Jan Burke - Dear Irene

“You don’t know that!” John said vehemently. Seeing my surprise at it, he added, “Besides, I hate all the dull stuff we’ve been running lately. I hate the holidays.”

“Bah, humbug!” I said.

“Go ahead and laugh. You and your snookums will be having a great time, Kelly, while I slave away.”

He was trying to make me believe that he hadn’t forgiven me for asking for a few days off around Christmas.

“What are you doing over Christmas?” Lydia asked.

I hesitated. I wasn’t completely comfortable with the plans Frank and I had made, but in a moment of testing myself I had agreed to them.

“We’re going up to his cabin in the mountains.”

“The mountains! Where-”

“No. Different place – not where they held me. According to Frank, his place is more like a house than a cabin.”

“But it will be near there, won’t it?” she asked, then saw I didn’t like the question.

John, in the meantime, had dialed Frank’s number. He told him about the letter and after a pause said, “She’s fine. You want to talk to her?” and handed the phone to me.

Frank told me he’d be down to pick up the letter and asked if the three of us wanted to join him for lunch. John begged off but Lydia was agreeable.

FRANK HAD SPENT the morning down at the county buildings, taking care of some business at the courthouse. He was happy to get a change of pace. We had lunch at a little hamburger joint a few doors down from the paper. It’s had about five different names in about as many years, but the same people seem to own it – or cook in it, anyway. They make good old-fashioned burgers, so risking arteries that will probably look like pinholes, I ordered up a cheeseburger, fries, and a strawberry shake. Frank followed suit but Lydia behaved herself with a chicken sandwich and a salad.

“So what are your plans for the holidays?” I asked her.

“Guy is going to spend them with me and my mom. You know that Rachel is coming out to spend Christmas with Pete, right?”

I nodded. Guy St. Germain had been dating Lydia since the summer, and Frank’s partner had been seeing as much of Rachel Giocopazzi, a Phoenix homicide detective, as he could manage between their work schedules and his fear of flying.

“Well, Rachel and I got this idea to do up a real Italian Christmas dinner,” Lydia went on. “It’s a two day affair. You get everybody together on Christmas Eve and eat nothing but meatless dishes – fish is okay, but no meat. Like Fridays used to be. Then on Christmas you go for broke. I’m doing Christmas Eve, Rachel’s doing Christmas, and my mom will do all the breads and desserts – oro corona pane, dodoni, rum tortes, things like that. We’ll eat both meals at my place. We’ve invited Jack Fremont to join us.”

Thank God our food came. Lydia is a fantastic cook, and I was working up an appetite listening to her. So our friends would be together. I became aware of Frank watching me. Lydia kept describing her culinary plans until she suddenly noticed his silent study as well. She looked between us. “I wanted to invite you two, but Pete said you already had plans, Frank. Irene tells me you’re going to the mountains.”

I concentrated on eating my lunch.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s been the plan. But I’m not sure we’ll do it. We may stay down here.”

“What?” I said, putting my cheeseburger back on the plate.

“I’ve given it a lot of thought, Irene. I know you agreed to go, but are you really pleased with the idea of going to the mountains, or are you just trying to make me happy?”

“I used to love the mountains.”

“That’s what I mean. Used to. Maybe we should stay home.”

“I don’t want to wimp out, Frank. I’ve got to keep facing the things I’ve become afraid of, get back into life.”

“There’s such a thing as pushing yourself too hard.”

Lydia has been a friend of mine since grade school, and she has seen me at high and low tide, but nevertheless there are some conversations I’d rather not have in front of her. I noticed her interest in this debate. I guess Frank saw me glancing over at her, because he said, “Let’s talk about it later tonight, okay?”

I nodded. I was a little quieter at lunch that day than usual, I suppose, but I had a lot of things to think through. As I swirled the same cold french fry in the same puddle of catsup half a dozen times, I wished that I could just think them through one at a time.

I SAW THANATOS’ LATEST MISSIVE as a declaration of war, so I spent the first part of that afternoon studying my enemy. I went over all the stories about the first murder, and I read the copies of the two letters again and again. I was pretty sure I knew what he was going to do and when. I just didn’t know who he was going to do it to, or why.

Lydia stopped by my desk and interrupted my musings. “You’re pulling on your lower lip,” she said. “What’s up?”

I put my hand down quickly. Beyond being chums for years, Lydia and I were roommates in college, so she knows most of my little idiosyncrasies. I don’t see this as a big plus.

“I was thinking about how it would feel to be very hungry and within sight of a bountiful feast, and yet unable to eat any of it.”

“Are you writing a Christmas piece on the homeless?”

I didn’t register what she meant for a moment. “No, no. I’m talking about Thanatos. I think he plans to kill someone by starving them to death within the sight of food.”

She gave me a look that was one part skepticism and two parts revulsion.

“I do, Lydia. What else could the reference to Tantalus mean? Nothing else in the letters lends itself to a method of murder.”

She shuddered. “It would be such a slow way to die. Not very practical as a means of murder, is it?”

“How practical is it to take someone’s body from a college campus and toss it into a pen full of peacocks? Besides, he’s hinted that it’s going to be a slow death. He says it’s already started and will come to an end in January.”

“Good Lord.”

“I wish to hell I could figure out who Thalia represents. Grace of Good Cheer. Who could that be? I’ve been pouring over the stuff on Edna Blaylock, trying to learn something from it. It’s maddening.”

“You think there’s a reason for these killings?”

“Yeah. You and I might not think his way of choosing his victims is rational, but I’ll bet he believes it’s perfectly logical.”

“But a history professor? Why? Do you think she had a secret past or something?”

“Hard to imagine. She fooled around with some students, so she wasn’t an angel. But other than that, she’s as solid as bedrock.” I read from my notes. “She was born in L.A., lived here in Las Piernas since she was about eight or nine years old. Her mother raised her; her father died in World War II. She went to Las Piernas College, then went on for a doctorate at UCLA. She wasn’t the most spectacular contributor to American historical scholarship, but she had been published in a few minor history journals. The article she was working on for the Journal of American History would have been an important feather in her cap.”

Lydia looked toward the City Desk, where Morry, the City Editor, was beckoning. “I’ve got to get back over there,” she said. She took a couple of hurried steps toward the City Desk, then stopped and turned back to me. “Do you think he might be a student or some other man she turned down?”

“Maybe.”

I watched her walk off. I thought about the first letter and the fact that whoever had killed Edna Blaylock not only knew her schedule, but knew how to sneak a body off campus. Maybe it was a former student or a faculty member. After all, the first letter had been mailed from the campus.