Джеффри Дивер: The Sequel

He removed the letter from his attaché case and read the passage aloud. He looked up. “So, in the spring of ’67 your father was in some idyllic countryside and apparently spent time in or near a church while he was writing the sequel. If we can find out where, we might be able to pick up leads as to who has the manuscript or where it is.”

“Pop wasn’t religious,” Anna pointed out. “It was one of the things that made the book so good. Spirit detached from formal religion. He tapped into the zeitgeist of the period, the conflicted 1950s.”

Stoddard and Beth looked at her blankly.

Lowell harbored a suspicion that Stoddard had never actually read Cedar Hills Road . He was sure Beth had not. Anna, on the other hand, had produced some critical pieces about her father’s work — good ones — before her energy for writing dissipated.

“We never went to church growing up.” Anna added.

“No. Never,” Stoddard agreed.

“Wouldn’t have been a bad idea,” Beth said cryptically and with an edge.

“What about the countryside reference? Was there a vacation home?”

“Not one that we ever went to. We didn’t see dad much for the last two years of his life,” Stoddard said darkly. “I think he was embarrassed about having a family.”

Anna countered, “No, he was going through hell. Writer’s block, the pressure to do a sequel, the cancer. He didn’t want us to see him miserable.”

Stoddard frowned. “Bullshit. It was that he was having affairs and didn’t want his girlfriends to know about us.”

“All anybody had to do was read the book jacket to know he had children,” Anna snapped.

The meeting was going even worse than Lowell had anticipated. “Do you have any letters, records from back then?”

Anna looked at her brother and grimaced. “He had quite a lot of our family’s things.”

Stoddard said sourly, “How was I supposed to know anybody’d come calling about a sequel?”

“You threw it all out?” Lowell asked in a whisper.

“Bad memories,” the man muttered. Then his face softened and he looked at the lawyer. “As long as you’re here, Frederick, tell me: When’s the next royalty check coming in?”

The following day, Lowell traveled to Southampton on Long Island to visit with Preston Malone.

Malone was, in a way, similar to Edward Goodwin. Although he’d written — and continued to write — essays and articles on literature, he’d penned only one full-length book in his life: Edward Goodwin: Cedar Hills Road and the Essential American Experience.

The exhaustive tome had won a Pulitzer and had at one point been required reading in many a college lit course. In recent years, though, Malone had become a bit of a caricature, growing more and more obsessed with Goodwin and Cedar Hills . While the biography was piercingly objective, later articles were less so. He took up the standard of championing the author to an audience that had moved on. Kinder critics called him Quixotic. Less kind — usually bloggers — called him names like “Goodwin’s pimp.”

The taxi dropped Lowell off at Malone’s modern gray beach house, which was nowhere near a beach. The bearded, balding writer, weighing close to three hundred pounds, greeted him the way a scientist happily identifies a new bug; Lowell was a minor genus but nonetheless part of the Goodwin mythos too.

“Come in, come in, Frederick! Can I call you Frederick? I’m Preston.”

They stepped into the large living room. And Lowell braked to a stop. He’d expected, given the writer’s interest in Goodwin, that he’d find memorabilia. He hadn’t expected a shrine.

There was no other way to describe it. Goodwin had been well photographed during his life and Malone must have had at least one copy of every snap ever taken. On one wall were bookshelves devoted to all of the American editions of the book, on another, the foreign. Movie posters hung from other walls: English language as well as Italian, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese. Advertisements for the book and the films sat on easels. Framed autographs and glass cases of pens and accessories like shoelaces and garments bedeviled tables and shelves.

“Frederick! Look at this, look! Oh, this is quite something. I know you’re going to get a chill down your spine.” Malone snatched up a small box, inside of which something rattled. Lowell reluctantly walked closer to the madly grinning writer as he reverently opened it.

My God, were they Goodwin’s baby teeth? Fingernails?

No, thank goodness. Cuff links.

“He wore these in the famous picture. You know the one I mean, of course.” He pointed to the Richard Avedon portrait.

“Impressive.”

“Now, now...” He snapped the lid closed and sat, gesturing Lowell to do the same. In a whisper: “You’ve found some reference to it?”

The Sequel to the Book.

He explained about the letter and showed the biographer a copy.

Malone nodded. “Connecticut. Sure.” As if he were an ace student rattling off answers to a professor’s question in class, he ran unhesitatingly through a half-dozen names of women who could have been the client described in the letter. Some of these Goodwin was with before his wife died, he explained, some after. Malone twisted his head sideways and looked pensive. “Katrina Tomlison, I’ll bet. She was beautiful. Articulate. A little crazy, true. Made him recite passages of the book so she could have an orgasm.”

Lowell steered matters back to his mission. “The clues are idyllic countryside and a house of God. Any ideas?”

“God, God...” This perplexed Malone. “Edward had issues. His brain made him an Emersonian Transcendentalist; his heart couldn’t quite slough off the Catholicism of his youth.”

Lowell said, “Even if not religious, though, is it possible that he might have found comfort in a country church or graveyard?”

“That’s more likely.”

“And it would be in the countryside. Any thoughts about that?”

“Edward was more comfortable in an urban setting,” Malone said in a prim tone, as if Goodwin were alive and present and expected the biographer to defend his reputation as a man who hated hiking and camping. “I don’t know any reference in his correspondence to spending time in the country.”

“The letter was dated in March of ’67,” Lowell said. “Where was Goodwin then?”

Without needing to consult any of the many file cabinets in the living room and den, Malone said sourly, “The last two years of his life were my biggest challenge — and those were the ones that I was most interested in. He’d grown very reclusive. Mysterious. Officially his address was Chicago. He was a widower then and the children were living in the city with their grandparents. Edward was away for much of the time, though. A lot of it Pittsburgh.”

Not exactly idyllic countryside.

Malone continued, “But I’m pretty sure he traveled elsewhere. I tried to find where but... I couldn’t.” His eyes were downcast, as if apologizing to his team for losing a game by striking out.

Lowell wanted to clap him on the back and tell him, “It’s all right.” He looked at the dozens of file cabinets. “Any documentation from March of that year?”

Malone now scooted off and returned with a slim file, neatly labeled 3/67. “There’s this.” He lifted out a single piece of yellowing paper.

Lowell’s heart began thudding. What would it show? An address? A safe-deposit box number?

It was a receipt for coffee and a cheese sandwich.

Lowell sat back. “That’s it?”

“Afraid so.”

The top of the receipt bore only the words, in scripty type, “The Hudson House.”

No city, no state, no phone number.