Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript (7 page)

“You two,” I allowed my voice to rise for emphasis, “I’ve told you before—I won’t marry a cop. It’s a terrible life. I don’t know why we can’t simply keep on as we are. You know, no entanglements. Just seeing each other, sleeping together. It’s perfect.”

Rudolph’s service was unbelievably efficient that evening: The waitress stepped up from directly behind me with the wine.

I took a deep gulp of the California red and groaned. It would be all over the dorms before bedtime: Pelletier was sleeping with a cop.

Chapter Six

“Whaddaya know…it’s Karen Pelletier. And all grown up.” The handsome stranger materialized next to me at the Lowell High School Reunion buffet table. Ruth Ann Bouchard Napolitano, rhapsodizing about her three adolescent soccer-star sons, faltered in mid-paean.

Alumni were gathered at round tables in the large balloon-decorated banquet room of the Lowell Doubletree Hotel. The color motif was pink and purple. On the bandstand, a pianist, drummer, and guitarist launched into a rocking-chair version of “Motorcycle Mama” to the accompaniment of joyous shrieks from people who hadn’t seen each other in decades—and hadn’t wanted to. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing there. The crime fiction conference was only a few days away, and I could have been at home, polishing my talk, comfortable in sweatshirt and jeans, feet up in front of a cherrywood fire.

Bored pie-eyed by Ruth Ann’s heroic-soccer-mom tales, I’d been thinking about skipping out. The hell with the two hours it had taken me to drive here. The hell with the fifty dollars I’d plopped down for the ticket. I was still deep into
Tough Times
and had left Kit Danger teetering on the edge of a construction girder hundreds of feet up in a half-built skyscraper. Reading at home would be a lot more fun than this reunion.

But suddenly there was this intriguing man.

He was forty, gingery Irish, six feet tall, broad of shoulder, with eyes of such a light green they appeared empty. He wore a well-made brown suit and charcoal-grey dress shirt with a Jerry Garcia tie in deep reds and blues. He looked muscular, masculine, intelligent, capable of swift movement and decisive action—and oddly incongruous in this reunion crowd.

“Denny?” Ruth Ann queried. She was round-faced, pudgy, and fluttery, and the newcomer’s unsmiling gaze seemed to fluster her.

The man had a stranger’s face but vaguely familiar features. I squinted in the dim party light. Take one skinny, undersized Irish kid with bad acne and worse attitude; add three or four inches to the height, more to the shoulders, sandpaper the complexion, readjust the aesthetic scale of the facial features, once ludicrously outsized, now rough-cut and angular: come up with square jaw, thin lips, long nose, high cheekbones. And those cool green eyes.

“Dennis O’Hanlon? Is it really you?” The last I knew of this classmate, he was a cocky, red-headed runt, always in trouble, suspended during junior year for selling marijuana to the daughter of the local Episcopal priest.

“It’s me.” He shrugged. “I grew up, too.”

“I’ll say,” I replied, trying not to stare. “You look great.”

“Thanks. Same back atcha.” He gave me a long, slow smile. “Can I buy you another one of whatever poison it is you’re drinking. For old time’s sake.” I glanced around. Susie Leblanc was headed in our direction clutching a puffy pink photo album.

“Sure can,” I said. “Scotch rocks.” I followed him off to the bar. Ruth Ann, fortunately, had been struck immobile, as well as mute, by Dennis O’Hanlon’s miraculous transformation.

When I was a kid, the O’Hanlons had lived down the hill one street over on an Irish block that abutted our French-Canadian neighborhood. The only difference between our sagging frame row house and theirs was the number of people crammed into the five miserable rooms. Counting my grandmother, there were six of us, but Dennis was the youngest in a brood of thirteen. While we Pelletiers weren’t exactly solid citizens, at least my father worked when he wasn’t on a tearing drunk, and my mother somehow managed to put three squares a day on our chipped enamel kitchen table. Nobody knew what went on at Denny’s house, but the O’Hanlon kids ate wherever they could grab a mouthful, and come five o’clock my mother more than once had set a place for the grubby little Denny. My dominant memory of the young Dennis O’Hanlon was that he was a troublemaker, always on the run from somebody—and always hungry.

Now here was once-scrawny Denny O’Hanlon bulking out the shoulders of what I could have sworn was a custom-made suit.

The Doubletree cocktail lounge bustled with highly made-up women wearing pastels. It was either an evangelical women’s gathering, a convention of politician’s wives, or a Mary Kay conference. Dennis and I bellied up, ordered two Dewar’s, and took them to a glass-topped table in a back corner, out of the sight-line of any classmates who might decide to forgo the inferior libations available in the ballroom.

“To old times.” Dennis raised his glass and touched it to mine. “May they never return.”

“Skoal,” I replied.

The green eyes studied me. They were clear, like arctic ice. “I always did like the way you wore your hair, Karen,” he said, finally. “All loose and shiny like that. Unpretentious. And, tonight, that simple, flowing dress, not fussy like the rest of these girls.” He motioned toward the ballroom with his drinking hand. “You know…” he gave me a cock-eyed grin, “all these years later, you still look damn good.”

“Thanks.” I swallowed hard. Graciousness in the face of praise does not come naturally.

That simple, flowing dress had cost me a full weekend’s shopping time and three hundred dollars at an Enfield boutique whose doors I hadn’t previously darkened in the entire four years I’d worked at the college, and most likely would never darken again. But once I’d made my impulsive decision to attend the Lowell High reunion, I’d been determined to appear naturally, and effortlessly, elegant. Dennis O’Hanlon’s appreciative gaze confirmed that the effort had been worth it.

“You look like life has been kind to you,” Dennis pronounced. He said it as if he were used to making complex evaluations given minimal evidence. And used to being right.

Poker-faced, I tipped my head in acknowledgment of the remark, if not necessarily of its truth. The grown-up Dennis O’Hanlon was an intriguing guy, and I was titillated by this serendipitous encounter.

He registered my demurral. “I didn’t say life had been
easy
. Believe me, if anyone knows what your childhood was like, it’s me. I said life had been
kind
. It’s not the same thing.”

I contemplated the distinction, shrugged, then nodded. Life had walloped me hard at the start, but now I had my wonderful daughter, Amanda. I had work I loved. I had Charlie Piotrowski, who wasn’t with me tonight only because I’d refused to let him come. If I was going to face my teenage demons, I’d wanted to do it alone. Now, sitting here drinking with this adult version of Denny O’Hanlon, I was wickedly grateful not to have Charlie tagging along like a chaperone. Or like a husband. In my tame life this encounter felt deliciously—almost dangerously—like adventure.

“Do you remember the fish?” Dennis leaned back in his molded plastic chair and regarded me with a faint smile.

“Fish?” This wasn’t what I expected from adventure—fish talk.

“Your father took us fishing one afternoon. Remember? First we got some frogs in the marsh.” He said
maash
, like a good Lowellian. “God, those things were ugly little fuckers, freaked me out to touch them. Then we went down to the river. I caught an enormous bass. Your mother filleted the fish, battered the frog legs, cooked it all up and served it with French fries.” He was smiling into his Dewar’s. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anything I enjoyed as much as that meal, and, believe me, I’ve eaten in some classy restaurants over the years.”

I remembered then. We must have been about seven, and we’d trekked along the Merrimack until we’d come to a marshy spot outside of town. My father wielded the net, and it was Denny’s job to drop the frogs into the pail and slam the lid down. When my father flipped him the first huge warty bullfrog, Denny screeched and dropped it. My father curled his lip in derision, and called the panicked boy “Frogface.” Denny burst into tears, and Daddy hooted in derisive laughter. Then Denny caught the bass, and my father taunted him for thinking he was a hot shot. Even now, thirty years later, I wanted to apologize to Dennis for my father’s nastiness that afternoon—but all he seemed to recall was the good meal.

Before I could respond, Dennis abruptly changed the subject. “I see you’re not wearing a wedding ring.”

I glanced down at my left hand. He was right. I wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “Neither are you,” I replied.

“Not anymore.”

We looked each other over. It was a frank appraisal, on both sides. Then he asked, again abruptly, “So…what are you up to these days?”

Behind him, one of the pastel women glided by, clutching a Manhattan in a rocks glass.
Not
an evangelical gathering. From the ballroom came a mangled medley of John Denver tunes.

“I’m an English professor.” I sipped my Dewar’s.

“No kidding. A professor, huh? Impressive.” There was a reflective pause while my companion processed the information. “Well, you always were a brain.”

“Ha!” I sipped more Dewar’s. “Among other things, you mean. What are
you
up to, Dennis?”

He paused again before he responded. “Oh, a little of this, a little of that.” Cagey. I didn’t let it go, tilting my head in inquiry. He tapped his fingers on the glass tabletop. “Nothing as fancy as a college professor, I’ll tell you that.”

“Give me a break, Dennis. I’m not about to buy the rube act. Look at you.” I swept a hand in his direction. Fifty-dollar haircut. Hundred-dollar shirt. Million-dollar attitude. “Obviously you’re doing well at something.”

His broad shoulders moved up and down easily in the beautiful jacket. “I’m an investigator.”

“Really? A cop?” I’d known a number of cops in my life, but they didn’t run to bespoke suits.

“No. Private.”

“Private!” I stared at him, then grinned. “Well, that makes sense, I guess. Once you hit high school, you became a hard-ass troublemaker.”

He laughed. “That I did. But it’s standing me in good stead these days. And you…” Dennis evaded the topic of himself as if he made a habit of it. “You’re a professor,” he repeated. “Where do you teach?”

“Enfield College.”

“Enfield!” Pale lashes blinked over startled eyes. It was worth the entire fifty-dollar admission fee to see Dennis O’Hanlon’s taken-aback reaction. Then he set his drink down on the table and sat up straight. “Enfield College. Well, I’ll be damned.” The eyes squinted, as if in speculation. He gave me a slow, thin smile. “Lowell High is doing itself proud. But, like I said, you always were a brain. Kind of a prig—but a brain.”

“Ha!” He surprised another laugh out of me.
Prig
was the last label I’d ever have expected from one of my high-school classmates. He was right of course. I had been a prig. I’d read all those doom-laden nineteenth-century novels where the virtuous young woman is seduced by an experienced older man, becomes pregnant after a single act of sexual intercourse, gives birth to a virtuous daughter, and dies. But, in the end, the lesson hadn’t taken. And I hadn’t died, just submitted myself to marriage, in my particular case a fate worse than death, given birth to Amanda, and lived on to untangle myself from everything about the whole sordid mess. From everything, that is, but my wonderful daughter.

“And you always did have…” He eased into silence, as if his words were leading him into an unexpected train of thought. I had the impression of strong muscles under pale skin, and, oddly enough, a still-hungry expression in the cool-green eyes.

“Dennis?” I queried after a silent minute.

He shook his head. “Sorry, Karen. I was woolgathering. Hazard of the profession. I was about to say, you…always did have your nose in a book.” He leaned toward me, elbows on table, chin on hands. “So. Karen. Here we are, twenty years later. Tell me about your life. Tell me about your job. Tell me about Enfield College….”

We chatted our way through another round of Dewar’s, then I turned down an invitation for a post-reunion drink in his room. He walked me to the parking lot and saw me safe into the Subaru. “Be seein’ ya, Karen,” he said, smiling crookedly.

Be seeing me?
I reflected as I drove away, and wondered just exactly what I’d do if the boy from Lowell ever called.

Chapter Seven

Avery Mitchell took my hand in both of his. “Karen, how are you?” His clear blue gaze gave me the usual flutter in the gut.

I detached my hand. “I’m fine, Avery.” It was hothouse warm in the president’s office, and a scent of roses wafted from the arrangement on the long table by the bookcase. “What’s up?” I knew I sounded rude, but I wanted to get this—whatever it was—over with.

“What’s up? Let’s see…ah, what time is it, Karen? 4:13? Would you like a drink? Scotch, maybe?” He motioned me to a maroon leather chair and walked over to the liquor cabinet across from the fireplace. Avery was tall, sandy-haired, fine-boned, with the thin lips and long nose of the true New England WASP. Today must have been a dress-down day; he was wearing khakis and a bright green sweater over a blue chambray shirt. “I have Glenfiddich, Black Label…”