The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  “My father lives with me. He’s … uh … not capable of living alone. He’s got Alzheimer’s.”

  “God, Piotrowski, that’s rough!”

  “Yeah, he … he … used to be a great guy.” His brown eyes fixed on something outside the window. I knew from bitter experience that he was seeing nothing but the past.

  “But I mean—that’s gotta be rough on you.”

  The big cop shrugged, then threw back the last of his coffee as if he were slugging a shot of whiskey. He shoved his chair back from the table and jumped up, businesslike once more. “Okay, Doctor. We both got work to do. I was gonna leave a trooper here with you, but there’s so many accidents out there I got no one available. As for me, I got someplace I hafta be.”

  “You’re going to leave me here alone?” The thought was not appealing, but, really, did I expect a state police lieutenant to babysit me for an entire afternoon?

  The library had darkened with the worsening storm, and I switched on all available lights. This room was even more dismal than the kitchen. How could anyone have lived in such a lifeless house? I kept my eyes studiously averted from the dried stains on the desktop as I finished looking through Elliot’s file cabinets. No one lived here anymore.

  Having found nothing but the driest of academic trivia in the seemingly endless ranks of manila folders, I was only too happy to shift my search to the marginally more cheerful dining room. The books stacked in haphazard piles on the table there were mostly studies in literary theory—Derrida, Foucault, Jameson. After an hour of paging through one torturous treatise after another, I concluded they contained nothing of any relevance to a homicide investigation. I trekked reluctantly back to the library with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Climbing the sliding library ladder, I went methodically through the books, pulling each one out, checking titles, inscriptions, marginalia, shaking each to dislodge any contents, returning each one to its place. Nothing.

  Piotrowski stomped into the house again about a quarter to four, epaulets of snow decorating his broad shoulders. In his leather-gloved hands he carried two paper coffee containers. “Thank God. I’m dry as dust,” I said, clambering down the ladder, prying off the plastic lid. The unanticipated, scrumptious aroma of hot chocolate engulfed me. “Oh, yum!”

  “I thought we could use a bit of a lift,” he replied. “Now listen. I really think it’s time to get outta here. There’s at least eight inches out there and it’s still coming down.”

  “But I’m not finished—” I hate driving in snow, but once I get into a job, I’m like a pit bull.

  “Yeah, but it’s bad out. And if you’re not finding anything anyhow …”

  “Let me at least finish this shelf,” I said, climbing back up the ladder, pulling out a copy of Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge. As I did so, I dislodged a slim paperback with a psychedelically flowered cover. It fell to the floor, and Piotrowski retrieved it, handing it up to me.

  I turned the book in my hand. “That’s odd.”

  “Odd is good. Odd means some kind of a … a telling incongruity. So, what’s odd about this particular book?”

  “Well, the book itself is incongruous. Elliot mostly has big books, substantial hardcover editions for the most part, on abstract philosophical and literary subjects, and here’s this”—I examined the book more closely—“cheap volume of what look like … flower-power poems. You know? From the sixties? What on earth was Elliot doing with a frivolous book like this?”

  I descended the ladder and showed the book to the lieutenant. “Wings of the Mind,” I said, “by Skye Larrk.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Piotrowski exclaimed. “Ya know? I think I’ve seen this book before.”

  “Really?” I opened the volume to the title page. It had been published in 1968 by Far Out Press, obviously a shoestring publishing house, and one I’d never heard of. I’d bet anything that press hadn’t outlasted Woodstock.

  “Yeah. Wasn’t it some kind of a hippie best-seller?”

  I shouldn’t have laughed. “How would you know about that, Lieutenant?”

  “Oh, I did my share of undercover work, you know. This state … ya know, all the colleges … was a hotbed of …”

  “The counterculture?”

  “Yeah.”

  I looked at the man with new eyes. Piotrowski as an undercover hippie? And he thought he didn’t have any interesting stories to tell?

  The lieutenant took Wings of the Mind from my hand and opened it purposefully to the inside back cover: on the dust jacket was a full-length photograph of Skye Larrk, the author, a pretty, daisy-crowned, wild-haired, bare-breasted flower child, with a smile as amiable and as dopey—in the narcotic sense—as that of the bandana-wearing yellow Labrador retriever reclining at her feet. Piotrowski grinned at me sheepishly, and tapped the photo. “This is what I remember.”

  I retrieved the book from the lieutenant to study the photo more closely. Something about Skye Larrk seemed familiar. Not the sun-streaked mass of flyaway curly hair. Not the dreamy smile. Not the drug-addled eyes. Was it the … the breasts? My eyes zoomed in on the small tattoo just above the left nipple: an image of an insolent blue-black crow! “My God, Piotrowski, this … this … this hippie poet … is Jane Birdwort.”

  “Birdwort? Jane Birdwort? Isn’t she a prof?”

  “Yes. Did you guys ever talk to her?”

  “Hmm,” he said, “by now we’ve interviewed everyone in the English Department, so someone must of questioned her. Musta been Schultz. As I recall, Ms. Birdwort said she didn’t really know Corbin.”

  I turned to the opening pages of the volume, looking for inscriptions, and the book’s dedication caught my eye: To el, with eternal luv. “She knew him all right, Lieutenant. Looky here.” I handed the book over, open to the dedication page. “Who else could ‘el’ possibly be?” Then a faded color Polaroid worked its way loose from between the pages, and I caught it as it fluttered toward the floor. Together, Piotrowski and I stared at the idyllic pastel scene. A wedding, a hippie wedding, in a pasture. The bride wore a daisy-crowned veil, a gauzy peasant blouse and bell-bottom jeans. She carried a bouquet of pale green oats and wildflowers. She was barefoot. The groom wore jeans, an elaborately embroidered denim vest, and sandals. She was Skye Larrk. He was Elliot Corbin. Not only had Wings of the Mind been dedicated to my late colleague; he had at some time in the dim, departed past been married to the poet Jane Birdwort.

  16.

  “What is a man anyhow?

  what am I? what are you?”

  —WALT WHITMAN

  TWIN CONES OF SWIRLING SNOW were all that was visible of the narrow, winding road in the Jeep’s headlights. I peered intently through the windshield. It didn’t matter that Piotrowski was at the wheel, I knew that only my hypervigilance kept the vehicle on the increasingly treacherous road.

  While Piotrowski made calls from Elliot Corbin’s kitchen phone, I’d stared anxiously out the library window. Nothing was moving out there except the weather. At the far end of Elliot’s driveway, my Jetta was buried up to its fenders in snow. It was the first day of December and an hour before sunset and it was already impenetrably dark.

  “Listen,” the lieutenant told me, tucking his notepad into a jacket pocket as he returned to the library, “there’s no sense even trying to get your car out. I put in a call for a tow truck, but—the state of the roads out there—it could take hours. I’ll give you a lift home in the Jeep.”

  “Lieutenant,” I wailed, “if you drive me home, I’ll be stuck out there in the boonies with no car. And I’ve got an eight o’clock class tomorrow.”

  “You really think there’s gonna be school, the way this is coming down?” He gestured toward the window and, by extension, to the deadly white scene beyond. “We get your car out, and the roads get a little clearer, I’ll have someone drop the Jetta off. Okay? Now, get your coat and I’ll warm up the Jeep. That is, unless you want to hang around here in Professor Corbin’s house till the storm’s o
ver? They’re predicting it’s gonna take all night.”

  I shuddered and headed meekly for the hall closet.

  We’d left the town of Enfield—and its street-lights—behind, and had embarked on the long, featureless stretch of wooded road that leads to my isolated little home just outside Greenfield. In the headlights, only the faint parallel tracks of a ghostly vehicle that had preceded us at some never-never hour in the past were visible. I kept a deathwatch on those tracks. “Relax, Doctor,” the lieutenant said, glancing over at me, “we’ll get there. We just have to take it slow, is all.” The Jeep swerved. I gave a little screech. He laughed, eyes front again. “Looks like I better pay attention.”

  It was a long, slow trip. Snow beat relentlessly against the windshield, accumulating faster than the wipers could clear it. At first, neither of us had anything to say. Piotrowski was concentrating on the road. I was brooding about Jane Birdwort and the revelation that she’d once—in another life, I was certain she’d say—been married to Elliot Corbin. I knew one of Piotrowski’s phone calls must have imparted that information to his investigative team, and I felt guilty—and anxious about Jane. Obviously she’d wanted to keep her relationship with Elliot hidden, and if I hadn’t recognized that tattoo in the picture on the flyleaf, her link with the murdered man might never have been uncovered. Now Jane was in for some intensive police questioning. Police investigation, I realized—not for the first time—was a wee bit different than scholarly research. The stakes were infinitely higher. Who was I, I wondered, to meddle around in someone else’s life, playing God?

  “What?” Piotrowski asked.

  “Huh?” I replied.

  “You just let loose one hell of a sigh. What were you thinking about?”

  “Jane Birdwort.”

  “Yeah? What about her?”

  I tried to make up for some of the trouble I’d caused Jane. “Somehow, I just can’t imagine Jane being involved in Elliot’s death; she’s so … narcissistic. I don’t think the usual motives for murder could possibly pierce her psychic armor.”

  “The usual motives?” In the green glow from the dash lights, I saw the lieutenant’s thick eyebrows rise.

  “Well, you know—greed, ambition, revenge—ah … sexual obsession …”

  “And?…”

  I thought for a minute. “I’m tired. I can’t come up with any more.”

  “I can.” He shifted down, and the Jeep ease d out of a fishtail.

  “I’ll bet you can,” I said, far more crisply than I intended, “but I don’t think I want to know about them.”

  We lapsed into silence again. I had no idea where we were, the headlight cones here—wherever here was—were identical to the cones we’d left behind in Enfield, half an hour back—blinding white swirls in the blackness. Then a green sign flashed ephemerally into view: GREENFIELD, 4 mi. Almost home. “Piotrowski,” I said, “you know, this … job, this … whatever it is I’m doing for you … research?… investigation?… it’s turning out to be a lot more than I ever intended to take on. I mean, for God’s sake, I’ve just let a colleague in for a hell of a lot of trouble.”

  “Ms. Birdwort?”

  “Yeah.”

  He shrugged. “The woman musta lied to us. She’d of been a good deal better off in the long run if she’d told us right away about her involvement with the victim.”

  “She probably has her reasons.”

  “Yeah, like maybe she offed Professor Corbin.” He shifted up again, and the car picked up speed.

  “No! Jeez, Piotrowski, that’s just what I was afraid of!”

  “What? Afraid of what?” He took his eyes off the road just long enough to cast me a challenging glance.

  I bit back another hasty reply. “Piotrowski, just what the heck am I supposed to be doing? All I know about research methodology is this: First, identify the problem. Okay, here’s the problem: Who killed Elliot Corbin? Then, second, break down the tasks. Okay, so I network friends and associates—which, as you can tell, makes me feel like a creep; I do scholarly research—with about a snowball’s chance in hell of making any connections to the murder; I search Elliot’s house and office—and find out dirty little secrets about people they’ve kept hidden for decades. So, okay, I’m doing all that. Then what’s the third step? Interpret data and draw conclusions. So, the only real data I’ve come up with is that Jane was once married to Elliot, and now you leap to the conclusion that Jane killed Elliot!”

  “You know me better than that, Dr. Pelletier.” The lieutenant’s tone was one of infinite patience. “The only conclusion I’m gonna leap to, Doctor, is that Ms. Birdwort might possibly have had a motive to kill Professor Corbin. Nothing more. Nothing less. And …” Piotrowski said, as he swerved around a corner and pulled cautiously into what I hoped was my driveway, “that’s a real orderly methodology you’ve developed for yourself, Doctor, as far as it goes, but you’ve left out one real important factor.”

  “What’s that, Lieutenant?”

  “You’ve forgotten the wild card.”

  “The wild card?”

  “Yeah. Irrational human need. You always got to factor in the possibility of something totally off the wall. Something that doesn’t make any sense to anyone but the killer. Something the killer wants or needs so bad he’s willing to risk everything for it, even his eternal soul.”

  “His eternal soul?” We’d come to a stop just a few feet into my driveway, and I placed my hand on the Jeep’s door handle.

  “Or whatever,” Piotrowski said. “I been reading some of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories.”

  “You have?” Why was I surprised? I didn’t know many people more intelligent than this big cop.

  “And the thing that he gets right is all that stuff about damned souls.”

  “Damned souls?”

  “He doesn’t call them that, but that’s what they are. Oh, yeah, I know: sociopaths, psychopaths, whatever. But all that clinical stuff doesn’t begin to get at the twisted darkness of some a these creeps the way Poe does. I mean, whoever was desperate enough to stab Professor Corbin with such force that it only took one blow with a knife.…” In the preternatural glow from the dashboard, I could see Piotrowski’s lips twist. He must have had an entire gallery of graphic horror pictures imprinted in his brain. How did he get through his days with those images of death always present?

  “Ya know that story of Poe’s where the brother buries his sister alive? Then she comes back from that burial vault under the house and she attacks him, and the house collapses in on them?”

  “ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ ‘We have put her living in the tomb!’ ” I intoned in a sepulchral voice. “That’s one of my all-time favorite over-the-top literary lines. And then just before the mansion collapses, a huge crack appears down the front and the moon glows luridly through the fissure. I’m not crazy about Poe’s work, Lieutenant, but he was always great with the creepy details. Did you read ‘The Black Cat’?”

  “That’s where the perp bricks this cat up with the corpse of his murdered wife, and the thing yowls and yowls till the investigators find the victim.”

  “Weird.” I shook my head.

  “Yeah, but believable. The perp musta had an unconscious wish to be caught. I’ve seen that happen. The killer hasta keep talking, hasta leave some little piece of evidence. Hasta let us know. He doesn’t really wanna get caught, but this is the biggest event of his scuzzy little life, and he’s just gotta let someone know about it. Ya can practically smell it on him—the urge to spill the beans. All ya gotta do is keep him talking—gotta form a bond. These creeps, they want someone—need someone—to understand them. Even more pathetic, they want someone to like and respect them.”

  “God, you have a hideous job.”

  But he wasn’t looking for sympathy; he wanted to talk about literature. “Poe wasn’t so hot on the police stories, though. I mean—you know, that one about the billet doux that got stolen?…”

  “ ‘The Purloined
Letter.’ ”

  “That’s the one. Well … no criminal investigator with the right stuff wouldn’t have gone through everything on that mantelpiece at least once. I mean, give me a break … that French police officer … Monsieur G—, was it?… he was specifically looking for a letter. No way he wouldn’t have had everything off that card-rack. Sloppy.”

  Then the police radio crackled—something about a five-car accident on 1-91—and Piotrowski abruptly terminated the conversation.

  “So—you figure you can get to your house okay from here by yourself, Doctor?”

  After his gruesome little meditation on the nature of the criminal mind, I didn’t want to go anywhere by myself. Ever again. But Piotrowski was already looking over his shoulder, assessing his chances of backing out onto the road again without getting stuck in the ditch, and I opened the door like a big girl. It suddenly hit me that he was now going to have to make a return trip to—where? Wherever it was he lived; I had no idea. I stepped out of the Jeep, and promptly sank knee-deep into the snow. It had to be at least two feet deep in the drifts. “It’s going to be a slog, Lieutenant. Can you keep your lights on me until I get to the door?”

  “Of course. I’d a done that anyway.”

  “I know. Thanks. And, Lieutenant? …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Drive safely, will you? You’ve really gone out of your way for me. I appreciate it.”

  In the shadows, his wide smile flashed. “It’s okay, Doctor. This oughta get me out of decades of Purgatory.”

  Even though the snow had cease d falling sometime before dawn, morning classes were canceled. When I got to school at noon—having found the Jetta safe and sound in my driveway when I awoke at eight A.M.—not much was moving on campus. Snowplows and snowblowers roared through the parking lots as I pulled my car in off the still-slick street, and snow shovelers scraped away diligently at the walkways. As I entered the quad from the path that runs between the library and Emerson Hall, I paused, awestruck by the sight in front of me. Boxy Victorian buildings were sunk to their windows in feathery drifts and further softened by pillows of snow drowsing on roof, cornice, and ledge. Branches of winter-stark trees curtsied gracefully, flaunting white velvet gloves. And here everything was hushed; even the shouts of the student snowballers behind the dorms seemed muted. I was momentarily entranced; the pastoral perfection, the mythic Currier and Ives fantasy of an ideal time, place, and purpose belied the Enfield College I had come to know. Backbiting, scheming, plagiarism, theft, even homicide: How could these horrors have contaminated the idyllic, almost sacral, scene now spread before me?