The Northbury Papers

by Joanne Dobson

  By the time Brewster had regained consciousness, Schultz had him handcuffed to a sofa leg. Then the backup she’d called in began to arrive. Jill and Dr. Thorpe were taken to the hospital for observation—Jill to be treated for shock and bruises, Will for a minor heart attack. Thibault Brewster was also in the hospital—with a concussion—cyber-concussed, the EMT had diagnosed, with a perfectly straight face, when she saw Earl Wiggett’s dented computer. But Wiggett hadn’t yet actually seen the manuscript, and Brewster wasn’t talking. The manuscript of Child of the North Star remained among the missing.

  “Professor Pelletier?” Shamega stood in my office door, a sagging Gap shopping bag seeming oddly heavy in her hand. It was three days after the confrontation with Thibault Brewster at Meadowbrook, and life was just beginning to return to normal. I’d come to campus to prepare my book orders for fall classes; the bookstore manager was calling me at least every other day to threaten me with bookless classes in September unless I got my orders in now. “Are you busy?” Shamega asked.

  My eyes fell to the half-completed form in front of me. Publisher? it asked me. ISBN? Edition? I sighed. “Come on in, Shamega,” I replied, and shifted a pile of textbooks from my green vinyl chair to the floor.

  Shamega sat and placed the Gap bag carefully between her feet. She seemed to be wearing its original contents—overdyed, straight-legged jeans and a form-fitting short-sleeved orange sweater cropped to the waist. Her features appeared less tense than they had in months.

  “So,” she announced, “Tibby Brewster.” She raised her slanted eyebrows at me.

  “So,” I replied, “what about him?”

  “That bastard. I got him!” She sat back in the big chair.

  An image of Rudolph’s kitchen knives flittered through my mind. “Shamega, you haven’t done anything—violent, have you?”

  “Oh no,” she said, her expression serious. “Worse than that. What I’ve done is perfectly legal—that’s the joy of it.” She paused, obviously uncertain. “At least I think it’s legal.” Her dark brows furrowed. “Well, maybe not. But if it isn’t, I don’t give a damn, because I’ve finally gotten back at that creep for all the things he did to me!”

  “Shamega! For God’s sake. What have you done?”

  She sat up and clasped her slender dark fingers. “You know how gossip flies around here, Professor?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Well, I heard about Dr. Hart leaving her house and everything in it to the college for some kind of women’s literature center. And that Tibby’s father was Dr. Hart’s nephew, which makes Tibby a great-nephew, right? And some kind of heir, right? And—I heard what his father did—that he killed that weird blond guy, the one that lived with Dr. Hart, because he turned out to be an heir. And … and—did he kill Dr. Hart, too?” Her dark eyes grew even more sober. “I liked her so much.”

  “The police still aren’t certain about that, Shamega.” And I knew they might never be. But Brewster had confessed to going out in the rowboat with Gerry Novak—ostensibly to fish for trout—then overturning the boat and struggling with Gerry until he drowned. Another claimant for the estate had proven to be too much for this spoiled little man to handle.

  “I kept thinking about that manuscript,” Shamega continued, “you know, that novel manuscript Amanda and I found? In the hatbox? The one that disappeared when Dr. Hart died?”

  “Yes?” My breath snagged on the word.

  “And it got me thinking. In the library, you and I looked for Northbury stuff in the Pinkworth archives, and there wasn’t much there. And there was nothing at all under Mrs. Northbury’s name. But last night, I started wondering if maybe there were letters and things filed under Dr. Hart’s name, so I looked this morning. But—nada. Then at lunchtime, when I heard about Mr. Brewster, and that he was the one who’d taken the manuscript …”

  “Shamega,” I whispered, my eyes drawn inexorably to the oddly bulky Gap bag, “don’t tell me—”

  “… I knew that someday Tibby might get his hands on it and maybe sell it for big bucks, and I couldn’t stand the thought of him profiting from Mrs. Northbury’s novel. So I went back to the library and … and maybe it is illegal for me to take things without permission, but I don’t care. I just don’t want Tibby Brewster ever to get this book. It doesn’t really belong to his father, right? It belongs to the Northbury Center like everything else at Meadowbrook, right?”

  “Right! At least, I think so. The lawyers—” Shamega reached into the bag. I leaned forward, breathless. She paused, then sat back again, hands crossed loosely in her lap. “And I know I’m a real bitch, because Tibby’s got it hard right now, what with his father …” Her voice faltered, as if she was just now realizing the appalling position Tibby Brewster was in. “But after all the things he did—”

  “What’s in the bag, Shamega!”

  “Well, after I heard about Tibby’s father, I decided to look in the archives under the Brewster name.”

  “Yes?” I was almost falling off my chair, I was leaning so far forward.

  “And this is what I found …” She reached into the bag again and pulled out a string-tied bundle of ragged-edged pages: the manuscript copy of Serena Northbury’s unpublished autobiographical sensation novel, Child of the North Star.

  “And so it seems,” I explained to Earl Wiggett two weeks later, as we sat at Rudolph’s bar in the Friday evening crush and waited for our table, “that Tib Brewster filed the manuscript with his own family papers in the library’s archives. Brewster was a trustee; he had access to everything. And his family was an old one; there were lots of Pinkworth/Northbury/Brewster records there. He must have slipped the manuscript in when the library was closed. On a weekend perhaps.”

  In my effusive gratitude that Wiggett had saved the damsel in distress from the dastardly villain, I’d invited him to dinner at Rudolph’s. The moment the invitation was out of my mouth, I’d begun to regret it. But Wiggett was thrilled. And, as things had fallen out, in addition to dining with him, I was going to be coediting Child of the North Star with this “literary gumshoe.” Once Wiggett realized that Edith Hart and I had talked about publishing Child of the North Star when we’d first found the manuscript, he’d backed out of his informal editorial agreement with Sally Chenille. That turned out not to be a problem. The words interracial and love had fused in Sally’s fevered intellect as interracial sex; as soon as she’d understood just what kind of semi-sentimental tale Northbury’s novel actually was, she’d lost interest. The manuscript was currently in probate with the rest of Edith’s estate. But when ownership was determined, we’d have no trouble finding a publisher. We’d both read a Xerox of the novel and agreed on that. Already, two major university presses, including Oxbridge, were making queries, but Wiggett was holding out for a commercial press. When it came to marketing sensational literature, Earl Wiggett knew precisely what he was doing. And I wouldn’t even try to snatch this prize from him. Not after he’d saved Jill Greenberg and the baby.

  Wiggett was drinking a brandy Alexander, while I sipped on yet another margarita. He had made a major sartorial effort for our dinner date. His denim-blue polyester leisure suit had snappy red stitching down the lapels and across the pocket. His raggy hair was plastered flat across his shiny pate. Powerful waves of Aqua Velva assaulted my olfactory senses. The new computer Wiggett’s insurance company had paid for sat prominently on the bar in front of him. I’d protested that he wouldn’t need it at dinner, but he’d insisted. “You and I are going to be doing a great deal of brainstorming, Karen. You never know when inspiration will strike. Better safe than sorry.” Cream from his foamy drink dripped down his leisure suit and onto the computer’s lid. He wiped the computer with a pineapple-motif cocktail napkin.

  “Professor Pelletier?” The ponytailed waiter had been a student in my Survey course. “Your table’s ready, Professor.” I left my empty margarita glass where it sat. Wiggett stuffed his trusty computer under his arm, plucked his brandy Ale
xander from the bar, and we followed the waiter. I glanced surreptitiously around the cocktail lounge as I passed through with my new editorial partner. For once, nobody I knew seemed to be around. Good. All I needed in this nosy little town was to kick off rumors linking me romantically with Wiggett.

  Wiggett sat me at the table, fussing over which chair I should have, then over how comfortable I was once it was pushed into the table. Then he flapped my napkin open and handed it to me with a flourish. I suppressed a sigh, accepted the napkin with a show of gratitude, and ordered a double vodka martini, straight up. As Wiggett pored over the extensive menu, occasionally surfacing to ask me about such terms as terrine and papillote, I decided on filet mignon. It was always good at Rudolph’s, if you ordered the béarnaise on the side so it didn’t drown the meat. That decision made, I sat back and surveyed the room. My eye was immediately taken by an elegant woman with shoulder-length dark hair sitting alone at a table across from me, toying with a gin and tonic. She was strikingly beautiful, and mysteriously alone.

  While Wiggett studied the menu as if it were the Rosetta stone, I studied the beautiful face at the table opposite us. I’d never seen such blue eyes on anyone—on anyone, that is, other than Avery Mitchell. To while away the time while I waited for Earl Wiggett to make his decision, I began to compose a romantic story about this mystery woman. Alone, waiting for her lifelong love to reappear in the smoky cantina … (Northbury’s prose style was impacting even my fantasies.) … the melancholy woman toyed with her exotic tropical libation. Suddenly, as she—Suddenly, as she gazed at a point somewhere over my shoulder, the mystery woman’s face lit up. Her dinner companion must be arriving. Anxious to see the man—it had to be a man—who could bring such an expression of pleasure to this lovely woman’s face, I swiveled slightly in my chair—as if to see whether or not the waiter was coming with my martini—and gazed straight into the glorious blue eyes of Avery Mitchell.

  “Karen,” Avery said, and had the grace to look nonplussed. But not for long. Not this infinitely polished man. Pausing for a moment by my chair, he turned to the woman, who was smiling at me quizzically. “Liz, darling,” he said, “I’d like to introduce you to Karen Pelletier.” Liz? Liz, darling? Ohmigod! His ex-wife! “Karen is … ah … a member of our English faculty.”

  “So nice to meet you, Karen.” Her manners were impeccable.

  Before I could reply, my dinner companion emerged from behind the oversized menu, stringy hair flopping across his shiny forehead, brandy Alexander foam flecking the lapel of his polyester leisure suit. “Karen,” Earl Wiggett brayed, “do you know the meaning of the word flambé?”

  Epilogue

  The truest love [Serena Northbury wrote in the Epilogue to Child of the North Star] will ne’er submit to the tyranny of circumstance. Color, caste, time, space, and nation are as nothing to the hunger and thirst of the heart, which must have what it must have, be all the world against it.

  I sighed as I replaced the final page of the photocopied manuscript, clicked off the bedside light, turned, and settled myself to attempt sleep. My head was still thick from the second double martini. Closing my eyes, I waited with suspended breath for the face that would swim up out of the darkness.

  Afterword

  Neither Serena Northbury nor Joseph Monroe Johnson ever existed, except in my imagination and in the pages of this story. And the character of Serena Northbury owes much to the fascinating life of real-life novelist Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth (1819-1899). In addition, The Duke’s Daughter was not written by Louisa May Alcott, but by her alter ego, Jo March, in Alcott’s Little Women, where it serves to pay the March family’s butcher bill. Alcott and other nineteenth-century literary figures mentioned in this novel actually lived and wrote, and their texts are currently taught in English departments nationwide.

  About the Author

  JOANNE DOBSON is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University. She is a former editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers and the author of Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America. Her first mystery, Quieter Than Sleep, was nominated for an Agatha Award. She lives in the New York City area.

  If you enjoyed Joanne Dobson’s

  The Northbury Papers,

  you won’t want to miss any of the mysteries in this series. Look for

  Quieter Than Sleep

  and

  The Raven and the Nightingale.

  Coming in paperback from Bantam Books

  Cold and Pure and Very Dead

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is purely coincidental.

  This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  THE NORTHBURY PAPERS

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH DOUBLEDAY,

  A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC.

  DOUBLEDAY HARDCOVER EDITION PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 1998

  BANTAM MASS MARKET EDITION / AUGUST 1999

  EXCERPT FROM POEM #640 REPRINTED BY THE PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHERS AND THE TRUSTEES OF AMHERST COLLEGE FROM The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  Song lyrics from “Cover Me” by Bruce Springsteen copyright © 1984 by Bruce Springsteen. Reprinted by permission.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1998 by Joanne Dobson.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-5895

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Doubleday.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76145-3

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