The Northbury Papers

by Joanne Dobson

  “Noooo.” Shamega’s eyes widened. “Why? Is he a criminal?”

  “No.” I shrugged. “At least as far as I’m aware, he’s not. I just know they wanted to talk to him.”

  “Well, now that I come to think about it, he did act kinda suspicious.”

  Really? “What do you mean, suspicious?”

  “He was real jumpy while he was going through the boxes, kept looking up at the door. I watched him kinda close, ’cause I thought maybe he was thinking about pocketing something. He didn’t try anything though—at least not when I was around. And he seemed kinda frustrated when he left, shoved his chair back with this real grating screech, then slammed it under the table with a crash.” She giggled. “Ask Marian the Librarian. She gave him such a frown.”

  “Millie,” I said. “Her name is Millie, not Marian.”

  “I kno-o-ow.”

  “I guess I’m done for now, Shamega. I’ve got to go make a phone call.” I closed the account book, and slipped it back into the file box; I needed to talk to Piotrowski about this. He wanted me to share information with him? Well, then, he was going to get his wish, and he would probably be sick and tired of me before this investigation was over.

  Shamega caught up with me as I was going out the door. “Dr. Pelletier, will you be at that subcommittee meeting?”

  I nodded. I’d forgotten Shamega was the student rep. “Oh, yes.”

  She gave me a slanted look. “I wouldn’t miss it, myself. Just think, another opportunity to meet the distinguished author and cultural critic Professor Sally Chenille in the oh-so-very documented flesh.”

  “You’re bad, Shamega.” But I was grinning.

  The literature subcommittee of the College Curriculum Revision Committee was waiting, seated around the Comp Lit department’s conference table, when Shamega and I arrived in the lounge of Anderson Hall later that afternoon. Sally Chenille had managed to locate a few hours in her hectic book tour and lecture schedule to pencil in the meeting. But, as Shamega and I rushed through the door to the air-conditioned lounge, ten minutes late, Sally wasn’t in evidence—in the flesh, or on TV, or in any other manifestation.

  “Karen?” Miles growled. Yet another black mark in Professor Pelletier’s departmental record book. Not only wrongheaded, gender-biased, and sucking up to the administration, but tardy as well. Obviously an excuse was called for. Better yet, a note from my mother.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “We were talking to the police.”

  All heads swiveled in our direction. The police?

  I waved a hand dismissively; a full explanation would involve far too much information about the recent homicides, and no one needed to know how closely I’d become entangled in the investigation. “Nothing worth talking about. They were just interested in someone who’d used our library. And Shamega and I had both seen him, so they wanted to talk to us.”

  Piotrowski had grunted when I’d informed him of Earl Wiggett’s presence yesterday in the Enfield Library. Then he’d sent Felicity Schultz to talk to Shamega in my office. But I didn’t care to go into all that with my nosy colleagues. I sank into one of the blue upholstery-and-chrome conference-table chairs and chirped brightly, “So, are we ready to begin?”

  “Sally hasn’t come yet.” Latisha’s lips were pursed with irritation. “We scheduled this meeting for her convenience. In her department. To suit her schedule. And she doesn’t even have the good manners to show up.”

  “She’d better show,” Ned complained. “Sara and I rescheduled our vacation to fit this meeting in. The Cape is crowded already, and the house we wanted wasn’t available after this week. We had to settle for something smaller.” His habitually melancholy expression had taken on an air of truculence. “If it rains, it’s going to be hell with the kids.” The mood around the table was getting ugly.

  “Hey, she’s only fifteen minutes late,” Joe Gagliardi jumped in. His defense of Sally didn’t surprise me; they were buddies. They could have been clones: Joe was as emaciated, as tattooed, and as pierced as Sally was. Today, in spite of the muggy heat, he was clad in skintight jeans and a body-hugging black T-shirt. The sleeves of his T were rolled up to his shoulders, baring fish-belly-white upper arms. A detailed tattoo of a pack of Camel cigarettes adorned his scrawny left biceps. A postmodernist outlaw. A James Dean of the Intellect. A Real Tough Guy.

  “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.” Sally Chenille sashayed into the room in her trademark black miniskirt, and flopped into the chair next to Joe. She outdid his postmodern, postpunk, posteverything look only by the cobalt-and-purple thistle tattoo bristling from the cleavage of her form-fitting sleeveless black tank top. The cropped hair was pus yellow today. Bruise-colored blusher sharpened her already angular cheekbones. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said, “but I was—occupied.” Her contusion-tinted lips turned up at the corners, smirking at the double entendre. I winced; but, then, simply looking at Sally Chenille was a painful experience.

  “So,” Sally slapped her hands on the table in front of her and spread her fingers wide to admire the polished black nails. “So, I assume we’re all agreed that this committee’s top priority will be to yank the study of literature out of the Dark Ages and expose our students to the age of hypertext and genderbend. Now …”

  Miles’s already flushed face took on the hue of boiled beet.

  At the end of two hours of erudite wrangling, my tradition-bound department chair was forced to acknowledge defeat. While not willing to agree to Sally’s demand for a mandatory course in Queer Theory, Miles had given in to the pressure from the rest of the committee for a requirement in multicultural literature. The question of whether or not a Shakespeare course should remain mandatory was tabled for discussion at a later time. By the time he closed the meeting, Miles was looking every minute of his close to seventy years. Pale, and sweating profusely, he was obviously exhausted. I almost found it in my heart to feel sorry for the poor dear. Then, as he gathered up his notes, squaring the lined yellow pages meticulously, he turned to me. “The memorial service?” he barked.

  “Huh?”

  “The memorial service? Friday? For Gerry Novak? Are you coming?” His brusque manner barely covered some quite elemental emotion I couldn’t identify. “I thought it would be fitting for a few members of this department to acknowledge his passing.”

  I sank into the chair next to him. I was curious. “How did you know Gerry, Miles?”

  Miles appeared startled that I was actually initiating a conversation. “Known him for years. He was my student.”

  Ah! “Really?”

  “Yes.” Stowing the notes in his briefcase, Miles seemed to relax a little; maybe I wasn’t going to bite his head off after all. “Years ago. Back in the seventies. Best young poet ever to come out of Enfield. Tragic thing—his dropping out of school like that in his final year. Never did understand why. Something about his mother.”

  “Really?” Which mother? I wondered.

  “Yes. Last few years I was gratified to see his poems cropping up in the little magazines. Got in touch with him, and …” His gruff voice trailed off. Something was about to remain unsaid. Miles shook his head. “Tragic, just tragic.”

  “Tsk,” I said. And did you know he hung out with druggies and lowlifes? But why should I tarnish Miles’s fantasies? And besides, the two faces of Gerry Novak were by no means incompatible. Novak might well have been both: a drug dealer and a brilliant poet. Who’s to say an addiction to drugs precludes an addiction to language? According to literary legend, Samuel Coleridge was high on opium when he wrote “Kubla Khan”: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea. Not bad for a pothead.

  I was deep in my thoughts about Gerry, barely paying attention to Miles, when, as he pushed his chair back from the table and stood, I heard him mutter something under his breath—something about “manuscripts in that rat’s nest of a house.”

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nbsp; “What?” I queried, struck by a sudden, irrepressible, thought. That’s right: Who knows what’s in that “rat’s nest of a house”? Who knows what’s been there for years? For a century even. And even though in the next breath I understood that Miles was talking about Gerry’s poetry manuscripts, I knew I had to get into the Novak house—by hook or by crook—and see if I could uncover anything that might elucidate Mrs. Northbury’s life or work. For what would be more natural for an author who had a secret—and that unpublished manuscript was surely a secret from her family—than to entrust it to the guardianship of a faithful family servant?

  Sally Chenille caught up with me on the way down the stairs from the Comp Lit lounge.

  “What’s your little friend doing today without her bodyguard?” she queried.

  “Little friend? … Bodyguard?” I wasn’t about to let this bitch fluster me. “Whatever do you mean, Sally?”

  “You know very well what I mean, Karen. Every time I tried to get anywhere near Little Mary Sunshine, you showed up to run interference.”

  “Sally, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I knew she was referring to Jill, of course. But why was she speaking in the past tense?

  Sally laughed. Then she gave me a long, slow onceover. “You know, you could do a hell of a lot more with yourself, Karen. You really could.” Her pale-eyed scrutiny was contemptuous. “You look like a woman running away from her body.” She swept off down the hall, stiletto heels tapping fiercely on the polished limestone floor of the Anderson Hall lobby.

  I glanced down. Loose khaki pants. Navy blue T. Sturdy leather sandals. I shrugged. There was a body under there somewhere. But what concerned me about this encounter with Sally was not the aspersion she had cast on my sex appeal; my sex appeal was just fine, thank you. I was beginning to worry about Jill. What was this fixation my funky pus-haired, black-nailed colleague had on my young friend, Jill Greenberg?

  E-mail; I needed to check my e-mail before I left for home. Schlepping back to my office, I lowered myself into the desk chair, and clicked on the icon. Five messages awaited me, but it was the one titled hate mail that drew my attention. I clicked and the words appeared. It was indeed hate mail, and Shamega’s screen name sgilfoyle was in the address box above my kpelletier.

  babes who think they have brains

  are really second-rate pains

  they’re all really dunces

  who think with their cuntses

  their heads should be stuck up their anus

  The sender’s address box was blank.

  I stared at the screen in shock and disgust, tearing my eyes away from the crude verse when I heard the clatter of angry feet in the hallway. Then Shamega stood in my office door, a printout in her hand. She looked furious.

  “This is it,” she snapped. “This is the last straw. He’s not getting away with another thing.”

  “Good,” I responded. “It’s about time. You can call Security from my phone.”

  “Security? Hell, no! I’ll take care of Tibby Two myself. I’ve let this go much too long.” Shamega’s jaw was set in determination. “I just hope—”

  There was a long pause. Long enough for me to picture my petite student lying battered and broken in some deserted alleyway. “What?” I implored.

  “I just hope I don’t kill him!”

  Twenty-four

  “Karen?” President Mitchell’s mellifluous tones on my voice-mail seemed to lack their usual composure. Had I not known such an idea was preposterous, I’d have said that Avery, the consummate sophisticate, was a bit shaken. “Karen? Avery here. Listen, ah—listen, something totally unanticipated has come up. I’ve got to go out of town for a day or two. Possibly longer. Our talk about … ah, about … the Herald article will have to wait. I just want to reiterate that you are not to be concerned about … about the article. I’ll be in touch when I return.” There was a pause. “See you, Karen.” Another pause. Then the connection was cut.

  I sighed. It was heading for six P.M. on this beautiful summer evening; I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to see. Shamega, the avenging warrior, had just stormed out of my office and was heading for work in Rudolph’s kitchen. I hoped, for his own sake, that Tibby wouldn’t go anywhere near the place. I was just a little bit worried about all those knives.

  The library was closed; Dickinson Hall, home of the English Department, was deserted; the campus was emptying out fast. From my open window I could see the last few professors and administrators wandering singly and in pairs to the parking lots.

  And Avery Mitchell had headed off for parts unknown.

  I sank down onto the green plush cushions of the recessed window seat and breathed deeply of the scent of roses wafting in my direction from the circular bed just outside the building. Big mistake. Along with the perfume of the flowers, an image of Tony’s square, battered Irish face drifted unbidden into my consciousness. Was it only three days ago I had seen him at the diner? Would I ever see him again?

  I leapt up from the window seat. Nonsense! Tony was married now, and I was fine with that. I’d made my choice, and I had a full and rewarding life. Before self-pitying tears could spill over my eyelids, I grabbed my book bag, and headed for the door. I’d get some Chinese take-out, rent a video, and have a terrific evening home alone. Damn it!

  Or, maybe—just, maybe—I’d take a run up to Meadowbrook.

  Well—it was a gorgeous evening, and, even though I couldn’t get into the old house, I could walk the grounds and sketch out some tentative plans for landscaping. An old-fashioned herb garden, I thought, and another garden planted solely with nineteenth-century flowers. And a tea garden. What was a tea garden, anyhow? A garden to serve tea in? A garden planted with tea bushes? A garden with blossoms for the tea table? I had no idea, but it sounded lovely. Maybe I’d ask Helen Whitlow. She did a lot of gardening. Yes, I would consult with Helen. And I was definitely going to take a ride up to Meadowbrook.

  And I wouldn’t even think about the possibility of peeking in the windows of Gerry Novak’s house. Or of trying the knob to see if maybe the police had left the cottage unlocked. Or of surreptitiously sorting through the decades of stacked books and papers to see if I could find anything related to Serena Northbury. No. That would all be illegal, and I wouldn’t even dream of attempting it.

  It would be dark in the cottage. Did I have a flashlight in the car? I could stop at Koenig’s Hardware and get one.

  With my hand on the doorknob, I recalled the open window behind me. Better lock it up; no sense inviting another intruder into my office. As I reached for the old-fashioned casement lock, two figures moved away from me on the far end of the campus common. One—the black-clad skeletal figure—could only be Sally Chenille—unmistakable at any distance. The other person was too tall to be her sidekick, Joe, but something about his height and gait seemed oddly familiar. Skinny and shambling, with a scarecrow’s loose pants flopping around his ankles, this distant figure inclined his head attentively, taking in my distinguished colleague’s every word. For some inexplicable reason, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Off his pants, in particular. Loose, bell-bottom pants. Rust-colored bell-bottom pants. My God! It was Earl Wiggett!

  I threw the window open again. “Sally!” I yelled. “Mr. Wiggett!” But, out of earshot, they didn’t even pause, continuing their steady progress toward the faculty parking lot. Slamming the window shut, I sprinted from the office.

  By the time I reached the faculty lot, Sally’s chartreuse BMW was vanishing down Field Street. I was out of breath, and a stitch in my side reminded me that I was also out of shape. “Shit!” I stamped my foot on the asphalt. “Shit!” I must have said it aloud, because Jill Greenberg’s distinctive laugh pealed out behind me.

  I swiveled. “Jill! What are you doing here?”

  “Taking a shortcut home. And you?”

  “I had a meeting. But I didn’t expect to see you out and about. You know … so soon. Are you up to working?”
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br />   “Oh, yeah. Really. I’m fine.” And she did look fine, with that glow women often get during the second trimester of pregnancy, her red hair flamboyant in the late afternoon sun, her still-slender body resplendent in a scarlet gauze tunic and orange skirt. So much for a low profile in this, her hour of grief and shame. “You heading anywhere in particular, Karen?”

  “No. No!” I let the tempting image of Meadowbrook slide. “What’d you have in mind?”

  Jill’s kitchen smelled of garlic, onions, and basil. We sat at the blue enamel-topped kitchen table with thick chunks of bread, wiping the last of the take-out sun-dried tomato sauce from her pale yellow Fiestaware dinner plates.

  “There was such an edge to our relationship,” Jill said. “Something really—dangerous.” She grinned ironically. “Of course, as the theorycrats would say, all heterosexual attraction involves complex negotiations of reified biological and cultural binaries.”

  I laughed. “That may well be true, but it does tend to take the juice out of the experience.” I lifted my glass. “Vive les binaries!” I drained my red wine. “Vive la reification!”

  Jill poured me another glass of wine, then eyed it longingly. “Yeah, well, with Gerry, those binaries sure as hell set off sparks. They weren’t only gendered; there were class frictions, as well, and really jagged personality clashes.” She paused. “He thrilled me.” Glancing at me sheepishly, she picked up my wineglass. “Just one,” she said, “one little sip. What could it hurt?”

  “Jill!” I admonished, and removed both the bottle and my glass from her reach. “Think of the baby.”

  She sighed, but went on with her love story. “Just being with Gerry gave me the shivers; anything could happen.” She paused thoughtfully. “And did.”

  I sipped wine and waited. I didn’t really want to know what anything might be.

  “Karen, I hope you don’t mind me telling you this stuff.” She didn’t wait to find out if I did or not. “It’s just that, you know, I’ve always had this need to take risks.” Jill stretched across the table, commandeered the wine bottle, took a deep slug.