Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 05 - The Maltese Manuscript Read online

  ***

  After class, I checked in at the Enfield College English Department office to get my mail. Monica was standing by the fax machine, shamelessly reading her way through the latest private-and-confidential faculty fax transmission.

  “This is for you, Karen,” she said, without looking up. “You’re invited to a high-school reunion, it says here.” She gave me an appraising look. “Lowell High, huh? I woulda thought you’da gone somewhere a whole lot classier than Lowell. We used to play them in football, you know. You shoulda seen their cheerleaders. Talk about cheap! Those Lowell girls are so easy.” Monica should talk. To my certain knowledge she had a bit of a history herself, and, like me, a fatherless child to prove it. A stocky woman in her early thirties, our secretary had chopped-off brown hair, a sallow complexion, and the shrewd black eyes of a witch. Which she was: a practicing witch and member in good standing of a local coven. A witch in orange stretch pants and a long rust-colored sweater hand-knit in a complicated cable stitch. Monica glanced at the fax again, then up at me. “You oughta be able to go, Karen. It’s the end of February, and mid-term exams will be over by then. What’s the matter? You okay, Karen? You look sick.”

  “I’ll take my fax now, Monica,” I said, plucking it from her hand. “Thank you very much.”

  ***

  Sleet had turned to steady snow by the time I left my office for the day. As I passed the library, I was warmed by the glow from the windows. A Gothic grey-stone mausoleum, the old library lacked the light, openness and electronic efficiency of the magnificent new edifice under construction. Nonetheless, it had served the college well for over a century, and the staff worked wonders in spite of the building’s shortcomings.

  Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow I’ll spend the entire day in Special Collections reading through the National Police Gazette.

  But, of course, when tomorrow came, I found I’d forgotten about the ten a.m. emergency meeting of the English Department hiring committee. The committee wrangled until noon, then the final candidate for the African-American position showed up for an interview, and she turned out to be white, precipitating all manner of surreal discussion—and Tomorrow was swallowed up just as thoroughly as all my Yesterdays had been.

  ***

  Not that I didn’t find time to read Sunnye Hardcastle’s latest, Tough Times. I closed each day in the company of Kit Danger, as if she were a fictional sister.

  Power oozed from him like pus from a boil. Kit recognized the set of his shoulders, the cut of his suit. The black silk tee. The pants that fit where they were supposed to. The Italian shoes of leather too soft to be shiny.

  She slapped a twenty on the table and slipped from her booth in the coffee shop window.

  He was alone. So was she. She loitered at the pastry case as he passed. Kit was a mistress of disguise. A man like Jack Vecchio wouldn’t even see the fiftyish shopper she’d become for the afternoon. She could tail him anywhere.

  A man like Jack Vecchio. Muscle and money.

  And murder.

  By the end of that week, invitations to my high-school reunion had arrived in every conceivable form: fax, phone, U. S. Postal Service, and e-mail. It turned out my sister Connie had given my various numbers and addresses to Ruth Ann Bouchard, the biggest mouth in the Lowell High School class of 1978, and Ruth Ann was determined she was going to get me to attend. “How could you do that to me, Connie,” I raged over the phone, after I’d hung up on Ruth Ann’s interminable call. “You know how they screwed me at Lowell High.”

  I wanted nothing to do with Lowell High School ever again, not since a prudish administration had snatched away my prized valedictorianship twenty-some-odd-years earlier. In my senior year I’d disgraced myself by becoming pregnant, thus, in some incomprehensibly tortuous socio-economic-psycho-cultural manner, totally negating my thirteen-year unchallenged record as Class Brain. When word of my little problem leaked out in early June, pom-pom girls gloated and valedictorian-status slid greasily out of my hands and into the sweaty grasp of that suck-up dweeb, Ernie Conklin, with his measly 95.4. And—damn it—I let the school get away with it. I marched down the aisle, my barely discernible little belly concealed by a voluminous black graduation gown, as passively anonymous as any other mill-town kid, in spite of having the class’s highest cumulative average, out-of-sight SAT scores, and a lifelong record of perfect attendance.

  Of course, plenty of girls got knocked up by the end of senior year, but Karen Pelletier was supposed to be different. Karen Pelletier was supposed to provide evidence that Lowell’s educators were not wasting their lives. Karen Pelletier was supposed to demonstrate that the American Dream is intact, that American education works, that even from the meanest homes in the meanest neighborhoods of the meanest towns a life can be salvaged through the proper teaching of Diligent Study Habits, Working Well With Others, and Proper Classroom Behavior.

  And it’s true. The American Education System has been good to me. Through the application of Diligent Study Habits, Working Well With Others, and Proper Classroom Behavior— plus a mind-boggling amount of dogged determination and a generous endowment of innate intelligence—I’ve earned myself a Ph.D. in English and a tenure-track position at one of the country’s most prestigious colleges.

  It’s just that things would have been a hell of a lot easier if the purveyors of American Education had taught me a teensy leetle bit about Methods of Proper Birth Control.

  “You know I don’t want anything more to do with those people,” I whined to Connie.

  “Lighten up, Karen,” my sister snapped. In the two years since my daughter Amanda forced me back into the bosom of my estranged family, Connie and I had seen each other only three times—old animosities die hard—and our relationship was still shaky. I could picture her standing at the kitchen phone in her tight jeans and tight red sweater, a doughnut in one hand, car keys in the other, impatient to be on her way. She worked as a department manager at the Wal-Mart, and she was ambitious. Store manager was the next rung up the ladder. When she hit it, she’d probably be making twice as much money as I was.

  “I have to deal with ‘those people’ every time I go to work,” Connie said. “Why should you be any different from the rest of us?”

  I thought about it. Maybe she was right. Maybe it was time to forgive and forget. Maybe it was time to grow up. “Hmm. When is this thing, anyway? In three weeks? Connie, have you ever gone to one of your class reunions?”

  “You kidding?” she replied. “I see those people every day. I don’t need to spend even a second more with them. But…” She paused, and when she spoke again, her usually abrasive tone had become reflective. “You know, after what they did to you, Karen, I’d say go. I mean—look at you, a professor and everything. I’d want to show them. You know? Now,” her attitude defensive again, “you okay with this, Karen? I’m late for work.”

  I walked the cordless phone back to the kitchen, and set it on its base with exaggerated care. Connie was right. I felt warmed by her insight. I stood there with my hand still on the phone, chewing the inside of my lip. I could show those bastards. Show them good. Impulsively, right there at the kitchen table, I wrote out a check for fifty dollars, addressed an envelope to the reunion committee, and, before I could change my mind, licked the stamp. And, besides, it would be the mature thing to do, wouldn’t it? Mend fences. Let bygones be bygones. Whatever. I was a grown-up now. Everything was under control. I headed to the doughnut shop.

  Chapter Four

  “Don’t let this get around, Karen, but we’ve had another break-in.” As I pushed through the double doors to the anteroom of the Special Collections Division the following Monday, Rachel Thompson, the curator, pulled me into her private office. “We’re supposed to keep it quiet, but since you already know about the one last month…” Tall and full-bodied, with crisp dark hair styled medium-short and curly, Rachel was dressed, as usual, in flowing natural-fiber garments, today a cafe-au-lait tunic over a long pale ro
se skirt.

  “When did it happen?” And I’d always thought libraries were such safe places.

  “Last night, about two. I’ve got the alarm rigged to ring at my house as well as at Security, so I was here right behind the campus police, but—” She spread her hands. “Not a soul in sight.”

  “He get anything?”

  “Not that we can tell. We’ve been doing inventory since the last intrusion, and it looks like nothing’s missing.”

  “That must be a relief.”

  “You’re telling me! Why the Gutenberg alone might be worth a couple of million at auction. If it was a legitimate sale, that is.” In spite of twenty years in academe, Rachel still spoke with the twang of her native Texas. “Well, anyway, I’ve been meaning to call you ever since the night of the first break-in, but as you can imagine, things have been insane here. How are you? That was quite a knock you took. I kept thinking you should go to the E.R.”

  “I must have been in shock. I didn’t feel a thing until the next morning. Still have pain in my elbow, though.”

  Rachel gave me a down-home tsk-tsk, but she still had her mind on the intruder. “Avery wants both break-ins hushed up.” Avery Mitchell is Enfield’s president. “Bad for public relations, he says. And as long as we haven’t lost anything…” She shrugged. “It’s a mystery, the whole thing—how the thief gets in, why he tried to take the Chandlers last time, why he doesn’t go after something worth mega bucks. Security didn’t find any signs of an actual break-and-enter either time, Brady Hansell says. Brady thinks the thief must have a key, even though we had the locks changed after the last break-in. But Avery still doesn’t want to go to the police.”

  She sat down at her desk, suddenly deflated, as if someone had let all the air out of her. Memos and book-order forms were strewn on top of dog-eared file folders. An ancient Styrofoam cup overflowed with paper clips. A stack of old library journals perched precariously by the phone. How anyone who had ever taken a course in library cataloging could live with such chaos was beyond me.

  The fax machine clattered to life, capturing Rachel’s attention instantly, as if she’d been waiting for it to ring. “Karen, I’ll let you get to work. Glad you weren’t hurt.” She pulled a sheet from the fax machine, glanced at it, then vanished through a door marked Restricted Entry.

  Pushing open the glass doors, I entered the reading room, a spacious chamber furnished with long golden-oak tables and an elevated librarian’s desk. The walls were lined with built-in bookcases displaying priceless volumes locked behind glass doors with ornate metal grids. I glanced around me for possible book thieves. None in sight. A short, potato-faced man in a yellow sweater leafed through what seemed to be an early twentieth-century volume, taking notes on a laptop computer. A distinguished-looking woman with pewter-grey hair in a tight bun sifted impatiently through a folder of handwritten letters, obviously not finding anything that satisfied her. A few students reading old newspapers looked as if they might be doing research for a history course. The silence in the room was broken only by the occasional turning of a page or a sigh from the grey-haired woman.

  I sat at one of the oak tables, filled out the request form for the first ten years of the Police Gazette, and handed it to the small, dry-as-dust desk librarian, Nellie Applegate. Where Rachel was vibrant and ruddy, Nellie was enervated and pale. Although only in her forties, she had salt-and-pepper hair, which was cropped off unimaginatively just below her ears. She wore a calf-length slate-grey shirtwaist dress and looked as if she had stepped out of an old photograph, not the sepia kind colored in earth tones, but a 1930s snapshot in washed-out greys and flat whites. She accepted the call forms hesitantly and said thank you apologetically, as if I were undertaking a job for her instead of vice versa.

  Fortunately for me, with my specialization in the literature of the American working class, the Enfield College library boasts a world-class collection of popular fiction: newspapers, magazines, books and manuscripts. The Gazette is a nineteenth and early twentieth-century weekly magazine featuring every conceivable sensational variation on criminal activity. It’s only one of many valuable crime-fiction resources available to researchers, thanks to the generosity of a wealthy alumni collector.

  While I waited for the periodicals to be delivered, I slid the copy of Tough Times out of my book bag and began to read.

  9:14 a.m. A Housemaid’s Home Cleaning Services van pulled up to the luxurious Riverfront Apartments. Two uniformed workers unloaded cleaning supplies from the rear. The driver remained in his seat as one woman lugged an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner to the building’s front doors and pressed the entry buzzer.

  “Yeah?” queried the doorman. Shiny name tag: Raphael.

  “Vecchio,” said the tall blonde. “9-A.” Her co-worker came up behind her, a dark stocky woman whose upper-arm muscle definition threatened to split the seams of her uniform shirt.

  The doorman shook his head. “Mr. Vecchio didn’t say nothing about no cleaning service.”

  The blonde widened her eyes. “He called last night. It was like a real emergency. You sure he didn’t tell you? Heavy-duty work. Had to have it done by dinnertime. Ain’t that what you got in your book, Gloria?”

  The dark woman pulled a dog-eared appointment book from her cleaning caddy. “Yeah. Vecchio. Nine a.m. Urgent.”

  The blonde spread her hands. “See? And we’re late already. Mr. V.’s gonna go ape-shit if we don’t get the job done on time.”

  Raphael was familiar with Mr. V.’s wrath. “Awright. Awright. You got the key?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Kit Danger held up the key she’d copied from Vecchio’s. “We’ll just let ourselves in.”

  “Professor Pelletier?”

  I jumped. The book skidded across the table.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.” My student Peggy Briggs stood by my chair with a dozen archival boxes on a book cart.

  “It’s okay, Peggy. I guess I was just engrossed.” I retrieved the book and turned it over so she could see the title.

  She yawned.

  Work-study, I thought, probably on top of another part-time job. No wonder the poor woman is strung out. She must be exhausted.

  Peggy was an enigma to me. Following her departure in hysterics from my seminar the day of Sunnye Hardcastle’s visit, she had waited for me after class and offered an apology, but no explanation. Since then she had attended classes, prepared her assignments, and taken dutiful notes. But she kept a very low profile, half-asleep most of the time, speaking only when called upon, never volunteering an opinion.

  “Peggy,” I asked, “how are things going?”

  She gave me a wary glance. “I’m fine.”

  Pride. “I’m sure you are. It’s just that I know how hard school can be for returning students. I was one myself. If you ever need someone to talk to, you know where my office is.”

  “Thanks,” she replied. “Maybe I will…sometime.” She eased the book cart up level with the table, cast me a wan smile and plodded away.

  ***

  The newspapers were yellowing and smelled of the past. I lost myself immediately in the brute violence and lurid sensationalism that constituted much of what the nineteenth-century laboring classes read. Murder. Rape. Infanticide. Kidnapping. Theft. Fraud. Fraud. Fraud. All the stuff we never learned about in the sanitized history I was spoon-fed in college.

  By noon I’d had enough of the Gazette. I filled out another request form, this time for three of the popular nineteenth-century Beadle’s dime novels. Beadle’s Dime Novel Series ran to 321 volumes, its pocket-size books, a mere hundred pages in length, featuring a distinctive burnt-orange cover and sufficient thrills, spills, and adventures to keep the American working-class reader occupied and out of trouble. It was nineteenth-century dime-detectives such as Old Cap Collier and Nick Carter who became the prototypes for the Sam Spades, Philip Marlowes, and Kit Dangers of the twentieth century. I submitted the request form to Nellie, who accepted it meekly
. Then I headed out for lunch.

  ***

  In the baronial hall that served as the library’s foyer, a half-dozen display cases had been set up with mystery exhibits in anticipation of the crime-fiction conference. As I came up the stairs, a book jacket in the glass-topped case nearest to me caught my eye: 1970s hot-pink and chartreuse stylized design of a crouching woman aiming a shiny black revolver directly at the reader. I paused to look it over: a first edition of Sunnye Hardcastle’s Rough Cut. Wow! That was it, the book I’d lugged around with me in various moves over the past twenty years. The one I’d mentioned to Charlie, and then forgotten again. Now I stared at the volume displayed like a jewel in its protective case: Was my twenty-five-cent copy a first edition? Had it become valuable over the years? And where was my copy, anyhow? In one of my cluttered bookcases? In a box in the attic? And, really, how much might it be worth? Then I brought myself back to the present. I had a conference paper to write, and I was in the library to do research, not to piss my time away with fantasies of unearned wealth.

  When I returned from my hastily consumed tuna-fish-sandwich lunch, Rachel Thompson popped out of her office again and waylaid me before I entered the reading room. Her usually rubicund cheeks had gone pale. “Karen,” she said, “I’m afraid there’s going to be a delay in filling your request for the dime novels.”

  “Someone else has the books?”

  Rachel hedged. “Not exactly.” Her expression was somber. Through the glass doors behind her I could see Nellie Applegate at the reading-room desk, gazing abstractedly in the direction of the researchers at the long tables. Rachel reached up and fingered the filmy scarf at her throat. She beckoned me to follow her into her office, and then through the door marked “Restricted Entry.” We entered an enormous room. I glanced around, curious. This must be what they called the closed stacks. Empty book carts lined the wall next to me. Book-laden shelves stretched from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, as far as I could see.