Songs of Innocence

a test, it said.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did she want you to get her mail?”

“She said she didn’t know when she’d be coming back. She didn’t want messages piling up, she didn’t want her customers to get angry when nobody responded to them. Of course when I read about...about what happened, I figured she was really just setting things in order before...well, you know.”

“Before killing herself.”

“Yeah,” Sharon said softly. “It was like she was giving away her things. Sending her customers to me because she knew she wasn’t going to need them anymore.”

“That’d be true if she just moved away, too,” I said. “She wouldn’t need customers in New York if she’d gone to the other side of the country.”

“That’s what I figured she meant at first, sure.”

And it’s what I figured now. She’d decided to run, so she put her customers in the hands of someone she felt she could trust to service them, to keep them warm. It seemed to me it was a clear sign that she’d planned to come back at some point, because otherwise why bother?

Of course, Dorrie had done more than just forward her mail. She’d also taken the trouble to clean out her system, to erase all her old messages—every message she’d ever written, every message she’d ever received, all gone. Like leaving an apartment broom-clean when you moved out. No personal items for the new tenant to find. But in this case, who was the new tenant she was afraid of? Who had she been afraid might one day be poking through the old e-mail she’d exhanged with her clients?

“Have you talked to any of her customers yet?”

“I’ve seen one so far. I’ve written back to a few.”

I wondered if any of the ones Sharon had written to were the same regulars Susan was trying to contact right now. It could be awkward—some guy hears from two separate women, each claiming to be a former colleague of Dorrie’s. On the other hand, who could say, maybe that would be exactly the extra pressure it took to drive Dorrie’s killer out into the open.

“Sharon,” I said, “have you read all these messages?” She nodded. “Were there any that struck you as odd or suspicious...?”

“They’re pretty much what you’d expect. A couple of guys saw the articles about her in the paper and wrote to say Was that you? or I hope that wasn’t you, and I wrote back to say I’m sorry but it was. There was one...hang on.” She bent over the keyboard. “There was one I thought was a little funny. Sort of misspelled and rambling, like maybe the guy was drunk or high or something, but it was obviously someone who knew her, since he used her real name.” She found the message, brought it up on the screen.

I read it. I didn’t say anything.

“You see what I mean?”

I saw what she meant.

I didn’t know whether the man who wrote it was drunk when he typed it or just suffering from the condition that had made him switch from typing to dictation, but I sure as hell knew that rambling, misspelled style.

dorrrie, sweet grl, poor sweet girl, what man could willngky caus you grirf/ forgive me pls my importunate illjudgd attentions. my photo hid too mch but so did yrs dear girl so did yours

Chapter 20

I rang the doorbell at the top of the steps, the steps I’d helped him up so often, sometimes giddy and stumbling myself, sometimes stone cold sober like I was right now. I’d cabbed it up to Morningside Heights, another twenty out of my pocket, and that on top of the eighty I’d forced on Sharon before I’d left. Not her fault I wasn’t the paying customer she’d been led to expect, and I didn’t want the house’s fifty percent to come out of her pocket.

I’d stayed long enough to scan the other 94 messages myself, one by one. I found it amazing how many men, when asked to supply a photo of themselves by a young woman over the Internet, responded by sending a digital snapshot of their penis. But then I’m mister vanilla, we’ve already established that.

One of the messages had come from Brian Vincent: “Cassie, I saw this piece in the Post, it looked like you— but it wasn’t, right? Hope not, girl. Don’t you ever do anything like that, understand?” None of the other addresses were ones I recognized. No sign of Mr. Adams, Mr. Lee, or Mr. Smith.

They weren’t much on my mind, though. Let Susan find them. I had Mr. Kennedy to deal with.

No one answered the door, even after I rang twice more and pounded on it with the side of my fist. It was a brownstone in a poor neighborhood; some instructors qualified for faculty housing but Stu didn’t and he couldn’t afford better than this. Two families shared the building with him, but apparently no one was home right now. I looked both ways down the empty street, saw no one coming from either direction, and rammed the door with my shoulder. I felt the impact in my chest, and it wasn’t a pleasure. But the door popped open, as I’d seen it do more than once when Stu couldn’t find or had forgotten his key. Old buildings, old doorframes, old doors. I told myself it wasn’t breaking and entering because I knew the man, which is the kind of logic that only makes sense when you badly need it to. I eased the door shut behind me, made sure the latch caught, then went to Stu’s apartment at the back of the first-floor hallway. I found his spare key where he always stashed it, under the umbrella stand in the corner. Let myself in, turned on the lights.

He was in bed, asleep, breathing heavily through his nose. A bottle of Bushmills stood half empty and uncapped on the table. Beside it, a 1970s-vintage tape recorder, a fist-sized microphone attached to it by a frayed cable. Some handwritten notes on yellow ruled paper, the line of his writing shaky and weak. He had a comforter pulled up to his chin, which was dotted with the beginnings of white stubble. I fought the momentary urge to cover his face with the extra pillow beside him, this man I’d called my friend, this man with his importunate illjudgd attentions.

“Get up,” I said. “Up. Up.” I shook him by the shoulder. His eyes popped open and I saw as recognition slowly settled into them.

“John?” His voice was thick, from sleep and drink. “What are you doing here? What happened to your hair?”

“When was the last time you saw Dorrie, Stu?”

He sat up in bed, his arms thin and pale, his chest hollow beneath his yellowed undershirt. He rubbed a palm across his cheek, eyed the whiskey bottle behind me on the table. He made a motion toward it with his head.

“Will you join me, John?”

“When did you see her last?”

He stood, unsteadily, walked to the table, tilted the bottle toward the tumbler beside it. I saw his arm shake as he raised the glass to his mouth. He wasn’t facing me when he spoke.

“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t already know,” he said.

“It was on Saturday, wasn’t it?”

“No. No, it was on Thursday. Thursday night.”

“But not in the classroom.”

“No,” he said, “most definitely not in the classroom. How did you find out, John?”

“It wasn’t hard with you sending e-mails to every address she had.”

“Ah,” he said. He pulled out a chair at the table, sat. Put the glass down. “I suppose that was unwise. One forgets that these things are not the ephemera they appear to be.”

“What happened, Stu? What did you do to her?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I did nothing to her. And yet I did too much.”

I felt pressure building up in my chest, in my arms. I could feel my fingers trembling. “Start talking, Stu, or god help me, I’m going to hurt you. I’ve had enough. I’ve had too much. I can’t take any more.”

“John. Please calm down.”

“Did you kill her, you son of a bitch? Did you kill her?”

He creased his eyes shut. When he spoke, it was in a low murmur. “I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times. I don’t think so, John. I don’t think so.”