I suspected I knew what he hadn't said: that right now, finding Dad--alive--was more important than proving his innocence.
'I'll keep this safe for now,' Michael said, folding the map and taking out his wallet.
'Don't trust me not to destroy it?' I said.
'I wasn't thinking that at all,' he said. 'But you can't keep carrying it around in your pocket; it'll turn to mush. And we can't just leave it lying around where someone could get hold of it prematurely, and, unlike your purse, my wallet almost never leaves my body.'
'Well, that makes sense,' I said, slightly mollified by his tone.
'Shall we go back in?' Michael asked. 'Much as I'd enjoy being alone with you under other circumstances, this shed's getting colder by the minute. And damper,' he added as a large drop of water splattered his nose.
'Hang on a second,' I said, opening up my knapsack. 'As long as I'm confessing to my crimes against humanity, I may as well make a clean breast of it. I found an envelope in Resnick's yard after we put his body in the shed--tripped over it, actually. It didn't seem wet enough to have been there long, and I wondered if it fell out of his jacket while we were moving him.'
'Let's have a look at it, then,' Michael said.
I pulled out the envelope and we both pointed our flashlights at it. It was an ordinary nine-by-twelve brown clasp envelope, with no markings on the outside. Inside we found an inch-thick sheaf of papers held together with a giant binder clip as well as a smaller Tyvek envelope.
The top sheet of the papers held a title, centered, in all caps: VICTOR S. RESNICK: UNHERALDED GENIUS OF THE DOWN EAST COAST. A BIOGRAPHY. By James Jackson.
'Wonder who James Jackson is,' Michael said, flipping to the next page.
'I don't know, but the Tyvek envelope is addressed to him,' I said. 'In care of General Delivery at the Rockport Post Office.'
'My God, listen to this,' Michael said. ' 'In this tome will be related the story of a great man whose genius has gone largely unappreciated in our century, a century in which the degradation of artistic taste has led to the exaltation of lesser artistic talents and those whose talents lie less in art than in publicity and the pursuit of notoriety, while alone, at the head of a small contingent of artists who still adhere to the tradition of representational art and the tenets of artistic quality that have prevailed, until now, since the Renaissance, Victor Resnick holds back the bulwark against the barbarians of popular culture and the deliberate obfuscations of an outworn academic community; unsung, unheralded, unappreciated, in recent years largely neglected, Victor Resnick nevertheless--' Arg!'
'Was that really all one sentence?' I asked.
'No, only about a third of one,' Michael said. 'I'm not sure which is worse, James's writing or his blatant toadying.'
'I'll give you odds this is the authorized biography,' I said.
'Definitely authorized,' Michael said. 'Our friend Victor has begun making some rather pungent comments on the first couple of pages. 'Small contingent of artists' used to be 'small contingent of artists, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper.' Jamie boy might have crossed out the names himself, but only Resnick would scrawl 'Stupid! Don't mention those clowns!' Speaking of odds, I'll give you odds no one ever publishes it unless Jamie boy does a lot of rewrites.'
'Looks like he already has,' I said. 'We've got draft seven, according to the footer. Oh my God!'
'What's wrong?'
'Jackson's got a time/date stamp in the footer--he printed this yesterday at six p.m. The ferry had stopped running by that time. He's on the island!'
'Lucky him, then; not every biographer gets a ringside seat at his subject's murder.'
'We've got to find him.'
'Why?' Michael asked. 'To give him our editorial comments?'
'He's Resnick's biographer; he must know everything about bis life,' I said. 'He'll know better than anyone who might have it in for Resnick.'
'We've already decided that's a long list.'
'Well, Jamie boy can tell us who's at the head of it. For that matter, we can probably get some ideas from the biography.'
'Of course to do that, we'll have to read it,' Michael said.
We both stared down at the manuscript in Michael's lap. I flipped over a page. Someone--Resnick, I suspected--had crossed out a paragraph with such violence that his red pen had torn the paper, and he had scrawled, 'No, no, no!!!' in the margin.
'My sentiments precisely,' Michael said.
'You know, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that James Jackson is a suspect, too,' I said.
'He's lucky he wasn't the victim,' Michael grumbled. 'Writing this badly ought to be a capital offense.'
'Maybe Resnick finally realized that the guy can't write and so decided to fire him, or unauthorize him, or whatever you'd call it when you stop cooperating with a biographer.
And Jackson saw his years of hard work go down the drain, and he lashed out and killed Resnick.'
'We'll keep it in mind,' Michael said. 'Meanwhile, I guess we should start reading. I'm sure it's no worse than some of my students' papers.'
I read over Michael's shoulder for the first twenty or thirty pages. Okay, I confess, I skimmed a lot. When you chucked out the excess verbiage--was the man paid by the word, or only by the adverb?--and untangled the convoluted sentences, Resnick's story was really pretty simple. He'd grown up in a small midwestern town, a sensitive, misunderstood child, the butt of every bully and jester in town, until the day he first picked up a pencil and began to draw. At which point, to judge from James Jackson's account, the earth trembled, comets were seen in the skies, three-headed calves were born, and wise men came from the east bearing gifts in the form of a scholarship to study art at the Boston Conservatory. By the time we reached the detailed description of the physical ailments that had kept him, despite his intense patriotism, from serving in World War II, my head was spinning.
'I need a break,' I said. 'I think I'll see what's in Jamie boy's mail.'
'It's a federal offense to open mail!' Michael protested.
'Well, I know that,' I said, in exasperation. 'It's already opened, and I've never heard it was a federal offense to read stuff that people leave lying around in their yards. So there.'
'Sorry,' he said. 'Must be the demoralizing effect of Jamie boy's prose. Carry on.'
I opened the envelope, to find another sheaf of papers--slimmer, fortunately, and not written by James Jackson. The first sheet was a cover letter to Jackson from a Boston private investigation firm, dated a few weeks earlier, stating that the information he had requested was enclosed and that if he required any other assistance, he should contact them.
I turned to the next sheet. A list of names, all with birth dates and some with dates of death. Some of them were people I knew--Mary Ann ('Mamie') Dawes (Benton). Elspeth ('Binkie') Grayson (Burnham). Lucinda Hart Dickerman. Others sounded vaguely familiar. Old island names, many of them. All women, born between 1925 and 1940. Some were crossed out in bright red ink. Others had question marks or checks beside their names. No clue what the list was for.
I finished scanning the first page and flipped to the second, shorter page. Along with the crossed-out, checked, and question-marked names, one was circled heavily in bright red pen: Margaret Hollingworth (Langslow).
What the devil was this list, and why was Mother on it, so prominently singled out?
I went on to the rest of the papers. A series of reports from the detective agency on the whereabouts of the women on the list during their teenage years.
How odd.
I scanned the reports, fascinated. Binkie had gone from a posh boarding school to an equally posh women's college, and from there to Harvard Law School. Not what James Jackson wanted, apparently; he'd crossed her name out on the main list. Several other names had similar histories--summer people, I noticed; their lives contrasted starkly with those of the year-round island residents, many of whom were married and had had several children by the time their wealthier counterparts graduated from whichever of the Seven Sisters they'd chosen.
