Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript Page 2

  The walkway to the parking lot passed the library quad, skirting Clark Memorial, the current Enfield College library building, and the construction site for the new, and as yet unnamed, Enfield College library center. When it happened, it happened so fast, I thought I was hallucinating. To my left, the library, dreaming in the darkness, flared suddenly to frantic life, alarms blaring, blinding white strobe lights flashing like a futuristic war zone. Then a figure sped out of the shadows with breathtaking velocity, slammed into me, knocked me to the pavement, staggered, recovered its equilibrium, and vanished into the night.

  “A book thief?” Charlie Piotrowski repeated, incredulous. “You were knocked down by a book thief!”

  It was Saturday morning, and we were taking a trip to the ocean, the last chance we’d have to relax together for the foreseeable future. On the way, we planned to stop at the nursing home in Leominster and visit Charlie’s father. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the latter—Alzheimer’s takes a pitiful toll. But the Maine coast has its own restorative beauty in winter, when the grey rocky skies match the grey rocky shores, and the only other people on the beaches are those strong-hearted souls who live on the rugged coast year round.

  “Yes, a book thief,” I said. “He triggered the alarm system, the entire library lit up like a disco dance floor, then—wham. God, was he strong! I went over like a bowling pin.”

  “You okay, babe?” He used to call me “Doctor,” now he calls me “babe.” Maybe as a feminist I’m not supposed to like that, but I do.

  “Aside from a few bruises, yeah.”

  Charlie pulled the Jeep into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven and turned off the motor. “Unauthorized entry, huh?” Always thinking like a cop. “Did he get anything?”

  I shook my head. “Thank God, no. But it was a close call. Nobody knows how the creep did it, but he got into the closed stacks where the rare books are, boxed up an entire set of Raymond Chandler first editions, and trucked them out to the library loading dock. Then it looks as though he tried to get into the vault where they keep manuscripts and inscribed volumes, and that’s when he set off the alarm. Rachel Thompson says—”

  “Helluva risk to take for a bunch of old books. Who’s Rachel Thompson?”

  “She’s the Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The head of the library’s Special Collections division. Security called her, and she came in to check it out. She thinks it’s odd the intruder didn’t go after something more valuable than mystery novels. Some of the incunabula, for instance—”

  “What the hell is incunabula?”

  “Are incunabula. It’s a plural noun derived from the Latin.” I hate it when he rolls his eyes. “Incunabula are the first printed books, from the second half of the fifteenth century. Some of them are priceless. The college library has a Gutenberg bible, for instance, donated by some hot-shot alumni book collector, oh maybe a hundred years ago. Compared with that and some of their other holdings—such as a Shakespeare first folio and their Bay Psalm Book—the Chandlers they have here aren’t worth a lot. A few thousand dollars at the most.”

  Charlie whistled. “Thousands?”

  “Oh, yeah. Rare books and manuscripts can get exorbitant, Rachel says, into the millions. And it surprised her that the thief didn’t seem to target anything else. At least, she didn’t see anything else missing. And Brady Hansell. He’s—”

  “—Head of College Security. Yeah, I remember him. Skinny guy in his forties. Dark hair. Shifty eyes.”

  “That’s him all right. Brady says he’s going to step up the library security patrols, but he has no idea how this guy could’ve got past the existing patrols, let alone bypass a state-of-the-art alarm system.”

  “But he didn’t get past you, right? Of course not!” Charlie shook his head, clicked his tongue, then sighed, the full monty of Piotrowskian exasperation. “You were right there on the scene again to throw your body between a criminal and freedom—and get yourself trampled in the process. Karen—babe…What is it with you? It was bad enough when we were just acquaintances, but now…”

  I smiled at him. “At least,” I said, “it’s not something you have to get involved with. At least…,” and I laughed. “At least there was no body in that library.”

  “Body?” He had opened the car door. Now he halted, one foot on the asphalt, suddenly hyper-alert. “What do you mean, ‘body’?”

  “Miss Marple,” I explained.

  He gazed at me blankly.

  “You know? Agatha Christie? The Body in the Library?”

  “Oh.” His expression relaxed. “A book.”

  “Yes, a book. Sorry, Lieutenant.” I grinned at him. “I forgot that for you a body is more than simply a literary convention.” I kissed his cheek. “Go get the coffee.”

  ***

  Charlie came out of the 7-Eleven five minutes later carrying two foil-wrapped bagels, two cardboard cups of coffee, and a copy of People magazine. We’d been lovers for months now, but for one split second as he pushed open the big glass door, I saw him as if he were a stranger: a tall, solid man with the shoulders of a linebacker, a broad, kind face, intelligent eyes, cropped beige hair, and extremely kissable lips. Then he was in the car and was simply Charlie again. I ran my index finger down his cheek, from his eyebrow to the corner of his mouth. He smiled at me. Then he laid the bagels on the dashboard, set the cups in the cup-holders, and handed me the magazine.

  I gave him my I’m-a-Ph.D.-in-English look. “You know I only read People in the grocery store,” I said.

  “I thought you’d want to see this issue.” Charlie winked, turned the key in the ignition, and checked the Jeep’s rear-view mirror before backing out of the parking space. I took a closer look at the magazine.

  “Whoa!” A full-page photograph of Sunnye Hardcastle wearing a black-leather motorcycle jacket and a tough-gal sneer graced the cover.

  “I knew you’d be interested. You’ve been talking about this Hardcastle dame for days.” He glanced over at me, and raised his beige eyebrows. “I thought you were never gonna put that book of hers down last night and turn off the light.”

  I grinned at him. “I did, though. Didn’t I?”

  He grinned back. “So…aren’t you going to read me what People has to say about your favorite writer?” He unwrapped his bagel and bit into it.

  “My favorite writer? Not really. And it’s not as if I actually liked her. She was rude and self-centered. Although, I must say, she was very nice to my students—”

  “P.R.” Charlie said.

  “Could be. It’s just that…”

  “Just that, what?”

  We were driving through a strip of winter-denuded oaks and maples. An occasional clump of evergreens relieved the black-and-white monotony.

  I was about to say something that I knew would sound stupid, so I phrased my thoughts carefully. “What appeals to me about Hardcastle’s writing is the restlessness.” I was having trouble peeling open the little sipping tab on the lid of the coffee container. “Her books make me want to live a life where I’d have some…adventure.” I let it trail off lamely. Adventure is time-consuming and dangerous, not exactly what an assistant professor coming up for tenure really needs. “Anyhow, even though she’s obnoxious, the books are good. You ought to read one.” We hit a bump just as I got the tab open, and an ounce or two of coffee slopped over onto my new jeans. Yieeee! In the process of mopping at the burning fluid with a wad of paper napkins, I banged my bruised elbow against the door handle. Ouch!

  “Detective novels? No thanks. They never get the facts right. When I want adventure stories, I’ll stick to the seafaring stuff.” Charlie had read every single one of Patrick O’Brian’s tales of nautical life. “But she sounds like hot stuff—the Hardcastle woman.” He glanced over at the magazine. “Foxy, too.”

  “Well,” I said, “they must have taken an airbrush to the photograph.” I couldn’t believe I was being so cat
ty. “But, yes, she is attractive—in a well-preserved sort of way.”

  Charlie laughed. “Read the article, babe. I want to hear what they have to say about her.” He signaled for a right turn onto Route Two. The day was cold and bright, and we’d decided to take back roads. We had a two-hour drive ahead of us through the bleak winter landscape, and reading aloud sounded like as good a way as any to pass the time.

  I opened the glossy magazine, paged through to the feature article, and read:

  TOUGH BROAD FOR TOUGH TIMES

  If the luscious Kit Danger of book, movie, and TV fame is anything like her creator, the mystery novelist Sunnye Hardcastle, she is one formidable woman. Hardcastle, 52, rides a Harley, is a crack shot with a pistol, raises Rottweilers, and holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Further hobbies include “international adventures in exploration and infiltration,” about which she is, appropriately, mysterious.

  Brought up in Detroit’s Cass Corridor, Hardcastle says she had to get tough at a young age or she wouldn’t have survived her childhood. A full scholarship to the University of Michigan gave her the leg up she needed. In law school, the writer says, she was so bored, she spent her class time writing fiction. Then she dropped out of school to promote Rough Cut, her first Kit Danger novel. That began a twenty-five-year writing career, during which Hardcastle added an enduring icon to the American imagination—the hard-boiled woman detective.

  Unmarried, but not, we would imagine, without romantic entanglements, Hardcastle lives in a starkly postmodern aerie on a rugged peak in the Colorado Rockies. Aside from her dogs and her horses, Hardcastle shares her retreat with ten thousand first-edition American novels, of which she is an avid collector.

  Asked about her plans for the future, the novelist says she will “continue to write, write, write, write, write.”

  “Sounds like one tough cookie,” Charlie said, when I closed the magazine.

  I was lost in a daydream of living high above the world in a “starkly postmodern aerie” with my horses and my dogs, sighting down the barrel of a Sig Sauer 226 at a camouflage-garbed evildoer slithering through the underbrush.

  “And is that supposed to be a bad thing?” I snapped.

  “No.” He wrinkled his broad forehead. “I like tough cookies. What’s gotten into you, babe?”

  I tossed my hair back. My feminist ire was aroused. “It just pisses me off when men mock a woman who steps outside the traditional gender roles.”

  “I wasn’t mocking anyone!”

  “And don’t call me ‘babe.’ Now, if I could be more like her—”

  “Like who? Sunnye Hardcastle? Or Kit Danger?”

  “Either. And it’s whom, not who.”

  He rolled his eyes. Again.

  Why did I suddenly feel like provoking a fight? “If I could be more like her, I…I’d…” I wasn’t certain what I’d do.

  “Babe.” Charlie placed his hand lightly on my thigh. “Don’t even think about it. You get yourself in enough trouble as it is. If you were more like either of those…tough cookies… you’d probably be dead.” He shuddered. “I can’t bear to even think about that.”

  ***

  In Leominster we pulled into the circular drive in front of Pine Acres Nursing Home. “Karen,” Charlie said, as I opened the door, “I don’t want you to go in.”

  “You don’t?”

  “He was a great guy. I don’t want you to think of him this way.”

  “Well…if you’re sure…”

  A half-hour later, I looked up from the student paper I’d just marked with a B+. Charlie got into the Jeep without meeting my eye.

  “How is he?”

  “Fine.” He bit off the word.

  “Fine?”

  “Fine.”

  “That’s good.”

  After ten minutes, his eyes intent on the road, Charlie spoke again. “I followed the nurse into the room. My father asked her who I was. I said, ‘Dad, I’m Charlie.’ Then he frowned and said, ‘I used to have a son named Charlie.’”

  Grown men don’t cry, so I didn’t even glance at him as I handed over the box of tissues.

  ***

  Later that afternoon, with the cold sun slanting behind us, we sat on the rocks at Ogunquit, surveying the wind-driven waves.

  “You know,” I said, “somewhere I have a copy of Sunnye Hardcastle’s first novel, Rough Cut. I picked it up maybe twenty years ago at a tag sale in North Adams. I think I paid twenty-five cents for it, which was about all I could afford in those days. I wonder if it’s a first edition?”

  “Would that make it valuable?”

  “Couple of hundred bucks, I bet.”

  “Hmm,” Charlie replied, and snuggled me closer to his warm chest.

  “You just love me for my money,” I said.

  Chapter Three

  In New England, February is the cruelest month, and we were right in the middle of it. Sleet drew a barely penetrable veil over the blocky red-brick buildings that surrounded the quad, grey, icy drops on the verge of becoming thick, wet flakes. I could see the fine scrolled carving at the base of the Dickinson Hall pillars directly in front of me, but on the edge of campus, the library, the scene of my collision with the book thief two weeks earlier, was merely an insubstantial image from some faded lithograph. Students and a few professors stomped by in heavy boots on walkways an inch and a half deep in gritty slush. I shivered, pulled my coat collar up, tightened my scarf, and headed cautiously toward Emerson Hall. My Freshman Humanities class awaited me.

  On the bulletin board in front of the Student Commons, a brightly hued poster in acid-green and burgundy caught my eye.

  C O N F E R E N C E

  MURDER: THE PEN/KNIFE AND THE PATRIARCHY

  One Hundred and Fifty Years

  of

  American Crime Fiction

  Distinguished Guest Speaker

  The Feminist Mystery Novelist

  Sunnye Hardcastle

  Hellman Hall

  March 7-10

  A burgundy dagger skewered the word MURDER, whose final “R” oozed lurid drops of burgundy blood.

  “Wow,” I thought, “so Hardcastle’s agreed to come.” The tale of her surprise visit to my seminar had spread across campus like wildfire, granting me twenty-four hours of pedagogical fame. My colleagues, of course, were skeptical about having a pop writer in the classroom, but according to the students you’d have thought I’d lured William Shakespeare to Emerson Hall.

  As I studied the poster, the date of the conference suddenly struck me: only a month from now. Little caterpillars of anxiety goose-stepped through my gut. In four weeks I was scheduled to deliver a scholarly paper during a panel called Murder in History. In the audience would be one hundred and fifty academic experts in the history and art of crime. I hadn’t even begun to write it.

  A breathy voice hailed me. “Karen. Hold up a minute.”

  Claudia Nestor glided through the slush, moving as effortlessly as if she were on skis. She was all in brown, and with her short dark hair slicked close to her head by the precipitation, she looked like a skinny seal. Claudia was the director of the upcoming conference, which the Women’s Studies Program was sponsoring in an attempt to “reintegrate popular modes of expression with the Woman’s Voice.”

  “Cool poster, Claudia.”

  “Thanks. I asked for something hard-edged, unsettling.” She fluttered her eyelids nervously, caught herself, opened her eyes wide and fixed her gaze for two seconds, then fluttered again.

  Unsettling? My colleague from Women’s Studies must have led a far more sheltered life than I had. “Hardcastle’s pretty unsettling all by herself,” I responded. “How’d you get her to commit?”

  “Money.” The eye flutter again. The catch. The fixed stare.

  “Yeah? How much money?” I’d tucked away tons of detective fiction in between megatons of abstruse scholarly volumes during my years of grad school and teaching, and most of it was by women writers. I wondered if “the Wom
an’s Voice”—whatever that was—had ever actually been suppressed. But then I hadn’t been granted a cartload of reparation dollars by an historically all-male college to run a conference based on the premise that it had.

  “She held out for ten thousand dollars.” Claudia glanced around furtively. “But that’s in strictest confidence.”

  “Right,” I agreed. If I knew the Enfield grapevine, it would be all over campus by tea-time tomorrow.

  Enfield is a wealthy school, but not spendthrift. Last year they’d coughed up ten thou for an appearance by the film maker Spike Lee, then the same for a talk by comedian Sandra Bernhard. Now they were bringing in the hard-edged Hardcastle, whose Kit Danger unfailingly discovered vile corruption at the heart of that very same white-male power structure for which Enfield College kept churning out white-male power pups. But it was always a sure sign that a controversial artist was edging toward the mainstream when an elite college like Enfield shelled out cold, hard cash to lure her to campus.

  “Thanks. I knew I could count on you.” The eyelids fluttered. I found it impossible to talk to Claudia for more than five minutes at a stretch without becoming lightheaded, holding my breath, waiting for the next agitated twitch. Wiping slush from the lenses of my recently and reluctantly acquired eyeglasses, I put them back on, ready to resume the slippery trek to class. But Claudia didn’t seem in any hurry to get in out of the sleet. “So, Karen, how’s your conference paper coming along?”

  “My paper?” The gut caterpillars clicked their heels and stomped into double-time. “Fine. It’s going fine. Just fine.” And, really, it should be fine. After all, how hard could it be to put together an authoritative study on class binaries in the representation of murder in American working class discourse? All I had to do was read through the college library’s entire run of the National Police Gazette (1845-1936), then take a long look at their collection of nineteenth-century dime novels, and finish up with a review of mid-twentieth-century detective fiction paperbacks. That’s all. And now I was going to be on the program with Sunnye Hardcastle, someone who really knew something about how murder scenes were constructed. I could feel my own eyelids begin to flutter.