Shadows on the Ivy (5 page)

It took a few more minutes for Maggie to assure Detectives Newton and Luciani there was nothing more she could add to their knowledge about Sarah Anderson.

Maggie wondered about the parents who had deserted Sarah; the many foster families Sarah didn’t talk about. What about the last four years, when Sarah had been a struggling single parent with a little girl? There must have been people in her life during those years. There must have been hard times. Could any of those have come back to haunt Sarah now? And Dr. Stevens had asked who Aura’s father was…. When Sarah had asked Maggie to be Aura’s guardian, she’d just said Aura didn’t have a father. Did that mean she didn’t know who Aura’s father was? That the man didn’t know he had a daughter? That Aura’s father had left them? Or that Sarah, for whatever reason, wanted nothing to do with him?

There was a lot about Sarah Anderson she didn’t know. What part of that life had made Sarah a victim yesterday?

The question echoed through Maggie’s thoughts as she turned on her computer and piled up her papers for this morning’s classes. If she’d known Dorothy’s cell phone number, she could have called. But she didn’t. She was already late for her 6:45 parking-lot appointment, and Dorothy would just have to wait a few more minutes.

What Maggie needed was a word from someone far away from Somerset College.

That word was waiting in her e-mail in-box.

Maggie smiled. Will had been a teacher for years and was now trying to make a living as a full-time antiques dealer specializing in colonial kitchen and fireplace equipment. He couldn’t help teasing her about her choice to go the opposite route: to deal in antique prints only on weekends and vacations. She moved Winslow off the keyboard and read the rest of Will’s message.

Maggie turned off the computer. Calm and sunny. That’s what the world should be, for sure. She checked Winslow’s water dish; it was full and he had plenty of dry food. She gave his head an extra scratch for good luck. Luck for all of them. For her. For Will. And for Sarah Anderson.

Dorothy was standing outside the driver’s door of her BMW when Maggie pulled up beside her in the church parking lot. The early-November air was dank. Not sunny. And not calm.

“Where have you been? It’s after seven. I’ve been here for almost half an hour!”

Maggie had barely turned off her van’s engine, and Dorothy was already questioning her.

“I was held up. Two detectives stopped in to say ‘Good morning.’”

“The police? They came to your house?”

“They just left. They were asking questions about Sarah. Dr. Stevens called them when the lab report came back saying she’d been poisoned.”

“But—already.” Dorothy pushed up the shawl collar on her heavy navy cardigan. It probably kept away some of the cold. It also hid part of her face. “What were they asking?”

“What I knew about Sarah. How long I’d known her. About Whitcomb House and the students there.”

“What did you tell them?”

“What I knew, which wasn’t much. And that I couldn’t think of any reason someone would want to harm Sarah.”

“Did they say anything about her condition?”

“So far as they knew it was unchanged.”

Dorothy reached into her sweater pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Maggie had never seen her smoke before.

She lit one, dropped the match, and crushed it with her right foot, grinding small pieces of the paper match into the parking-lot pavement under her polished loafer. Behind her the elegant granite of Christ Episcopal Church’s steeple rose into the dim morning light. No other cars were in the parking lot on this early Monday morning.

As she watched Dorothy’s measured cigarette ritual, Maggie wondered again why they’d needed to talk immediately. And why in person? And why here?

Dorothy inhaled deeply, then blew smoke and warm air out in a small cloud. Neither she nor Maggie said anything for a few moments.

“Do you think they’ll question me?” Dorothy finally asked quietly.

“You funded Whitcomb House, and Sarah was at your home when she collapsed. I suspect they’ll talk with everyone she knows. At least until they learn what it was that poisoned her.”

“How is Aura taking all of this?”

“Fine, last night. I’m sure she doesn’t realize how sick her mother is. Kayla and Tiffany were going to take Aura to the day-care center this morning. They’ll watch out for her while Sarah’s in the hospital. They’re very concerned.”

“They’re good girls,” said Dorothy. “We chose good mothers—and Kendall—to be in the first Whitcomb House group.”

“Yes.”

“Did the police ask how we selected them?”

“Not specifically. The police know they’re single parents, and I said they’d been chosen out of many applicants.”

“Right. That’s just right. Maggie, I’m so proud of this program. I wouldn’t want any bad publicity to result from Sarah’s situation.”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. You can’t stop the press from reporting that one of Somerset College’s students may have been poisoned and the police are investigating. They’ll get that much from the local police record.”

Dorothy dropped the rest of her cigarette. “Hell.”

“They have to investigate, Dorothy. They have to find out who tried to hurt Sarah.”

“I know. I just don’t want anyone getting involved in things that are none of their business. Some parts of life are private. Sarah’s life, and other people’s lives, too.”

Did Dorothy know something? Something that might help the police find whoever had poisoned Sarah?

“We have to cooperate, Dorothy. It wouldn’t be fair to Sarah or Aura not to do that.” Maggie paused.

“Of course it wouldn’t, Maggie.” Dorothy set her mouth in a tight smile and patted Maggie’s arm. “Of course not, dear. We’ll all cooperate. And I’m sure everything will just be fine. No one we know could have hurt Sarah. It was probably just some strange coincidence.”

Poison? A coincidence? “Why did you ask me to meet you here, Dorothy? What did you want to tell me?”

Dorothy glanced around nervously, tapping her foot as if she wanted to leave. “It wasn’t important. You go on over to the college. You said you had a nine-o’clock class, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then you go. I was just nervous this morning; I shouldn’t have bothered you. We’ll have plenty of time to talk later. I’m going to stop at the hospital to visit Sarah, if I can, and see Dr. Stevens.”

“If Sarah’s condition changes, or if you hear anything—you’ll let me know, Dorothy?”

“Of course, Maggie. Just like you called last night to tell me Sarah had been poisoned.” The BMW door slammed a little too close to Maggie for comfort, and then Dorothy’s car zoomed out of the church lot.

Dorothy knew something. That was clear.

But what was it? Could she know why Sarah was now in a coma and be keeping it to herself?

Maggie’s damp and chilly van did nothing to improve her mood. She wanted to stop at Whitcomb House to check on Aura, but the residents were no doubt busy getting themselves and their children up and fed and dressed for the day. Not a good time to stop in. How had Aura gotten through the night? How had she reacted when she woke up and found her mother wasn’t with her?

Maggie had been reading a lot about adoption recently. She wanted to check out every possibility. She’d gotten on the mailing lists of several local and international adoption agencies, and after months of pamphlet-reading she now knew some things about the realities of adoption today.

If Sarah’s parents had deserted her as a child, why hadn’t she been adopted? She’d been white, she’d no doubt been cute, and she didn’t appear to have any physical disabilities. Prospective adoptive parents waited in line for years in hopes of adopting a little girl like that.

Many older children, though, didn’t find homes. She didn’t know how old Sarah had been when her parents left. Sarah was twenty-three now; what had been the definition of an “older child” when she was a toddler?

Maggie did know that Aura was four and would be missing her mother. She’d stop in at the day-care center to see her. Later in the morning. But first she had to teach her class.

The American wilderness—an Eden offering haven and moral cleansing and an alternative to the corruption and filth of the city? Or a cruel place where savages and beasts roamed, people lived beyond a just world’s laws and religions, and nature’s ferocity made even survival of the fittest only a possibility?

The theme for her class this morning.

Sarah’s survival seemed a much more immediate issue.

“Currier and Ives was among the most successful mid-nineteenth-century American companies,” Maggie began. The twenty or so students looked as they often did on Monday mornings…as though they hadn’t quite woken up. The cups of coffee or tea she saw on nearly every desk would eventually bring them around, she knew from experience. She raised her voice. That might help, too. “The images first produced by Currier and Ives are still a success today, reproduced on calendars, mugs, and T-shirts, giving us a view of America as Americans wanted to think of themselves in the mid and late nineteenth century.

“Lithography, discovered in 1796 in Germany, was adopted in the first quarter of nineteenth-century America for printing business forms and lettering. Nathaniel Currier was the first to apply the technique to art on a large scale. Beginning in 1835, he produced lithographs of important news events, and then of more general pictures, to decorate the homes of America. His brother-in-law, James Merritt Ives, joined him in 1857, and the firm of Currier and Ives became, indeed, ‘printmakers to the American people,’ as their slogan claimed.”

Maggie took a sip of her Diet Pepsi. Where was Tiffany? She wasn’t in class. Again. Single parents didn’t have the default excuse of oversleeping. Two-year-old Tyler would definitely have been up at dawn. Maggie made a mental note to talk to Tiffany later. She must be upset about Sarah, of course, but her grades, and her scholarship, depended on her keeping up with class work. Skipping classes wouldn’t help with that, no matter what the excuse.

“American culture has grown up embracing contradictory myths. Currier and Ives prints illustrated both sides of the theme we’re going to discuss today: the role of the wilderness in American history and myth.

“For some nineteenth-century Americans the wilderness represented freedom and opportunity. Land for all. An untouched Eden; a new world, uncluttered by the corruption of the city, where Americans could make their own future. Life in the country was seen as pure and moral—very different from life in cities. Cities both in Europe and in America had become crowded, dirty, and crime-ridden.”

What would the Somerset County of today be considered? Maggie wondered. Frontier? Not anymore. But not a true city, either. Perhaps today’s suburban landscape was a classic American compromise. And that compromise bred neither the innocence of the frontier, nor the evils of the city, but something in between.

Maggie removed a print from one of her portfolios and leaned it against an easel.

“This print,
Life in the Country—Evening,
is a Currier and Ives from 1862 which shows a very civilized ‘country’—a large house with a trimmed lawn, a European-style fountain and garden, and a gatehouse by the fence that protects the house from the thick woods surrounding it. In this illustration the wilderness is tamed.”

She pulled out a second Currier & Ives and placed it on top of the first. “In
The Pioneer’s Home—On the Western Frontier,
1867, the house is a log cabin. But it is similar to the earlier print in that the home is surrounded by a cleared part of the wilderness. The home is full: three small children are clean and well-dressed; chickens and goats are in the yard; and the returning hunters of the family are bringing with them deer, wild turkeys, and pheasants. This wilderness is, like the eastern home, a tamed wilderness, with plenty for all. An Eden of sorts, providing food, comfort, warmth, and community to the family.”

One of the students raised his hand.

“Professor Summer, that picture is too perfect! Even the children playing in the dirt yard and the men returning from hunting are wearing clean clothes! Did people really believe the frontier was like that?”

Maggie seized the opportunity to get their attention. “People idealized the frontier, Jason. In the same way many people today believe romance is the way it is in the movies, where couples have simultaneous orgasms and wake up together with perfect makeup, hair in place, and sweet breath.”

Two students who had been dozing suddenly sat up. Mission accomplished.

“So, yes, many Americans, especially those who had never been to the frontier, believed in that image. Remember, one of the purposes of these lithographs was to attract people to go West. But now let me show you another view of the American frontier.”

Maggie opened a large book of Currier & Ives reproductions to
Prairie Fires of the Great West
and held it up for the class to see. “In this 1871 print the horrors of this same wilderness are clear. Giant flames and clouds of smoke from the prairie fire fill the horizon, threatening both herds of buffalo and the train which transects the scene, symbolizing civilization. The train’s billowing smoke blends with the smoke of the fire. This wilderness is uncontrolled and uncontrollable.”

Uncontrollable. Was what had happened to Sarah uncontrollable? But how could we prevent what we didn’t anticipate? And if it could happen to Sarah, then could it happen to someone else? Maggie hoped fervently that Detectives Luciani and Newton had already found whoever had caused all this pain. Found that person and locked him or her up, far away from civilization.

She turned the book to still another page. “
High Water in the Mississippi
illustrates another natural danger of the wilderness. The Mississippi has flooded. The large home in the rear of the print is surrounded by water; in the foreground a group of black Americans try to escape the waters by gathering on the roof of a house. Again, as with the fire, the flood has destroyed what men have made; nature is man’s enemy, not his friend.

“And here is a final example.” Maggie balanced the large book on the desk in front of her. “This 1868 Currier and Ives,
Across the Continent: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,
takes its theme from a series of paintings Thomas Cole did in 1836 called
The Course of Empire.
Cole’s paintings depicted the rise and fall of European civilization: an American reaction to the problems escaped by emigrating.

“By the way, if you’d like to see paintings by Thomas Cole and other American artists of that period, the Montclair Art Museum has an excellent small collection that includes most of the major American artists of the nineteenth century.

“In the Currier and Ives version, ‘the course of empire’ westward is visualized as a positive, inevitable step in taming the savage wilderness. Instead of Cole’s depictions of the crumbling ruins of Europe, here the railroad cuts a dramatic line through the untouched prairie. But civilization has already taken a toll. On one side of the railroad tracks pioneers are resolutely cutting down trees, creating towns and schools, and ‘civilizing’ the land. On the other side, the Indians on horseback watch near the forests, separated from the white community by the railroad.

“In many ways this print most accurately reflects the way in which Eastern Americans viewed the journey westward in the mid and late nineteenth century.”

Maggie closed the large book.

As soon as the bell rang, she could see Aura and find out how Sarah was doing. If she was still alive.