A Rare Murder In Princeton (5 page)

THE NEXT MORNING the snow had stopped. George was up early and shoveled the sidewalk in front of the house. “The Borough is strict about the sidewalks being shoveled,” he said when McLeod came down and complimented him on his promptness. “So I did the sidewalk, but I didn’t do the walk to the house or clean the cars off or shovel the driveway so we could get them out. I’m going to walk to work as soon as I can get ready and I’ll call Dante from the office. Can you walk to the university all right?”

“Sure, if everybody is as good as you are about shoveling the sidewalk.”

“Otherwise, walk in the street. They’re all plowed. Everybody does it. It’s too bad the garage is so full of junk we can’t get the cars inside.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll get there,” said McLeod.

George left and sometime later McLeod, in boots and shearling coat and muffled in scarves and a warm hat and shearling mittens, was ready to leave, too. The doorbell rang, and it was Dante Immordino.

He smiled his dazzling smile again and this time McLeod invited him inside immediately. “Mr. Bridges called,” he said. “He wanted me to shovel the snow.”

“If it’s not too much for you,” said McLeod.

Dante looked offended. “It’s not too much for me,” he said.

“Of course,” said McLeod. “I’m sorry. He left his new shovel here on the porch.”

Dante scorned George’s new shovel. “Mrs. Murray had a real nice shovel. I’ll look in the garage.”

It had been twenty years since Jill Murray’s murder, McLeod thought. And somebody else—the man from Texas—had owned the house briefly before George bought it. How could Jill’s snow shovel still be around? Nevertheless, since she already had on her boots, she followed Dante down the steps and stepped in his tracks to get to the garage door. Dante poked around amid the cartons and garden tools in the garage and came up with an old but very substantial-looking snow shovel.

“Here it is,” he said. “It’s good.” He looked around. “And some of her other stuff is still here.” He pointed to boxes on a makeshift shelf of boards on the rafters of the garage. “I put that stuff up there on those rafters for her,” he said. “Little Big—that’s her son—never took it away, I guess. Little Big, he’s an odd duck. He cleaned out the house, but I guess he left these things here and then the other owner just never bothered with those boxes.”

“What about all the other stuff—the lawn mower and all that?”

“Some of that is hers, and some of it is not. Some of it must be the other owner’s—or maybe Mr. Bridges’.” He shrugged, took the old shovel outside, and started his work.

McLeod followed, looked around, and grimaced at the snow on both cars. “I don’t even have one of those things you use to scrape the snow off the windshield,” she said. Dante said not to worry, that he’d clean the cars off. So she set off for the university, feeling like Ernest Shackleton in all that snow.

 

THAT NIGHT GEORGE was impressed with the job Dante had done. McLeod asked him about all the things in the garage.

“I didn’t put that junk there,” said George. “The seller was supposed to clean it out but he didn’t do it. I’ll tell you what: I’m going to clean out that garage. Then we can put both our cars in there.”

“And then they won’t get covered with snow!”

“That’s right,” said George.

“What a concept,” said McLeod. “Look, I’ll be glad to help clean out the garage.”

“Thanks. I’ll get Dante over to help us, too. Many hands make light work,” said George, who liked old maxims. “I’ll see if he can come Saturday.”

“By the way,” she said, “Jill Murray’s son was named Little Big. Is that right?”

“Little Big? Oh, I remember. Jill’s husband was Bigelow Murray and everybody called him Big. So the son was Bigelow Murray Jr. And everybody called him Little Big.”

 

FROM TIME TO time she went back to Rare Books, always stopping in the exhibition gallery to look at Jonathan Belcher’s office in the showcase. She liked saluting old Belcher’s artifacts, then crossing the gallery to Rare Books, signing the day’s register, stowing all her belongings in a locker, and proceeding to the Reading Room with nothing but loose sheets of paper and a pencil, then filling out a call slip for the next box of papers, and giving it to Diane, the watchful clerk who sat at a desk. It was like preparing for surgery, she thought. While she waited for the page to bring her order up from the vault, she looked around the octagonal room, with its tall windows on four walls. She enjoyed watching the other researchers, if there were any, and wondering what they were looking for. Some were using rare books, which had been laid reverently before them on V-shaped pillows, and some were going through folders and boxes of papers.

McLeod couldn’t get to Rare Books every day—after all, she had a class to teach. The class met for only three hours once a week, but the students seemed to require a lot of conferences with the teacher. They also sent her frequent e-mails, which McLeod answered scrupulously. Then there were the classes themselves to plan, and the visiting speakers to arrange, meet, host, and see on their way. Busy as she was, she went to Rare Books when she could and plowed slowly through the van Dyke papers. When she saw George, she told him about some of the things she found—essays and orations van Dyke had written in college, and the promised letters from six presidents of the United States.

“The plum I’ve found so far,” she told George one night, “is this fight song he wrote for Princeton. It was to be sung to the tune of ‘Marching Through Georgia.’ I wrote down some of the lyrics:

“Isn’t that gorgeous?” she asked.

“Well,” said George, “not exactly.”

 

BUT WAS THERE a book in all this stuff? McLeod didn’t think so, but she kept on with the research. Sometimes she thought it must be her innate curiosity that drove her, and sometimes she thought it was just deeply satisfying to sit in the octagonal Reading Room and read old letters and clippings. And maybe she persisted because she was interested in all the people who worked in Rare Books and Special Collections. She talked to Diane, the clerk who sat all day at the table in the Reading Room, and found out that she was a single mother whose child had a learning disability. Diane was trying to get him into a special school. Molly, the receptionist, took ballet lessons at night and dreamed of dancing. Jeff, one of the pages, was writing a novel.

She sometimes chatted with other researchers who came to the Reading Room. One was Barry Porter, an English professor on leave from Harvard, who was doing research on Eugene O’Neill.

“What’s O’Neill’s connection to Princeton? Why are his papers here?” McLeod asked him when they were having a quick cup of coffee in the little café in the basement of Chancellor Green.

“There’s an extraordinary collection, despite his brief stay at Princeton. O’Neill matriculated in the fall of 1906, but he dropped out after his freshman year,” said Porter.

“Why?”

“Disciplinary and academic problems,” said Porter. “He worked in a mail-order house and then went to sea before he started writing plays and went on to win the Nobel Prize. But he had some sort of feeling for Princeton—he gave them a collection of his earliest manuscripts.”

Another researcher, or “reader,” as the staff called them, was a delightful woman named Swallow. Her hair was white, though not prematurely white like McLeod’s. Miss Swallow might be old, but she was writing a book on botanical painters—Princeton had wonderful books with beautiful paintings of plants and flowers, Miss Swallow told McLeod, as well as loose prints.

“They’re all so gorgeous,” Miss Swallow said. “I’m writing about the lithographs and researching the lives of the painters. I’m concentrating on the women. Rachel Ruysch in Düsseldorf was one of the first women to earn a living painting, and she did flowers. Her thistle is superb. And Princeton has Elizabeth Blackwell’s
A Curious Herbal.
She painted the specimens in the Chelsea Physic Garden in London in the eighteenth century. Did I tell you more than you wanted to know?”

“It’s fascinating. How did you get interested in this?” McLeod asked her.

“I’m a gardener, and an amateur painter, and I like to write. I used to write children’s books.”

“Did you illustrate them yourself?”

“Sometimes I did,” said Miss Swallow. She paused and then said, “This is the best project I’ve ever worked on.”

McLeod liked Miss Swallow, liked her looks, her energy, and the way she dressed, in trim pantsuits, always with a nice piece of old jewelry—a silver pin, a cameo, or a coral necklace.

She was a paragon, McLeod thought, and she deserved a super project. If flower painters was her master work, then good luck to her.

IF MCLEOD DIDN’T see Nat Ledbetter as she came into Rare Books, he nearly always stopped by the Reading Room to speak to her when she was there. One day when she was signing in, Ledbetter was on his way out with another man. He stopped to introduce her to his companion, who was the curator of Rare Books, Randall Keaton.

“But everybody calls him ‘Buster,’ ” Nat said.

“I’m glad to know you,” said McLeod, shaking hands with Buster, who was dark-haired, dark-skinned, and angry-looking. Almost bellicose, she thought, creating a device to remember his name.

“Have you had lunch?” Nat asked her. “Won’t you come with us to the Annex?”

“I shouldn’t,” said McLeod, “but I will.” And she put her coat and hat and scarf and gloves back on and happily went out with Buster and Nat. Later, she was glad she went—Buster turned out not to be bellicose at all, but more of a bluffer, with a tendency to make sweeping statements. Buster the Blusterer, she came to think of him.

“How are you coming with the van Dyke papers?” he asked her.

“Slowly,” she said.

“The dullest man who ever lived,” said Keaton.

“Hardly,” said McLeod. “There’s Calvin Coolidge.”

“But nobody’s writing anything about Coolidge either,” said Keaton.

And so it went. Tomato soup (which McLeod had just ordered) was the blandest soup in the world, according to Buster. The news in the paper that morning about global warming, or whatever was the top story of the day, was the worst thing that had ever happened. His cup of coffee was the vilest he had ever had. The director of libraries at Princeton was the biggest fool he had ever seen. That winter’s weather was absolutely the foulest yet.

What Buster really liked was books. He was obsessed by books. “It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen,” he said when he was talking about a
Book of the Dead
from Egypt. “It’s a manuscript on linen, and it dates from the Ptolemaic Period.”

McLeod wondered when the Ptolemaic Period was, but before she could find out, Buster had moved on to talk about a copy of Richard Lovelace’s
Lucasta,
published in London in 1648, which was up for sale.

McLeod had never heard of Lovelace or
Lucasta
but didn’t get a chance to find out more because Buster had already moved on. “But even more important,” he was saying, “is the copy of
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.
You know, by Anne Bradstreet, the first book of verse published in America. We must have it to go with Sheridan’s
Bay Psalm Book.
I want it more than anything.”

“You always want the next thing ‘more than anything.’ ” said Natty. “Maybe we can get it. Let me look at our funds.”

 

SHE MET FANNY Mobley, the curator of manuscripts, on her own. Fanny stopped her as she was leaving late one afternoon and said, “You’re McLeod Dulaney, aren’t you?”

“ I am.”

Fanny introduced herself and said, “I just wanted to tell you how glad we are that you’re working on Henry van Dyke. We’ve had those papers a long time and I’ve always wished someone would do something with them.”

“I think he’s a very interesting man,” said McLeod.

Fanny was a tall woman with longish red hair that was turning gray. That day she wore a fringed, woolly, home-spun skirt that fell well below her knees and a gray cardigan over a maroon silk blouse. “I hope you’re finding everything you need.”

“Oh, I’m finding more than I know what to do with,” said McLeod.

“Everyone is being helpful?” asked Fanny.

“Everybody is wonderful. This is a marvelous place to do research.”

“I hope so,” said Fanny. “Let me know if there’s anything at all I can do to help you.”

“I certainly will,” said McLeod. “Thank you so much.”

The next morning, McLeod stopped in Fanny’s office door to say hello. Fanny merely scowled at her. “I’m sorry,” said McLeod, “are you busy?”

“Very,” said Fanny. Still scowling, she got up to close her office door.