A Fugitive Truth (24 page)

The last letter was from Margaret, and while I was let down that it did not have any news about the trial, I should have remembered that nothing ever works out the way you expect in historical research. I’d had so much luck so far, it seemed greedy to want more—but it was the only really crucial part of the mystery I didn’t yet understand.

I flipped back and forth through the letters. There was no way to get around it: I wasn’t going to find out about the trial from anything here at Shrewsbury. As disappointed as I was about the trial, I had to admit that what I found instead was a little jewel. Madam Chandler announced the imminent arrival of her first child with a mixture of pride and playful triumph, but I noticed a little nervousness worked in amongst her remarks about Justice Chandler’s reaction and her careless mention of her good health. Besides death by fire, mostly suffered from working stooped over in an open hearth with long skirts, childbirth was the leading cause of death for women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Faced with that knowledge, I might have been a little skittish myself. That reminded me that I should call Marty to see how she was doing.

I checked my genealogical notes and found that she had been safely delivered of this child, and had seven more who survived to adulthood—quite an impressive feat for the time. Again I was struck by the irony of already knowing all the answers to the questions Margaret would have had about her life even as I was trying to piece together the shape of the quotidian existence she knew so well. For a moment I wished there was some way that I could reassure her that everything would turn out well, but then suffered a pang when I realized that Margaret had been dead for more than two hundred years and I would never get to meet her. It was difficult, at times, to remember that this research was a journey that I would make on my own, with no one to greet me at the end and confirm my conclusions. I alone was responsible for breathing life back into Margaret’s story.

At the same time, I knew that I was coming to a kind of crossroads in my own life and wished someone might give me a few answers to that story too. I shook myself and returned to my work.

Her cousin Daphne seems to have been a central character in that story—her name showed up often enough in the diary and her own hand revealed much of the truth at which Margaret hinted in her journal. Daphne Mainwaring obviously fancied herself the coming family matriarch and was what P. G. Wodehouse might have described as “acutely alive to the existence of class distinctions.” For all her bluster and her posturing, however, I got the impression that she was goodhearted, though, and her remarks about the “trifels” she sent to Margaret and her wish for her return almost balanced her obvious desire to be the center of attention and the bearer of any news. Almost. That line about Margaret’s “thotlessness” was a pip. It was possible too that she wrote in jest—for all of her refusals about their wager, I noticed that Margaret still told her what she wanted for a prize; there might well be something more between them than the light tone of her letters suggested. And there must have been something in Daphne to have attracted such a series of husbands. Good grief, I had enough trouble just keeping up with one, never mind four in a row. She certainly didn’t have any of the stereotypical widow’s troubles in remarrying. I’d have to look into Daphne’s life a little further.

It was that thought about historical realities that reminded me that I needed to get to work on my presentation for Monday—just five days away, now, and I would have to work through the coming weekend. I gathered up my computer and notes and carefully replaced the letters in the folder, set them on Sasha’s desk, and returned to the house.

Michael was nowhere to be seen: good. It made it that much easier to ignore my growing concerns about him—for the moment. I made a couple of sandwiches, grabbed a carton of orange juice, and headed upstairs to get to work.

I started sketching out an outline for the talk. Sasha had said about fifty minutes, so that meant about twenty pages if I read formally, or about five outlined pages if I were more casual about it. A little bit about my work on the archaeology of the Chandler house, which presumably was their new one, a little about other famous diarists—better throw in a little about Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and her work on Martha Ballard, to get the point across about the importance of scrutinizing even seemingly banal details as well as the relevance of women’s lives.

The sound of the ringing phone scared the hell out of me. I thought about ignoring it, but habit got the better of me. It was Pam Kobrinski, and she didn’t have good news.

“I have to release Gary Conner,” she announced briefly. “I thought you should know.”

My heart sank. I hadn’t realized until just then how much I had been counting on his being guilty, even though I didn’t think much of him as a suspect. “Why?”

“His fingerprints were found only on one of the books in his locker.”

“The encyclopedia,” I said.

“Right. How did you know that?” Kobrinski asked.

“I couldn’t see Gary digging into the Puritan theories of praxis. What about other people’s prints?”

“Not any we can identify. Some old ones of Harry Saunders, but that’s to be expected.”

“No one else’s?” I asked, then made myself say what I was thinking. “Were there any of, y’know, Michael Glass-cock’s?”

“No, why? Ah, because he was the one who happened to observe all this,” the detective answered her own question. “No, none of his. The others, the religious ones, had blurs and partials, and none of them looked too fresh. Gary maintains he’s innocent, and we couldn’t find a damned thing in his apartment to suggest that he’s not. He finally admitted that he did take something off the victim’s body—”

“What was it?

“Two twenty dollar bills.” She shrugged. “I think I believe him, he’s real scared now, but there’s not a lot I can do to prove that now. Constantino isn’t interested in prosecuting on the strength of an encyclopedia—hell, he’s taking Gary’s side, saying he was just looking something up. I called because…because I thought you’d want to know.”

The way she said that reminded me of the rage that possessed Gary on his way out of the library. A little shiver ran down my spine, and I decided that I wouldn’t want to bump into him on a dark street. “Thanks for the warning.”

There was a longish pause. “That’s not the only bad news. Legally, I’m also about three seconds away from having to release Paul Burnes. He’ll probably go this afternoon.”

I gasped and she continued, angrily. “There’s not much I can do. At this point, it looks like he was on the plane at the time when his wife was murdered. I’ve got him until I can get a definite statement from the airline and from our ME, Dr. Bambury, but that’s it. Damn it, every time I get close to something in this case, it evaporates into nothing. People were killed, I’ve got leads—then—nothing!”

I had to agree, thinking about Paul’s disturbing behavior in the interrogation room and my own sensation of being Alice in an overturned world. “Everything looks like the opposite of what it is. Smoke and mirrors.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Like the first time in history the guy who beats his wife isn’t the best suspect for killing her. And it happens on my watch. Any defense lawyer in the country would eat it up with a spoon, anyone else I bring in for this. I don’t know what else to do and I’m running out of options.”

She sounded so frustrated that it was more out of a sense of pity than having any real solution that I made the offer. “Why not meet with me tomorrow? We can talk about other options.”

I could hear paper ripping on the other end of the line and presently heard the munch of Tums as the detective mulled it over. “What other options? There are no other options.”

“I’ll try to dredge up some other ideas. Just blue-sky. What can it hurt?”

She sounded resigned and unconvinced. “Why not? I’m not getting anywhere fast at the moment. Make it breakfast early tomorrow?”

I shuddered. “Make it lunch. I had a late night last night. And the night before.”

“What are you working on there, anyway?” she asked. “I mean, officially?”

“Journal of an eighteenth-century woman. Actually, she was caught up in a murder too, and when it was all over, she said, ‘The truth is more than a sum of facts.’”

“Smart lady,” the detective said.

I barely heard her. Suddenly, there was a roaring in my ears, brought on by the force of the idea that I’d just had. If I’d been a Zen student getting whacked in the head by an irritated monk, the impact couldn’t have been any more sharp or illuminating. Unfortunately, the notion that just occurred to me was as terrifying as it was sudden and irresistible.

“Why don’t you come hear my presentation on Monday? I’m suddenly struck by a number of parallels between my research and this case that I think you’ll find interesting. I’m also betting that there’ll be one other person in the audience who’ll be impressed by the similarities as well. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow, but for now, I may have a plan to flush out the killer!”

I
RESOLUTELY WENT BACK TO MY ROOM, DETERMINED
to continue framing my paper for the presentation on Monday, but despite my resolution it wouldn’t happen. Not a damned word. I stared at the screen. I thought about making another sandwich. I considered going for a run. Nothing. My heart just wasn’t in my lecture notes now, and my brain was entirely elsewhere.

I realized that I’d been landlocked for too long. As much as I loved the library, I needed to see some landscape a little more lively than that on the estate. Water, if possible, deeper than wading depth. I needed to get out of there altogether, truth be told. I’d already told some friends at a local historical society that I’d be by for a visit at some point, and that trip would expand my horizons for the afternoon, at least. I left a note on the table, the phone rang; it was Sasha asking if I was okay, because I hadn’t shown up. I told her my plans and got into the car.

As I drove farther away from the complex, losing myself on the highway, I felt as though a weight was falling from me; not only had my horizons been limited by the trees and buildings of Shrewsbury, but my spirit had been bound up by the place as well. It was almost as though I hadn’t taken a good deep breath in weeks, something that felt too much like distress, as opposed to plain old common or garden variety stress.

And speaking of stress…Ol’ Bessy made an uncomfortable grinding sound as I shifted gears going up another foothill. It wasn’t so bad the next time, but it persisted nonetheless. All of this gearwork was taking its toll on her, and this time I was convinced that there wasn’t going to be a nice, cheap quick fix for whatever was making that noise. It sounded terminal. I didn’t see any lights go on, and I had checked all the fluids repeatedly since I’d come out here, but I got the impression that if I made it through this trip, I’d be lucky.

It was fortunate that the last unkind hill had brought me within level distance of my destination, the Redfield County Historic District. My friends Nell and Chris were in charge there; having started out years ago as the archaeological component of the visitor center’s crew of six, dwindling funds and increasing cutbacks insured that they now covered everything including geology, history, natural history, and, occasionally, archaeological fieldwork. Still, they were happy about it; the schools who perennially dropped off thousands of students from all over the state were happy about it, and they just kept crossing their fingers every time budget time came around.

The visitor center was an ugly, squat concrete building that was meant to look exciting and modern but only managed to look like a bunker, stark and hideously out of place against its wooded location. The last hopeful gasp before the funds dried up in the 1980s, the building was just one story tall, with long banks of windows that afforded good views of the outside.

I pulled into the parking lot, recently repaved to repair the damage from the frost heaves. It was a patchwork quilt of filled-in potholes, the tar stained with salt like the edge of a margarita glass. I found myself noticing, out of habit, which ones overlay others and were therefore later repairs. At one point, I was so busy following one long patch of purplish asphalt that I found myself observing that a break in the surface resembled two fragments of broken pottery that would mend together. I shook my head and thought, I need to get out more often. Really.

The door to the building opened and a heavyset man stepped out, wearing a down vest over a dress shirt and tie, along with a wool cap. As I approached, Chris sipped on a can of soda and leaned against the frame of the closed door, letting the weak March sun warm his teddy-bear face.

I guess he hadn’t changed much in the years since we first crossed paths, archaeologists studying a similar time period and working within a couple of hours’ drive of each other, but the lines on his round face were a little deeper, and I got the impression that the cap was covering an ever-diminishing amount of wavy brown hair. The times we met were at conferences for the most part, though our e-mails were filled as much with personal updates as bibliographic exchanges. He and Nell were good people, into the work with a good balance of reality and idealism, juggling their growing family with complicated schedules, diminishing state and local budgets, and their mutual passion for colonial reenactment.

I waved and he responded, tentatively, until I walked closer and he recognized me.

“Hey, Emma! You still driving that piece of shit?” Chris and I had been friends since Bessy was a proud and recent acquisition.

“Not for too much longer, if that nasty sound it was making up the last hill was any indication.” We shook hands warmly. “How you been, Chris?”

“Overworked and underpaid. Damn glad it’s spring, though it always seems to come later and later out here. How about you?”

“Much the same. Also underappreciated.”

“I hear you.” He sighed and scratched behind his ear, under the cap. “Why, just last week, I managed to trim my budget without taking too big a bite out of the new programs Nell wants to do next year and without having to cut back on the old stuff. What thanks do I get? The finance committee got on my case for not having made the changes in the first place, and I caught a ration from Nell, who also called me a butcher.”

“Sounds rough.”

He shrugged. “Nah. It’s just the same crap every year. It doesn’t even bug me anymore. It comes with the seasons, right? I go home and complain to my wife about what kind of a magician I have to be to do the job I have and how whiny my staff is, and Nell comes home and complains to me that even after four years, her ungrateful boss asks her to do more and more with less and less. Then we have a drink and get the kids out of hock, and it’s cool.”

I furrowed my brow. “Please tell me that by out of hock, you mean you pick them up from school or something.”

“Daycare, but Todd’s off to big-boy school next year. He’s very impressed with himself.” Chris took another swig of soda. “God, listen to me. Between the bureaucracy and the kids, my vocabulary has gone into the poo-poo toilet. Save me, tell me what you’re up to. Something adult and archaeological, with artifacts and everything.”

I briefly filled him in on the Chandler journal and what I’d been doing at Shrewsbury. Although he’d heard about the murders—how could he not?—Chris only stopped me to ask whether I was okay. I didn’t elaborate any further on that situation than to reassure him I was fine.

“I just needed a break, you know?” I finished. “Get out of there, get out of myself.”

“I hear you,” and that was the end of his questions. I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Look, if you want, Nell’s in the activity room with a batch of fourth-graders. You can go watch her for a bit if you want, she’ll even put you to work, if you don’t move fast enough out of her reach. Or if you want, you can go check out a couple of the cellar holes we’re going to take a peek at next year. We have two definites—they’ve got flags—and one possible. We’re going to break for a late lunch in about twenty minutes, but they’re not far.”

I knew right away how I was inclined. “I think I’ll take a walk and see if I can’t discover any more of your cellar holes. With the way my luck’s been running, I’ll probably find one by falling into it.”

“Don’t knock it; it worked for me. That’s why I leave the fun to Nell these days, and hide at the desk. I can’t believe how much it takes out of me. It wasn’t that long ago that we were all indefatigable, was it, Emma?”

He sighed, but looked content enough, I thought. “Not that long at all.”

“Okay, I’ll see you in a bit. Just follow the trails around back. We trust you enough so you can move off the paths, no matter what the signs say.” He wagged a finger at me. “Just don’t go taking anything, now, young lady.”

“Damn. There goes my funding for next year.”

I went around back and paused at the window to watch Nell for a minute. She was a graying ash blonde, slender and looking lost in one of Chris’s old sweaters. The waiflike look was misleading, as I knew that she was all whiplike muscle from fieldwork and wrangling her toddlers at home. It took me a moment to figure out what she was doing; the window was shut tight, blocking out the sound in the classroom, and she had a group of kids helping her make a cake. That didn’t make a lot of sense until I realized she was teaching them about stratigraphy and how archaeologists look at the layers of soil on a site. The plate was put down first, the earliest “layer.” Then one layer of pound cake, a thick smear of frosting, a layer of sprinkles, another layer of cake, more frosting, some chocolate chips, and a final layer of cake, the frosting on top of that, and then gummy bears on the very top.

My stomach rumbled as I watched her, as if by pantomime, show that to get to the earliest layers, a careful archaeologist or cake-eater had to work from the top down; I also noticed that she had them jot down how they ate the cake, recording the layers as they carefully exposed them with plastic spoons. I suppose that went a long way to take some of the sting out of hearing about how we learned about dating things, reasoning the layers on top were deposited later in time relative to the ones on the bottom. If she threw in a few of those gold-foil candy coins or some other goodies, she could have gone on about how we can work with artifacts whose dates we do know.

God bless her, I thought, for having the guts to work with ten-year-olds, though perhaps their parents wouldn’t love them having a big chunk of cake at school, or learning to eat their food in layers, which didn’t bode well for future meals of lasagna, sandwiches, or s’mores. The kids were probably old enough to understand the concepts she was teaching them, but I personally never felt comfortable talking to anyone under twelve, in the instructional sense. Though if Marty’s kid was going to be my godchild, then I’d have to learn. But Nell had the knack of getting across to any age group, which was a talent I just didn’t have, nor did I have the patience to work on acquiring it.

Nell caught my eye and held up a finger for me to wait for her until she’d finished, another minute. Then as the kids were cleaning up, she came over to the window, and raised it up.

“Hey, you! What are you doing out here in the back of beyond?”

“Clearing my head. You’re finishing up soon?”

She glanced at the clock. “Another twenty minutes or so? Got time to stick around for a chat?”

I nodded. “I’ll catch you on my way out.”

“Good deal. See you then.”

I followed the trail for about ten minutes. It was well maintained, different paths marked for different destinations, difficulty, and distances, and what’s better, it was nothing like the manicured woodlands at Shrewsbury. There was just enough honest mud, frozen, dried, and hardened into boot-shaped ridges, to remind me it was March. Even the air was different, more of a bite, and I could hear the sound of an eagle screaming as it soared overhead. The sky was pale blue and unbroken by clouds; it seemed to go on forever. Out by the highway, it seemed almost to race the stony hills to the horizon; here in the woods, the trees were the columns supporting the sky like the roof of a cathedral.

As I walked along, I kept my eyes open for clues that would lead me to a cellar hole. Openings in the trees, perhaps a sparse stand of younger trees that had grown in the area after the house was abandoned and had collapsed over time. Collections of stones that were not natural, something more than glacial deposits. Stones that were squared off, worked, perhaps even with the telltale tool marks left by the feather and wedge used by some stonemason long ago to dress them. Fruit trees, perhaps the remains of an orchard, or roses, anything that had been introduced and cultivated by humans, or maybe even some clusters of native but opportunistic plants that throve on the edges of habitation sites, where there might be disturbed soil, waste dumps, or animal pens. Just one more example of how so often studying humans comes down to looking at their trash.

The smell of dried leaves and earth was restorative, and settling into my old habits of field walking was a balm. I paused on the trail, squinting off to the left. Sure enough, in amid some fairly old oaks was a small cluster of flat stones, tumbled perhaps, but still in a roughly rectangular shape around an indentation. Taking advantage of Chris’s permission for me to go off the trail, I ventured into the woods to get a better look. It took me a moment, but then I found the flagging that my friends had used to mark the area. Satisfied that I hadn’t lost my skills, rusty as they presently might be, I continued on the path.

I was just about to turn around, having walked for about twelve minutes, when I heard a gunshot. Hunters, I thought automatically, though the notion didn’t cheer me much, being dressed in dark colors and without any fluorescent safety gear. I didn’t think it was actually hunting season, but the shot sounded remarkably close by, though I didn’t have any idea how sound carried in the hills around here. More than time to get back, I decided.

That’s when the second shot came, and this one was undeniably close.

I whirled around crazily, but couldn’t see anyone sporting hunter’s orange. “Shit! Hey! There are people out—!”

At that point, a third shot rang out, and I heard a heavy thud beside me; I felt a sharp pain in my cheek. I abandoned the ideas that it was hunters, licit or illicit, and I didn’t care to find out why anyone should be so careless. I was still hoping that it wasn’t deliberate, as I broke into a run. A fourth shot followed, and this time I could tell a tree had been hit, within feet of me.

I tore down the trail toward the visitor center, but realized that the path was probably the least safe option: Whoever was shooting at me would know exactly where I was heading. I certainly didn’t want them to be able to find me, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to lead them back to the visitor center and all those kids, either. Operating under the assumption that whoever had the gun was behind me, I left the path and hit the woods, heading roughly back the way I’d come. As I entered a small clearing, I heard another sharp crack and dove behind a slight rise in the ground. That hurt as much as the shelter comforted me; leaves covering rocks in a shallow concavity didn’t much help to break my fall.