A Fugitive Truth (16 page)

A thought, an incredibly distressing one, hit me between the eyes. “Oh, my God. The library!”

She looked doubtful. “Hide the diary in the library? Wouldn’t that be dangerous?”

“It would blend right in,” I said. “What better place to hide a needle than in a haystack?”

We both slumped; she knew as well as I did that going through all those shelves could easily take days and that we’d be cross-eyed at the end of it. “All right, we’ll go have a look around the reference room,” Pam Kobrinski conceded reluctantly. “You have to admit though, it takes balls to hide something in plain sight.”

I had been staring right at the Victorian desk when the detective said that, and a second brainwave, stronger and truer than the first, hit. “What did you say?”

The detective misunderstood me. “Okay,
guts
, it takes a lot of
guts
to hide something in plain sight. That better? This political correctness thing is a real pain in the—”

“No, no not—” I shook my head; she’d misunderstood me. “Just hang on a minute. The diary’s not in the library. I know where it is.” I crossed the room.

The detective folded her arms across her chest, clearly annoyed by my changeability. “Well?”

“It’s just when you said, ‘hiding in plain sight,’ you reminded me of something I heard in a class a long time ago,” I murmured, almost to myself, as I gazed at the old desk. “A class about decorative arts. In particular, the lecture on nineteenth-century furniture.”

“Huh? There’s nothing in the desk, I already looked,” she said impatiently. “I even looked under the drawers, behind the damn thing. It’s not there. We don’t even know if another diary
exists
.”

“Yes we do, and I know where it is. Faith wouldn’t let her diary get too far away from her, particularly not if it had something important in it.” I pulled down the drop front again and tried pushing one ornate panel at the back of the desk. Nothing happened. “You see, the Victorians loved tricks, secrets, hidden meanings.” I tried poking a beautifully carved section of vine. Nothing there. “‘Springes to catch woodcocks.’”

“You think there’s a secret panel,” the detective sergeant said, doubtful.

“I know there is.” I opened the door to a little cubbyhole in the center of the desk and pressed the back, but to no avail. “At one point, I had a pretty good idea of where the secret compartment was located in most of these old desks. That was a long time ago, though. I could have sworn it would be at the back of that cubby. That’s what’s speaking to me.” I peered at some ornate tracery, trying to distinguish a crack or a hinge. “Come on, where are you?”

Stepping back, I tried to look for the obvious that wasn’t obvious. I kept coming back to that little door. And then I smiled triumphantly, reached forward, and pulled at the decorative wooden pilaster on the right side of the door. It slid out easily, the linear decoration concealing the fact that the column was just the front of a tall, narrow drawer. It was empty, but as the detective stepped forward eagerly, I pulled out the left column and inside was a small, modern exercise book with the date January 15, 2003 written on the front of it.

“Faith took that class too,” I said.

I handed the detective the diary feeling distinctly smug; she hadn’t been able to find it. But to my amazement, she only put the diary in a plastic evidence bag.

“Hey, aren’t you even going to take a look at it?” How would you feel if you handed someone a light blue box from Tiffany’s and they just chucked it into a closet?

“It’s got to go through the lab first,” she said. “Then we’ll both—”

She was interrupted when we heard someone pounding up the stairs and a crash out in the hall. We started out of the room to investigate, when Michael stumbled into the doorway.

“I…I found him. I found Jack,” he gasped. He was sweating, pale, and breathing heavily, obviously distressed.

“Where?” we asked simultaneously.

But I almost knew the answer even as he said it. A prickle ran down my spine and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

Michael looked like he was ready to faint. “In the gazebo. I think he’s dead.”

T
HERE WAS
J
ACK, LYING SLUMPED AGAINST THE
latticework railing of the gazebo, just as Michael had described. The three of us drove over in Detective Kobrinski’s car after she called for the EMTs and crime scene squad. We paused a moment after we arrived, all for different reasons, I suppose. I faltered at the stairs because I was waiting for the joke to be exposed, waiting for Jack to jump up and shout “Gotcha!” and for him to congratulate Michael on a well-executed gag, even though I knew that would never happen, no matter how much I wished it would. I saw Detective Kobrinski hesitate to glance quickly over the weathered wooden floor before she walked on it, presumably for any clues as to the cause of Jack’s death, because it seemed to me that anyone could tell just from looking that he
was
dead. Michael, for his part, never even climbed the stairs leading up to the gazebo. He just waited at the foot, looking in any direction but ours, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat. It looked like he was trying to keep his face blank, but I noticed the strain of queasiness across his features.

When I finally walked around the gazebo, I could see that Jack was wearing his usual dark blue janitor pants and his gray duffel coat, which was unbuttoned, exposing a frayed pale blue dress shirt and a couple of sweaters. His headphones on his head, the tape player almost falling out of his coat pocket, just the way I’d always seen it when he was alive, and Jack looked for all the world like he’d just decided to hang out in the gazebo and listen to his tapes. In one hand, he still clutched an empty whiskey bottle, and based on the faint smell coming from the body, not much of it had been emptied by spilling or evaporation. Jack had been on a world-class bender.

I looked at his face even before I could decide whether I really wanted to. It was now trapped in a permanent grimace, the sort of face he had made before when I spoke of exercise or archaeology. One difference was that there was a distinct bluish tinge to his exposed skin and particularly to his lips that I couldn’t attribute to the dying light of the afternoon. The other was that a thick rope of dark vomit had crusted down his chin from the corner of his mouth. I looked away hurriedly.

“Looks like he froze to death, or maybe he choked,” Detective Kobrinski said, echoing my own thoughts as she squatted down beside him. She was looking intently, but still didn’t touch anything.

I had a quick flashback to last Thursday, when she was looking at Faith just the same way. That thought reminded me of just how much was happening around me, and I quickly shoved it aside. “I don’t think he could have been out here since Friday or Saturday, though, could he?”

Kobrinski looked at me and frowned in a “Who the hell invited you?” fashion, before she answered, more politely than I expected. “You would have seen him before, wouldn’t you, when you came by here since then, right? Hey,” she called to Michael, who was shuffling through the pebbles around the base of the gazebo, “when was the last time you saw Mr. Miner here alive?”

“Friday, I guess,” he said slowly, as he traced a pattern with his toe. “No, wait, maybe it was Saturday?”

“But Saturday was the day you went into Boston early,” I pointed out. “I heard him in the bathroom. Did you see him before you left?”

“Maybe it was Friday,” Michael corrected himself hurriedly. “I didn’t see him all weekend after that.”

“Well, do you if know if he was gone the whole time?” I persisted. “I couldn’t tell if he was just avoiding me because of our little to-do.”

“I said”—he scuffed out his pebble lines impatiently—“I haven’t seen him all weekend.”

“Do you have any idea where he might have gone?” Even though I could tell I was irritating him, I just couldn’t stop asking the questions that popped unbidden into my head. “Hey, wait a second! I didn’t hear him slamming around in the bathroom this morning! Did you?”

Michael finally looked up at me. “What kind of ghoul are you?” He stared in revulsion. “I mean, how can you ask if I heard Jack taking a piss this morning, when he’s lying there like…like…fuck it! Like a piece of meat!”

“Hey Michael, come on! There’s no need to be like that,” I said. “I’m just trying—”

But Michael just scowled, batted a hand dismissively at me, and stalked off across the field, following the stream road back toward the house. His overcoat flapped around his heels like a faithful dog.

I stared after him and called, “Hey, wait a minute!”

“Umm, Emma—”

“Where’s he going?” I asked, turning to Pam Kobrinski, who was watching the exchange. “We need to figure out—”

“Say, here’s an idea,” the detective offered lightly. “How about you ask me your questions, and I’ll deal with everyone else?”

“What do you mean?” Her mild criticism on top of Michael’s stung more than I expected. “I was just—”

“I know you were just.” Kobrinski sat back on her heels. “I think things will work out better if you focus on observing and I’ll do the interrogating.”

“I wasn’t interrogating,” I insisted. “I was just asking Michael some questions.”

“Still.” She paused to hook her bangs out of her eyes with a pinkie. “We’ll start at the beginning. Let’s have a look at Mr. Miner here and try to decide just how he died.”

The discussion was closed. She’d let me off very gently, but it didn’t help much.

I took a deep breath. “Well, he could have been drinking and then passed out and froze to death, right?”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “Seems to be lots of alcohol flowing around this place. There was a high, but not legally intoxicating, amount of alcohol present in Ms. Morgan’s blood.”

“Jack was worse than most, though,” I pointed out. “He’d been drinking steadily and more heavily ever since I found Faith, and he was pretty much in the bag every night before that, according to Michael. As far as I could tell, it was a regular ritual.”

“So this isn’t inconsistent with previous behavior.”

“But the fact that he’s outdoors,” I said. “That is.”

Detective Kobrinski grunted. “And we need to know how long he was here.”

“Won’t the autopsy help with that?” I couldn’t help shivering, not only because the sun was going down and the wind was picking up, but also because I thought of the glee with which a certain medical examiner would have tackled the problem.

“Maybe. Might even tell us if it was alcohol poisoning and not the cold, if he drank enough. But again, as with Ms. Morgan, it’s going to be difficult to determine the time of death with the cold weather the way it is, altering rigor.” Detective Kobrinski gently prodded Jack’s arm. “You didn’t notice him this morning or this afternoon, right?”

“Right. You know, I can’t imagine what would have brought Jack out here. He hated the cold, he hated the idea of exercise, and his car’s back at the residence.”

Kobrinski looked up. “Interesting.”

The dying light reflected off Jack’s Walkman in a peculiar fashion, giving me another idea. “What about the batteries? He used the rechargeable sort, there was always a set charging in the kitchen. That might help with time of death.”

“Maybe. Hang on a second.” The detective took the pencil out of her little spiral-bound notebook. “He used these all the time?”

“Between that and the scotch, it was like Jack was trying to block out as much of the world as possible,” I said. Suddenly I couldn’t look at the face of the sad little man and focused on the Walkman.

“The radio?” She moved the portable stereo a little with the pencil, to better look at it.

“No. It was almost always tapes. Fake jazz, that sort of thing. Always cranked way up. Why?”

“The tapes would use up the batteries faster.”

“Oh. Of course.” The odd light attracted my attention again and this time I knew why. “Could I borrow that a second?”

She handed me the pencil and I reached over and pressed the eject button with the pencil eraser.

We could both see it then. Jack was wearing his headphones, but there was no tape in the cassette player.

“Still, it doesn’t mean it was murder…” the detective mused.

“Huh? Who would want to murder Jack?” I stammered, not thinking.

Pam Kobrinski sighed and looked about a million years old. “Who’d want to murder anyone? You’d be surprised at what would prompt someone to kill someone else. It doesn’t take much, I’m sorry to say. But you gave me a motive yourself this morning.”

“Me?” My mind raced back to our breakfast meeting and screened the possibilities, until one hit me right between the eyes. “Oh, my God. The note.”

“Right. The note that Jack left for you in the library. Where, as far as I can tell, almost anyone could have seen it. It said that Jack knew something and was going to tell.” She stood up and stretched casually, but looked tense.

“But…but…the note. The note was on my desk. What if…what if…?” My words trailed off even as my imagination, as overfed as it had been in the last week, took off like a greyhound, haring after the worst possible conclusion.

“What if whoever saw the note,
if
someone saw the note, thinks Jack also spoke to you?” The detective had trouble concealing her unease. “I’m afraid we can’t rule out that possibility.”

Everyone was remarkably tolerant of me, not asking me to move off the bottom step where I had sunk down until they actually had to. They finally removed Jack’s body, hauling it off in the bag on the gurney forty minutes later. At the news that he might have been murdered and that now it might be a good idea for
me
to be worried too, I’d sort of collapsed in on myself, head on my knees, arms wrapped over my head, willing everything to just go away. Flashbulbs flared, notes were taken, the surrounding ground searched, little puffs of breath hanging in the air around Pam Kobrinski and a State Police officer and the ambulance EMTs who showed up promptly. But I was oblivious to it all. While it was still possible that Jack hadn’t been murdered, that he’d just forgotten a tape in his drunken stupor and succumbed to the cold, I didn’t think so. It was too big a coincidence after Faith’s death. Something horrible was going on at Shrewsbury, and I was no longer just on the edge of it all; it was moving closer and closer, threatening to envelop me.

“I think we’re done here, for tonight,” Kobrinski said. She was rubbing her hands together trying to warm up. “C’mon, I’ll give you a lift back. I’m going back to the house to have a look at his room now.”

The thought of being cooped up in the car even for the half a minute it would take to get back to the house was utterly abhorrent to me. I shook my head. “No thanks, I need to stretch a bit, warm up. I’ll walk back, see you in a minute.”

“You sure?” she asked impatiently; she didn’t really have time to mess with me. “It’s getting pretty cold out here.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t tell her I wasn’t certain I could even face being back in the house, closed up alone with my thoughts. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

“Okay.” She looked doubtful. “I’ll need the note, if you’ve still got it.”

“I think it’s in my wool jacket. I’ll check.”

The detective peered at me. “You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Don’t dawdle. It’s going to be a long night for us all.”

I nodded and watched her pull down the road, headlights on even though there was still a little light left in the deepening dusk. And as soon as her car pulled around the bend, out of sight, I knew I should have accepted the ride.

I was overwhelmed with the most extraordinary sensation of isolation. I felt exposed, on the edge of the woods at the foot of the mountains in the middle of nowhere, with nothing for miles around but me and spiraling catastrophe. I could see the glow of ambient light from Monroe blinking on against the pinkish blue and black of the gloaming, and it only increased the profound pall of loneliness. The dark obliterated any trace of the emerging spring, and all I could see were the ghostly branches that rocked in the cold wind. A single star appeared, winking palely, watching with a distant chilly light.

I want to go home, I thought miserably. I want Brian. I want to hide under the blankets until this all goes away. Thoughts of familiar things and the security of them sent a pang of longing through me. Even Quasi, the feline Prince of Darkness, would be a welcome sight.

But it was the thought of the cat’s disinterested malevolence that actually changed my mind and bucked me up. I got up from the gazebo steps to think it through. If I was being completely honest, it was impossible for me to leave now. I simply couldn’t desert Madam Chandler. It was though I had a physical craving to find out what happened during the trial to save her from being hanged. There was no way I could abandon the diary, not with the letters about to be released from conservation, not with the transcript of the trial about to arrive at any moment. I’d be throwing away half of my evidence by leaving the diary
itself
unstudied. Who knew what information would be revealed in the fabric of the diary itself? Perhaps by a closer examination of the pages and binding, something would be revealed to me. I needed all of the diary’s clues to crack the code. I started to walk.

Brian might categorize this decision—and I realized in that instant, it was a decision to stay—as “exciting,” or worse. I wasn’t too sure how bright it was myself. I just knew that I was as close as anyone had been to finding out the truth about her journal and the trial. Call it instinct or call it conceit, I needed to stick it out for Margaret.

There was another thing, too. I couldn’t do anything about what had happened to Faith or Jack, but I could sure as hell try and help find out what had gotten them both killed. Kobrinski was right: I had access.

I hadn’t changed a thing except myself, but it was surprising what a difference that made. I was still only dealing with speculation, there was no real reason yet to think that Jack had been murdered. And if he hadn’t been, then I had nothing to worry about, really. And we’d find out what happened to Faith, I was willing to bet, now that we had her diary.

As I came around the bend to the final stretch of the road leading to the front of the house, I realized that someone—not Detective Kobrinski—was leaning in to the front seat of her car. It took a moment before I realized that this wasn’t right.