On Turpentine Lane(57)

“Did you ask him not to tell anyone else?”

“Good luck with that.”

“Everyone knows?”

“You can picture it, in a coffee line, to whoever was listening, ‘Nick here has some news.’ Or ‘Nice going, lover boy.’ It saved him from making intelligent conversation with the trustees.”

That prompted me to ask about certain board members, the few who wrote me thank-you notes for my big Hepworth score. I also brought up one of our favorite topics. “How was Dickenson?”—understood to mean how much did our headmaster drink before, during, and after the dinners.

“Under control. He sure can hold it . . .” Then: “Sometimes I wonder if he has any idea what a fool he hired as head of Development.”

“Any rumblings about that at meetings?”

“Not from Dickenson, but from a couple of trustees. They asked me about Reggie after he gave a particularly lame department report. No one explicitly questioned his competence, but the gist was definitely Is your boss this goofy on the job or just while public speaking?”

“Were you honest?”

“Kind of. Each time I said, ‘I’d be guilty of departmental disloyalty if I answered that truthfully.’?”



Late, almost midnight, after the welcome-home celebration had gone horizontal, we were side by side in my slightly warmer, south-facing bedroom. Nick’s eyes were closed, and his breathing had taken on the rhythm of sleep. Propped on my side, quite sure he was out cold and deaf to my question, I whispered, “What did you say when Reggie asked if I was good in the sack?”

His eyes didn’t open but he smiled. “I said, ‘Some things are too sacred to speak of aloud.’?”

“No, you didn’t.”

He sat up, brought to life as if reliving the weekend’s aggravation. “Okay, I didn’t. I was pissed. I said, ‘Did you really just ask me how my girlfriend is in the sack? Because Faith and I are your employees, and the school specifically bars . . .’?” followed by more words, more sentences, more indignation.

But I didn’t absorb the rest and didn’t need to. My powers of concentration waned after hearing him use the lovely, unambiguous girlfriend.





36





Dead or Alive?


CLEARLY I WAS in a confessional mode, which happens when a person is drinking coffee with three police officers at her own kitchen table. Having taken a mental health day, I found myself confiding to the female among them that the possible homicide under investigation wasn’t the only creepy thing associated with my house.

“Go on,” said Detective Dolan.

I told them I’d been having nightmares about something I’d found in the attic, in a cradle, in an otherwise empty photo album—all at a pace that prompted Detective Dolan to suggest I go straight to the meat of it.

I said, “Sure. Sorry. Inside the album were pictures of twins, newborns. Girls, I think. On the bottom of the Polaroids, handwritten, it said, ‘Born’ such and such a date. ‘Taken’ such and such a date—a week later. I mean, why would two babies die on the same day, exactly a week after their birth? Doesn’t that strike you as suspicious?”

“And who takes pictures of dead babies?” Sergeant Hennessy asked.

Officer Oskowski said, “People do that now. It’s supposed to help later . . . like they were real persons, not just fetuses who didn’t make it.”

“What year was this?” Dolan asked.

“1956.”

“Were there even neonatal ICUs?” he asked his partners.

“They had incubators, certainly,” said Oskowski, mother of four, she added, one a preemie.

“My parents combed the death records and the obituaries, but didn’t come up with anything,” I told them.

“Then they didn’t die,” said Hennessy, the blood-spatter expert.

“Or . . . they died, but she never told anyone because she killed them and who gets death certificates for that? Certainly not the perp!”

“Whoa,” said Dolan.

“Want to see the photos? They’re right on the bookshelf . . .”

“I wouldn’t mind,” said Oskowski.

I retrieved the photos from their new resting place, a white envelope between the pages of my thesaurus. I handed them to her first, pleased to see she was taking my suspicions seriously enough to put her latex gloves back on.

“Creepy, all right,” said Oskowski, passing them on.

“You’re sure they’re not just some random photos of someone else’s babies?” Dolan asked. “And what about the handwriting? Do you have anything of the previous owner’s to compare against these?”

I said, “They were taken here. No question.” I gestured toward my gold-flecked Formica. “And you can just see the bottom of my cabinet above their whatchamacallits.”

“Car cribs,” said Oskowski. “The forerunner to car seats. And what makes you think they’re not just asleep?”

“The sign? Not their names, nothing. Just ‘Taken,’ meaning by God or Jesus or whoever takes babies.”

“If you knew the stuff we see,” said Dolan, “you wouldn’t think this was so weird.”