A Killer Crop (35 page)

When Meg let him in, he drew her aside into the little-used parlor on the west side of the house. “Okay, what’s going on?”

“I’ll give you the short form. We’ve found what we believe is a batch of letters written by Emily Dickinson to someone who lived in this house in the nineteenth century. We also think that the letters were the catalyst for Daniel Weston’s death.”

“Why?”

“Because”—Meg swallowed—“I think his graduate student Susan Keeley had something to do with his death. She’s here, and she’s willing to talk to you.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Nothing. I stopped her before she could say anything. You can take it from here.”

“She in there?” He nodded toward the other side of the house.

“In the dining room.”

Marcus turned and strode toward the dining room, stopping when he realized that there was already a small crowd of people there. Meg, trailing behind, caught up with him and said, “I think you know everyone here, except Susan.”

“I do. Ms. Keeley, I understand you have something to tell me?”

Susan nodded. “I do. Can everyone else stay? I want everyone to hear what I have to say.” She paused while everyone found a chair, except for Seth, who opted to lean against the doorframe, his arms crossed. Phillip took a chair on Susan’s right, while Meg sat across from her so she could watch her face. The open box and its stack of letters sat in the middle of the table. “It was an accident,” Susan began.

“Tell me what happened,” Marcus said, not unkindly.

Phillip interrupted. “Susan, you don’t have to tell him anything.”

“Mr. Corey, she’s not under arrest. Are you her attorney?”

“I will represent Susan if that’s what she wants. Susan?”

Susan glanced up at him. “No, it’s okay. I want everyone to know what happened.”

Susan turned back to face Marcus. “I really want to get this over with. I’ve felt so awful, ever since . . . I’d better start at the beginning.” Susan folded her hands in front of her and began talking. “I’m writing my PhD thesis about Emily Dickinson. Daniel Weston was on my thesis committee as an outside advisor, and we met maybe a couple of times a month, over the past year. I grew up in Amherst, so I’ve kind of been living with Emily Dickinson all my life. Plus I had another connection—my great-grandmother worked for Emily’s brother next door, and his widow, Susan, after that. After Emily’s brother died, Susan and their daughter were the ones who first published Emily’s poetry. But Susan did a lot of editing, and she tossed a lot of stuff, too. It looks like my great-grandmother kind of kept a lot of what she found in the trash, don’t ask me why.

“But I only found that out recently. You see, my grandmother has Alzheimer’s, and she’s in a home now, and my mother finally decided to clear her stuff out of her house. She found this box of papers and told me she thought I might be interested in them, because I liked old stuff. I don’t think she ever looked at them. Could I have some water, please?”

“I’ll get it,” Seth volunteered.

Susan resumed. “So one night I went through them and I found a bunch of letters, and when I started reading them, I realized what they were, or what they might be. I was so excited! I mean, it was unreal—letters that had actually belonged to Emily Dickinson, and I had them right in my hand. Of course, I had to do some research to be sure, but it’s all there in the censuses—my great-grandmother, called ‘servant,’ right next door to Emily’s house. My mother didn’t even know, and it was too late to ask Nana if she remembered anything. But I had the letters, so of course I took them to Daniel right away and showed them to him. And he got excited, too. And then he said, you know what this means? That there may be letters from Emily to this Ellen somewhere. And I said, well, why haven’t they been found? And he said, maybe because no one was looking?”

Seth reappeared and silently handed Susan a glass of water. She drank gratefully.

“When was this?” Detective Marcus asked.

Susan frowned in thought. “Not long ago—maybe last month? And I told Daniel about it a couple of days after I found the letters.”

“And what did Professor Weston do?”

“He said we should look for Emily’s letters, and he had some ideas about how to do it.” Susan gave a short, bitter laugh. “Turns out mine weren’t the only letters from Ellen—I didn’t know about the ones in the Amherst College collection. Daniel had already seen those. He showed them to me and said maybe if we combined the information from all the letters, we’d have a better idea where to look.”

“Wait a moment,” Elizabeth interrupted. “You mean you and he had already done all this genealogy?”

“No, no. Daniel knew Emily’s life backward and forward, so he could point to where she visited, who she’d known, at least in known sources. But it hadn’t occurred to him to look for relatives, especially the ones where a Dickinson woman married someone else, and you don’t always see the surname. He just wasn’t into all that. Looking at the extended family connections was my idea.”

“And you continued to share information with him?” the detective asked.

“Yes, of course. I thought we might actually find the letters, and if we did, maybe we could publish the results jointly. You know how great that would be for my career, to start out with something like that?”

“So that’s what took him to Dickinson’s Farm Stand? You were there?”

Susan nodded. “We figured out some of the Amherst Dickinsons, and he knew that the buildings at the farm were probably from the right time period. He told me to meet him there that night, when nobody would be around.”

“Why on earth didn’t you go by daylight, when you could see what you were doing?” Elizabeth asked.

“I don’t know. He was really paranoid that someone would figure out what we were looking for. He said that Professor Henderson was crazy enough to follow him around and spy on him. Plus we were running out of time, but I didn’t know that until we got there and he told me what he was going to do.”

“Which was?”

“That he was going to announce finding the Emily letters at the symposium. He was pretty sure he knew where they were, thanks to my letters and the research I’d done. They weren’t at the farm stand—there was something about the configuration of buildings that Ellen had mentioned that didn’t fit Dickinson’s. But he said he’d have them soon, and he was going to stand up at the symposium and tell the world about his great find, and take the credit for it. He said he’d be sure to give me a footnote when he published his discovery.”

“What happened that night?” Marcus asked.

“I met Daniel at the farm stand, around ten o’clock. We looked at the layout, and he pointed out the parts that didn’t jibe with Ellen’s descriptions. But he didn’t seem too disappointed, and when I asked why, he said he thought he knew a more likely place—he was just confirming that he could cross Dickinson’s off the list. I asked him where, and he wouldn’t tell me. That’s when he told me he was going ahead without me.

“You can imagine how I felt. I mean, I’ve got all these student loans, and I really need a job when I get done, and it’s not easy to find one these days because nobody has any openings and they can’t even afford to fill the ones they do have ...”

Meg reached out and touched Susan’s hand. “Slow down, Susan. Take a drink of water.”

Susan complied, then resumed in a calmer tone. “I told him, ‘You can’t do that!’ I was the one who brought him the letters, and I should get equal credit. And he looked down his nose at me and said, ‘You’re only a student. As your advisor, I can claim whatever I choose. I’ll be happy to give you a nod—in a footnote.’

“I argued with him, but he said, who was going to believe me if I went around saying that I had made this big discovery and he said it wasn’t true? He was the expert, and I was nobody. He just wouldn’t listen, and I got so mad . . . I hit him.”

“You hit him?” Marcus prompted. “With what?”

“With my fist. I just hauled off and socked him, right in the stomach. I’ve never done anything like that before in my life, but I’d been so happy, and for him to do that to me . . .” She swallowed, fighting for composure. “And he fell down. I just stood there and stared for a while, I don’t know how long, waiting for him to get up. But then I realized he wasn’t moving, and when I checked, he wasn’t even breathing. As far as I could tell, he was dead. I’d never even seen a dead person. How was I supposed to know? I mean, maybe I should have called someone for help, but I really couldn’t believe it, and I guess I was in shock or something, but I just kind of sat down and waited. It was dark, and really quiet. If Daniel had been breathing, I would have heard it. But he wasn’t.” She swallowed a sob. “It took me a while before I could think straight. I’d killed him, even if I didn’t mean to.”

She took a deep breath. “I know what I did next doesn’t make me look too good. But I figured if I told the police I’d killed him, I’d be kissing my career good-bye, and then nobody would find the Emily letters. I couldn’t take back what I’d done, but at least I could finish what Daniel and I had started. He’d said he was pretty sure he knew where to look, so I figured I’d just retrace his logic. And then I found out about you, Elizabeth, and I realized that if he’d asked you here at this particular time, there must have been a good reason.”

“Wait—how did you know who I was and that I was here?” Elizabeth asked.

“You had dinner with him right before we met that Sunday night. He told me he’d seen you, and that you held a key to the puzzle. He was really stoked by then. That’s why I volunteered to go through his papers with you, and why I asked you to help me out with the genealogy. I knew there had to be some connection, and I had to spend time with you to figure out what it was. And I was right.”

Elizabeth nodded. “And when I think about it now, he did spend a lot of time talking about Meg and how he didn’t realize we had roots in the area, let alone an old house in the family. He was probably angling to get into the house.”

“That’s what I’d guess,” Susan said. “I think he’d eliminated most of the other possible hiding places anyway— either they didn’t fit, or they were long gone. Maybe you were his last shot at finding the letters, but he seemed pretty excited after he’d seen you.”

“Obviously he was right, although we’ll probably never know why,” Elizabeth said.

Phillip cleared his throat. “Detective, it sounds as though this was a tragic accident. Susan here was wrong not to come forward, but she had no intention of killing the man.”

“Be that as it may, Mr. Corey, but at the moment I need to take her in. We can discuss this there.”

Five minutes later Detective Marcus left with Susan in tow.

“I’ll follow you in Northampton, Susan,” Phillip told her. “Don’t say anything else until I get there.”

“I’m coming with you, Phillip,” Elizabeth said.

They departed in Phillip’s car a few minutes later, leaving Meg, Seth, and Bree alone in the house—with the letters.

“Well,” Meg began, and stopped. She had no idea what to say.

“We should put this stuff someplace safe.” Seth waved at the items on the table.

“Oh. Right. Of course.” Meg carefully pulled on the gloves and slipped the letters back into their box, and added the other items on top, much as they had been stored since who knew how long. “Where should I put them?”

“Do you have a safe-deposit box?”

“No.”

“Seems like a good time to get one.”

“You’ll be back for Thanksgiving?” Meg asked, hugging her mother hard.

“Of course we will. I can’t wait for us to share a real New England Thanksgiving in this house.”

“You, too, Dad?” Meg let go of her mother and hugged her father.

“Wouldn’t miss it. Don’t you work too hard between now and then.”

“At least the picking should be over by the time you come back. And thank you for helping Susan.”

“She’s not a bad person—she just got herself into an unfortunate situation. Something like I imagine you did?”

“You’re right, and I’m glad she had someone like you on her side. I can’t bring myself to be angry at her. She saw her chances slipping away when Daniel betrayed her, and she just lashed out.”

“I have to agree that he treated her rather shabbily at the end there. Maybe he was feeling that his time had passed, and he wanted one more success before it was too late.” Phillip turned to Seth, waiting behind Meg. “Seth, a pleasure to meet you. I hope we’ll be seeing more of you?”

“I hope so, too, sir.” The men shook hands while Elizabeth and Meg exchanged an amused glance.

“Drive safely, both of you. And let me know when you get home,” Meg cautioned.

“Yes, dear,” her mother said. “We’ve been driving for, oh, forty years now. I think we can manage. Take care, darling, and we’ll see you soon.”

Meg watched as her parents pulled out of the driveway in tandem. She sighed and sat down on the granite step outside the kitchen door, where Seth joined her.