by Robin Kirman
Copyright © 2015 by Robin Kirman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Penguin Random House LLC for permission to reprint “I Knew a Woman,” copyright © 1954 by Theodore Roethke; from COLLECTED POEMS by Theodore Roethke. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kirman, Robin.
Bradstreet gate : a novel / Robin Kirman.—First Edition.
pages cm
1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Coming of age—Fiction. 3. College students—Crimes against—Fiction. 4. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3611.I7695B73 2015
813'.6—dc23 2014047554
ISBN 9780804139311
eBook ISBN 9780804139328
Cover photograph: Dina Greenberg
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part II
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part III
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Acknowledgments
For Reuven and Emmanuelle
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
PROLOGUE
A young man stood on her stoop: tall, with lanky hair falling in his face, and thin, busy lips that he chewed while she studied him across the threshold. No one she’d met before. The sun was sharp; the maple outside her house was spiked with buds. Spring had arrived without her noticing.
“Georgia Calvin?”
She turned to check on Violet, in the dining room behind her, jabbering in her high chair.
“Miss Calvin? I’m Nat Krauss.” He shifted his knapsack to offer her his hand. “I left a message I’d be coming.”
There had been several messages, in fact, from a young man at the Crimson: she’d erased them all without playing them through. Only one matter ever brought reporters calling, though years had passed since anyone had tried.
This May, it would be ten years, exactly, since Julie Patel’s murder. Georgia always marked the day, May 5, and made sure flowers were delivered to the family: Mr. and Mrs. Barid Patel, 32 North Beatty Street, Pittsburgh, PA. Nine bouquets and no replies. Nonetheless, she kept sending them, hoping that, if she hadn’t been forgiven, she might at least be accepted as a valid participant in the family’s tragedy, someone who’d been involved in those events the way they had: directly and against her will—unlike the many others who’d taken an interest in the murder out of some personal objective, the Nat Krausses of the world. “You’re the Harvard reporter.”
“Editor in chief, actually.” His hand remained outstretched; she took it at last. The boy’s palm felt sticky; his fingertips were stained with newsprint, black under the nails.
The oncologist had warned her again this morning: Mark could only be safely released to a clean, contained environment. No welcome home bouquets, no gifts of food, no guests.
“I’m sorry, this really isn’t a good time.”
A crashing noise came from behind her; she rushed back inside, relieved to find Violet strapped into her high chair, her bowl of mashed bananas spinning on its side across the floor. Georgia knelt to clean the mess; when she stood again, the young man was in her living room, laying his unwashed jacket over one armrest of her sofa.
“Ms. Calvin.”
“Reese. I’m Reese now.” She hadn’t taken Mark’s name when they’d married, but with the onset of his illness, she’d filed the papers. She would be Reese and remain Reese, whatever happened, from here on.
The clock in the living room read 10:15; by noon Mark would be prepared for discharge; Violet still needed her nap. Food lay scattered around the high chair; the reporter had tracked mud across the floor. “Look, if you’ll just leave me your number—”
“One question. Please. Give me five minutes and I swear I’ll get out of your way.”
Despite the unkempt hair and rumpled bowling shirt, nods to hipsterism, the young man was clearly fanatically determined. The kind of guy that, ten years before, she’d have found easy to handle. These Harvard boys had not changed.
She was the one who’d changed. Her shirt was stained; her leggings had a hole in one knee; her eyes were ringed from lack of sleep and white hairs had multiplied among the gold. The past year had done the transformative work of a decade; just over thirty, she must seem far removed from anything to do with sex or scandal.
Violet let out a whimper of exhaustion.
“I need to get the baby to sleep first.”
“No problem. I can wait.” The young man dropped onto the sofa.
Georgia resigned—“one question”—and leaned down to unstrap the baby from her high chair. When she glanced up, Krauss was staring; her shirt gaped and, since she was nursing, she hadn’t bothered with a bra.
Krauss turned away, to pull a notebook from his bag. But a moment later, from the stairwell, Georgia caught him watching her again: a more prurient curiosity shone in his expression.
It was a look that she remembered, encountered often after the murder, in the faces of strangers who’d linked her to the figure in the news. Rufus Storrow’s student girlfriend. The seductress or the naïf, the betrayed or the betrayer, the partner of a killer: she’d been all these things to different people, might be any one or more of them to this Nat Krauss.
She shut herself inside the baby’s room. Almost half an hour went by while she nursed and rocked and hummed; the presence of a visitor made Violet agitated. By the time Georgia laid the baby, sleeping, in her crib and tiptoed down, she’d allowed herself to hope that Krauss had given up and left. Instead she found him typing into his phone; his feet were propped up on the coffee table, beside a stack of unpaid bills: mortgage payments, insurance claims.
“Good to go now?” He sat up straight and pocketed his phone.
She took a seat across from him, inside this living room she’d scarcely used, furnished with items she and Mark had bought over the summer at local auctions: one way to introduce an element of chance, some playful chaos, into the seemingly staid business of setting up house—as if chance and chaos weren’t already with them, as if she’d forgotten the lesson of ten years before.
“You can guess what’s brought me,” Krauss began.
“The memorial this May.” Every member of her graduating class had received notice, and she’d been made aware of it much sooner, since Charlie and Alice had take
n part in the arrangements. Over lunch, that winter, Alice had warned her that the ten-year anniversary of Julie Patel’s death would have consequences: the media was taking renewed interest in the story and the investigation had been reopened; there was a chance that Georgia might be contacted by police or press. “You’re covering the ceremony?”
“Also.” Krauss shifted forward; the smell of cigarettes wafted from his clothes. “But my question has more, specifically, to do with Joe Lombardi—the officer who headed up the Patel investigation.”
“I know who he is.”
“Right, though maybe you’re not aware he’s Chief of Police Lombardi now. I don’t know how much you keep up with Cambridge politics—there have been complaints of corruption, incompetence. Which must come as no surprise to you: given what went on with the Patel case.”
That case had been mishandled in a dozen ways, but she’d never thought to blame officer Lombardi more than anybody else involved: the politicians who’d pushed the department to name a suspect quickly; the press that never clamored for a broader investigation. Everyone concerned, it seemed, had played his eager part in persecuting Storrow.
Storrow had been too perfect a target, after all: too well dressed and too well spoken, with a high Virginia drawl and the sort of fair, delicate good looks that called to mind outdated notions like breeding. A charmed, young Harvard professor, whose reputation she’d assisted in sullying forever.
Across from her Krauss brushed the hair off his pimpled forehead; he was sweating, talking on excitedly: “And not just any statements, potentially exonerating statements. I’ve already spoken with one witness who claims Lombardi completely disregarded what he told him: a classmate of yours. Miguel Santina. You might know him.”
“Know who?” She rubbed her eyes; the night before she’d scarcely slept, woken by Violet twice and kept awake by her own fears that the day would bring bad news, that Dr. Poole would tell her Mark’s immune system was still too compromised, that his release from the hospital would be postponed once more. We can’t be overly cautious; he’s undergone a very serious surgery, gravely serious, the name notwithstanding: Whipple—a word better suited to Violet’s toys and gizmos than to a procedure to remove half of Mark’s insides.
“Excuse me, Nat is it? I thought we’d be discussing the memorial, not the murder.”
“Obviously, they’re connected.”
“Maybe they shouldn’t be.” A ceremony to honor a young woman’s memory, to bring some comfort to her family: that was not an occasion for muckraking.
“I know these questions might make some people uncomfortable, but if Julie Patel was denied justice, that needs to come out. I’m sure the Patels would feel the same.”
“Yeah? I kind of doubt it.” On what should be a hopeful morning, she didn’t need to recall death; and as unpleasant as returning to this subject was to her, it would have to be pure torture for Julie’s family.
She studied the reporter, perched at the sofa’s edge, knee bouncing; his pen ran, buzzing, up and down his notebook’s spiral. A creature positively twitching with ill-contained ambition—as if he’d given a damn about Julie Patel or her family, until he’d seen his chance to earn some notice from Reuters or the Times.
“If you’re here to discuss details of the case, I really doubt that I can help you; I said all I had to say to the police ten years ago.”
“To Lombardi, you mean.” Krauss looked down at his lap; he’d stuck his pen inside the notebook’s spiral. He lifted the book, trying to shake the pen free without her seeing: a flush bloomed beneath the rash of tiny pimples; he was a child suddenly.
In spite of herself, she smiled. She supposed she was being rather hard on Krauss—too hard, probably, conflating him with the reporters who’d once assailed her, or with Alice, who’d been the one to expose her affair with Storrow, first to Charlie and then in the pages of the Crimson. Long ago, when they—she, Alice, and Charlie—were all really just children, too, self-preoccupied and reckless.
“Go on,” she resumed, more indulgent. “Your question: there was a classmate…”
“Miguel Santina. The name came up in an old Globe article.” Krauss abandoned the stuck pen and pulled a second one out of his knapsack. “Turns out the guy had phoned Lombardi to report seeing Storrow’s BMW on the night of the murder. Fifteen to thirty minutes before—parked on Cowperthwaite.”
The street adjoining Mather House, where she’d been living senior year. Back then she’d never have imagined Storrow would risk seeking her out in her dorm, that he could be so rash or obsessive, but subsequent years had made her less certain. “This is the first I’m learning of it.”
“The first anyone is learning of it. Seems no one pursued the claim.” Krauss repressed a grin: so pleased to have surpassed the achievements of the many adults who’d dedicated months to these same mysteries before.
“We weren’t together, Storrow and me, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“No, I know. You were at a party. Kirkland House.”
A detail she hadn’t had cause to recollect, not since she’d been held inside a detective’s office for three grueling hours of questioning. “So if you read the police report, you already know everything I know. I’d have mentioned seeing Storrow or his car.”
“You’re sure of that? Because Lombardi might have left it out.”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“Maybe there were other occasions; he’d come by another time?”
“Not that I ever knew of, no.” No meetings on campus: foremost among Storrow’s many rules. It had seemed the height of irony, really, that after all the disagreements they’d had about his precautions, bordering on paranoia—Who gives a damn who you’re sleeping with?—in the end, every move Storrow had made in those months, including with her, had been scrutinized publicly, and judged.
Krauss chewed his bottom lip: it seemed this wasn’t the answer that he’d hoped for. “I’m not here just on the word of Santina, so you know. There was a girl, on your floor in Mather, who also thought she heard a man’s voice in your room.”
“Well, she was mistaken.” Not that it was necessary to defend her statements to this kid: Nat Krauss was not the police and she was no longer a guilt-ridden girl of twenty. “Look, I’ve told you what I can and now, really, I’ve got other things to do.”
She rose and stood in front of Krauss; he remained seated, determined.
“If you don’t want to help me, I get that, but I’d assume you’d want to help your friend.”
“Storrow, you mean?” Even during their affair, she wouldn’t have described him as her friend. Charlie was her friend. Alice, too, or so she’d thought. But not a man she’d spent the last decade avoiding, not a man she couldn’t swear had been incapable of a brutal crime. “We haven’t spoken in five years.”
“Regardless, I’m sure you’re aware of how he’s been ruined: professionally, personally.”
“So Storrow’s your concern? I thought it was justice for the Patels.”
“I’m concerned for everyone Lombardi’s lies affected—and if Storrow had his reasons for keeping quiet then, it looks as if he has a different story to tell now.”
“What story’s that?”
“I hope to find out when we meet.”
“You’re meeting—where?” The last she’d heard from Storrow, he’d been living in India, where she’d hoped he had the good sense to remain. Doing penance, so he’d said, with deliberate provocation: the memory of that improbable encounter, inside a tiny Mumbai kitchen, made her jittery still.
“He’s in Virginia. Great Falls,” Krauss explained. “I’m driving down next week.”
The news gave her a jolt: Storrow back on American soil, in contact with this kid who was now inside her home. “You know what he’s doing there?”
“Visiting his mother, apparently, though I got the sense there might be more to it: government business.”
When he spoke of Storrow, Krauss lowered
his voice, and his tone became more knowing. That was Storrow’s absurd effect, she recalled, on a certain kind of young man, even one as smart as Charlie. There had always been a bunch of them trailing Storrow across the Yard, enamored of his West Point lingo, entranced by his stories of the JAG Corps, suggestions of covert operations he was part of, the precise definitions of which always remained elusive. Whatever elite connections Storrow had once possessed had been severed long ago. A decade ago, come May.
“You don’t think he’s come for the memorial? For God’s sake, he doesn’t plan to use the occasion for grandstanding?”
“I can’t guess what’s on his mind.”
But she could guess. A man like Storrow, so devoted to the perfection of his image; he wouldn’t allow himself to be remembered as a villain, or to be forgotten either.
“He cannot be there. It would be a disaster for that family.” Her voice was shrill. A small cry sounded from upstairs. She paused, waiting to be reassured that Violet hadn’t fully woken. “The Patels must be allowed to have their day.”
“I understand your feelings here.”
“No, I don’t think you do.” Nat Krauss couldn’t begin to understand what it would do to Julie’s parents if Storrow showed his face again, what a horror it would be for them to see the man they believed had taken their child from them. Until Violet was born, Georgia couldn’t have grasped it either: what it meant to care for a creature of such sweet defenselessness, from the soft crown of her head, to those feeble, immaculate feet—to tend to another body, its needs and pains, more thoroughly than to one’s own. Even the ghost of a child was a mother’s possession. Mrs. Patel ought to be left in peace at least with that.