***
On campus the snow was heavy and wet, the walkways a half-inch deep in murky water. Remnants of yesterday’s towering snow fort sagged on the quad. This morning the scene around the library seemed normal: no crime-scene tape, no police vehicles. Three tall students I recognized from the basketball floor lounged on the steps, basking in the sun’s rays. From an open dorm window came the voice of Lucinda Williams singing about this sweet old world.
I called Peggy from the office, but the man who answered the phone at her house said he didn’t know where the hell she was, and, no, he wouldn’t take a message, he wasn’t no goddamned secretary.
I looked up her e-mail address in the directory and sent a message: Peggy, get in touch. It’s important.
Not that I was about to clue her in on the location of her missing backpack; she’d get that bad news soon enough. My good news—Sunnye Hardcastle’s research proposition—wouldn’t really counteract it, but, then, an offer of money never comes amiss to a scholarship student.
Or to anyone.
***
I was deep into preparing a spontaneous class discussion on liberty and self-determination in Jane Eyre when I sensed a scrutinizing presence. I looked up. Harriet Person, in a black pantsuit under a navy wool coat, loomed in the open doorway. In her short dark hair, the white blaze had widened strikingly.
“Karen, the a.m. sessions have already started. If we leave now we’ll make the end of the first paper.”
I laid down the green pen and pushed the desk chair back. “Sorry, Harriet, I can’t go this morning. I have a class to prepare.”
“Can’t go?” Over her narrow features came an expression of consternation. “Karen, this conference is a Women’s Studies highlight. It’s the apex of the year’s events.”
“But I have to teach at four, and I’ve already canceled one class because of the conference.” And have been thoroughly chastised by my department chair. I stood up and walked around the desk.
From the hallway came a young woman’s voice, “And then I go, but Kevin, that is so wrong….”
My senior colleague entered the office, closed the door behind her, and shot me the slit-eyed glare of a sixth-grade teaching nun. “You do realize, Karen, don’t you, that your tenure decision is scheduled for next fall?”
I went icy cold. First Miles, now Harriet. “Of course I do.”
Her thin lips pressed together. “What I’m going to say to you now is for your own good. It is not in your best interests for colleagues in Women’s Studies to receive the impression that your feminist commitment does not extend to supporting our collective endeavors.”
In spite of her elliptical wording, this was a direct threat, far more serious than Miles’s vague maunderings. The ice in my veins turned to fire. “Harriet,” I said, hearing my voice rise with each word, “if my colleagues in Women’s Studies don’t know by now that I’m a feminist to the very marrow of my bones—”
A staccato rap on the door interrupted me. I scowled at Harriet, stomped over to the door and threw it open. Charlie Piotrowski stood there, his muscular bulk filling the doorway: Superman to the rescue.
“Hi!” I said, with a big, false, smile.
Charlie’s attitude was curt and professional; you might have thought we’d only met once or twice, and that in fully clothed situations. “Sorry, Professor Pelletier, I didn’t realize you were in the middle of something.”
Right. They could hear my outraged bellow as far away as Boston. “Professor Person was just leaving.” I cast her a good-riddance look.
Charlie watched Harriet stalk away down the corridor, her back ramrod straight. Then he turned to me. “What was that all about? I heard you clear down the hall.”
I told him what she’d said. “I’m doomed, Charlie. Not only have I been insufficiently supportive of Women’s Studies, I’ve also smarted off to Harriet. To Harriet, a full professor!” I placed the back of my hand to my forehead and tilted my head like a Victorian heroine, but I wasn’t really playing it for laughs. “I’ll never get tenure now!”
And Charlie didn’t think it was funny. “Shit! Can she get away with treating you like that?”
Suddenly I was shaky. “As I said, she’s a full professor. She can get away with anything.”
“I suppose you could apologize….” He sounded dubious.
“No, I damn well couldn’t!”
Charlie placed a comforting hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be all right, babe. You’ll see.”
“Umm. What’re you gonna do? Arrest her?”
He pushed the door shut, pulled me to him, and held me till I stopped shaking. When I felt composed again, I sat in the green chair.
“Now, listen,” he said, sitting down across from me. He suddenly seemed hesitant, even nervous. “I’m sorry about the timing, Karen, but some new evidence has come up, and I’m afraid I have to ask you a few questions.” His gaze was straight and sober.
“Me?” A new terror arose: Oh, God—he found Peggy’s backpack! “Charlie, suddenly you’re talking like a cop.”
“Yeah, I am.” He gave me a sidelong look. “I need to know a few things about Ms. Hardcastle.”
I could feel my eyes widen with astonishment. “Sunnye Hardcastle?”
“Wednesday evening. The reception in the library. Were you with her the entire time?”
“Yes,” I replied, without thinking. “But why are you asking questions about Sunnye?”
“Why didn’t you tell us about Hardcastle and Munro?”
“Huh? Hardcastle and Munro?” It sounded like a high-end funeral home.
“You must have known that Sunnye Hardcastle went off somewhere with Elwood Munro. We have a witness who saw them together.”
“Oh—yeah…” I remembered now. “Sally Chenille.”
“The weirdo with the green hair,” he agreed.
“Is it green today?”
He gave my arm a gentle squeeze. “Don’t try to sidetrack me, Karen. This has become an…er…issue in the investigation. Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I didn’t actually see them together. Sally mentioned it.” I shrugged. “Then I forgot.”
“You forgot?”
I’d deliberately evaded telling Charlie about Peggy’s backpack—and that was something like outright prevarication—but I’d merely forgotten to mention Sunnye’s talk with Tooey, er, Munro. “That crazy scene last night at Munro’s house just about drove everything else out of my mind.”
He sighed. “I don’t know what to do,” he said, shaking his head. For several long seconds he pondered his immaculate fingernails. Then he looked up at me. “I’m really uncomfortable about this. I shouldn’t have called you up to Chesterfield yesterday.”
I frowned at him. “But you said I was a big help.”
“And that’s true. We wouldn’t have had a clue about all those books without you. But now you’re involved in this investigation, and it’s just not a good idea…”
“So, you think you can turn me on and off like a light bulb?”
He rolled his eyes. “See what I mean. You just won’t…”
He chewed on his upper lip and tried again. “So, Karen, you, personally, didn’t see the subject in conversation with Munro?”
“The subject? Jesus, Charlie, why are you talking to me like a cop?”
“I am a cop. Don’t forget that.”
“Don’t worry, I never do.”
He gave me a sharp look. “Where did that come from?”
“Sorry. Knee-jerk reaction.” I ran a hand through my hair. “But why are you calling Sunnye Hardcastle the subject? She’s an internationally respected crime novelist—”
He held up a hand. “Just answer the question.” This was a far cry from the light-hearted man who had called me earlier that morning—and from the gentle man who had just moments ago comforted me.
“I want to know why you’re asking me these things about Sunnye. Lieutenant.”
“I can’t tell you.�
�� Charlie leaned forward, an elbow on one knee, a hand splayed on the other. He sighed again. “Look, babe, I’m in a bad position here. Can’t you understand that? Something unexpected has come up, and I need your cooperation. And I need you to back out of this case and stay out. Believe me, the last thing I want to do is piss you off, but there’s stuff I’ve got to keep to myself. Can’t you trust me? Can’t you just answer the question?”
He was so sincere I gave in. “Well…I was with Sunnye Hardcastle all evening except when she…” I paused, recalling the period of time—about a half hour—when I hadn’t been able to find Sunnye. Then she and Trouble had reappeared through the hidden door in the library’s foyer. The hidden door…the library foyer.… The pieces fitted together: The police suspected Sunnye Hardcastle of murder! I stared at Charlie in horror. Would my statement that Sunnye had vanished for a half hour incriminate the novelist even further?
“Except when she what?” Charlie asked. I could tell by the control in his voice that he was doing his best to placate me.
I eyed him narrowly. “Oh, except when she went off to the bathroom. I didn’t find it necessary to accompany her there. After all, she had Trouble.”
“Yes,” he said slowly, “she had Trouble. That dog.”
***
Forty minutes later I’d completed my class prep. If it hadn’t been for Harriet’s attempt at intimidation, I would then have gone to hear the last paper of the morning session. But I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of showing up. Monica eyed me snidely when I stopped by the office to pick up my mail. At first I thought she must have heard my altercation with Harriet, but, no, it was Dennis O’Hanlon she wanted to talk about.
“So, where’d you end up going with my hot guy yesterday?”
“We didn’t go anywhere. Just walked across the campus.”
“Yeah, right.” She took her nasty grin right to the precipice of a leer. I had to remind myself that Monica didn’t single me out for insults; she dissed everyone. “Man, first time I saw that stud, I thought, I could go for that. Then, when he showed up again yesterday—”
“What? He’s been here before?”
“Yeah. Couple of weeks ago. I saw him in the library. There’s no mistaking him, he’s so sexy. Sure doesn’t look like a professor though. More like one of those tough TV cops. You know—kind of a hard guy.”
I didn’t respond right away. I was trying to recall; hadn’t Dennis told me that yesterday was his first day ever on the Enfield campus? When I did speak, it was absently. “Yeah, I do know—kind of a hard guy.”
***
Forgetting to pick up my mail, I went to the Dean of Students’ office to look at Peggy’s class schedule again. I needed to talk to that girl. No classes on Friday. I trekked over to Special Collections, assuming she would be at her library work/study job. When Nellie Applegate saw me walk through the reading-room doors, she plucked a number-two pencil from a cup and began to tap the eraser end against the desk. Pallid by nature, today Nellie seemed even whiter than usual. She was also disheveled, her chopped-off salt-and-pepper hair in need of a good brushing, a button on her white cotton blouse dangling by a thread.
“Hi, Nellie. Is Peggy Briggs here?”
“No.” Her voice was so muted, I didn’t quite catch the response.
“No?”
“Peggy didn’t show up this morning,” she whispered.
“Oh, is she upset because of…yesterday?” There was something about Nellie that made a person resort to evasions and euphemisms.
No response. Her complexion bleached even further. She was the whitest person I’d ever seen.
“When she stumbled over…well, you know,” I blundered on. “In the stacks. You must all be…upset to have something like that happen in a place like this.” Upset. Something like that. A place like this.
By response, Nellie sniffed into a crumpled tissue.
Belatedly, I recalled her interest in the little researcher, or at least that’s how I had interpreted the few surreptitious glances I’d noticed.
“Poor Mr. Tooey,” she choked, and dropped the pencil. It rolled off the high desk, hit a half-loaded book truck, fell to the floor of the quiet room with a sharp click-clack. I bent over to pick it up.
“Munro,” I corrected her and held out the long, yellow pencil. It was dumb, but that was all I could think of to say. “His name was Elwood Munro.”
“Munro.” She swallowed visibly. “Rachel told me that. But he called himself Bob Tooey.” She took the pencil from my outstretched hand and sniffed again.
“Did you know Mr. Munro well?”
“Know him? What do you mean, know him?” Tap, tap, tap with the pencil.
“I meant—”
She gazed at me with a flat look in her mouse-brown eyes. “I didn’t know Mr. Tooey at all outside the venue of the library.” Venue of the library? “Now he’s dead.” Her tone was oddly devoid of affect.
I bumbled on. “Is Rachel around?” Nellie had made it clear I was bothering her, but I felt compelled to find out how Munro had smuggled all those books out of the library.
“She got a phone call first thing…” She pulled another tissue from the box. Maybe she was broken-hearted; maybe she just suffered from an allergy to book dust. “And left without even letting me know how to reach her.”
Probably a call from the state police, I thought. Rachel’s most likely in Chesterfield right now, identifying stolen books.
“And now,” Nellie continued in the same flat tone, “Peggy hasn’t shown up. I’ve got all this reshelving to do.” She gestured at the cart with its modest load of books. “And no help. I don’t know how Rachel expects me to do it. Someone’s got to watch the desk, and these returns just keep piling up. I can’t do everything by myself.” Suddenly there was an undercurrent of feeling in her voice. She wiped her red eyes with the tissue. “It’s just not humanly possible,” she concluded and blew her nose. At first I’d thought it was quiet grief that had caused Nellie’s sniffling, but, perhaps it was simply the arduous business of reshelving.
I said good-bye to the pathetic little librarian and left without having learned anything more about my worrisome student.
On the library steps, I hesitated, squinting in the glare of sun on snow. Peggy Briggs. Peggy Briggs. Where the hell was Peggy Briggs?
Chapter Sixteen
I was still assigned to escort Sunnye through the mean streets of Enfield. On this final evening before the conference broke up at noon on Saturday, Women’s Studies was treating its guests to a farewell dinner at the Mai Thai restaurant on Varsity Street. When I called the novelist to confirm that she was planning to attend, she asked if I’d gotten in touch with Peggy yet about doing research for her. My negative response goaded her into a plan of action. “You said she lives near here. Why don’t we take a ride over to her house? How far is it, anyhow?”
“About ten miles. But we’ve got this dinner…” I’d thought about that, too, tracking Peggy down at home. But between teaching, the conference, and incidentals such as murder and a house full of stolen books, I hadn’t had a moment to do anything more about my student than simply worry.
“A Women’s Studies dinner. Oh, joy,” Sunnye intoned. “The things I do for money. So? What time is it now, five o’clock? The dinner’s at seven, right? We’ll be back in time. We can’t just let this student of yours vanish.”
Sunnye’s take-charge attitude began to rankle. “I don’t know that Peggy’s vanished. It’s just that no one at the college seems to have seen her in a couple of days. And the man who answers the phone at her house is a real jerk. He won’t talk to me.”
“When did you call?”
“I’ve been trying off and on all day. The last time was a few minutes ago, right after class. He recognized my voice and slammed the phone down.”
“He’ll talk to me,” Sunnye said. “Pick me up in front of the Inn.”
“When?” I replied automatically. Once again Sunnye was bar
king out orders, and I was obeying. Who did she think she was? Kit Danger?
“How about right now?” Yeah, she did. And I was her sidekick, Karen the Wimp.
I sighed. She was right. We could whip over to Durham Mills, talk to Peggy if she was home, and be back in town in time for the Women’s Studies dinner. And I had a compelling reason to control my irritation with Sunnye. It wouldn’t hurt to have Trouble at my back when I talked to Peggy’s nasty stepfather.
Any other student’s absence from school wouldn’t have concerned me so much, but Peggy Briggs was compulsively conscientious in a manner known only to those who were studying, like her, to change the course of lives otherwise predestined to poverty. She was as motivated as hell. It made me extremely uneasy that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be when she was supposed to be there. It also alarmed me that she was leaving personal belongings, her backpack, with her books and notebooks, I assumed, in places where she had no reason to be.
“Right now is fine,” I agreed.
***
It was rush hour in Enfield, as much as Enfield ever has a rush hour: As I edged along Field Street, I passed professors on their way home from office hours, parents car-pooling eight-year-olds from ballet lessons to soccer practice, students out for pizza prior to the weekend booze fest. A faint mist hung in the dusk, diffusing the illumination from headlights and street lamps, glamorizing storefronts and purifying piled-up mounds of filthy snow. It all seemed picturesque and exceedingly quaint, yet down the street, at the red-brick college drowsing in its Friday-evening lassitude, a man had just met his death, and a student seemed to have mysteriously vanished.
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