Phoebe Michaels answered on the fourth ring.
“Dr. Michaels, my name is Kathleen Paulson,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday morning, but I’m hoping you’ll talk to me about Gregor Easton. You knew him as Douglas Williams.”
“You’re Dr. Tremayne’s friend,” she said.
Thank you, Lise, I thought. “Yes, I am. You know that Mr. Easton is dead?”
“Yes,” Dr. Michaels said. “Did you kill him? That doesn’t mean I won’t talk to you. I’d just like to know.”
“No, I didn’t kill him,” I said. “In fact, the police haven’t said how he died yet.”
“But you don’t think he died of natural causes.” Her voice was low and husky.
I sat down on the footstool. “I don’t. I’m the librarian here in Mayville Heights, Minnesota. Mr. Easton was in my library the night he died, and I’m the one who found his body at the Stratton Theater the next morning.”
“Ah, so you’re a suspect,” she said.
“Yes, I guess I am. And it doesn’t help that I’ve only been here a few months.”
“So how can I help you, Ms. Paulson?”
“First, please call me Kathleen,” I said.
“All right, Kathleen—if you’ll call me Phoebe. I’m only Dr. Michaels to my students and pretentious colleagues.”
I smiled, liking her more the more she talked. “You were in the music program at Oberlin Conservatory with Gregor Easton, when he was known as Douglas Williams.”
“I was.”
“What was he like?”
“Handsome, charming, amoral, manipulative and not very talented.”
“There were rumors he was cheating somehow when it came to his compositions.”
“Oh, I think that was more than a rumor. I think it was the truth.”
“Why?” I asked, stretching both my legs out in front of me.
“He had no ability, no talent as a composer. Then suddenly he got incredibly good. He claimed he’d just been suffering from performance anxiety.”
“You didn’t believe him?”
I heard a snort of derisive laughter.
“No, I didn’t,” she said emphatically. “Doug—Easton—was confident to the point of arrogance. The music he started handing in was complex, sensitive and inspired. All the things he wasn’t. I don’t know where it came from, but I’ve never believed he wrote it.”
“Easton left after a year,” I said, trying to work up to asking her about the pictures. I didn’t need to.
“Kathleen, I’m sure Dr. Tremayne told you about the pictures.”
“She did. I didn’t want to embarrass you.”
She laughed. “Oh, that ship sailed a long time ago.” Her voice grew serious again. “Yes, he took photographs of me. Nothing that would be a big deal now.”
“But not then.”
“No,” she said. “Then it seemed like the end of the world. I was eighteen. I’d been sheltered by my parents from everything. He was older. He seemed so sophisticated, so worldly, compared to the boys I knew. They seemed like, well, boys. I was an easy mark.”
“Did he pressure you to pose for the pictures?”
“‘You would if you loved me,’” she said. “How many women have fallen for that line? He promised the pictures would be art. They were just shots of me in my underwear, wrapped in some gauzy black fabric that had probably been a window curtain.”
“But no nudity?”
“No. Just bare shoulders or a curve of cleavage. But it was how things seemed that was the problem, not how they really were.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand,” I said, changing my position on the footstool.
“He did my makeup—red lips, black eyeliner, false eyelashes. I didn’t exactly look like some inexperienced young woman from a good family.”
“What happened after?”
“He dropped me as soon as he had the pictures. I cried. I begged. He laughed. I was terrified he’d show them to everyone I knew.”
I tried to imagine how humiliated she must have felt. “I’m so sorry that happened to you, Phoebe,” I said. “It must have been horrible.”
“At the time it was. But I was very lucky. I had a mother I could talk to and a father with money. I went home for ten days. When I went back Easton was gone.”
“Your father paid him off.”
Her voice turned thoughtful. “You know, I don’t know for certain. I just assumed he did. We never spoke about it. I thought at the time that my father had gotten the photographs from Easton and destroyed them.”
“He didn’t?”
“No. One day the photos and negatives just showed up in my mailbox in the proverbial plain brown envelope.”
“And you don’t have any idea who sent them?”
“I don’t think I was the first young woman Easton took photographs of. Or the last. I always felt it was one of the women from our Tuesday seminar class.”
“Why?”
“Those were the people Easton spent all his time with.”
“Was there a young woman named Violet in that group?” I asked.
“No.”
“You’re certain?”
“I am. I still have a photo of all of us. Ironically, it was Easton who took it. There was no Violet in the class.” She listed off the names from memory.
So either I was wrong about when Violet had been at Oberlin or she hadn’t known Easton. I felt relieved, but it was a long time ago and I wanted to be sure.
“Phoebe, do you think you could find that photograph?”
“I think so,” she said. “But it’ll take some time. I’m a bit of a pack rat.”
“That’s all right,” I said.
“Give me your e-mail address. If I find the picture I’ll scan it and send it to you.”
“One last question,” I said. “Oren Kenyon. Was he in the seminar class?” Please say no, I thought, crossing my fingers.
“Oren Kenyon? Would he have been maybe sixteen or seventeen?”
“Yes.”
“He was. But I think he was auditing the class, not taking it for credit.”
I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “Thank you so much for talking to me,” I said. “I won’t keep you any longer.”
“You’re welcome, Kathleen,” she said. “When this is finally settled, when you finally figure out what happened, please call me and let me know how it ends.”
“I’ll do that,” I promised. We said good-bye and hung up.
I went back to the kitchen, where the papers were still on the table. It always came back to Oren, no matter which way I turned. The more evidence that piled up against Oren, the more resistant I got to the idea that he’d had something to do with Gregor Easton’s death.
“I have to talk to him,” I said to the empty kitchen. I shut off the coffeemaker. Again. I went upstairs, brushed my hair and put on some lipstick.
I stared at my reflection in the mirror. Was I crazy? Was going to talk to Oren a mistake? But I needed to find out if he was involved in Gregor Easton’s death in some way.
Was this like one of those old melodramatic, womenin-jeopardy movies? Was I just like the innocent young heroine who, when she hears a noise in the cellar late at night, with a violent serial killer on the loose, tosses her hair, licks her lips and goes down into the basement instead of getting the heck out of there? My hair was too short to toss and I didn’t want to lick off the lipstick I’d just applied. Oren was not the bad guy in some old Hollywood B movie.
I got my keys. Both cats were sitting on the bench in the porch. I stopped to pet them. “I have to go see Oren,” I told them. “I’ll be back soon.” I locked the door behind me. It would at least keep Owen from roaming around.
The clouds overhead were thinning, being blown away to wisps of nothing over the lake. It was another beautiful day. I realized I was beginning to think of Mayville as home.
I could see Oren’s truck in the driveway as I approached his house. Moving closer, I caught sight of him on the verandah. He was painting something. It looked like a wooden trough; then I realized it was a window box. Oren looked up and waved his paintbrush in greeting.