Page 14 of A Talent for Murder

I weighed what I was going to say and finally decided to say the truth. “It’s a lot of evidence, Martha, that many unsolved deaths. The bloodstain, I think, can be explained away, but all the similar assaults in cities he was in... I don’t know, it seems like a lot of smoke.”

“For there not to be a fire,” Martha said.

“Right,” I said. “Although, as you pointed out, these are major cities he travels to. It would be more suspicious if a weekend passed without there being some kind of unsolved killing.”

“Shepaug’s not a big city.”

“It’s not,” I said. “Look, all I’m saying is stranger things have probably happened. The world is full of coincidences.”

The check came, and Martha insisted on paying it. I let her. After putting down cash, she said, “Oh no. We were supposed to have dinner, weren’t we? We can stay.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m not even hungry yet, and we talked about what you wanted to talk about. And now we have a plan.”

Outside of Tipsy McStaggers I walked Martha back to her car. The sun was low in the sky, but it was still bright enough outside that my eyes were adjusting from the dim interior of the faux–Irish pub we’d just exited. At the car she said, “We didn’t even talk about the other suspicious deaths I found.”

“You have them written down in your notebook?”

“I do. I could send you a copy.”

“Why don’t I take a picture?”

That’s what I did. She flipped through the notes she’d taken, not just the names and dates and places of potential victims, but also a list of every business trip Alan Peralta had gone on since they’d been together. I took pictures with my smartphone, the recent acquisition spurred on by my mother. Then we hugged, and I walked back to my own car, humming to myself. It took me a moment to realize what the song was, and then it came to me. “Martha My Dear” by the Beatles. The brain is a strange machine.

That night I sat with my father in the living room at Monk’s House while he played records and sipped whiskey and water. I had just come down from my room, where I’d spent most of the evening looking into the death of Josie Nixon on the Shepaug campus. I’d also done some research into the other deaths that Martha had found. All young women, all unsolved crimes. When my eyes began to ache, I came downstairs to have a drink with my father.

“Oh, I have something for you,” he said, after I sat down across from him. He got up and wandered off, returning a few minutes later with a full drink and a used copy of The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton.

“For you,” he said.

“Yes, I know. I ordered it.”

“And I opened it.”

“Do you often open mail that’s addressed to other people?”

“Well, it was book-shaped, and I’ll admit I didn’t look at the name on the label. My old friend Ian Peck has been threatening to send me his new book and I thought it might be that.”

I picked the book up, smelling it. “I’ll forgive you your trespass,” I said.

“Thank you. Are you an Anne Sexton fan?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “It was a recommendation.”

“Henry Kimball?”

“Good guess,” I said. My father was right. It had been a year since I’d last seen Henry, a year since he’d asked for my opinion on a case he’d been working on, convinced that he’d been set up as a witness to a crime. He had been, and it nearly got him killed. The last time I’d seen him was when he’d come down to visit after being released from the hospital, lucky to be alive, and slightly brain-damaged. In the year since I’d seen him, we’d been writing letters back and forth, the ancient kind done with pen and paper. It was partly an affectation but mostly a necessity. Henry and I had a history together. Shortly after I’d first met him, I’d stabbed him in the stomach, worried that he was on the verge of discovering some of my secrets. That was back when he’d been a police officer and he’d suspected me of murder. Since then, he’d become a private investigator. No one besides my parents knew that we were friends.

“He’s the Sexton fan, then?”

“In his last letter he said how much he’d been enjoying rereading her poems, and so I ordered this book.”

I watched my father’s face, the varying responses he might make flickering across it, until he landed on, “Back in my day, we just fucked the people we were in love with.”

That night, I lay in bed and thought about Martha and her love curse, and a little bit about Anne Sexton, since her book of poems was open on my chest.

Before coming up to bed I’d read a random poem from the book aloud to my father. The first lines of the poem were, “It is half winter, half spring, and Barbara and I are standing confronting the ocean.”

When I finished the poem, my father said, “It’s kind of half winter, half spring right now.”

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