Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Thirty-Eight

Before I’d left Whitesboro College Jeannie Holton had told me that she was well aware that the second Mr. Melanie Joan, as she called John Melvin, was currently a guest of the state at MCI–Concord.

Then told me that Charles Hall was in a different kind of prison. Home confinement, she said, just not for any reason having to do with the law.

According to her records, Hall was seventy-nine now, but had retired from teaching twenty years earlier, before even reaching the age of sixty. He had told the school administration that it was time for him to do some writing of his own, in the small cottage on Sauquoit Creek that he had inherited from his parents. His parents, Jeannie Holton said, had both worked until their retirement at Oneida Limited, a few miles away in Sherrill, a company famous in the area for its cutlery and tableware.

“Is his impairment physical or mental?” I said.

“Dementia,” she said. “Early onset happened a long time ago, as far as anybody knows here. I’m guessing that’s why he stopped teaching when he did.”

She had given me Hall’s address. When I arrived at the cottage I thought it might be made of gingerbread. The lawn was neatly manicured and clearly well kept. There was a white picket fence where the lawn ended, small rose gardens flanking the front door where the red-brick walk ended.

Welcome to Mr. Chips’s house.

I had called ahead and spoken to the woman who answered the phone, explaining why I was in town. She had identified herself as Holly, and said I was welcome to stop by, but would be wasting my time.

“The Charles who taught us is gone,” she said.

I told her that I was aware of his circumstances, but that I had come this far, and that perhaps her memories might be helpful even if Charles Hall’s were gone.

“I don’t see how,” she said.

“Then I won’t take up much of your time,” I said.

“You are not easily dissuaded, Ms. Randall,” she said.

“I’m thinking of putting that on my business cards,” I said.

Holly answered the door. She was nearly six feet tall, wearing jeans and a man’s white shirt. Being a sneaker nerd, I saw that she was rocking a pair of On running shoes. She had allowed her short hair to go completely gray. Somehow it didn’t age a quite pretty face and I wondered why more women her age didn’t do that. I wondered what I’d do someday when I lost the battle against gray hair. I had her at about Melanie Joan’s age. Maybe a couple years either way.

She put out her hand. I shook it. Firm, look-you-in-the-eyes handshake, right out of the handshakers’ manual.

“Ms. Randall,” she said.

“I didn’t catch your last name on the phone,” I said.

“Hall,” she said as she showed me in.

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know that you married him, too.”

“And Charles so hated clichés in writing,” she said. She grinned, almost sheepishly. “I thought I was Charles’s heart’s desire. I was at the college first, but he threw me over for her, maybe because she was a better writer than I was.” She shrugged. “But I played the long game. I never thought they’d last, and they didn’t. I was still living in Whitesboro. Lo and behold, there I was to pick up the pieces.”

“How long after you were a student?” I said.

She smiled, as if her own circumstances amused her.

“Just long enough,” she said. “And one thing hadn’t changed. He was still far too much older than I was.” She paused and then added, “Now it seems as if he was a hundred years older.”

The front room was surprisingly big and sunny, and the windows open. I looked past her, toward the open doors leading to the backyard.

“He’s on the back patio,” she said. “I never let him out of my sight for very long, because he will wander off. The creek feeds into the Mohawk River. Fortunately he’s never made it all the way down there.”

The kitchen was to our left. When we sat down on the long sofa, I could see the back of Dr. Charles Hall’s head. White hair. Seated on one of the Adirondack chairs on the patio. Staring out. I could see a writing tablet on the table next to him, a pen on top of it.

“He insists on taking the tablet out there with him every day, weather permitting,” she said.

“So he does communicate with you?”

“Hardly at all.”

“When he does, what is it about usually?”

“Hardly anything,” she said.

“Does he ever write anything?” I said.

“Not even his name,” she said. “He tried to be a writer when he was a younger man. Or so he says. It didn’t take. Those who can’t teach write, right?”

“I heard that somewhere.”

She said, “Sometimes he just looks at me when I address him by name and smiles and says, ‘Who’s Charles?’ ”

“But you stay with him,” I said.

“Ain’t love grand?” she said.

“Are you able to take care of him by yourself?” I said.

“We have two caretakers,” she said. “One is me. The other is a visiting nurse who’s here when I’m not.”

“That must be expensive,” I said.

“I do some freelance editing,” she said. “But on top of that, there’s more than enough of the other money for us to live on.”

“ ‘Other money’?”

She looked at me quizzically.

“You don’t know?” she said.

“Don’t know what?” I said.

“I would think your client would have told you.”

“I apologize for being dense,” I said. “But is Melanie Joan paying your husband alimony?”

“Not alimony,” she said. “Even if the checks do come monthly.”

“What checks?” I said.

“The ones from the nondisclosure agreement,” she said.