Page 18 of A Talent for Murder

“Oh,” David said, his unruly eyebrows raising a fraction.

“There was a suicide on campus last summer. It was during a teacher-training conference and one of the participants leapt from Milner Dorm.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. Did you know that Arnold Milner, who donated the money for that atrocity, was a pedophile?”

“I did not know that.”

“He was.”

“You think that has anything to do with that conference participant jumping out of his building?”

I’d said it as a joke, but my father thought for a moment and said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Lil.”

“Yeah, I suppose. Look, all I’m trying to find out is if it was a clear suicide or if there was something suspicious going on.”

“Well, Libby will probably be your woman for the job. I think her last name is Frost.”

“I don’t suppose you have contact information for her?” I said, not really sure why I was asking. My father didn’t own a phone and probably didn’t know what “contact information” even meant.

But he thought for a moment, then said, “She’s down at Stone’s Throw probably every morning. They have a coffee shop there now, you know.”

Stone’s Throw was the name of our town’s independent bookstore, run by a longtime Shepaug resident named Stanley Perrini. It was one of the few places where my father agreed to go, partly because he liked Stanley, and partly because there was a whole shelf devoted to David Kintner books in the store.

“When were you there that you saw Libby?”

“I see her whenever I’m there, but I talked to her a couple of weeks ago. It was some morning you weren’t around and your mother dropped me off there on her way to rehab her hip.”

Our town center was about two miles from Monk’s House by road, and about a mile and a half if you walked through Brigham Woods and then cut across the old Keene Farmstead. I put on my boots and set out through the woods, reaching the bookstore about five minutes after the morning rain had really turned torrential. I stood just inside the entranceway and dripped for a few moments. The coffee shop area was to the right, a counter offering hot drinks and baked goods, plus about five small tables, three of which were occupied. I barely remembered what Libby Frost looked like, although she’d been one of my father’s coworkers during the years he was at the university, but from where I stood I could hear a woman’s slightly cracked voice and knew immediately that it was Libby. She was diminutive, her hair back in a gray ponytail, her mouth circled with the tiny wrinkles that longtime smokers had—but the voice was unforgettable.

I went to the free table closest to her and draped my wet coat over the chair, then got myself a hot tea from the teenager behind the counter and took my seat. Libby was still talking. She was seated at her table, a picked-at croissant in front of her, but the woman she was talking with was standing up, in her coat, a Stone’s Throw plastic bag in her hand. I recognized the woman’s posture as belonging to someone looking for an opportunity to interject a few words to indicate she had to get going. Sure enough, after Libby finished a story about her neighbor turning her garage into some sort of Airbnb rental, the woman in the coat said, “Lib, I’ve got to run. Scruffy’s at the vet.”

“Go, go,” Libby said.

I pried the plastic lid off my tea and blew on it. I’d been thinking about how to introduce myself to Libby Frost when she suddenly said, “I know you. You’re David Kintner’s daughter.”

I turned. “Guilty, I suppose.”

“You won’t remember me,” she said, brushing croissant crumbs from the front of her purple sweater, “but David and I taught in the same department back in the caveman days.”

“You’re Libby Frost,” I said, and her eyes lit up.

“Oh, smart girl. I am. How’s your father? You know, I saw him here not too long ago, and he told me that he was late for his hormone replacement session...” She looked at me questioningly.

“He was kidding you.”

“Yes, I figured that. He was always a naughty man, your father.”

I asked her if I could join her at her table, wanting to get closer to her just so she’d speak a little more quietly. She was thrilled for the company, she said, and spent twenty minutes recalling some of the stuff my father got up to during the years he was an adjunct professor. Most of what she told me was harmless—the department meetings he slept through, the time he drunkenly gave a reading from a new book all while impersonating the then–department head’s voice perfectly. “No one would get away today with what he got away with, I’ll tell you,” Libby said, with a faraway look in her eye, and I wondered if she’d slept with my father. It was hard to imagine, looking at her now, but my father, and my mother, as well, had made quite a sport of infidelity back when they were married.

“You know, I was thinking of you the other day,” I said.

“Oh yeah?”

“I met this guy—he’s the husband of one of my dearest friends—and he said he’d spent a week at Shepaug last summer for some teacher-training conference. Didn’t you used to arrange the summer programs?”

“No, you’re thinking of Diane Hodder, probably. Back when I was at Shepaug my husband and I rented the same house in Tuscany each summer. They couldn’t have paid me to stay here in Connecticut during the summer months.”

“Right, Diane Hodder. Haven’t thought of her in years.”

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