A Pinchbeck Bride (3 page)

Chapter Four

We were supposed to read the architects’ report as soon as possible and meet the following Monday at Mingo House, having each written a list of possible responses. At this next meeting, an architect from Glidden & Associates would speak about their findings in greater detail.

On Sunday, I received a second late-night call, but this caller, unlike Rudy Schmitz, at least apologized. “Mark, it’s Genevieve, Genevieve Courson from Mingo House. Please pardon the intrusion, especially at this hour, but I need a small favor. I’d like to show you a little something from school. Related to my internship.” She hesitated. “I mean, you’re a writer.”

I tried unsuccessfully to censor my yawn. “…Okay.”

“Come by Mingo House early, before the trustees’ meeting tomorrow. Come at six-fifteen. Dorothea is off. She’s at a wedding in Edgartown, so I’m manning the fort. I’ll be there late.”

I nodded, and then realized sleepily that she couldn’t see me. “Sure. No problem.”

“Was that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?” Roberto said, in a perfect imitation of Rudy’s voice, which he had experienced only via voice-mail.

“No. Just that ditzy docent.”

I spent the next afternoon on our balcony, writing fresh material for my standup act. It was a warm, pollen-filled day, so, unusually for me, I consumed a couple of beers along with my salmon-burger and spinach and endive salad. By the time I changed into business attire, I had a subtle buzz.

I pushed open the front door to Mingo House. No lights were burning, so the rooms were shadowed, blurry. I realized then that there was a window thrown open toward the rear of the house because a humid breeze was trespassing through the rooms.

“Hello…Is anyone here?”

I saw the walnut staircase ascending to my left, and, at its base, on a plinth, the marble bust of Corinth Hollis Mingo, like something summoned during one of Clara’s séances. On a shelf in the dining room, a Bohemian glass decanter glowed red as a vial of freshly drawn blood, and, nearby, at the dining room table, sat the mannequin—now fitted with something lavish, a dress, a ball gown, made of celadon-green bunched silk. Had they gotten a grant to buy some period clothing?

The floor creaked as I walked down the hall. Then, in the dining room, I detected a scent, something differing from the odor of dusty velvet or Oriental rugs; it was a modern perfume, one I remembered from a sample card bound into an issue of
Vanity Fair
.

The perfume seemed to be emanating from the mannequin, whose plaster features had become detailed, but not lifelike—there was no life in those liquid brown eyes, in the corpse in Victorian dress, slumped in the rosewood rocker.

For an instant, I couldn’t move. I felt bolted to the spot beneath the portrait of the doomed Mingo triplets.

“Genevieve!” I said, knowing a response was out of the question.

Then I ran from Mingo House as fast as I could.

Chapter Five

She became known throughout the country, indeed, throughout the world. It was a slow news month, that May, and the media seized upon her murder the way a starving mutt seizes a piece of gristle—with greed, desperation, and tenacity.

Genevieve Courson, the college student I knew, became the “Victorian Girl” to the great public. She was the coed strangled, stripped, and then decked out in period dress—in a corset and lace mittens, in a chemise and button shoes, in a green dress with a great cabbage of a bustle, so fashionable during the 1880s. She had been pulled back in time to the decade of the Garfield assassination and Jack the Ripper. Mingo House had indeed “claimed” her. She was one with Aginesse, Alva, and Araminta.

Reporters from
USA Today
and
Paris-Match
, from the
New York Times
and the
Daily Mail
, besieged Mingo House. Camera crews filmed the “memorial” obstructing the front steps, the votive candles and poems on pink stationery, the plush puppies and daisies from Stop & Shop, the artificial roses and genuine grief scrawled across sympathy cards depicting sunsets, saints—and, most poignantly for me, swans.

We trustees couldn’t meet at Mingo House without being interviewed, so we convened at the Ritz bar and drafted a brief, curt statement to the press, saying as little as possible, of course. Long despairing that Mingo House would ever be noticed, its trustees were now paralyzed by this veritable hurricane of publicity.

The police interviewed us all, most doggedly, me. I told them everything I knew, including about Genevieve’s late night request, but the “little something from school” that she’d mentioned she wanted to give me was not, to my knowledge, found at the crime scene. “Maude,” as naked as the day she was manufactured, was left unmolested under her sheet, where Genevieve and Dorothea had placed her—while Genevieve’s street clothes had presumably been stolen. Nothing else in Mingo House was so much as touched.

What did I know about Genevieve Courson, beyond that she was a docent on a volunteer basis and a student at Shawmut College, a few blocks down Beacon Street toward Mass Ave? True, I had been with her for two days per week for almost a month. She was very talkative, one of those young people who seem to find themselves endlessly fascinating, but when I reviewed the conversations I’d had with her, I realized she’d revealed very little about her life. Every lunch hour she’d ordered the same spicy vegan burrito with extra guacamole and a Pepsi. She was a fan of German expressionist cinema (“I had boyfriend I nicknamed Nosferatu”). She ransacked thrift shops for “relics” as she called them: a quilted bed-jacket of silver lame, bracelets of bright bakelite fruit, pins encrusted with rhinestones, and her favorites, cameos—of shell, agate, and celluloid. She would purchase these things on her lunch hour and return breathlessly to show us each one. She bought these with more than a nod to retro chic; she was focused on the history, the context, of every item. “This is a little bit of the past, a bygone era. The people are gone, but their handiwork survives.”

She had expressed a desire to live in the past. “Not for long. Maybe just for a day. Long enough to see what it’s like.”

But she shied away from specifics about herself and I never pressed her. “I’m from north of Boston,” she would reply, when asked about her origins. “I’m still deciding,” she would answer, when asked to name her major. About graduate school or her goals in life she would say, “I’m sort of making it up as I go along.”

But she was a marvelous docent because she truly seemed to love Mingo House. She would run her finger along the creamy Carrara marble of a mantle and say, “Imagine, this stone came over on a steamer with a paddle wheel, across the Atlantic.” The color of the brownstone reminded her of fruitcake. “It’s like this house is a recipe handed down, perfectly preserved, to us. It’s a gift. How many people really appreciate that?”

She had an essence I found attractive. And I believe she liked me. Who had so disliked her as to kill her? Who indeed could strangle a college girl, keep the pressure on her neck while she shuddered and gasped and lost consciousness during those endless seconds? Who could plan this intricate kind of crime? Someone with a passion that had curdled into anger, a boyfriend or an ex-boyfriend? But what did the clothing and setting suggest? That the Victorian era or what it symbolized held a potent attraction—or repulsion—for the killer?

No signs of struggle were found at Mingo House. Nothing in the dining room—the raspberry-pink china, the Meissen peasants, the portrait of the three doomed children—had been shoved or shattered. The killer had been brutal with the victim but tender with the artifacts. Perhaps Genevieve had been murdered elsewhere and then transported to Mingo House.

Finding or creating the period-style dress—it was a reproduction, which the media insisted fit perfectly—suggested weeks of planning. Had Genevieve sat for fittings, with a tailor, or with a tailor and her killer, as she was measured?

Chapter Six

Roberto had become an excellent cook, as gauged by our slightly expanded waistlines. He was placing jumbo-sized shrimp he’d marinated in lime juice atop a grill on our balcony. He was also nervously watching for Miriam Hilliard, our friend and neighbor, sure she would reproach him for this violation of condominium rules. “Thou shall not barbecue,” he was laughing. “And shellfish to boot.” He came from a family of Puerto Rican Jews.

Miriam was the reason we could afford this costly address. She had inherited what was an immense unit from a cousin who’d bought the condominium as an investment—and then subdivided it, offering us the resulting small unit for a flagrantly generous price. It was a reward, literally, for our saving her daughter, Chloe, from a psychotic who’d seized her in an inheritance scheme on Cape Cod.

Chloe, now a precocious student at a Back Bay girls’ school, had smelled the mesquite charcoal and came running onto her balcony, adjoining ours. “Mother alert, Mother alert! The Mothership will return in twenty minutes.”

“The shrimp are almost done.” Roberto prodded them with a fork. “Where is she?”

“She went to buy freshwater pearls. She’s making a bracelet to donate to the Channel 2 auction.”

That was our local PBS fundraiser. “Isn’t she a little late? Hasn’t that already started?”

“Yeah, she’s having a cow. The pearls came late because some parasite was croaking all the mussels on the farm…” She paused to chew another gummy worm. “Hey, how about that weird murder? With that girl dressed up like she was dating Sherlock Holmes. Mark, didn’t that happen where you work on the board of trustees?”

I tried not to blanch but was sure Chloe had seen me; she didn’t miss much. No one but Roberto knew I’d found Genevieve Courson’s body. The police had withheld that from the media.

Roberto removed the shrimp from the grill, doused the charcoal with water meant for our impatiens, and sprayed the air with a citrus-scented freshener that did nothing to disguise his cloud of gourmet smog.

“How about we forget about it? All of us. We’ve had trouble enough without looking for more.” He gave me a look that could have grilled me too.

Chapter Seven

But, somehow, I wanted to commemorate the young woman I knew, rescue her, in my mind, from the lurid screenplay the media were fabricating. I wanted to attend any funeral or memorial service scheduled. So I stopped by Shawmut College, which occupied a series of brownstones not unlike Mingo House itself, but much altered. Television crews from Channel 7 and Fox News had parked their trucks in the neighborhood, and I recognized Marcia Haight, one of Boston’s star anchors, interviewing a group of young people outside a fraternity. My goal, luckily, was in the other direction.

The college registrar’s office retained vestiges of its origins as a private men’s club: egg-and-dart molding, mosaic lions on the floor. The counter was manned by a plump woman with the kind of baby-soft skin that doesn’t wrinkle with age.

“I’m trying to find out about the funeral plans for one of your students, a young woman I knew, Genevieve Courson.”

“Are you from the media?”

“No.”

“Show me your credentials.”

“I’m not a reporter. I volunteer at Mingo House. Genevieve…was such a great person. She had an internship there, as a docent. We spent quite a bit of time together. She was a remarkable person.”

The woman’s expression softened instantaneously. “Oh, what a shock. What a crime. So senseless.”

At first she hesitated to speak, checking the room to make sure her colleagues weren’t listening. “She was always so polite. Only the good die young.”

At this point a student interrupted the conversation. “I need some help.” She shifted her shoulders and her backpack, which bore a patch advocating the legalization of marijuana. “I’ve decided to drop ‘Aspects of Government’.”

“You must inform your professor first, miss. As a common courtesy.”

“But why?”

“It’s policy.”

The sternness returned to her face but left as the girl strode away. “Genevieve was nothing like that.”

“You knew her personally?”

She leaned over the counter. “Genevieve had trouble paying her bills. She had to drop some courses because she couldn’t afford the tuition. The poor kid. And she was smart as a whip. I really felt for her, who wouldn’t? But then, this spring, she said some money was coming through. I really thought things were looking up.”

“Money? She never mentioned that.” Yet something financed her thrift shop spending sprees.

“She was very modest about it. Never one to put on airs. Like that spoiled brat who just left: ‘My father owns a car dealership, so I’m royalty.’”

“So Genevieve had come into some money? Was it a lot?”

The woman, whose badge informed me her name was Trudie, leaned so close I could smell her clove Life Saver. “She confided in me. She said, ‘I’m fixed financially for a while.’ And now dead. God love her.”

Then the spoiled brat returned and cast off her backpack onto the counter. “I’m tired of being given the runaround,” she snapped. “I pay tuition here, and I expect some service.” I wanted to get Genevieve Courson’s home address and telephone number, but now wasn’t the time. “Genevieve lived in Howard Hall until last year. Her best friend was Peggy O’Connell,” Trudie called as I left.

The dormitory was a block farther toward Mass Ave, a hideous building of steel, glass, and sparkly beige brick that must have replaced something Victorian that burnt; it had been put up before historic preservation guidelines were in vogue. It was co-ed, but with post 9/11 security in effect, impossible for me to penetrate. Instead I stood helpless under the magnolias blossoming by the entrance. There, a red-headed young man in a Patriots T-shirt accosted me. “You have ‘reporter’ written all over you. Haven’t you exploited this story enough?”

I challenged him. “What story?”

“Gimme a break.” He might have been considered handsome, except that his features were too large for his face. He was heavily freckled, muscular, and peeved. “You’re here about Genevieve, aren’t you?”

Something made me defiant and a little daring. “I found her body.”

He flinched, lost his composure for a moment. “So what do you want?”

“Look, I’m not from the media. I work at Mingo House. I knew Genevieve, I liked her. I want to find out if there’s a funeral happening…Were you a close friend?”

He was chewing gum discreetly, using his back molars. “Peggy O’Connell was her roommate. She lives in Howard 201.”

“I’m just wondering whether there will be a service or a funeral, anything open to the public.”

“Genevieve was a very private person.” He had no problem assigning her to the past tense this soon. He rocked gently back and forth on his expensive sneakers, which were emblazoned with silver cheetahs and endorsed by a big basketball star.

I decided to lie a little. “She mentioned an old boyfriend who was giving her trouble. She’d nicknamed him Nosferatu.” I wanted to say, It wasn’t you, was it?

He stopped rocking and just stared. “She hadn’t dated anyone since the accident.”

“What accident?”

“She was injured last year, in a motorcycle crash. That idiot Zack Meecham drove them both into a tree. She was limping around for months. Hey, I have to get going.” He was jiggling one hairy, muscular leg. He had the calves of a runner. He was the sort who wore shorts the moment the calendar dared announce it was spring, even if the forsythia was still embedded in ice.

“Go in.” To my surprise, he climbed the steps to the dormitory, inserted a plastic card into a slot and held the buzzing door open for me to enter. “Go see Peggy O’Connell in Room 201.”

“I’m Mark Winslow. Thanks.”

“Fletcher Coombs.”

Room 201 was open, allowing the soft sounds of classical music into the hall. The room was hung with bolts of Balinese batik and posters of Venice, U2, and, of all things, Friedrich Nietzsche. On one wall, a series of shelves held a collection of unicorns, in resin, bisque, and pewter, some with glitter sprinkled on their horns. A heavyset girl with auburn hair was leaning on some pillows on the floor in a corner, at work on a book of sudoku. She spoke first. “Hello. I don’t give
interviews
. I don’t care to speak to any more reporters about poor Genevieve. If you have any questions, I suggest you contact the police.”

“I’m not a reporter, I promise.” I stepped inside without being invited. The room was a double but with one bed, at the far left, stripped, and one desk equally barren. “I worked with Genevieve at Mingo House. We ate lunches together and hit the thrift shops. I was actually the person…who found her.”

She stopped doing her sudoku. She indicated a squishy blob of a chair. “How awful for you. How awful for all of us.”

I sat.

“Genevieve was such a sweet person. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. Wouldn’t
have
.”

I said I wanted to know of any service that was happening, as did “her friends” at Mingo House. She seemed to be assessing my trustworthiness. “Do you have any idea who could have done such a thing? Did Genevieve have any enemies, any former boyfriends who were bothering her?”

“Did she ever.” She replaced the classical CD with Green Day. “That idiot Zack who almost killed her on the Jamaicaway. In the motorcycle crash. Her leg was torn up, it was hideous.” Perhaps that was why Genevieve favored peasant dresses and vintage clothing—the lower hemlines.

I would wait for her to confirm the name. “Zack…?”

“Zack Meecham.”

“Has he bothered her lately?”

“Not at all.” She actually smiled. “He’s dead, he was killed in the accident. Oak tree one, Zack zero. It’s horrible to say, but that was one of the best things that happened to her—Zack checking out.” She continued, how Zack had been insulting, controlling, condescending. He was a graduate student at Harvard. They had met when she taking a course at the Extension School. At first he seemed a mentor of sorts. “But then he became totally toxic. I mean he was a regular Superfund site, they should have put him on an EPA hit list. He tried to take over her life. She almost went to the police.”

“So why was she riding on his motorcycle? If she considered him a dangerous man, that seems like a dangerous thing to do.”

“They had been to a party. She needed a ride home, to the dorm. He was the only person left who was sober. She needed her sleep. She had exams the next day.”

Peggy was the robust type who plays field hockey or maybe softball, with an intelligence that made me want to earn her respect.

“How did it happen?”

“He swerved to avoid a jaywalker. It was on a bad curve. He slammed into a tree and died instantly. Her leg was a mess.”

“It’s so awful, her surviving all that—”

“And then this horrible thing.”

She set down her book of sudoku. “Why do you think she was murdered
at Mingo House
?”

“I have no idea.” But that wasn’t quite true. Mingo House had somehow figured in her death. Was it tied somehow to the “little something for school,” the project? Probably not.

“Why was she killed there and dressed that way?” She was glancing at the collection of unicorns when she added, “It’s perverse.”

Perverse, yes, exactly the word. “This Zack. He was much older?”

She stood and took a neat stack of books from her desk. “I’ve got a final coming up.” She focused on my eyes with an opthamologist’s precision. “Why are you doing this? This investigation? Were you in love with her too?”

It was a bold question, but a sound one. I’d gotten in life-threatening trouble before, and of my own volition. “There was something compelling about her…We had a kind of connection. Nothing sexual.”

“Yeah,” she said. “You’re probably gay.”

Why, for a moment, was I insulted? I didn’t respond.

“She had every straight guy panting after her.”

The books under her arm were all about philosophy, Hegel and Kant. She had the manner of a much older person, a confidence few college students could muster. “I’ll tell you something, and I feel guilty about saying this, but Genevieve was trouble. She just seemed to attract trouble. Right until the end.”

Like the Mingoes, I thought. And don’t all murder victims “attract trouble,” somehow, by definition?

Ushering me out of the room, she joined a group of students, including Fletcher Coombs, chattering in the echoing stairwell.

That evening, Roberto and I ate with Miriam and Chloe on the terrace of their condominium next door. Miriam was now a strict vegetarian but Chloe was a confirmed carnivore. “And she likes red meat only,” Miriam complained. “I mean beef is the whole reason we’re deforesting the Amazon. We’re razing the rain forest to create pastures for cattle. Nature is being destroyed for the sake of cheeseburgers. Some tradeoff.”

Chloe and Roberto were slathering their medium-rare burgers with Miriam’s homemade onion relish, which was delicious—spicy, starting a five-alarm fire in your mouth. To appease our hostess, I’d agreed to have the curried tofu with snap peas she had cooked for herself.

“What was that girl like?” Chloe asked as Miriam and Roberto frowned in tandem. They knew Chloe meant Genevieve Courson.

“We’re letting the police handle that situation, aren’t we?” When Miriam used the “royal we,” she meant business.

Chloe was wolfing down her hamburger and gulping her glass of Trader Joe’s limeade. “I don’t get it. Why would the killer dress her in Victorian clothing? It doesn’t make sense. It takes too much time. A killer would want quick, right? Just surprise, kill, then leave. Maybe she dressed
herself
.”

No one—from the police, the media, or the Mingo House staff—had suggested that. Everyone had assumed the clothing on Genevieve was some kind of fetish, some ritual or “signature.”

“It’s the end of the school year. She might have been going to a party. Or a prom.” Mugging, onion relish on her chin, Chloe regressed and again became a little girl.

Miriam began ladling tofu onto Chloe’s plate.

“Mum, it tastes like Styrofoam. It…is…so…gross.” (Chloe was right.)

“They don’t have proms in college,” Miriam said. “And no one goes to a prom wearing a bustle.”

“But I’ll bet the students had costume parties, if not in May then at Halloween. She could have designed that dress for a class.” Stupidly, I said it out loud: “I should research whether she was enrolled in any costume-design classes.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort.” Roberto was also wearing relish on his chin, but I didn’t dare mention it now. “Mark, if you play Hercule Poirot again, it will have
consequences
for us.”

“The last thing we need is another murderer in our lives.” Miriam refreshed her limeade.

Chloe emitted a gentle burp. “What if we already have one but we just don’t know it?”