Free Cold and Pure and Very Dead by Joanne Dobson Page A

again. There’s this beautiful girl lying unconscious in the road. He doesn’t know what to do. There’s no traffic, so he can’t flag someone down and get help, and of course he can’t leave her there. So he picks her up and puts her in the cab of the truck with the suitcase and the typewriter and takes her home to Mama. And the rest is history. They get old Doc Daniels in—he wasn’t old then, of course—and Betsy Finch nurses the girl back to health, and she’s got nowhere to go, so she stays with the Finches. A couple years later Jimmy married her.” Wendy paused as she cut a tight right onto a narrow dirt road. Then she glanced over at me, with a wistful smile. “Isn’t that the most romantic thing you ever heard in your entire life?”
    “Right out of a storybook,” I agreed. “But who was she? Where’d she come from?”
    “She never told him, he says—not very talkative, our Milly. But the station master—this is back when Chatham was a big railroad town—the station master says she got off an express out of New York—Chatham was the end of the line then—picked up her bags and just started walking. He figured she knew someone in town, was going to their house. But it looks like she had no idea where she was going, just decided to walk—until she dropped.” Wendy pulled the LandCruiser into a secluded driveway and suddenly got professional. “Okay, Mrs. Pelletier, here’s the home we’re showing. Nice four-bedroom Cape, two and a half baths, six acres …”
    I don’t remember a thing about the house. I was so entranced by Milly Finch’s story, it was as if I’d beentransported to another time. Forty years earlier Mildred Deakin had stepped out of her life of fame and fortune and onto a north-bound train. She’d traveled to the end of the line, then, on a raw November afternoon, she’d gotten off the train and, lugging her suitcase and typewriter, she’d trudged through the darkness until she’d fallen in her tracks.

C ookie, sweetheart,”
Cookie’s mother said. “I was just thinking, for your sixteenth birthday we should do something really nice.”
    Cookie grimaced. “I don’t want one of those awful pink corsages with the roses and bubble-gum.”
    “No, of course not. We’d never do anything in such poor taste. But I was thinking, how about if you invite two or three of your nice little friends, and we go to Boston for an all-girls pajama party. We could stay at the Copley, have dinner somewhere special, and maybe take in a concert. It would be really special. Would you like that?”
    “Oh, wow. That would be terrific, Mom. Thanks!” She jumped up, threw her arms around her mother, and hugged her. Then she pulled away. “I’ll just go call Sara—”
    Mrs. Wilson took Cookie gently by the arm. “Just a minute, honey. Don’t you think it might be kinder
not
to ask Sara? After all, she’s probably never been in a nice hotel, and she might feel very uncomfortable. How about some of your other friends. There’s that nice Norton girl.…”
    Cookie stared at her mother uncomprehendingly. “Not ask Sara? What do you mean? She’s my best friend. I’d never go anywhere without Sara!”

8
    J ake Fenton was a born storyteller; I sipped my vodka martini, mesmerized—by his words and by his intense gray gaze. It was 11:52 the evening of the day after my visit to Nelson Corners. I’d wanted to share Mildred Deakin Finch’s poignant tale with Jake—he’d been so interested when he’d seen the writer’s picture in the
Times
a couple of months earlier—but I couldn’t seem to get a word in edgewise.
    We sat at the battered oak bar at Ernie’s Grill in Greenfield. I worked on my martini and listened to Jake spin tales of heroic adventure. Jake was on his third Crown Royal—double, straight up—and heading for the fourth. How he could handle that much booze without slurring so much as a single consonant of his kayaking-the-rapids-of-Tibet story mystified me. My eyes