I made my way to the wine table and helped myself to a clear plastic cup half-filled with red wine. It was sweeter than I expected. I didn’t feel like drinking the whole cup or bothering with the guilty buzz it might produce. We all had to drive home, after all.
Probably there was more satisfaction to be had upstairs. Upstairs, where for once the citation files stood alone, in the dark. Open for the taking. Promising to fill in all the hungry hollows.
I put the cup in the barrel by the door. As I reached for the door, I heard Mr. Phillips calling, “Hey, Billy … Where do you think you’re going?” But I knew he was having too much fun to come after me.
I didn’t bother to turn any
of the upstairs lights on. I preferred the peace of the darkened office. With 1951 finished, I figured Mona and I might want to begin on 1952 after Christmas Eve dinner. With our 1952 list in hand, I wandered into the cit stacks and started extracting the right
words. After I found the first fourteen in the file, there was still quite a lot of room in my backpack. The file was very forgiving, so tightly packed with words that you could take giant chunks out and the cits just snapped back into place as if nothing was missing. I took about fifteen more to complete my Santa sack.
Just as I was zipping up my backpack, the office lights came on.
“Were you working in the dark?”
I turned. It was Dan.
“Just taking a break from that party,” I explained too quickly, laying a casual hand over my enormous backpack. “I’m not so into these holiday things.”
“Me neither,” Dan said. There was a slight and unfamiliar lilt to his voice. His face was a little flushed. He’d probably had a few cups of wine. “I came up here to regroup. Something rather perplexing just happened down there.”
“Really? Something perplexing?”
“Mildly.” He shrugged.
I was about to ask him what it was when he leaned on my cubicle.
“So tell me,” he said. “Your middle name’s really Homer?”
“No. Who told you that? It was just a nickname at one time.”
Dan didn’t look surprised. “What’s your real middle name, then?”
“Benjamin.”
“Really. Mine is Scout.”
I hesitated. My heart was racing. “As in the
To Kill a Mockingbird
character?”
“No,” Dan replied slowly. “As in Cub. As in Eagle.”
I waited for a response to come to me, but none did. I got the distinct feeling that I was disappointing him somehow.
“You have plans for the holiday?” I asked, frantically improvising.
“Yes. My family is having Christmas Eve in Lenox. In the Berkshires.”
“Is that where you grew up?”
Dan nodded. “My mother still lives there. And my brother as well.”
I could have shared my own plans, but he hadn’t asked and likely didn’t care. I rummaged in my brain for some other innocuous conversational topic.
“That reminds me of a joke,” I said.
“Yes?”
“So a guy is alone for Christmas, so he goes to a diner to treat himself to a little Christmas breakfast. He orders the eggs Benedict. A little while later, the waiter brings his meal in a hubcap. He looks at it and says, ‘Hey, man. What’s with the hubcap?’ And the waiter goes—”
I flung my hand out and lowered my voice to deliver the punch line in a baritone.
“‘There’s no plate like chrome for the hollandaise.’
For a moment, Dan stood in stunned silence. Then he laughed. Not his usual parched chuckle, but a real laugh. I had a feeling it was not the punch line, exactly, that amused him.
“Very good,” he said, rubbing his eye. “Well. I don’t want to keep you. You have a good holiday, Billy.”
I headed for the library right
after saying goodbye to Dan.
Mona had found that articles about Derek Brownlow trailed off about two weeks after his death, and stopped there. I hadn’t thought to ask Tom how long it took the police to learn about Brownlow’s background, and he probably wouldn’t have remembered anyway. So I started where Mona had left off—the beginning of November 1985.
After about an hour of microfishing, I started to find the events to which Tom had referred:
Claxton Daily News
DECEMBER 12, 1985
KILLER IN OUR MIDST?
Deceased man had a criminal record
and a history of attacking women
C
LAXTON
— Derek George Brownlow, the victim of a gruesome murder in Freeman Park in October, may not have been a victim at all, according to new details released by police yesterday. Brownlow might have died while attempting to abduct a woman, police are now theorizing.
“We found some items in Mr. Brownlow’s car and apartment that forced us to reconsider our thinking on his death,” said Sgt. John Polaski, who’s leading the investigation. “And we’ve been working with several out-of-state law enforcement agencies to confirm Brownlow’s criminal record.”
Brownlow, who moved to Claxton just four months ago from Fitchtown, Pennsylvania, served seven months in county prison there in 1983 for assaulting a young woman, whom police said he had been stalking. According to court documents, Brownlow broke her arm and knocked out several of her teeth when he attempted to abduct her outside the office building where she worked.
In Brownlow’s Highland Street apartment in Claxton, police found a collection of “disturbing” pornography and evidence that may link Brownlow to other crimes, Sgt. Polaski said.
“Over the last few days, we’ve been working very closely with law enforcement officials in Mr. Brownlow’s last known residence, Wittburg, Pennsylvania. They’ve been investigating a death there, which occurred in 1979, and evidence we found here may be helpful to them,” Sgt. Polaski said during a press conference at police headquarters.
In that case, police are trying to link Brownlow to the murder of an ER nurse whose remains were found in a wooded area only a few yards from the state highway. Evidence indicated the woman had been bound with duct tape before she was stabbed to death. Hospital records indicate the woman had treated Brownlow for minor injuries just months before her death.
Claxton police found two rolls of duct tape in Brownlow’s car, Polaski said.
“Knowing that Mr. Brownlow worked for a hardware store, we didn’t realize the importance of the rolls of duct tape until we spoke with police in Wittburg,” Polaski said.
According to past reports, two witnesses told police that a young girl, probably teenaged, was walking in Freeman Park at
dusk. She entered the path just as they were leaving the park. She was described as fair-skinned, average height, with light hair.
“If that young woman saw what occurred or, heaven forbid, was involved, we would hope she would come forward and give us any details of the event,” Polaski said. “It would certainly help us in this case, but possibly also in others.”
As I neared the end of the article, a freezing sensation crept up my arms. After finishing it, I had to stand up and walk around the library for a few minutes. I paced up and down the current periodicals, scanning the magazine covers. A copy of
Bon Appétit
caught my eye, with a nice-looking shrimp scampi on its cover. But upon reaching for the magazine, I discovered my hand was shaking too hard to turn its pages. A woman in a sparkly pink sweatsuit peered up at me as I fumbled it back onto its shelf.
I sat back down but didn’t read the article again. The details were already burned into my memory, and I had trouble determining which was the creepiest of them. Probably the poor dead Pennsylvania nurse. But then there was the duct tape—that was a close second. Also Mary Anne herself, creeping by in the second-to-last paragraph. Surely she was the blonde girl in the park. Mr. Phillips had never said she was pale, but he’d mentioned she was delicate and strawberry blonde. Close enough. It was disconcerting to see her like this—just a glimpse of a girl someone barely saw. Just whispering by, and then gone.
She was so candid and emotional on paper. Why did she choose to make herself a ghost in real life? Could there really be anything at play here but self-defense? Could their encounter have been planned? Maybe they’d developed some
connection as a result of Samuelson correspondence? Maybe Brownlow had tried to trap her somehow? Or perhaps Brownlow had done something to her, and she was traumatized into silence. But then, if she wanted to stay silent, why confess at all? Even if only to the cit files?
I made a copy of the article for Mona. I’d be arriving at her place Christmas Eve with this article tucked under one arm and a bottle of red wine under the other. Now all I needed was a gift.
Once, in college, I found myself
standing behind a guy at a grocery store who was buying only two items: a dozen pink roses and a box of condoms. There’s something to be said for knowing exactly what you want to say with a gift. When it came to my obligatory gift for Mona, I had no such clarity. I wandered the mall for a couple of hours, considering and discarding gift ideas. Some little animal earrings might say,
I think you’re cute, but not in a romantic way
. A small framed Edward Hopper print might say,
I recognize your simple but sophisticated tastes
. Body Shop products could have any number of sticky possibilities, such as
I like to imagine you naked in a steaming tub of bubbles
.
I gave up and got her a couple of CDs. I’d noticed she had a pretty meager selection of music that first time I’d gone to her apartment. My final selections were
Johnny Cash’s Greatest Hits
and
Buena Vista Social Club
. Something for each Mona.
After seconds on apple-cranberry pie
(my father’s recipe), we sat together on Mona’s fancy black couch. She’d framed one of her windows with a string of twinkly lights,
so we got to unwrap each other’s gifts in its cozy white glow. Mona was looking pretty festive, with her soft red cardigan and her hair twisted up into a beaded clip. It looked like she might have been wearing eye shadow, but maybe it was just the way the light was hitting her eyelids.
After unwrapping my CDs, Mona thrust a flat, silver-wrapped box into my hands.
“I almost had a T-shirt made up for you that said
Coed Naked Wordsmithing,”
she said. “For casual Fridays.”
“What stopped you?”
“Eh. That whole ‘Coed Naked’ thing is pretty old.”
“Not for some.”
Mona tapped the box. “Well, in any case. You’re not getting one. Not from me, anyway. Open it.”
Inside the box was a pair of soft black woolen gloves. I wasn’t sure how to react to this gift. It seemed a little like the sort of thing my mother would buy for my father in an off year when she couldn’t come up with something more creative.
“I wish I was a knitter,” Mona said. “Then this present would seem a lot more thoughtful.”
“And you’d seem a lot dorkier,” I said, picking them up. “They’re nice.”
Mona watched me for a moment before asking, “Do you know why I got you these?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Because I’ve never seen you wear gloves. Even on our park bench lunches. You always look like you’re struggling to hold on to your sandwich.”
“That’s true.”
“Is it a macho thing, or—”
“No,” I said. There was no real explanation besides absent-mindedness. As the temperatures dropped, I’d meant
to buy a hat and gloves, maybe a scarf. In the strained effort to transform myself into a functioning workaday adult, I hadn’t gotten everything in order yet. It was hard enough to get up at six every morning and put the garbage out on Thursdays. Details were often overlooked: flossing, hygienic storage of leftovers, getting my emissions checked. I didn’t know whether to regard Mona’s observant eye with gratitude or irritation.
Johnny Cash serenaded us. I admired my woolly black hands.
“I have something else for you,” I told her. “Not exactly a present, though.”
I went to the kitchen and got the article out of my jacket.
“Our mystery’s just about solved, I think,” I said, handing it to her.
Mona read through the article, punctuating nearly every paragraph with a little gasp.
“Wow,” she said, looking up. Her face had gone pale. “Probably Mary Anne did it.”
“It sure sounds like it,” I said. “But then why didn’t she come forward? I mean, if it was self-defense?”
“Lots of reasons, probably. Remember how she said she didn’t trust policemen? Maybe she didn’t think they’d believe it was self-defense.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Can’t you just see the headlines?
‘Word Nerd Defines “Vigilante Justice.” ’
I mean, maybe she was terrified of a media circus.”
“But if she was just defending herself, then she had nothing to be ashamed of,” I pointed out. “Right?”
“I guess we don’t really know that for sure, do we?” Mona said softly. “We don’t have all the pieces yet. Maybe there’s
a piece that makes her culpable in some way. Maybe just some small piece that made her doubt she could plead self-defense.”
Johnny Cash was crooning a sad song now. I squinted at the square of Christmas lights around Mona’s window.
Some small piece
. Seemed reasonable, but I didn’t see where such a piece would fit in with everything we already knew. Everything we knew pointed at self-defense.
“But then, maybe she just didn’t see it as anyone’s business,” Mona suggested. “Brownlow was dead. He couldn’t hurt anyone else anymore, whether Mary Anne went public or not. What would be the point of confessing?”
“I guess there wouldn’t be a
point
, sure. It just seems like what most normal, law-abiding folks would do. Help the police out. Get it off your chest. Put everyone’s mind at ease. Then try to move on with your life.”
Mona sighed, tossed the article onto the couch next to me, and then started picking nervously at the cuff of her elegant red cardigan. “I don’t know. This whole thing is
crazy
.”
We sat in silence. After a few minutes, I started to hear a gentle tearing sound. She was yanking at a knotted thread on the edge of her cuff.