Quieter than Sleep

by Joanne Dobson

  Never one to accept compliments gracefully, even when unruffled, I replied with abject stupidity. “So did Magda,” I said. And then I wanted to die.

  Avery seemed taken aback. Then he spoke carefully and in lowered tones. “Well, yes. But, then, one expects that from Magda. The central purpose of Magda’s life is to look sensational. But with you it’s—well—an occasional by-product of a life lived for varied purposes. And a delightful by-product, if I may say so.”

  I was stunned speechless. But Avery went on smoothly, seemingly not noticing my discomfiture, to discuss Hungarian politics, and the differing political responses of Hungary and Yugoslavia to the breakup of monolithic Communism. Cool. Very cool.

  When I regained my composure, I sat back in the low-backed bar stool and regarded Avery as dispassionately as I could. He was dressed casually in gray cords, a charcoal gray mock-turtleneck jersey, and a heavy black zip-up sweater. The dark colors emphasized the long line of his jaw and shadowed his eyes, which were now the murky blue-green of a choppy northern sea. As he spoke, he moved his slender hands with instinctive grace.

  The charisma of this man was so natural and persuasive that I just about gave up and succumbed. But some small, remote, annoyingly rational node of consciousness wouldn’t quit. Kept suggesting that, for some reason, incomprehensible to me, I was being deliberately charmed. The funny thing was that I didn’t give a damn. Charm away, I thought. Beguile me. Captivate me. I like it.

  And then, about halfway through our second drink, Avery’s mood changed rather abruptly. He fell silent. As the cocktail chatter swirled around us, he met my attempts at picking up the small talk with abstracted smiles. Then, eyes focused on his glass, he spoke quietly. “I don’t know why I do this.” With long, slender fingers he smoothed out the lock of sandy hair that had fallen again across his forehead. That was it. Just “I don’t know why I do this.” And silence.

  After waiting in vain for elaboration, I asked, hesitantly, “Do what?”

  “This performance I’m putting on.” He looked over his shoulder, away from me, as if suddenly taking an intense interest in our fellow drinkers. Following his gaze I saw Ned smile wanly and wave his arm to attract his petite blond wife Sara, who was ushering their two little girls through the restaurant’s front door. As Ned introduced her to Jill, I brought my attention back to Avery.

  “I don’t … know what you mean.”

  “Oh, I spin this web of—what?” He looked up at the ceiling fan and rubbed the fingertips of his right hand together as if trying to conjure up an elusive word.

  “Charm?” I couldn’t help it. It just popped out.

  “Charm. Yes. Charm…. You noticed.” He smiled briefly, a flash of fine patrician teeth. Then he took another sip of his scotch and looked directly at me for the first time in five minutes. “I’m very good at charm, you know.” I nodded. “It’s a form of insulation. It protects me from human contact, or so my ex-wife informed me on any number of occasions. And when a situation threatens to get out of hand, it allows me total control. Liz never liked that about me, my need for total control.” His voice tightened when he mentioned his wife. He looked down into his drink again. When he spoke his words were so quiet I almost didn’t hear them. “But I don’t know how else to handle you.”

  I felt as if my breath had been sliced in half by a very thin, exceedingly sharp knife.

  “Really?” It was more a sigh than a word.

  “You intrigue me.” He glanced cautiously around the bar, and then looked directly at me again. His blue eyes held a wistful curiosity. “But it wouldn’t work, you know.” He shook his head, with slow, determined emphasis. “I won’t put you in that position.” His eyes focused intently on the South Seas mural over the bar.

  “Avery.” I reached over to touch his hand. He pulled it away and stood up immediately.

  “Let’s get out of here.” He grabbed my jacket and held it for me to put on.

  The crowd at the bar was dense and our seats were commandeered almost before we relinquished them. Avery took my arm to guide me through the crush. Pushed against me by the crowd, he spoke directly into my ear. “I’m tired and I don’t usually drink this much anymore, and the booze is talking, and I’m making a fool of myself. Forget I said anything.”

  I didn’t reply until we had left the restaurant. In Enfield, even the doorknobs have ears.

  “Avery,” I said, as we began the short walk to the college parking lot. “You can’t really expect me to forget you said anything—”

  “God,” he interrupted. “I’ve put you in an awful position, haven’t I?” He stopped in the shadow of the library wall. He had, I noticed, let go of my arm. “Karen, I’m sorry. Listen. I want to get something clear. Don’t exaggerate what I’m saying to you. All I’m saying is that I’m attracted to you, nothing more. I’m attracted to you, but it won’t work. Given our relative positions here at the college, it would be extremely—shortsighted—for me to get involved with you. And it wouldn’t be ethical. I feel very strongly about that. All the issues it raises …”

  I knew he was thinking about the fierce faculty-meeting battles about sexual harassment and abuse of power. I opened my mouth to protest, but he kept right on.

  “I should have kept quiet about it but I was making such an ass of myself…. Well, I wanted you to know there was a reason.”

  “Avery, you weren’t making an ass of yourself. And I find you—well—enormously attractive.”

  “But?” he broke in.

  “No but, just enormously attractive. It’s only that you’ve caught me off guard. I—”

  He reached up, as if to stroke my cheek, but let his hand drop without touching me. “Karen, listen to what I’m going to say, and then I’d better go. I will not call you. Don’t expect to hear from me other than in the normal course of things. I mean that. I know you’ve worked hard to get where you are. I will not complicate it for you.”

  All I wanted at that moment was his arms around me. The hell with sexual ethics. The hell with my career. That bothersome little core of rationality was sinking fast. I reached out my gloved hand. Maybe I could just touch his arm.

  But then he said, “And—I know this makes me an SOB—but it would be disastrous for me, too, I just can’t take the heat right now. You know how the shit would hit the fan if I started fraternizing with an untenured woman.” He said “fraternizing” ironically, to stress its absurd inadequacy to the whole extraordinarily complicated business of erotic life.

  His words arrested my caress. I put my hand in my pocket. He was right. He was an SOB. A cold, calculating son of a bitch, and I would never forgive him. But he was also right on the mark. Any relationship between us, in this place and at this time, would be disastrous, for both of us.

  I wanted him to kiss me anyhow. Just one little kiss, I thought, what could it hurt? But he didn’t. He squeezed my arm gently, gazed at me soberly for a heartbeat, then turned and strode away toward Emerson Hall. I watched him go. In the deep winter shadow of the library, my lips were cold.

  Twenty-two

  ISAT ON THE EDGE of my bed with the phone to my ear and listened as its ring shattered Piotrowski’s sleep. At least I assumed he was asleep—it was 3:17 A.M. It was two nights after my encounter with Avery and record cold, even by New England January standards.

  “Piotrowski.” He picked up on the second ring, speaking in an uninflected tone, fully alert, revealing nothing. He sounded just like Tony. They must learn it at cop school.

  “Piotrowski, we’re on the wrong track.” My voice, in contrast, was high and rushed. “These killings have nothing to do with Randy’s research. I just woke up from a dream about corpses and it all fell together. The killer is—”

  “Karen Pelletier? Is that you?”

  “Yes, Piotrowski. Of course it’s me. Now, you see—

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s an ungodly hour, but—”

  “Has something happ
ened?”

  “No.” I was losing patience. “No. But I’ve solved the murders!”

  “In your sleep? You’ve solved the murders in your sleep? An entire team of highly trained homicide investigators has been working on this thing day and night, and you’ve solved it in your sleep?” It sounded like the unflappable Piotrowski was annoyed.

  “Are you angry or something, Piotrowski?”

  “Oh, no. I get far too much sleep. I always appreciate being woken at—what?—three-nineteen—by someone wanting to talk about her dreams. Keeps me from dreaming too much myself.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to talk about my dreams, exactly….” The lieutenant’s uncharacteristic sarcasm was beginning to cool me down. Perhaps my middle-of-the-night epiphany wasn’t so brilliant after all. Perhaps this phone call in itself was part of a lunatic nightmare. I pinched the back of my hand to see if I was dreaming. I wasn’t.

  At about a quarter after three I had awakened suddenly from a dream about bloodless corpses sprawled across a freshly mopped library floor. One of them seemed to be crying. I woke with the image of tears on an alabaster face only to hear a car slow on the road outside my bedroom window. As the desolate sobbing of the corpse blended into the sound of the car’s motor, it struck me, with sudden heart-stopping clarity, that Piotrowski and I had been totally wrong in our assumptions about the motivation for the two murders. Randy’s scholarship had nothing to do with them. With the cold, clear, rational certainty of dead-of-the-night insights, I came to the conclusion that the killer must be Stan Warzek, Sophia’s father. My next thought was that Piotrowski had to know. And right away. But now, in light of the detective’s reaction …

  “Piotrowski, I’m sorry. I guess I should’ve waited till morning. I must be cracking from the stress. But it just seemed so clear all of a sudden.”

  “Well, Doctor, you might as well go on.” He spoke grudgingly. “Now that you’ve got me awake anyhow.” A vague image of Piotrowski in bed flashed into my mind. I tried to clarify it. Would he be sitting on the edge of the mattress as I was? Or would he be lying down? These were not questions I could ask him without sounding like a heavy breather. Are you alone? Are you wearing pajamas? God, woman, I thought, what’s the matter with you?

  The room was freezing and the telephone cord wasn’t long enough to let me reach the thermostat in the hall. I burrowed back under the blankets. Even thermal socks couldn’t keep my feet warm.

  “Well, a few minutes ago I was awakened by a car going past the house very slowly. It was loud and seemed to take forever to get past. Or maybe that was part of the dream—”

  “What time did this car go by?” The question slashed through my explanation.

  “About—well, exactly—three-fifteen. I looked at the clock right away.”

  “And it was loud? You mean like it had a bad muffler?”

  “Well, yes. But—”

  “Then it wasn’t the patrol car.”

  “What patrol car?”

  “The one that’s been keeping an eye on your house.”

  I sat up in bed again, letting the covers fall back. “Jesus Christ, Piotrowski! Why don’t you tell me these things so I don’t make a fool of myself calling in the middle of the night?”

  “You’re not listening to me, Dr. Pelletier. I just said it wasn’t the patrol car. Listen, I’m sorry I snapped at you. I know you wouldn’t call without a reason. It’s just that I figured I might actually get to sleep all the way through the night tonight. But I guess not. So, go ahead. Tell me what you’ve been thinking.”

  Some retrograde part of my brain decided the man must be sleeping alone. Otherwise he surely would have switched to another phone before he settled in for a long conversation. I filed that fact away for future reference.

  I told him my revelation, although I was nowhere near as certain about it as I had been when it first flashed into my mind. I phrased it more tentatively than I had planned. “Piotrowski, why couldn’t Sophia’s father have been the killer?”

  “What makes you say that?” His voice on the other end of the line was very still.

  “Well, it’s obvious, Lieutenant. Think about it. He comes to work at the college because his plant closes down. Some busybody tells him about Randy and Sophia. He gets furious—he’s got a savage temper—and strangles Randy. Then—maybe that busybody was Bonnie Weimer, you know—he kills Bonnie so there won’t be any witnesses. It all fits together, don’t you see?”

  “Oh, yes, it does. Very neatly. And, of course, it isn’t as if we haven’t seriously considered that possibility….”

  “Oh.” I felt deflated. Of course he had; that was his job.

  “But that leaves some leftover pieces. Like why would Warzek search Astin-Berger’s office?”

  “Ah—maybe looking for incriminating letters, so the police—you—wouldn’t get them? And—he would have had a passkey. For cleaning, you know.”

  “I dunno, Doctor, as far as we can tell, he wasn’t at the president’s house the night of the Christmas party. There were a couple of maintenance people there, but not Warzek. Unless—”

  “Unless he came in wearing his uniform and nobody noticed him. They wouldn’t, you know. I hate to say this, but any one college worker would look to the faculty like any other. Especially after a few glasses of champagne.”

  “Right. But his wife says he was home with her. Didn’t feel well that night and called in sick.”

  “Well, she would, wouldn’t she? She’d say anything he told her to.”

  “Yeah, but … And would he have computer expertise? Unless it was someone other than the killer who trashed Astin-Berger’s office…. I don’t know, Dr. Pelletier. We’ll keep looking into it, of course. But it doesn’t really fit my theory.”

  His theory? I longed to say something snide about people who force facts to fit theories, but I glanced at the clock and saw that it was almost a quarter to four. I was seized by a fit of contrition. “I’m sorry, Piotrowski, I should have known you would have considered that. I’m sorry I woke you up. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I hope you can get back to sleep now.”

  “I’ll have to make a coupla calls first. One thing is, I want to send officers over to look around your place. So don’t be alarmed if you hear someone outside.”

  “Why on earth—?”

  “Don’t you remember the car, the noisy one that woke you up? I’m just a little concerned about what someone was doing, slowing down in front of your house in the dead of the night.”

  “Oh….”

  “Again. Remember New Year’s Eve? Oh, and Dr. Pelletier …”

  “Yes?”

  “How do you know Warzek has a—I think you said ‘savage’—temper?”

  I told him about Warzek’s visit to my office and the nasty scene at my house on Christmas Eve. And the call to Sophia in which he’d said I “wasn’t going to get away with it.”

  Piotrowski’s response was low and controlled. “And you didn’t think to tell me about this harassment?”

  “Well, it wasn’t harassment, exactly….”

  “Sounds like harassment to me. You hear from this creep again, Dr. Pelletier, you get on the phone to me immediately. Ya got that?” He was really pissed.

  “But I didn’t—”

  “You didn’t what?”

  “I didn’t want to make him any madder than he already was. I figured it would only make a bad situation worse for Sophia if he found out I’d been talking to the police about him—”

  “That is really stupid!” He was angry now and no longer holding it back. “Dr. Pelletier, I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but did you ever think that for a very, very smart woman there’s sometimes something a little off in your thinking processes? You didn’t want to make a bad situation worse! Jesus Christ!” He paused. The line was dead quiet. “Just think about what you’re doing, will you? Just fucking think!” The silence between us crackled. He said, “I’m not going to say another word. Good night, Doctor.” He s
lammed down the receiver.

  Fifteen minutes later, a state police patrol car pulled unobtrusively into my driveway, its motor silenced immediately. Two troopers got out and stood quietly, listening, I assumed. Another car pulled in a minute or two later. The officers surveyed the road, the yard, and the surrounding woods, their powerful flashlights slicing through the dark.

  Finally a female trooper, the tall athletic blonde I remembered from the site where Bonnie’s body was found, came to the house to ask if I was okay. Next to her bulky blue uniform jacket and pants, her heavy black boots, I felt frivolous in the hot-pink chenille robe Tony had given me. “We’ll be around again.” She was formal and polite, the strong Nordic planes of her handsome face stern under the wide brim of the trooper’s hat. “We’ll keep an eye on things.” I could see her breath freezing in the frigid night air.

  She turned to go, then turned back again. “The lieutenant says for you to go back to bed now.” She flashed me a wicked grin and left.

  Twenty-three

  THE SUN was warm enough the morning I left for Cambridge to melt snow from the roof. Outside the kitchen window a four-foot icicle relinquished its frigid heart drip by reluctant drip. Rinsing out my coffee mug in the sink, I watched the icicle’s demise until the sunshine glaring off its tip dazzled me.

  It had been two days since my lunatic predawn phone call to Piotrowski, and in a couple of subsequent calls we had smoothed over the embarrassment caused by my impulsiveness and his harsh words. Even so, I was just a little nervous about seeing him again.

  I toted my overnight bag and briefcase out of the house and threw them into the backseat of the Jetta. Piotrowski and I were having breakfast in Enfield. After that I planned to drive to Cambridge to research Henry Ward Beecher’s papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library. I glanced back at the house before I got in my car. It looked so safe and peaceful, nestled in the woods, with its peeling white paint and the water dripping hypnotically from its eaves. I was puzzled by my sense of relief at getting away from it for a while.