A Bookmarked Death (11 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

N
EVERTHELESS
, I
LEFT
Southampton. I hadn’t found the missing man, but I told myself that finding him was probably impossible anyway—like going to a book sale and trying to find a specific novel published in the 1950s. In the unlikely event that I located a man who looked like Ethan Crosley and had disappeared that night, I would not be able to convince the police anyway. Or maybe I was just tired of knocking on doors.

When I came into Port Lewis Books, Susie glanced up from behind the counter and smiled at me weakly. She did not look any happier than she had a week earlier.

“Hey,” I said. “Are you okay?”

She shook her head and plucked at a large argyle sweater, probably her husband, Paul’s. I realized it was meant to hide her dawning pregnancy.

That thought took me somewhere unexpected. The weekend in March that all the children were home, the family finally complete, had felt like going up in the attic and finding a Shakespearean folio. With a full house, Colin and I, the happy parents, were forced into the matrimonial bed. It had been me, I admitted to myself, who had been caught up in the fantasy that now the family was miraculously repaired we could go back and recapture the lives we had been meant to live. It was not impossible to have another baby at forty-five, a symbol of a fruitful beginning.

By the time my period came three weeks later I already understood that a baby would only complicate life. It would be the answer to nothing. Yet for several days after I still felt times of sadness for what might have been.

“What happened?” I asked Susie. Had she miscarried?

No, her round face still shone with new life.

Probably her husband, Paul, was insisting that she quit working at the bookstore now that she was expecting. He had been opposed to her working in the shop from the moment I mentioned it. His plan was for her to continue staying home, chained to the computer, selling worthless books on eBay. He had been forced to take a job at Home Depot last fall to keep from losing their cottage to foreclosure, but he had vowed to stop as soon as their book business “took off.”

Which would never happen. Susie and Paul Pevney were as low as you can get on the bookseller tree, so far down that the other Long Island dealers called them the Hoovers. The name reflected their practice of coming in at the end of a book sale and vacuuming up the dregs that the organizers were worried about having to dispose of: movie star biographies, fad diets, the James Patterson novel that everyone had already read. The sale organizers were practically ready to pay the Pevneys to cart them away.

And Paul expected Susie to fritter her life away trying to sell those books. One reason I had campaigned for her to work in the bookstore and earn a regular salary was because she was so anxious to move ahead and start a family. She had pointed out to me more than once that a gerbil on a wheel was having more fun out of life than she did.

“Does Paul want you to quit working here?”

“Well, he’d always be happy with that. But—it’s even worse.” Susie’s voice caught and her glasses glinted as she checked the door to make sure no new customers were coming in. Those already here were settled in, browsing as contentedly as a herd of Guernseys. “I thought he’d be excited about the baby, you know? We’re already in our thirties! But he’s saying I should put it off a few years.” She pulled off her glasses to see me better, and her large brown eyes locked onto mine.

“Wait. Putting it off is what you do when you’re still making a decision, not . . . He knows you’re pregnant, right?”

She nodded, her face as stricken as a little girl’s who’s had her birthday party postponed.

“You mean he wants you to have an abortion.” The words sounded ugly in that traditional room.

“He says we can try again in three or four years. As soon as our
business
is established.”

I pressed my lips together as if applying ChapStick, to keep myself from saying something I would regret later. Paul Pevney was even crazier than I thought. Maybe not crazy in the way of shooting up a Home Depot, but it was hardly normal to think of your own child as disposable as an old shirt, one that could be replaced when you wanted a new one.

Susie’s full lower lip trembled. “He says we should have talked about it first.”

“You must have talked about it.”

“Well, we did when we got married, we both said we wanted kids. But then he’d get mad when I’d bring it up. So I didn’t. But this is what women do. Have babies!”

Maybe in 1940s romantic comedies where Cary Grant comes home from his steady job and is surprised and delighted to hear Mrs. Grant’s news.

“He thought I was still on the pill. But it was time.” Her chin jerked and I remembered how stubborn she could be.

It must have struck Paul like a sack of wet cement. “He probably just needs time to get used to the idea.”

“I don’t know, Delhi. He really wants me to—put it off.”

“Can’t you go back home till the baby comes?” Surely returning to South Dakota, back to the pioneer stock that had created her, would give her what she needed. I had an image of her family coming together for Saturday night suppers and rodeos, observing the rituals of birth and death.

Susie’s hand, still holding the receipt pen, jerked. “Home? You mean to Huron? Why would I do
that
?”

I felt my footing on the polished oak floor slip a little. “I thought you missed your family. You were so happy when you came back from seeing them at Thanksgiving.”

“Of course. I love them. But I hated growing up there. Anyway, Paul is my husband and I understand him. We’ve been married eleven years!”

I put my hand out, but didn’t quite touch her. “Okay, but you still have time. You don’t have to do anything yet.”

She nodded. “I don’t have a doctor’s appointment for two weeks.”

“Good. Do you want me to go with you? Sometimes it helps to have someone else there.”

“No. I was going to ask you to mind the store.”

“Of course. Whatever you want.”

I turned away from the counter just as my iPhone rang. Groping around, I pulled it out of my bag. Hannah’s number flashed up at me.

“Hi, honey.”

“Mom? I just heard from Elisa. She’s okay!”

“Oh, thank God!” I stumbled over to a leather wing chair and sank into it. “Thank
God.
Thank God. What did she say?”

“Nothing. She just sent me a text saying she was okay.”

“She didn’t say what happened to her at graduation? What did she say exactly?”

Hannah sighed. “She said, ‘I’m okay. Be careful.’ ”

“That’s it? She told
you
to be careful? Be careful about what?”

“She didn’t say.”

Be careful.
What did that mean? If Elisa was in danger, was she afraid Hannah would be next? No, she had said she was okay. But did “okay” mean safe or just alive?

“Did you text her back?”

“How could I? She left her phone behind, remember?”

It was suddenly chilly in the bookstore. “She could have gone back for it.”

“Well, she didn’t. She was using another number. It flashed and then disappeared. I don’t have one of those fancy phones like you and Jane.”

“You will. But what happened when you tried to retrieve it?”

“How do you do that?”

I sighed. I didn’t know what to tell her. I barely understood my own new phone. “How did the number start?”

“Nine-something.”

“Could it be 917?” The area code flashed in my mind though it wasn’t by magic. Most New York City cell phone numbers seemed to start with 917 including my sister, Patience’s.

“Yes! That was it. I noticed it especially because I didn’t know who’d be texting me from a strange area code. But I can’t remember the rest.”

“She signed her name, though.”

“No . . .”

I stared at my phone, my Christmas present from Colin that I was still learning how to use, and debated what to say next. An anonymous text from a strange phone had to be a misdial. But Hannah was so easily crushed, so excited that Elisa had contacted her, that I couldn’t point that out. Sometimes I felt as if I’d spent my life popping her fantasy balloons.

She read my silence as disagreement anyway. “I know what you’re thinking, but it
was
her. Who else would text me to say she was okay? I’m her
twin.
I know when she’s trying to reach me.”

Perhaps that was true. “Okay then, but you should pay attention to what she said about being careful. Don’t go off by yourself anywhere deserted. Look out for cars when you’re crossing the road. Just—be careful.”

“I will. But why is she being so mysterious?”

“I don’t know.” But I could think of several possibilities, none of which I wanted to share.

Chapter Twenty-Two

T
HE
TIME
BETWEEN
that Saturday afternoon and Colin’s arraignment Monday morning was slow torture. I was as jumpy as a frightened cat, unable to concentrate on what I was doing for more than a minute or two. I tried listing the art catalogs I had bought earlier in the week, and wrapping sold books to mail, but my mind kept slipping into lurid scenarios: visiting Colin in jail when I wasn’t fighting for his conviction to be overturned. I saw myself latching on to every encouraging wisp, trying to keep his hope alive. But it wouldn’t work. I saw him behind the glass, hulking and unkempt, mumbling into one of those phones. Hannah would have dropped out of vet school and a successful life and we would never see Elisa again.

Colin, meanwhile, was away for the weekend at an archeological conference in New Haven. I knew that he had to go, he was part of a panel discussion, but it left me to obsess on my own. I didn’t begrudge him the distraction the conference would be or the comfort of being with friends and colleagues, though I knew Ethan’s death would be a lively topic. But no one yet knew that Colin was being linked to the fire. After Monday that would change.

On Monday morning, Colin and I drove silently to Central Islip in my van. We were taking my van so that if bail was denied, his precious car would not be stranded in the parking lot. Although he would not admit it, he did not trust me to drive the BMW home. I realized how upset he was when he didn’t even complain about the condition of my van. Because it was my mini office, there were loose books, umbrellas, and thermal cups I never remembered to take back inside to refill. Although he hated artificial scents like the vanilla given off by the tree that dangled from my rearview mirror, he had not even mentioned it.

Yet Colin did not look as frantic as I felt. His trim white beard and tiny rimless glasses made him look, as always, like Santa Claus out of costume. Today he was wearing a lightweight tan suit and a yellow tie with brown dots. I tried to assess what a judge would think of that tie. Too frivolous? As if he didn’t take going to court seriously enough? Yet Colin appeared sober and learned, a responsible citizen, so maybe the tie would be okay. I planned to fade into the background. I was dressed in black slacks, a cotton blazer, and a white shirt Jane had left behind. My wild hair was pulled into a sober twist.

The Cohalan Court Complex had been built in 1991 on the outskirts of the struggling town of Central Islip. The anonymous beige buildings rose out of a neighborhood of tract houses, check-cashing storefronts, and bodegas. The town was a haven for newly arrived immigrants. Neon palm trees and smiling yellow suns glowed from grocery store windows, but nothing else made you think of days at the beach.

Even though we were early—I had been awake and ready to go since 4 a.m.—the lobby of the Criminal Court building was jammed. It was easy to identify the lawyers, the only people wearing suits and carrying briefcases. Next to them, Colin and I were the most respectable-looking people in the lobby. I glanced around critically. Why would someone show up for a court appearance in a T-shirt that read “Beer Gut” with an arrow pointing at the overhang? Why hadn’t anyone told that clutch of teenage boys in matching silk jackets with skulls on the back that judges weren’t impressed by gang solidarity?

I also frowned at the number of small children running wild, darting in and out of the lines of people and stopping to stare up at security guards. Their mothers were on cell phones or deep in conversations with other neglectful mothers.

No, I was not in a good frame of mind.

Colin and I were midway through the line that snaked to the metal detectors when Colin’s lawyer, Stanton Miles, hurried in. He planted himself in front of Colin and glanced around, disgusted. “The low end of the gene pool. Come on, we can go right in. We’re in Part 17.”

I hadn’t seen Stanton since a Christmas party five years ago, but he had not changed very much. The adjective that came to my mind was smooth: smooth even features, smooth dark gray suit. I felt that if I put out a hand and touched his cheek it would feel like silk.

After shaking Colin’s hand, Stanton turned to me. “Delhi! I didn’t know that you’d be here today. Not much will be happening.”

“Really?” I was lifted on the wings of hope so quickly that I only then understood the depth of my fears. “I thought they might—you know . . .”

“No, no, they won’t hold him. He’ll be ROR’ed for now. It’s all ridiculous. Every year it gets more ridiculous.”

I was desperate to believe Stanton. I had done some research of my own and knew he was talking about “released on own recognizance.” I had also read that granting bail, much less ROR, was rare in premeditated murder cases.

Stanton sprang us from the line and escorted us to a guard with a metal detector. Then we headed down a corridor. Given the size of the four-story building, the courtroom was smaller than I could have imagined. Its pale wooden benches were barely filled and Stanton settled us halfway down on the aisle. As we waited, groups of two and three people began straggling in.

“I think we’ll be first,” Stanton leaned over to tell us. “They have to bring some of the defendants from the holding cells, and that won’t be before eleven.”

I shuddered.

At 10 a.m., after we had waited for a restless hour, we were instructed to rise, and Judge Cooperman took the bench. I hadn’t known what to expect. He looked to be in his sixties, with gray hair that had thinned even at the temples. His glasses were invisible unless he turned his head to one side. A black robe can look stagy on some people—professors in an academic procession, for instance. This judge’s robe seemed as natural to him as an old cardigan. He gave a brief nod, a smile that reached no one, and settled himself to face us.

Two men and a woman, obviously lawyers, took their places at a table to the right. I decided they were from the district attorney’s office.
The enemy.

Perhaps because I had never been in a courtroom before—I’d been excused from jury duty twice because we were out of the country—I sat with my hands jammed in my lap to try to calm myself. I lived in fear of being sued, shuddering at stories of innocent people getting tangled in nightmare situations and spending thousands of dollars trying to extricate themselves. Even glimpsing an official seal on an envelope made my heart race. I got very few complaints about the books I sold, but when I did I offered a refund right away.

Yet despite all my precautions, I was trapped in a web that I could not have imagined.

As Stanton had predicted, our case was called first, and he and Colin rose and walked to the front. The woman lawyer stood up as well, but did not leave her place at the table. I disliked everything about her, from her short, slicked-back hair to her frumpy navy suit. I condemned her for not wearing makeup though I rarely did myself.

For a minute the judge looked down, reading a sheet of paper that his clerk had handed him. Then he looked up. “Counsel, has your client read the criminal complaint?”

“Yes, he has, Judge.”

The judge turned to Colin. “You have been accused of one of the most serious crimes known to mankind, premeditated murder. The State asserts that you cold-bloodedly dowsed two people with an accelerant, people you have known for many years, watched them burn, then went outside and”—he scowled at the paper—“several hours later set fire to their home. This was allegedly in revenge for your daughter’s kidnapping nineteen years ago. How do you plead?”

“Not guilty.” Colin’s voice was calm. Too calm? Maybe the judge would think he was a sociopath without emotion.

I imagined myself up there instead.
Listen, Judge, whatever that paper says, I didn’t do it I would never set anyone on fire, much less stand there and watch them burn! This is all a terrible mistake.
I would continue babbling until they led me away.

Judge Cooperman turned to the prosecutor and regarded her. His gold-rimmed glasses were visible now.

“Good morning, Ms. Turnelli. Let me say first that I find the State’s case remarkably thin. I notice that the principals were in possession of crystal balls. Dr. Crosley gazed into his and saw that he would suffer grievous injury at the hands of Dr. Fitzhugh—despite the fact that he had not seen him for nearly twenty years. Dr. Fitzhugh gazed into his and saw that Ethan and Sheila Crosley were not at home in Rhode Island or in Barbados, but staying at a vacation house in Southampton.

“How else could he have known after all these years except by magic, even the address where to find them? The Internet perhaps, but there is no evidence from the State that a search for that information was found on Dr. Fitzhugh’s computers. Tell me, Ms. Turnelli, what did the police find from the forensic examination of Dr. Fitzhugh’s automobile and place of residence? I assume such a search was conducted.”

I could see only the prosecutor’s profile, but I was happy that her cheeks seemed to redden
. Tell him the truth, you idiot!
“Nothing substantial, Your Honor. But—”

He peered at her. “No trace evidence at all?”

“No sir. But the boots—”

I winced, but the judge interrupted her.

“Ah, the boots. A pair of common rubber boots left outside a home where Dr. Fitzhugh no longer lives. That suggests to me that someone not knowing that fact could have planted them there. Has that not occurred to anyone else?”

Me, me! It occurred to
me, I wanted to shout.

Ms. Turnelli looked down sullenly but did not answer.

He leaned back in his leather swivel chair and sighed. “If this weren’t such a serious case, I’d be tempted to dismiss this complaint. I doubt that a grand jury would return a true bill based on what’s here.” He slapped the paper with the back of his hand, startling the room.

“Your Honor, we are pursuing other avenues, such as Colin Fitzhugh’s trip to Rhode Island in April to confront Dr. Crosley. I believe that by the time the case gets to a grand jury, the evidence will be considerable. We are asking for no bail as befits a capital offense.”

I pressed my hands together, shocked. How did they know about Colin’s attempt to confront Ethan? Would the people he spoke to in Rhode Island have to come down and testify? What if they were Ethan’s friends, and wanted to avenge his death? What if they
lied
?

The judge sighed. “Ms. Turnelli, my duty is to make an assessment based on the evidence in your complaint, not some pie-in-the-sky you hope to feed us at a later date.”

Someone in the front snickered.

Stanton Miles finally stepped forward. “Judge, we move that you dismiss the bill of criminal complaint based on insufficient evidence.”

“Motion denied, Counsel.”

I slumped back against the bench. From the way the judge had been attacking the prosecution’s case, I’d thought he was on our side. Maybe he had been playing a game with her that had nothing to do with us, a game that he let her win at the end. So much for my hope of Colin walking out of here free.

“Your Honor, Dr. Fitzhugh is a tenured member of the Stony Brook University faculty and has never been charged with a felony or misdemeanor, not even a speeding summons. He is a noted archeologist whose behavior has always been exemplary. He owns property and he has four children. The police are holding his passport, so he could not leave the country even if he wanted to.”

“Hitler had a pet kitten,” the judge mused.

Stanton was undeterred. “Dr. Fitzhugh is no flight risk. Furthermore, there is simply no physical evidence to place him at the scene of the fire, nothing incriminating on his computer or in his home or car as Your Honor has pointed out. He did not drive to Southampton the night of the crime. Based on this fairy tale, I’m requesting that Dr. Fitzhugh be released on his own recognizance.”

“Granted.” Judge Cooperman lifted his gavel but Ms. Turnelli was lifting an arm too.

“Objection! We are in the process of gathering more information that will lead to a stronger indictment.”

“Overruled. Next case.”

I
COULDN
’
T
BELIEVE
that we were walking up the aisle and out of the courtroom, that Colin was walking next to me and on his way home. My legs seemed weightless as we pushed through the swinging doors. A man and a woman close to my age jumped up and followed us.

“Dr. Fitzhugh, Dr. Fitzhugh,” the man cried.

Colin turned, startled. A former student?

“Is it true that you hadn’t seen the deceased in years? Or was there more recent contact? How
did
you know he was out in Southampton?”

There was a sudden flash, a tiny supernova, and I saw that the woman was pointing a camera at Colin.

Stanton grabbed Colin’s arm. “Damn newspaper ghouls. Even when there’s no case, they’ll try to make one.” He hurried us down the hall toward the lobby, turning back only once. “We have no comment. If you listened to the judge, you’d know they have no case.”

“Why are they doing this?” I gasped as we entered the nearly empty waiting room.

“Because nothing exciting ever happens on Long Island and this is the kind of gruesome news they love. Don’t be surprised at what they concoct for
Newsday
tomorrow morning.”

“
Newsday
!” Colin and I were both dismayed.

“They’re going to put his picture in the paper based on nothing?” That bothered me almost as much as Ms. Turnelli’s threat to find better evidence.

The reporter and photographer had circled around and were waiting for us by the outside doors. They had been joined by a freckled, sandy-haired man. He was the one who asked the next question. “Dr. Fitzhugh, what did the judge mean about the Crosleys kidnapping your daughter nineteen years ago? Did you ever get her back?”

“Don’t say anything,” Stanton hissed, and we didn’t. The woman with the camera ran around in front and photographed all three of us. There was something aggressive about her action, a slap at us for being uncooperative.

“How did they know we were going to be here?” I asked Stanton.