Murder Off the Page

by Con Lehane

  When Ambler headed to work the next morning after dropping Johnny at school, he was a wreck, fixated on the thought that everything doesn’t always turn out all right in the end. In recent years, he’d had his world-weary, jaded bartender friend as an antidote when he’d lost his way. “Something will turn up,” McNulty would say. For both their sakes, would that this be true.

  As soon as he opened the door of the crime fiction reading room, he let out an audible groan. He’d forgotten he was supposed to meet with Harry. Thinking he was alone—though he’d been running late and the library was open—a woman’s voice from quite near startled him. “Are you all right?” He turned and saw Andrea Eagan behind him.

  “I’m fine.… What are you doing here?…” He shook his head. “Not that. I’m sorry. How are you?”

  Her eyes shone. Her expression was that of a young girl who’d made up her mind to cause mischief. “I’ve brought you Sandi’s laptop.”

  Ambler pushed open the door in front of them. “Come in. Come in.” Excited, beside himself, he started to go first, thought better of it, turned around in the doorway, bumping into Andrea and pushing her back out the door. His thoughts were flying.

  When he finally got them both inside the reading room, she handed him a laptop carrying case. “I’ll need it back by the end of the day. I can’t stay.”

  Ambler was speechless.

  She looked art him curiously and said, “I know the password. I played around and after a while figured it out. Her daughter’s name and the year she was born.”

  “Great. How?…”

  She read his mind. “Simon doesn’t know I took it. My husband doesn’t know either. They think I’m on a shopping trip to the city, so I need to do some shopping.”

  “I appreciate your doing this.” Boy did that sound lame. He tried again. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. I’m overwhelmed.”

  “I’m not sure why I’m doing this.” The expression in her eyes went wild for a moment. “It’s for Sandi. The man you asked me if I knew, Wainwright. I found messages from him in her email.” She looked behind her. “I’ve got to go. I’ll be back by four thirty. That’s the latest I can stay.”

  When she left, he opened the laptop. While it was booting up, he remembered Harry, so he closed it and hid it at the bottom of a file box in front of one of the bookcases, catching himself looking furtively over his shoulder as he did so.

  Harry was in a better mood this morning. Ambler, on the other hand, was keyed up. “Sorry I’m late. A reader in the crime fiction room.”

  “That’s fine.” Harry had brought coffee and Danish. “When I left you yesterday, I felt we misunderstood one another. Fortunately, I spoke to Adele. We had a long talk.”

  Ambler had a moment’s panic trying to remember what Adele might know that he didn’t want her telling Harry. He certainly didn’t want Harry to know he had Sandra Dean’s purloined laptop in his office.

  “She reminded me of how important your friendship with Mr. McNulty is to you. I was callous in how I spoke about him. Adele doesn’t believe he did what he’s accused of. This weighs heavily on you both. I understand.”

  For the second time that morning, Ambler was at a loss for words.

  Harry’s expression as he munched on his cheese Danish suggested the contentment people feel when they’ve gotten something weighty off of their chest. At his essence, Harry was a kind man. Fate had done him a disservice by putting him in a position of authority. He’d be much happier, like Ferdinand the Bull, under a tree smelling the flowers.

  “There’s something you should know,” Ambler said, and before he knew he was going to, told Harry about his falling out with Lisa Young.

  “I’d expect more compassion from Mrs. Young,” Harry said. “You have to wonder if her concern is the child’s welfare or her social standing.”

  “I’m telling you because she could cause trouble. I’m still going to fight her.”

  “I imagine you would.” Harry cleared his throat. “There’s still the question of Mr. Dean and the journals. I told him I would discuss the issue with you. He wasn’t pleased.”

  Chapter 24

  As soon as he got back to his office, Ambler searched through the emails on the laptop until he found the messages to and from Wainwright. Sandra used the name Sandra Dean not Shannon. “You’re a fraud,” the first message from her said, “and I’m going to prove it.”

  Wainwright replied as if he’d expected her message. He called her Dr. Dean. “Everything is not as it seems, Dr. Dean.”

  “You ruined my mother’s life,” she wrote. “You ruined my life. You made her leave me.”

  Wainwright responded. “Your father kept your mother from you. Your mother and I wanted you to be with us. Have you asked her? You weren’t told the truth.”

  Sandra didn’t believe him. He responded with a lengthy email that told her how her separation from her mother came about. What struck Ambler was the self-justification and undertone of panic in Wainwright’s message.

  In the email, he told Sandra he was still married to his first wife when Jayne Galloway left her husband to come live with him. He was on the faculty of a conservative Catholic college, about to be considered for tenure. His tenure application was not especially strong and would have been denied if he were discovered to be involved in two messy divorces: his own, and Jayne’s. Sandra’s father threatened a public fight with charges of infidelity, adultery, and desertion. His price for cooperation and a quiet divorce was for Jayne Galloway to relinquish her parental rights. “He forced her to choose between you and me,” he wrote. “It was the most unfair choice possible for her.”

  Sandra’s response was simply, “She should have chosen me.”

  There were other emails. Wainwright knew Jayne Galloway was dying of cancer and encouraged Sandra to forgive her, to visit her. She told him she didn’t need his advice about her mother.

  “Everyone she loved turned against her,” he wrote.

  “She did it to herself,” Sandra wrote back.

  Some emails might have been deleted because a couple of threads of discussion weren’t followed up. The most interesting of these was from Wainwright. “You have to wonder about a husband who keeps his wife from her mother.” He most likely meant Sandra’s father. But he wrote wife not daughter. If what Jayne Galloway said about Simon Dean’s dislike of her were true, Wainwright might have meant Simon keeping Sandra from her mother. So how would Wainwright know that and what did it mean? The next message from Wainwright told Sandra he’d be in the city and asked her to meet him for lunch. She responded that she would. There were no emails after that, so no telling if the lunch took place.

  He was going through the emails a second time to make sure he hadn’t missed anything when Andrea Eagan arrived in the late afternoon to pick up the laptop. He asked if she’d read the emails. She hadn’t, so he gave her a summary. “Sandra blamed Wainwright for her mother leaving her. That’s what the correspondence is mostly about.”

  Andrea smiled wanly. “That was hard for Sandi. I don’t think she ever forgave her mother, even though I think she tried to. I’d read a couple of Jayne Galloway’s books.” Andrea waved her arms at the shelves of books surrounding her. “I’m a mystery reader, you know. I love your reading room. When Sandi found out I’d read them, she wanted me to tell her about the books, as if it might tell her about her mother.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said the books were good, but somber, dark, not a lot of tranquility restored to Cabot Cove.”

  “Are you aware that Sandra did reunite with her mother?” He told her Sandra and McNulty went to Jayne Galloway’s house on Long Island after the murder in New York and exchanged cars. “Previously, she’d hired a private detective to track down Sandra only to be rebuffed by her and her husband.”

  “I guess I’m not surprised she went to her mother’s when she was in trouble.” Andrea walked over to the library table Ambler used as a desk and
sat down, so he did, too. “I remember when her mother tried to find her. Sandi told me about it at the time. She was excited about seeing her mother. That’s when we talked about her mother’s books; I think Sandi began reading them. And then she and Simon turned against Mrs. Galloway, and nothing came of the visit.”

  Ambler turned to Sandra Dean’s laptop and found the message from Wainwright he wanted and read it to her: “‘You have to wonder about a husband who keeps his wife from her mother.’ Could he have meant Simon?”

  Andrea’s voice had a ghostly quality. “Yes he meant Simon. But how would he know? I truly believe Sandi wanted to see her mother again. Simon wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Wouldn’t allow it?”

  “I feel like a traitor talking about him like this. He is my brother. And he’s not an ogre. He cared about Sandi, in his own way.” She shook head. “It’s just his way was … Oh boy!” She laughed.

  “Simon was way too influenced by the Old Testament—or something he read from the Dark Ages. He was lord of the manor. Sandi made him dinner every night after working all day. He never washed a dish, ran a vacuum cleaner, or God help us changed a diaper. When Sandi traveled, she left dinner for him and Carolyn to heat up. Simon ruled over her. That’s what made me so mad, that she’d put up with that. Now he thinks he’s in charge of her in death, able to decide what people can know about her.

  “Simon despised Mrs. Galloway for what she did to Sandi. Sandi didn’t tell me he forbade her to see her mother. But I’m sure he did.” Andrea turned up her nose and curled her lip, not a sneer, an expression of distaste. “Believe me. Simon was in charge. He missed the humility part of the Lord’s teachings when he was in the seminary.”

  “Simon studied to be a priest?”

  Andrea laughed. “When Simon was a teenager, he thought he was mystic. We all thought he’d become a priest. My parents sent him to a Catholic seminary in Pennsylvania for high school. Then, something happened at the seminary. He came home near the end of his senior year and never went back. No one told me why. It wasn’t like I was his confidant, anyway. It didn’t change him. He was still devout and arrogant about it, and still is.

  “When the time came to talk about marriage, he required Sandi become a Catholic. He wouldn’t marry her unless she converted. Worse, he’s the old ‘binding with briars my joys and desires’ kind of Catholic, strict, patriarchal. Sandi wore a head covering to Mass. She might as well have walked three steps behind him.

  “Truthfully, I never knew what Sandi saw in Simon. Once, before they were married when they were engaged, she and I shared a bottle of wine, two bottles if you must know.” She winked. “Too much wine, because I tried to talk her out of marrying him.

  “Sandi had a difficult life. And then she married Simon who wasn’t right for her. Forgive me for saying she deserved better. Simon is an emotional void, a tyrant. She loved him, getting nothing in return. Who knows why people do what they do? He helped her through medical school. I guess that’s something.”

  Andrea was right, even if she didn’t believe she was right. There was risk in judging someone else’s relationship from the outside. It wasn’t so clear to Ambler who was the wronged person in the marriage of Simon and Sandra Dean. He tried to say this to Andrea, that Sandra might have caused Simon suffering, too.

  “Yes. There’s that. I didn’t know Sandi as well as I thought I did. Yet if either of them were to have a secret life, I would have bet on Simon. He was a sphinx even as a kid. You never knew what he felt, what he thought, what he liked or didn’t like. I grew up with a stranger for a brother, an imperious stranger.”

  Ambler was surprised by Andrea’s take on her brother and didn’t know how to respond. Not that he didn’t believe her. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to show a different side to the world at large than to those close to them. He didn’t think Andrea was trying to malign her brother. It was as if there was some truth about him she thought Ambler should know and in an oblique way was telling him.

  “Your brother and Sandra had an unhappy marriage?”

  Andrea shook her head. “I guess I can’t say that. One never knows what goes on in private between two people. I do know what I saw, and I know Simon. He was unreasonably demanding of her. He demeaned her in front of others. She was a brilliant doctor and he talked down to her. Other times, he ignored her in front of people. She’d say something to him and he wouldn’t respond.”

  Ambler remembered what Cosgrove and McNulty had said about Sandra’s fear of someone. “Was she afraid of him?”

  Andrea shook her head. “No. It wasn’t like that. He never hit her or threatened her. They didn’t have arguments or fights, not that I saw. His was a kind of subtle emotional abuse. I don’t think he even knew when he humiliated her. Simon came first, everyone else, including Sandi, a distant second. Maybe it was different when they were alone. She loved him. She bought into his idea that it was her duty to be his handmaid. I think it drove her crazy.”

  When Andrea made ready to leave, Ambler walked around the library table to stand beside her. She was clumsy getting the laptop into its case. He thought she acted worried now that the time for returning the laptop got closer.

  “Are you sure this will be okay?” He touched her shoulder.

  She laughed uneasily. “I can handle Simon. He’s tried to boss me around since we were kids. I’ve never put up with his crap.” She met Ambler’s gaze; there was fear and defiance in her eyes. “I don’t know why he’s being such a pill. He thinks the bartender killed Sandi, but it might be he’s not absolutely sure, so he’s afraid you’ll prove him wrong.” She imitated a stern male tone. “And Simon has to be right.”

  Ambler was drawn to the genuineness of her expression, the genuineness of her. She reminded him for the moment that goodness existed in the world. They looked at each other for a moment until she opened her arms slightly and leaned into him. He hugged her. “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve taken a big chance to help me.”

  “Not just you. I’m not sure why but I believe you wouldn’t do what you’re doing if you believed your friend the bartender killed Sandi. I want to know what really happened to her.”

  Ambler hugged her again. As he let go of her and turned, he heard a throat being cleared and knew it was Adele. He also knew—or learned for the first time—that the sound of a throat being cleared could convey criticism. “Adele!” he said much louder than he intended, letting go of Andrea’s arm and taking a slight hop back from her. “You remember Andrea.”

  Andrea, still guileless, smiled and held out her hand. Adele held out her hand, smiling also, but shooting a quick glance at Ambler that felt like a hard poke in the eye.

  As they watched Andrea walk away, Adele said, “That was cozy.” Her glare had not diminished.

  “It wasn’t cozy,” he said—correcting himself to, “She brought me Sandra’s laptop.”

  Adele sat down. “And?”

  He told her what he’d learned from the emails.

  “So Mr. Wainwright reappears. What was the fraud she accused him of?”

  “It’s strange. Neither of them said what it was. Yet, you can tell from Wainwright’s explanations and justifications that he knew.”

  “So what does it mean he’s a fraud? He’s missing and a fraud.”

  Ambler wasn’t really listening to Adele who began talking about a number of different things at once. He was mentally sifting through the emails he’d read and what Andrea had said. Adele liked to think out loud if someone else was present, while Ambler preferred to keep his thoughts to himself. After a short pause, she said, “So much of who we are is determined when we’re kids and have no choice about what’s happening to us. And her mother, too. I bet the man she left for this Wainwright person drove her to it. I wonder if she writes about him in her journals.…”

  Ambler shook his head. He didn’t know what Adele was talking about but didn’t want to admit it.

  Adele slapped her hand on the library table. “Wha
t were the dates of the emails?”

  Ambler was totally lost. “What emails?”

  She gave him a pained look. “Do you know what we’re talking about?”

  After a moment, he caught up with her and looked at his notes. “The first one, from Sandra, is dated September 2.”

  Adele stood. “That’s it. Look at the dates. She was here at the library on September 2 reading about Wainwright in her mother’s journals, right before she disappeared and not long before she was murdered. That’s when she emailed Wainwright. Whatever made him a fraud, she found in those journals.”

  Wainwright disappeared from his college campus at the beginning of the college’s autumn quarter, the first week in September, around the time of the emails. Ambler had stored the boxes holding the Galloway collection temporarily on open shelves on the mezzanine level of the crime fiction reading room and had kept them there after Sandra Dean’s disappearance and then her death.

  “Do you know which boxes Sandra was using?” Adele watched the box in front of her as if she expected it to talk.

  When Ambler found the right file boxes, Adele began searching the files containing the correspondence between Jayne Galloway and Dillard Wainwright, the correspondence was long enough ago to be handwritten or typed letters. Ambler gave her the journals in which Galloway wrote about her first contact with Dillard Wainwright.

  While Adele did that, Ambler dug out the more recent journals he’d retrieved from Jayne Galloway’s house on Long Island after her death. He and Adele worked together on either side of the library table in the middle of the crime fiction reading room for a couple of hours.

  At 7:30, they met Johnny and his newly titled “after-school companion,” former babysitter, Denise Cosgrove, at an Indian restaurant on Lexington Avenue for dinner. Johnny and Denise had been taking Lola to obedience classes and, having successfully completed her training, Lola had been awarded her canine good citizen certificate, so it was something of a celebration, though without Lola.