A Fugitive Truth

by Dana Cameron

  She took it with a glance that warned me of betraying her with hope, and scanned it quickly. “You know, you’ve written more than twice as much for Mr. Glasscock than you have for anyone else here. Pretty incriminating stuff too.”

  “I know.”

  A little spark of vitality seemed to ignite her eyes. “Looks like some overlaps between here and events at the Philadelphia library. Maybe I’d better give a call to the Philadelphia police, find out what they know about those stolen items. Maybe call the Parker House, ask some questions.”

  “Maybe.”

  Obviously feeling a little more her old self, Pam Kobrinksi said sternly, “Under no circumstances are you to go setting traps in your talk.”

  I gave her a sour look that informed her precisely what I thought of her order, and got up to leave. “Monday. Two o’clock.”

  She caught me by the sleeve as I passed her and I had to stop. “Dr. Fielding?”

  That was the first time she’d used my professional title since we met. Up until now, she’d been very careful to use the more democratic “Ms.” “Yes, Detective Sergeant Kobrinski?”

  “Shots in the woods. A list of suspects. The library teeming with corpses. All of a sudden I’ve got an idea we’re getting close to this. Do me a favor, would you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Watch your back.”

  Chapter 18

  THE GRINDING NOISES COMING FROM UNDER THE hood finally convinced me that they weren’t going to go away, so I stopped while I was in Monroe, to get Bessy checked out. The mechanic’s initial assessment was grim, both for my pocketbook and in his prognosis for my car’s long-term future. He agreed to do what he could, and gave me a lift back to Shrewsbury.

  Back at the residence, the next assault I experienced came from the last place I was expecting—my sister Bucky—and that was really more the threat of an invasion. Bucky called to tell me that she’d found “just the cat” for me.

  “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that I already have all the cat I need, or that Quasimodo would make short work of any other cat that darkened his doorstep.” Our present cat was still not certain I would get to stay.

  As usual, Bucky disregarded anything that was inconvenient to her. “You overreact to Quasi. He’s a pumpkin, really, just with a strong sense of territory and limited people skills. He’ll be fine with Minnie.”

  “Minnie? What, as in Minnie Mouser?”

  “Minnie as in Minerva. The shelter brought her into the surgery for me to check out, and that’s what they’re calling her. She’s really bright, so it fits her. I call her Skinny Minnie, though, because she’s a tiny little thing, mostly bones at the moment. She’s got a real pretty color, and once you meet her, her personality—”

  “Bucks, you’re talking like I said I’d take this cat. The truth is I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I’ve got too much going on in my life with work right now, my tenure portfolio is being reviewed, the house is still a mess, and, well, there’s just too much going on here at the moment for me to even consider adding anything else to the pile.”

  “You need to get a life.”

  “Excuse me? I thought I just got done telling you I had too much already!”

  “No, you got it wrong—”

  “I beg your pardon?” There really is nothing like a sister to crawl up your nose. Nothing besides nails down a chalkboard, grit in a salad, or bamboo under one’s fingernails.

  “You got it wrong when you said ‘the truth is.’ Those are just facts, Em; the fact is you’re overworked and otherwise busy. The real truth is, you need a life. Don’t confuse the two things.”

  “Jeez, thanks for the lesson in semantics.” I was feeling distinctly nettled; it was what I’d been talking to Pam Kobrinski about, what I’d been pondering as I studied Margaret’s diary.

  Bucky sounded pleased with herself. “Makes all the difference in the world. Yes, you say you have Quasi, but he’s not really your cat, is he? Big difference there. Now, when do you get home? Or should I just drop her off, and have Minnie waiting for you when you get back?”

  “Bucky, don’t! We’ll talk about this later.”

  I think I managed to convince her that she wasn’t going to visit this cat upon me, but when I finally hung up, I realized that what Bucky’d been saying about the difference between truth and fact was exactly right. That seemed to be what unstopped the genie’s bottle, and I finally got to work on my paper.

  All the rest of the weekend I was caught up in the flurry of writing and rewriting my presentation, and by Monday, my nerves were a jangling mess. Finally, after riding the roller coaster between believing that I was writing pap I would have shot a freshman for spouting and knowing that I was just the best thing to happen to archaeology since cold beer, I made my last edit, had a final read-through, and pronounced it good enough for government work.

  Which would have been fine, except that this wasn’t just a conference paper, something to provoke comments from colleagues. This time I was trying to provoke a killer’s curiosity. I wished for the long-ago days when I thought that a word choice in a paper would make or break my career, not this surreptitious prodding and poking, like an experiment that might blow up in my face.

  Monday morning I went downstairs for a gallon of coffee, still in my sweats and silly robe. I was too beat to worry about getting dressed before stimulants.

  Michael was there, of course, staring out the window as he always did. He didn’t bother turning around either, and today I noticed he had Le Monde and Die Welt to one side with The Sun open now. For apparent language skills, however, he seemed stuck on page three of the London tabloid. “Morning, Auntie. Ready to dazzle us all this afternoon?”

  I may have mentioned, I’m a little slow in the morning. I stared at him, wondering how he knew it was me. “How did you—”

  “You’re the only one left, aren’t you?”

  He sounded so damned spooky that I missed his next question. “What?”

  “I said,” Michael repeated slowly, exasperatedly, “what are you going to wear?”

  “Ware?” I was thoroughly confused now, thinking that he was talking about ceramics, and fumbled for the coffee pot. I needed to feel that exquisite sensation of my poor, overworked skull being cracked open, reborn to the possibilities of the universe. The coffee had been sitting a while, but I drank it greedily anyway, burnt offerings to the gods of intellect.

  “For your talk,” Michael explained. “Gonna get dressed up for it, right? But I hope you’re not like some of my overeager chums in the English department who feel they have to dress the part of their lecture. I have one colleague who feels obliged to wear a big white shirt and Polo cologne whenever he’s doing the Gothics. I personally leave the building when Oscar Wilde comes up in the survey—the sight of him in a velvet coat and a Hermés scarf soaked in Chanel No. 5 gives me the willies. Absolutely no pun intended. It wouldn’t be so bad if he were gay, I suppose, maybe then he’d know how to wear the clothes, but he still ends up leaving more first-year girls for me. So what kind of perfume do lady archaeologists wear?”

  “Obsession,” I answered promptly, saluting him with my mug.

  Michael turned around, critically surveying the resurrected wreckage of me from over the rims of his reading glasses. “God, it’s like taking the cover off the parrot cage, isn’t it? In any case, I’d suggest the dark green silk shirt, that’s a nice one with your hair, and you haven’t got a pair of black leather trousers, have you?”

  “I do not.”

  “Pity. With a string of pearls…well, never mind. I’d just lay off the gray wool skirt, that’s all. It doesn’t exactly make you look dumpy, but—”

  “You are the last person I’d take fashion advice from!” I rinsed out my mug and left it in the strainer. More than time to get out of there. I couldn’t bear any further banter with Michael, not when I’ve just given the police a bunch of good reasons to look into his activities.

  �
�You don’t need to look like a model to be an artiste, sweetie.” He turned back to the engrossing and wholly artificial charms of Miss Page Three.

  He can’t be the murderer, I thought desperately, I just can’t see it. But he’s the best candidate so far. I just have to remember to be careful, not let him get past my guard.

  I ended up wearing the green shirt anyway, just because it was the last clean one I had.

  As I entered the lecture hall down the hall from the library that afternoon, all my anxiety fled. Even noticing Pam Kobrinski over in the corner, I felt completely calm. The sensation was almost like a light buzz, a state of relaxed alertness. An actor friend of mine described the same feeling once. “The lights go down, the intro music goes up, the adrenaline floods, and poof! You’re in character. You’re not worried about hitting your marks because you’re Hamlet worrying about regicide, you’re Willy Loman worrying about making the next sale.”

  So nearly twenty years of habit came into play while Harry introduced me to the audience, a good-size crowd of staff and museum members. I smiled benignly—wasn’t that nice of him to say those swell things about li’l ol’ me?—and, to show my professionalism, gave the audience a somber little nod as I reached the lectern. I shuffled my notes and then let rip with an impish half-grin that said, Hey folks, hang onto your hats. You’re gonna love this, as I started to read.

  My calm lasted long enough to get through my plans for further archaeology on the Chandler homestead, my description of my work on Margaret’s journal, and a little background about women’s history. It wasn’t until I got to the part about how the official record doesn’t tell you the whole story that I started getting edgy. I managed to keep my voice from betraying me by pretending I didn’t know there were two meanings to nearly everything I said.

  “I’ve learned many things about Margaret Chandler from her diary, her day-to-day life, her struggle with servants, her desire to have children, her pain at being separated from her family, and gradually, how she learned to love her husband—I suspect that it’s possible that they had married out of respect and propriety, but never anticipated romantic attachment.

  “I’ve also been learning about Madam Chandler’s earlier life in England, and found some hints about her from how she approached life in provincial Massachusetts. She was going through a lot of difficulties settling into this new life: just married, uprooted from everything she was so well-suited to in England, and set down in a world in which she was the exotic, the suspect. I tried to imagine how the cosmopolitan Margaret would have been viewed by her neighbors, who might have been suspicious of her worldly ways, her Anglican religion, or her wealth and high station. It’s abundantly clear to me that she had problems fitting in, she who would have been the ultimate social creature in England.

  “But the most important lesson, the one I’ll talk about today, has rather more dramatic overtones. I’m talking about one particular incident, but a crucial one that fills the pages of the diary I’ve been studying here at Shrewsbury. It has to do with a murder and a set of falsely leading circumstances.”

  I let that sink in a moment. With the lights down, except for the low-powered spots pointed at me, I couldn’t see the audience very well, but could hear them buzzing and shifting in their seats. The coincidence of what was going on at the library was lost on no one.

  “Madam Chandler wrote to her cousin, ‘I count it as a dear lesson, that the truth is more than a sum of facts.’ Although that lesson almost cost her life, she was correct then, and her words still bear remarking today. Things are not always what they seem, the obvious choice is not always the right one. Occam’s razor can cut too deeply, too deliberately, and it nearly was Margaret’s undoing.

  “We know from court records and a few antiquarian biographies about Judge Chandler’s life and career, and in none of those is there anything referencing his actually presiding over a case in which his wife, Margaret Chandler, was a defendant, accused of murder. Now, not every court record survives, and the ones that do don’t always tell the whole story. In this case, it seems that the records of this were lost or suppressed, possibly sealed. Our best description is pieced together from oblique scattered references and the diary itself. Perhaps I’ll find more as my work continues, but for now, we know these facts from her own hand.

  “Margaret was newly come to Stone Harbor, Massachusetts. She was a woman used to a fairly sophisticated life in England, and so perhaps it was no surprise that she should have spent a good deal of time in the company of the Reverend Lemuel Blanchard, one of the leading ministers of that seaport community, and a well-educated man. Madam Chandler wrote of how she had problems with her new neighbors, who probably weren’t as cultivated as she was. Think of it as a clash of cultures. The Reverend, however, had been raised in England, had had a small parish in London, and was known to enjoy the pleasures of the table, perhaps a little more than was strictly appropriate for a minister in those puritanical days. In fact, Margaret herself wrote, ‘Reverend Blanchard to tea today. He so thoroughly enjoyed the venison pasty that the Judge must eat cold beef pie for his supper as there was not a crumb of it left.’”

  A small titter rippled through the audience, and that reassured me that I had relaxed them enough after my discomforting remarks before. I carried on, building the scenery a little more, and although I could only see her silhouette now, I noticed that Detective Kobrinski was standing to one side paying rapt attention, not to me, but to scanning the crowd.

  “So maybe it was no surprise that she enjoyed his company. This congenial situation did not last, however. Reverend Blanchard had been ill, at first mildly, then much more seriously. He quickly deteriorated, dying within a space of three weeks. It did nothing for Madam Chandler’s popularity that a well-loved minister collapsed at a party that she was giving, dying at her feet.”

  Audible shock in the audience this time; I gave the whispering a moment to die down.

  “It is about this time that the majority of the entries in her diary are written in code—entries that I’ve only recently decoded. The substance of the journal now is this: Because his demise was so violent and so quick, it apparently didn’t take much time for the rumor to start that Madam Chandler, who had been giving him tonics as soon as she knew of his discomfort, had poisoned him. That gave birth to speculation in several forms, one rumor that she was murdering him to cover up his knowledge of her sexual misconduct. The other rumor, one that seems to show up wherever you find historical rumors of women, sex, and/or poisoning, was that she was a witch.”

  A small gasp ran through the audience; this was much stronger meat than they had been expecting. I thought it was pretty juicy myself, and looked forward to having the same shocking effect on professional audiences later on. If I survived my little performance today.

  “The distinction between poisoning and witchcraft were often confused in theology and popular concept, then as now, and particularly where women are concerned. Fortunately, Justice Chandler was able to employ the lessons learned from the witchcraft horror in nearby Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, and was able to keep the trial focused on the charges of murder by poison. Still not very appetizing for a man who’s just learning that he’s in love with his wife.”

  I gave them that last uneasy laugh, knowing I once again was leading them into turbulent waters.

  “Look at it this way. Margaret Chandler was a stranger newly come to a community. She came from a wealthy background, and her aristocratic ways must have seemed out of place, even alien, in what was essentially a provincial village. Her personality—by her own admission ‘proud and stubborn’—probably rubbed people the wrong way, making it easy for them to malign her. I’m sure she was probably struggling with her recent separation from her old life in England—from everything she knew—and maybe she did ruffle feathers. I know from reading her diary that she had a hard time settling in and that she was a distinctly opinionated woman, even haughty, at times. If these are qualities that stil
l can nettle today, imagine how they might have been received in a world that was organized on the superior-subordinate relationship of man to woman, a microcosm with a densely woven web of personal interaction governed by strict rules, rife with gossip and self-righteousness.”

  Here I paused, waiting to see who was getting it. There was an air of tension in the room, like the smell of ozone before a thunderstorm, but try as I might with the lights in my eyes, I couldn’t see anyone reacting. All I could see was the detective sergeant, who seemed to be staring in particular at one corner. I couldn’t stop to try and discern the source of her interest. I had to plow on.

  “She was probably a ‘difficult’ woman, with all the freight that word implies, but I also know, from my intimate acquaintance with her—through her diary, of course—that Margaret had a strong sense of her role in life and was determined to carry it out. As a woman of rank, she took her duties seriously, helping the poor, tending the sick, sometimes even arbitrating neighborhood squabbles. She taught her servants to read and pray, she ran her household strictly but fairly, even generously, for the times. And in her own words, she ‘took to regulating the habits of Mr. Chandler,’ meaning that she reminded him to eat his meals, dress tidily, and become involved in the community on a social as well as judicial level. She describes with pride and affection how people remarked on these positive changes in Matthew after their marriage and her arrival.

  “But all of this was forgotten when someone pointed out that it was shortly after her arrival in America, after her frequent visits, that the Reverend Blanchard fell ill and died. All that was remembered then was that she was a stranger. That distracted people from examining what had really happened, that the reverend was murdered, but by someone else, for reasons that I still don’t know. I don’t know, but I have my suspicions.”