I drove to Chick’s house. This time he didn’t know I was coming. I ran through the icy rain to his porch. I rang the bell. I straightened my vertebrae and waited.
He came to the door in a baggy pair of walking shorts, inside-out sweatshirt, messy hair and bare feet. He was not exactly happy to see me. “Miss Marple, I presume?”
I smiled weakly. “I guess you saw the college paper.”
“Pretty hard to miss.”
“That’s why I came. I figured I should explain myself.”
He led me to the living room. He motioned for me to sit on the sofa. He sat in a wing-backed chair, on the other side of the room. “I didn’t want you to think I suspected you of anything,” I began. “Because you know I don’t.”
“Do I know that, Maddy?”
If he was going to be snippy with me, well, then I was going to be snippy right back. “If you don’t, you should.”
He softened a smidge. “Why didn’t you tell me you were looking into Gordon’s murder? I would have helped you any way I could.”
“That still goes?”
He leaned back in his chair and wrapped his arms around his skinny torso. Between his big pointy nose, scowling eyes and long bony legs, he looked like the freeze-dried cadaver of a whooping crane. “Of course it still goes,” he said.
It would have been a nice time for him to offer me a cup of tea, or even a glass of ice water. But he offered me nothing and I started into the speech I’d been rehearsing all morning and still didn’t know how to end: “I don’t suspect you of anything. But I’m not so sure the police don’t. I know you’re a private man, Chick, but unless you’re totally forthright about things, you might find yourself in a lot more trouble than you deserve.”
He hinged his knees and leaned forward, as if he was going to spring at me, and peck out my eyes. “And just what do you think I should be forthright about?”
“About anything you need to be forthright about,” I said. “Like your fight with Gordon at the Kerouac Thing. You told me it didn’t amount to anything. And you probably told the police it was nothing, too. But it did amount to something. And from what I hear, you can’t account for your time that Thursday.”
Chick unfolded from the chair and stalked to the fireplace. “I taught my morning class. Came home. Had lunch. Worked all afternoon grading papers. Had a sandwich. Curled up with Carl Sandburg and went to bed.”
I chose my words carefully. “It’s just that some people are questioning your relationship with Gordon.”
He swung around. His walking shorts fluttered. He knew what I was getting at. “Do I look like a homosexual to you?”
“Heavens to Betsy, Chick. At my age I don’t even remember what a heterosexual man looks like. But people are wondering.”
“You mean you’re wondering.”
He was right, of course, but I stuck to my guns. “People are wondering.”
He started to boil. “If Gordon and I were that-wouldn’t that make it less likely that I killed him?”
“People who are just friends rarely kill each other,” I said. “Lovers, all the time.”
He flopped next to me on the sofa. Rested his head on the Indian blanket across the back. “I did not kill him, Maddy.”
“And you’ve got Carl Sandburg to vouch for your evening?”
He threw up his hands, like an Italian waiter carrying giant bowls of pasta. “People can believe what they want to believe. You included.”
I stood up and fidgeted with the bottom of my sweater. “Would it be okay if I used your bathroom?”
My luck was with me. He told me the bathroom was upstairs. Which is exactly where I wanted to go.
I climbed the hollow steps. I leaned on the bathroom sink and took off my shoes. I remembered the day I’d visited how I could hear the floor squeaking above me. I slid carefully into the hallway and shuffled in my stocking feet to his office. I quietly orbited his big messy desk. I searched the row of photographs on his bookshelves, until I found the one I wanted-the one he’d shown me the day I came to lunch, the one of Gordon and him at Jack Kerouac’s grave.
I studied their young faces. Were those the faces of friends or lovers? I studied the easy, intimate way they were leaning against each other. Had I missed something all those years ago? Was I missing something now? Then I heard the floor squeak and saw Chick’s frozen silhouette in the doorway. He came toward me. He lifted his arm. He took the photograph. He studied it the way I’d been studying it.
I took a shaky breath. If he intended to kill me, it apparently was not going to be immediately. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to see it again,” I said. “It’s such a wonderful picture of you two.”
He looked at my feet. He smiled sadly. He wasn’t buying my explanation but he didn’t seem to care. “That was a long time ago, Maddy. A million years.”
I hadn’t come to wheedle a confession out of Chick. Or to convince myself that he was innocent. I’d come to see that photograph again and somehow get an answer to the question I was now going to ask: “Who took it, anyway?”
He glared at me over his beak.
I played down my curiosity. “It’s just something I always wonder when I see an old photo like that. Who was there but couldn’t be in the picture because they had to take it. My father took us all over the place on vacations-to Niagara Falls and Maine and Atlantic City and one year in the middle of summer to Florida-and it was like he never went along, because he was never in any of the pictures. Of course, maybe you had one of those cameras with a timer.”
He put the photo back on the shelf. “Penelope Yarrow took it,” he said.
“I don’t think I ever met her.”
“She was Gordon’s old girlfriend.”
“Oh.”
Chapter 14
Saturday, April 28
The Easter Bunny didn’t bring me anything but a long, cold, rainy, boring-as-hell weekend with James. But Eric Chen had a nice present for me on Monday-the address and phone number of my Lawrence’s fourth and final wife. I immediately picked up my phone and punched her number, before I could chicken out. I caught her at home, right as she was leaving for work. I apologized for bothering her. She apologized for not having time to talk. “Let me get right to the point then,” I said. “Do you have any of Lawrence’s old clippings from his college newspaper days?”
“Oh my, yes,” she said. She invited me to lunch.
And so the next Saturday Eric and I headed for Sharon, Pennsylvania. Eric agreed to drive his pickup. I agreed to buy his gas, his breakfast, and his six-pack of 20-ounce Mountain Dews.
We left Hannawa at nine-thirty in the morning, heading north on I-491 under a blanket of dirty spring clouds. We shivered at a McDonald’s for a half hour-my egg-and-sausage sandwich making a better hand warmer than an appetizing breakfast-and then we headed east on State Route 82, across Ohio’s half-empty northeast corner. We went through Mantua Corners and Hiram, Garrettsville and Levittsburg, Warren and Brookfield. At eleven-thirty we slipped across the Pennsylvania line and headed for Sharon.
Sharon is only one-tenth the size of Hannawa-sixteen or seventeen thousand people-but it has the same big problems. The steel mills and factories have closed, robbing thousands of local families of the good, steady wages they once depended on. Most of the stores downtown have either gone out of business or moved to the suburbs. The old residential neighborhoods in the hills above the Shenango River are slip-sliding into despair.
Ironically, Sharon in recent years has become something of a tourist destination, drawing a steady trickle of daytrippers from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo and Hannawa. They don’t exactly come to suck up the scenery. They come to shop. Sharon boasts the world’s largest candy store, the world’s largest outlet for off-price women’s clothing, and the world’s largest shoe store.