The Raven and the Nightingale

by Joanne Dobson

  “Really?” He regarded me blankly. “Why?”

  “Why? What do you mean, why?” The flimsy deli napkin disintegrated under the touch of my moist fingertips. Could this otherwise intelligent young man be as oblivious to the consequences of his disappearance as he seemed? “Nobody knew where you were!”

  “I’m an adult now. It’s nobody’s business where I go.” His response was as close to sullen as this nice boy could get.

  I bit back my impulsive first comment: Adult? You kidding? “Mike …,” I said—I really couldn’t seem to shake off the maiden-aunt role—“adults let their friends and family know where they are. That’s basic adult consideration.”

  “I tried to call you a few times—about the exam—but someone else kept answering your phone.”

  “My daughter,” I replied. “And you scared the heck out of her when you kept hanging up.”

  “Sorry.” His pout made him look like a preschooler.

  “And your mother is worried sick,” I added.

  “My mother?” The resentment at being scolded vanished from his eyes. “Someone called my mother?”

  “Of course. You’ve been gone over a week. What do you think? The college is going to let you disappear without any inquiry?”

  “Ohmigod!” he exclaimed. “I gotta call home. My poor mom’ll be out of her tree!”

  While Mike was upstairs on the phone, I wandered around the house. The blue recycling bin in the butler’s pantry between the kitchen and dining room contained more beer cans, plus a goodly number of red-and-white cans of Campbell’s soup. No wonder the poor kid was famished: He’d been living on watered-down soup.

  Aside from the kitchen, the house was exactly as Elliot—and the police—had left it, dingy, dusty, and outdated, and no one had turned off the electricity, water, or phone. Who would take care of that, I wondered, if there was no surviving family? A lawyer, perhaps? Maybe the housekeeper? Was Monica still responsible for this house? I remembered Piotrowski saying Monica didn’t work for Elliot anymore. But did someone else clean the house once in a while? Elliot wasn’t the type to do it himself. Did someone else have a key?

  “I think this house is haunted.”

  I jumped a good three inches as Mike came up behind me in the shadow-filled entry hall. “Haunted? Oh, come on, Mike!” But I immediately switched on the light; the few bulbs still working in the ornate chandelier overhead chased the ghostly murk to the corners of the room.

  Mike pulled on his purple-and-white Enfield football jacket and hefted his backpack. He must have decided to come back to campus with me; he’d gathered up his things in a hurry. From a half-zipped backpack pocket dangled a pair of jockey shorts imprinted with fat pink pigs. “I mean it,” he said. “I’ve never believed in ghosts, but I’ve been staying here, what?—a week now? ten days?—and there’ve been … noises. It freaked me out.” He paused, then snickered self-consciously. “Of course, I was pretty wasted at the time.”

  “I bet.” But given the circumstances—that a man had been murdered here—I couldn’t completely discount Mike’s story. “You really heard noises?”

  “Yeah. Creakings. Rustlings. In the night. It gave me the cold creepies. And a couple of times I came downstairs in the morning and found … and found things that had … had been … interfered with during the night!”

  “Interfered with? How?” Now my skin crawled with the cold creepies.

  “Come here,” he commanded, and led me into Elliot’s study. “You see … that … thing … on the desk?” He pointed, grimacing. “You see it? With the dark stain on the edges?”

  Reluctantly I looked. The blood-soaked blotter that Sergeant Schultz had removed from Elliot’s desk at my request had been returned, but the topmost layer of thick green paper had been ripped off, and the remaining sheets were pulled awry. “Yeah? I see it.”

  “Well, that stain? I figured it was … his … you know … his blood. And when I heard the noise in the night, I was … scared to come down. In the morning this is how it was. I figured he’d come back—”

  “Come back?”

  “Yeah, you know, to haunt his house.” Mike looked drawn, his young face tight and pale. “You know … his restless spirit, searching for revenge. Maybe,” he whispered, “maybe trying to get his blood back.”

  “Jeez, Mike,” I blurted. “Didn’t you say you’d quit the booze?”

  “Yeah, but I read a lot of vampire novels.” He grinned at me, that sudden, irrepressible and utterly contagious young-kid grin.

  I laughed. “Let’s get out of here,” I said, and led him back through the entry hall into the dining room. Suddenly, from the kitchen came the resounding slam of the back door.

  Mike opened his eyes even wider than I did. The whites were bloodshot clear to the rims.

  “Mike,” I murmured, “you shut that door behind me, didn’t you?”

  “Shut it and locked it,” he replied, sotto voce. We stared at each other, then turned simultaneously toward the kitchen door, as heavy footsteps traversed the floor.

  “Who’s there?” I called, shakily, motioning to Mike to get behind the heavy butler’s-pantry door. He glared at me, his young masculinity offended. “Do it,” I hissed. I was still the teacher, and he scampered behind the door.

  Monica Cassale burst into the room, a Louisville Slugger baseball bat clutched menacingly in one hand. She stopped dead when she saw me.

  “Karen Pelletier!” she exclaimed. “What the fuck’re you doing here?”

  25.

  A Word dropped careless on a Page

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  ME?” I SPUTTERED. “WHAT AM I doing here? What about you?”

  Monica lowered the bat, and granted me a narrow stare. “I drove by and saw the tire tracks in the driveway.”

  “Oh.”

  “No one’s supposed to be here, so I thought I’d check it out. I got a little nervous when the tracks went into that old garage, so …” She swung the bat loosely, then strode toward me. In her baggy wool Red Sox jacket and thick leather gloves, she looked well prepared to wield her weapon. I took three instinctive steps backward and narrowly missed being clobbered by the dining-room door as Mike slammed it open … right into Monica’s face.

  “I told her to put the car in the garage,” he said, stepping into sight. “Give me the bat.” He held out his hand.

  “Who the fuck are you?” was Monica’s startled response. Then she took a good look at Mike, paled, and stared, aghast. In the dimly lit dining room, with his assured manner, Mike resembled Elliot so strongly it took even me aback. Monica’s remaining challenge—“and what the fuck are you doing here?”—trailed off from something resembling the bark of a patrolling rottweiler to a kittenlike whimper.

  “This is my house.” Mike’s suddenly proprietary attitude added years to his age. “Give me the bat,” he repeated. He flexed his fing ers, as if commanding it in his direction.

  “Your house?” Monica floundered. Then her eyes widened, she whispered, “Elliot?” and I realized that the broad-shouldered, tough-talking secretary literally thought she was seeing a ghost. Without hesitation she passed Mike the bat. Then her shaking hand flew to the silver pentagram at her throat, and she clutched the amulet convulsively. “How in hell?…”

  For a long silent moment in the gloomy chamber, hell must have seemed all too terribly real to Monica Cassale. Then the back door crashed open again, and we all jumped. Young Joey materialized in the doorway. He was brandishing a Little League softball bat.

  “Leave my mother alone!” Joey’s wide-legged stance and belligerent expression mirrored Monica’s at her most menacing, but his face with its neat features was an immature replica of Elliot Corbin’s. He saw Mike, and his jaw dropped. Mike seemed equally startled, as if he suspected the universe of matter had somehow hiccuped out a clone.

  Belatedly, I remembered my manners. “Mike,” I interposed. “Meet your little brother Joey. Joey, this is Mike. You guys are going to want to
get to know each other.”

  “Brother!” Monica’s sharp exclamation was a knife hurled straight at Elliot Corbin’s cold, dead heart.

  As I lay in bed that night, something I’d seen at Elliot’s house clamored for my attention, but, stressed by the events of the day, I couldn’t identify exactly what it was. The weather was borderline freezing. A slushy rain threatened to turn into an early winter ice storm. Before I’d gotten into bed, I’d made certain I had a flashlight and candles in reach, in the all-too-likely event of a power outage.

  I was alone. Amanda had deserted me to spend a couple of precious pre-Christmas vacation days in Lowell with her newly discovered grandmother, aunt, and cousin. Was I pissed? Damn right, I was pissed. The family that had abandoned us in our hour of need twenty years earlier was now luring my daughter away from me—and at Christmas time, too. Amanda had invited me to come to Lowell with her, but I’d pleaded overwork. She’d looked at me with the narrow-eyed, untested sagacity of the twenty-year-old. “Why do I have a feeling you’ll always be too busy to go to Lowell?” she’d asked. I’d shrugged. I was having a hard enough time with my own feelings; I didn’t intend to conjecture about hers.

  So, it was now eleven P.M., and I lay in bed, alone except for Emmeline Foster’s final journal. I wanted to reread the journal, but tonight the poignant entries didn’t engage my attention. I couldn’t erase from my mind the encounters with Mike and Monica at Elliot’s dilapidated mansion. For one mad moment when Monica had stood there in the doorway hefting her lethal-looking bat, I’d thought the mystery of Elliot Corbin’s murder was solved at last—that Monica Cassale, furious over Elliot’s cavalier treatment of her and Joey, had knifed him to death at his desk after she’d dished up his turkey and gravy. I’d also half-hysterically concluded that Monica—Bad Witch Monica—had followed me from my office to the Corbin house, and that I was fated to die a hideous death in a Poesque Gothic mansion at the hands of a villainess straight out of the pages of Stephen King, if not precisely of Edgar Allan Poe. But Mike’s phantasmagoric appearance and my identification of him as Elliot’s son—and Joey’s brother—had melted the murderous Monica into a puddle of resentful tears. Then I had a gloopy marshmallow witch to deal with as well as the hung-over putative heir to the house of Corbin. The evil that men do, I mused, contemplating Elliot’s selfish, careless life, may long live after them. I couldn’t think of any good that might have been interred with my departed colleague’s bones.

  Sorting everyone out involved brewing strong coffee for Monica in Elliot’s dismal kitchen, then making numerous phone calls from the kitchen phone. Mike’s mother hadn’t been home when he called, and for reasons known only to himself, he hadn’t left the poor woman a message. That task was left to me as Mike got to know his new brother over a computer game Joey had retrieved from Monica’s Ford. I scratched Mike’s mother’s phone number on the back of an old Chinese-food menu I’d pulled off the cluttered little bulletin board by the Princess wall phone and started making calls: to Earlene, to the dorm R.A., to Piotrowski, and to Mike’s mother, the former Angela Vitale—now Angela McDonald—arranging for her to pick up her wayward son at my home. I wasn’t about to let Mike out of my sight until I’d personally given him over to the custody of his mother. While I made the calls, Monica huddled at the kitchen table drinking endless cups of black coffee and muttering to herself about false spiritual guides and pernicious earth-plane deceivers, and the boys bonded noisily over their game. “Die, you wicked sorcerer!” I heard Joey shriek as I climbed the back stairs to tell them it was time to leave. In the waning light, the house seemed to take on an ageless quality. It was as if those sidelit, brooding balustrades, arches, and cornices had preexisted time and would long outlast it.

  Now, I was safe at home in my own cozy bungalow, snug under a down comforter. I let Emmeline Foster’s old copybook fall shut, and clicked off the light. It was dark, I was alone, and wet snow slithered down the windowpanes with a monotonous, unrelenting shush. My overburdened brain drifted into a sleepy fugue where Poesque images of beautiful revenants and hideous, hissing black felines ushered me into a dreamless abyss.

  The flickering light of a long black candle alerted me to a presence in the room. I opened my eyes to see shadows dancing eerily across Harriet Person’s face as she loomed over my bed. In a thin white hand with tapered black-painted nails, she gripped a needle-sharp stiletto. The knife was pointed directly at my breast. “Where is it?” she demanded.

  I was dreaming. I knew it. This was too bizarre to be real. I closed my eyes again, craving the peaceful, sleepy oblivion that usually constituted my midnight repose.

  “Where is it?” Harriet’s voice persisted.

  I forced my eyelids open. Oh, God! Harriet was still there! She was wearing cat-burglar clothing: black jeans, a sleek black jacket and a black knit watch cap. Her winter-pale face was streaked with something dark—she’d obviously seen the same movies I had, the ones where charcoal-smeared crooks break into heavily guarded palaces in search of the Orient’s most fabulous treasures. But what was she doing here? There was no treasure anywhere in my functional little house.

  “Where is it?”

  I sat up cautiously, clutching the comforter to my chest. “Where is what?”

  “You know. The notebook.”

  “Notebook?”

  “The Emmeline Foster diary. You were obliging enough to inform me you’d found it again. Now hand it over.” Harriet had placed the pewter candlestick on the nightstand, and her face with its beak of a nose was lit flickeringly from below. Oh, God, I thought. Oh, God. I’d tried to shake someone’s tree, and look what had flown out: a vulture!

  I’d never before noticed how raptorlike Harriet’s features were: narrow skull, long thin nose, practically lipless mouth, heavy brows over dark, fathomless eyes. And that livid white streak peeking out from under the skull-tight cap!

  “Get up. Now!” she commanded, motioning with the long knife. She wanted me out of bed. I obliged, swinging my flannel-covered legs from under the blankets with a great show of alacrity.

  “I don’t have it, Harriet,” I said, feeling with my sock-covered feet for the fleecy slippers I’d left beside the bed. “I … I took Emmeline Foster’s books and papers to the Special Collections librarian. You can find the notebook in the college archives.”

  Harriet’s eyes narrowed. “You are a liar, Karen Pelletier, and an unwitting tool of the patriarchy!”

  Huh? Tool of the—“No, Harriet,” I pled, abjectly. “I’m a good feminist!”

  But my colleague wasn’t paying attention. From out of some fathomless corner of my bedroom, a black cat leapt and landed on her head with a hellish screech. Harriet, blinded, flailed at the needle-clawed beast. The vicious knife—or was it a pen?—or a knitting needle?—clattered to the floor. I kicked it away and bodyslammed Harriet into the book-lined alcove that had somehow inexplicably appeared behind my bed. She grunted at the impact, smashed into a nine-foot-high library shelf, crumpled to the floor, and lay there, momentarily stunned by the weight of the falling books. Without a second’s hesitation, I brained Harriet with a variorum edition of Paradise Lost, and followed the concussive attack with an American Library hardcover of Moby Dick. A massive edition of the Riverside Shakespeare followed, and then I was flinging book after book at her recumbent body: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Portrait of a Lady, Sister Carrie, Rasselas, The Rape of the Lock, The Old Man and the Sea, The Faerie Queene. When Harriet finally lay immobile under the fatal load of texts, I came to my senses, appalled at the bloody carnage. Or was it … verbiage? I wasn’t certain. The black cat eyed me with its evil yellow glare from the penultimate shelf of this vast, never-before-noticed library of massive tomes hidden away behind my bedroom wall. Ever so deliberately, I retrieved a Penguin paperback edition of The Scarlet Letter from the wheelbarrow of books placed so conveniently close to hand, laid my hand on a convenient trowel, slid it into the mortar, and began to brick up the arch
way, book by book by book.

  When I woke, I was exhausted. Early sunlight peeked through my window, illuminating every corner of the small, bare room. Except for the copy of Emmeline Foster’s journal tangled in the bedclothes, there wasn’t a book in sight.

  Evergreen swags and white fairy lights captivated me as I drove through the shopping district that morning on my way to school. Instead of heading right to my office, I parked in the college lot closest to Field Street and strolled toward the stores.

  It was seven days and counting to Christmas, and the town of Enfield was in full festal mode. The night’s storm had left just enough ice on bare branches to create an otherworldly sparkle above the heads of harried shoppers. As Harriet Person passed me on the street, toting a plastic bag from Smith’s Bookshop, I felt a twinge of unease, but couldn’t put my finger on its source. I shrugged; it hadn’t been a peaceful night and I was too tired to deal with either paranoia or my colleagues. A force field of negative psychic energy was keeping me away from my office and the papers remaining to be graded. I hoped a sixteen-ounce infusion of caffeine would get me in gear for the final push. Just outside Bread and Roses, I ran into Greg Samoorian. Tucked under each of Greg’s arms was a miniature Canadian fir—one for each of his twin daughters, I supposed. With his thick beard and burly build, he resembled a youthful Santa Claus.

  “Hey, Karen.” Greg greeted me by waggling each tree in turn. “Think Jane and Sally will like these?”

  “You bet,” I replied. “What are they? Three months old now? Deck the boughs with a few strands of those trendy citrus-colored blinking lights, and they’ll be totally awed. How about a cup of coffee, Greg? I haven’t seen you in … millennia.”

  Dark circles of sleep deprivation shadowed Greg’s eyes, but he had the relaxed appearance of a very satisfied man. “I didn’t realize being a good daddy would take up every second, but I guess that’s what parental leave is for. Yeah, sure, I could use coffee. I could also use a chat with someone who’s already cut her eyeteeth.”