The Raven and the Nightingale Read online

  “Who said you had to live with him?” Earlene grinned at me slyly. “How about just a teensy-weensy little fling? It’s not natural for a woman your age to live like a nun.”

  “Who says I’m living like a nun?” I ripped open the bag of parsnips, thrust a fat one in her hand, plucked the paring knife from the block again, slapped it in front of her. “You don’t know everything about me!”

  This time I got the age-old, infinitely wise, African-American-woman-understands-the-blues look. The trouble was, although I hadn’t ever told her about my daughter’s father, Earlene really did know a hell of a lot about me. I was living like a nun.

  Earlene proved to be a lively dinner companion, relating hilarious accounts of Thanksgivings with nutsy relatives in her large family in the Cleveland projects. She even got Agata Warzek to reminisce haltingly about holiday traditions when she was a child in Poland. And I did my part, with holiday-cooking disaster tales. Having lived with a cop for years, I had all too many of those to tell; so, there, Earlene, I longed to say.

  Surprisingly, the younger women at the table were no fun. I knew exactly what was on Amanda’s mind, and Jill was preoccupied with Eloise, who, after sleeping like a hibernating bear cub all afternoon, had begun to whimper the instant I finally got everyone gathered around the laden table. But I didn’t know what was keeping Sophia so quiet, and that bothered me. Even though she was habitually reticent, my former student usually allowed herself to be drawn out in congenial company. But today—flat monosyllables greeted any query. And when I complimented her on the poems she’d read at the library on Sunday, Sophia went bone-pale and practically choked on her mashed potatoes. After that she didn’t eat much of anything, just pushed food around on her plate, and I realized I’d better leave her alone with her distress—whatever it was. I realized this particularly strongly when Amanda kicked me under the table. A Doc Marten is a big boot, and it makes an impression.

  So I resorted to gossip. That never fails to liven things up. “Earlene, you know Elliot Corbin, of course. What’s the buzz about him? I was at his house for a meeting the other night, and he was going on and on about the Palaver Chair—you know, that prestigious position we’re hiring for in the English Department—and what he’s going to do when he gets it. Not if he gets it, but when he gets it—”

  “Is that a sure thing? That he’ll get it?” Earlene looked troubled.

  “He seems to think so.”

  “Too bad. I think I mentioned to you how many students have—” Earlene glanced over at Sophia, who was, after all, still an Enfield student. She let her words trail off. As Dean of Students, Earlene was privy to all sorts of information about both faculty and students, but much of it was confidential.

  “Isn’t Harriet Person expecting to get that job?” Jill had silenced Eloise by opening her loose-fitting pumpkin-orange blouse and popping a nipple in the baby’s mouth. That was good for about five minutes of peace. “At the last Women’s Studies meeting, she seemed really confident. She was promising great advances for feminism on the Enfield campus—a new ‘wimmin’s’ center, a sexual diversity initiative, safe rooms in every dorm.”

  “I was kind of hoping we’d hire a poet.” Sophia said the word poet reverently, as another person might say saint. This was her first voluntary contribution to the conversation, and I immediately turned to her. She had dressed up for the day, wearing the sky-blue sweater I had given her the previous Christmas and a long navy-blue wool skirt. Her blue-gray eyes shone briefly, like a spring sky between showers.

  “Who’d you have in mind?” I asked. As if I didn’t know. I loaded more stuffing on my plate, pulled the gravy boat in my direction.

  “Well, Professor Birdwort, of course. She’s so accomplished.…” Sophia actually took a bite of cranberry sauce—to celebrate the thought, I assumed: Saint Jane. Then I noted the snideness. Was I just a little jealous? I’d always been Sophia’s hero.

  “Doesn’t Jane Birdwort have some connection to Corbin?” Earlene asked, loading her fork with peas. “It seems to me I heard something.… What was it?” She slapped her head with the heel of her hand, but didn’t knock any information loose. She shrugged, and said, “Old age! It’s pretty bad when you can’t even recall the juicier bits of scandal.”

  “Scandal?” I replied. “Oh Earlene, do try to remember.”

  Amanda laughed, for a moment her usual lively self. “Mom, Enfield College must be the scandal center of the universe. I’ve never heard so much downright salacious gossip as you’ve passed on to me since you’ve been on this quiet little campus.”

  “Salacious!” I exclaimed.

  “Good Lord, girl!” Earlene joked. “What kind of education are they giving you there at Georgetown? What’s the next tidbit of expanded vocabulary you’re gonna run by us: concupiscent?”

  “No,” Amanda replied. “But try this one on for size: There’s a woman in one of my classes called Chastity.”

  “Oh,” said Earlene, grinning at me wickedly. “Your mother knows all about that.”

  Just as Sophia was about to set the pumpkin pie in the center of the table, between the apple crumb pie and the vanilla Häagen-Dazs, the doorbell rang. Sophia jumped and let the pie plop onto the table. “Who on earth?…” I said, mystified, and hefted myself up off the suddenly gravity-intensive chair. I reached the door as the bell gave a second peremptory jangle. Who could it be? On Thanksgiving Day? An image of Tony’s battered Irish face came immediately to mind. We’d been together so long that no holiday seemed complete without him. As I threw the door open, I saw immediately, of course, that my former boyfriend was nowhere in sight. But I stared in astonishment at the bulky figure who was framed there in the doorway. Broad shoulders, nicely contoured lips, just as I’d recalled. As horrified as I should have been about the presence of this particular man on my doorstep at—let’s see—6:47 Thanksgiving evening, Earlene’s speculations momentarily blocked out all other conjectures, and I simply gaped at him, like an adolescent with a precipitous crush.

  “Doctor Pelletier.” Lieutenant Piotrowski cleared his throat twice. He looked extremely solemn. “I am terribly sorry to interrupt your holiday meal.” He peered over my shoulder at the guests gathered around the table, and I knew each one would be indelibly registered in his memory. “And I wouldn’t do it unless it was absolutely necessary. But something real nasty has just come up, and I gotta talk to you. I believe you know a man named Elliot Corbin.”

  9.

  So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn

  Which once he wore!

  —JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

  ELLIOT CORBIN WAS DEAD—an apparent homicide, Lieutenant Piotrowski said, but wouldn’t elaborate. Next to his body, police had found a lined yellow pad, with my name scribbled on it, heavily underlined.

  I focused only on the initial information. “Dead? Elliot dead? But he can’t be! I just saw him two nights ago!” The second the words tumbled out of my mouth, I realized how stupid that sounded.

  “Nonetheless, Doctor, he is dead. And in case you didn’t hear me, I’ll say it again: Your name was found at the scene.

  “At first glance, it looks like the name was there before the blood spatters,” the lieutenant continued carefully, as I dropped like a stone into the nearest chair, suddenly light-headed with shock—blood spatters!—“so we don’t necessarily read it as a dying accusation—”

  “What do you mean, necessarily?” my Amanda exploded, instantly ready to do battle for her mother. “Of course it’s not an accusation! Mom had nothing to do with—”

  “I would assume not,” the lieutenant interrupted, with a faint smile. He liked Amanda, had told me the previous summer that he thought she had the kind of smarts that would make her a great cop. Not that I wanted to hear that: No daughter of mine …

  Now Piotrowski turned to me. “But, I gotta admit, Doctor Pelletier, it gave me a hell of a jolt to find your name at a crime scene—so prominent-like. So … well … I need to talk to
you. Is there somewhere you and me could have a little privacy,” he held up a meaty hand to forestall Amanda’s protest, “so I could ask you a few questions confidential-like?”

  I led Piotrowski into the kitchen and closed the door on my gaping family and friends. As I cleared a spot for the lieutenant at a table littered with cold potatoes, congealed gravy, and a mutilated turkey carcass, I noted him eyeing the food with what appeared to be more than investigative interest.

  “Have you eaten, Lieutenant?” Even though, as far as I knew, my scrawled name seemed to constitute the sole clue so far in this homicide—or, maybe because of that—I couldn’t let this man go hungry.

  “Nope. Call came late afternoon. Haven’t had a minute to think about food.” Piotrowski didn’t look particularly malnourished. In fact, he looked no different than last time I’d seen him: tall and broad, with medium-brown hair cut short, wearing a conventional gray tweed sport jacket and gray pants spiffed up a bit with a charcoal-gray turtleneck jersey, as if for a holiday. Was there a wife waiting with dinner for the lieutenant somewhere? I knew he had grown sons, but he’d never said anything about a wife. “So, yeah,” he continued, “I could eat. If you’re offering. The minute I walked in here I got hungrier than a bear.”

  “Tsk. On Thanksgiving!” I loaded a plate, covered it loosely with plastic wrap, and placed it in the microwave. To live with death on a daily basis as the lieutenant did seemed only to give him a heightened appetite for life. I liked and respected this big cop. I’d first met Piotrowski two years earlier, when a colleague and a student had been murdered on campus, and then had come across him again when the death of a friend had proven to be a murder. On each occasion my scholarly expertise had assisted the detective in identifying the killer. But I hadn’t thought about Piotrowski since the Hart case had been resolved—at least, not until my friends’ foolishness had brought him so vividly back to mind: broad shoulders, surprisingly shapely lips. Yeah, yeah. But surely my matchmaking pals were mistaken in their speculations that the lieutenant had a “thing” for me.

  “Listen,” he said, in a business-like manner, “what I need to know right off is, how well d’ya know this guy Corbin?”

  The microwave beeped. I removed Piotrowski’s plate, placed it in front of him, found napkins, butter, salt and pepper shakers. “Well, he’s my colleague of course.” The glass of white wine I placed by his plate got a nod of thanks.

  “Yeah, so I assumed. He was a professor in your department, huh?” I noted the change in tense: was.

  “Yes, but I don’t … didn’t … know him at all well.” I shifted the turkey carcass to the counter—suddenly the debris of the holiday table revolted me—poured wine for myself, a generous glass, and sat down across from the lieutenant. “Do you have any idea yet what happened? I know you can’t tell me much, but—”

  “Believe me, Doctor, this case is fresh. I mean, listen, I get the call, I show up, and your name’s at the scene. I got myself over here quick as I could. So tell me what’s what with you and Corbin. Just get me clear on that up front.” He forked down a heap of potatoes with gravy.

  “What do you mean what’s what? He’s my colleague.” I paused. “Was my colleague.” Piotrowski’s graphic description of the crime scene—blood spatters!—made Elliot’s death all too real. “God, it’s just beginning to sink in. Elliot is dead!” I searched for words of grief—or at least, shock—but what came to my lips was something far more mundane. “Jeez, all hell is going to break loose at work!”

  “Yeah? Tell me about that.” The lieutenant was seriously engrossed in the turkey and stuffing. I shuddered. I was still thinking about the blood.

  “Well …” I sighed profoundly, and related everything I knew about Elliot Corbin, which wasn’t much: the recent work on Poe that had finally brought him the scholarly acclaim he’d yearned for, his ambitions for the Palaver Chair, even the handball. “And, aside from his being generally obnoxious,” I concluded, “he didn’t seem to have any particular enemies. Oh … wait a minute.…” I told Piotrowski about the altercation in Elliot’s office I’d overheard a week earlier.

  “A woman’s voice?” He relinquished his fork for a notebook and pen, made chicken-track marks on the pad. “And, you’re saying you didn’t recognize the other speaker?”

  “I have no idea who it was. She was speaking very quietly.”

  “As I recall, anybody has access to that building.…”

  “Students, faculty, staff, prospective students, alumni, even casual visitors.”

  “Great! Female, huh? That gives us, let’s see, exactly fifty-one percent of the world’s population to investigate.”

  “You don’t have to get sarcastic, Lieutenant.”

  The hinges on the kitchen door creaked. Amanda poked her head into the room. Earlier she had moussed her chestnut hair in trendy spikes, but now it lay flat on the right side, as if she’d been nervously running her fingers through it. “Mom? You okay?”

  “She’s fine,” Piotrowski replied, grinning at her. “Did I see pie out there on that table?”

  “Monica Cassale found him,” I told my dinner guests, after the lieutenant had scarfed down two slabs of pumpkin pie and hurried back to the crime scene.

  “Monica? You mean the English Department secretary?” Sophia queried, appearing as mystified as I was. “What was she doing at Professor Corbin’s place?”

  We sat around the dinner table, sobered by Piotrowski’s news.

  “I don’t know.” I stared at the pies, then rejected the thought. Who could eat with such appalling news on her plate? Almost immediately, I relented and cut a sliver from the pumpkin, placed a teaspoonful of ice cream on it. Jill opted for a slice each of pumpkin and apple; after all, she was eating for Eloise. “For some reason, she stopped by his house—with a serving of Thanksgiving dinner, I think he said. I have no idea why she would be taking dinner to Elliot. And she found him there. Dead.” I examined the dessert on my plate. Did I really want that?

  “Poor Monica,” Sophia said, unexpectedly. “She never gets a break. No thanks,” she demurred, when I slid the pie in her direction. “I don’t touch that stuff.”

  “You know Monica?” I asked, surprised.

  “I know her,” Sophia’s mother said. We all started. It was as if the dead had spoken. Agata Warzek probably wasn’t much older than me—maybe five or six years. But I still thought of myself as young. I was young. Life—and a brutal husband—had defeated Agata. She was a rag of a woman, with Sophia’s fine features and delicate coloring, but wrinkled and threadbare and washed out.

  “You do?”

  “Yes.” And that was it, nothing further forthcoming from Agata Warzek.

  “She’s our neighbor, has been for years,” Sophia clarified. “She moved in down the street when Joey was a baby. She works all the time—I mean, all the time—and her mother takes care of Joey.”

  “Really?” I finished the sliver of pie, cut another, dipped into the now-soppy ice cream.

  “I was happy for her when she got such a good job at the college. She quit cleaning houses then, and cut back to just weekends at the Stop N’ Shop. I thought maybe she’d be able to take it a little easier, but she still seems to work around the clock.”

  “Huh. I didn’t know all that about her.”

  Sophia and her mother exchanged meaningful glances. Then Sophia spoke. “Well, you wouldn’t, would you, being a professor and all?”

  That was a complex assessment, and I let it rumble around in my mind before I attempted to respond. Had my life taken a different turn I could easily have been Monica, but it hadn’t, and I wasn’t.

  “Is she married?”

  Again the exchange of glances. “Not that I know of. But my mother thinks she goes to see some guy.…”

  “What do you mean, goes to see some guy?” I asked, as I finished my second sliver of pumpkin, eyed the apple pie.

  Sophia glanced at her mother. Agata shrugged. Then Sophia shrugged. That was cl
early as much as I was going to get from them.

  “Mom,” Amanda commanded, “just cut yourself a decent size slice and get it over with.” I did. Earlene and Amanda followed suit. Then Agata. We ate slowly and solemnly, as if in the shared ritual we might somehow discover the key to a great mystery.

  “Why are we talking about Monica, anyhow?” Jill asked, as she pushed her plate away. Eloise was spread out across her mother’s knees, face down and blissfully asleep.

  “It’s just so intriguing that she would be there,” I replied. “I can’t conceive of any possible reason for her to be at Elliot’s house—taking him Thanksgiving dinner, for God’s sake!”

  “What’s really intriguing,” Earlene countered, “is that Elliot Corbin is dead—and someone seems to have killed him.” She began stacking empty cups in front of her. “And it might very well be someone we know.”

  First thing the next morning, Lieutenant Piotrowski called. Amanda answered the phone; after the lieutenant’s startling announcement about finding my name at a homicide scene, my daughter hadn’t said another word about going to Lowell, and I hadn’t asked. In her mismatched sweats—green pants, orange top—with her short hair still mussed from sleep, she looked about fourteen years old. She handed me the phone without comment, and I gave her a quick hug as I grabbed it. We may have our misunderstandings, but I do love that kid.

  “Doctor.” The way Piotrowski enunciated the word—in two quick syllables—you would have thought it was my first name. “It looks like I’m gonna have to call on you again for some help. What you told me last night was real useful, and I’ve got something here at the station—a piece of evidence—I wanna run by you. Would you be able to stop in?”