Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Twenty-One

Melanie Joan Krause had grown up in Oneida, New York. The small town, I happened to know, was famous for Oneida silver and for being the geographic center of New York State. And for a Native American tribe still known as the Oneida Indian Tribe. Old school.

“When I was growing up in Oneida,” she once told Vanity Fair, “we thought going to the city meant Utica.”

She grew up without a father, who her mother told her died before she was born, but turned out to have gone out one night for a pack of cigarettes and never returned. She said she got her love of reading and writing from her mother, an English teacher in the town’s Seneca Street School. Melanie Joan Krause graduated from Oneida High School and ended up at little Whitesboro College, in a small town next to Utica. After her mother died, she said she managed to pay her way through school working nights at the Utica Observer-Dispatch.

It was then, or so she had always told interviewers and feature writers with quotes that were often the same, word for word, that her dream of being a novelist fully took hold. She had short stories published in a campus literary quarterly. And around her work schedule, she did manage to write her first novel, one that she said died a tragic and lonely death in the bottom drawer of her desk.

“Where it shall remain forevermore,” she’d said, again and again. “The only way I can properly describe it is that it was as bad as your worst college haircut.”

But then she wrote a second novel after college. A Girl and Not a God was published to scathing reviews from mainstream critics and became a runaway, word-of-mouth sensation. Within two weeks, it was No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller List, where it remained, taking on all comers, for the next three months. During the time she said she was writing the novel, she had married one of her former English professors from Whitesboro College, Charles Hall, divorcing him just a year later. But by the time the book became a hit, she was Melanie Joan Hall, and the world knew her name the way Cassandra Demeter, her creation, wanted the world to know hers.

The way Athena Mars, according to my unknown author, wanted the world to know hers.

There was, I noted in cross-checking these features, very little known about what Melanie Joan had done during her first years after college, other than laboring in obscurity, writing away.

When the occasional interviewer would ask about those years she would answer, “I was finding myself, as a woman and as a writer.” She loved talking about how her office had been coffee shops and diners, some of which she said she worked at as a way of supporting herself, and her dream.

Her second novel sold better than the first. The third sold better than both of them. The daughter of a single parent and then no parents, the college girl who had worked her way through a small school in central New York, was richer than even she could ever possibly have imagined she would be someday.

Now here she was. As were we all, in what was showing all signs of being not just a bad week, but a full-out dumpster fire.

I closed the laptop finally and looked down at Rosie, in her usual spot at the end of the bed, my only company in this bed for quite some time, not that I preferred to dwell on that. My eyes were getting tired. My dog was already snoring softly, tongue hanging out of her mouth.

“Our landlord’s story is quite inspiring,” I said to her. “Maybe even more inspiring than Cassandra Demeter’s, if you can believe it.”

Rosie picked up her head, immediately rousing herself, as if somehow inspiring had at least raised the possibility of a late-night snack of some sort.

When she quickly realized there wasn’t a chance of a treat, she went back to sleep. I then tried to do the same. I had no idea whether the mystery document that someone had left for me was real or not, or if it had been written before Melanie Joan penned a similar story that would change her life. I reminded myself that in the end it wasn’t my job to prosecute my client, but rather defend her. And her reputation. And keep her safe. All of the above.

But she was the one acting defensive. And probably holding things back from me, though I couldn’t prove what, at least not yet. She reminded me, more than ever, of an old Kristofferson line from a song I loved called “The Pilgrim,” about a man who was a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.

But then maybe we all were.

I lay there in the dark, listening to Rosie’s snoring, wondering about where Melanie Joan had been in those five years after college, and what her life was like when she wasn’t writing her book.

If she’d found herself, I could find her, too.

I was, after all, recent events notwithstanding, a trained detective.