The Raven and the Nightingale Page 25

  “Wouldn’t that be plagiarism?”

  I thought for a minute. “Legally, I’m not certain if it is—not if it was done with Amber’s permission. But in terms of intellectual integrity … Well, let’s just say if word got out, it would pulverize Elliot’s reputation as a scholar.”

  But Piotrowski had taken my conjectures far beyond their professional ramifications. “Would having your ideas … er … taken be a strong enough motive to kill for?” He looked skeptical.

  “Who knows, Lieutenant? I’m just speculating here.”

  “I dunno, Doctor. You say this woulda happened three, four years ago. So why wait till now to kill him? That just doesn’t fly as a motive.”

  It made so much sense to me, I couldn’t believe he didn’t see it. “Amber was desperate, Piotrowski. She’s trying to finish her dissertation and she’s also teaching five courses a semester at three different schools just to make ends meet. Can you imagine?”

  He shrugged.

  “And—let’s say, she was struggling with her dissertation, and the job prospects were looking dimmer and dimmer, and there’s Elliot, junketing off around the world, getting all the acclaim for her ideas.… Suddenly she’d had enough.”

  Piotrowski said nothing.

  “You know,” I persisted, “either Amber or Elliot could have taken Monica’s knife from my office. Think of it this way, Amber gets one more turndown on a job application, she freaks out, goes to his house, threatens him with the knife, or …”

  “Or, what, Doctor?”

  “Or … maybe … Elliot threatened her—”

  “Ugh.” It was an eloquent ugh; I glanced at him. “That sounds more like it,” he said. “In my opinion, anyhow. Nichols threatens to expose him, humiliate him in front of the other profs, maybe she even tries to blackmail him. He goes into a rage, knows he has to get rid of her, strikes out at her with the knife he’d swiped from your office. They struggle, she gets the knife—she’s a tall, strong young woman—and … bam, she kills him.”

  The scene was so vivid, the way he put it, that I shuddered again. “Blackmail … You know, Piotrowski, I wouldn’t put it past her. How much character could a woman have who would agree to a scam like his in the first place?”

  “So, ya think it was all about blackmail?”

  I spread my hands: Who knows? “As I said, Lieutenant, I’m simply theorizing from the data. I’m not making any accusations.”

  “Well, Doctor …” The lieutenant’s words trailed off, and he fell into deep thought, his forefinger tapping his lips. With his broad features and monochrome coloring, Piotrowski wasn’t a classically handsome man, but he did have the nicest lips.…

  The house was noisy. Walls creaked in the wind. Barren branches clawed at the windows. Clanks and clunks announced the rising of heat in the old steam pipes. My restless gaze wandered around the kitchen. Something was … missing; what was it? I frowned in concentration. Then a livid bolt of lightning threw the gnarled limbs outside the window into momentary high relief, the power went out, the house was plunged into sudden darkness, and all at once things became weirdly phantasmagoric. Bony fingers clattered against the windows. The furnace groaned piteously, then died. The image of the bare kitchen walls lingered like a spectral imprint on my brain. And in that ghostly afterimage I saw what I hadn’t been able to discern in full light. As Piotrowski groped for his flashlight, I jumped up from the table. “Where’s that black cat?”

  “Huh?” He flicked the switch and swung the beam of concentrated light toward me.

  “Jeez, Lieutenant! Get that thing out of my face!” I yelped, blinded.

  He lowered the high-intensity beam; light puddled at our feet. “Sorry, Doctor. What d’ya mean, black cat? What black cat? I haven’t seen any cats here.”

  I didn’t respond; my attention was elsewhere. “Give me the light!” I grabbed for the flashlight, and Piotrowski instinctively stepped back twisting it from my grasp. The poor man probably thought I’d taken leave of my senses. The wind howled.

  “What the hell?” he exclaimed. The luminous circle danced crazily around the room like a demented will o’ the wisp. My wrist ached, and I reminded myself: Never, ever, ever make sudden, unexplained moves around a cop.

  “Shine that flashlight over there,” I ordered. After a second, he obeyed. The beam illuminated the corroded thermostat by the door, then a hanging ivy, long dead. “No! There! There to the left!” The light abruptly picked out the avocado Princess phone mounted in lonely splendor on the otherwise empty wall.

  “It’s gone!” I exclaimed triumphantly.

  “What’s gone?” The light was shining on me again.

  I bumped it away from my eyes. “The black cat! You know, Elliot’s bulletin board—the one in the shape of a cat.”

  Starkly limned at the perimeter of the flashlight’s beam, Piotrowski’s broad features were wrinkled in puzzlement. “So?”

  Before I could answer, the lieutenant’s pager beeped, and, without warning, the lights came back on. For a second or two it seemed like cause and effect, as if some external force had beeped the lights back on. The detective plucked the pager from his belt, squinted at the readout, then grabbed the receiver from the phone. He’d pressed two buttons before he removed the phone from his ear and frowned at it. “Huh?” He jiggled the hook, then listened again. “No dial tone. Must of turned the phone service off.”

  “It was on yesterday. I made several calls.” My thoughts were racing. Where could that bulletin board have gone? I knew it was still hanging there when Monica, Mike, and I had left the house the afternoon before. But the detective was focused on his little gray beeper; he wasn’t interested in any pussycat bulletin board.

  “Listen, Doctor, I gotta get this page toot sweet. I’m gonna call from the car. We done here?” Icy rain suddenly launched an assault on the window panes. It was going to be a hell of a night.

  “Give me a couple of minutes, Lieutenant.”

  “Okay. Ya need me, I’ll be in the Jeep.”

  “Right,” I replied absently. A wild gust of frigid wind whipped through the room as Piotrowski headed out the back door to his Jeep. Rain pounded the windows. I searched the cluttered kitchen counters for the memo-and-coupon-laden black cat. Next I drifted toward the butler’s pantry. No bulletin board there, either. In the dining room, dust and a residue of black fingerprint powder filmed the disheveled piles of scholarly books with which the table was laden.

  I checked the chair seats and the sideboard: no bulletin board. Nothing but scholarly detritus: notepads, printouts, xeroxes. Who would eventually inherit this mess, I wondered? Would it be Mike Vitale, as my student himself seemed to think? But probably not—not solely, anyhow. Now little Joey was on the scene, and Monica would make very certain her son by Elliot also got his share.

  The back door screeched, and the sound of the storm intensified. Piotrowski called from the kitchen, “Doctor, I gotta go take care of something right away. You wanna come, or are you okay here for … oh, maybe twenty minutes?”

  Sometimes my scholarly training renders me a bit myopic when I’m tracking an intriguing piece of information. “I’ll be fine,” I yelled back, impulsively. “Don’t worry about me. I’m just giving the place one last looksee.”

  “Ya sure? It might be a half hour.”

  “A half hour’s fine. Go do what you’ve got to do.”

  Wind howled, then the back door slammed with its usual ear-splitting bang. I was alone in the house.

  In the central hall, I peered into dim corners and scrutinized the wide staircase as far as the first landing, where the steps abruptly turned left and vanished from sight. I’d search the downstairs rooms first, I decided, before I headed up those stairs into the dreary second-floor chambers. I crossed the threshold into Elliot’s study. Except for the body of Amber Nichols sprawled across the blood-soaked desk in the far corner, the room looked exactly as it had when Piotrowski and I had riffled the file cabinets earlier.


  The body of Amber Nichols sprawled across the blood-soaked desk! I did a quick double take, and a croak uncannily like a raven’s caw caught in my throat. I closed my eyes, then opened them. No. This was no stress-induced phantasm. Amber Nichols, her long, honey-hued hair obscuring her face, was sprawled across Elliot Corbin’s fatal desk. I bolted across the room to see if there was anything I could do to help her, then croaked again as I touched the body: still warm. Well—of course it was; scarcely twenty minutes ago I’d sat at that very desk and gone through those very cabinets with Piotrowski. One of us would have noticed a corpse.

  Piotrowski! Pivoting, I sped to the hallway to summon him, then snapped my mouth shut before the yell could emerge from my throat. Piotrowski wasn’t here, of course. He’d gone off on a call. Those were his storm-streaked taillights vanishing down the drive. I was alone in this creepy house with this dead—or dying—woman. Any help for Amber Nichols would have to come from me.

  I turned back to the body at the desk, and slid my hand under the mass of Amber’s hair to feel for a pulse at the carotid artery. Thank God! She was still alive! But what should I do now? Piotrowski was unreachable, the phone line was disconnected, and Amber didn’t seem to be breathing; it was up to me to take some action. Tony had made me take a CPR course once—years ago. Surely I could still remember the moves. First—get Amber out of that chair and onto the floor. A clap of thunder shook the house, as I grabbed the body by the upper arms, and pulled. Just as I tensed my shoulder muscles, anticipating Amber’s full weight, the body suddenly gave a powerful twist, leapt up, and grabbed me back. I let out a screech. The next instant, very much alive, Amber Nichols had me in a cruel grasp from behind, with my left arm bent, and a cold, thin blade pressing at my throat.

  In my ear I heard her high, pedantic voice. “Sorry, Karen, but you really seem to have backed me into a corner here. I’ve been trying to get out of this damn house without being seen ever since you came in with that boneheaded cop. I almost made it, but no, you—you just had to keep snooping around.”

  “My God, Amber! What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

  I struggled. Her grip on my neck tightened cruelly. “Oh, I was looking for something—and I found it.” This close, I could smell alcohol on her breath: gin. “And, no one’s going to take it away from me.” I was pressed so close to Amber’s body, I could feel her tension in my own. Every muscle, mine as well as hers, was as taut as a length of steel cable.

  “Believe me, Amber, I don’t want anything you have.” I just want to get out of here alive.

  “Oh, you’d want this.” She was silent then, as if in deep contemplation. “You know I murdered Elliot, don’t you?” Her hand on my arm trembled slightly; the blade of the knife nudged my windpipe. I was so shocked by her admission that I couldn’t respond, and Amber continued, in her precise voice, strained now with anxiety. “I don’t think it’s going to be possible for me to allow you to leave here, Karen.”

  “Gaaah,” I choked. Hail hit the windows and Amber started. Then she shook off her alarm.

  “I didn’t really mean to kill him. It just … happened. But you? You’re a different story. Given the circumstances, I don’t see that I have a choice. If only you hadn’t been so damn persistent.…”

  “Amber, I don’t understand anything about this. Just let me go, and I’ll forget I ever—”

  “It’s too bad I can’t. When I heard the cop say he had to leave, I thought for certain you’d go with him, and I’d be home-free. There wouldn’t have to be more violence.” The growing edge of hysteria in Amber’s voice told me this was no cold-blooded killer, but a woman who, for some unknown reason, had been driven beyond endurance. “But you kept on snooping around, and there was no place left to hide, so on the spur of the moment I thought up the dead-woman ruse. It was the only way I could catch you off-balance.” She laughed. “Quite Poesque, huh? The dead woman returns to life?” She shuddered, then she intoned, “ ‘We have put her living in the tomb!’ ” A bolt of lightning emphasized her words. I’d never heard Edgar Allan Poe quoted to such devastating effect. Was Amber living in a fantasy world where real people stalked the boards of her own mad psychic drama? Around me, the books on Elliot’s haphazardly stacked library shelves seemed to come to life, the shelves themselves to press more closely around me. A devastating clap of thunder followed the lightning.

  Get a grip, Pelletier! I admonished myself. Here’s the story: You’re trapped in an old house with a madwoman. You’re not the first girl to find herself in a situation like this.

  I had to think about this. I had no idea what had driven Amber over the edge—unless, of course, it was the job market. Hmm? An off-the-wall hunch, but what if I went with it? Could Amber’s murderous desperation have something to do with her tortured dreams of a job in academe?

  I recalled Piotrowski’s assessment that desperate people feel compelled to tell their stories. As an English professor, I knew the power of stories. And she was talking. Piotrowski had said: Gotta keep ’em talking; gotta form a bond. “Amber,” I said, and heard the wobble in my voice. “First of all, you’re hurting me.”

  “Sorry.” With the automatic surface civility of academic culture, she slackened her hold, but not enough to allow me any real movement. She might have to kill me, but God forbid she should inconvenience me in any other way.

  “And I’m really sorry you’re feeling so … desper—ah, stressed,” I amended. “Tell me, Amber, what’s going on? I’d like to know. I’d like to understand. What did you find? Why is it so important?”

  “You’d like to know, huh?” The irony in her voice was as thick as the clotted prose in the essay I’d just shown Piotrowski.

  “Yes,” I croaked, a tad desperate myself, “I would. I really, really would.” More lightning.

  “Ha.” The syllable expressed more sarcasm than humor. “Well, all right, then, Karen. You might as well know it all before I … before I … dispose of you.” More thunder.

  What fiendish plan was she conceiving? My imagination went into hyper-drive again, projecting horror after horror. Would she knife me? Garrote me? Bury me alive—brick me up forever in some hideous vault far beneath this hideous house? Face it: we had read the same books. Whatever abomination I could imagine, Amber could come up with, too.

  “You see, Karen, when you were in the kitchen with that cop, I was in the dining room, and I heard you talking. You were wrong, you know.” For a second, Amber pressed the blade so hard into my throat, I knew she must have drawn blood. I’m in such a state of shock, I thought, that I can’t even feel the slicing of my own throat.

  The furnace clanked. Another crack of thunder sounded, and the old house creaked as the storm shook it. Amber didn’t seem to notice. “I didn’t kill Elliot because of my essay. He died because of … Emmeline’s poem.”

  “What? Emmeline Foster? Elliot had an Emmeline Foster poem?”

  “You remember that day everyone was in your office? The day we opened the box?” The pressure on my throat lessened enough for me to nod. I swallowed for the first time in at least a light-year.

  “I was leafing through that little notebook of her poems.… You remember a little blue leather notebook?”

  I nodded again. Very carefully.

  “And I came across a poem that … that … well … Let’s just say the discovery of that particular old poem would make … will make”—I felt her breath steady with resolution—“my scholarly career. But Elliot was nosing over my shoulder. One look and he knew what I had there. He snatched the notebook out of my hand, and, five minutes later he waltzed out of your office with it. How could I protest? I didn’t want to alert anyone else to my find. And then he wouldn’t answer my calls. By the time I saw Elliot again, the night of the study-group meeting, he had squirreled that damn poem away somewhere.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spied the object I’d been searching for, the black-cat bulletin board that had gotten me into this deadly confrontation in
the first place. Stripped of its notes and coupons, the empty board tilted crazily, half in and half out of the big wire wastebasket next to the desk. “Amber, what’s the—?”

  She yanked my attention back from the discarded bulletin board. “I told Elliot to give me back the poem or I’d let everyone know I was the one who’d written the Poe monograph. He laughed at me—said I wouldn’t dare, said I was pathetic. He said I’d never find the manuscript. Said Poe himself had told him where to hide it. Then he said that I was ineffectual. That I’d never make it in the academic literary profession. That I didn’t have the right cutthroat instincts …”

  With her blade at my throat, I hoped to hell Elliot had been right.

  I had some dim fantasy that if I kept Amber talking she wouldn’t kill me—at least not until she was done telling her tale. And, face it, I was genuinely curious. “What was it, Amber? What was the poem Elliot hid from you?”

  “It was—‘The Raven,’ ” she said. And, as if in some bad melodrama, lightning flashed, thunder crashed, and, once again, the lights went out.

  Instantly the knife was so tight against my windpipe I whimpered. “Don’t try anything, Karen. I don’t need to be able to see you in order to slit your throat.”

  An errant breeze wafted against my cheek, as if a door or window had suddenly been opened somewhere, and just as swiftly shut. The darkness took on texture and shadow and motion. Death was no longer some farfetched Poesque fantasy; suddenly it had become all too real. I thought of Amanda, and how I would miss her. Tony flittered through my mind, how we had loved each other. Every minute of my past life became a … a treasure chest of memories. I thought of the music I would never hear again, the laughs I would never laugh, the books I would never read. Nevermore would I know love. Nevermore would I feel joy. Nevermore … I thought of Lieutenant Piotrowski and his very nice lips. Nevermore would I—Piotrowski? Whaaa? I’m on the cusp of eternal oblivion; why the hell am I thinking about—