Quieter than Sleep

by Joanne Dobson

  At bedtime she kissed me on the cheek, as if she were Amanda, and then hurried away to bed.

  Santa Claus came early that night; I went to bed with my eyes full of tears.

  Thirteen

  THE DAY AFTER Christmas I curled up in my battered black leather recliner with an afternoon cup of English tea. The storm had subsided, and thin winter sunlight haloed the bright roses on the table by the window. Sophia had recovered enough strength to leave the house, so the girls were out for a short walk, and I was reveling in the silence. I sipped at the strong hot tea. With its clear, uncomplicated flavor, it seemed like an elixir of peace.

  The wrappings and ribbons were swept up, the gifts had been gloated over, and Greg had gone home to find a repentant Irena awaiting him. He had called this morning, dazed and happy, to report her return. Tea, sunlight on roses, the prospect of holiday leftovers for dinner—life was good.

  Then the phone rang. When I said “Hello,” no one responded. “Hello,” I repeated. “Hello?”

  No one there. Another crank call?

  I hung up. Immediately, the phone rang again.

  “Hello!” I snapped.

  This time it was Piotrowski.

  “Dr. Pelletier?”

  “Yes?” I knew immediately that my fragile peace was about to be snatched away. “Yes? What’s the matter?”

  “Could I come see you?” I noticed that he hadn’t responded to my question.

  “What’s the matter?” I repeated.

  “I’m not far from you. I could be there in ten minutes.”

  “Is it important?”

  “Yes,” with a slight tone of impatience, probably at the implication that he would call me for anything trivial.

  “I’d rather you didn’t come here. I don’t want Sophia upset. Where can I meet you?”

  “Right now I’m at Bub’s Coffee Shop over on One Thirty-eight. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes,” I responded. “I’ll be there. Ten minutes. How’re the roads?”

  “Okay.” He hung up without giving me a chance to ask any more questions.

  I had driven by Bub’s Coffee Shop numerous times, but would never have thought of stopping in. The parking lot was always full of cars, but the place itself looked shabby and uninviting. Inside, however, it proved to be clean and functional, if somewhat dull in decor. The walls were blond wood paneling and the floors asphalt tile, brown with white striations. Each table featured a milk-glass bud vase holding a bunch of artificial daisies.

  Piotrowski sat in a booth toward the back, chowing down on a hot turkey sandwich and mashed potatoes, just what I was planning on having for supper. Both the bread and turkey were thick, fresh, and hand-sliced. The dressing looked homemade and the gravy was lumpy with giblets. I was instantly ravenous, and had to remind myself that I had leftovers at home. I ordered tea. Wonder of wonders, it came steaming in a china pot. I poured tea into the thick brown mug and sipped. Prince of Wales. I sipped again, then put the mug down. I was not here for a culinary experience.

  “What’s up, Piotrowski?”

  He pushed his plate away. “Dr. Pelletier, do you remember Bonnie Weimer?” He was watching me closely.

  “Yes, of course.” I had almost completely forgotten about Bonnie and about her disappearance; subsequent events had proven to be so much more pressing.

  My look of mystified apprehension seemed to satisfy Piotrowski. “The body of a young woman has just been found not far from here. There is a possibility it is Miss Weimer. I wondered if you would be willing to come look at her. We’d like to see if we can make an identification before we take her into the morgue in Springfield. Otherwise we’ll have to wait to get a positive ID until we can get her parents up here from New Jersey. And there’s no sense in disturbing them if it isn’t her.”

  I swallowed hard. I had not seen many dead people in my life, and only once—and very recently, at that—had I seen a victim of violent death. I certainly had no desire to set eyes on another. But it seemed to be my duty.

  “Where … is she?”

  “Do you know the hiking trail at Pioneer State Park?” His gaze, once again, was disturbingly intent.

  “Not really.” I vaguely remembered having driven a few times by a green road sign with an arrow pointing to the trail.

  He told me where it was, about a fifteen-minute drive south of Bub’s, in the direction of Williams-town. As far as I could recall there wasn’t much on that road but mountain vistas, rocks, and trees. And, evidently, a state park with corpses.

  “Who found it, uh—her?”

  “A pair of snowshoers. Idiots were trying to cover a ten-mile section of the trail today and almost froze their ass—er, themselves. Came across the body in one of the trail shelters—seems they got some sense and were trying to get out of the cold. Young woman, about twenty years old, same height and hair coloring as this Weimer girl. Hard to tell from a photograph if it’s the same girl, but could be….”

  I could feel my lips go cold. It was as if I had stepped without warning into some alternate reality where the assumptions of daily living were weirdly and permanently suspended, where colleagues and students tumbled quite routinely from closets and shelters. My mind conjured up a fantasy image of Bonnie with Randy’s tie knotted around her neck.

  “How?” I croaked, surprised my voice worked at all.

  “Strangled, it would seem. With her wool scarf.”

  Piotrowski went on, something about no evidence of sexual molestation, at least initially. About the body being fully clothed, wearing a jacket, mittens, wool hat, and boots over jeans and a sweater. And the fatal scarf. About the initial estimate of the time of death. But I wasn’t hearing much all of a sudden.

  “Are you all right, Dr. Pelletier?” His voice faded; my mind seemed to have migrated to some far distant zone. “Here. Here, drink this.” The mug of tea was an intrusion at my lips. I resisted. “Drink.” It was an order. Obediently I sipped, and then sputtered, fully conscious again.

  “Dammit, Piotrowski, you put sugar in it! Yuck.”

  “Yeah. You gonna be okay with this? You don’t have to do it, you know.”

  An image of sunlight on roses flashed into my mind.

  The roses were the color of blood.

  By the time we arrived at the state park, the afternoon light was almost a memory. Piotrowski was driving a Jeep, and we covered the short distance from the main road to the site where the body had been found without any trouble, even over a trail that had just recently been broken in a foot or more of snow. Ahead, revolving amber and blue lights confirmed that we were headed in the right direction. In the distance, a two-way radio crackled.

  Piotrowski stationed me outside an area marked off with yellow crime-scene tape. The area inside the tape looked no different from the rest of the woods. Evergreens and maples interspersed with birch. Deep snow, pristine in some sections, trampled down and soiled in others. Starkly delineated in the harsh white spotlights of two state police cars, the shelter was a fairly primitive structure: three sides of rough boards and a peaked roof that overhung the open front. The shelter’s protection had not been sufficient to keep the body from being almost entirely covered in snow, Piotrowski had told me, but the snowshoers could hardly ignore the red boot sticking out of the drift.

  Visualizing the lieutenant’s blunt image—that homely boot, like a splash of blood on the snow—had affected me oddly. Emily Dickinson’s words again floated through my mind, made this young woman’s death real to me. Real—and final. Looking at Death, is Dying—/Just let go the Breath—/And not the pillow at your Cheek/So Slumhereth—

  But the boot wasn’t visible now. “Wait here. The technicians are almost through.” Piotrowski stepped over the tape and approached two uniformed troopers standing by what looked like a stripped-down hospital gurney. In the deepening twilight the dark bulk on the gurney resembled nothing so much as a row of half-filled trash bags.

  It was Bonnie Weimer. In the near d
ark of a late winter afternoon, before I even saw the corpse, I knew that in my gut. The gurney bumped over the packed, lumpy snow. The officer pushing it, an athletic-looking blond woman not much older than Bonnie herself, brought it to a halt in front of me, and unzipped the black plastic bag. Bonnie’s eyes were wide open, in death even more protuberant than usual, and her mouth was agape in final petulant complaint. Looking at Death, is Dying—I stared for a few seconds, not really seeing much other than that it was indeed Bonnie and that her jacket sleeve was dirty and ripped open at the shoulder seam. I nodded at Piotrowski and turned away.

  “It’s her?”

  “It’s she.” Then I hated myself for being persnickety at a moment such as this.

  “It’s Bonnie Weimer?” The lieutenant was persnickety himself.

  I nodded. “May I go now? Please?”

  “Yes, of course.” Piotrowski was suddenly solicitous. He looked at the trooper, and made a “take it away” gesture with his gloved hand. “Why don’t you go sit in the Jeep for a minute while I finish up here, and then I’ll drive you home.”

  “My car …” I could hear the faintness of my voice.

  “Don’t worry. Someone will get it for you.”

  By the time he returned to the Jeep I was sobbing quietly into some “man-size” tissues from a pack I’d found on the dashboard. He glanced over at me once and then turned the key in the ignition, looked over his left shoulder, and began to back the vehicle down the rutted lane.

  When I could speak again, I said inanely, “She would be so upset about her jacket.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s all dirty, and she took such good care of it when she came into the classroom, hung it on her chair just so, so the sleeves wouldn’t touch the floor. The other kids just fling their stuff around, but she—” A graphic memory replaced the image of Bonnie in class—Bonnie in a white apron standing by my table in the Faculty Commons the day after Randy’s death. The memory came flooding back so vividly I could almost hear her nasal whine: Isn’t it awful about Professor Astin-Berger … he looked so happy … with the letter and everything….

  “Ah—Lieutenant—did I happen to mention to you…?”

  The whole time I was telling Piotrowski about talking to Bonnie in the Commons, what she had said about Randy and the letter, I was thinking, Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod. Why didn’t I tell him right away? If I had gone right to the police, maybe she’d still be alive. Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod.

  “I don’t know why you didn’t tell me about this sooner….” His exasperated eruption was what I expected. What I deserved.

  I dropped my head into my hands and shook it slowly from side to side. My eyes burned. “I simply forgot. I’ve been on such overload. First the murder, then that crazy note on Randy’s computer, and then Sophia’s suicide attempt—everything else just flew out of my mind….”

  “Well, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference.” He sighed. “You say she didn’t show up to turn her paper in?”

  “Right.”

  “And that wasn’t like her?”

  “Right. She always had everything done on time.”

  “Well, then I’d say, whatever happened happened shortly after you left.”

  “Again?”

  “Again,” he said, and clicked his tongue. “Again.” The look he gave me was straight and serious.

  The rest of the way home we talked about what exactly Bonnie had said, how she had behaved, who else had been there, about Bonnie’s personality, her annoying little traits, her performance in class, about other students and teachers and how she had gotten along with them, about the course itself, what we had studied, about Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath … Piotrowski was a skilled questioner, and the words just seemed to flow.

  By the time we pulled into my driveway, I felt in control again, although I had wandered far afield from the subject of murder. I realized later that that had probably been Piotrowski’s intention. I was telling him about Sophia’s brilliant paper on the Master letters as he turned off the ignition and started to open his door.

  “Oh, but you’re not interested in that….” I was babbling. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” He pulled his door shut again and settled back in his seat. “It’s fascinating stuff. I always enjoy getting educated.” Was he being snide? I didn’t think so. He was silent for a moment and then went on, “Sounds like the nineteenth century was a pretty hot time in spite of its reputation: You know, lie back and think of England. And all that.”

  I glanced over at him, surprised.

  He looked straight ahead, silent and thoughtful for a minute. I could see Amanda peering out at us from the kitchen window, trying to scope out the unfamiliar vehicle. If I sat out here much longer she’d go looking for a baseball bat. My hand went to the door handle, and Piotrowski spoke, almost as if he were thinking out loud.

  “You know, this doesn’t smell like sex to me.”

  “What?” My expression this time was undoubtedly one of pure astonishment. My hand dropped back into my lap.

  “Sorry.” He looked a trifle shamefaced. “Talking to myself. What I mean is that I’ve been operating on the assumption that this case was somehow related to Astin-Berger’s, er—copious—sex life. But, now I don’t know…. I don’t quite … That just doesn’t feel right to me anymore. I have a hunch….”

  He ceased speaking and sat in silence another minute or two. It had just popped into my head that maybe I should tell him about my two visits from Sophia’s father when he shrugged, opened his door, got out into the snow, and crunched around to my side of the car. By the time he reached my door I had it open and was halfway out. I decided not to say anything. Poor Sophia had enough trouble without me siccing the police on her father.

  It was not absolutely necessary that Piotrowski help me over the icy spots, but he did it anyhow.

  “Take care,” he said at the door. And for an instant I feared it was more a warning than a conventional farewell.

  Fourteen

  ASMALL COLLEGE like Enfield never really lets you get away: classes, department meetings, faculty meetings, damage-control meetings, secret strategy conclaves, gossip sessions, encounter groups and, worst of all, dinner parties. At times I found myself actually yearning for the anonymity of my former teaching job in New York. There, in that city of infamous repute, I’d never had to deal with the violence that seemed to be hounding me on this bucolic little campus.

  The day after my ghastly visit to the state park, I decided not to show my face at the college. Nonetheless, all morning I had to handle curiosity calls from colleagues, people as varied as Miles Jewell and Magda Vegh. With them I was evasive and vague, qualities I had developed during a wary childhood and mastered during my brief but treacherous marriage.

  One call I couldn’t fend off, however, was from Avery Mitchell. He called around noon and asked if I could come in and meet with him, “about the, ah, difficult situation we seem to be finding ourselves in at the moment.” From his subdued tone I couldn’t really tell what kind of a session this was to be: gossip, strategy, or damage control. Or something more personal and much more to be desired.

  Dream on, little dreamer.

  I dressed with self-conscious nonchalance in my best jeans and a black scoop-neck sweater. I didn’t want my clothes to suggest in any way that I had dressed to impress. On the other hand, I wanted to look fantastic. I must have changed a half-dozen times. Go figure.

  I dropped the girls off at the mall. Amanda, slender as she was, looked almost hefty in her plaid jacket next to Sophia, frail in a loden three-quarter coat Amanda had outgrown when she was fourteen. Amanda had my credit card, and they were headed for the postholiday sales. I made a valiant attempt to rein in the spending. “Remember, a three-hundred dollar limit. Right? And mostly for Sophia. Right? Underwear. Socks. Sneakers. Boots. Right? Practical stuff.” The gleam in Amanda’s eye did not bode well for my MasterCard balance.
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  As I walked down the corridor of Emerson Hall, I noted once again how the ranks of the departed dominated this center of college power. President after president, from Amos Pratt Hamilton in 1819 to Wesley Buckman in 1985, brooded over the long and gloomy space. Dead white males all: How ironic that from the power brokers of their own times they had become the power clichés of this era of pseudoegalitarianism.

  Bucky, as he had come to be known, was the most recent to be hung—so to speak: President of Enfield College, 1970–1985. Portrayed in his presidential robes, the velvet hood of his Harvard doctorate framing a pale, heavy face with only a trace of the pendulous jowls that show up in yearbook photos, Wesley Buckman looked complacent and in control. Who could have expected the suicide that would end his tenure as president, and the subsequent financial disclosures that would send shock waves through the entire extended Enfield community of students and alumns? Avery had succeeded him and, I’d been told, had done a brilliant job pulling the school out of the period of anxiety and self-doubt—and, it was rumored, something approaching financial collapse—that had followed Bucky’s demise. How nice that the solidly comfortable should find themselves solidly comfortable once again, I thought snidely, and pushed open the door leading to Avery’s outer office. How very, very nice for them.

  The main office was deserted. Neither Lonnie, Avery’s secretary, nor Anne, his administrative assistant, was in. The window drapes, ecru-and-green chintz, were drawn, the thick green carpet had been freshly vacuumed, and the computers wore their plastic covers. Of course. College staff was on vacation the week between Christmas and New Year’s; officially, the school was closed. I’d forgotten about that. It was so quiet in this usually bustling building that the silence was beginning to give me the creeps. The door to Avery’s inner office stood open. I walked over and looked in. Empty. I knocked on the door frame, remembering my hiring interview, the only other time I’d been here.