As he helped me back on with my black coat, the only thing I had with enough style to wear in Manhattan, Tony asked, “Are you sure you won’t change your mind?”
“Tony, I’m hardly going to be there. I’ll be in Boston and New Haven and God knows where until school starts again. I’ve told you that. I may even come back here. Wherever the research takes me. I haven’t mapped it out yet. I’ll let you know.”
“Piotrowski had no right to drag you into this.” Tony’s lips set in a straight, hard line. “You’re not a professional. And you’re right—what you said before: I do think you don’t know how to handle it, Karen. How could you? You’re an academic, for God’s sake. He had no right—”
“Piotrowski didn’t ‘drag’ me into this. Whoever the killer is did that. I had just been talking to Randy, and he was trying to tell me something, but I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t listening! His body fell right out at me, for chrissake. And then my student … My God, Tony, I saw her corpse. Her face …”
“There’s plenty of dead bodies. That doesn’t mean you have to become one of them.”
“Jesus, Tony, what do you think I’m planning to do—get involved in a shoot-out? I’m simply going to a few research libraries—noted for being secure places, by the way—and read through a few old papers. My God, some places you have to be interviewed before they let you in, and then you have to show your bona fides at the desk every day. And you’re not allowed to take anything into the reading room but a pad and a couple of pencils. The first time I went to Harvard, I honest-to-God thought they were going to frisk me. And once you’re in there, with your hands actually on the precious papers, you’re under constant surveillance. What could happen?”
“Who knows what could happen? There’s no good reason for you—”
“And you forget something, Tony. I may not be a professional when it comes to criminal investigation, but you could say I am a trained investigator. I know you don’t think much of academics, but I have picked up a few skills along the way. I know how to do intensive research and close analysis. And, if I say so myself, I am a little more knowledgeable about nineteenth-century America than, say, your average street cop. I know how to look at evidence and wrest meaning from it. If Piotrowski is right, and there’s something unsettling to be found in Randy’s research material, I’ll find it.”
“I know you will. That’s just what I’m afraid of.”
By this point in the conversation we had moved from the living room to the apartment foyer. We were facing each other in our classic antagonist stance, feet apart, hands on hips, jaws set in righteous anger. Clearly neither of us was going to convince the other. It was time for me to leave.
As I fished through my tote bag for keys, Tony startled me by asking, “Do you still have your gun?” A few years earlier there had been a series of brutal rapes in the neighborhood, and Tony had somehow procured a handgun for me, a lethal little semiautomatic. Its provenance was shady, I’m afraid, having something to do with one of his drug busts. Then he had insisted on dragging Amanda and me up to a friend’s weekend house in Columbia County every Sunday for shooting lessons in the back field. I was okay at it—adequately trained to hit a target cooperative enough to allow me time to steady my aim. Amanda, however, had become a crackerjack shot. She could hit anything. Tony had laughed and called her “Calamity Jane.” I’d just stared at her in wonder. My secret fear was that she was passionate enough about this stuff to go into police work.
“Yes.” My reply was impatient. “I still have the gun. It’s right where you told me to keep it, in the bedside stand. And the clip is there, ready to hand, if I should need it.”
“You remember everything I told you about using it?”
“Yes, for God’s sake, Tony, I remember. But I’m not going to need your fucking gun.” I was furious by now, glaring at him. “Why the hell are you smothering me like this? I’m a fully grown adult, and I can damn well take care of myself.”
When I realized that I had just stamped my foot like a spoiled adolescent, I closed my eyes for a moment to calm myself and then smiled ruefully at Tony.
“Sorry. I know you’re genuinely concerned; I shouldn’t react like that. But really, I’ll be fine.”
We stood there in the foyer, silent and awkward, cooling off, and not quite knowing how to say goodbye. Like an idiot, I stuck my hand out to shake his. But Tony took me in his arms and kissed me so long and hard he left me breathless. Then he opened the front door, gently guided me outside, and shut the door. I stood there stone still until I heard the bolt slide shut, then I turned and headed slowly down the long hall toward the elevator.
By three o’clock I had turned the Jetta north on the West Side Drive. As if I needed more grief, the pale January sun that had shone on us during our morning’s drive down gave up the struggle by the time I hit I-684 at White Plains. By Brewster and I-84, the clouds were pulled tighter across the sky than a hospital bedsheet. From Waterbury on, it sleeted all the way home.
Twenty
IHAD WRITTEN a dozen names on the yellow lined pad, names familiar to me such as the Reverend William Ellery Channing and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, and names I’d never seen before I began my research into nineteenth-century ministers. Randy, it seemed, had intended to run the entire gamut of midcentury American divines, from the most liberal to the most conservative. There were call slips for manuscripts from Unitarians, such as Channing, and evangelicals, such as the Reverend Thomas Skinner. How deeply he had intended to look into their work I had no idea. Simply thinking about reading all those sermons made my eyes glaze. To date, however, it would appear that he had dipped into their archives only randomly, testing the waters, I imagine. Perhaps testing his tolerance for crabbed handwriting, crabbed prose, and crabbed thinking. I hadn’t read any nineteenth-century sermons yet, but I was already biased against them.
Next to each name on my list I wrote down the libraries where Randy had requested papers and the number of files he’d asked for. The evidence of the call slips in his office showed that the only preacher whose work he had looked at with more than perfunctory attention was Beecher, whose papers were deposited mostly at Harvard, Yale, and the New York Public Library. Good, none of these libraries was more than a few hours’ drive from Enfield.
I leaned back in my desk chair, chewing on the top of my pen. Then I sat forward and drew an arrow next to Beecher’s name. Then another. Then a third. This was where I would start.
Ignoring Piotrowski’s warnings, I was working in my office at the college. It was quiet on campus, but not as quiet as it was at my all-too-quiet house now that Amanda and Sophia were gone. I missed them—the ceaseless beat of R.E.M., the bathroom cluttered with hairbrushes and apricot scrub, the burnt popcorn pans. The racket. The energy.
Sunlight shone in squares through the high window behind my desk, illuminating the work I had planned to do on my semester break—the essay I needed to revise for publication, the book I’d agreed to review. This was the work that would advance my career, but it paled beside more immediate concerns. I had begun this investigation with Piotrowski’s per diem as incentive, but in the past few days the search itself had somehow taken on momentum. If Piotrowski and I were right—and there was always the possibility that we might both be off the wall here—someone, for some reason, found Randy’s research sufficiently threatening to kill for. And not once, but twice.
I thought about the lieutenant’s analysis of the killings as reactive rather than planned. With chin in hand I sat at my desk and stared at the name to which the arrows pointed. Was there any possibility that anyone alive in the final decade of the twentieth century could care passionately enough about the nineteenth-century Henry Ward Beecher to kill for him—impulsively or otherwise? No, I thought. No. No. This is ludicrous. I must be on the wrong track here.
I went back over the other names on my list: Horace Bushnell, W. B. Sprague, John Abbott—even less likely. Suddenly a sense of the futility of
this endeavor overwhelmed me. If I’d thought it up on my own, I would have abandoned the investigation right then and there. But Piotrowski was a seasoned police investigator, wasn’t he? He knew what he was doing, didn’t he? Unless we were involved in some kind of delusional folie à deux, he did. Well, if he wanted to continue to shell out taxpayers’ hard-earned money for this academic wild-goose chase, it might as well go to me rather than to some La-La Land psychic. At this point, however, I didn’t have much more faith in any results I might produce than I would in those of a clairvoyant.
Let’s see—what did I know about Beecher? I remembered telling Piotrowski about the affair with Libby Tilton that had rocked the nation in the 1870’s. Did I tell him, I tried to recall, that it had actually gone to trial in 1875, with Theodore Tilton suing Beecher for alienation of affection? That the trial had lasted for six months and received international media attention? I knew I hadn’t told him that, at one point, the reverend’s sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, outraged at his behavior, threatened to march into Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights when the renowned Henry was preaching from his illustrious pulpit and denounce him. Or that another sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, even more famous than Henry, attended services with the express intent of stopping her. This stuff was worse—or better—than soap opera.
But that was such an old scandal and very well documented. It might emphasize the human frailty of even our most celebrated public figures—the uproar over Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers sprang to mind here, a blip on the screen compared to the Beecher brouhaha—but it certainly wouldn’t cause anyone today to flip out to the point of unpremeditated murder.
I was deep in thought when someone knocked on my office door. I jumped, and the pen in my hand drew a crazed squiggle through Beecher’s name. I shrugged; the squiggle seemed just as comprehensible an addition to my notes as anything else there. I scooped up the papers I’d been working on, dropped them into the center drawer, and shut it. “Who is it?” I called as I rose and walked to the locked door. Both the lock and the question were recent, due to Piotrowski’s enjoinders of prudence.
“It’s me.” It was Greg’s familiar, cheery voice. When I opened the door he continued, “Awful cautious all of a sudden, aren’t you?”
“You never know. How’d you know I was here?”
“Easy—no one answered the phone at your house, and when I walked by the light was on in your office. How’s that for brilliant deduction?”
“Awesome.” I was in no mood for banter. “Did you want me for something in particular?”
“Well, I was going to invite you to dinner, but with a welcome like that maybe I’ll invite someone friendlier—Attila the Hun, perhaps, or maybe even … Margaret Smith.”
“That bad? I’m sorry. I’m just preoccupied. I’d love to come to dinner. If I can come as I am, that is.” I looked down at my jeans and baggy red Gap sweater—not too bad, considering. And I didn’t feel up to driving all the way home to change.
“You’re fine. It’ll just be you, me, and Irena, and God knows you don’t have to look good for us….”
“Thanks a lot, pal.” I punched him on the arm.
“And,” Greg continued with a flourish, “I’m making your favorite: angel-hair pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and porcini mushrooms.”
“Yum.” He didn’t have to know I’d given half my last helping of this dish to a derelict on a Manhattan street corner just two days ago.
“Well, you look busy. See you around six for a drink?”
“Hang on, Greg. Are you in a rush? Or can I pick your brains for a few minutes?” In spite of Piotrowski’s admonitions, I wanted to talk to Greg about Beecher. Without saying why, of course. Greg had an absolutely amazing mind. Facts, significant and trivial, adhered to it as if it were composed of Velcro. When I needed some obscure, recondite information I went to Greg first, then to the standard reference works.
“No, I can talk.” He loped over to the green armchair and settled himself down willingly enough. Always ready for a good schmooze.
“What do you know about Henry Ward Beecher?” I pulled up the black Enfield captain’s chair.
“Beecher? That sanctified lech?” He grimaced. “Why do you want to know?”
I waved my hand in a generally dismissive way—just curious. “I know you’ve done work on ethnicity in nineteenth-century America. I wondered if you’d run across him at all.”
“Well, he didn’t like the Irish, that’s for sure. But then nobody did. I don’t think they liked themselves much, either, from what I can tell. But other than that, I just know the general stuff—that he had an income of over forty thousand a year when the average working man’s family was starving on less than a dollar a day; that he walked around with uncut gems in his pocket because he liked to run them through his fingers. That kind of stuff.”
“That’s the general stuff, huh?” It always amazes me what scholars think is commonknowledge.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Oh, it’s this article I’ve been thinking about—the one on the women writers. I’ve been reading about Stowe, and her brother keeps popping up. I couldn’t believe that what I was reading was correct. Did he really hold slave auctions at Plymouth Church?”
“Better believe it, honey. Beecher’s so-called ‘auctions’ were to raise money to buy the freedom of fugitive slaves, an admirable cause, of course. But for some reason most of the slaves ‘auctioned’ were female, light-complected, and young. He could whip a congregation into a frenzy by asking them to picture their sisters—their very own sisters—in the hands of just such lecherous masters as these young women had to deal with every day.”
“Jesus.”
We went on to talk about Beecher for a while longer. I didn’t learn much that I hadn’t already known. I did, however, confirm that Greg cared nothing about Beecher and didn’t have the slightest suspicion that I was endeavoring to associate the reverend gentleman with our current violent happenings. We drifted off into other topics.
“So’d ya have a good time at our party?”
“It was great, Greg. I was just a little wiped out, especially by the end. I couldn’t get into it as much as I wanted to.”
“Yeah, I saw you just before you left. You looked like you’d been hit by a snowplow. But it was a swinging evening by Enfield standards, wasn’t it? People were really getting loose. Even Avery, for God’s sake. Did you see him with Magda?”
Here my renowned control came into play. “Oh, yeah, I guess I did.” Very cool. “I didn’t know they were an item.”
“Well, I don’t know for certain, but it sure looks like they are. I’m surprised at his choice, but happy he’s found someone who, ah—interests him. He’s had a pretty rough time since—well …”
“His wife left him, right? And somebody said something about Randy.”
“Yeah, Avery’s wife left him, all right.” Greg’s mouth twisted, as if he had tasted something unpleasant. “Happened the first year I was here. She was a real looker, Liz, a knockout, in a refined and quiet manner. Looked a little like the young Katherine Hepburn. From what I could tell they were fairly happy together, at least until Astin-Berger started making his moves.”
“I thought she ran off with a musician.”
“That’s who Liz left with, but the whole thing started with Randy. From what I heard, as soon as he got tenured he started hitting on her. She must have been a hell of a challenge to him—the president’s wife. Think of the arrogance of that prick!” Greg’s tone was suddenly so bitter I wondered if he had a personal reason for despising Randy. Certainly Irena, who made a living by her looks, wouldn’t have escaped the notice of the campus Lothario. Hmm.
But Greg continued his story without personal disclosure. And I wasn’t about to pry. “Everywhere Liz went, there was Randy, admiring her clothes, the way she walked, the books she read, playing tennis with her, inviting her for walks through old graveyards and long afternoons in antiquarian b
ookstores. All the things a busy college president wouldn’t have time to do. Especially since he was cleaning up the mess ol’ Bucky left behind.
“Well, as the quintessential Don Juan, Randy knew how to get what he wanted. It took a while, but he hooked her. Then she began to weary him, and he brushed her off, not very gently. Word got around, and Avery heard. I guess things were never the same between Avery and Liz after that. Months later she took up with this young composer from the Music Department. Ran off with him in the late spring, just after graduation.”
“Wow.”
“Avery was devastated. He took a leave of absence for the fall semester, and rumor had it he wasn’t coming back. Pulled himself together, though, and he’s been doing a great job ever since. Never saw him cozy up to a woman like he did the other night, though.”
“Hmm. How interesting.” And it was. Oh, it was.
“Speaking of Magda,” Greg said, “she and Randy went way back. She’s hinted to me that they were acquainted—well acquainted, if you get my drift—during Randy’s Fulbright year in Budapest. But, oddly enough, I always thought they avoided each other while she was here.”
“Did they? Well, I think now she’s angling for another year at Enfield, Greg, or maybe something even more permanent. She certainly is giving Miles Jewell the full treatment—cleavage and all.”
Quieter than Sleep Page 18