shaken with my ample animal charm, and that tiny chip of ice will just be a nightlight showing me the way. David intended to loosen up the mystery woman with the help of alcohol and bebop and then close in for the kill with his enormous ego-not a particularly new strategy. What really made me squint, however, was the tiny chip of ice reference. That just had to mean a diamond ring. Apparently Miss Forty Below was engaged.
The final thing for me to ponder that night was why Gordon had kept David Delarosa’s letter all those years. One possibility was that Gordon didn’t even know he’d saved the letter. Maybe he’d stuck it in that old book and forgotten about it. But in a book by the famous Heinrich Schliemann? On his historic excavation of Troy? No, I think Gordon would have gone back to that book again and again.
So my guess was that Gordon not only knew he had the letter, but kept it in that safe, secret place for a reason. Was it simply because David had meant so much to him? Was it another very personal treasure? Like that can of Jack Kerouac’s pine cones? Or was it something else?
David’s murder hit Gordon hard. He sulked for days then took the bus to Sandusky for the funeral. He returned to Hannawa full of anger. He wanted David’s killer found. But he never believed it was Shaka. Maybe the letter held a clue to David’s real murderer.
I refolded the letter and put it in the envelope. I folded the envelope and wedged it under my other heel. I turned off the lamp. “Does it, Gordon?” I whispered. “Does that letter say who killed David? Who killed you?”
Chapter 22
Friday, June 8
We had a good country breakfast-scrambled eggs and onions-and then headed out to load the books into the van. Effie saw to it that Mickey did most of the work. “Save your back, Maddy,” she said. “It’s just going to be me and you when we get to the bookstore.”
We wedged James into the small space we’d left for him behind the front seat. Then we crawled in ourselves, Effie behind the wheel, me shotgun. Our freshly filled Thermoses were lying between us on the seat like a couple of unexploded artillery shells. I cranked down my window to say good-bye to Mickey. “When you get back to Hannawa tell Detective Grant I said hello,” he said, grinning like a raccoon. “Assuming he didn’t fall in the river and drown yesterday.”
I didn’t say anything.
Effie did. “We can only hope he did.” She backed the van around and headed down the long drive, blowing a big, theatrical kiss at Mickey in her rearview mirror.
I felt foolish. Like this whole trip was a badly staged junior class play and I was the only one who thought it was real. But I was also relieved. Mickey and Effie were taking Detective Grant’s not-so-secret presence in good humor. The way people with nothing to hide would. I gave James a cat-shaped biscuit and nestled back in the seat for the long drive home.
We crossed the Potomac into Maryland and headed north on Route 65 toward Sharpsburg, where one of the Civil War’s most inconclusive bloodbaths took place, the Battle of Antietam Creek. I suggested we take a quick drive through the battlefield but Effie was in a hurry to get home. She had her books and most likely her fill of James and me. She planned to connect with the Pennsylvania Turnpike and shoot straight west into Ohio. No more of that, “If it ain’t a back road, it ain’t a road worth taking” stuff for her.
“I’ve been doing an awful lot of thinking about the old days,” I said after an hour of silence. “Who we were back then and what we meant to each other.”
“Those were special times,” Effie said.
“Yes,” I said. “Even the crappy times seem special now.”
Effie motioned for me to pour a cup of coffee for her. “There were plenty of those, too, weren’t there.”
I’d been maneuvering toward a particular crappy time, of course, and figured now was as good a time as any to bring it up. “None crappier than the night David Delarosa was killed.”
“That does win the Oscar,” she said.
“I didn’t know him as well as you, of course.”
Effie cackled. “I’ve already admitted to sleeping with him, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“He was quite the ladies’ man, I guess.”
Said Effie, “That’s putting it mildly. It was easier to keep track of who he didn’t sleep with than who he did.”
I handed her a sloshing cup of coffee and then screwed the lid off my Thermos of tea. “So-who didn’t he sleep with?”
“I’d say just you and Gwen. Unless you’ve been holding out on me.”
“Lawrence and I were already engaged that year,” I said. “Not that I would have slept with David otherwise. Or more accurately, not that he would have slept with me.” I finished pouring my tea. I took a cautious sip. It was plenty hot but not unswallowable. “You sure about Gwen?”
Effie hooted like an owl getting its belly feathers tickled. “I’m sure she didn’t even sleep with Rollie before they were married.”
I told one of my patented half-truths. “I was only wondering if she was engaged then or not, Effie. I’m no more interested in her sex life than I am in mine.”
We didn’t get back to Hannawa until late in the day. We unloaded Gordon’s books then headed through the rush-hour traffic toward my bungalow. It was six o’clock by the time I got home. I immediately went to the basement and checked my files. The information I needed wasn’t there. I called Eric at the morgue. “Stay put until I get there,” I said.
He whined like a third grader. “But it’s Friday.”
“It also might be Christmas,” I said. “Stay put!”
I filled James’ food bowl and headed for the garage. I was downtown in twenty minutes, storming through the newsroom like a category five hurricane. I was so anxious to get to work that I didn’t even take time to make a mug of tea. Which worried Eric to no end. “I will be able to get out of here sometime tonight, won’t I?”
“If the microfilm gods are with us,” I said.
Today we save stories on CDs. But a lot of the older stuff in the morgue is still on microfilm. I told him to pull out all of the film for 1956 and 1957. I sat him in front of the machine and pulled a chair alongside. “We’re going to start with 1956,” I said, “and check backward from the end of December.”
Eric wisely asked the pertinent question. “Check for what?”
I pretended he was the ignorant one and not me. “The society pages. For the engagement announcements. For the engagement of Gwendolyn Moffitt and one Rollie Stumpf.”
Newspapers don’t have society pages any more. The sexual revolution saw to that. The Herald-Union now has a section called Hannawa Life. Despite its gender-neutral title, it’s clearly geared at women. In addition to the stories on lowering your cholesterol, finding the right pre-school, and exercises you can do while pushing a supermarket cart, you’ll find the same old stuff we ran before Bella Abzug started waving her big floppy hat at us in the sixties: weddings, anniversaries and engagements, lots and lots of engagements.
We went through the December papers. The November papers and half the October papers. Then there it was, Saturday, October 13, 1956:
Mrs. and Mrs. Calvin W. Moffitt of Hannawa announce the engagement of their daughter, Gwendolyn Leigh, to Mr. Rolland H. Stumpf, son of Martin and Gladys Stumpf, of Pittsburgh, Penn.
Both Miss Moffitt and Mr. Stumpf are seniors at Hemphill College. They plan a June…
I leaned back and rubbed the long hours of travel out of my neck. “You can go home now,” I said to Eric.
He was uncharacteristically concerned. “You sure?”
I swept him away with my fingers. I watched him hurry to the elevator, swigging his Mountain Dew as he maneuvered through the mostly empty desks in the newsroom.
I thought about walking down to Ike’s. But I went home to James instead. And that Rubbermaid tub of Lawrence’s clippings Dory gave me.
