Quieter than Sleep

by Joanne Dobson

  I looked one more time, just to make certain I wasn’t suffering from some neurotic selective blindness, and then rose to take the folder over to the librarians at the desk. My finding—or lack of it—caused a small flurry of consternation among the library staff, who assured me they would look carefully into this disappearance.

  It only took me another five minutes to glance at the final file, which contained a letter from the abolitionist Wendell Phillips asking Beecher to give a speech. Nothing new or shocking there. I leaned back in my chair, stretched my arms high over my head (not caring now whether or not I disturbed my snooty neighbor), then piled up the files to return them to the desk. Quarter of five. Not bad. I’d have a cup of tea, case out the bookstores, call Piotrowski with my nonnews, and have something exotic for dinner, something Enfield didn’t offer—Thai cuisine, perhaps.

  After all, I might as well live it up. It wasn’t often that I got to dine compliments of the Massachusetts State Police.

  Twenty-six

  THE WOMEN’S ROOM at the Houghton is a kick. Trust Harvard to have such a grandiose john—done entirely in light brown marble. Matching marble stalls, marble paneling, and marble floor tiles. The pedestal sinks and the black art deco vanity suggest that this bathroom was furnished in Woodrow Wilson’s administration. We’re lucky that in those benighted days they thought of having a women’s room at all.

  When I came out of the stall, I found myself sharing the bathroom with the redheaded researcher and Margaret Smith. The redhead sat on the vanity seat intent on her image in the mirror, doing something elaborate to her hair with fingertips and a spray can of mousse. Margaret was washing her hands at one of the sinks. She looked up and saw me reflected in the mirror. I nodded at her reflection as I commandeered the other sink, but she didn’t respond. She just kept washing her hands, lathering them up with soap, and rubbing them together over and over, as if she were a surgeon about to undertake a very delicate operation. Once she slid her eyes over to glance at me, but as soon as she realized I’d seen her, she stared down at her hands again. She gave me the creeps. I was glad I wasn’t alone in the room with her.

  The redhead finished spiking her hair. She pulled out a mascara wand. I rinsed my hands, splashed water on my face, and reached for a paper towel, accidently brushing Margaret’s shoulder. “Sorry,” I said. She was taking a long time to dry her hands. I threw the damp towel in the waste container, and turned to leave. Margaret stood directly in my way.

  “Excuse me.” I smiled a polite apology. Oh, God, I thought. Another weird little Margaret Smith scene. I’m too tired for this shit.

  This woman seemed to have some secret grudge against me. Maybe it was because my career appeared to be on the fast track whereas hers seemed to have derailed decades ago. But should that matter to anyone who had any sort of life? What I was dealing with here, I decided, was a pitifully unhappy woman with a bad case of personal envy. I could feel sorry for her, but I wasn’t going to put up with much more of her crap. If it weren’t for the other woman obliviously absorbed in reshaping her lips in front of the vanity mirror, I would have confronted Margaret then and there. But a public scene was more than I could tolerate at the moment.

  “Excuse me.” This time I didn’t smile. Margaret moved fractionally to one side. I brushed past her, picked up my pad and pencils from the shelf, said “Good night, Margaret” and walked out.

  I had promised myself a cup of tea, so I maneuvered around clumps of frozen snow and garbage to cross Massachusetts Avenue. The gray-haired wild woman was gone from in front of Au Bon Pain, but her place had been taken by a saxophonist playing “Am I Blue?” with remarkable verve, given the cold, the sparsity of the audience, and the Bill Clinton mask he was wearing. I threw a handful of coins in his open case.

  But tea and then an hour’s browsing among the books at Wordsworth did not distract me from my own personal blues. I was supposed to be conducting an investigation, and I had wasted an entire day combing through irrelevant trivia. At six-thirty I was plodding back up Massachusetts Avenue toward Charlotte’s house, an aimless integer in a crowd of seemingly purposeful individuals pushing past in their rush to be anywhere else but here.

  The gray-haired woman had found a new platform. She was haranguing a crowd of activist pigeons in front of the Coop. I heard her scream something about patriarchal oppression and the military-industrial complex as I edged past on the sidewalk. All her misgivings about this nation would have been confirmed if she had known what I was up to. In the pay of the state police, I was using my elite intellectual training in a covert operation designed to deprive an American citizen of all rights but the right to breathe incarcerated air.

  The walk back to Charlotte’s seemed interminable. As I left Harvard Square, the crowds thinned out somewhat, but the slick sidewalk was still swarming. I was jostled by fellow pedestrians with more energy than I had—professors, businesspeople, street people, graduate students, hustlers, and the occasional fourteen-year-old prostitute out to make the price of a fix. And what was I out to make the price of? Food, shelter, and clothing, the same as anyone else here. Add a little occasional happiness, minus the syringe if possible, and I would be content.

  Slogging through more freezing slush as I turned onto Huron, I began to brood about Piotrowski. How did he manage the tedium of constant investigation? What did they call a police officer in England? P.C. Plod, wasn’t it? How did Piotrowski do it? Plodding along, day after day after day, sifting through landfills of irrelevant information with seldom anything to show for it. What kept him going? I was terminally exhausted and discouraged after a single day and beginning to be humbled by this whole experience. Who was I to think I could participate in a criminal investigation? Maybe Tony was right. Maybe I didn’t have a clue about what I was doing. My foot slipped on an icy spot. This sidewalk hadn’t received municipal attention. It was shoveled only in random places, and I decided belatedly to pay very close attention to my feet. Plod. Plod. Plod.

  Good thing Huron didn’t get the kind of traffic with which Massachusetts Avenue had to contend. To go along with their lack of shoveling, the sidewalks here were rimmed with four-foot snowplow piles. Occasionally a streetlight was dark. Aside from a couple of stragglers behind me, I was the only pedestrian.

  I shifted the heavy briefcase hanging from my shoulder by its leather strap and started thinking about police work again. Piotrowski had accused me of being “off” in my thinking. I didn’t think he was accusing me of being crazy. I wondered if he meant that I didn’t think like a cop. Hmm. How would a cop think about this day? I slipped again and grabbed a signpost for support. One of these times I was going to go down. How much farther to Charlotte’s? About two more blocks. If I had to walk this again, I’d call a cab. Or, even more drastic, I’d drive. Well, maybe not. Not in Cambridge.

  I tried to compose my thoughts in preparation for calling Piotrowski. Policethink: What would it tell me about the events of this day? I thought long and hard. Nothing. Two annoyances kept getting in the way of any Holmesian deduction—the missing Beecher document and the curious behavior of the redheaded researcher at my library table.

  As I turned finally into Charlotte’s front walk, I still wasn’t satisfied that my thinking was “on,” in Piotrowski’s terms. If I were really thinking like a cop, I thought with a snort of amusement, I’d probably decide someone was following me. Although the area was generally deserted, there had been fairly steady footsteps behind me. And they’d stopped when I turned off the sidewalk. All at once a wave of panic overtook me. The footsteps! I became convinced that someone really was watching me, had been watching me for some time. Had really been following me. As I reached the steps of the porch, I turned quickly and peered back down the street. The only person nearby was turning up the walk of a house half a block away. Farther down, a drunk sprawled across the hood of a car. In the far distance, a student hefted a heavy bookbag to her shoulder.

  I resumed breathing. Just paranoia. A
pro would have known better than to panic. And yet, I was happy to get inside.

  Piotrowski was still in his office when I called. “Don’t you ever go home?” I asked. “It’s after seven.”

  “Not often enough.” His voice sounded weary. “What havya got for me?”

  I ran through my pathetic list—the number of documents I’d looked at, Beecher’s dreadful handwriting, the note I suspected was a camouflaged billet-doux, the empty folder, the annoying table-mate, Margaret Smith’s rudeness, the slippery streets, my exhaustion, my plans for dinner. I must have gone on for about fifteen minutes, with occasional questions from the detective. To my surprise he wasn’t particularly interested in the redheaded researcher, brushing her off as “just some oddball. Cambridge is full of them.”

  “But don’t you think it’s possible she has something to do with this case? I mean, she just kept hanging around. Maybe she’s connected with Randy in some way. An ex-lover? A scholarly rival?”

  “Well …” He sounded doubtful. “We haven’t come across anyone like that. But I’ll run her through.”

  I had to be satisfied with that. I didn’t think to ask him what he would run her through.

  What did interest him was the folder with the missing document. He pressed me intensively on what I could tell about it.

  “The catalog describes it as a single-page manuscript letter, correspondent unknown, Piotrowski. That’s all the librarians could tell me. Ask them yourself.”

  “Oh, I will. When does that place open? And how likely is it that this document would simply be mislaid or misfiled?”

  “Extraordinarily unlikely. They take ‘the most stringent measures’ to assure against that happening. At least that’s what they told me when I asked. I think it might actually be easier to steal it than to mislay it inadvertently.”

  “Really?” he replied. “Really?”

  “Yeah. They just check your notes when you come out of the reading room. They don’t do a body search. If you had the right kind of clothing, the document was small enough, and you picked your moment perfectly, you could slip it in a pocket and walk out. It’s been known to happen.”

  “Would Beecher stuff have any monetary value?”

  “God, I don’t know. I have no idea what the market would be for it. And this was an unknown correspondent…. I don’t think money would be the issue. But, Piotrowski, there could be a dozen reasons for this. It really could be misfiled. Why are you so interested?”

  “Things that are missing always interest me, Dr. Pelletier. Things that are not where they’re supposed to be. Especially when it’s something as well-protected as this letter was. This is an intriguing—er—absence.” He paused.

  “You think this ‘absence’ could have some significance?”

  “Yeah. It could. On the other hand—”

  “On the other hand,” I broke in, “it could be totally meaningless.”

  “Right.”

  “Hmm.” A half-formulated notion was beginning to develop. I’d have to give this some thought.

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing….”

  “Don’t hold back on me, Doctor.”

  “It’s nothing, Lieutenant. I was just woolgathering.”

  “Are you sure?” He was testy again.

  “Yes!” It was a crazy notion. I wasn’t about to risk being told again that my thinking was “off.”

  I remembered my thoughts about plodding through a landfill. Plod. Plod. Plod. Fleetingly, I thought of the footsteps behind me, but didn’t bring them up. He might take my paranoia seriously, and I didn’t want to complicate the evening. All I wanted to do was shower, change my clothes, and go out for a well-deserved meal. In addition, I was too tired and hungry to engage Piotrowski in a discussion about how to handle the tedium of criminal investigation. I didn’t think this was a propitious moment anyhow. He sounded cranky. I told him good-bye. Before I got involved in a theoretical discussion of investigative procedure, I’d wait and see if I actually did anything to help solve the crime.

  Twenty-seven

  MUCH TO MY SURPRISE, Ned Hilton and Magda Vegh were leaving the Thai restaurant as I walked toward it later that evening. Ned wore his little-boy jacket and scarf, and Magda was still in her American incarnation of jeans and leather bomber jacket. I slowed my steps so I wouldn’t run into them; I was preoccupied with my thoughts and didn’t want to have to talk to anyone I knew. Finally I came to a stop in the shadowed doorway of a New Age bookstore and watched as Ned made ineffectual efforts to hail a cab while Magda looked on, attractively fragile and helpless in her oversized jacket. Then it struck me—leather bomber jacket That’s what had caught my attention in Rudolph’s bar, the last time I’d seen Magda. She’d been wearing Randy’s bomber jacket then, too. From my current vantage point, I could tell it was his by the distinctive yellow-and-red pseudomilitary insignia. That’s why the jacket was so big on Magda; it was the one I’d last seen discarded on the floor of Randy’s ravaged office. Magda must have snagged it after the police had released the scene. But what right did she have to the coat? Not that I was about to inform anyone; Randy had no further need for fashionable outerwear. But, still, I marveled at the nerve of the woman: stealing a dead man’s clothes!

  When a taxi finally pulled up, Magda got in, and Ned shambled off down the icy sidewalk. As the cab pulled away, Magda’s eyes raked over the crowd of pedestrians. I didn’t think she saw me, but I couldn’t tell for sure.

  And—Ned Hilton with Magda Vegh? An unlikely pair. Again I remembered what Ned had said about most of Enfield heading for Cambridge at semester break. This must have been just another happenstance encounter. They must have bumped into each other on the street, and Magda had latched on to him. She wasn’t one to let an available man get away. Or an unavailable one.

  The coincidence unnerved me, though. Who else was I going to run into, for God’s sake? Avery Mitchell? I moped through my Pad Thai. My research had been unproductive, and Avery had rejected me. I was a failure as an investigator. I was a failure as a woman.

  I brooded about Avery until I left the restaurant. He was “intrigued,” was he? Well, goddammit, why didn’t he do something about it? Get me all worked up and then walk away without so much as a lousy little kiss! Was he a man, or was he a mouse?

  As usual in affairs of the heart, my thinking was sophisticated and complex.

  The bone-chilling walk home revived me. I began to speculate on the significance of the missing letter that had so interested Piotrowski. I had changed into jeans and sturdy boots and my footing was a little surer on the treacherous sidewalk, so I was free to think about the details of the day’s research. I was developing a hypothesis about a possible connection between the disappearance of a letter from a scholarly archive and the murder of a scholar who had frequented that archive. My theory was so farfetched and unbelievable that I kept shaking my head to clear it. It really wasn’t like me to indulge in such wild flights of fantasy. But …

  Deeply absorbed in my speculations as I approached Charlotte’s place, I didn’t notice until the last minute that the streetlight in front of the house had joined the ranks of the unlit. What really irritated me was that the porch light was also off. Hadn’t I remembered to turn it on? Sometimes I was so dim. I fumbled in my bag for the key as I mounted the steps to the dark porch. “What if …” I was thinking, “what if…?”

  I inserted the key in the lock and turned it. I was just reaching down to twist the knob when someone grabbed me from behind and slammed me full length into the still-closed door. As my left arm was twisted violently behind me, I felt cold metal press against my temple.

  Oh, my God, I thought. Oh, my God! The force of the impact had expelled my breath with a violent whoosh; I gasped for air as I heard a hoarse whisper in my ear.

  “I have a gun, and I will use it. Don’t make a sound. Open the door and go inside. Go inside, shut the door, and turn on the light. Do you understand?” The gun was pressed even mo
re firmly against my forehead. I was afraid to nod. I was unable to speak. I opened the door, went inside, closed the door, fumbled for the light switch. My heart was racing like mad; I was colder than I’d ever been in my entire life.

  With a final vicious twist of the arm, my captor thrust me through the archway of Charlotte’s living room and gave me a fierce push. I cried out in pain and, stumbling into the dark room, smashed into a small table, knocking over a pile of books with a loud crash.

  The noise wouldn’t matter. There was no one else in the house.

  “Turn around,” commanded the voice, and I did. In the dim light from the hall archway I wasn’t really surprised to see the stolid figure of Margaret Smith. She was staring at me with cryptic intensity. She held a small deadly-looking handgun trained directly at me. For the first time in my life I knew what it meant to be scared to death.

  “Margaret….” The syllables rasped painfully out of my constricted throat. My brain was racing to figure out a way to deal with this insane situation, but my heart was racing even faster. Tears of pain streamed down my cheeks. My wrenched left arm hung limp at my side.

  “Close the blinds.” With the gun, she motioned toward the windows. The long room ran the entire width of the house and, as I walked from window to window pulling down blinds, I looked frantically around in the faint light for something I could use to protect myself. Aside from the heavy old-fashioned furniture, there was little in the room but books, ranked row upon row on shelves, piled crazily in corners, displayed on tables.

  Margaret flicked the switch, and the overhead light went on. She motioned me back to the center of the room. I stood staring at her while crazy speculations whirled through my brain. Had my half-baked hypothesis been correct?