Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript (9 page)

The End

The End? Already? I sighed. Okay, so it was a little over the top. Quite a bit over the top, actually. But, oh, to be Kit Danger, bold, and brave, and strong.

I rose from the chair and went into the kitchen to start the chili for supper. I wondered how much of Kit Danger there was in Sunnye Hardcastle. I wondered if there was any in me.

Chapter Eight

I worried about Amanda, but she rallied after a few days at home and returned to school on Sunday. Wednesday, opening day, I was free to slip into conference mode. I drove to campus under a lowering sky experiencing the usual pre-conference combination of excitement and dread. An academic gathering is something like a carnival. A participant steps outside of her daily identity, for one brief shining moment divorced from her daily self: appearance, personal history, even course load. She is “Woman Thinking,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson might have phrased it, would he not have considered such a statement to be a contradiction in terms.

In the coffee shop Claudia Nestor passed me carrying a tray with two chocolate glazed doughnuts and a mug of milky-white coffee. “So the big day is finally here,” I said. “How’re things going?”

“Diversionary modes of occluding the class binaries,” she muttered.

“Claudia?”

“Held hostage to fashionable political and theoretical agendas,” she hissed.

“Claudia?” She neither saw nor heard me.
Dear God
, I pleaded,
just let her make it through the conference with her sanity at least semi-intact
.

And mine, too, after God knows how many hours as Sunnye Hardcastle’s escort.

Miles Jewell, English Department chair since God was a boy, stopped me as I approached Dickinson Hall juggling my briefcase, a large coffee, and an egg-and-bacon sandwich in a white paper bag. He was well protected from the frigid weather in a grey wool overcoat, a crimson scarf with the Harvard insignia in white, and the kind of brimmed felt hat I think is still called a fedora.

“Karen, what’s this I hear about you canceling a class today?” His thick white hair flopped over his thick white eyebrows.

A chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the weather. I’d deep-sixed my freshman class that afternoon because of the conference. “The opening reception is at four o’clock.”

He frowned. “Opening reception of
what
?”

“Of the crime fiction conference. I’m serving as escort for our guest of honor, Sunnye Hardcastle.”

“Oh, Women’s Studies. I suppose…Well, just don’t make a habit of it, Karen. Teaching comes first. And remember,” he said vaguely, as he wandered off, “your tenure decision comes up next year….”

The chill migrated to the pit of my stomach:
Bastard! “Remember your tenure decision,” indeed! As if I could forget it! Asshole! Pompous son of a bitch!

My conference paper was completely drafted but needed fine-tuning. I thought I’d take the morning to slash clichés that had weaseled their way in despite my vigilance:
gender binaries; cultural construction of identity; patriarchal power structures
. I assumed that by four o’clock I’d have this sucker honed to a razor point, ready for a knock-em-dead delivery first thing tomorrow morning.

Peggy Briggs was seated on the floor outside my door.
No, Peggy
, I thought.
Not now!
She saw me and slapped shut her dog-eared paperback, sliding it into her canvas backpack. “I know you don’t have office hours today, Professor,” she ventured, levering herself up. “But I hope it’s okay for me to talk to you.”

I swallowed my sigh; there went a prime chunk of revision time. “It’s fine, Peggy. Come on in.”

She shifted her backpack from one hand to the other. “I work in the library every day until just before my classes. It’s hard to make your regular hours.”

“It’s all right. Really.” I dumped bag, briefcase, and coffee cup and hung my coat on the rack. Peggy sat down on the green chair, on the very edge of the seat, as if she felt she had no right to occupy the entire space. She wore a royal-blue ski jacket, the down kind with rows of horizontal stitching every three inches, and the puffy strips bulked out her already stocky body.

“I want to apologize for missing class yesterday, Professor,” she said. “You see…I fell asleep in the closed stacks.” That was as honest an excuse as I’d ever gotten from a student:
I fell asleep in the closed stacks
. No dead grandmothers. No life-threatening gynecological symptoms. And, indeed, as always, Peggy did appear exhausted, her skin pasty, dark circles beneath her eyes.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. I’m a patsy for a student’s hard-luck tale. “It could happen to anyone.”

Peggy began to say something further, hesitated, then gathered up her courage. “I don’t know what you know about me?”

I couldn’t imagine an opening like that leading to anything I wanted to hear. I tried to swallow yet another sigh. “Why don’t you tell me what I need to know.”

The plastic coffee-cup lid resisted my fingertips. I cast a yearning glance at my briefcase.

Peggy balanced on the six inches of chair she had allowed herself. “Five years ago my twin sister Megan was murdered by her boyfriend.”

“Oh, Peggy!” The top popped off the cup. I forgot about Miles’ vague threat. I forgot about the speech.

My student’s eyes brimmed with tears. “He was abusing her. One week she’d have a split lip, the next, a black eye. Once he even broke her arm. I kept trying to get her to leave, but she was so afraid of him. Said he’d kill her if she left. Finally I found a battered-women’s center and talked Megan into going to their safe house. He tracked her down. He shot my sister right in front of her four-year-old daughter. She died on the spot.”

“I’m so sorry!” Suddenly Peggy’s outbursts in class began to make sense. Of course the literary exploitation of violence would disgust her.

She was practically whispering now. “I keep thinking that if Megan hadn’t listened to me, she’d be alive today.”

“Peggy, there was no way you could have known.”

That seemed to be what she wanted to hear. She slid back in the chair and let her body slump. “It changed my life, Megan’s death—working with the Women’s Center, talking to the cops, testifying at the trial. I was so angry. I missed Megan so damn much, and…what was worse, I was terrified I’d go down the same road myself one day. So I…I got some help. Then I decided to become a social worker. Things haven’t been easy, but I got through Greenfield Community College, and I’m going to make it here at Enfield.”

“Of course you are.” At that moment I identified so strongly with my student that I had her already graduated—with an M.S.W. to boot.

“It’s just that, you know, the bit about missing class…I was never in one of your courses before, and I don’t want you to think I…well…have a problem with it or anything. Especially after I…well, you know.” Yes, it made sense now: the hysteria during Sunnye Hardcastle’s visit, the strange eruption of anger in seminar. All were Peggy’s response to what she must perceive as trivialization of tragedy. What had she said in class? Something about murder in real life not being entertaining or amusing, but “brutal and sordid.”

She sighed, looked down at her intertwined fingers. “I’m tired, is all. I carry a full load of courses. I have custody of Megan’s daughter, Triste. I have a work-study job fifteen hours a week in the library. On weekends I tend bar at Moccio’s. To top it all off, we live with my mother in Durham Mills. In her house. With her husband.” She tightened her lips. Something wasn’t being said. “It’s not easy, Professor, but I’m going to make it. For Megan’s sake—and for Triste.”

She rose from the chair and hefted her bulging backpack. A small stuffed animal was attached to one strap, a grungy old Pink Panther. It had been a while since I’d seen one of those. She caught me looking at it. “It was Megan’s,” she said.

“Oh,” I replied. Here was someone who faced serious life challenges, not simply a department chairman’s absent-minded admonitions. Sexual harassment guidelines prohibit us from touching students, but I gave her a squeeze on the arm. “Don’t worry about missing the class, Peggy. And try to get some rest.”

***

When I realized that I’d read
patriarchal power structure
twice in contiguous sentences without deleting either, I knew I had to pay closer attention to my revision. But I couldn’t help brooding about Peggy Briggs and her quest for a better life. I’d have to find some way to let my student know she could count on me. But for what? To give her advice? To cut her some slack? To listen when she needed a sympathetic ear?

Soon I had the talk in decent shape, except for one publication date about which I was uncertain. I trudged over to Special Collections to check it at the source. Bob Tooey was at his usual place in a baby-blue sweater that seemed to have shrunk in the wash, pulling tight across his shoulders and upper arms. As Nellie placed the requested book in front of me, with a sidelong glance at the little researcher, my eyes adjusted. It wasn’t that Tooey’s sweater had shrunk, it was that the little man was really built. I hadn’t noticed that before: a short, plain-looking guy, but with the upper-body definition of an Olympic gymnast. Surprisingly powerful looking. I stared at him for a few seconds, then caught myself. I checked the date I was looking for, and went back to the office.

***

“I told you I’d be seeing you.” I glanced up from the computer monitor, startled. Dennis O’Hanlon stood in my office doorway. He was wearing an olive drab trench coat of some fashionable crinkly fabric, and looked just as out of place in the Enfield English Department as he had at the Lowell High reunion.

“Dennis? What the hell are you doing here?”

“Don’t get up,” he ordered, closing the door quietly. He pulled over one of the captain’s chairs and sat down, practically knee-to-knee with me. He looked me in the eye, straight on. In the light coming from the tall window I could see what the dim illumination of the Lowell Doubletree bar hadn’t revealed, a straight white scar running from the corner of his right eye across his temple and disappearing in the curly ginger hair. “Karen, I need a favor,” my visitor said.

“A favor? What kind of favor?”

He reached in his coat pocket, removed a cigar case, tipped out a fat brown cigar. “I need you not to know me.”

“What are you talking about?
Not to know you
?” This was just a little too much like a TV police drama. “And what are you doing at Enfield anyhow? And what the hell—”

“I told Mitchell this wasn’t gonna be easy.” He clipped off the end of the cigar, returned the case to his pocket, and retrieved a silver lighter.

“Mitchell?” That stopped me cold. “You mean Avery?”

“Avery Mitchell. President of Enfield College. Right.
That
Mitchell. Your boss. My client. I told you I was a P.I., didn’t I.” He tilted the unlit cigar in my direction. “You don’t mind, do you?” The flame flicked to the cigar’s tip before I could respond. He took a drag, then studied the incipient coal. “You see, Karen, I’m on a case, and in pursuit of the investigation I’m attending your crime-fiction conference. Undercover.”

I gaped at him. “An undercover scholar! You’ve got to be kidding!”

“Undercover
as
a scholar,” he corrected me. “There’ll be so many professors on campus for the conference, no one will notice one more new face. That gives me a perfect opportunity to hang out, talk to people, get the lay of the land. Only, I need you…not to know me.” He leaned back, took another deep drag, let out a slow, thin stream of smoke. In spite of myself I inhaled deeply. The smoke smelled warm and strong and masculine. The smoker exuded an air of sensuality powerful enough to make my skin tingle.
God!
What was the matter with me? This was grungy little Denny O’Hanlon.

I looked out the window, away from Dennis. The campus was at its most dismal: bare branches, denuded lawns, cold, hard sky. Students on their way to classes hurried by, hands in pockets, heads bowed against the invisible wind.
Snow before lunchtime
, I thought.
Late March, and this winter refuses to end
.

Dennis sat very still, watching me with sea-glass eyes. His red-blond hair sprang into sleek waves in spite of the ruthlessly short cut. He looked like a street-bred tabby cat.

“Avery, you say?” I recalled the conversation in the President’s office. Avery had talked about stolen books. He had mentioned taking
drastic steps
. For a classy institution such as Enfield, engaging a private investigator would indeed constitute a drastic step. Despite nods in the direction of social equality, Enfield College represented the entrenched values, interests, and institutions of the rich. Dennis was a Lowell street kid. I could easily imagine him, like Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, snarling, “To hell with the rich!” I was intrigued by the paradox. “Avery?” I repeated.