Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

I promise to write tomorrow. I’ll keep the letters coming. I haven’t heard from you in a week or so. I hope you get this.

Love, Peggy

Peggy. Peggy Howell. Just as Anna finished reading, a nurse came in to check on her. It was medicine time. She put her hand up to her chest.

“Saved the best for last,” the nurse said, like she always did. “The pink one.”

Anna didn’t respond. Usually she laughed and said something about how the blue pills were her favorite. She sat motionless, clutching the letter.

“Anna, are you all right?”

The old woman shook her head.

“Do you need the doctor?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“I need you to do something for me,” she said, pushing the letter into the nurse’s hand.

The nurse, a younger woman with a normally sunny disposition, took the letter, her eyes falling on the paper.

“You can read it,” Anna said. “But it won’t make sense to you. I need you to fax this letter over to Detective Alexander at the Tacoma Police Department. Her card’s over there on the table.”

Phillip Marciano was in his mid-seventies and he looked it. Maybe even older. His hair was combed over his pink pate in three parallel striations and his skin was white parchment. He looked slightly frail and he moved slowly. Very slowly. He and Jackie, his wife of almost fifty years, lived in a condo in Gig Harbor. It was a two-bedroom home, but the second, smaller bedroom had been converted to a library, befitting the world literature professor that he had been at the university. Or, would always be. He and Jackie had lived in Gig Harbor since his retirement, fifteen years ago.

Grace Alexander had called ahead, something she didn’t always do when working a case. She didn’t want to give a potential witness a head start in either running or in conjuring some kind of cover story. This case-her sister’s-didn’t really call for either.

At least that’s what Grace hoped.

When the detective appeared in their doorway, he introduced her to Jackie.

“This is Grace, Jackie,” he said, letting her inside. “She’s one of my students. She’s working on a novel.”

Jackie, a beautiful woman with cobalt eyes, and an orange scarf around her slender neck, smiled warmly.

“I wish Phil would finish his book,” she said with a little laugh. “Maybe you can inspire him.”

Grace nodded, going along with the lie as the old man led her from his wife to the library.

He shut the door and his smile faded.

“Look,” he said, “I understand how this is part of your family history. I recognize that you want answers, but this is my life now. We can’t always go back and fix things. I answered everything I could years ago. I truly don’t know how I can help you.”

He’d tried to shut her down, but Grace was undeterred.

“First, I’m grateful that you are seeing me now,” she said.

“What choice do I have? If I didn’t, you’ll blow this all out of proportion.”

“I’m not here to cause you any harm.”

“Just being here causes me harm.”

“May I sit?” she asked.

He nodded and motioned to a settee. Grace looked around the room. The walls were floor-to-ceiling books, many, judging by their covers, rare. This was not a library for show, but one that showcased the best novels ever written, amassed by a collector who could quote from many of them. On some of the shelves were family photos-Jackie, Phillip on vacation at the Grand Canyon and the Caymans, and other family members.

“Sorry, of course. No matter what you think of me, I still have manners.”

Grace looked up. Mrs. Marciano had entered the room with two cups of tea and a plate of biscotti.

“Darjeeling,” she said. “Just like Phil always served in his one-on-one sessions back in the day. Cookies are homemade.”

“Thanks, honey,” he said. “We’re going to get started.”

His tone was dismissive, but Jackie didn’t appear to mind. She’s probably used to it, Grace thought.

Grace took a cup from the table where Jackie had carefully placed it.

“She doesn’t know, does she?” she asked.

Phillip swallowed some tea, pondering it. “I honestly don’t know,” he said, softly. “I hope not. I have done everything I can to keep it quiet, to keep her out of it.”

“She suspected, though,” Grace said. “I read it in the interview report.”

“Yes. She made some complaints. She was fighting to keep me, not to hurt me. I was the fool here. Not her.”

He stopped talking, pondering once more.

“How was my sister… was it my sister?”

Silence.

“Professor?”

He shook his head. “Sorry. What were you saying?”

“Are you all right?”

Again, a slight pause. A beat of silence. “I have pancreatic cancer,” he said. “I don’t know how much more time I have, how much I should say.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, which she was. She’d had an uncle who’d died of the same devastating disease. He’d go fast. “Do you know what happened to my sister?”

“I think I’m too tired to talk,” he said. “Maybe we should do this another time.”

Grace set down her tea and stood, inches from the professor, who now seemed smaller, frailer than he had when she arrived. She couldn’t allow herself to feel sorry for him. If he knew anything at all, he was a bastard for keeping it to himself for so many years. He was small, cruel man.

“You owe me and my mother an explanation,” Grace said. “Were you having an affair with Tricia?”

Finally, a look in his eye-a snap of recognition came to his face.

“No, no, I wasn’t, but… she knew about it, Detective. She saw me with her. She told me that what I was doing was wrong, which I already knew.”

“When did she confront you?” she asked.

“A week before she disappeared. It didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance. I wasn’t having an affair with her. I agreed with her that it was wrong. I broke it off.”

“How can you be sure it didn’t? Professor, how can you be sure?”

The professor looked up, his eyes full of tears.

“Because I’ve lived every day since then telling myself that very thing. That it didn’t matter. That it couldn’t matter.”

“Who was the student?”

Phillip kept his eyes cast downward. “Margaret Howell.”

The name was like a bullet to Grace’s chest.

“Peggy?” she asked. “You were involved with Peggy?”

The professor shook his head and finally looked up. “I was, like I’ve admitted to you a moment ago, a fool. I don’t like the word involved. It seems too personal. Too committed. I was stupid. We both were.”

He’s still justifying it, she thought. “The reports I read indicated that the affair was only a rumor, that you were exonerated by the school.”

Phillip looked over in the direction of his wife as she moved down the hall toward the living room.

“She forgave me,” he said, overcome by emotion, but fighting to hold it together. “She told them that she’d lied. She gave me a second chance.”

That’s all that Grace wanted, too. A second chance.

“What did my sister do about it? Peggy was her best friend.”

The professor nodded. “The last time we had coffee, we talked about it. Your sister had urged Peggy to stop seeing me and she promised she would. For the most part, it was over. It really was.”

In the second-floor generic-as-can-be interview room, four people gathered to discuss Emma Rose. Only one knew something. Maybe two. Alex Morton looked worse than the proverbial deer in the headlights. The teen’s tough-guy attitude had evaporated. He trembled a little underneath the thin graphic T-shirt of some band Grace had never heard of, and his breath seemed a little short. He moved his hands from his lap to the table, as though he couldn’t seem to get comfortable. Not even a little bit. And in what was not a shocker to the detectives, in the seat next to Alex Morton was a lawyer, not his father. Nor was it surprising that the lawyer was one of the best in Tacoma.