Helen Hath No Fury (12 page)

All I was going to accomplish or had accomplished was to hurt that girl more.

Let Helen rest in peace, however she had come to her final rest. Let her loved ones rest peacefully, too.

Sometimes, as Sigmund said, a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes, the official interpretation of what happened is as close to the truth as a human being can get.

I wasn’t going to forget Gretchen’s tortured expression.

I felt as if in doing nothing from now on, I would finally be doing the right thing.

“W
HAT WAS THAT ABOUT
?” M
ACKENZIE ASKED WHEN HE
rejoined me after Ivan Coulter had gone.

“I’ll explain, but later.” I wanted a longer time of flowers and plants and beauty.

Later, after a day of horticultural delights, we returned to the car. Mackenzie spotted the forgotten envelope on the backseat. “Will we have time to read it before the Hilemans get to the restaurant? I feel like a kid who forgot to do his homework.”

“Doesn’t matter, because—”

“How ’bout you read it out loud while we drive.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Carsick? You never have been before.”

“I think I’m out of line, making the Coulters’ situation worse.”

I sat facing forward, not looking in Mackenzie’s direction, but I felt his glance turn to me. “That what Coulter said?” he asked.

“Sort of. And he’s right. He told me she’d been depressed—I mean clinically, for real—at least two times before that he knew of, and somebody told me that she said she was going through a bad time, so …”

“You think she jumped?”

“It still doesn’t make sense, but nothing else does, either. Including me. I mean think about it—how stupid
was the idea that the book group could find the real Helen and turn her history over to the authorities so that justice was done.”

He drove on.

“I’m glad we’re both seeing Susan. With two of us there—”

“She’d object to callin’ it off, you think? I mean if we weren’t both there?”

“She has these enthusiasms. Maybe I got carried away with her excitement. She loves mysteries. Loves reading them and writing them and thinking them. This is too much of a game for her, but I think if we emphasize that this is causing pain, she’ll back off. Besides, I don’t know if there’s any real basis to our suspicions. Maybe we hate the idea that Helen might have killed herself, but being uncomfortable with it doesn’t mean it wasn’t so.”

“There’s that Dumpster graffiti.”

“But I don’t know when that was written. After she died, but beyond that, anybody could have done it at any time for whatever sick reason.”

And for the rest of the hour’s drive, we spoke of other things—almost anything besides Helen Coulter.

We found a parking spot within hiking distance of the White Dog Cafe—quite a feat on Penn’s campus, but Mackenzie has parking karma. If I’d been behind the wheel, we’d have circled another half hour, but when Mackenzie approaches a congested area with a desire to park in it, people feel compelled to drop whatever they’re doing, rush back to their cars, and clear a space for him.

Before locking up, Mackenzie pulled the envelope out of the backseat. “Let’s return it,” he said, and I agreed. Walking the few blocks to the restaurant, I felt nostalgic and old. A century ago I had been one of those incredibly young and untroubled-looking undergraduates. I knew they were facing finals, that life issues loomed large, and
that their lives were as fraught with grave matters as mine was.

But I didn’t believe it. I was awash in mental mush about the good old days, and my false nostalgia was underlined by the time we entered the cafe’s homey—not my homey, but a semimythic lace-curtained bric-a-brac kind of homey—atmosphere. The restaurant was in a row house that had once been owned by Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society. Once, she had a leg so infected, it was scheduled to be amputated, but it was cured, apparently, by a white dog lying upon it. In appreciation and homage, white dogs were everywhere represented—in china figurines and on prints and paintings.

It was a comfort to know that we were in no danger of having our limbs amputated while dining there.

Our table was ready, so we opted to wait there for Susan and Joe, instead of at the impossibly crowded bar.

“Well, here’s to you and flowers and a fine Saturday,” Mackenzie toasted when our glasses of wine arrived. And here was to us, and then to us again, and finally, Mackenzie grew tired of toasting and waiting and picking at the bread tray the waiter had put down, and he opened the plastic envelope. “Why not?” he said. “Just so I have an idea what … It’s not as if we’ll do anythin’ with it. Here, take half.”

I couldn’t think why not, either. It was better than being annoyed with Susan and Joe’s late arrival, although reading in the dimmed light was annoying, too. Oddly, the restaurateurs hadn’t planned on having dinner guests read in lieu of eating.

Helen’s “note” was in my portion, and I read it carefully out loud, but softly. The tables were very close, and the couple next to us looked bored with each other and
in search of stimulation elsewhere. I leaned forward and whispered.

Helen’s handwriting was jagged, with lots of spiky letters. Combined with the pale light of the little lamp on the table, it was almost illegible, but what I made out was:

I read its cryptic, incomplete staccato phrases twice, then showed their arrangement to the cop and waited for a reaction. He had his chin pushed forward meditatively. “Odd,” he said finally. “She didn’t talk that way, did she? So vaguely? Disjointedly?”

“Not at all. Besides, why leave such a note in a loose-leaf book at the office? Who was supposed to find it?”

“Well, I’ve got my own mystery here,” Mackenzie said after fanning his pages and picking a few out. “Do you know somebody named—” He lowered his voice still more. “—Polly Baker?”

It took a moment for the name to connect. I could almost feel my brain scan files—people I worked with, was in book club with, knew socially, went to school with years ago. But just as I was ready to say that I absolutely
did not know such a woman, I remembered.
“Polly Baker!”

“Shhh.”

“Sure. Well, not know her, but know of her.”

“Sounds like a piece of work. Listen: ‘Prosecuted for fornication having borne her fifth bastard child.’ Where is this? Have things degenerated further than I knew about?”

“She’s—”

“Apparently, the father of her first child abandoned her and the child. And look here, a quote: ‘Where there is no law, there is no transgression. Take away therefore the law, and you take away the sin; for ’tis none against nature.’”

The man was in love with his own voice. Even his own whisper.

“Doesn’t say who said that about the law, but she—Helen—underlined it. And then it says—”

“Mackenz—”

“Oh, it’s historical—I see now. The trial was in 1747.” That intensified his enthusiasm. Anything historical does. If I were a few hundred years older, he’d have been paying attention to me.

“Conan?”

He barely took time to shake his head. “Let me finish. The woman’s really something. She defended herself so well—including the fact that her first seducer had been a judge—that one of the judges married her and they had fifteen more children. Talk about a good closing argument!”

“Caedfel! Chauncey!”

He turned the page toward me. “What’s this with the arrow pointing to
RvW
over here? You see that? Obviously important, but—”

I let my voice reach normal restaurant-dining decibels.
“Polly Baker never lived. She was Ben Franklin’s hoax. He loved practical jokes.”

I had Mackenzie’s full attention now, and what a kick to be teaching him history for a change. “For two—nearly three—hundred years, people believed the story and used it for their own purposes. Voltaire referred to her and so did Balzac. Others used her case to advocate legalized prostitution. Some for men leaving women alone on issues of sex. Some to contest how the courts work. Franklin claimed he just wanted to fill space in his paper,
The Pennsylvania Gazette.
The point of what happened with it was how many versions it had and how far it traveled—the point is how history gets written.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Because Susan is using Polly in her mystery, and Susan talks about her to the point of stupefaction.”

His jaw was pushed forward again as he thought. “But still … why did Helen write all this down with underlines, question marks in the margins, a big arrow pointing at the thing about laws?”

I shook my head. I had no idea.

There wasn’t much else. Susan had given me about twenty-five pages. “Think this really is all there was?” I asked.

Mackenzie sighed. “Worth double-checking, if we were checking anything, but my guess is this is all of it, because even most of these are doodles. Recipes.” He passed the pages across to me, and I flipped through them and mine. I’ve been told that everyone has her own instinctive doodle shape, and I now learned that Helen’s had been spirals. Large and small spirals, spirals with highlighted sides, spirals that were squared off to become almost mazelike.

I wondered what she’d been thinking about while her hand drew the ever-widening arcs.

I could tell what Mackenzie was thinking about. “I am starvin’,” he said. We’d failed to have lunch. “And your friends are one half hour late. Do you think we could check whether they’ve left home yet, ’cause I’m ready to order without them, or is that too crass for words?” He took his tiny cell phone out of his pocket.

“Check the menu while I call them.” I hate it when people flip phones in a public place. Hate to have their conversations intrude on my dinner, so I gestured to Mackenzie that I was taking the phone outside, and he nodded.

First, I phoned home to see if there was a message from the missing couple, but there was not. I then dialed Susan’s house ready to leave a message because I was sure that they were en route.

“Okay, people,” Susan’s message said. “It isn’t like answering machines are a new invention. Speak up.”

“Susie,” I said. “This is Amanda. We’re at the restaurant and you’re not. Guess you got tied up in traffic, so say we’ll wait another … we’ll be here, okay? But we might go ahead and order—we’re starving. When you get here, we’ll keep you company while you eat—hurry up!” I was squinting in the dim light to see the END button when the phone squawked with a male voice.

“Amanda? This is Joe. I picked up because—first of all, I apologize. I forgot about tonight.”

“Well, that’s okay,” I said, not meaning it for a split second. “We’ll just go ahead and—”

“Listen, I forgot and we aren’t there because … the thing is, I just brought Susan home from the hospital.”

“She’s sick?” I had visions of one of those horrifying new viruses. “She seemed so healthy last—”

“She was … she was assaulted. Mugged,” he said, sounding as if he had to force himself to speak. “Last night, after the event. She was going to her car—it was
parked on the street, not the lot, but close by—and somebody came up from behind and … walloped her. With a stick, they think.”

I could barely breathe. “I can’t believe … I—how is she?”

I heard his loud exhalation. “Not great. She was concussed, and she has a big egg on her head, plus broken ribs, and the way she fell, she smashed part of her jaw. She’ll be fine, they told us. But she doesn’t feel that way now. She’d tell you so herself, but it’s hard for her to speak.”

“They—who—he?”

“She isn’t sure. All she saw, before she was hit in the ribs, was a beige raincoat, she thinks. And pants. Could be anybody.”

“That’s all the person did? I mean that’s awful, and I’m glad that’s all! But it must have been a lunatic, to whack her with a stick and run away. Somebody insane.” The city was different now, better, safer, and how could anyone even do it with an enormous crowd—a thousand Republicans, for God’s sake—spilling out of a ballroom? Why? Why her?

Of all the people at last night’s event, Susan was surely the least affluent, the least bedecked and bejeweled.

“Somebody driving by honked and shouted that they had called the police on their car phone—and the person with the stick took off. Otherwise, I don’t know what might have …” He didn’t bother to finish the sentence.

“Thank goodness for that Samaritan. Did the person in the car see the mugger?”

“No. According to the police, only from a distance. Saw Susan being hit, is what.”

“Is there anything we can do, Joe? Anything anybody can do to help out?”

He made reassuring noises that all was well, she’d be
fine, he’d be with her till she was up and about, and she was going to be back to work in a few days, as soon as she could speak clearly.

I heard her voice in the background, and then Joe chuckled. Not a happy laugh, however. “Can you hear her?” he asked. “She said—in a fashion I won’t try to imitate—a lot of uh-buh-duh’s—or tried to say that she won’t have work to return to because the quote damn mugger took all the records she was carrying. Her contact list—even her calendar. She actually didn’t say all that—those are the accumulated facts she has shared today.”

Her envelopes. That was too ridiculous. I mean I, too, lusted for them, but nobody goes berserk over stationery.

“She didn’t notice till she was helped up, and then she realized he’d grabbed them when they fell on the ground. One truly stupid mugger. There is nothing of worth in any of them—except to Susan.”

“Did he take her pocketbook?”

“No. She had it strapped across her chest, you know that way. Maybe if that driver hadn’t shouted …”

I felt shaken and couldn’t help but remember Susan laughing last night, invoking a mystery cliché, wagging her finger and saying that if there’d been a crime, then she’d be the obligatory second corpse.

I felt wobbly as I made my way back to the table. All I could hear was the word
mugged
, which didn’t sound as brutal and terrible an act as it actually was. Bones broken, face injured.

And for what? Colored plastic folders that held business trivia, that meant nothing to anyone except their rightful owner.

However, there had been another folder. The one I now had. A folder you could read right through. Was it possible that’s what he—or she—wanted? Only Susan,
Mackenzie, and I knew that folder was no longer with Susan.