The Northbury Papers

by Joanne Dobson

  “You’re a smart woman, Doctor, and knowledgeable,” Piotrowski began, without preliminaries. “And, even though we don’t always see eye to eye, I know you can be real helpful to me. On that Enfield case, you—”

  “Okay, Lieutenant, cut the flattery. What do you want?” In my denim shorts and Enfield T, I felt at a sartorial disadvantage, but it was a warm day, heading for hot, and my house isn’t air-conditioned. I suppose I should have changed into something more professional when the lieutenant called, but he seemed in a hurry, and, besides, I thought, it’s only Piotrowski, I don’t have to bother. Now here he was, so nicely dressed that I perceived myself, stupidly, as somehow—grieved. What is there about this man …?

  But he was in an expansive mood. “I’ve sent out for some good coffee, Doctor—Starbucks—and a coupla scones in case we’re here longer than I expect. I want ya to be comfortable—”

  Scones? “What is it you want, Lieutenant?”

  “And if we go till lunchtime—”

  Lunchtime? “Lieutenant? Just tell me what you—”

  The door opened and a uniformed trooper entered. Piotrowski jumped up, grabbed the officer’s cardboard tray of coffee containers, began fussing with napkins.

  “Lieutenant!”

  “All right. All right. I need your help.” He peeled the plastic lid from a coffee cup, checked out the contents. Black and bitter. He handed it to me, reached for another. Peeled. Checked. Light and sweet. He sipped, then slurped.

  “You said that on the phone.”

  “Yeah, well, we went over the victim’s place with a fine-tooth comb—” Images of cops and cooties flashed through my all-too-literal imagination. “—and we found nuthin’ like that manuscript you were talking about—” When he placed the coffee cup neatly in front of him it was already half empty. I know, because I checked.

  I must have made a tsk sound, because Piotrowski broke off to say, “Yeah, I get real suspicious when something is missing, no matter how unlikely it looks for a motive.” He finished off his coffee. Reached for another cup.

  I scowled, untangling his syntax. But he misinterpreted my scowl.

  “I know you’re a busy woman—”

  “It’s okay, Lieutenant. Just put me out of my suspense. I liked Edith. I want to help. Tell me what you want me to do.”

  Piotrowski put his second coffee down without opening it. From a manila envelope on the table he extracted the six extant manuscript sheets in their plastic sheaths.

  Yes!

  “You remember these documents?”

  “Well, yes, I do.” Let me at ’em!

  “Will you—”

  “Certainly.” I leaned forward, elbows on the table, fingers loosely cradling my Starbucks cup, the very model of amiability. “Happy to assist you, Lieutenant.”

  Piotrowski loomed over my shoulder as I set the first two sheets aside and picked up the third.

  —179-

  The great port was abustle as Emmy disembarked with her heavy valise. She had no other baggage because notice had been short and the message urgent. He was here! He was safe! He was awaiting her! A lively urchin with a tousled head of dark curls pushed his way through the crush of porters and tram men.

  “Please, lady, do you want your carpet bag carried?” And before Emmy could protest, the ragged child—he couldn’t have been more than twelve years old—grabbed her bag and flung it onto a barrowlike cart, glanced at her with a pair of mischievous, dark gray eyes, and said, “Where to, lady?”

  Trams and coaches rushed by, and the clamor and filth of the city were as Emmy recalled. Where to, indeed? A dozen grand mansions within the metropolis would have opened their doors at Emmy’s request with joyous and bounteous welcome, but not for her this day the refuge of the genteel and substantial citizens of Gotham. Not on this—of all errands. Not today, and perhaps never again. The bar that lay between her and the well-bred circle of her acquaintance would, if known, close all doors to her—forever!

  Pressing a silver coin in the hand of the little “prince of rags and patches” …

  I grabbed for the next sheet.

  —180—

  who stood, first on one foot in its ragged shoe, then on the other, in his impatience to be gone, Emmy said, “Take this bag to the Astor House, boy, and book a room for me there in the name of … Mary Smith of … oh, New Hampshire. Tell them I will arrive by dinnertime tonight.” Then, with lilylike hands, she lifted her skirts, and set off on foot, dodging carts and cattle, in the direction of a more modest area of the town.

  “If she’s Mary Smith,” the urchin muttered, “I’m the heir to a great fortune. But, say, crikey, she give me a whole dollar by mistake, she can be Mary Smith if she wants ter.” And the ragamuffin set off at a smart pace for the Astor Hotel.

  The door at which Emmy knocked, when, footsore and exhausted, she reached the designated spot, opened readily and the woman of the house, her dust cloth still in hand, glanced at our fair heroine with dark, suspicious eyes.

  “The North Star rises tonight,” said Emmy, as she had been directed. With a whoosh of its brass rings, a heavy curtain was swept aside from a door adjoining the small but immaculate entry, and Emmy, sobbing through her cries of joy, was in his arms at last!

  “Hmm,” I said to Piotrowski, who’d been reading along with me, “if this is what I think it might be, it’s truly an amazing find.”

  “Well, what do you think it is?” He tapped his meaty fingers on the scarred table top.

  “Let me read the rest, then I’ll tell you.” I skipped to the two end pages: 432 and 434.

  —432—

  the heartbroken pair.

  “Are you my father?” the young girl asked. “My mother wears your likeness in her locket” Lizzie’s sallow hand, no longer golden from the unbiased rays of the summer sun, reached out and grasped the dark, strong hand of he whose care and adoration had been denied her by the bars of an un-Christlike world.

  Armand allowed his tears to flow unchecked upon the child’s pale forehead in both baptism and farewell. In the quiet room a wan beam of light shone through a pane upon which a fly buzzed in impotent desire to be free.

  Emmy looked upon the joined hands, one so fair and one so dark, and avowed that the passion of her life would not be in vain, that, although a great earthly wrong had been done to this small family, they would indeed rise and gather together in Heaven’s happy home.

  As the sun slipped beyond the green mountains of old Quebec to the east, the promise of the North Star was realized at last. The three, alone around the fever-dampened bed, formed a momentary circle of devotion. Lizzie glanced up from her bed of pain and smiled wearily at her progenitors. Outside, an ax thwacked thick branches of the felled oak. A calf bawled somewhere in the distance. The scent of boiled cabbage wafted in from the lean-to kitchen. But the room itself, save for the droning of the entrapped fly, was still, as the tearful family, together at last, awaited the onset of Death.

  The wan shaft of sun lingered long on the locket around Lizzie’s throat, where the intertwined strands—

  The page ended. “I was right,” I said to Piotrowski.

  “Right about what?” he demanded.

  “Shh. Let me finish.” I picked up the final sheet. It was half covered with Mrs. Northbury’s curlicue script.

  —434—

  Armand circled Emmy with his strong arm, as they looked from the ship’s deck back at the receding land of both their births. She took one final glance at that receding green where the child of her heart slept the long, deep sleep, then turned to her protector, blue eyes gazing deeply into brown.

  “A great wrong has been done to us, my dearest love. A nation has turned its back upon a people of feeling strong and deep. You and I, Armand, will share our love in exile, and our children will shun the native shores to dwell with more compassionate races in the older world.”

  “With you, my Emily, no place is exile. As the poet has said, ‘The world is all before us.’
” He bent his dark head to her fair, and their kiss sealed a bond of passion fated to endure.

  The End

  “Amazing,” I murmured, eyes on the precious page of manuscript. I thought that now I understood, both why Northbury didn’t publish this novel, and why Earl Wiggett might be interested in it.

  “What’s so amazing about it? Like you said before, it’s a love story.”

  “Yeah, it’s a love story, all right; but it’s an interracial love story. Emmy is white. Armand is black—probably a fugitive slave. That’s what’s so astonishing. Historically, interracial sex happened all the time, especially in the South, but it was taboo as far as literature went. No other novel—or even short story—that I know of from the antebellum era—”

  “Antebellum?”

  “From before the Civil War. No other novel centers on interracial lovers who are allowed to survive and go off together to live happily ever after—”

  “This doesn’t seem like a happy ending. They lost their kid—”

  “Yeah, but that had to happen.” My mind was clicking away on the symbolism of all this. “Their child had to die because she represented the fate of interracial union in the U.S.—which Northbury sees as cruelly denied. But their future children—”

  “Would thrive in Europe?”

  He was quick. “Yeah, don’t you see, this is a truly subversive text; it figures the centrality of amalgamation to the continuance of a just American polity.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah, you see, the concluding kiss figures sexual congress as compensation for a political congress that denies citizenship—indeed, denies humanity itself—to races legally marked as chattel, for commercial exploitation, or for extinction. Hence, the necessity in the U.S. of Lizzie’s death. But in an idealized Europe the continuance of a mixed-race—”

  “Right, Doctor,” Piotrowski said. His expression of baffled disgust snapped me out of my flurry of lit-crit theorizing. “So let’s cut to the bottom line here. Who benefits from this book? Would anyone kill for it?”

  “Jeez.” I was baffled now. “I don’t know why.” The detective pried open the lid on a second cup of black coffee and handed it to me. He opened his own cup and eyed the scones. He selected a raisin scone and slathered it with butter from a foil packet in the Starbucks box. Crumbs fell on his trousers, and he brushed them off with care. “Piotrowski?” The e-mail message from the literary gumshoe was niggling at me. “Have I mentioned Earl Wiggett to you?”

  “Wiggett? Maybe. Refresh my memory.”

  “He calls himself a literary sleuth. He edited Alcott’s The Duke’s Daughter—”

  “—For two million bucks. I remember now. Why do you bring him up?”

  “Just the question of profit. Of how much is enough to kill for.”

  “This guy’s a killer?”

  “Well—no! Don’t be silly! It’s just that his name popped into my mind. This manuscript could conceivably sell for a pretty penny, if it was marketed right—as a transgressive text about a forbidden interracial love. It depends on how good a story it is, whether it would go to a commercial press or a university press. But, at the very least, in the current politicized academic climate, it would get a zillion course adoptions.” I mused a bit on the idea. “Yeah,” I said. “There could be money in this. And it’s the kind of thing Wiggett would be interested in. But—well—forget about Wiggett, Piotrowski. How the hell would he even know about this Northbury thing?”

  “So, you think this story might be worth money, huh? Enough money to kill for?” Piotrowski was nothing if not persistent.

  I laughed. “How much is enough to kill for?”

  He shrugged. The massive shoulders underwent a process resembling seismic upheaval. My agile mind raced on to something else.

  “Piotrowski, here’s another thought. Have you considered Thibault Brewster? As a suspect, I mean? In the murder?”

  “Why do you ask?” He had that still look he sometimes got, as if all faculties were suspended except for listening and thinking.

  “Because he’s a nasty man.”

  The lieutenant snorted. “Dr. Pelletier, if we arrested all the nasty men in the world, the planet would be paved wall-to-wall with correctional facilities.”

  “I know,” I insisted. “But he’s real nasty.” And I told him about my encounter with Brewster in the library. By the time I’d finished, the lieutenant’s eyes had a sort of unseeing, inward look, as if the reality in his mind had superimposed itself indelibly upon the reality of the grim green room. As if he wasn’t really seeing me any more, I thought, but was cogitating upon what might possibly happen to me in the worst of all possible worlds.

  I shivered, and clasped both hands tightly around the cup of lukewarm coffee. Once, a long time ago, when I was eating chicken à la king in a school cafeteria, I chomped into a bit of the gallbladder a careless cook had failed to remove. That was exactly the taste I had in my mouth now.

  Fifteen

  I rounded the corner of Kinney and Whitlow streets, and the scent of lilac assaulted me. Local rumor had it that the ramshackle three-story Victorian dominating this block was owned by an eccentric recluse who hadn’t shown her face in public since a romantic disappointment fifty years earlier. Helen Whitlow, it was whispered, lived alone with a dozen cats, cared for by a mysterious man who came and went under the cover of darkness. I didn’t believe the gossip, but I loved walking on Whitlow Street because occasional glimpses of the mysterious yellow Italianate mansion were available behind the hedge of overgrown yew. Once I even caught sight of the recluse herself, tending her roses, surrounded by felines sunning themselves on the spacious lawn. Disappointingly, she had been garbed in baggy khaki pants and a man’s plaid shirt rather than the filmy white dress local myth clothed her in. In the spring I often took this route—a long-cut rather than a shortcut—from campus to town; walking down the quiet street made me feel momentarily transported, as if the scent of lilacs were the eternal reality here, transcending time and weather, eliciting the same sensuous response now as it had in a past so dim that only mere traces of its vitality survived. The scent of lilacs or roses, or the weight of snow on the yew.

  But today I was not transported by the lilacs. Today was Tony’s wedding day. This very afternoon my former lover was marrying someone named Jennifer. Amanda said Jennifer wore her blond hair in a French braid. I’d never met Tony’s bride, but I hated her anyhow. As I passed the Whitlow house with its tales of old passion thwarted, the thick fragrance of the heavy purple blooms squeezed at my heart. I picked up my pace; the Whitlow route had been a mistake.

  The night before, Tony had called, waking me from a restless sleep in which I was dreaming about a house with endless rooms. Each time I thought I’d gotten to the end of this beautiful house, a new door appeared, and carpeted halls led off to chambers unknown. I descended a curving staircase into a spacious living room furnished in the bulky greens and chintzes of a 1930’s English country house. French doors led through a bower of lilacs to a swooping expanse of country lawn. In the dream I had just stepped out of a bath, wrapped my scented body in a silk dressing gown, and was descending the stairs in delicate gold-embroidered Chinese slippers, when the phone rang. I had a vague notion that Winston Churchill was on the other end of the line.

  “Karen? I know I shouldn’t be doing this.” Tony’s voice had the texture of lilacs, lush, sensuous. I think he was a little drunk.

  I stumbled over my response, struggling with surprise and a sleep-thickened tongue. He was silent then, and I used the moment to test whether or not I was still dreaming. “Tony? Is that really you?”

  “I’m getting married today, Karen.”

  “Amanda told me.”

  “I thought I should let you know that you … you still mean a lot to me.”

  “You, too, Tony. To me.” I swiped at a tear. Damn allergies.

  “It’s just—you know, I want … I need …”

  “I know, Tony. You want a
home and children. You want someone there for you all the time and dinner on the table. You don’t want a flighty, self-involved academic type who’s only around when she hasn’t got anything better to do. I understand, believe me.”

  “You have a right to your life, Karen. I know that.”

  “Yes. You, too.”

  Then there was a long silence. Tears coursed down my cheeks. Those damn lilacs.

  “Karen, are you still there?”

  “Yes, Tony.”

  “Have a good life, Karen. I hope you get everything you want.”

  “Oh, Tony …” But he’d broken the connection.

  Miles’s house was a comfortable late-Victorian within walking distance of campus, and I’d taken the Whitlow Street route as a delaying tactic. The annual English Department garden party was an obligatory festivity for the twenty or so members of the department and their domestic partners and hangers-on. I had stopped for a bottle of chardonnay at a liquor store on Field Street, one of the few locally owned businesses left on Enfield’s trendy main shopping thoroughfare. Over the past decade, upscale mall franchises had discovered the marketing potential of Enfield’s concentrated population of students and professors. The previously functional downtown with its food markets and dry cleaners was now tenanted by self-consciously low-key versions of The Gap, Banana Republic, Baskin-Robbins, and Pottery Barn. Even McDonald’s had gotten by the zoning board, but without the golden arches and with an enormously discreet sign. It was easier to buy a pair of safari pants in downtown Enfield these days than it was to buy a quart of milk.