The Purveyor, page 3
part #2 of Ivers & Wilson Series
She took the cell phone out of her pocket and dialed Helen’s number again. It rang to voicemail. Then she rose, holding onto the windowsill for support. The room spun. Her stomach heaved with a nausea that was deeper than food and bile. She edged her way around the room, passing each of ten windows, touching each window ledge for balance. On the other side of the parlor her laptop rested on a large roll top desk. It had been a gift from Cecelia, wrapped in a cream-colored box and tied with an enormous gray velvet ribbon. She had only used it for one thing, and Helen had not responded to any of her emails. Now she sat in front of the black screen, her finger hovering over the power button.
What could she possibly type? What could she beg of Helen when an army of mute nursing staff worked day and night to rid the parlor of her smells? When her mouth tasted of metal and her body ached inextricably and she could not concentrate enough to read plays she had once memorized? What could she ask for? If Helen came back, she would bar her from the sick room.
At that thought, she dropped her face in her hands and sobbed, wracked by a bone deep sadness for all the things she would not experience again. She cried for Helen’s beautiful body, the slight softness that settled around her hips and belly, the line of blond hair that bisected Helen’s stomach, her lips, her sex. And she cried for her own body, whole and strong, for the smell of good sweat, for the flush of running, for the heat of summer and for the clean ozone smell of snow. For the speed of a sled racing downhill, for her students laughter, for her lips damp on a friend’s flask because no one cared about germs or sickness. For the spring.
Which she knew, suddenly and entirely, she would not see.
aaAA
And then it was late winter, the snow melting off the rooftop, crocuses breaking through the ice, the anniversary of her mother’s death. Adair understood that she had been waiting for it the way geese remember the south. She had barely kept track of the weeks, let alone the days. But there it was. She did not have to consult the calendar. Her body knew.
She sat down at the desk and pushed the laptop aside. Slowly, she pulled out the top drawer. Her mother’s fountain pen lay inside, the ink long dried. There was also a stack of creamy stationary and a Mont Blanc ballpoint that the nurses used to make notes on her chart. She scratched the pen to life on the blotter and began:
Dearest Helen,
Why have you forsaken me? I loved you. I needed you. I woke up and you were gone, and I was afraid. They say PCPS is an autoimmune disorder. I thought that if you could only have held me somehow my body would not have betrayed me.
She wrote for a long time, her words slanting off the page. Then she crumpled the paper and threw it in the trash. She tried again.
I am glad that you did not stay to see what has happened to me.
She thought of the IV, the feeding tube, the bouts of nausea, and worse of all, the sense that she was barely present in her own mind.
In the end, I suppose it is best that you did not stay. I wanted you to come to me, but I don’t now. I know how deeply your sister’s death affected you. I know you felt responsible. Please know that you are not responsible for what I am going to do today. This is not the slamming closed of a book. The book that was my life ended with Drummond’s bullet. Everything has burnt to ash. This is but a shred of paper drifting over the flames.
Please be careful. Marshal Drummond is an evil man, and he is powerful. He will find a way out, and he will come for you again. My only regret is that I do not have the strength to go after him and to kill him. If there was anything left of the woman I once was, he would be dead. Know that I have loved you deeply and that your memory is the only good thing remaining to me.
Yours,
Adair
PS: If you are curious, my family can explain the details of my medical condition to you. I prefer that you do not know, but I will not be there to protest.
Adair addressed the envelope to Helen Ivers at Pittock College, Pittock MA. She had forgotten the zip code, so she added “Berkshire County” beneath the state. She sealed the envelope, tucked it in her pants pocket, then pulled the needle out of the IV port that the doctor had planted in her arm.
Dressed in a heavy wool overcoat, Adair trudged along the slushy paths of the Versailles garden, down to the stables. Inside, the large building was warm and smelled of hay. The stable master was gone, and a young man of about twenty lounged behind a makeshift desk, thumbing his phone. He jumped to attention when Adair entered.
“Can you ready a horse for me?” she asked.
“Yes ma’am. Right away.”
He didn’t seem to recognize her as anything more than part of the family. She was relieved. The nursing staff would have alerted Cecelia the minute she stepped outside, but the boy just smiled and asked which one.
“Do we still have Naples Peach?” It occurred to Adair the old Clydesdale might have been sold or shot. It had been several years since she rode out from the Wilson’s stables.
“Yes ma’am.”
“How is she?”
“Slow ma’am, and stubborn.”
“Fit?”
“She’ll outlive me.” He smiled.
“Saddle her up then. A western with an extra saddle pad.”
A few minutes later, the boy returned, leading the giant horse.
Adair lifted her hands to the horse’s massive head and pressed her lips to its nose. She closed her eyes holding back the tears.
“Where you going?” the boy asked.
“Nowhere. Just getting out to enjoy the air,” Adair said, but she had chosen the exact location. Wyatt’s Bluff. A flat, hilltop meadow open on one side to the valley with a forty foot drop.
“Be careful how you tie her,” the boy said. “She’s a real Houdini.”
“I know, but she’s a good girl,” Adair said, pressing her cheek to the horse’s neck.
“She always finds her way back home.” That was why Adair picked Naples Peach. The horse was wise enough not to follow her over Wyatt’s Bluff, wise enough to simply wander back to the stables, the reigns neatly tied up behind the pummel so they would not tangle in any loose branches on her solitary walk home.
“One last thing,” Adair said. “Will you post this letter for me? It needs to go out today.
Chapter Five
Helen Ivers sat at her desk in Meyerbridge Hall. It was a bleak spring day in the Berkshires. The temperature was warm enough to turn the paths on the Pittock campus to slush. The quad was still covered in piles of dirty gray snow. The oak trees were bare, and the cherry blossoms had been knocked down by the previous night’s storm. Around the edges of the academic halls, crocuses lay crushed beneath the weight of the snow that slid off the roofs.
Helen opened her calendar screen and scanned the day’s events. A conference call with the University of Massachusetts about their new transfer compact. A meeting with the president of the local community college. Lunch with the accreditation team. Two hours budgeted for negotiations with the faculty association. She sighed. Every day was different, yet it was still boring.
Helen opened the window behind her desk and took out a pack of cigarettes. She drew in a breath of smoke. It was an old habit left over from her teenage years when she had taken up smoking on the porch at night to avoid her sister Eliza.
Feebly, Helen’s mother had pleaded with her not to smoke.
“Then get her out of my room,” Helen had countered because at night Eliza would stand over Helen’s bed while she slept, clutching a Bible.
“I know. I know,” her mother said, but the two inch deadbolt her father installed in her bedroom door lasted only a week. Eliza crashed through it one night, dislocating her shoulder and sending a shard of molding across the room with such force it had cut Helen on the forehead and left a fine, white scar. So Helen had smoked every night from age fifteen to seventeen, then gave it up the day she left home. She had not smoked again until the day she knew for certain that Adair had left her.
Even now, she felt her fingers reaching out to dial Adair’s phone number. How many times had she called in the past months? A hundred? A thousand?
“That shit will kill you,” her friend and secretary, Patrick Jaycee, yelled from the front lobby. “Don’t think I can’t smell it just because you opened a window.” She heard Patrick get up and open the door to Meyerbridge Hall. He greeted the mailman as he did. They exchanged “nice days,” and then Helen heard the slap of a large stack of mail hitting Patrick’s desk.
The sounds were so familiar, she could picture the entire scene from her seat at her desk.
“This one’s addressed to Helen Ivers. Pittock College, The Berkshires,” the mailman said, undoubtedly holding it up for Patrick’s perusal.
“Oh, one of them!” Patrick said. “Let me see it.”
The mailman carried on with his pleasantries, but Patrick fell silent.
Helen finished her cigarette, crushed the embers out on the sill of the open window, and put the butt in a mason jar in her desk drawer.
She wandered into the foyer of the chapel-turned-administrative building. Sometimes the renovation still struck her as sacrilegious. At other times, she saw Patrick resting in the glow of the stained glass rose window and thought it was perfectly appropriate. A slightly balding angel, a purple shirt over his barrel chest and tucked into khaki cargo shorts, a matching purple Bluetooth in his ear. She had been raised catholic. She knew the Bible. Angels never appeared as people expected them. “What have we got today?” Helen asked wearily.
Patrick looked up. “You can’t smoke in the building. You gotta quit that shit.” He didn’t seem to have his heart in the anti-smoking campaign. He looked back at an envelope in his hands.
“Another nut case?” Helen asked.
They had both been on edge. Marshal Drummond’s arrest and sentencing to the State Hospital, under an insanity plea, had not alleviated the anxiety that hung in the office like Helen’s cigarette smoke. The students seemed impervious to it. Even some of the faculty seemed to dismiss the events like any other college scandal. But Helen was always scanning her inbox for threats, the mail for odd letters. The blinking voicemail light on her phone still filled her with apprehension. Sometimes she wondered if she actually wanted another crisis, something to relieve the monotony of waiting.
Patrick looked worried.
“What is it?”
“Helen Ivers. Pittock College. The Berkshires,” he said, holding up the letter.
Helen felt as though the blood had drained out of her body. “It’s her handwriting.” She had only known Adair Wilson for a few months, had only known her intimately for mere days before she disappeared. But she had noticed Adair’s writing on a stack of student papers and been struck by the hand, both masculine and Victorian in its flourishes. Like the handwriting on the envelope.
“I’m sure it’s not,” Patrick said, handing her the letter.
Their eyes met.
“I…” Helen could not finish the sentence. It had been almost a year since Adair had commissioned a limousine to drive Helen from the Cape back to Pittock and a helicopter to fly herself back to the Wilson Estate in New Hampshire.
“I just need to see my brothers for a few days,” Adair had said, cheerfully, casually. “Make sure Cyrus doesn’t do something dumb and heroic.”
“Like shut down Pittock College?” Helen had asked.
Adair’s shrug said maybe. “He worries about me. He always has. He just doesn’t know how to do it right, you know?” She smiled. “He’s like a big dog that bites your date because they hug you. I’ll be back in a week.”
Helen could still see Adair silhouetted against the chopper, and behind that, the flat blue infinity of the Atlantic Ocean. Adair wore black slacks, spike heels, and a short-sleeved shirt made of black calfskin leather, with a silver zipper up the front. It would have been a bizarre outfit on anyone else, but it was stunning on Adair.
Two days later, Helen had received an email from her saying she would be staying in New Hampshire a bit longer than expected. Her responses to Helen’s emails were curt. She did not return Helen’s calls. Finally, Adair wrote to say she would not be coming back to Pittock College. She hoped Helen would forward her resignation to HR. She did not even mention their relationship. After that, every email Helen sent was returned “undeliverable.” Every phone call she placed rang to an impersonal computer greeting reciting the number.
When Helen drove up to the Wilson Estate, a stern Asian butler told her Miss Wilson was traveling. He did not know when she would return. Helen had driven an hour south before she started to cry. Then her tears were a deluge. She pulled over to the side of the highway, insensitive to the semi-trucks that hurtled past her. She had been a fool. She was just a working-class girl from a sad Pittsburg family. The daughter of a house painter. Her sister’s caretaker. She had become one of those plain, bitter, dutiful women who mortgaged their life for others or for position, then ended up alone, taking Saturday crafting workshops at Jo-Ann Fabrics, talking about “me time.” She had met women like this, even in the higher echelons of college administration, and she avoided them as much as she could, as though their loneliness would rub off on her. Then, in the horror and feverish excitement that surrounded the Pittock murders, she thought that she could be Adair’s lover. She thought that was the life she had been moving towards.
But she had meant nothing to Adair. A fling. A dalliance. A one night stand. A mistake. Adair had not fallen in love with her, Adair had fallen in love with the adrenaline that coursed through the campus, the excitement whose absence left Helen as bored as she was anxious.
These realizations had broken her heart and left her whole body flushed with shame.
Now Helen stared at the envelope on her desk. She lit another cigarette. Her hands trembled. It was probably just an old woman writing to complain about the students tromping across her lawn, or a goth kid with pretentious handwriting. She smoothed the surface of the envelope. It felt like cream. She lifted it to her nose, but she could only smell the cigarette smoke on her fingertips. Then Helen did what she had always done and moved inexorably forward into duty. Open the letter. Read it. Discard it. Accept the call from UMass. Try to forget.
She slit the edge of the envelope with a letter opener, pulled out the letter, and froze.
Dearest Helen.
It was like finding her sister Eliza again. She stared at Adair’s careful, imperfect handwriting.
I am glad that you did not stay to see what has happened to me.
For a moment, a calm voice inside Helen’s mind said, this is incorrect, and I will fix it. I will call her and tell her that there has been a mistake. All crises were solvable. Even Eliza’s death had, in some way, been a solution. Even Carrie Brown’s death was just a mystery to be solved. She would just…“No,” Helen said aloud.
Please know that you are not responsible for what I am going to do today.
Then for the first time in months, Helen heard Eliza’s voice. Help me, Helen! She grabbed the letter and the envelope and ran for the door of Meyerbridge Hall. She didn’t care who saw her as long as they did not try to stop her.
The book that was my life ended with Drummond’s bullet.
She ran across the main quad, slipping on patches of ice, then ran past the library, between the science building, and past the frozen fountain in the science courtyard. She nearly fell as she raced down the steeply sloped service road that led to the playing fields. It didn’t matter. She crossed Barrow Creek, ran the length of the rugby pitch and then half ran, half clambered, up the hill that led to the asylum. She stopped only when it came into sight, three stories, four wings, all arranged in perfect symmetry, a beautiful, monstrous palace dusted with snow, rising out of its own ruin, the windows shattered, the leafless ivy pulling at its turrets.
Helen fell to the ground in the overgrown rose garden. She knelt in the snow, insensitive to the ice beneath her knees, clutching the letter to her chest as though to staunch blood from a wound.
Adair had waited for her, and now she was dead.
Her mind reeled. Had she misread Adair’s curt emails? When the messages started coming back undelivered, had she somehow forgotten the address? Mistyped it a hundred times? Had Adair called out for help? When she had phoned Adair, had she misdialed? Called a work number? An old cell phone? Had she made some terrible mistake? All the time she had spent reaching out for Adair, had Adair been reaching out for her too?
My only regret is that I do not have the strength to go after him and to kill him.
For a long time, Helen was aware of nothing but her own breathing and her grief. It was possible that a pair of joggers had run by and waved to her. There might have been a trio of students who whispered, “I think that’s the president.” She did not know. The first thing to bring her out of her own mind was the weight of Patrick’s hand on her shoulder.
“Let me see it,” he said.
Helen was still gripping the letter. She did not move. She couldn’t. She had hallucinated before. After her sister’s suicide, she had seen Eliza everywhere. Perhaps she had dreamed the letter. As long as she held it, the words might not be true. They might not be there. She might unfold it, and see “Dear College President…an invitation…the next annual conference.”
Patrick reached over and touched the paper.
“No!” Helen’s voice echoed off the walls of the asylum.
“Helen,” Patrick murmured. “What is it?”
“She’s dead.” Helen sobbed, a raw, animal cry. “It was Cyrus. He kept me from her.” She pushed the letter at Patrick, suddenly loath to touch it. “After Adair was shot last fall, I went up to the Wilson’s house. You remember. You told me to go after her. I went up to their mansion, and her brothers treated me like some sort of interloper. Her older brother, Monty, told me he didn’t want me to see her, but it was Cyrus who hated me. I could tell. He looked like a brute, like some bouncer who was going to take me out back and beat me if I didn’t do what they wanted. He must have kept us apart. You know I tried to call her. You know I did. I did everything I could.” She wasn’t pleading with Patrick. Maybe she was pleading with God. “They told me she was traveling. They made their butler tell me she was gone, and now she’s dead.”
