by Madison, Ada
I whispered my thanks and left.
I left the library, realizing I’d blown it. I’d pushed too hard. Would Wendy have said more if I hadn’t been so aggressive toward the end of our meeting? I wondered if I’d ever have a chance to talk to Wendy Carlson again.
She’d been warming up to me, possibly forgetting whatever formula Ted might have given her. Then, I’d all but accused her of obstruction of justice for not telling the police about the squirrelly men in Kirsten’s life. She’d shut down.
But wasn’t that exactly what she’d done twenty-five years ago—obstruct justice? Even if I had no business grilling her, didn’t I now have an obligation to tell Virgil? I struggled with the dilemma. And with the weather.
Wind and snow whipped my face as I walked toward the parking structure where I’d left my car. Snow was coming down, fast and furious, piling up on the sidewalks and streets. It was one thing to admire the beautiful snowscape in Childe Hassam’s Boston Common at Twilight at the MFA; it was another to drive for an hour or more while your windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the whiteout.
It would be dumb to drive now, but frustrating not to be home. I needed to sit somewhere warm and think about what to do next. If I made a call to Virgil, I had only my word to back me up. Wendy could deny she’d ever mentioned that Kirsten had been hanging around with a group of losers who were capable of anything. She could claim she’d hardly talked to me, except for a casual chat between an alum and a Henley professor who happened to be in town. Could the HPD question Wendy twenty-five years later? Could she be prosecuted if they determined she’d impeded an investigation? She was only a teenager at the time. How about Ted, who’d been old enough to know better? I knew there was no statute of limitations on murder, but who said there was a murder involved?
Other than me, that is, more convinced than ever that Kirsten died at the hand of one or more of the rough types who lingered in Wendy’s memory. Through her roommate, Kirsten had access to a key to the tower, if a key was even needed back then as it was now, and might have used it as a trysting place, only to meet her death instead.
I crossed Huntington, heading for a bagel shop at the edge of the shopping center nearest me, my mind still on Wendy. I realized I didn’t know anything about her personal life. Had she ever married? Did she live alone? She didn’t wear a ring, but that didn’t mean much.
Whirr, whirr, whirr. Whirr, whirr, whirr.
No sooner had I turned my phone on but a call from Bruce was on tap. I could let it go to voice mail, but he wouldn’t give up. My message icon told me I had ten voice mails already, and I knew that several would be from Bruce. If I didn’t take a call from him soon, he’d worry. But if I clicked through, he’d hear the traffic noise and know I wasn’t at home making soup for dinner. From my position at one of the busiest corners in Boston, could I convince him that the car horns he was hearing were from rush hour on Henley Boulevard?
“Hey,” I said, all cheery and pretend warm.
The drivers of a fleet of cars and SUVs chose that moment to honk their horns to make a passage for a police car that flew screaming by me toward Copley Square. Busted.
“I knew it,” Bruce said. “You’re in Boston.”
“How’s your day?” I asked.
“Are you on the road?”
“No. I’m about to make a final decision.”
“Stay there, please. It’s worse down here than in Boston. We’ve got travelers’ advisories all over the news.”
“But you’re off work and we could—”
“Never mind that. You need to get a room there. Promise.”
I huffed and puffed. “Promise.”
“How did it go with the roommate?” Bruce asked.
“Nothing special.”
“No more information on the tower death?”
“No. It was good to meet her, though.”
“Maybe you’ve done all you can. Just let Virge go after Jenn’s attacker.”
“Uh-huh. Right.”
“You’re not telling me everything, are you?”
“We can talk more when I see you. I’ll text you when I have a room,” I said, and the long-suffering Bruce let me off the hook.
“I’ll give you a regular report on conditions down here,” he said.
What a sweetie.
I knew Bruce was right about the folly of trying to drive home. The snow swirled around me as I entered the lobby of the shopping center and the door banged behind me, blown shut by the wind.
I took a seat on a bench in the center court area, surrounded by high-end stores, many of which were closing up for the night. Bruce and I chatted awhile, then I braced myself for a reluctant overnight stay.
• • •
An hour later, I was ordering soup and salad from room service, which sounded better to me than a cold bagel. Since January was not exactly tourist season in Boston, I had no trouble getting a room in one of the big Copley Place anchor hotels. I figured it wouldn’t be so easy later, when there might be a crowd of workers realizing they couldn’t drive home. I wondered where Wendy lived, whether I should invite her to be my roommate. LOL at that idea.
I’d picked up overnight essentials in the hotel gift shop and taken advantage of a luxurious terry robe, compliments of the hotel. I had my own coffee and tea setup, two double beds, and a pile of fluffy towels. The minibar was stocked with liquor (a waste) in a rack on the door and candy (tempting) on the shelves. Maybe forced confinement wasn’t so bad after all. As long as I had Internet connectivity, which I did, for a small fee.
After my meal, my cleanup consisted of placing the tray on the floor outside the door. I could get used to this. I sipped tea, opened my laptop, and settled in. Nothing says “relax” like looking up bank robbery archives.
As I typed keywords into my search engine, I pitied anyone trying to profile me based on my browsing history. Today alone my searches ran from Archimedes to puzzles and games to bank robbery stats for Bristol County, with beading books (presents for Ariana) and fleece-lined boots (present for me) thrown in.
I was pleased to see that Henley and surrounding towns in Bristol County were singularly low in robberies. Occasionally a note had been passed to a teller, demanding all she had in her money drawer, but there had been nothing involving weapons or bodily harm to staff or customers. It gave me a warm feeling about my hometown.
Eventually, I realized that if Kirsten and her friends were planning to rob a bank, it would probably be in Boston, not small-town Henley or its neighbors. Boston wasn’t called the Bank Robbery Capital of America without good reason.
There were more than three hundred robberies a year in Boston, though not all of them involved banks. Two of the robberies were legendary, making most lists of “Crimes of the Century”—the Brink’s job in 1950, where eleven armed members of a gang, all of whom were eventually arrested, held up the Brink’s building and stole millions of dollars in cash, checks, and securities; and the Gardner Museum heist in 1990, where two men posing as cops walked off with an estimated three hundred million dollars in art. In both cases, the spoils remain unrecovered.
I made a guess that the robbery I was looking for was smaller than either the Brink’s or the Gardner job, both of which had been the subject of books, novels, feature films, and documentaries. For smaller efforts, I’d have to dig into police reports for the year Kirsten was a sophomore. It took a few minutes to call them up, but a Suffolk County website provided a long list of summaries for each year.
As I read through the paragraphs, I saw what excitement I’d been missing, focusing on differential equations instead of on the police blotter all these years. A seventy-year-old Chelsea, Massachusetts, man was turned in by his adult son who recognized him in surveillance photos of a local bank robbery. A Springfield woman fashionably dressed in a cloche hat, scarf, and dark glasses tossed an unknown green liquid at tellers and grabbed the cash available. A serial robber was caught after making off with loot from seven d
ifferent banks in the greater Boston area, each time claiming he had a bomb strapped to his waist.
I must have been channeling my movie-loving boyfriend Bruce, whom I missed, because I kept thinking of the actors in Boston heist movies through the years, from Robert Mitchum in The Friends of Eddie Coyle to Ben Affleck in The Town.
Fascinating as the anecdotes were, I saw nothing that fit with what Wendy had told me, or with Judy’s and Fran’s reports on the gossip. I needed a story that included a woman not quite out of her teens. If the tale included the initials KP, so much the better.
On the fourth page of reports for Kirsten’s sophomore year, I found what I was looking for. Two suspects—an armed man in his early twenties and an unarmed woman, possibly a teenager, according to witnesses—were being sought for questioning in a string of small robberies in Boston and a major heist at a bank in nearby Brockton. I clicked on the next page for “More” and saw a photo of a third man, who’d been caught fleeing the scene of the last, biggest robbery.
I peered at his grainy countenance. I cringed at the sight of his stringy ponytail, added twenty-five years, and shaved his face. My lying-in-wait man. I got up from my desk-table combo, nearly knocking my chair over, as if Wendy’s “Ponytail” had just entered my hotel room. The long-ago robber was the man who’d been standing in the Henley College parking lot, watching me enter my car last night.
I slowed my breathing and went back for more.
The whole article was painfully brief, noting only that the man was being held for arraignment. So far, he hadn’t given up his partners.
If this truly was a big heist, there should be follow-up stories. I searched using as many keywords as I could reasonably relate to the story. Nothing came up, even though I pleaded with my computer each time the pinwheel spun, trying to honor my request. What was wrong with Boston reporters?
Skimpy as the data was, I had no doubt who the man was, and who his undisclosed partners had been. For better or worse, that’s how my mind did its calculations.
I looked out the window at the still-falling snow. I wanted to flee to the safety of my blue and white Henley cottage, though I knew better than to head out in this storm. “If we can’t fly, you shouldn’t drive,” Bruce always told me. I wished Bruce were with me now. I checked for the fourth time that the chain was pulled across my door, dragged the heavy desk chair over the carpet, and shoved it under the handle.
Foolish, I knew. My imagination was working overtime. I’d last seen the man in Henley, not Boston. I was actually safer here.
How come it didn’t feel that way?
• • •
Reading my math journals in bed seemed to calm me, except that every time I heard a noise in the hallway or a rattling of the window, I jumped. I was happy that Bruce checked in with me often, but the ringtone startled me, also, and I set the phone to vibrate to avoid the sudden sound.
I hadn’t told Bruce what I’d found in the police blotter. I debated calling Virgil. What could I tell them to get their attention? That I’d found an old police report and a newspaper photo of a bank robber from the eighties who looked like a man hanging around campus today? Oh, and that the eighties guy had a ponytail and so did the current guy. What a difference that made.
Maybe if I threw in my whole encounter with Wendy Carlson they’d see the connection I’d been trying to make all along. It couldn’t be coincidence that, according to Wendy, a guy named Ponytail hung out with her and her roommate at a diner in Henley, and a look-alike, from his hair to his mug, showed up a quarter of a century later on the same campus.
All I had to do was figure out how the carillon played into the story, other than as a curse to those who climbed the tower. That, and questions like “Why did he come back?” I assumed Ponytail the Younger spent some time in jail for the Brockton robbery. Did he take the fall (I really had to cut back on TV talk) or had he given up the names of his two partners? A new, wild thought came to me. What if Ponytail had eventually ratted on his associates, and Kirsten, unable to face prison and the scandal for her family, had chosen suicide instead?
I rubbed my forehead, squeezing my eyes against a headache. Why did every tiny “answer” generate more questions, more possibilities?
I decided I’d call a meeting when I got home. Bruce, Virgil, and me. I could lay it out—Wendy’s withheld knowledge and the bank robberies of the past, and my quasi-stalker in the present. Bruce and Virgil could point out all the holes and then I’d drop it, once and for all.
Sometimes for me, working out a problem, even if the solution wouldn’t be implemented for a while, was satisfying. My mind at ease, I drifted off to sleep.
• • •
Tap, rattle.
Loud noises woke me.
Tap, rattle. “There goes the bride.” Tap, rattle. “All dressed and wide.” Tap, rattle. My doorknob shook.
Someone was trying to enter my room. I sat up, my heart pounding. I pictured the man with the ponytail trying to force his way in. I reached for the phone, then realized there wasn’t some one outside my door; there was a whole choral group outside my door, many voices singing a parody of Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus.” My best guess was that they were from the wedding party I’d seen earlier on the ballroom floor. Unable to do the town on a stormy Saturday night, they’d taken the festivities indoors. And on my floor. Lucky me.
Eventually, the tapper and rattler of my door handle went away—no, this is not the maid of honor’s room—and the loud group reveled their way down the hallway.
Fully awake now, my thoughts turned again to Wendy Carlson, who’d made a brief appearance in my dreams as a cowardly lion. I got up and walked to the window. A lovely view. I was too high up to see any sullying of the blanket of snow that covered the rooftops. The snowfall was softer now; maybe the storm had turned and headed east, to the ocean. I seemed to be able to see through the flakes to a dark but clear sky. I’d been so distracted when I checked in, I hadn’t taken time to appreciate the panoramic view I had of Boston and points north.
I looked past downtown Boston to the streets of Cambridge and beyond, wondering where Wendy lived. Somewhere close by, I assumed. Who’d want to commute very far in Boston traffic, on roads carved out by meandering cattle four hundred years ago?
Tap, rattle.
One more isolated tap, rattle didn’t frighten me. I was likely being bothered by a tipsy groomsman looking for ice. No one was deliberately trying to break into my room.
Was Wendy safe? What if Ponytail or Einstein, or whoever, had followed me from Henley, hoping to be led to Wendy? Maybe the third guy, the “Big Dog” who had allegedly disappeared, was still in the picture after all. And if Ted thought so much of my investigative skills, it was possible that the bad guys admired them also, and figured I could do what they hadn’t been able to do all these years. Find the girl who’d sat in on their diner conversations. They probably didn’t know her name any more than she knew theirs, and maybe they weren’t Internet savvy. It was also possible that they simply hadn’t seen her as a threat until now.
None of this could be connected directly to why Jenn was attacked. How could she be involved? Maybe she wasn’t, as much as I wanted to make sense out of all the loose ends. Did Jenn know something that made her a target? What could that be? Kirsten, Wendy, the diner, the robberies—all of that belonged to a past before she was born.
I missed home. I wondered how the Marshalls, all of them, were getting along. I’d talked to Jenn’s roommate, Patty, once today, during Wendy’s coffee errand, and had some assurance that Jenn’s parents were taken care of. A relative from Fitchburg had arrived with clothes and supplies to make their dorm stay a little more comfortable. I knew that neither of Jenn’s parents had been to college; this was a tough way to experience campus life for the first time. I hoped they could bring themselves to trust in Jenn’s safety in the future. I made a great effort to think of when, not if, Jenn woke up.
I wrestled with my responsibility to p
rotect Wendy, especially if I was the reason she might be in danger. I couldn’t fall back to sleep with her fate weighing on my mind. I checked my cell phone, down to 49 percent of its battery power, but still able to display the time. Eleven eleven. I liked the symmetry and decided to act on it.
I hit Virgil’s name on my contacts screen. He might trust my instincts enough to have the police check on Wendy. He’d spent a lot of his career with the Boston PD and surely would still have friends here.
“Yo,” Virgil said. Was that a spring in his voice, at this hour? I harkened back to his noncommittal answer regarding a date in his future.
I laughed, in spite of the disquiet building in me. “Yo, yourself. Did I wake you?”
“As if you’d care. What’s up?”
I briefed Virgil on my last twenty-four hours, starting with the creepy appearance of a man at my car last evening, and then the same man showing up in a mug shot from twenty-five years ago. Of necessity, I confessed to tracking down Wendy Carlson, now a researcher at the BPL, and, in as few non-incriminating words as possible, told her story and expressed my reasons for concern for her safety.
“Ponytail is obviously out of jail, if he was ever in, and he may be after her. Can you get one of your old buddies to check on her?” I asked. “I don’t know where she lives, but isn’t that what you guys do?”
“Sure. And we bring cupcakes. They’re the new donuts, you know.”
Sometimes I thought Virgil stayed awake nights thinking up ways to aggravate me. “Virgil, this could be serious.”
“I know that, Sophie. There have been some developments here.”
“What? What developments?”
“Can you send me that mug shot? You probably know how to do that, right?”
“No problem. Check your email in five minutes.” My heart beat faster. “What’s happening there? What are the developments? Good ones or bad ones?”
I paced my small room with my phone. Were developments the same as breakthroughs? Was it a big clue? An arrest? And here I was miles away. It wasn’t fair.