The Edith Wharton Murders Page 9

  “Get a grip, Priscilla. Nobody’s going to boil your bunny or shoot you in a bathtub. If Chloe and Vivianne really are coming to the Wharton conference—and we haven’t gotten registration forms from them—then I’m the one in trouble. I’m the conference chair, remember? And the party for Chloe was at my house. It’s me they’re after.”

  Priscilla perked up a little. “You think so?”

  Stefan wasn’t interested in hearing my woes that night, so I stayed up watching TV until four a.m., crawling from one dreary cable channel to another. It was the first time I noticed a strange linguistic development. Speaker after speaker—whether on infomercials or the news—weirdly emphasized the prepositions in what they said. Like: “One of them—” At first I thought I might be tired, but I soon realized it was stationwide. It sounded so ugly and inappropriate. Or was it me? Was I becoming hopelessly cranky?

  That morning I also learned all about Diamonique, ab machines, and real live psychics. I felt like I could use all three.

  REGISTRATION FOR THE conference picked up within a few days after Priscilla got the news (or rumors) about Chloe, but unfortunately, Chloe and Vivianne were indeed SUM-bound. Chloe was being courted by many publishers, and she’d announced that she intended to reveal her choice at the end of the conference. We were all going to be upstaged—but there was nothing to do about it.

  Yet even a terminal pessimist might have felt hopeful as the conference rolled around the first weekend of April. Most of the remodeling and repairs at the Campus Center were done except for one wing near our meeting rooms, but we wouldn’t be bothered. And after another visit, I was actually pleased. The lower half of the walls were almost all redone with gorgeous polished granite tiles that were midnight blue, heavily flecked with orange. This was the kind of granite you see decorating the exteriors of office buildings, or used for floors, and these tiles were twelve by twelve inches and half an inch thick. I know because they were stacked in some unfinished hallways and I picked up one to take a better look. It was surprisingly light.

  A Campus Center workman, youngish, with a goatee, came up right next to me. “Nice stuff,” he said. “Solid granite. Indestructible. Expensive.”

  I put the tile down guiltily. “I’m a faculty member,” I blurted, and he nodded suspiciously, as if faculty members had already been caught pilfering these lovely granite tiles.

  I slunk away, mortified, but the beautiful weather immediately changed my mood, and I wondered about possibly redoing our entryway floor in those same granite tiles.

  We were having a glorious early spring, and SUM’s campus was wild with forsythia, redbuds, and crocuses of every hue. Soon, you’d notice that whole streets were lined with flowering lilac bushes, each a different shade from a white that seemed almost gray to deepest purple, as if a painter were showing off the refinement of his palate.

  Already there was on campus the air of festival and reprieve that people in warmer climates can never know. Even Stefan seemed a bit calmer about the Edith Wharton monkey on my back. “I hope things go well,” he said at breakfast the morning of the conference.

  As for the conference itself, there were enough people registered to make sure we turned a profit, no flight delays, no problems with reservations or name tags, no typos on the program. Joanne Gillian had also fallen silent for a few weeks. I’d been avoiding her husband, switching my office hours around, and all in all, if I wasn’t exactly whistling a happy tune, I sure wasn’t sunk in Buster Keaton frowns.

  And I thought my first official act as conference chair that Thursday would likely be the hardest, making the rest of the weekend seem like an Aegean cruise by comparison. I was picking up both Van Deegan Jones and Verity Gallup at the airport—at the same time. There were so few flights into Michiganapolis (despite it being the state capital), and they were usually routed through Detroit, so it wasn’t an unlikely coincidence.

  But it was hellish for me.

  Jones came down the beige walkway before Gallup did, sixtyish, portly, beautifully dressed and manicured as always. Round-faced, blue-eyed, and bald, Jones had a vaguely hieratic and sinister air about him, as if he should have been some Renaissance cardinal who could order an assassination with the flick of a jewel-heavy index finger.

  He nodded as I approached him through the drifting crowd, handing me his heavy black leather garment bag, the bag practically jerking my shoulder out of its socket. Holding on to his attaché case, Jones proceeded towards the escalator, paying no attention to anyone or anything around him.

  “We have to wait,” I said.

  He turned, one eyebrow up. “Can’t she take a cab?”

  I wondered how close together their seats had been on the plane.

  Verity Gallup strode over to me, eyes narrow. All she had was a bulging backpack slung over her heavily buckled black leather jacket, which she kept, eyeing the garment bag I held with wary amusement.

  It got very quiet around us, and Gallup smiled languorously, enjoying her role as showstopper. She wore tight jeans, heavily stitched cowboy boots, and a tight black turtleneck sweater that looked like cashmere and was working overtime to cover her Baywatch breasts. Her black leather biker’s jacket bristled with so many buckles she could have been an amulet-draped shrine in Spain.

  Her white-blond hair was cropped even shorter than usual, and with the large round-framed blue glasses, she looked like a brainy European terrorist.

  Neither one of them directly acknowledged the other, and we must have made a very odd trio heading out to the parking lot, because people stared. I kept up mindless conversation about the conference, desperate to fill the ugly silence between them.

  When I unlocked my new spaceship-like purple Taurus, Jones opened the back door and slid inside like a potentate. Verity Gallup sat in front, tucking her backpack between her feet, and I kept yammering about the conference while I stowed the garment bag in my trunk, relieved that I had washed and vacuumed the car that morning.

  As we drove off, Gallup drawled, “Frankly, I’m so tired of Edith Wharton.” She sighed, sounding like Alexander the Great lamenting that there were no more worlds to conquer. So that’s why she’d declined doing her own talk.

  Van Deegan rose to her bait. “What?”

  Verity shrugged gracefully, but didn’t turn around to him. “I think we pay far too much attention to dead writers these days. If we’re to live, our authors should be alive, too.”

  “It’s easy to get bored when you have nothing to say,” Jones spat.

  Verity laughed. “Well, boredom’s one thing you know about.”

  I wondered how I could keep violence from breaking out in the dismal fifteen-minute ride to campus, but they both shut up.

  THE TENSION DIDN’T end there. The cocktail party reception that kicked off the conference that Thursday evening was as strained as the dance in West Side Story. Members of the rival Wharton societies had instantly formed separate clusters, staring suspiciously at each other.

  Wharton Association members were uniformly dressed in sober-looking suits, while the Wharton Collective constituents were given to New York black. A number of them had chic eyebrow piercings that made me shudder because I assumed they signaled more private, discretionary holes.

  Van Deegan Jones had switched to pinstripes; Verity Gallup had the same outfit on but with an oversized blue blazer that made her look even sexier, though in a daunting, heroic sort of way. Like Delacroix’s bare-breasted woman with the French flag.

  I guess it didn’t help that we were in a fairly featureless conference room with black and blue carpeting and drapes. Great, I thought. If there’s a brawl, the bruises will mix right in.

  We were all supposedly admirers of Edith Wharton, and lots of the eighty-five or so people there were carrying paperbacks of their favorite Wharton books, or copies of critical studies and biographies. They looked a bit like priests with missals.

  A local bookstore, Ferguson’s, had set up a small table in one corner with dozens o
f books by Wharton and her critics. Serena had insisted we have Ferguson’s in charge, since it wasn’t a chain store but the last independent bookseller in the area. The people who weren’t drinking or chatting were browsing through the books. Some even made purchases from the clerk, who seemed to be having trouble with his credit card machine.

  The clerk was a former student of mine, Cal Brendon, a sweet, soft-spoken Michiganapolis boy whose father taught economics at SUM and whose mother owned one of the better jewelry stores near campus, Beau Geste. Cal had graduated last year, but wasn’t sure what he wanted to do besides be around books. And though he was a graduate, he still looked like a student, wearing what I thought of as “the” haircut right then, since half my male students had it: shaved on the sides and back, thick English schoolboy waves brushed straight back but tumbling free every time he moved. A high-maintenance haircut that he was always adjusting. He had shaved the optional goatee, however.

  “Having fun?” he asked, as I drifted over at one point.

  “Check with me when it’s over.”

  I noticed that a few academics were jealously inspecting books at the table to see if their rival’s work was there, and the really envious ones were looking at publication information on the copyright pages to see how many printings the books had gone through.

  Every now and then, I saw Jones and Gallup glare at each other as if ready to duke it out. Each time, I turned away, wishing that Stefan were there to remind me that none of this was really very serious.

  Serena Fisch kept up a sarcastic commentary for me, resplendent in a shimmering white silk pants suit that seemed very Jackie O. She was even wearing large sunglasses, and I wondered if she was trying out a new image.

  “You should have had a metal detector at the door,” she whispered at one point, while I watched people circulate warily through the room. “This crowd could get ugly.”

  I whispered back, “They are ugly.”

  Behind me, I heard some fuddy-duddies from the Wharton Association savaging The Buccaneers, a recently published unfinished Wharton novel that had been rewritten and completed by a minor Wharton scholar who wasn’t at the conference. The men were quite hostile, angrily quoting from a Book of the Month Club ad that said the book was “finished in the Wharton style.” The line struck me as waiter talk; you know: “The roast goose is finished by a reduction of port wine, goose stock, and an infusion of butter.”

  Suddenly the whole party seemed to be talking about The Buccaneers, though still with clear boundaries between the two groups.

  One reviewer had called the book “literary necrophilia,” but it had been made into a PBS movie, and the “author” had probably earned more money than anyone in the room would ever make from their writing on Wharton.

  “They’re envious,” I said quietly to Serena. “Underneath the bitching, they wish they’d thought of the dumb idea and gotten some idiotic publisher to pay for it.”

  Serena roared, “Why stop there? Why not rewrite Wharton’s finished novels? That’s the real challenge. Some of her books are such downers, like Ethan Frome. Do we really want our children reading that kind of stuff—in high school?”

  I shushed her because I couldn’t afford to seem unprofessional, but around us, a few men and women nodded appreciatively at Serena’s salvo. Even Verity Gallup and Van Deegan Jones looked amused, though they became poker-faced when they caught each other smiling.

  Where was Priscilla? She’d promised to come and help me feel less isolated and desperate, and I needed as much support as possible.

  Just then, Grace-Dawn Vaughan made her entrance, and the mood in the chattering room turned dark again. Vaughan was the only truly popular and successful writer at the conference. The “Wharton boom” in books and movies hadn’t made money for any of the army of critics working on Wharton, though they would all kill to get the kind of attention and money that Vaughan had earned for her forthcoming biography.

  In cruel contrast to her hyphenated first name, she seemed neither graceful nor liable to inspire an aubade. In fact, she was rather troll-like: short, glowering, beady-eyed. Dressed a bit like Cher in her gypsies, tramps, and thieves period, Vaughan was followed by Devon Davenport. Serena had picked them both up at the airport and when I’d asked her before the reception what they were like, she would only slyly and melodramatically quote Joseph Conrad: “‘The horror, the horror.’”

  Stefan had explained to me about Davenport: he was one of the best-known editors in publishing, both for being a star-maker and for his cruel rejection letters. Tall and thin, Davenport was as leathery and wrinkled as someone who’d spent his lifetime in the Australian outback rather than a manuscript-ridden office.

  I sailed over to Davenport. “Welcome! I’m Nick Hoffman.”

  “I know that,” he snapped, and he steered Vaughan to the bar manned by a student in the hotel management program. The Campus Center was almost entirely staffed by these generally eager but hopelessly young-looking kids. I couldn’t hear what passed between Davenport and the student bartender, but it couldn’t have been pleasant, since the kid looked stunned when Davenport snatched a wine glass from him.

  With amusement, Serena and I watched Davenport hold rude court. He leaned back against the portable bar with a sneer on his wizened old face. Various professors drew closer, apparently trying to suck up to him, but all were brutally rebuffed as if he were a crime boss who’d never do a favor for even the most obsequious supplicant. I’m sure there were some men and women in the room who’d had their book proposals mockingly returned from him in the past. Academics often mistakenly think they can “dash off” a popular book and get themselves on the best seller list—after all, how hard can it be?

  Loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, Davenport said to Grace-Dawn, “Authors! They’re all scum! Except you, sweetie.”

  I moved through the room trying to do some damage control, but even though everyone I spoke to was friendly enough, I couldn’t get much of a conversation going anywhere. Maybe it was my fault. I was nervous, wondering when Chloe and Vivianne would show up, and vainly hoping they hadn’t made it. And why couldn’t Stefan have cancelled his evening class to be there and help me?

  Turning to get a refill on my rum and coke, I froze when I saw Joanne Gillian enter the room with the air of someone in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union about to take out an axe in a saloon. Bob Gillian was by her side, even more dapper than usual in contrast, though that wasn’t hard, given Joanne’s unflattering dark blue suit. What an odd couple they were—they barely seemed connected to each other. He had that dashing Jaguar and she was a troglodyte.

  Joanne surged over to me, looking as large as life—in Oscar Wilde’s phrase—but only half as natural. Bob followed in her wake, flicking his driving gloves against his side like a riding crop.

  “I want you to know,” she announced in a fishwife’s voice, “that I protested the choice of Chloe DeVore as a guest speaker. She’s foul and degraded, and her work is poisonous. Bob couldn’t even read it.”

  Bob nodded severely, and I wanted to deck him. Chloe DeVore as the Marquis de Sade of contemporary literature? It was ludicrous!

  “I did everything possible to see that this purveyor of filth was uninvited, but I failed.” Her eyes narrowed. “You people are very powerful—sometimes. But evil cannot triumph in the end.” She stalked away, having delivered her sermon. Bob followed, without any comment.

  Whatever happened to being polite to your host, I wondered, trying to make conversation with conferees. And which people did she mean? Bibliographers? That’s right, I wanted to yell at her, the bibliographers are plotting to take over the world—and bore everyone to death!

  I kept glancing at the door as people passed in the brightly lit hall way, hoping that I’d see Priscilla. From where I stood, I could see a large backlit map of Michigan. That main hall of the Campus Center was lined with several of these, along with maps of the campus for visitors, blown-up photographs
of scenic parts of campus, and Michigan travel posters (our tourism industry brings in well over a billion dollars annually).

  Suddenly, there was a loud cry of “Bitch!” outside the door, and two women were snarling at each other, but in French now. I could tell that one voice was a native French speaker’s, the other clearly American-accented. Oh, God, I thought, it was Chloe and Vivianne, it must be, and they were creating a scene!

  Everyone in the room fell silent and we stared at the door as expectant as science-fiction movie earthlings watching a flying saucer land.

  I made out a few words in the vicious argument: “salope,” which meant whore, and “espèce de con,” which meant cunt.

  One or two people in the room gasped in surprise or disapproval, though a few chuckled.

  The shouting stopped as unexpectedly as it had erupted. And then lustrous Vivianne Fresnel walked into the reception, head high, cheeks red and a striking contrast with her beautifully tailored lime-green suit.

  She gave me a little wave and mouthed “Hello, Nicholas,” with a wry smile, as if we were old friends.

  My name isn’t Nicholas but it sounded good—it sounded right—when she said it.

  Fresnel headed to the bar and I heard her ask for champagne, which I was sure was unavailable, even that Freixenet slop.

  A moment later, Fresnel was followed by the rather dowdier Chloe DeVore, wearing the same frumpy outfit she’d done her reading in a few months earlier. Most of the Wharton scholars didn’t recognize Chloe and Vivianne, though they all stared at the two actors in the strange little hallway drama.

  But a few people seemed not just to know them, but know them well. Crane Taylor, of the Wharton Association, stared for a while, looking sweaty and white-faced, and then he darted out of the room as if he were going to be sick.

  Gustaf Carmichael, a Wharton Collective member, raised his glass to Chloe ironically, but she ignored him.

  Even stranger, Grace-Dawn Vaughan looked very upset to see Chloe and Vivianne. She gulped down whatever she was drinking and turned her back on them. Devon Davenport put his hands on her shoulders as if to calm her down, and then he made a beeline for Chloe, taking her aside and whispering to her urgently.