Read Cold and Pure and Very Dead Online
Authors: Joanne Dobson
I
found the letter
in my mailbox Friday afternoon, along with a memo from the College President about plans for a new state-of-the-information-arts library, a memo from the Academic Dean urging faculty to hold the line on grade inflation, a memo from the Security Office about parking regulations, a memo from the Department Chair about hiring plans. I’d scooped them all up and taken them to the coffee shop to read over a cup of hot tea.
It had just stopped raining, and a chill gray damp pervaded the air. My light denim jacket did nothing to keep me warm. I navigated the narrow paths that crossed the quad, carefully skirting the puddles.
When lit by autumn sunshine, the campus seems sparkling, magical, a place somehow outside of time and power and money and all the other imperatives that drive the modern world. In gloomy weather like this Enfield College looks more like a fortress or a nineteenth-century asylum, a blocky square of straight-edged buildings imprisoning a forlorn patch of green. We were a week and a half into the semester, and the lighthearted mood of the first days was beginning to dissipate. Students walked in earnest couples, rather than boisterous clumps, or else they walked alone. Two greeted me abstractedly. A clump of prospective students and their eager parents passed, guided by an
earnest young man who walked backward as he intoned statistics on the percentage of Enfield graduates who entered law school.
In the coffee shop a tall, broad kid in an Enfield sweat suit munched on mid-afternoon pizza. Four girls hunched over class notes, preparing for a late-afternoon quiz. The scent of stale coffee permeated the air. I took my cup of English Breakfast tea to a table by the window and began sorting through the mail. The small cheap envelope with the pinched handwriting had no return address. I drew my breath in sharply; it was postmarked
Hudson, NY
. I ripped the envelope open, jostling my cup in the process. Milky tea sloshed across the table.
September 14
Dear Ms. Pelletier
,
There is nothing to do in this place from sunrise to sunset except think, and I have been thinking about your biography of me
.
“I am
not
writing your biography,” I protested. Aloud, it would seem; a student at the next table, a light-skinned African American girl with short, bleached hair, glanced up from her notes. “Of course you’re not,” she agreed with a straight face. “I’m only nineteen years old; I haven’t done anything worth writing about yet.” I laughed and went back to my reading.
That my early life could provide the material for a dozen scurrilous books, I have no doubt. I understand what it is you want to know, but those things have nothing to do with who I am or how I have lived. They have nothing to do with my real life, the life on the
farm, the depth and texture of it. No biographer can track the development of a soul in a state of quietude, and what could a woman’s soul want more than quietude? To grow her food in peace, to harvest the wild berry in the field, to know the tart intensity on the tongue, the sweet stains on the fingers, the glory of each bright jar on the shelf, of each new-risen loaf of bread. All this is
real
—not simply words. Will you get any of it in your book? Will anyone read it if you do? The warmth of the goat’s flank on a winter morning? The hiss of the steaming milk in the pail? The rest of it, the early days, the falseness, all those men, all that hollow laughter, all that gin, the thick taste of it all in the mornings. The pain. That makes for good reading, perhaps, but not good living. The past four decades, while for me dense with life, will be of no interest to the world. No beautiful people. No illicit sex. Just a woman living her days as most women live their days, in repetitious cycles of quiet tasks. I justify my living—and my having lived—by doing something useful. Can you say the same for yourself? Leave me alone
.
Mildred Finch
P.S. That gun stood in the kitchen by the door for over thirty years, and I moved it every time I cleaned. Of course it had my fingerprints on it
.
I sat at the table, tea forgotten, stunned by the novelist’s powerful plea. Or, perhaps I should no longer refer to Mildred Deakin Finch as a
novelist
, but as a
farm woman
, or
goat farmer:
the identity she had chosen for herself. As a literary scholar, I’d made the unthinking assumption that literature defines a writer’s self: that
the fact of writing, of having written, takes primacy over all else. Mildred Finch was telling me otherwise.
The warmth of the goat’s flank. The wild berry in the field:
For her, the life itself—the
lived
life, without the words about it—had become everything.
“Got something interesting there?” I looked up. George Gilman stood by my table with a mug of coffee. “Let me guess: A former student wants a letter of recommendation, right? Or a university press wants you to read and evaluate a six-hundred-page erudite manuscript for pennies a page? Or a government agency wants you to review a grant proposal for free?” He grinned, but his banter seemed forced, as if he had something more serious on his mind.
“None of the above, George.” I smiled at him. He looked … nice. In a blue tweed jacket and neatly pressed gray flannels, he’d taken more care than usual with his appearance. “Can you sit for a minute? I have something I’d like to show you.”
“Sure.” He sat, carefully centering the creases in his pant legs over his knees.
“George, you’re the one who put me on to the article about Mildred Deakin in yesterday’s paper. Maybe you’d like to see this letter; it’s from her.”
“From Mildred Deakin?”
“Mildred Finch, really,” I amended, recalling her insistence on that identity.
He read the letter quickly, then, without commenting, read it again. When he’d finished, he sat in silence for ten seconds. Then he frowned. “I didn’t know you were writing a Deakin biography, Karen. Maybe you ought to rethink it.” He said it soberly, as if there were more than one level of significance to the statement.
“I’m
not
writing her biography. That’s just an idea she’s gotten in her head. I’m still working on research
for the Northbury book. At least, I am when I get any time for it,” I said wryly. “But isn’t this an amazing letter?” I picked up my cup and sipped tea.
“I like the way she thinks,” George said, deliberately. “The focus on the sensory life, on … quietude. What a lovely word:
quietude
. A retreat from the noise of the world. She doesn’t use the word
spiritual
here, but that’s what she’s talking about—the spiritual life. The immanence of spirit in the natural world.”
I glanced over at him, surprised by these musings from a hard-headed academic careerist. Then I took in the blue-striped dress shirt, the snazzy tie with its whimsical pattern of children’s drawings. “You look nice, George. Very spiffy. I haven’t talked to you in a while. What are you up to these days?”
I wasn’t certain whether I imagined it or not, but I thought his gaze became evasive. He shrugged. “Teaching, grading, thesis supervision, committee work, research. Same old same old. But right now, I’ve got to run. I’ve got an … an appointment.” He rose from his chair, straightened his shoulders, adjusted his tie. “Seriously, Karen, Mildred … er … Finch wants the literary world to leave her alone, and it might be a good idea for you to back off.”
By the time I’d finished reading Milly’s letter for the third time, what remained of my tea was lukewarm. I rose to get a fresh cup. As I tipped boiling water from the stainless-steel urn, I heard a snatch of conversation behind me: “… all the evidence I need to make the case …” Then Jake Fenton’s bass tones faded out. Casually, I turned with my refilled mug and scanned the room. Jake was sitting with Ralph Brooke in a partially sequestered nook. That I heard anything at all must have been a trick of the large room’s acoustics, for the body language of the two—leaning sharply toward each
other—suggested the intention of strict confidence. Ralph’s back was to me. All I could see was the curly iron-gray fringe of his hair and the old-man hunch of his shoulders. Jake faced me, sporting a complicated smile, part gloating, part something not quite so healthy even as a gloat. When he glanced up and saw me watching him, all expression vanished instantly from his handsome features.
I tipped milk into my steaming tea and carried the cup back to the table. As I drank, I forgot about Jake, engrossed as I was in pondering Milly Finch’s letter. Maybe there was something I could do, after all, to help the elderly novelist out.
L
ieutenant Paula Syverson
greeted me in her office at the Claverack barracks of the State Police wearing a russet suit with a knee-length skirt and mid-heel brown loafers. “Professor Pelletier, you’re a long ways from home. What brings you the hell over here to New York State?” The police officer’s ramrod straight posture imposed all the stiff formality of a dress uniform on her ordinary business attire. The only human touch was a pair of reading glasses pushed hastily to the top of her head, releasing one tendril of fine, pale hair onto her temple. In my navy cords, off-white jersey, and denim jacket, I felt at a decided sartorial disadvantage.
In spite of George’s injunction against meddling in Milly Finch’s business, I’d called the lieutenant as soon as I’d gotten back to my office from the coffee shop. Syverson had not been thrilled about my request to meet with her. Obviously she’d assumed that by now the professor would have tired of playing sleuth. But, polite as always, she told me she’d be in her office until
six, and if I could get there by then, she’d see me. Otherwise it would have to wait until Monday morning.
The drive through the mountains would have been beautiful if I’d been able to pay attention—rising mist and an occasional fringe of crimson on the trees. I drove very fast, saw very little, and got to the police station at a quarter to six.
Now, settled in a molded plastic chair across from Lieutenant Syverson, who had barricaded herself behind her metal Corcraft desk, I considered the best way to approach her. Two framed portraits of little girls in blond pigtails graced the desktop. “Cute kids,” I said. It surprised me that Syverson was a mother. I found it difficult to imagine this stiff woman in the throes of childbirth—or of any process that led to childbirth.
“Thanks,” she replied—stiffly. And waited. A buckled briefcase on the floor by her chair spoke of her readiness to depart for the weekend.
“I won’t take up much of your time, Lieutenant,” I said. “I’m sure you want to get out of here as soon as possible. Since we spoke on Wednesday, I’ve learned two things, and I thought I should tell you about them in person.”
She nodded, still waiting. She wasn’t about to make this easy for me.
“Did you know that Mildred Deakin Finch had a child out of wedlock just before she fled Manhattan for Nelson Corners?”
A noncommittal
umm
. Her thin face couldn’t have been any less expressive if it had been cast in plaster. “And what is your source for that information, Ms. Pelletier?”
“Sean Small—you know, the Skidmore professor I told you about. He located a previously unknown
archive of Deakin papers at the library of some small woman’s college Deakin had attended in New Hampshire. Evidently it was stuff someone had hastily bundled up from Deakin’s desk after her disappearance and donated to the school without looking at it. Professor Small was the first scholar to request the papers, and in them he found both the birth certificate and the adoption papers. The adoption was arranged by some big Manhattan agency, and the papers don’t list the adoptive parents’ names.
“Now, Lieutenant, here’s what I’m thinking. If Sean Small—who is not the swiftest of men, let me tell you—could stumble across those papers, Marty Katz—who was pretty
damn
swift—could easily have located them. That’s another reason why I think we have to keep looking for a killer. Maybe Marty was murdered because someone didn’t want this adoption revealed. Maybe the adopted child himself—”
“Or, maybe Mildred Finch, herself—” Syverson interjected. She rearranged the framed photographs so they sat at a precise ninety-degree angle to each other. Then she sat back, folded her hands, and gave me a level look. “Professor, I’ll be straight with you—I did
not
know about this child until just now when you told me. But as far as I can see, that doesn’t let Mrs. Finch off the hook at all. It simply gives her one more reason to panic and kill the reporter who threatened to expose her—and her sins—to the world. Nowadays an illegitimate … er … a child born out of wedlock would be no big deal, but forty years ago …? And, if you ask me, this woman is living in the past.”
“No, she’s not,” I protested, pulling Milly Finch’s letter from my jacket pocket. “The past means nothing to her. Read this.”
Syverson flashed me a long-suffering look, plucked
the letter from my hand, retrieved her reading glasses from the crown of her head, and read. Then she shifted her glasses back to their perch on her hair, met my eyes—and waited.
“The gun,” I said. “She moved the gun when she cleaned.
That’s
how it got her fingerprints on it.”
“So she’s told us. Over and over again.”
“Oh.”
Syverson sighed and leaned toward me, her hands clasped. “Look, Professor, I know you mean well, but there’s nothing here …” She waved the letter at me. “… that provides any new leads.” She lifted a file folder from her desk, checked out a set of handwritten notes. “I tell you what: See these notes?” She turned them toward me.
“Agent. Editor. Family. Townspeople,”
she read. “I got them all down here from our last conversation. Now I’ll add
child
to that list:
child—given up for adoption
. Okay? And how about
lover?
If there was a child, there was probably a lover. Right? That’s how these things work.” She entered
lover
on the list, then returned it to the folder. “Okay? Now, listen—I’m tired. It’s been a long day. I want to go home and take a bubble bath, then have dinner with my husband and kids. And I don’t want to think about Mrs. Mildred Finch again until Monday morning. What about you, Professor? Isn’t there someplace you’d rather be than here?”