Cotton

by Paul Heald

  Their joint declarations seemed a natural end to the morning’s investigation. They speculated briefly about the girls in the Geneva photo and Granville’s possible motivations for killing Diana, but they still had too few pieces of the puzzle, even assuming what they had collected belonged to the same picture. To avoid communicating by email or telephone, Melanie agreed to return to Clarkeston the following weekend so they could share whatever new information they had gathered.

  James walked her to her car and held the door open for her. “Thanks for taking my mind off my personal bullshit.” He nodded back to the building. “That was good work in there.”

  “Yeah,” she replied as she gave him a moist kiss on the cheek and slid into the car, “we make a pretty good team.”

  XXII.

  TABLES

  Thorsten Carter put his feet up on his desk and tried to concentrate on writing Sunday’s sermon, but thoughts of Miriam Rodgers kept interfering with his attempt to put some fresh spin on the appointed gospel reading, the venerable parable comparing rich men to camels trying to pass through the eye of the needle. He imagined himself preaching for her, despite the fact that she would not be in the congregation. What a change that would be: seeing a friendly face in the crowd instead of a sea of encrusted privilege squinting their doubt of his worthiness to occupy the pulpit. No, he would be left preaching to the frozen chosen, who would be expecting him to explain how Jesus’s disapproval of the rich man did not bar their own entitlement to salvation. He was tempted to teach the parable literally and demand that they give up all their possessions or burn in hell for eternity. That might shake them up.

  Unfortunately, Thor did not believe in hell and had no real desire to threaten anyone with devils, pitchforks, and lakes of burning fire. Nonetheless, he did want to rattle them a bit. More than a bit, truth be told, and he stood up to search his bookshelves for a source that might provide him with the proper sort of theological dynamite. Although he had been ordained for less than five years, he had amassed a decent collection of scholarly commentaries on the Bible, many of them gifts from friends and relatives upon his graduation from seminary or his ordination. They were occasionally helpful, usually because the writer had tackled the scripture in its original language and had some insight to offer based on the inadequacy of the English translation, but he wanted more than just insight into language this time.

  His scanned his collection and leafed through a couple of reliable sources, but none added anything earthshaking to his own understanding about the interrelationship of wealth, charity, and salvation. Beside his own books were several dozen volumes belonging to Father Rodgers that he had appropriated as his own. On occasion he had found something useful among his predecessor’s tomes, and after studying the titles he found one that held some promise. It was written by John Shelby Spong, the outspoken former Anglican bishop of Newark, New Jersey. Spong was famous for rethinking almost every major position in traditional Christianity, from the virgin birth to the resurrection of Jesus to the marriage sacrament. If anyone had anything radical to say about the parable, it would likely be him.

  As he pulled the book out and flipped to the index, he noticed a letter marking the start of a chapter entitled “Miracles in a Post-Newtonian World.” It was postmarked Washington, DC, and was handwritten on generic Department of Justice stationery. The letter was authored by someone named Giles Keefe, who promised to recommend Miriam Rodgers for undergraduate admission to Harvard. Given the text of the letter, Keefe was clearly responding to an earlier request by her father to use his influence to help Miriam in the application process. The letter was very personal and invited a response updating Keefe on how Ernest and his wife Caroline were doing. The tone was informal and demonstrated a friendship of significant vintage. Thor smiled and immediately picked up the phone to call Miriam.

  “You never told me you went to Harvard!” The priest’s voice conveyed how impressed he was.

  “I didn’t.” Miriam sounded confused. “You know that I went to Georgia.”

  “I thought that was just grad school.”

  “What makes you think I went to Harvard?”

  “Well, I was flipping through one of your dad’s old books and out pops a letter from someone who’s supposed to be helping you get in.” He held the letter in his hand and fingered it in the sunlight. The postmark was ten years old, just about the time she would have been applying for colleges.

  “Harvard was Dad’s thing. He always wanted me to go there, even when I was a little kid, but there was no way you were getting me that far from home. Even being in Athens made me homesick sometimes. I didn’t apply anywhere outside the state.”

  This surprised him. Miriam struck him as extremely independent and cosmopolitan. He liked Clarkeston, but he could not conceive of what might keep an ambitious young woman so tied to the town.

  “Well, whether you wanted it or not, some guy named Giles Keefe went to bat for you with the admissions committee.”

  “Who?” Her voice was emphatic.

  “The letter was from Giles Keefe. Why? Do you know him?”

  “No, but I think that was one of the names on the back of that Washington, DC, photo of my dad’s.” She paused for a moment. “Let me check it out tonight and I’ll give you a ring. Maybe this guy was my dad’s connection.”

  Once she had hung up, Thor had to wonder whether his girlfriend (dare he call her that?) was getting a little obsessed with events far in the past. Well, if wanting to play Nancy Drew was her biggest fault, then he would count himself a lucky man indeed. In fact, when she called back, he planned to ask her to Chez Pierre, the best (or at least the most expensive) restaurant in Clarkeston, and see if he could turn the heat up in their relationship. Her last goodbye kiss seemed to be pointing to something tantalizingly steamier.

  When she called, she had learned nothing new about Giles Keefe but insisted that her mother’s reaction to the name had been interesting. Caroline Rodgers denied any memory of him, even after her daughter took down the picture of their group of Washington friends and pointed out Keefe as an attractive and unusually tall man standing next to her husband.

  “She flat out denied knowing the guy and was pretty combative when I pressed her.”

  “Isn’t your mother always pretty combative?”

  “You know what I mean! She was really interested in telling me stories about their time in Washington when we talked before. Now she seems to have amnesia.”

  Thor thought about the contents of the letter. “I don’t want to feed your paranoia, but this guy specifically referred to your mother by name. As of ten years ago, he certainly had not forgotten her.”

  “I’m telling you: something is really fishy here. I’m going to track this guy down.”

  Thor suggested that she tell him the result of her snooping over dinner the following evening and was rewarded by a spontaneous acceptance. Now, if Sunday’s sermon would just write itself, the week would be perfect.

  * * *

  Melanie sat at her desk looking at the address and phone number of Carolyn Williams, Diana Cavendish’s mother. It had taken less than forty-eight hours for one of her investigative staff to track down Julius Cavendish’s ex-wife. His speculation about her profession had made the job easier, as her business address was listed as Cakes By Carolyn on the north side of Chicago, not too far from Wrigley Field, if Melanie remembered her geography correctly. As requested, the investigator had supplied basic background information on the woman, including her credit rating (quite good), her arrest record (a ten-year-old drunk-driving charge), and a glowing review of her cakes from a Chicago Tribune article. She had apparently become one of the most popular supplier of fancy pastries to well-to-do residents in Lincoln Park.

  As a precaution, Melanie had the report sent to her private Gmail account rather than her official Department of Justice address. Her investigator had used government search tools, but Melanie doubted that the name Carolyn Williams would set off any al
arm bells, and she had not mentioned to anyone the connection to Diana Cavendish or Jacob Granville. To make her tracks even harder to trace, she decided to call Williams from an empty conference room several floors below her office.

  Melanie was surprised when the businesswoman picked up on the second ring. She was preparing for a wedding the following day, but found time to talk when she learned that the investigation into her daughter’s death had been reopened.

  “I know this may seem a strange way to start a conversation,” Melanie apologized, “but I wonder if you’ve heard anything from your daughter since she disappeared.”

  “No.” She sounded confused and then a note of suspicion entered her voice. “Why? Have you found her?”

  “No,” Melanie hesitated. “I haven’t.” She was taken aback by the mother’s response. She had expected a flurry of optimistic questions or an outburst of tears or a fearful readiness for bad news. She wished she could see the woman’s face and read her body language. “Your ex and Granville’s parents have both shown me emails that may have come from Diana.”

  “What do you mean, may have come from Diana?”

  More suspicion. Melanie did not want to lose her. “They bear her name but there’s no way to tell if they’re authentic.”

  “I don’t know about any emails,” Williams finally replied, “but then again I don’t think that Julius or Jacob’s parents even know where I am. It’s not like we’re trading Christmas cards.” Her voice trailed off. “I accepted long ago that Diana was dead. It’s easier that way.”

  “It’s unclear what’s going on,” Melanie said in a soothing voice. “There were only a couple of very short messages, both of them received right after the disappearance. No one’s heard anything for almost five years, but we just found out about this and are trying to follow up.”

  “Shit.” A long exhalation of breath. “So, they could just be Jacob’s idea of a sick joke.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He kills her, runs off, and taunts the parents.” She paused. “And then gets bored with taunting. Maybe I should be happy that he didn’t contact me.” Another pause. “What did the messages say, anyway?”

  “They indicated that Jacob and Diana had run into some trouble in Clarkeston and had to leave. Neither message was more than two lines. Apparently they were sent from a new email account set up in Mexico.” Melanie thought back a moment. “Did Jacob even have your email address?”

  “Oh yes. Definitely. He and Diana visited me in Chicago about a month before they disappeared. The three of us emailed back and forth, what time they were arriving at the airport, that kind of thing. Afterward we shared some stuff we found on the Internet. I sent him links to a couple of stupid cat videos as a joke. His links were usually political.”

  Melanie mentally kicked herself for not previously considering a now obvious line of inquiry. “Were you Facebook friends?”

  “Yeah, it was just starting up back then. Diana made me sign up. I didn’t post much stuff then, but it’s been really great for the cake business recently.”

  Melanie took a deep breath and crossed her fingers. “Could you log on when you get back home and copy everything off of his home page? Everything that he ever posted? You’d be surprised what might be helpful to us. It’s not like I can friend him now and see it myself.”

  Carolyn took a moment to respond. “If you’ve got a website where I can verify who you are, I’ll forward what I can find, but he hasn’t posted since the disappearance. I’ve checked a couple of times.”

  Melanie gave her the URL of her Justice Department online profile and then continued. “You said earlier that you think Granville kidnapped Diana … Is that just a logical assumption or are you thinking of something more concrete?”

  “Well, I’m not sure what you mean by concrete.” She was thoughtful and unruffled. No sign of the drinking problem with which her ex-husband had branded her. “It’s more an informed instinct, I suppose.” She gathered her thoughts. “I’m an alcoholic. I haven’t had a drink in years, but I’m still sensitive to addiction. When Jacob and Diana were visiting, I could tell that they were getting high, so when they went out, I took a look through their bags and found a huge amount of pot. Way more than you’d just use yourself. If Jacob was dealing and stringing Diana along, something could have gone wrong.”

  “I see,” Melanie replied. “Was there anything else?”

  “It’s hard to say … I got along pretty well with Jacob. He was funny, intelligent, and handsome, but there was also a hardness about him. He had a way of nodding while you were talking, like he was listening closely but really thinking you were an idiot. Diana adored him, but I never thought that he was Prince Charming and they would live happily ever after.”

  “Do you think he was capable of murder?”

  Her response was immediate. “I think everyone is capable of murder.”

  “But he more capable than most?”

  “Maybe.” She sighed. “I don’t know. Like I said, I didn’t trust him.”

  Melanie liked the woman on the other end of the line. She was no-nonsense, analytical, and tried to keep emotion separate from reason. Melanie had seen this before in other former alcoholics, a thoughtful tentativeness about judgment.

  “Carolyn,” she continued, “thank you so much for speaking with me. This is extremely helpful, and I only have a couple more questions. Most important is whether you know anything about Granville’s trip to Geneva, Switzerland, the week before he and Diana disappeared.”

  “A little,” she answered and then interrupted herself, “wait.” She gave instructions to someone in her kitchen about the spelling of a name on the cake. “Sorry about that. I knew that Jacob was going. He claimed that he had a source within the World Trade Organization and was going to break a huge story. He didn’t say what it was about, but he claimed that the New York Times and the Washington Post would be fighting to hire him once he published it.”

  “Did he mention his source or say anything about the research?”

  “No. He let slip the pronoun she a couple of times, so I figured that his source was a woman, but he was pretty tight lipped about the story itself.”

  “But he never mentioned a name?”

  “No.”

  * * *

  The same afternoon that Melanie was on the telephone to Chicago, James was talking to his editor at the Clarkeston Chronicle. Stewart Mitford had inherited the paper from his father, but not before he had acquired an MBA from the University of Georgia and spent several years working in almost every one of its departments. After he sold the paper to a large regional news conglomerate, he stayed on as editor in chief and managed to prevent the quality of the Chronicle’s content from plummeting too precipitously. He had a light-handed management style with his reporters, preferring to pay more attention to the advertising department, which funded the local stories that kept his readers from switching to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution or The New York Times.

  James found Mitford sitting behind his desk, frowning at a pile of resumés. “Jesus!” the editor exclaimed. “We’ve got almost a hundred applicants for two unpaid summer internships.” He shook his head. “Talk about proof that the economy really is in the toilet.”

  “Not a good time to be launching a career in print media.”

  James liked his commercially savvy boss. He was a bit risk averse when running stories critical of local figures, but as long as a reporter had all of his facts double-checked, the editor would sigh and let it run.

  “No kidding. We haven’t hired a new full-time reporter in over three years. I don’t know how the hell anybody can even get started these days.”

  James figured that at least some of the talent that used to go to newspapers now found something to do on the web, but he hadn’t come to discuss the pressure the digital age was putting on the Chronicle. Mitford had, at least, started an online version of the paper. “Speaking of failing to get a career started, I was
wondering if I could ask you a question about Jacob Granville.”

  “What do you want to know about Jake?”

  “It’s almost five years since he and Diana Cavendish disappeared, and I’m doing a retrospective on the story.” He watched the editor’s face closely for any sign of disapproval. “I went one more time through the stuff Jacob left here and found a possible lead that I never pursued. Right before he and Diana vanished, he went to Geneva, Switzerland, to research a story. I checked online and saw that he had published an article on a World Trade Organization case. I was wondering whether his trip was following up on his article.”

  Mitford drummed his fingers on his desk. James had never determined whether the editor was a supporter of Granville or had come to the logical conclusion that the paper’s former photographer had committed kidnapping and murder. He had never quashed any of James’s stories about the case, but he had demanded extra verification of facts on several occasions.

  “Yeah,” Mitford finally replied, “he asked me for money to go to Geneva to talk to some super-source.” He shook his head. “Are you fucking kidding me? We barely have enough money to pay people gas money to Atlanta!”

  James suppressed a smile. Unlike the stereotypical newsman, Mitford almost never swore.

  “And to make matters worse,” he continued, “the kid wouldn’t give me any details of his plan. He acted like I might steal his story if he told me too much. He just kept going on about international scandals and corrupt politicians.”

  “Were you aware that he went?”

  “Yeah, he needed to ask for the time off, but I sure as hell didn’t pay him. If he had been full-time, he would have had to choose between his trip and his job.”

  “Did you tell the cops any of this?”

  “I don’t remember.” Mitford shrugged. “It was a long time ago, and it didn’t seem relevant. Still doesn’t.”

  “Did you ever see any videos he posted on YouTube?”

  “No.”