The Fortune Teller's Daughter

by Lila Shaara

“Not as hard as it sounds, Harry. Turns out he had a handkerchief with a slice of honeydew melon wrapped in it, and they found another dead wasp in that same pocket.”

  “But no one else thought that was suspicious?”

  Jonathan smiled. “Sure, a lot of us did. But Dad liked his fruit. He did that sometimes, wrapped a piece in a hankie for later. It was one of his more eccentric habits. Lots of people knew about it. And the EpiPen could have fallen from his pocket at the party. So that’s what the police concluded.”

  Harry smiled back, but he didn’t look friendly. Jonathan didn’t know what he’d done to produce such contentiousness in the reporter. “But that was a pretty big risk, surely. She could have been killed in the crash herself.”

  Jonathan shrugged. “I always assumed that she expected to have more control over the situation. They were run off the road by an impatient truck driver. I’m sure she didn’t plan that. I figured she was going to get him to pull over first, then pull the handkerchief out.”

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Why would she want him dead?”

  Jonathan was surprised by the question. “To get his money, of course. To keep everything for herself.”

  “But from what I understand, she didn’t profit from his death at all.”

  Jonathan nodded, relieved that he understood what the problem was. “That’s only because my mother made sure of it. She told Emily that if she didn’t give up her claim to everything of my father’s, we’d get the police to look at her more closely, for both my father’s murder and other things. I was there for the conversation. My mother was very persuasive.”

  “What other things?”

  “I shouldn’t say. I can’t prove anything.” Harry raised his brows at Jonathan, but he went on. “We were partly bluffing.” He smiled again. “We had suspicions of certain improprieties, with grant money and so on. But no proof. But Emily took my mother’s warnings to heart.” He leaned back in his seat and shrugged. “My mother has a lot of clout in Lucasta. And Emily knew that Mother’s word would carry a lot more weight than hers.”

  “Even,” Harry said, “without any actual evidence of wrongdoing.”

  “Oh, yes,” Jonathan said. “I’m sorry that none of this can be corroborated, which I know you need as a reporter, but I thought you might want to know why everyone is so hostile to Emily’s memory.” I can’t understand why you’re not more hostile to it, thought Jonathan. You should be. He added, “My mother doesn’t need any more pain, Harry.”

  Harry nodded. “I can understand that.”

  Harry got Charles Ziegart’s son out of his house before dinnertime; he had no interest in prolonging the interview. The younger man’s affect had been the most interesting aspect of the story so far. Against his will, his interest was piqued again, although, he suspected, not for the reasons that Jonathan Ziegart probably intended.

  20

  JUSTICE

  REVERSED

  Injustice, inequality

  Harry taught his last First Amendment class of the term on Tuesday, giving back papers with grudging praise. “You folks may make it as attorneys yet,” he said, shocked by how happy the cliché made most of his students. He gave a final exam in his Media and Law class on Thursday, and realized that all he had left to do was mark them and enter his course grades online. He commented on this to Serge, whom he met in the hallway outside their offices waltzing with the head administrative assistant of the Law School. Serge said, “My favorite time of year,” and waltzed some more. Harry returned to his office, plopping the pile of exams on his desk.

  He had just sat down when Julie Canfield came through the door. Fortunately, she wasn’t in either of his classes this term, but since they’d had lunch together and she’d met his son, she’d been hovering around him more than ever. Harry didn’t know how to discourage her without being mean; when they met in the hall he tried to adopt a stoic, emotionless façade, but he usually wound up making ridiculous jokes. She always laughed way too hard at them, which Harry found more annoying than if she’d kicked him. She’d made a point of telling him that she was going to be in Stoweville all summer. Thank God I wasn’t waltzing when she came this way, he thought. She might have cut in, and then he chided himself for being an egomaniac, even as she said, “Professor Sterling, remember that I’m available to help with any research you need done for your book.” Her ability to call him Harry had evaporated after that Saturday afternoon, and he’d decided that the formality wasn’t a bad idea. She smiled, her teeth smooth and so white they were like ice. “I’m a good typist, too, although I know I’m not supposed to be willing to admit that.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Harry said, shuffling papers busily until she left.

  An hour later, he’d read six essays, finding each one more boring than the last. He decided to take a break, getting himself a cup of coffee after making sure no one else was in the lounge. When he got back to his desk, he thought about Doug McNeill, obese and unliked and unrespected. He hadn’t done much research on “Poor Doug,” so instead of reading more beastly essays, he turned to his computer and typed “Douglas McNeill” in the search bar. It wasn’t long before he was staring at the screen in surprise.

  On Friday morning Harry went to the campus to enter his grades on his office computer. Frank Milford had e-mailed him the name and number of a secondhand contact at Cantwell named Ed Sanderson. He punched the appropriate numbers while looking out his window at the mixture of bricks and cinder blocks that made up the wall of the window well. The phone rang twice, then was answered by a voice that sounded like that of a man with pebbles in his throat, low and bumpy. “Sanderson,” he said. He didn’t sound anywhere near as round and friendly as Frank Milford.

  Harry introduced himself and his subject, emphasizing his past tie to The Washington Post. Sanderson seemed unaware of Harry’s conversation with DeGraff and sounded generally unimpressed.

  “There’s information on Charlie all over the place. What do you want from me?”

  “You knew him personally?”

  “I’ve been here for almost thirty years. I was on the committee that hired him. I was junior faculty then; I’d only been here about five years at that point.”

  “He would have been how old?”

  “Mid-twenties. Right out of grad school at MIT.”

  “He’d already made a name for himself by then?”

  “He was a rising star. His dissertation involved equations to define surface features of light-deflecting materials.”

  “You mean stuff that’s invisible?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’ve read about this,” Harry said. “Right out of Harry Potter.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Harry could picture the man’s nose rising. Sanderson went on, “Other people, at Duke and elsewhere, have reached the experimental stage. Charlie never got that far.”

  “So, what did Ziegart do once he was at Cantwell?”

  There was a brief laugh from the phone, dry, like a little cough. “He liked playing with guns.”

  “He worked on military projects?”

  “He wanted to. I thought at the time that it was because the money was so good. But now, I don’t know. That was part of it. But I think he just liked the idea of laser beams in outer space. In real life, he mostly worked on increasing the efficiency of energy transmission. He had great success with superconductivity, although the problems involved with making it practicable were always there.”

  “Did he make much money off this research?”

  “The more patents he filed, the greater his percentage of the return on them. The military was interested in the Ziegart effect research, so I imagine the money involved by then was serious. But those figures are not at my fingertips, and I’m not sure I should divulge them anyway.”

  “What can you tell me about Emily Ziegart?”

  There was a short silence before Sanderson answered. “What exactly do you want to know?”

/>   “She was Ziegart’s student before she was his wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was her specialty? The same as his?”

  “Well, of course there was some overlap, or she wouldn’t have been his student in the first place.”

  “Did you know her very well?”

  “No. Charlie and I weren’t close, not on a social basis, you understand. I’m a workhorse. Charlie was more of a player, schmoozing the local money people, society folks and so on. He was handsome and from that world to begin with. He knew his way around the hunt club, if you know what I mean, and he looked good in a tux.”

  “What about Doug McNeill?”

  “Oh God. Poor Doug.” Here we go again, Harry thought. “I was afraid you were going to ask about him. He was kind of a mess. Bad health problems.”

  “But as a student?”

  Another silence. “He was okay. He followed Charlie around as though he were God. But a lot of people did that.” Sanderson gave a sigh. “Look, poor Doug was close to three hundred pounds. Not terribly presentable. He had skin problems. He was always sweaty. He had a squeaky voice, he wheezed, he smelled funny. In a profession of nerds, geeks, and misfits, he was at the bottom of the social barrel. I hate saying all this since the poor fellow’s dead. I wish I’d liked him more. I felt that way when he was alive. Most people felt sorry for him and found him annoying at the same time. A bad combination. He had an eating disorder, and to see him put away any food was not a pretty thing.”

  “Were he and Emily friends?”

  “Not that I know of. They were both Charlie’s students, of course, and so were in a pretty small social universe. Neither of them was exactly popular, so it’s possible they had bonded in some way.”

  “Why wasn’t Emily more popular?”

  “Charlie started seeing her almost as soon as she got here.” Harry was interested that Sanderson put the active verb on Ziegart. “They were married by the end of her first year. As his wife, she was kind of above the other students. Or outside them, I should say. I doubt anyone here could claim to have known her very well.”

  “Did Charles Ziegart steal her work, or Doug McNeill’s?”

  “Of course not.” There was an indignant pause. “Graduate students’ work belongs to their professor by definition. Charlie didn’t steal anything.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Harry said, checking his notes, “is why Charles Ziegart took Doug’s and Emily’s names off the paper before it was published. They were both on the original draft. Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know for sure. There are lots of possible reasons. I never understood why Doug was on in the first place, to be honest. He worked on optics, and as far as I know, wasn’t involved in the work on the Ziegart effect at all.”

  “But Emily was?”

  “Well, yes. She was the project leader. Under Charlie, of course. Her suicide was such a waste. There are so few women in the sciences. As far as I know, she never finished her Ph.D.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have no idea. I assume it had to do with the trauma of Charlie’s death. There were even rumors that she was responsible for it.”

  “Do you believe them?”

  “No, they were ridiculous.” Harry thought, Then why bring them up? Sanderson went on. “She was in the car with him, and she was pretty badly hurt herself. But the article came out not long after, with Charlie getting sole credit for the Ziegart effect, so after the fact it looked like she might have had a reason to be pissed at him. After his funeral, she just left. That didn’t help stop the rumors.”

  Harry let that sit for a minute, then said, “So was she a scientific gold digger? Stealing Ziegart away from his happy family to bask in his reflected glory?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Just, you know, an ambitious student. Not that unusual. And Charlie and Pamela had gotten divorced just before Emily came to Cantwell.”

  “That wasn’t the impression I’d gotten. Why?”

  “I have no idea. I wasn’t privy to the internal details of their marriage.”

  “It wasn’t considered improper when Charlie and Emily started seeing each other? What was her maiden name, by the way?”

  “I can’t remember. Something unremarkable. Unmemorable.” Harry could hear Sanderson blowing air at the mouthpiece of the receiver. “When faculty date graduate students, it isn’t exactly comfortable for everyone, but there’s nothing illegal about it. With undergraduates, the rules are stricter. And Charlie was the kind of guy that everyone forgave. Charming.” This didn’t sound like a compliment.

  Harry said, “One last question. Was Emily a better student than Doug McNeill?” There was silence. “Dr. Sanderson?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to remember that?”

  “I’ve only been teaching one year, and without referring to a single test score, I could rank groups of students pretty easily. I’m not talking about anyone’s worth as a human being or the respect or happiness in life that they’re entitled to. Strictly from an academic perspective, you can’t tell me which one of them was stronger?”

  “Okay, Emily was probably stronger academically. I don’t know how this could possibly be important to anyone now.”

  “Because the school started a scholarship in the name of poor Doug McNeill, who no one apparently liked or respected, no matter how unjust that may have been. There’s no scholarship in Emily Ziegart’s name. Her only offense seems to have been that she was young and attracted Charles Ziegart. No one seems to be mourning her at all. That doesn’t seem right.”

  Sanderson was silent; Harry imagined he had taken a mechanical pencil from a pocket protector and was doodling swearwords on a blotter in front of him. He liked the image. He waited until Sanderson finally said, “It’s not a big scholarship.”

  “No, but I was able to find out that it’s funded by one of Charles Ziegart’s patents.”

  “Not one of his major ones.”

  “True. But why? I can understand why a suicide might not get that kind of honor. But why did Doug? It wasn’t his family who insisted. He apparently didn’t have any.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t make decisions like that.” Sanderson sounded irritated.

  “Who does?”

  “Ask Gillian.”

  “She started the scholarship?”

  “I didn’t say that. I don’t know anything about it. But I assume she would.” Sanderson cleared his throat. “The department got a letter about Emily’s death five or six years ago. I remember Louise Glade, our administrative assistant, putting it on the bulletin board. It was sent by a relative, a sister I think. So someone somewhere is probably mourning her. Now I’ve got things to do.” Then he hung up.

  21

  QUEEN OF CUPS

  A woman who lives in her dreams; at times she sees things that may not be there

  Maggie had called before he’d left to meet her at the cemetery. As soon as he heard her voice on his answering machine, he picked up, thinking about the things he’d told her, things he hadn’t even told Serge. Well, he thought, I’ve been slowly going crazy myself for the last couple of years, so I guess it’s fitting that I have a friend like her.

  She said, “Would you mind a short visit with Miss Tokay? I asked her if we could walk on her property today, and she said that would be fine.” Speaking of crazies, Harry thought cheerfully.

  He met her at the end of the dirt drive tucked next to the shrine. The house was about fifty feet down the narrow road, which was crossed by a chain with a sign attached that said “Private Drive.” Maggie unhooked it before they took their cars in next to the house. It looked even more decrepit close up than it did from a distance. One of the pillars holding up the roof of the front porch was missing; in its place was a tower of cinder blocks piled one on top of the other; they met the edge of the roof a few inches lower than the pillar would have done, hence the roof’s smiling sag. The green and black shingles above were the only things about the pla
ce that looked sound. The porch floor was wood, and Harry wondered how long it would hold the weight of the cement blocks. The rest of the place looked as though termites feasted there regularly; there was no reason the porch planks would be an exception.

  They parked in front, where the driveway disintegrated into a yard of hard-packed clay with intermittent patches of flattened grass. Maggie led Harry to the front door, the steps giving slightly, as though they were made of canvas. The door frame was peeling, but the door itself looked new and expensive, enameled steel painted a bright violet, with a heavy brass knob and a dead bolt.

  “They mean it when they call her the Purple Lady, don’t they?” said Harry.

  “Yes,” said Maggie, knocking on the door, then turning the massive knob. The door was unlocked and opened easily. She leaned her head in and said loudly, “Miss Tokay? It’s Maggie. I’ve brought Harry.”

  They walked in, the cool dark of the hallway making Harry’s irises ache with the effort of widening enough to see. The space was almost as large as Maggie’s living room. After a few seconds he got the impression of an ornate fixture hanging from the ceiling and a grandfather clock that was taller than he was, flanked by a pair of heavy chairs. Through the shadows, he heard Miss Tokay’s gentle little voice say, “Maggie? Come on in, honey.”

  Maggie led Harry from the front foyer into a large room, lightened by sunlight shining through tall, slender windows. A heavy, impossibly old ceiling fan turned sluggishly, making a soft, rhythmic buzzing sound, like bees doing a tango. The room was furnished with pieces that were all at least as old as their owner: an oak roll-top desk in a corner, a beautiful Persian rug that edged up to a fireplace with a brass screen, two wing chairs in rose-colored velvet, a few small tables, and a Tiffany floor lamp beside a Victorian sofa under the trio of windows in the far wall. Miss Tokay sat in its center, wrapped in the same purple shawl she’d worn the day Harry met her; she was backlit by the window, so her features were in shadow and her hair wisped around her head, glowing like a halo. Harry was willing to wager that her attitude in the light was intentional. She looked up at them with a smile, her teeth the brightest part of her face, and she extended her tiny hand in greeting. Maggie approached her and took it, leaning down and giving the old woman a kiss on the cheek. Then Maggie stood up and waved toward where Harry stood at the entrance to the room, as though Miss Tokay needed to be shown that he was there.