A Novel Death (21 page)

I handled its red cover with wonder. The dust jacket illustration showed a watercolor of Sambo smiling and pointing at letters on a blackboard with his closed umbrella, teaching four small Caucasians in nursery dress. Below it and on the back were black and white caricatures of Sambo and his family portrayed, as the blurb indicated, by "later and less sympathetic illustrators."

As I expected, there were several biographies of Rudyard Kipling. I picked out three, and checked the books out.

Since it was nearly noon, I decided to have lunch near the water. Could I afford it? Of course not. But I needed it, and needed to be safely surrounded by other people. I settled into a white vinyl chair on the faux deck of the SS Seascape and ordered a lobster roll and a diet coke. By the time my sandwich came, pink and white chunks in a hot dog roll, every table was filled. Safe in the crowd, I was soon lost in Helen Bannerman's life.

Helen, a tall, rangy Scotswoman, had a good sense of humor and no aptitude for housework. Her physician husband was deeply involved in plague control around Bombay and the family was neatly divided into two older girls and two younger boys. When the girls spent the years between 1902 and 1905 in school back in Scotland, she turned her energies to her sons.

Although Helen died in 1946, before serious accusations of racism battered Sambo's reputation, the last chapter in the biography was written by Elizabeth Hay as a response to Bannerman's critics. It was a defense that transferred the blame to the coarser American illustrators. The picture of the Sambo family decorously eating their pancakes on a white tablecloth had deteriorated into Sambo alone in a bare wood shanty, scarfing down cakes like a solitary boozer. The book did not include the picture of the slender Black Mumbo in a Dorothy Lamour sari or Sambo as a freckled, redheaded American kid.

The last chapter in the biography was also the most intriguing. The initial story, that Helen Bannerman wrote Sambo for her daughters on the train after leaving them in Edinburgh to be educated, was not true. In 1898, she had left them temporarily at the family's second home in the hills to escape the Bombay summer when tropical illnesses bloomed. Yet in 1902, Janet and Day were left in Scotland, separated from their parents for three years. It appeared that this future separation had been foreshadowed in the book by Helen, knowing it had to come.

The gifts Sambo's parents gave him helped in his temporary separation from them. More than that, they kept him from being eaten.

It wasn't until I closed the book that I realized there was no mention of Rudyard Kipling.

After I paid for my lobster roll and left the restaurant, the day took another dip. Back in the barn, I called Detective Marselli and got his voice mail. I left a message saying that I wanted to see Margaret. I also wanted to know what was happening with Russell Patterson, but wasn't sure he would tell me.

Next I switched on the computer. The first e-mail told me that I had sold an expensive edition of The Great Santini by Pat Conroy. I should have been thrilled. The only trouble was, it was the same book I had sold in June and forgotten to remove from one of the databases. Someone who had taken the trouble to locate the book and go through the credit card process now believed he owned a Conroy first edition-and didn't. I authorized a refund and wrote an apologetic message.

As if in rebuke, there were no other book orders or inquiries.

There was, however, a response from Katie:

Dear Delhi,

So nice to hear from you!

I checked with my father who has been in the business for a thousand years. He has never had an inscribed Helen Bannerman book and thinks it is quite uncommon. With what you told me about it, including the original artwork-could you send me a scan?-he estimates its value at about $25,000. If it were a true author's copy, a unique item, the value could go up considerably, especially at auction. As you know, two collectors can drive a price into the stratosphere.

Why do you want to know? He said to tell you he would be very interested in such a book!

She hadn't believed my disclaimer that it was a theoretical question; why would she? Yet it was true. The inscription was uncertain; the provenance was unknown, and it wasn't even my book. Outside of that ... it was probably worth more than she said anyway. That was the bargaining price in case I had one to sell, the price that would give her father some margin when he resold Sambo. I could imagine the book highlighted on a page in one of his expensive catalogs.

When the phone rang I hoped it was Detective Marselli. "Secondhand Prose!"

It was. "You called me?" He sounded impatient.

"I wanted to know where Margaret is."

"Ms. Weller was moved to a nursing home."

"I know that. Where?"

"We're not giving out that information."

"But I want to see her!"

"It's either do it this way or post a guard. And we can't justify doing that"

"But I'm not a suspect."

Silence.

"Am I?"

"We don't use that terminology anymore"

"Okay. I'm not an `alleged perp,' am I?" An unindicted coconspirator?

An amused snort. "You don't fit the footprint."

"You have footprints?" But as soon as I said it, I realized he did not mean it literally; I would have blushed if we had been in the same room. "But what about Russell Patterson?"

There are natural pauses in a phone conversation, and there are silences so deep you can look into them, black holes rimmed with ice.

"Who told you that?"

"His wife. Shara?"

"Why?"

"I don't know. She didn't know anyone else to call, I guess."

"Well, she can relax. Her husband has been cleared."

"He has? But I thought-" I would have to revise what I thought. "Are you sure?"

He responded with what might have been a laugh.

"But he's a violent person. He bullies everyone!"

"Yes?" He seemed skeptical.

"He bullies her. He bullies everyone!"

"Are you afraid of him?"

"Me? No. Why would I be afraid of him?"

"I'll let you know about seeing Ms. Weller."

"Is she any better?"

"About the same." He hung up.

I clicked on the NEW MESSAGE icon. An order for a large Raoul Duty art book. And another blast from oceans9:

YOU'LL BE SORRY.

That was a threat. But I didn't have anyone to call.

Rather than stay in the barn, I drove into Port Lewis. With two of the Kipling biographies under my arm, I walked over to the waterfront cafe, settling in at the same sunny table where I had sat with Roger, The Bookie. This time I ordered an icy mochaccino and watched the gargantuan white ferry, the Moby-Dick, arrive from Connecticut. Foot passengers streamed off first, then cars and trucks bumped gently down the gangplank and into the street. Just beyond the ferry, pleasure boats rose and fell in its wake, waiting for the weekend. Although it was mid-afternoon, a scent of fried clams came from somewhere nearby.

I missed Sambo. The book glowed with its own history and existence, a clear beam shining down from the past. The fact that everyone involved in writing and publishing it was long dead gave it the usual poignancy. What matters? What really matters? The past is sealed. The future holds annihilation. Being able to sit in the sunshine and breathe in the salty air on a summer afternoon was, in the end, all you had.

I warned myself not to go there. I did not want to go once more down the path that beckoned to me like an inexorable hand.

Instead, I escaped into the life of Rudyard Kipling, looking for the point where his world intersected with Helen Bannerman's.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling had been a sad and defiant little boy, especially after his parents left him and his younger sister, Trix, in a foster home in England. The parents dropped the children off without explaining that they would not be back for a while-six years. Their foster mother was a cold and pious woman named Mrs. Holloway who stitched a sign that said LIAR to Ruddy's jacket and forbade his reading fiction. The tiger's pounce? Even though Helen's daughters had been left in the loving care of family members, she would have understood that nothing can quench the yearning for the beloved parent.

I skimmed the pages to get a chronology of Kipling's life, entertaining myself with thoughts of Helen and Rudyard having tea under the hot Rangoon sun. It was hard to imagine much more. My image of Kipling was of someone stodgy and monocled, rather like Teddy Roosevelt, while Helen in her photographs was tall, pleasantly homely, and board-thin. Call me unromantic, but I could not picture anything but friendship between them.

There had not been a whisper of him in her biography. Given all the illustrated letters she sent home, if they had met she surely would have sketched Kipling-what a treasure that letter would be! Of course, she had not started writing letters to her daughters until 1902 and her book had been published in 1899.

Navigating my straw through the slushy mocha, I realized that I needed to see a map of India. Lahore, Bombay, Madras, Simla. They were familiar names-from before I could walk there had been a map of India on my father's study wall-but I could not remember very clearly where the cities were. Helen Bannerman had first arrived in India in November 1889; Rudyard Kipling, who had been working on a newspaper in Allahabad, left earlier that year for London and returned for a visit with his parents in Lahore in early 1892. I checked my notes. At that point Helen and Will Bannerman would have been in Mangalore, arriving in Madras in September 1893.

I read on. By 1892 Kipling had published Soldiers Three, Wee Willie Winkie, and The Light That Failed. The next year his parents moved from India to Wiltshire, England, though Trix married and stayed on in Simla for most of her life, suffering from emotional problems. Small wonder, given the shocks of her childhood. But though her brother worried about her, I could find no evidence that he ever went back to India again after 1893. There was no record of his ever traveling to Scotland from his London home, either. It was possible that Helen and Rudyard had met in India in 1892, but I would have to check the geography.

I pushed away my empty glass mug and wondered what Kipling would have thought of Little Black Sambo. He had written his Jungle Stories about Mowgli first. Mowgli was good with animals, but so was Sambo, in a way. It had been Sambo's good fortune that the tigers abandoned their finery and he was able to retrieve it. On the other hand, how long would a tiger be happy squeezed into a little red jacket?

Kipling's earlier success might have given Helen Bannerman more reason to send him a copy of her own effort; in a way they were double compatriots. The painting of Sambo could have been Sambo bowing to Kipling's established literary position.

Gathering up the books, I realized that I had been counting on something more conclusive. If not a documented friendship, then at least a known meeting between the two authors. Victorian writers were always being introduced to each other and going off on trips together. Indian expatriate society had been tight and chances were that they would have met if they had been at all geographically close. But India is a huge country.

Another mood dip, which meant it was time to move on. Leaving the cafe, I crossed the street to Cornucopia and ordered a smoked turkey wrap and a pound of mixed salad to take home. Standing in front of a deli case which had even healthier things inside, tofu lasagna and veggie burgers, I had the familiar sense that I was managing my life badly. I should have called Jane to reassure her about what had happened; I owed Jason in Santa Fe a call. At least I had told Hannah I would pay for her car repair. But this was not about my living children.

Back on the crowded sidewalk, skirting far too many tourists, I finally let myself think about what had happened on this date nineteen years ago. Picture a very young mother, five months pregnant, with three little girls in tow. A park bench in Stratford beside the calm-flowing Avon, not far from Anne Hathaway's cottage. Young men and couples row slowly by. Sitting on the bench with a two-yearold in her arms, buzzing insects and the lulling scent of honeysuckle, she is too drowsy to keep her eyes open. Her two other daughters play in the grass at her feet. Except-