Page 23 of A Talent for Murder

Martha paused slightly after she’d finished this answer and the detective quickly added, “We all good here?”

“One last question,” Martha said. “What was she wearing when she was pulled out of the water?”

“Okay. Let me see. She was wearing jeans and a green cotton top. And she was wearing a white sweater, a cardigan. Nothing fancy or distinctive. Her shoes weren’t found.”

Martha decided to give up and said, “Detective Callahan, you’ve been remarkably helpful. Thanks for talking to me.”

The detective’s voice brightened a little and she said, without a touch of irony, “Hey, no problem. Being helpful is my job.”

“Well...” Martha said, and then couldn’t think what to say to finish the sentence.

“Oh, and she wore a pin,” Detective Callahan said, as though she’d just remembered that particular fact.

“Who?”

“The victim. You asked me what clothes she was wearing. I’m looking at the file right now. She wore a pin on her sweater. Like a... like a brooch.”

“What of?” Martha said, trying to keep her voice neutral.

“Ah, let me see. It’s a woman’s face. She has white hair. No, it’s some kind of hat she’s wearing.”

“A photograph?”

“No, it’s a brooch.”

“Can you do me a big favor, Detective? Can I give you my cell phone number and can you text me a picture of that pin?”

“It’ll be a picture of a picture.”

“That’s fine. I just really would like to see it.”

After they hung up, Martha stared at her phone until the text arrived. It was a picture of a brooch, not a very good picture, but good enough so that Martha knew exactly what she was looking at. It was a Jane Austen brooch, her hair in a white bonnet, the kind of brooch you might sell to an English teacher.

She sent a text to Lily, five words: I think I found something.

Chapter11

I was crossing over the Hudson River on the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge when my phone made a sound. I was so unused to receiving messages that I didn’t know at first where the singsong alert had come from, but when I looked down at my phone that was lying across the unused cupholder, I saw that I’d received a text from Martha. She’d written, I think I found something.

I almost picked up the phone to call her right then and find out what she’d discovered, but I’d gotten a late start that morning and was rushing to get to my lunch with Travis Nixon in Woodstock. Over breakfast I had told my parents that I was meeting a friend, and that I’d be gone for some of the day. It probably would have been fine, but my mother, unbeknownst to me, had also made lunch plans, meeting one of her old college friends two towns over in the town of Bethlehem. My father, for most of his adult life, has had a deep phobia about being left alone, especially overnight (pretty much unthinkable at this point), but also around any mealtime. He claimed it was because he didn’t believe drinking to be a solitary act, and any meal naturally involved drinking. He generally had his first cocktail of the day, a single malt with water, around eleven thirty, after spending the morning reading and dozing in his office. Neither my mother nor I had a drink at that time but usually one of us was there to keep him company.

This morning, when he’d figured out that we were both going to be away, I saw a startled look in his eyes, a combination of fear and sadness. The closest I can come to describing it is that it looked like grief. And I think in a way it was. I spend too much time with my father to waste time analyzing him, but I do think that when he is alone, he is consumed with visions of death, both his own and those of the people he loves, and it’s too much for him to bear.

“Mom,” I said, “why don’t you bring Dad to lunch?”

She looked horrified, so I said, “Or maybe we could see if Stanley wants to come over?”

“I’ll be okay,” my father said, not very convincingly. “I’ll make myself a ham sandwich.”

Nevertheless, I managed to get Stanley, David’s friend and the owner of the Stone’s Throw Bookstore, on the phone and he agreed to come over around eleven thirty and have a drink with David. He’s a slow talker, Stanley, and we were on the phone for about ten minutes while I convinced him he didn’t need to bring anything in particular, or to wear a collared shirt. And because of all that, I was late heading into Woodstock, and then it took me about ten minutes to find the Dove and Hare, an ivy-covered one-story brick restaurant just off Main Street.

“I thought you weren’t going to show,” Travis Nixon said. He’d been waiting for me at the front entrance. Because I’d looked at so many pictures of him on Instagram, mostly posing with Josie, I was startled by how thin he was now, a ghost of himself.

“Sorry,” I said. “Late start, but I’m here now.”

I followed him to a table in a nook just past an ornate bar decorated with twisting branches and Christmas lights.

“This was our favorite place,” he said, taking a seat across from me.

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