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Mickey was laughing, too. He started to give that same line about my “Capsizing Is Fun” tee shirt he’d used on Effie: “Just remember what your—”

“Finish that sentence and this paddle will be sticking from your ass like a beaver’s tail,” I said.

***

I said nothing to Effie or Mickey about seeing Detective Grant in the rhododendrons. By the time Mickey pulled me out of the water he was gone. And maybe while the two halves of my brain couldn’t agree on what his presence in Harper’s Ferry meant, they did agree on one thing: Grant had wanted to keep his presence a secret. Good gravy! If James hadn’t growled, I wouldn’t have known he was there either. What a good dog.

***

Mickey chased the last two kayakers away. He lit the propane grill on his porch. He put on an entire package of chicken legs, slathered with thick brown sauce, and a wire basket of fresh vegetables—green peppers, zucchini, fat rings of sweet onion, pea pods and mushrooms. We ate like pigs.

At ten o’clock or so, Mickey led us to the barn. Gordon’s belongings, what he hadn’t sold already, were stacked in an orderly mound. I bet there were two dozen boxes of books.

Mickey had refused to sell Effie the books while they were still in Gordon’s house in Hannawa. Now Effie was paying him back. She wanted to look at every book. If it wasn’t sellable, she wasn’t going to buy it. “Nothing sinks a bookstore faster than books nobody wants to read,” she told us. Mickey and I sat in aluminum lawn chairs and watched in awe as she evaluated the books.

She not only judged the books by their subject and the author, but also by their condition, whether they were first editions or not. And she flipped carefully through the pages to see what might be tucked inside.

“I’ve already looked for hundred dollar bills,” Mickey said with a laugh.

“I hope you found plenty,” Effie said. “Because that’s not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for old letters, clippings, that sort of thing. What we in the antiquarian book biz call
ephemera
. Sometimes it’s more valuable than the book itself.”

“For you or for Mickey?” I teased.

“For both of us,” she said. “To be honest with you, I normally wouldn’t tell anyone about that. But Sweet Gordon was like a brother to me. Which sort of makes Mickey my nephew, too. And I would never screw a relative.” She threw back her head and ha-ha’d like Bette Davis. “Although he is kind of cute.”

It was two in the morning before Effie was finished evaluating the books. She offered Mickey a rather impressive sum and he quickly accepted it. We headed for the cabin and our beds.

When I got to my room I put on my travel pajamas, a baggy blue-flannel pair that covers every inch of me. I bought them during the Nixon presidency when I was still foolishly filled with the notion of being a world traveler. I figured if I ever had to flee a motel because of a fire or hurricane, I could run out into a crowd of people without worrying about hypothermia or embarrassment.

I locked the door. I pulled a small braided rug in front of the door for James to sleep on. I positioned my new Indian moccasin slippers on the floor. I peeked out the window hoping to spot Detective Grant leaning against a tree. If he was out there I didn’t see him. I turned the stuffed owl around so I wouldn’t have its bulging glass eyes staring at me all night. I knelt by James and gave him a final good-night ear-scratch. “Just in case you haven’t read your watch dog manual lately,” I whispered to him, “you’re supposed to sleep with one ear cocked.” I bent his ear to show him. When I let go it flopped like a dish rag. I clicked off the light and felt my way to the bed.

There is nothing more comforting in the world than sinking your head into a big, cool, fluffy pillow. And there’s nothing more disconcerting than a loud crackle. I popped up like a slice of toast. There was a note on the pillow. I fumbled for the lamp. I read:

Good gravy! What possibly did Mickey want? Did he want to threaten me? Strangle me? Did he have some important information about Effie? And how did I know that the note was really from Mickey? I considered my meager options: I could stay put. “I didn’t see your note until this morning,” I could whisper to Mickey, when Effie was taking her turn in the bathroom. I could open the window and scream at the top of my lungs for Detective Grant. Or I could stop being such a melodramatic old fool and meet Mickey on the back porch.

As usual, my curiosity outweighed my better judgment. I swung out of bed and put on my slippers. I folded the note into a small square and wedged it under my left heel. Detective Grant would need it for evidence if I ended up dead. I started to snap the leash on James’ collar but thought better of dragging him along. His obstinacy would surely wake up Effie. I gave him a rawhide instead.

I unlocked the door and slipped into the hallway. I padded down the stairs. Crossed the dark kitchen. Opened the screen door. Peeked outside. Mickey was comfortably wedged in a wicker chair. His bare feet were propped on the porch post. His hands were cradled around a beer bottle, standing straight up in his lap. I heard myself say what only someone with Effie’s deviant mind would say. “That is a beer bottle, isn’t it?”

He grinned. Toasted me with it.

I sat in the chair next to his.

“I hope the note didn’t scare you,” he began.

“I’m here,” I answered.

He offered me a swig from his beer. To my surprise, I took him up on it. “I know you’ve got your suspicions about me,” he said.

“Don’t take it personally,” I said, handing the bottle back. “These days I’ve got suspicions about everybody.”

“That’s why I wanted to see you without Effie.”

He pulled an envelope from his shirt pocket. “That stuff Effie said about ephemera tonight? About it sometimes being more valuable than the book? I already knew that.” He watched me open the envelope. “I found it in an old archeology book, by Heinrich Schliemann, on his excavation of the lost city of Troy. It’s from David Delarosa. To my uncle. It’s dated December 26, 1956.”

I unfolded the letter but I didn’t read it. “Who told you I’m interested in David Delarosa?”

“Effie,” he said. “During one of her calls I told her I’d met you. I may have said something about you being nice but nosy.”

“You were half right,” I said.

Mickey took a swig of his own. Handed the bottle back to me. “She said you were running all over Hannawa investigating my uncle’s murder. Suspecting everybody. Even trying to link it to a murder fifty years ago. A young wrestler named David Delarosa. I’d already gone through his books looking for money and personal stuff. So the name rang a bell.”

I was not surprised that Effie knew I was investigating Gordon’s murder. My visit to her bookstore in March made that fairly obvious. “So it was your idea that I come down here with Effie? So you could give the letter to me?”

Mickey pushed himself out of the chair and pressed his face against the kitchen window, to make sure Effie hadn’t tip-toed after me. He sat on the edge of the porch in front of me, six inches from my moccasins. “I want to know who killed my uncle, too,” he said. “I thought maybe you could tell me something.”

I handed him the beer bottle. It was time for me to read the letter:

I put the letter back in the envelope. I flashed an apologetic smile at Mickey. “There’s a lot to decipher here,” I said.

“Just tell me what you can when you can,” he said.

I promised I would. I went upstairs to bed. James was happily gnawing away. I took the rawhide from him. I clicked on the lamp by the bed. I crawled in with my moccasins on and started deciphering.

The first thing that struck me was the letter’s style. It was written in Beatnik. Or at least in what passed for Beatnik to a kid from Sandusky on a wrestling scholarship. Clearly he was trying to impress Gordon.

The next thing was David’s obvious hatred for his mother. Or more accurately, his hatred for the way his mother behaved with men. I know Sigmund Freud isn’t as popular as he was when I was taking college psychology, but I think that
ugly sounds at night
comment spoke volumes about his own sexual aggression.

David also made sure to show his appreciation for Gordon’s help with his grades.
Thanks to your most-excellent tutoring
, he wrote. I had no reason to doubt he was sincere about that.

But the real point of the letter, or so it seemed to me, was that last part about his intention to pursue Miss Forty Below.
I know you don’t exactly dig the idea
, David began. Now what exactly did that mean? Did it imply some kind of jealousy on Gordon’s part? Or was Gordon merely concerned about David’s pursuit of a particular woman? A woman he shouldn’t be pursuing? Whichever is was, it was clearly an issue between them. And David was telling him in no uncertain terms that he was going after Miss Forty Below whether Gordon approved or not.

And just who was this Miss Forty Below?

I’d overheard enough man-talk in the newsroom over the years to know that women unwilling to jump into bed after the first howdy-do are quickly labeled as frigid. I’d never heard the phrase before, but
forty below
was clearly shorthand for forty below zero. Based on everything I’d heard from Effie and Shaka, and especially from Howard Shay, the handsome David Delarosa was accustomed to bedding young women without much effort. Apparently Miss Forty Below was not thawing out as quickly as he wished.

The other intriguing line in that paragraph was the last one:
A little wine and Charlie Parker mixed and shaken with my ample animal charm, and that tiny chip of ice will just be a nightlight showing me the way.
David intended to loosen up the mystery woman with the help of alcohol and bebop and then close in for the kill with his enormous ego—not a particularly new strategy. What really made me squint, however, was the
tiny chip of ice
reference. That just had to mean a diamond ring. Apparently Miss Forty Below was engaged.

The final thing for me to ponder that night was why Gordon had kept David Delarosa’s letter all those years. One possibility was that Gordon didn’t even know he’d saved the letter. Maybe he’d stuck it in that old book and forgotten about it. But in a book by the famous Heinrich Schliemann? On his historic excavation of Troy? No, I think Gordon would have gone back to that book again and again.

So my guess was that Gordon not only knew he had the letter, but kept it in that safe, secret place for a reason. Was it simply because David had meant so much to him? Was it another very personal treasure? Like that can of Jack Kerouac’s pine cones? Or was it something else?

David’s murder hit Gordon hard. He sulked for days then took the bus to Sandusky for the funeral. He returned to Hannawa full of anger. He wanted David’s killer found. But he never believed it was Shaka. Maybe the letter held a clue to David’s real murderer.

I refolded the letter and put it in the envelope. I folded the envelope and wedged it under my other heel. I turned off the lamp. “Does it, Gordon?” I whispered. “Does that letter say who killed David? Who killed you?”

Chapter 22

Friday, June 8

We had a good country breakfast—scrambled eggs and onions—and then headed out to load the books into the van. Effie saw to it that Mickey did most of the work. “Save your back, Maddy,” she said. “It’s just going to be me and you when we get to the bookstore.”

We wedged James into the small space we’d left for him behind the front seat. Then we crawled in ourselves, Effie behind the wheel, me shotgun. Our freshly filled Thermoses were lying between us on the seat like a couple of unexploded artillery shells. I cranked down my window to say good-bye to Mickey. “When you get back to Hannawa tell Detective Grant I said hello,” he said, grinning like a raccoon. “Assuming he didn’t fall in the river and drown yesterday.”

I didn’t say anything.

Effie did. “We can only hope he did.” She backed the van around and headed down the long drive, blowing a big, theatrical kiss at Mickey in her rearview mirror.

I felt foolish. Like this whole trip was a badly staged junior class play and I was the only one who thought it was real. But I was also relieved. Mickey and Effie were taking Detective Grant’s not-so-secret presence in good humor. The way people with nothing to hide would. I gave James a cat-shaped biscuit and nestled back in the seat for the long drive home.

We crossed the Potomac into Maryland and headed north on Route 65 toward Sharpsburg, where one of the Civil War’s most inconclusive bloodbaths took place, the Battle of Antietam Creek. I suggested we take a quick drive through the battlefield but Effie was in a hurry to get home. She had her books and most likely her fill of James and me. She planned to connect with the Pennsylvania Turnpike and shoot straight west into Ohio. No more of that, “If it ain’t a back road, it ain’t a road worth taking” stuff for her.

“I’ve been doing an awful lot of thinking about the old days,” I said after an hour of silence. “Who we were back then and what we meant to each other.”

“Those were special times,” Effie said.

“Yes,” I said. “Even the crappy times seem special now.”

Effie motioned for me to pour a cup of coffee for her. “There were plenty of those, too, weren’t there.”

I’d been maneuvering toward a particular crappy time, of course, and figured now was as good a time as any to bring it up. “None crappier than the night David Delarosa was killed.”

“That does win the Oscar,” she said.

“I didn’t know him as well as you, of course.”

Effie cackled. “I’ve already admitted to sleeping with him, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“He was quite the ladies’ man, I guess.”

Said Effie, “That’s putting it mildly. It was easier to keep track of who he didn’t sleep with than who he did.”

I handed her a sloshing cup of coffee and then screwed the lid off my Thermos of tea. “So—who didn’t he sleep with?”

“I’d say just you and Gwen. Unless you’ve been holding out on me.”

“Lawrence and I were already engaged that year,” I said. “Not that I would have slept with David otherwise. Or more accurately, not that he would have slept with me.” I finished pouring my tea. I took a cautious sip. It was plenty hot but not unswallowable. “You sure about Gwen?”

Effie hooted like an owl getting its belly feathers tickled. “I’m sure she didn’t even sleep with Rollie before they were married.”

I told one of my patented half-truths. “I was only wondering if she was engaged then or not, Effie. I’m no more interested in her sex life than I am in mine.”

We didn’t get back to Hannawa until late in the day. We unloaded Gordon’s books then headed through the rush-hour traffic toward my bungalow. It was six o’clock by the time I got home. I immediately went to the basement and checked my files. The information I needed wasn’t there. I called Eric at the morgue. “Stay put until I get there,” I said.

He whined like a third grader. “But it’s Friday.”

“It also might be Christmas,” I said. “Stay put!”

I filled James’ food bowl and headed for the garage. I was downtown in twenty minutes, storming through the newsroom like a category five hurricane. I was so anxious to get to work that I didn’t even take time to make a mug of tea. Which worried Eric to no end. “I will be able to get out of here sometime tonight, won’t I?”

“If the microfilm gods are with us,” I said.

Today we save stories on CDs. But a lot of the older stuff in the morgue is still on microfilm. I told him to pull out all of the film for 1956 and 1957. I sat him in front of the machine and pulled a chair alongside. “We’re going to start with 1956,” I said, “and check backward from the end of December.”

Eric wisely asked the pertinent question. “Check for what?”

I pretended he was the ignorant one and not me. “The society pages. For the engagement announcements. For the engagement of Gwendolyn Moffitt and one Rollie Stumpf.”

Newspapers don’t have society pages any more. The sexual revolution saw to that.
The Herald-Union
now has a section called Hannawa Life. Despite its gender-neutral title, it’s clearly geared at women. In addition to the stories on lowering your cholesterol, finding the right pre-school, and exercises you can do while pushing a supermarket cart, you’ll find the same old stuff we ran before Bella Abzug started waving her big floppy hat at us in the sixties: weddings, anniversaries and engagements, lots and lots of engagements.

We went through the December papers. The November papers and half the October papers. Then there it was, Saturday, October 13, 1956:

I leaned back and rubbed the long hours of travel out of my neck. “You can go home now,” I said to Eric.

He was uncharacteristically concerned. “You sure?”

I swept him away with my fingers. I watched him hurry to the elevator, swigging his Mountain Dew as he maneuvered through the mostly empty desks in the newsroom.

I thought about walking down to Ike’s. But I went home to James instead. And that Rubbermaid tub of Lawrence’s clippings Dory gave me.

***

Monday, June 11

Eric usually gets to the morgue a good half-hour before I do—or so he tells me. This morning I was the early bird. I handed him the clipping.

He glanced at the four men in the photo above the story before letting it flutter to his messy desk. In one well-practiced motion he clicked on his computer and cracked the plastic cap on his breakfast Mountain Dew. “Who are those goofy looking dudes?”

I’d looked at the photo so many times over the weekend that I’d memorized where each was standing. “Left to right they’re Herbert Giffels, Rollie Stumpf, Don Rodino and Elgin ‘Bud’ Wetzel. They’re the 1957 state collegiate debate champions.”

“I figured they weren’t football players,” he said.

“You have a keen eye, Mr. Chen.” I leaned over his desk and handed him the clipping a second time.

From the look on his face you’d swear it was five in the afternoon and not nine in the morning. “I suppose you want me to find them for you.”

“You only have to find three of them,” I said. “We already know where Rollie Stumpf is.”

The significance of the photo finally dawned on him. “Ah—the woebegone spouse of Gwendolyn Moffitt-Stumpf.”

“That’s right. The other three could be anywhere.”

I got to work marking up the Sunday edition while Eric worked his on-line magic. It took him only fifteen minutes to determine that Don Rodino was dead. “Nothing fishy though,” he said. “Vietnam 1965. Navy pilot shot down over Hanoi.”

Just before noon he found Herbert Giffels. In a cemetery in Zanesville. “Must have been a car accident or something,” Eric said. “Wife died the same day. September 20, 1983.”

The search for Elgin “Bud” Wetzel took all afternoon. “Here he is,” Eric yawned at a quarter to five. “Beaufort, South Carolina.”

“Still alive?”

“Looks like it. Apparently he’s something of an expert on eighteenth century candle snuffers. He’s got a website—www. wickmeister.com.”

“How about a phone number? He got one of those antique things?” I asked.

And so I called Rollie’s last surviving debate partner. The voice of the man who answered was deep and clear, with only a hint that he might be on the south side of middle age: “Wickmeister!”

“This wouldn’t be Bud, would it?” I asked.

“It’s been a long time since anybody called me that,” he said.

I introduced myself. Told him I’d graduated from Hemphill a year before he did. That my late husband Lawrence had covered the state debate tournament for
The Harbinger
. “As I recall, he drove down to Columbus on the bus with you.”

“I do remember somebody pestering us with stupid questions while we were trying to prepare,” he said, adding a faint “heh-heh-heh” on the end to let me know he was joking.

It wasn’t all that funny, but I mustered up the best laugh I could. Then I got down to business, bending the truth every whichaway as I went along. “The reason I called is that I’m writing a memoir of sorts. And 1957 was such a big year for Lawrence and me. Him writing for the college newspaper. Both of us graduating. Getting married. And that horrible murder. It was the same day as the debate tournament as I recall.”

He corrected me. “The day after.”

I corrected him. “Actually, the police said he was killed in the middle of night. So I guess we’re both right.”

The champion debater in him wouldn’t let it go. “If it was after midnight, then it was the next day.”

I capitulated. “You’re right, of course. Anyway, I’ve been trying to piece everything together chronologically. When exactly Lawrence was in Columbus and when he was back here. And going through his old clippings I found the story he wrote on the debate tournament. And the photo that ran with it. The four of you with your big trophies. I figured somebody smart enough to win a state debate tournament would have a good memory.”

That really puffed him up: “‘Resolved…That the United States should discontinue direct economic aid to foreign countries.’ Don and Herbie handled first and second affirmatives. Rollie and I handled the rebuttal. We made those Wooster College boys sound like a pack of retarded chimpanzees, I’ll tell you.”

A number of snappy retorts came to mind. I wisely kept them to myself. “Lawrence and I knew the boy who was killed a little—David Delarosa was his name—and we were both shaken up. As you can imagine. I’ve been tying to remember exactly when the bus got back to Hannawa. I know I picked Lawrence up but I can’t remember if it was morning or afternoon or just when.”

Bud made my ear buzz with a long, thoughtful moan. “Boy, you’re making me go back a long time.”

“Unfortunately it has been a long time,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic. The reason I was asking him about the bus schedule, of course, was to humor my silly suspicions about Gwen: That just maybe she was the Miss Forty Below in David’s letter to Gordon. That maybe David had succeeded in seducing her that Wednesday night at Jericho’s. That maybe with Rollie down in Columbus she simply couldn’t resist David’s
ample animal charm
. That maybe she was the girl for whom David flipped the seven on his door into an L. “That L means
later
,” David told Howard Shay, “It means I’m getting
laid
.” So maybe Gwen was the one who knocked David over the balcony, and filled with fear and shame continued to batter his pretty face on the hard floor, long after he was dead.

“You know,” said Bud, “I don’t think we all came back together from Columbus. In fact, I’m sure we didn’t.”

I was puzzled. “Didn’t come back together? With my Lawrence you mean?”

“No,” he said. “I mean the debate team. The tournament ended at four. We got our trophies and your husband took that picture that ran in the college paper. We were all supposed to go out for dinner with the debate coach, Professor Cook, stay another night at the hotel and then come back on the Thursday morning bus. But Rollie was anxious to get back. He had something waiting for him the rest of us didn’t. A girlfriend. He asked Professor Cook for permission to take the overnight bus.”

I was more than puzzled now. I was flat out thrown for a loop. “What time did that bus leave Columbus?”

Bud let go with another one of his irritating moans. “I have no idea,” he said. “I do remember Rollie going to dinner with us. Your Lawrence, too. But I know Rollie didn’t come with us afterward on our tour of the local rathskellers.”

“What about my Lawrence,” I asked. “He took the tour, did he?”

Bud laughed like a nervous goat. “As I recall, it was his idea.”

I fought off my old feelings of betrayal and got back on the subject at hand. “About those trophies,” I asked, “did you get to keep them? Or did they end up in a glass case somewhere?”

“Professor Cook got one for the case outside his office. But, sure, we got to keep our individual trophies.”