I came across Mother's sheet, finally, and double-checked it. The private investigator had his facts correct, as far as I knew. Right address, and the dates she'd stayed on Monhegan seemed consistent with what Mother always related of her vacations on the island. High school and college data correct. And in the center of the report, the beginning and end dates of the two years she'd spent in Paris, living with Aunt Amelia, attending a French school, taking art and music lessons, and achieving a level of poise and sophistication I knew, even as a toddler, I'd never match.
I had sometimes wondered how different Mother's life (and mine) would be if when she was fifteen Grandfather hadn't finally given in to her pleas to see Paris. If instead he had, for instance, sent her to stay for a few months on Cousin Bathsheba's farm, learning to milk the cows and feed the chickens. That first trip to France was undoubtedly the watershed event in Mother's life.
So why had the private detective circled it in red? And printed five little exclamation points after it?
And why had the biographer clipped a Polaroid of Mother to the back of the page--the present-day Mother, stepping off the Monhegan ferry, wearing a scarf I'd given her three months ago?
I had a bad feeling about this.
'Michael,' I said.
'Mmm?' he replied absently. I glanced up. He was lost in the manuscript.
'The biographer's style must be improving,' I said.
'What's that?' he said, looking up with obvious reluctance.
'What's so fascinating? I thought it was a lousy book.'
'Oh, it is! The writing anyway; but the contents--You've got to hear this. Wait a second; let me get back to the beginning of this chapter.'
He flipped back several pages and began reading.
''It was at this formative stage of his life that young Victor Resnick underwent an experience, the impact of which would last for the rest of his life, an experience that, while producing no outward change in his demeanor or his countenance, would nevertheless affect the sensitive young artist in the most profound and permanent fashion imaginable. Who could have predicted this event, at once so joyous and so tragic? Who can calculate the import this occurrence would present upon his life and art? Who can possibly discern…' Well, you get the idea. It goes on like that for about another page and then Jamie boy finally gets around to dropping a few actual facts. Apparently, young Victor fell in love.'
'Don't tell me; I know what's coming. She told him to get lost.'
'No, apparently the attraction was mutual.'
'That's a little hard to buy.'
'According to this, young Victor was quite a hunk and a rising star of the art world to boot.'
'According to the biographer, who we already decided was telling Resnick's decidedly one-sided version of events.'
'Well, I suppose,' Michael said, running his finger down the page. 'Here we go: 'She saw beneath his gruff exterior the sensitive artist whose soul had been blighted by calumny and neglect; she alone appreciated not only the force of his artistic genius but also the inner light that he had previously shown only through his brushes, and, bravely scorning the rigid strictures of her upbringing, daringly risking the calumnies and slings and arrows of outraged society that would be flung at her if discovered, she at last surrendered to their mutual passion.''
'Ick,' I said. 'So she slept with him. I suppose there's someone for everyone, even Victor Resnick.'
'And no matter what the boomers may think, sex wasn't invented with the pill. Anyway, we now have several pages about the progress of the affair, a little light on concrete details, but heavy with descriptions of things heaving and throbbing--the sort of stuff that might be mildly titillating if better written.'
'Let me see that,' I said, looking over his shoulder.
'Be my guest,' Michael said. 'And if you should find any of it inspirational…'
'You can forget the rerun of the
'You know this from experience?'
'I know this from common sense,' I said. 'And do you have any idea how rocky the Monhegan beach is, not to mention the subarctic temperature of the water?'
'So we won't be doing Burt and Debbie this trip?'
'More to the point, I doubt Victor Resnick and his lady love ever did.'
'We take this passage with a grain of salt, then. Want to bet the writer learned his--or, more likely, her-- trade writing romances?'
'No--most romances are far better written. And most romance writers have a better grasp of reality; that, for example, is anatomically impossible,' I said, pointing to one particularly florid paragraph.
'Are you sure?' Michael said, quirking one eyebrow.
'Positive, as I'll happily demonstrate later. He's obviously unreliable about the details--probably embroidered them over the years. This only tells us that some poor woman had the bad taste to sleep with Resnick, and he remembers her fondly, perhaps because that kind of thing was a rare event in his life. And then she came to her senses and broke his heart, or, more likely, dented his ego.'
'It's a bit more than that,' Michael said. 'According to this, she was underage.'
'Well, I'm not surprised,' I said, fishing out my Gatorade and opening the bottle. 'No woman old enough to have any sense could possibly fall for him. How underage?'
'Fifteen. Just barely.'
'He's scum.'
'Resnick was twenty-five,' Michael added.
'Pond scum.'
'And her parents forced them to part, then packed her off to Paris to get over her broken heart. And then-- Meg, are you all right?'
'I'm fine; you can stop pounding my back,' I said, wheezing, once I'd finally cleared enough Gatorade from my windpipe to speak.
'You're not fine; I can tell,' Michael said. 'What's wrong?'
I handed him the detective's reports and sat back to cough a little more while he scanned them.
'Oh, damn,' he said when he got to Mother's sheaf.
'He thinks Mother was Victor Resnick's secret love.'
'Obviously,' Michael murmured. He picked up the biography again and nipped over a few pages, frowning.
'It's ridiculous,' I fumed.
Michael didn't say anything, and his eyes remained ostentatiously glued to the manuscript 'Okay, it's not ridiculous; it sounds plausible enough. I certainly don't believe it, but people would if they heard it and as long as Victor Resnick was alive, or even if he died of natural causes, the odds are no one would ever publish this travesty. But with his murder, they're going to want to drag all the skeletons out of his closet.'
'Including a few that just might belong to your family.'
We sat there for a few minutes, with me staring at the wall, trying to absorb what I'd read, while Michael continued to read the manuscript.
'Oh, bloody hell,' he said suddenly.
'What's wrong?'
'Here,' he said, handing me the manuscript and indicating a paragraph with his finger. 'Read this.'
I tried, but between the biographer's tangled grammar and his overly florid style, I couldn't make heads or tails out of the passage. Something flowery about a token of love, lost many years ago, that Resnick had sought ever since.
'I don't get it,' I said. 'What's this token thing anyway? Some kind of locket or something?'
'Sorry,' Michael said. 'It's a little hard to follow out of context. Back up and start reading a couple of pages sooner.'
'I'd rather not,' I said. 'Since you've already suffered through it, why don't you give me the gist?'
'Okay,' Michael said. 'The biographer thinks Resnick fathered a child with his underage girlfriend. And she went to Paris to conceal her pregnancy.'
