Cold and Pure and Very Dead (23 page)

“Pretty much. Course she was sick for a while when she first come here. Couple years.” He shut his mouth on the words. He’d said too much.

“Sick?” Sean asked quickly, ever the biographer. “Physical ailment, or psychological?”

“She wuz sick. That’s all.” He thrust his broad, scarred hands deep into the pockets of his denim jacket. “We got her healthy again, me and my mother. She’s been fine since then.” The words were abrupt and defensive. He donned his cap again, stuffing the recalcitrant hair back into its confinement.

“Look,” Jim continued, “I know Milly won’t like it
that I talked to you and let you see the place. She don’t like people poking into her business. But I figure you two’ll be writing about her, and folks around here have been saying some pretty nasty things, so I know what you been hearing. I want to set the record straight. Milly’s not a … an easy lady to live with. Never has been. And I can’t say as I been a saint.…”

I recalled my first sight of Jim Finch; he’d been flirting with the young waitress at the Homestead. No, not a saint.

“…  But she’s a good woman, and I don’t want her to go down in the books wrong. I thought if you could see what her life is like, you’d understand a little better.” Then he frowned and added, as if to himself, “But, mebbe it was a mistake to bring you here.…”

It was full dusk now, with rose-madder cloud remnants. In the relentless hard-edged clarity of motionsensor lights, the barnyard suddenly appeared less welcoming than it had in late sunlight—a domain of sinister, clinical light and abrupt, impenetrable darkness. My infatuation with the farm was vanishing with the sun. In spite of my wool suit, I shivered. I was glad not to be alone with Milly Finch’s husband in this place of suspicious white illumination and sharply demarcated shadow, stupidly thankful for even the company of the pudgy, out-of-shape Sean Small.

There was more I wanted to ask Jim Finch, but Sean had taken the hint, and was making ready to leave, slipping his notebook into the pocket of his leather jacket, thanking the farmer for the tour. He got into the red Ford Escort and turned the key. The melancholy tones of R.E.M. engulfed us along with the roar of the motor.

“Mr. Finch,” I asked, giving it one more shot as I opened the Subaru’s driver’s-side door. “Did you
know …” I hesitated, then plunged on, “did you know before the … the homicide, that Milly, er, Mrs. Finch, was a famous novelist?”

“I didn’t know she was a writer of any sort, famous or not. She never said.” He examined his close-clipped fingernails intently, then looked up at me. “Threw me for a loop to find out she’s been keeping that from me all these years.” He paused for a second or two, then muttered, “Of course, now it’s starting to make sense why she never got rid of that old typewriter.…”

Still standing by the car, I eased the door shut. The interior light clicked off. My heartbeat accelerated. “What old typewriter?” I checked over my shoulder. Sean’s Escort had already pulled out of the driveway, carrying the depressive music with it. I didn’t know whether to jump in the Subaru and take off in pursuit of his dubious masculine protection, or to secretly hug this new piece of information to myself until I’d teased out its significance. If it
had
any significance. Wendy, the realtor, had mentioned a typewriter, but I didn’t know until now about Milly’s continued attachment to it.

Jim hesitated before he answered. “One a those portable jobs they used to have. In a blue case with a handle. She had it with her the night I found her.”

“Really. A carrying case, huh?” Instantly I fantasized a stowed-away manuscript, the salacious sequel to
Oblivion Falls
. “Is there anything else in the case? Did you ever look to see?” Maybe Piotrowski was right; maybe I do suffer from hyperthyroidism of the imagination.

Jim Finch jerked his head up to look straight at me. “Of course not. Why would I? What else would be in there besides an old typewriter?”

“I was thinking … maybe some writing—”

He was quick. “You mean—another book, mebbe one like … 
Oblivion Falls?”
He bit one side of his lower lip.

“Maybe.” Sean’s taillights had vanished in the distance. I took a quick, deep breath and glanced toward the farmhouse. “Could I take a look?”

Milly’s husband hesitated again. The harsh barnyard lights revealed his total lack of expression. When he spoke, it was with an absence of the vitality that had infused his voice earlier in the evening. “I don’t think Milly’d like that, Miss Pelletier. I don’t think she’d like that at all.”

T
he thing
that was so different about dealing with modern literature, I mused, strolling down Columbus Avenue in New York City two mornings after my visits to Milly Finch and to her dairy farm, was that so many people were still alive. In my usual study of the mid-nineteenth century, I could be assured that all concerned were safely tucked away in their little beds of clay, as Emily Dickinson might have put it. Even though her “Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” Dickinson herself was securely stowed in a plot in Amherst, Massachusetts, beneath a good solid stone inscribed with the reassuring words “Called Back.” She wasn’t about to surface in some remote barnyard with a thirty-thirty Winchester and blow any newspaper reporters to kingdom come.

But Mildred Deakin was another story. Not only had she herself been resurrected live and in person, with lethal consequences, but other participants in her long-ago literary drama were beginning to surface. Evelyn Sackela, for instance—Milly’s 1950s literary agent.

After my disappointing “interview” with Milly Deakin Finch in the Columbia County Jail, Lieutenant Syverson had decided to forgo any further investigative assistance. But Piotrowski had called me the next morning, all brusque and businesslike. The suits, he said, in his most formal manner, had recalled “how useful my
specialist consultation had proven in previous cases” and wanted to offer me the usual deal to look into Milly’s literary background. I’d sighed at the lieutenant’s distant manner, but, since the “usual deal” was seven-hundred-and-fifty dollars a day for the kind of research I found fascinating enough to do for free, I jumped at it. I got right to work with the sources at hand, i.e., the materials mentioned in Sean Small’s bibliography of Mildred Deakin.

In the Enfield College Library periodicals archives, I’d found a microfiched copy of a January 1958
New Yorker
biographical profile of Mildred Deakin. The article summarized the details of the young writer’s childhood in New Hampshire, her education at Eden College in New Hampshire, the publication of
Oblivion Falls
and its instant popular success, the rumors of a hot new sequel to that novel, and the author’s presence as a
“glamorous star in the firmament of modern Manhattan nightlife.”
Most helpful, however, had been the mention of Evelyn Sackela, named as
“the high-profile Manhattan literary agent”
who’d
“discovered the luscious Miss Deakin”
and propelled her to literary fame. I’d leapt up from the antique microfiche machine in the periodicals room and headed for the library reference room, where I’d scanned the shelves for the current volume of
Literary Market Place
. To my astonishment, an Evelyn Sackela Literary Agency was still listed on West 84th Street.
Gotta be her daughter
, I thought, as I dialed the number from my office phone, but the ancient voice had answered in person and was more than delighted to accommodate a visitor.

Passing a Starbucks on Columbus, I glanced at my watch.
Early
. Might as well get a coffee. I ordered a half-caf, short, skim latte and carried it past the revolving book rack with its brightly colored paperbacks to the
counter by the window. Seated next to me, a graybeard in blue sweats was engrossed in a copy of
Oblivion Falls
. The latte was scalding hot, and I peered through its steam at the thronged sidewalk. As usual, the passersby were heterogeneous in every possible way: multi-ethnic, multi-generational, multi-sexual-oriented; multi-wealthed. Well-groomed, well-toned guys and gals in suits lugging laptops and talking on cell phones. Middle-aged artsy types in jeans and, on this brisk day, windbreakers or leather jackets. Students studded with gold in every conceivable body part.

A stout middle-aged Indian woman in a turquoise sari executed an undignified side step to avoid an African American bicycle messenger, who had veered cursing onto the sidewalk, cut off by a speeding white Mercedes with a blaring horn. An eleven-year-old baggy-pants white boy with a bleached Mohawk who should have been in school, swerved easily past on his state-of-the-art skateboard. An elderly street musician accompanied this little drama with a riff on his clarinet.

Street vendors with books. Street vendors with fruit. Street vendors with bagels and coffee. It was too early in the morning for the pretzel and hot-dog carts.

The Upper West Side of Manhattan was my old stomping grounds. For six years Amanda, Tony, and I had made our home there, and I knew its bustling neighborhoods well. After calling the literary agent yesterday afternoon, I’d left Enfield in the early evening and spent the night at 102nd and Broadway with Sandy Glazier, a friend from graduate school who was now teaching at CUNY. This particular Starbucks, at the intersection of Columbus and 86th, was way the hell out of my way in getting from Sandy’s place to Evelyn Sackela’s at 72nd and West End Avenue. But—so what? So Tony, my old boyfriend, lived only a half a block away? I’d had a good
healthy walk—and I needed coffee. I glanced at the clock over the coffee bar. It said 9:34. If Tony still worked downtown, he might possibly be passing this corner right about … now.

A slim blonde walked by pushing a stroller. I wondered if that could be Tony’s wife Jennifer, with their little Colin. I’d never met her, but Amanda had, and she’d described this interloper to me:
Blonde. Skinny. French braid. What else you need to know?
A million other people passed by, but I watched the blonde intently until she was out of sight.
Hmm
, I thought, if that
was
Jennifer, and if Tony was still home, he would be alone. It had been a long time since I’d talked to him.

I slipped a quarter and a dime in the coffee-house pay phone and dialed the familiar number.

“Gorman residence. Jennifer speaking.”

The receiver settled back into its bracket with a clumsy clunk. Another slim blonde passed by pushing a stroller. Then another. Then another.

Get a life, Pelletier
, I admonished myself.
Mooning around over a man you walked out on three and a half years ago, a solid family man with a wife and child, a man you haven’t seen or heard from since that chintzy Christmas card last year, that sappy stable scene featuring a gold-metallic holy family and a donkey. Get. A. Life
. An evanescent image superimposed itself over the bustling crowd outside the plate glass: Charlie Piotrowski’s broad face, his warm brown eyes and shapely lips.

Then another slim blonde with a stroller turned the corner of 86th. Maybe
that
was Jennifer.

E
velyn Sackela
was a twig of a woman in a tree of an apartment on the top floor of a 1950s co-op. The
tiny foyer was jammed with oversized potted plants—rubber trees, ficus trees, a long table crowded with gigantic cacti. Any contribution the resultant carbon-dioxide overload might have made to healthful respiration was offset by the cigarette dangling from Evelyn’s carmined lips.

Evelyn was in her eighties, chic in black, parlor-tanned, and desiccated. If she told me she weighed as much as ninety pounds, I wouldn’t have believed her any more than if she’d told me the bright hair teased and styled into a mid-sixties flip was its own natural blonde. “Professor Pelletier,” she rasped, her voice not so much smoky as smoked. “How
intriguing
to hear from you. You’ve quite made my day.”

She led me into a living room overlooking the Hudson through an extravagant set of windows that wrapped around a corner of the room. I sat on a forest-green velvet couch next to a side table featuring a freeform orange ceramic ashtray heaped high with cigarette butts. The smoky fug in the room slammed me back in memory to my childhood home where hazy carcinogens were as much a part of the atmosphere as the scent of onions frying with cheap meat. I coughed automatically.

“I don’t get many visitors,” the fragile-looking elderly woman said. “So I’m tickled pink that you’ve come.” She’d gone all out. The glass-topped coffee table was set with a platter of bagels, plates of cream cheese and lox, a carafe of Mocha Macadamia Nut coffee, and a pitcher of mimosas. My hostess stubbed out her cigarette in a lime-green twin to the orange ashtray. “And with news about Milly Deakin! Fabulous! I’m dying to hear all about her. Tell me, how does she look?” She picked fastidiously at a half bagel topped with a schmear and a single slice of Nova.