Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript (2 page)

Unless, of course, she wanted to discuss the wiles of treacherous, alluring men.

“This is going to be an historical novel,” the writer continued, “set in the New York City slums during the nineteenth century, and, to tell the truth, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by the research I’ll have to do. The book needs to be as authentic as possible, but I’m no historian.” Her dark eyes narrowed as she focused on me. “When I saw in the conference program that you were going to speak on the American working class, I thought maybe you could help me with some historical sources.”

I was scheduled to give a talk on murder in American working-class literature. It had been listed in the program as Deconstructing Death: Class Binaries in the Representation of Murder in American Working-Class Discourse, 1845-1945. In spite of the quasi-lurid title, this was a fairly dry academic topic, and I was up to my ears in historical sources.

“Well, certainly,” I said. “That would be no problem….”

Fifty minutes later, Sunnye and I were seated at the conference table, poring over bibliography printouts and old books. Someone knocked at the door, then, without waiting for a response, pushed it open. Monica entered, out of breath. A clump of short brown hair stood straight up where she had snatched off her baseball cap. “Mail delivery,” she announced.
Mail delivery
? Our mail is never delivered any further than the pigeon-hole boxes two steps away from the secretary’s desk.

Monica thrust a handful of envelopes in my general direction, but her eyes were glued to Sunnye Hardcastle, and she took an impulsive step toward her. Trouble growled. His mistress silenced him.

“Ms. Hardcastle,” the secretary said, braving Trouble’s tooth-baring snarl as she traversed the room, “I just wanted to make sure you didn’t leave without signing my copy of
Tough Times
.” Her hand rose to her heaving chest. “I ran all the way home to get it. You’re my favorite writer ever.”

Sunnye smiled at her. I was surprised she possessed the appropriate facial muscles. “How nice of you to say so. I’d be happy to sign your book.” She opened
Tough Times
to the title page, scrawled an inscription, and signed with a flourish.

“Thankyouthankyouthankyou,” Monica gushed, hugging the book to her chest. “I’ll treasure this forever.” Then she turned to me, her eyebrows puckering. “Karen? Don’t you have a class now?”

“Aaargh!” My watch informed me I had four and a half minutes to get across campus.

Sunnye stood up. “Professor Pelletier—Karen—I didn’t mean to make you late.” Then, very formally, she said. “I appreciate your help. If there’s ever anything I can do…”

I was thrusting notes and books helter-skelter into my briefcase, but I paused. The class would wait for me. Ten minutes for an assistant professor. Twenty for an associate professor. A half-hour for a full professor. That was the common etiquette in any college I’d ever had anything to do with. I had no idea where these laws had come from in the first place, but they seemed to hold true at all times in all places.

I hefted the briefcase and gazed at Sunnye consideringly. My seminar was in popular fiction. She was a pop-fiction ground-breaker, the first of the hard-boiled female detective writers, the creator of that feminist icon, Kit Danger, the bad-ass sleuth from Detroit. The woman intimidated the hell out of me, but she had offered. “Well, maybe there
is
something…”

***

Sunnye Hardcastle was a smash hit with my seminar, twelve honors students seated around a battered mahogany conference table. The Emerson Hall seminar room was long and narrow, painted pale cream above blue-green wainscoting. The novelist sat at the head of the table and answered questions about writing and the writer’s life for over an hour. Trouble brooded at her feet. She was gracious and charming, and, perversely, I was miffed by her congeniality. Why was she so damn pleasant with everyone else and so curt with me?

To cap off her appearance, the novelist read to the class from
Tough Times
.

Dead men don’t tell tales, Kit Danger mused, as she peered from the catwalk high above the vast emptiness of the abandoned automotive plant. The two men sprawled on the fractured concrete floor were indisputably dead. She’d read that somewhere, that line about not telling tales; that was all just words, black ink etched on a white page. But the bodies were real. From where she balanced precariously on the catwalk, they looked like squashed white spiders oozing ragged trails of blood across a floor the color of lead shavings. These men were snitches. They were here to talk. They had arranged to meet her amidst the industrial detritus with the sole purpose of talking. Now they themselves were industrial detritus. The long impersonal forefinger of cold, hard power had reached out and pressed the discard button. There would be no more tales.

At a soft sound from behind her, Kit spun around, the big Sig Sauer 226 ready in her hand….

When Sunnye finished reading, my students heaved a collective sigh. The edgy glamour of Kit Danger—and her creator—had gotten to them. At that moment I would have bet fully one half had decided to become crime writers themselves, and the other half, private eyes. The impetuous career-plan switches would last all of twelve-and-a-half minutes; with more than thirty thousand dollars a year shelled out for their education, Enfield College students tend not to be risk-takers.

Only Peggy Briggs, my “mature student,” seemed less than enthralled by Sunnye Hardcastle. Peggy watched the writer with hooded eyes, refraining from the general approbation. One hand clutched a blue ball-point pen, the other, clenched in a fist, lay taut on her thigh. As Sunnye Hardcastle signed bookmarks for the members of the class, Trouble raised his head from her boot and sniffed Peggy’s clenched hand. Peggy flinched. Trouble’s mistress yanked hard on his leash. The big dog sighed and lowered his muzzle to the floor.

Sunnye turned to Peggy and offered her an autographed bookmark featuring a lurid black-and-crimson image of a smoking gun. Peggy took one look at the bookmark, emitted a gasp, followed by a wail and a guttural sob. I turned to my student, concerned. Abruptly she leapt up from her seat and ran out of the classroom, leaving her books and backpack behind.

“My God,” Sunnye Hardcastle said, “what the hell was that all about?”

Chapter Two

Late that night I headed to the parking lot. A college campus is never exactly dark, even at midnight: Security lights illuminate walkways, and eerie blue bulbs mark the location of safety call boxes. But offices were unlit, as were most of the dorm rooms, and the quad as I crossed it was a lonely place. Then, from Prescott House, where the freshmen lived, came a sudden series of drunken hoots, followed by the crash of a shattering window. I spun in the direction of the disturbance, then turned back again; rowdiness in the dorm is not a professor’s business. A residential advisor would intervene. Or a security guard.

The night brooded in the tepid miasma of a January thaw. After the visit from Sunnye Hardcastle, the seminar, and the first full-college faculty meeting of the semester, featuring a nasty squabble over sexual-harassment policy, I’d gone back to my office to complete my opening lecture for the next day’s freshman class. Now, exhausted, I had barely enough focus to keep my feet on the path. God only knew where I’d find the energy to fire up the Subaru and drive the back roads to my little country house.

The walkway to the parking lot passed the library quad, skirting Clark Memorial, the current Enfield College library building, and the construction site for the new, and as yet unnamed, Enfield College library center. When it happened, it happened so fast, I thought I was hallucinating. To my left, the library, dreaming in the darkness, flared suddenly to frantic life, alarms blaring, blinding white strobe lights flashing like a futuristic war zone. Then a figure sped out of the shadows with breathtaking velocity, slammed into me, knocked me to the pavement, staggered, recovered its equilibrium, and vanished into the night.

“A book thief?” Charlie Piotrowski repeated, incredulous. “You were knocked down by a
book
thief!”

It was Saturday morning, and we were taking a trip to the ocean, the last chance we’d have to relax together for the foreseeable future. On the way, we planned to stop at the nursing home in Leominster and visit Charlie’s father. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the latter—Alzheimer’s takes a pitiful toll. But the Maine coast has its own restorative beauty in winter, when the grey rocky skies match the grey rocky shores, and the only other people on the beaches are those strong-hearted souls who live on the rugged coast year round.

“Yes, a book thief,” I said. “He triggered the alarm system, the entire library lit up like a disco dance floor, then—wham. God, was he strong! I went over like a bowling pin.”

“You okay, babe?” He used to call me “Doctor,” now he calls me “babe.” Maybe as a feminist I’m not supposed to like that, but I do.

“Aside from a few bruises, yeah.”

Charlie pulled the Jeep into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven and turned off the motor. “Unauthorized entry, huh?” Always thinking like a cop. “Did he get anything?”

I shook my head. “Thank God, no. But it was a close call. Nobody knows how the creep did it, but he got into the closed stacks where the rare books are, boxed up an entire set of Raymond Chandler first editions, and trucked them out to the library loading dock. Then it looks as though he tried to get into the vault where they keep manuscripts and inscribed volumes, and that’s when he set off the alarm. Rachel Thompson says—”

“Helluva risk to take for a bunch of old books. Who’s Rachel Thompson?”

“She’s the Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts.”

“What’s that?”

“The head of the library’s Special Collections division. Security called her, and she came in to check it out. She thinks it’s odd the intruder didn’t go after something more valuable than mystery novels. Some of the incunabula, for instance—”

“What the hell is incunabula?”

“
Are
incunabula. It’s a plural noun derived from the Latin.” I hate it when he rolls his eyes. “Incunabula are the first printed books, from the second half of the fifteenth century. Some of them are priceless. The college library has a Gutenberg bible, for instance, donated by some hot-shot alumni book collector, oh maybe a hundred years ago. Compared with that and some of their other holdings—such as a Shakespeare first folio and their Bay Psalm Book—the Chandlers they have here aren’t worth a lot. A few thousand dollars at the most.”

Charlie whistled. “Thousands?”

“Oh, yeah. Rare books and manuscripts can get exorbitant, Rachel says, into the millions. And it surprised her that the thief didn’t seem to target anything else. At least, she didn’t see anything else missing. And Brady Hansell. He’s—”

“—Head of College Security. Yeah, I remember him. Skinny guy in his forties. Dark hair. Shifty eyes.”

“That’s him all right. Brady says he’s going to step up the library security patrols, but he has no idea how this guy could’ve got past the existing patrols, let alone bypass a state-of-the-art alarm system.”

“But he didn’t get past
you
, right? Of course not!” Charlie shook his head, clicked his tongue, then sighed, the full monty of Piotrowskian exasperation. “You were right there on the scene again to throw your body between a criminal and freedom—and get yourself trampled in the process. Karen—babe…What
is
it with you? It was bad enough when we were just acquaintances, but now…”

I smiled at him. “At least,” I said, “it’s not something
you
have to get involved with. At least…,” and I laughed. “At least there was no body in that library.”

“Body?” He had opened the car door. Now he halted, one foot on the asphalt, suddenly hyper-alert. “What do you mean, ‘body’?”

“Miss Marple,” I explained.

He gazed at me blankly.

“You know? Agatha Christie?
The Body in the Library
?”

“Oh.” His expression relaxed. “A
book
.”

“Yes, a book. Sorry, Lieutenant.” I grinned at him. “I forgot that for you a body is more than simply a literary convention.” I kissed his cheek. “Go get the coffee.”

***

Charlie came out of the 7-Eleven five minutes later carrying two foil-wrapped bagels, two cardboard cups of coffee, and a copy of
People
magazine. We’d been lovers for months now, but for one split second as he pushed open the big glass door, I saw him as if he were a stranger: a tall, solid man with the shoulders of a linebacker, a broad, kind face, intelligent eyes, cropped beige hair, and extremely kissable lips. Then he was in the car and was simply Charlie again. I ran my index finger down his cheek, from his eyebrow to the corner of his mouth. He smiled at me. Then he laid the bagels on the dashboard, set the cups in the cup-holders, and handed me the magazine.

I gave him my
I’m-a-Ph.D.-in-English
look. “You know I only read
People
in the grocery store,” I said.