  3

  Twenty-four years …

  Guess I could have given myself an extra ten minutes, circled the block to make sure no DEA agent was tailing me, taken evasive action if necessary. Stopped at another drugstore and bought some Extra-Strength Tylenol for the headache gripping the base of my skull.

  I sucked air, blew it out in a sigh.

  “Twenty-four years,” I repeated, tempted to add a pungent curse, the way I would have when I was a cop. A mere glance at the silver-haired man with his grave expression and hopeful eyes kept my language pure.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “So why the rush?” I asked quietly, leaning my elbows on the desk, my chin on clasped and ringless hands. “Why the eager-beaver phone call, the immediate appointment?”

  “Thea Janis is back,” the man said vehemently, stepping on the tail of my question.

  “And you’ve seen her,” I said matter-of-factly.

  I could feel my eyebrows creeping up my forehead, registering disbelief. I tried to force them down. I was totally prepared for a positive response. Everybody looks like somebody. He’d spotted Thea’s double, her sister, her distant cousin, waiting at a bus stop. He’d squealed his brakes a moment too late; his vision had taken wing.

  “I have not seen her.”

  The man had a way of surprising me.

  Memories of Thea Janis, of her disappearance—wait just a minute, her death—floated through my mind like half-forgotten song lyrics. I was pretty certain there was more to this business than a runaway teen genius.

  Death.

  “Wasn’t it suicide?” I asked harshly, because I was hot and sweaty from my quick march home, because I was growing more irritated by the second. Finding the dead is not my forte. They tend not to reappear, even after twenty-four years. Unless we’re talking Elvis. “Didn’t someone find her clothes on a beach?”

  “There may have been clothing on some beach,” he said angrily, “but no one ever proved it was Thea’s, not absolutely. Not to my satisfaction.” He slid his rump to the edge of his chair, assuming a defensive posture.

  I smiled and made nice, kept my voice low. “You haven’t seen her in over twenty years. Right? So what makes you think I can find her?” I asked gently. “Now? After a lifetime?”

  “Look for yourself.” He opened the caramel briefcase, shuffled papers, extracted a manila envelope, and placed it on my desk, carefully aligning it with the edge of the blotter. I’ve seen priests handle the Host with less reverence.

  “Tell me about it,” I said, keeping my hands tightly folded. Some lessons, on
ce learned, become automatic: Don’t touch anything that might retain fingerprints.

  “Do you have a copy of Nightmare’s Dawn?”

  Thea’s book. Thank God he’d named it, or I’d have been up all night obsessing about the title. Haunting images. Prose blended with poetry. A brilliant and unpopular girl’s vision of prep school hell. Angry. Upsetting. Unsettling. The Bell Jar of her generation. Was it because Sylvia Plath had stuck her head in the oven and turned on the gas that Thea and death were so firmly linked in my mind?

  “Somewhere,” I said. “In the attic …”

  “I should have brought my copy.” His smile was endearing, an elderly baby’s glee. “My treasure. I keep it plastic-wrapped, in a glass display case. She wrote in it, inscribed a first edition, a very special dedication. I’ve been offered over five thousand dollars for that book.”

  “You’ve received something,” I reminded him, indicating the envelope. “A written communication—from someone purporting to be Thea.”

  I don’t use words like “purporting.” Honestly, I don’t. Haven’t since I gave up the badge. The twisted linguistics of cop-speak came out of my mouth unwelcome and unbidden. The wretched police vocabulary—“perpetrator” for “thief,” “incident” for “rape,” “missing” for “stolen”—has some merit. It grants a certain immunity. Distance might be a better way to put it … primarily distance … distance from pain. I found myself slipping into the lingo because the man seated across from me appeared so transparent, so easily hurt. And he desperately wanted to believe he’d heard from a woman whose scoured bones had probably decorated the ocean floor for two decades.

  Why was I so certain she’d drowned? I hadn’t lived in Boston any twenty-four years. Had Thea Janis’s death made national news?

  “I’m not a doddering fool,” Mayhew stated firmly, as if he could read my thoughts. “I am sixty-two years old. I am gainfully employed. I am not hallucinating, nor do I take drugs.”

  “Twenty-four years is a long time,” I said. “What exactly would I find in that envelope?”

  “Chapter One,” he said, trying and failing to keep a beatific smile off his face. “The beginning of the book, the new book. Written by Thea and no one else. It’s proof, absolute proof. In spite of everything, I could never bring myself to believe she was dead. She was so—vibrant, so real. But then the … the silence, the silence almost made me believe. A talent like Thea’s—you couldn’t keep her from pen and paper. It was the way she related to the world. Her way of talking. And that voice, that voice. If she were alive, no one could quiet that amazing voice. And she is alive. She is.”

  “In spite of everything,” I repeated slowly. “Would you care to expand on that, Mr. Mayhew?” I continued, borrowing his words. “I’d hate to take this case if there’s proof, absolute proof that Thea Janis is dead.”

  “Just look at what I’ve brought you, Miss Carlyle. Use your eyes.”

  “Right, Mr. Mayhew,” I said with a curt nod in his direction. Dammit, I hate to give potential paying clients the heave-ho. Our abrupt return to formality knifed through the air. I modulated my tone and my words, trying to get back to friendly if not trusting ground. “Adam, let’s say that whatever you have is Thea’s. It could be something she wrote before she disappeared. It could be a find, a major discovery of an old unpublished work—”

  “No!” he insisted. “It looks almost new. A cream-colored sketch pad, like she always used. Her handwriting …”

  “Well preserved,” I said. “A library archive—”

  “All of Thea’s work was donated to Boston University’s Twentieth Century Collection.”

  “Something may have escaped their attention. It’s possible.”

  “Twenty-four years ago, would Thea have written about the destruction of the Berlin Wall?”

  “Not unless she was psychic,” I admitted.

  In addition to being a prodigy and a genius.

  He nodded his satisfaction. “Find her,” he said.

  I made another attempt to dissuade him. “Someone’s imitating her style, as in ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.’”

  “Someone who knows Thea wrote in longhand on a particular kind of paper, using a calligrapher’s pen? Someone with Thea’s handwriting? Someone with—”

  “Okay,” I said, holding up both hands, palms outward, in surrender. “Have you gone to the police? Missing Persons would be my first recommendation—”

  “No,” he said flatly.

  “Why?”

  “The police have hundreds of cases. Do you?”

  “Not hundreds,” I said.

  “It’s worth a try,” he said firmly. “If only you’d known her. Thea was … no, Thea is indescribable. In my whole life, I never met anyone like her. She was quick, bright, but there was so much more to her than that. She was determined. She’d tunnel through a mountain with a nail file if what she wanted was on the other side. She could—”

  During an initial interview I generally grant a potential client plenty of space, enough rope to hang himself if he’s not on the level. It was time to crack down, to narrow the focus on this bird.

  “Who exactly are you?” My voice took on an edge and I let it. Twenty-four years is twenty-four years. If the woman was alive and wanted to be found, she’d had ample opportunity to come in from the cold. My headache was building into a doozy.

  “Adam Mayhew. I introduced myself—”

  “And who is Adam Mayhew? Of all the people in the world, why would Thea Janis choose you as her reentry point? Are you a publisher?”

  “I’m her uncle, her mother’s half-brother,” he said, showing little reaction to my sarcasm, just a mild attitude of apology. “I should have explained. I’m here to represent the family.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why not her mother? Her father? What does ‘represent’ mean? Are you a lawyer?”

  His lips tightened as he pondered his response. “Franklin, Thea’s father, died almost twenty years ago. He’d … accepted his daughter’s death. Thea’s mother … has come to rely on me.”

  I leaned over and stared at the manila envelope. It was lying face-up. Bare. No address. No stamp. No postmark.

  “How did you get this?”

  “It was mailed to Thea’s home. To the family home.”

  “You live there?”

  “It’s a big place. Rambling,” he murmured, staring at the floor.

  It could have been his first direct lie. Or his first avoidance of a direct lie.

  “The Janis house,” I said, urging him on.

  “Thea’s surname was never Janis. That was her literary persona, her nom de plume.” He certainly felt more comfortable talking about Thea than talking about her home.

  “I’d need her real name.”

  “Cameron.” He flinched, as though flashbulbs might pop when he mentioned the name.

  It took effort to keep my eyebrows from hitting my hairline. “As in the Cameron running for governor? As in ‘The Man Who Would Be King’?”

  He nodded. “Garnet Cameron is Thea’s brother. That title was ill-chosen,” he said ruefully. “Garnet’s not like that at all.”

  Memory came flooding back, a deluge, a tsunami. “Start from the beginning,” I said. “I remember bits and pieces, a lot of tempting little bits and pieces, Mr. Mayhew.”

  “I may be going about this all wrong,” he said helplessly.

  “I’ve got time,” I said.

  “Thea was born Dorothy Cameron.”

  “Cameron,” I repeated.

  “Yes,” he said wearily. “The Myopia Polo Club Camerons, the political Camerons, the literary Camerons. Her mother, Tessa—my half-sister—is Italian. Raised in Florence. Minor royalty, no less. She always called Dorothy ‘Dorothea.’” He pronounced it with no “th” sound. Do-ro-tay-ah. “Hence Thea.”

  “And Janis?”

  “Thea’s contribution.”

  “The connection to the C
ameron family came out.”

  “Almost immediately. No one could believe the author was so young. And some snip of a publicist, determined to make hay from Thea’s youth, discovered which school she attended. Avon Hill had no idea they were going against the family’s wishes.”

  “Were they?” My tone must have inched back into the skeptical range because he jumped on my question.

  “The Camerons have never sought publicity unless it was clearly for political ends. Thea’s talent had nothing to do with politics. She’d already told her mother and father about the book; she couldn’t contain her joy when the first reviews appeared. They were so positive.… Her parents decided, helped her decide, that she should keep silent as to her true identity.”

  “How did Thea feel about that?”

  “All she wanted was freedom to write.”

  “Freedom to write. That’s an odd choice of words.”

  “Is it?” He stared at his manicured nails, smoothed a sliver of cuticle. “She may have been under some pressure. She’d been schooled at home, along with her brother and sister. She’d hated her first year at Avon Hill; felt that their requirements frittered away her time with extraneous trivia, endeavors that detracted from her writing.”

  “Such as?”

  “Gym class,” he said. “Pep rallies. Foreign languages. Thea spoke fluent Italian, but they wouldn’t accept it as a substitute for French, German, or Russian. Dramatics. They insisted she attend Friday evening social dances. For a girl who’d been allowed to do exactly what she chose exactly when she chose to do it, the schedule at Avon Hill was onerous.”

  Avon Hill is as ritzy as Cambridge private schools get. Most local academies reflect the area’s left-wing political makeup, but not Avon Hill, where uniforms are required to this day. The kids stick out in Harvard Square, where jeans and tie-dye war with slinky black and studded heavy metal. Pristine white shirts. Navy blue slacks, skirts, sweaters, and jackets. Ties. I had no idea what Avon Hill’s headmaster or headmistress might consider appropriate attire for “social dances.”

  “So once upon a time a young girl ran away from Avon Hill and didn’t contact a soul for twenty-four years,” I said. “That’s your story?”