Quieter than Sleep

by Joanne Dobson

  Piotrowski was at the counter of the Blue Dolphin, but he was not alone. Dressed in his truly ill-fitting gray suit, he was deep in conversation with a uniformed trooper. A miniature trooper, I thought, until she turned and I saw that she was an average-size young woman—not what my conditioning had led me to expect a state police officer to be.

  “Oh, hello, Dr. Pelletier.” The lieutenant was conspicuously nonchalant about my arrival, but didn’t seem to be harboring any grudges. I relaxed a little. “I’ll be with you in a minute. I have to finish up something with Trooper Schultz here. Do you mind waiting in one of the booths?”

  Trooper Schultz looked at me, speculatively it seemed, and then turned back to Piotrowski. The sun through the window highlighted her roundish cheeks and very plain, unmade-up face, lent red highlights to her severely cut short brown hair. Surely no officer of the law should have such long eyelashes, I thought fleetingly, then chided myself for residual sexism. I’m sure she’s extremely competent, I told myself, righteously. Then I turned my attention to the waitress and her offer of a menu and coffee.

  I waited for Piotrowski to join me before placing my order of toast, sausages, and home fries. He ordered two poached eggs and an order of butterless whole wheat toast, coffee, and two large glasses of ice water. Hold the fries. I studied him more closely as he folded his menu and handed it to the waitress. His gray jacket was bagging under his arms and overlapping at his waist, overly large even for the good-size man sitting across from me. The planes of his countenance seemed more positively defined, as if a lens had suddenly come into clear focus, the flat cheekbones more prominent, a rugged jawline beginning to emerge, the full lips more sensuous now in the indubitably thinner face. Had something in my vision shifted, or…?

  “Piotrowski, are you on a diet?”

  “Under orders.” His voice was gruff and he flushed slightly, whether with embarrassment or with gratification that I had noticed I couldn’t tell. “Captain’s on a health kick.” Then he shut those nice lips—very nice lips—firmly. Not going to say another word about it.

  “Well …” Perversely, I wanted to tease him, to even the score just a little. “It’s very becoming to you, anyhow.” And I raised my eyebrows. His flush turned into a full-fledged, red-faced blush and I was immediately sorry. After all, I certainly knew how it felt to be sensitive about your appearance.

  “Hurrumpph.” He lifted the big white coffee mug to his lips, effectively hiding them, and his eyes, from view.

  When he finally emerged from behind the mug, I told him about my plans for the next few days. I would go to the Houghton, which had about thirty folders of Beecher material, and read through the files until I was done. God only knew how long that would take. Until my eyes gave out from the strain of reading, probably, and my butt from the strain of sitting. If I didn’t find anything there, I’d go on to Yale, and then to New York. I’d concentrate on Beecher, but I’d look at the other stuff as well—whatever Randy had requested. But I couldn’t guarantee anything. This was all a wild shot in the dark.

  “I know that,” he said when I had finished my agenda. “And I appreciate that we may be on the wrong track here. But I want you to keep in close touch with me, anyhow. Call me a coupla times a day and just talk. Talk about anything and everything—what you looked at, what it suggests, who you talked to, what you had for lunch, where you ate it. Doesn’t matter if it’s important or not—I want everything. Ya got that?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No but about it. Just do it. You may be investigating the research, but I’m investigating the homicides. I need to know everything. Ya never know when the most trivial detail is gonna knock everything else into place. If I could go with you I would. But”—and he grinned ruefully—”I’d be pretty conspicuous in a library.”

  Not if you got a new suit, you wouldn’t, I thought. And indeed, there was something scholarly about that high, wide forehead, something serious and thoughtful about those brown eyes.

  “You know how to get ahold of me at home now?” His expression was bland, but I could detect a gleam in his eye. I nodded, warily. “I mean what I said—if you stumble across anything, call me. Don’t worry about it. I’m sorry I was testy with you the other night.”

  I nodded again, slightly shamefaced. The wee-hours phone call was still a sore spot. What embarrassed me the most, I guess, was my arrogance in thinking that I could solve the murders in a brilliant flash of intuition when the professionals had already considered Warzek as a suspect and discarded him. What for me had seemed like ingenious deduction, for Piotrowski had simply been part of the ABC’s.

  Piotrowski sat back in the booth and carefully eased his empty breakfast platter over to the edge of the table, wiping the space in front of him with his paper napkin. Then he crumbled up the napkin and placed it on the platter, on top of the yellow egg smears and toast crumbs. He brushed his hands together, as if to remove any recalcitrant crumbs. He finished his first glass of water and began on the second. I messed around with my fork and my second sausage. A small silence had fallen between us, and I was no longer very hungry.

  Then he spoke, somewhat brusquely, as if he had been undecided about telling me something and had just this moment made up his mind to do it. “You’re gonna have to be extra careful about what you do and where you go. Who you talk to. This isn’t a game of Trivial Pursuit we’re playing here, and I’m taking a lot of heat about getting you involved.

  High-level heat.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I was beginning to have my suspicions. “From whom are you taking heat?”

  He winced, probably at my grammatical prissiness. “Just the brass, you know. They’re a little antsy about getting untrained personnel involved.”

  “What do you mean ‘untrained’? I know what I’m doing.”

  “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. I mean untrained in criminal investigation.”

  “Why should it matter to them? I know it’s not unusual to hire outside consultants. You told me so. Who’s leaning on you, Piotrowski? Is it Tony?”

  “Captain Gorman has made a few calls.” Piotrowski’s nice lips were now set in a tight line.

  “Goddammit.” I slammed my fist down on the table so hard my fork and knife leapt up off my plate and came down again with a loud clatter. Two elderly faculty wives in the booth across from us looked at me askance. I’d be fodder for the gossip mills at this week’s bridge game. Losing my temper in public. Associating with poorly dressed men. Enfield just hasn’t been the same since women were allowed on the faculty.

  I lowered my voice in deference to the great god Rumor. Enfield offers very little privacy. One has to resort to all sorts of wiles and stratagems simply to ensure oneself the basic American freedom of a private personal life. I leaned over the table so Piotrowski could hear my lowered tones. He had noticed our neighbors’ interest as well, and leaned toward me. Whatever my colleagues’ wives had thought before was assuredly intensified now by the secrecy of our manner.

  “Piotrowski,” I was almost whispering, “I can’t tell you how furious I am that Tony Gorman has involved himself in this. Not only has he no right to mess in my life, he also has no business interfering in your jurisdiction. I simply can’t believe he’s done this, and when I get in touch with him I’ll make it quite clear to him how I feel.” The abstraction of my language didn’t begin to convey the bloody hell I was going to give Tony as soon as I could get my hands on him. “I really am sorry, Lieutenant. If he’s caused you any trouble, I apologize.”

  He shrugged his burly shoulders. No problem. He could take the heat.

  “And, further, even if you pulled me off this investigation right this minute, I’d go to Cambridge on my own time and do what I’d planned to do anyhow, simply because when I start something I finish it.”

  He looked at me, expressionless.

  “Yeah, you’re right. Also out of sheer hardheaded orneriness. Goddammit! Nobody tells me what to do. And, especially, wha
t not to do!”

  He sat back and folded his hands on the table in front of him. He nodded. Then he spoke, slowly and with some pauses for thought. “Also, you’re curious. Right? Am I right about that? This whole thing is so—mystifying. Right? It seems to be a mystery from two centuries, and that’s got you hooked. It’s like one of those anatomy overlays in a biology textbook. You got Astin-Berger dead. You got the Weimer girl dead. You got his office tossed. That’s one sheet—the one from the 1990s. But that page isn’t quite transparent, is it? Underneath you see another picture. That’s from the 1800s. But it’s not clear to you yet. It’ll never be clear to me because I’ve only got modern eyes. But you, you’ve got nineteenth-century eyes, like you can put on a pair of magic glasses and read the past, see right through the overlay. You’re just itching to see through to that bottom page. Am I right?”

  I sat there, openmouthed with astonishment at his metaphor, and at how precise it was. “Whatever made you think of a biology textbook?”

  “What? You think I never went to college?”

  I guess I had, but that wasn’t the point. And besides, it didn’t really matter.

  “What I mean is you’re absolutely right.” I spoke with a kind of self-pitying melancholy. “I do have nineteenth-century eyes. Everywhere I go I see the past. It’s lurking there, just beneath the present. New towns built on old foundations. New scandals spun from old desires. New storytellers telling old tales. Sometimes as far as I’m concerned the present isn’t real at all. It’s all merely overlay.”

  I fell silent, remembering an uncanny experience I’d had once while researching at the American Antiquarian Society. I’d spent the entire day reading through the New York Tribune for the year 1848. I was looking for anonymously published poems by a popular woman poet, but could I restrict myself to the poetry section? No, I damn well couldn’t. I read everything: poems, politics, financial news, gossip columns, advertisements—even the shipping news. At the end of the day, when I lifted my eyes from the leatherbound volume of the crumbling newspaper, for one microsecond I was in the nineteenth century. And it was alive—swarming with life. Then I shook my head to clear it and the modern world, with its too-bright colors and its too-loud noises and its too-intrusive realities, came roaring back into my consciousness.

  I didn’t think I’d tell Piotrowski that story.

  “Well, it isn’t,” he said.

  “What? What isn’t what?”

  “The present. It’s real. It isn’t all overlay.”

  “I know that.” His admonishment annoyed me.

  “I thought you knew it. But what you said was so beautiful, it convinced me you meant it.” He grinned at me, as if we were amused together at my poetic self-indulgences.

  “You love it when I talk pretty, huh?” I grinned back. God, this man knew more about me than he needed to.

  He paid for our breakfasts, noted the expense in his little book, and took off in the red Jeep. I picked up a New York Times from a rack by the door and carried it over to the register. Then I waded out through the slushy mud to my car.

  When I pulled out of the Blue Dolphin’s parking lot, a noisy brown car followed close behind me. Around here there are a lot of old cars, but they’re usually Volvos. This one wasn’t. I didn’t know what it was; I’m not exactly good with cars. So I didn’t pay much attention until I turned off the winding country road onto Route 2, and the old sedan turned, too. Then I began to watch it in my rearview mirror. I was thinking, of course, about the noisy car outside my bedroom window a few nights back. This clunker stayed one car behind me for about ten miles. One car-length away, whether I sped up or slowed down. Just when I began to think about finding a phone, the driver turned off at a sign pointing south toward Amherst and Northampton. It was then I remembered Piotrowski had told me the car checking out my house on New Year’s Eve was a rusty brown Plymouth Duster.

  Was this car a Duster? I didn’t have a clue. But I was grateful it was daylight and the roads were busy. And I tucked the little happening away to tell Piotrowski. At least this time he wouldn’t be able to scold me for withholding information.

  Twenty-four

  CAMBRIDGE was its usual wintertime self—cold, crowded, icy underfoot. Walking down Massachusetts Avenue toward Harvard Square, I navigated piles of filthy, ossified snow and picked my way around the homeless people who increasingly populate the center of town. In front of the Harvard Square T entrance, next to the Out-of-Town-Newspapers kiosk, a short, plump woman wearing a full-length navy blue quilted coat stood, sobbing loudly and hopelessly. In one hand she clutched an Au Bon Pain paper coffee cup, in the other a sandwich bag. A longtime urbanite, I’ve become passive in the face of human tragedies that a decade ago would have caused me to spring into action, but this woman got to me. Never before have I heard anyone actually cry out “boo,” “hoo,” “boo,” “hoo,” as if they were actual words in the English lexicon. But I suppose the real reason I paused was that she looked enough like my mother to be her clone.

  I stood there, not knowing what I should do, what I could do. Just then a young Cambridge cop walked over, bent down, and put his arm around the woman’s shoulder, as if he had spoken to her before and knew what would comfort her. He led her to one of the stone benches by the T entrance, sat down with her, and helped her pry open the lid of her coffee cup. I watched as the woman chatted happily with him and sipped her coffee. He opened her paper bag for her and spread her sandwich out on a large paper napkin. I turned away and walked on toward the Houghton. She wasn’t my mother, and there was nothing I could do for her.

  I had arrived in Cambridge at about one o’clock and parked my car in the driveway of my friend Charlotte’s house. Charlotte’s place on Huron Avenue is my base whenever I come to the Boston area. It was semester break, and Charlotte was out of town. She professes to love Cambridge, but leaves it whenever she can. I brought my bag in and plunked it down on the red-and-black dhurrie rug in the tiny guest room on the third floor. Then I made myself a cup of tea and sat for a while in the book-lined living room while I drank it. Charlotte collected old books, and her living room—with cloth-bound and leather-bound volumes catalog on three walls of shelves, displayed proudly on small tables, and piled in corners waiting to be shelved—was comfortable, like a shabby English library. I leafed reverently through the three-volume first edition of Jane Eyre she kept displayed on a Chippendale table by the couch, and browsed through the books in a stack awaiting shelving.

  Then, fortified by the tea, I set out for the long trek to Harvard, an ambitious and gritty walk. By the time I arrived at Harvard Square, succumbed to the lure of the Harvard Bookstore, ate a bowl of chili at Mr. Bartley’s Gourmet Hamburgers, and was ready to attack the Houghton, it was half past three, an hour and a half before the library closed. That would give me enough time to go through the card catalog and fill out call slips for the items I wanted to see—which, since I had no idea what I was looking for, was everything in the Beecher archives. I got writer’s cramp just thinking about filling out all those little spaces on all those little cards.

  As I was crossing Massachusetts Avenue toward the high brick wall that surrounds the Harvard campus, I was startled to hear someone call out, “Karen. Karen Pelletier!” Looking up, I saw the tall, dispirited figure of Ned Hilton shuffling toward me through one of the lofty brick archways. His face was drawn, his angular features tight with anxiety. He wore a red hooded jacket and black hand-knitted mittens. His black scarf was wrapped tight around his neck and chin as protection against the increasingly blustery wind. In this getup he looked frail and vulnerable, like a boy, dressed by his mother, who had unexpectedly found himself stretched into a weedy, underdeveloped adulthood.

  “Well,” I said, after we’d exchanged greetings, “you can’t get away from Enfield, can you, no matter where you go.” I was only half joking.

  “Half of Enfield heads directly for Cambridge as soon as school is out.” Ned’s diction, as usual, was precise
, almost pedantic. “It’s a primal herd instinct for academics, I think. Like lemmings heading off cliffs into the sea.” Although his tone was wry, his metaphor reinforced my sense that he was teetering on the verge of desperation.

  The wind had picked up, and the sun was hanging low in the sky, no longer lending warmth to bleak city streets. Awkward together, acquaintances rather than friends, neither of us knew the proper decorum for this unexpected encounter. Shifting from foot to foot, we tried to keep our toes from freezing while we continued to make small talk. Ned started to tell me what he was doing at Harvard, but I interrupted him. “Listen, how about we go back to Au Bon Pain for caffè latte? It’ll warm us up.” I was eager to begin my research, but Ned’s gray eyes were opaque with despair, and I felt concerned about his well-being.

  We walked briskly back to the restaurant, which, in spite of the fact that it’s part of a chain, seems to have become the beating heart of Harvard Square. At any time of day or night you can see full professors in traditional British tweed jackets and homeless ex-graduate students in taped-up granny glasses and long matted ponytails hunkered over the tiny tables with coffee, croissants, and the omnipresent paperback tomes.

  Ordering two double lattes, we carried them to a table in the far corner. I began sipping at mine immediately, but Ned stirred his distractedly and stared out the window at a tall gaunt-faced woman wearing a sidewalk-length army surplus overcoat. Her abundant gray hair swirled in a maelstrom of curls about shoulders hunched against the bitter cold. As pedestrians hurried by, she lectured them with the authoritative gestures of an accomplished public speaker and the fervor of an evangelist. I couldn’t make out the words of her harangue through the window. A knitted wool cap sat by her feet, carefully cupped to catch the few stray coins flung in her direction.