Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript

by Joanne Dobson

  “My God, that’s…”

  “A half million. And we have no idea where—or who—the leak is. Very distressing.” He raised his eyebrows, inclined his head for emphasis, offered me more coffee. I accepted. He poured more for himself, added milk and sugar. “We’ve got to investigate these losses closely in the next few weeks, and that will require the utmost discretion.” He gave me a direct and meaningful look. “Now here’s the tricky part. According to the guidelines of something called the ACRL—”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Association of College and Research Libraries. They mandate prompt and full disclosure of stolen rare books and manuscripts, in part to prevent them from being purchased by unwary dealers and collectors. Now, I know this isn’t strictly kosher, but I need to buy a little time here. We’re talking to an alum about donating a major book collection. If word of these thefts got out right now…”

  I got it. “Rachel asked me to keep the loss of the dime novels to myself, and I’ll keep quiet about this as well.”

  “Good.” Avery sat back in his chair. “As you can imagine, anything concerning our collections, which, as you know, are exceptional, involves extremely delicate issues of public relations, such as donor confidence and perceptions of campus safety. Most likely I’m going to have to take a drastic step, a step not everyone will be comfortable with. And, oddly enough, as it turns out, I may have to request that you…” He sat immobile for a second or two, then jumped up and strode over to the fireplace to poke at the glowing logs. The iron poker had an Enfield crest wrought into the handle. He spoke with his back to me. “Anyhow, everything has to be done on the q.t. If I might ask you, for the good of the college, and as a personal favor to me—”

  I held up a hand. I didn’t think I needed to hear the rest of it. “Silent as the grave,” I said. “I promise.” Personal favor to you. You slick piece of work.… A two-year-ago kiss hung heavy in the air between us. I could still feel its ghost on my lips. Then I thought about Charlie and rose from my chair. “Well, if that’s all—”

  He turned and gave me a long, blue, hooded look, then sighed. “Yes, Karen, that’s all. For now.”

  ***

  I pulled into the driveway later than evening, and my headlights raked over a battered grey Jetta. Amanda! What the hell? What was my daughter doing home on a weeknight in the middle of her final semester at Georgetown?

  “Amanda?” I called, as I twisted the key in the kitchen door. “Honey?”

  She came out of her bedroom in black leggings and a navy sweatshirt, frowsy with sleep although it was only eight o’clock. “Hey, Mom, I was worried about you. Where’ve you been?”

  “Hey, Kid,” I mimicked, throwing my arms around her and squeezing. “I’m a grown-up. I stay out late.”

  “Yeah. I guess.” Her short hair was sticking straight up on top. “But I was looking forward to one of your beef stews.”

  I smoothed down the cowlick. “What say I throw together some bacon and eggs? I’ll tell you what I was doing at school, and you can tell me what you’re doing home.”

  My daughter was uncharacteristically subdued. “I’m tired, is all. It’s been a rough semester, what with my thesis, and the course work, and the waitressing.” Amanda had worked part-time throughout her college years to help me patch together her tuition, room and board. In spite of generous scholarships, the fees for her top-of-the-line university were more than an assistant professor’s salary could handle. “I just had to take a break, Mom. Called in sick at Giorgio’s, and I’ll cut a couple of days’ classes.” She gave me a defensive look. “I haven’t missed a class yet this semester, and I’m beat.”

  “You don’t have to convince me, Sweetie,” I said, giving her another hug. “A little hooky never hurt anyone. But are you sure you’re okay?”

  I was worried. Amanda was pale and quiet. She picked at her eggs, and almost fell asleep at the table. And then my usually up-half-the-night daughter went to bed again at nine and immediately fell asleep.

  ***

  The next morning Charlie and I sat on the living room floor pulling books out of the old glass-front bookcases I’d picked up years ago in a North Adams junk shop. The sun cast blocky shadows on the faded rag rug. A fire glowed in the wood stove. It was a cozy domestic scene. Although we weren’t officially living together, Charlie and I spent as much time with each other as we possibly could. We’d talked about me moving into Charlie’s small frame house on a side street in Northampton. Or, rather, Charlie had talked about it. What he really wanted, of course, was The Big Commitment, but the mere idea of another marriage freaked me out at some deep, dark level I couldn’t bear to probe.

  Maybe Jill was right; maybe I did suffer from a congenital inability to commit. After our conversation at Rudolph’s, Earlene had called to apologize for being so pushy about me and Charlie.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I’d said to her, “I’ll take the wedding cake. But no wedding.”

  “But, really, isn’t your relationship with that beautiful cop already the same thing as being married?” Earlene had queried. “Don’t tell me you don’t worry about him all the time, anyhow.” She laughed. “Only this way, if he dies in the line of duty, you don’t get the pension and the insurance.”

  I shivered, my blood suddenly frozen. “Jee-zus, Earlene,” I’d snapped at her. “I thought you were going to butt out of my personal life.”

  ***

  “Hey, is this the book you’ve been looking for?” Charlie had discovered a copy of a brightly covered Hardcastle novel shoved behind other books. “Bad Attitude?” He held it up. The lime-green and jonquil jacket featured the Hardcastle motif, a stylized woman aiming a huge hand gun at the reader.

  “No. The one I’m looking for is titled Rough Cut. But put that one aside, too.”

  “Sure thing.” He placed the book on the coffee table, lowered his hand and ran it slowly down my leg, then cuffed my ankle. Umm.

  “What’re you guys doing?” Amanda wandered out from her bedroom, still in her leggings and sweatshirt. Awkward with Charlie in his Mom’s-boyfriend role, she gave him a high five instead of a hug, then plopped down on the couch and picked up the TV remote.

  I sat up straighter. “We’re looking for a book called Rough Cut. You remember it, Hon? Hardcover. Hot pink with a gun.”

  “One of those Kit Danger books?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I read them all when I was—oh—maybe, thirteen.” Her voice grew reminiscent, as if that were decades in the past, instead of a scant nine years. “Decided right then and there I was gonna be a hot-shot private eye when I grew up.”

  Charlie grinned. “You’d be a natural.”

  I cast him an evil look. “Over my dead body. I didn’t raise this girl so she could put herself in harm’s way.”

  Amanda squinted at me. I changed the subject before we could take the discussion any further. “So, you have any idea where my copy of Rough Cut went?”

  After a short beat of silence, she said, “You kidding, right? We’ve moved twice, no, three times, since then. What do you want it for?”

  “Sunnye Hardcastle’s going to be on campus for a conference next weekend. I’m her escort.”

  “Cool! Wish I was gonna be around. I’ve never met an author.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, well, I’ve met this one. You’re not missing much. She’s a pain in the ass, even if she is a terrific writer. Rough Cut was her first novel. I want to ask her to sign it.”

  Charlie had a flannel rag I’d cut from one of my old pajamas and was dusting each book so carefully you’d think he was checking for fingerprints. “Your mother’s convinced she’s got a gold mine hidden away somewhere,” he said, “a rare first edition. She’s gonna sell it and put you through grad school.”

  Amanda’s dark eyes momentarily became opaque; she dropped her gaze. “Grad school? I don’t think I—” My daughter paused for a few seconds. Then she shook her head as if to clear it, and re
covered her usual aplomb.

  Charlie stacked the dusted books in piles by author. By the time he was done, I’d have the cleanest and best organized library in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

  “I hate to say this, Mom,” Amanda nonetheless said, “but when we moved up here from the city, didn’t you donate, oh, maybe, seven or eight boxes of books to the Salvation Army?”

  “Ouch! I think you’re right. But would I have put the Hardcastle book in with them?”

  “Who knows? She shrugged and clicked on the TV. “You were in a real slash-and-burn mood.” She began channel surfing.

  I took a closer look at my daughter: Was she losing weight? “How about some oatmeal, Amanda? I’ll make it the old way, with butter and brown sugar.”

  “Oatmeal with butter and brown sugar,” Charlie repeated. “And raisins? I haven’t had that since I was a kid.”

  “You got it now,” I said, grinning at him.

  “Maybe later for me,”Amanda replied. “I don’t have much appetite.” She clicked through another half-dozen channels. “Oh, look, a rerun of Cagney and Lacey. Cool!”

  ***

  That afternoon, Charlie watched the football game, Amanda dozed, and I picked up Tough Times.

  “So, you think you can play with the big boys, Danger. Well, you got another think coming.”

  “I’m no hard guy like you, Vecchio, but I’ve got what it takes. And more.”

  “Oh, yeah. Like you’re gonna pull that trigger. Little girl like you. Anything happens to me, and my boys’ll be all over you like shit on toilet paper.”

  Kit gave him the steely glance she reserved for heartless thugs. “Bang, bang,” she said. Then she pulled the trigger. The bullet whipped just past his left ear, as she intended. It zipped across the vast empty factory space and embedded itself with a thunk in a discarded wooden packing case. Jack Vecchio made his final move—a recoil that sent him back against the catwalk’s low steel rail. Coolly, Kit watched him stumble, overbalance, and fall headfirst, a long, fatal drop, to spatter like a squashed white spider on the unforgiving concrete floor.

  The End

  The End? Already? I sighed. Okay, so it was a little over the top. Quite a bit over the top, actually. But, oh, to be Kit Danger, bold, and brave, and strong.

  I rose from the chair and went into the kitchen to start the chili for supper. I wondered how much of Kit Danger there was in Sunnye Hardcastle. I wondered if there was any in me.

  Chapter Eight

  I worried about Amanda, but she rallied after a few days at home and returned to school on Sunday. Wednesday, opening day, I was free to slip into conference mode. I drove to campus under a lowering sky experiencing the usual pre-conference combination of excitement and dread. An academic gathering is something like a carnival. A participant steps outside of her daily identity, for one brief shining moment divorced from her daily self: appearance, personal history, even course load. She is “Woman Thinking,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson might have phrased it, would he not have considered such a statement to be a contradiction in terms.

  In the coffee shop Claudia Nestor passed me carrying a tray with two chocolate glazed doughnuts and a mug of milky-white coffee. “So the big day is finally here,” I said. “How’re things going?”

  “Diversionary modes of occluding the class binaries,” she muttered.

  “Claudia?”

  “Held hostage to fashionable political and theoretical agendas,” she hissed.

  “Claudia?” She neither saw nor heard me. Dear God, I pleaded, just let her make it through the conference with her sanity at least semi-intact.

  And mine, too, after God knows how many hours as Sunnye Hardcastle’s escort.

  Miles Jewell, English Department chair since God was a boy, stopped me as I approached Dickinson Hall juggling my briefcase, a large coffee, and an egg-and-bacon sandwich in a white paper bag. He was well protected from the frigid weather in a grey wool overcoat, a crimson scarf with the Harvard insignia in white, and the kind of brimmed felt hat I think is still called a fedora.

  “Karen, what’s this I hear about you canceling a class today?” His thick white hair flopped over his thick white eyebrows.

  A chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the weather. I’d deep-sixed my freshman class that afternoon because of the conference. “The opening reception is at four o’clock.”

  He frowned. “Opening reception of what?”

  “Of the crime fiction conference. I’m serving as escort for our guest of honor, Sunnye Hardcastle.”

  “Oh, Women’s Studies. I suppose…Well, just don’t make a habit of it, Karen. Teaching comes first. And remember,” he said vaguely, as he wandered off, “your tenure decision comes up next year….”

  The chill migrated to the pit of my stomach: Bastard! “Remember your tenure decision,” indeed! As if I could forget it! Asshole! Pompous son of a bitch!

  My conference paper was completely drafted but needed fine-tuning. I thought I’d take the morning to slash clichés that had weaseled their way in despite my vigilance: gender binaries; cultural construction of identity; patriarchal power structures. I assumed that by four o’clock I’d have this sucker honed to a razor point, ready for a knock-em-dead delivery first thing tomorrow morning.

  Peggy Briggs was seated on the floor outside my door. No, Peggy, I thought. Not now! She saw me and slapped shut her dog-eared paperback, sliding it into her canvas backpack. “I know you don’t have office hours today, Professor,” she ventured, levering herself up. “But I hope it’s okay for me to talk to you.”

  I swallowed my sigh; there went a prime chunk of revision time. “It’s fine, Peggy. Come on in.”

  She shifted her backpack from one hand to the other. “I work in the library every day until just before my classes. It’s hard to make your regular hours.”

  “It’s all right. Really.” I dumped bag, briefcase, and coffee cup and hung my coat on the rack. Peggy sat down on the green chair, on the very edge of the seat, as if she felt she had no right to occupy the entire space. She wore a royal-blue ski jacket, the down kind with rows of horizontal stitching every three inches, and the puffy strips bulked out her already stocky body.

  “I want to apologize for missing class yesterday, Professor,” she said. “You see…I fell asleep in the closed stacks.” That was as honest an excuse as I’d ever gotten from a student: I fell asleep in the closed stacks. No dead grandmothers. No life-threatening gynecological symptoms. And, indeed, as always, Peggy did appear exhausted, her skin pasty, dark circles beneath her eyes.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. I’m a patsy for a student’s hard-luck tale. “It could happen to anyone.”

  Peggy began to say something further, hesitated, then gathered up her courage. “I don’t know what you know about me?”

  I couldn’t imagine an opening like that leading to anything I wanted to hear. I tried to swallow yet another sigh. “Why don’t you tell me what I need to know.”

  The plastic coffee-cup lid resisted my fingertips. I cast a yearning glance at my briefcase.

  Peggy balanced on the six inches of chair she had allowed herself. “Five years ago my twin sister Megan was murdered by her boyfriend.”

  “Oh, Peggy!” The top popped off the cup. I forgot about Miles’ vague threat. I forgot about the speech.

  My student’s eyes brimmed with tears. “He was abusing her. One week she’d have a split lip, the next, a black eye. Once he even broke her arm. I kept trying to get her to leave, but she was so afraid of him. Said he’d kill her if she left. Finally I found a battered-women’s center and talked Megan into going to their safe house. He tracked her down. He shot my sister right in front of her four-year-old daughter. She died on the spot.”

  “I’m so sorry!” Suddenly Peggy’s outbursts in class began to make sense. Of course the literary exploitation of violence would disgust her.

  She was practically whispering now. “I keep thinking that if Megan ha
dn’t listened to me, she’d be alive today.”

  “Peggy, there was no way you could have known.”

  That seemed to be what she wanted to hear. She slid back in the chair and let her body slump. “It changed my life, Megan’s death—working with the Women’s Center, talking to the cops, testifying at the trial. I was so angry. I missed Megan so damn much, and…what was worse, I was terrified I’d go down the same road myself one day. So I…I got some help. Then I decided to become a social worker. Things haven’t been easy, but I got through Greenfield Community College, and I’m going to make it here at Enfield.”

  “Of course you are.” At that moment I identified so strongly with my student that I had her already graduated—with an M.S.W. to boot.

  “It’s just that, you know, the bit about missing class…I was never in one of your courses before, and I don’t want you to think I…well…have a problem with it or anything. Especially after I…well, you know.” Yes, it made sense now: the hysteria during Sunnye Hardcastle’s visit, the strange eruption of anger in seminar. All were Peggy’s response to what she must perceive as trivialization of tragedy. What had she said in class? Something about murder in real life not being entertaining or amusing, but “brutal and sordid.”

  She sighed, looked down at her intertwined fingers. “I’m tired, is all. I carry a full load of courses. I have custody of Megan’s daughter, Triste. I have a work-study job fifteen hours a week in the library. On weekends I tend bar at Moccio’s. To top it all off, we live with my mother in Durham Mills. In her house. With her husband.” She tightened her lips. Something wasn’t being said. “It’s not easy, Professor, but I’m going to make it. For Megan’s sake—and for Triste.”