Now she was picking at her lavender nail polish. "Never slept with him. Didn't have to. Like I said, I could afford to buy most things that I wanted." "What was he like?"
Kristin shrugged her shoulders and went on flaking off the chips. "He was an okay guy. He actually seemed to care about Charlotte. Maybe that's why she dumped him. I don't think she liked anybody getting that close to her."
"Did she leave him for someone else?" Mike asked.
"What's the difference?"
"'Cause maybe she's still alive. Maybe someone can help us find her."
"Some of us figure she doesn't want to be found. Just went off to lead her own life." Kristin's cavalier attitude about Charlotte's disappearance was disturbing.
"Did you know Professor Dakota?"
"Only by reputation."
"But Charlotte was a friend of the professor's, wasn't she?"
"No way," Kristin said, looking at me as if I were crazy.
"What makes you so sure?"
"Fall semester, last year, okay? Charlotte flunked Dakota's class. Capital F in some bullshit course about the mayoralty in New York, La Guardia to Lindsay. Set her off in a complete funk. It was one thing for her to sweet-talk a guy like Julian into feeding her pills, but if she was kicked out of King's, then she'd have no choice but to go home to South America. Tuition was the only thing her father would pay for. No frills. If she wasn't at college, hasta la vista, sweet Charlotte. You two look surprised."
"I am a bit surprised," Mike led off. "Lola Dakota kept a bulletin board behind her desk. Had some pictures of her relatives, had some snapshots of famous people. But she also had a photograph of Charlotte Voight. Like something from a freshman mug book. We just assumed it meant she took an interest in the girl. Cared about her. Missed her."
Kristin nipped at her raw skin again. "Julian would have keeled over at that one. He used to tell Charlotte that Dakota would get what was coming to her someday. I just thought he was being macho for her sake. Never thought anyone would kill the SOB. Must be some other reason that Charlotte's picture's on her board."
"Who else can we talk to about Charlotte?" I asked. "There must have been other people she confided in about her plans. You don't just disappear into thin air."
"Can't think of a soul. I was the last person to see her alive, far as I know."
"Where was that?"
"I was coming into the lobby of the dorm about eight-thirty at night. She was on her way out, going to Julian's. She never got there. Must have changed her mind. Found another source."
"Did she seem to be in distress? Unhappy? De-"
"Nope. She seemed just fine. Cheerful almost. I asked her if she wanted to come up to my room to do a few lines with me. Charlotte laughed and said she had a better offer. She was going to the lab."
"Where's that?"
"That's what she used to call Julian's room. If he didn't have what you wanted, just wait ten minutes and he'd cook it up for you," Kristin said, obviously pleased by the memory. "He was wasting his time in the criminal justice department. He should have been a science major."
Chapman was disgusted. "Better living through chemistry," he said, looking at his watch.
"Anyway, Charlotte walked out the door and I never saw her again. I just assumed she was partying over at the lab."
12
I rang the bell at the Kramer-Rothschild town house shortly before 7:30 P.M. Nan opened the door and I introduced her to Mike Chapman.
"We might as well go upstairs to my study. All the information about our project is there. I've lost my husband to a new client this evening. He's working late." We declined her offer of a drink and followed her up to the second floor.
"Could I trouble you for a television, ma'am?"
"Let's stop in the den first, then," she said, leading us around the corner and clicking on the set. "Something breaking on the news about your case?"
"No. Alex and I have a standing bet on the Final Jeopardy! question. It'll only take a few minutes."
We caught up on small talk while we waited for Mike to find the station and then for the commercial to end. Trebek was reminding the three players that tonight's category was Famous Firsts.
"Twenty bucks, Coop. Could be anything."
"Be generous, in the spirit of Christmas. Make it forty."
Trebek stepped aside and the answer was revealed on the screen. "First woman in America to receive a medical degree."
"I'm toast, blondie. I can never beat her on this feminist trivia, Nan. Probably right up your alley, too."
Neither Chapman nor the flight attendant from Wisconsin even ventured a guess. "Who was Elizabeth Blackwell?" I asked, before the Maine fisherwoman or the Virginia enologist gave their wrong answers.
"Sorry, sorry, sorry, folks," Trebek said, chiding the three contestants for their failure to come up with the right answer. "Born in England, Elizabeth Blackwell immigrated to this country, and in 1849, she became the first woman in the United States to get a medical degree, at Geneva Medical College in New York. So let's see how much money that leaves-"
"The Blackwell family settled on Martha's Vineyard after that. Right near my place in Chilmark."
"Not a bad lead-in to my story," Nan said, as Mike clicked off the television and we walked down the hall to her home office. "This dig we're working at is over on Roosevelt Island. But it wasn't given that name until 1973. Before that it was Welfare Island, and in the period we're studying, it was called Blackwells Island. Different Blackwells, of course. This piece of land was owned by a colonial merchant named Robert Blackwell, whose family lived there in the 1680s. Their original wooden farmhouse is still standing."
"And before that," Mike interrupted, "the Dutch called it Hog Island. It was a pig farm in the early 1600s. Covered with swine."
"You two will be light-years ahead of me," I explained to Nan. "Mike knows more about American history than anyone I've ever met. The fact that he's familiar with the island probably means it had some significance in military life. That's his real specialty."
Nan shrugged her shoulders. "Not that I'm aware of."
Mike lifted a ruler from Nan's desk and pointed to the southern tip of Manhattan on the huge map of the city she had pinned to the wall. "In 1673, when the British and Dutch were still at war, the sheriff of New York was a guy named Manning. The Brits put him in charge of the fort down at this end, the entrance to New York Harbor. The Dutch launched a naval assault to regain control of what had once been their colony, New Amsterdam. Manning surrendered without a battle. So King Charles court-martialed the disgraced commander and banished him rather than put him to death." He moved the pointer up to a place in the East River, halfway between Manhattan and Queens. "He was exiled to your little island to live the rest of his life."
Nan responded, "It's always been a place for exiles. For outcasts. That's part of its tragic background. Do you know much about it?"
"Nothing at all. I look at it just about every day, on my way up and down the Drive. It can't be more than the length of a football field away from Manhattan, and yet I've never set foot there. When you see it at night, there's a hauntingly romantic look to it."
"It's got a wonderfully romantic aura, I agree with you completely. It's a bit like the He de la Cite, in the heart of Paris. A sliver of land, in a river, right in the midst of a great city. And a quiet, small-town pace that makes you think you're in a private enclave, not an urban neighborhood. It's even more dramatic from the heart of the island. You get to see the magnificent skyline of Manhattan from every angle, and then off to the other side, there's the industrial backdrop of Queens that lines the river's edge-factories, smokestacks, and barges.
"Let me tell you what the project is, and what Lola Dakota's involvement was with us."
Nan took the pointer from Mike's hand and began her description of the river-bound fragment of land. "The island is two miles long and just eight hundred feet wide. See? It parallels Manhattan from Eighty-fifth Street, on its northern tip, to Forty-eighth Street in the south. That lower border of land is directly opposite the United Nations. Great views.