Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Thirty-Nine

Dr. Charles Hall’s second wife, the ex-student he married after marrying Melanie Joan Krause, said that the NDA that Hall had signed after A Girl and Not a God had become a runaway best seller had not been ridiculously lucrative. But still quite generous, and a lot more than his salary as a tenured professor at Whitesboro College. A professor who was clearly catnip to the ladies.

“Why did Melanie Joan need to buy his silence?” I said. “Silence about what?”

“He never said,” Holly Hall said.

“Not even to you?” I said.

“Charles may have had a weakness, shall we say, for his attractive female students,” she said. “But he had his own code of honor, even if it didn’t seem to apply to those female students in the moment.”

“A weakness that would get him MeToo’ed into a pillar of salt in the modern world,” I said, “even if he was teaching at the most liberal of any liberal arts college on the planet.”

I thought she might have colored slightly as she stared out again at her husband, who as far as I could tell hadn’t moved a muscle since I had arrived.

“Those of us who did succumb to his, ah, charms never complained,” she said. “And it really was a different world then, at least at good old Whitesboro College.”

I waited.

“He said that a gentleman didn’t talk,” Holly said. “And said that he had made a gentleman’s agreement. He considered his silence a small price to pay as long as the checks kept coming.”

She turned to stare out at the back patio.

She let some air out. “So there was a heart attack last year, from which he recovered,” she said. “But the doctors say that they just feel that even his own body is beginning to collapse on itself.” She offered me an extremely sad smile. “He’s shutting down at an alarming rate. But then shutting down for good would be a blessing at this point. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to say?”

“When he was able to communicate,” I said, “did he talk much about the money?”

“Only to joke about it,” she said. “He referred to it as his own academic scholarship. And said that she could certainly afford it.”

“And that was it?”

“It was,” she said. “Maybe he would have eventually opened up if he hadn’t shut down this way. Maybe there would have come a point where he thought we didn’t need the money any longer, even though we did. I simply don’t know. And will likely never find out.”

“This may sound indelicate,” I said, “but do the checks keep coming after he’s gone?”

I saw something change in her eyes, just slightly. Lights flickering.

“There may be, ah, some dispute about that eventually,” she said. “Just not yet.”

“But you truly never got any sense of what she wanted him to keep quiet about,” I said.

She shook her head.

“He told me once that he had written something about her, and that it would be up to me to decide whether to share it with the world after he was gone,” she said. “But he never told me in what form it was. Or where it was.”

She was talking to me but looking at him.

“He never used a computer,” she said. “Wouldn’t have known how to hit the power button. Never owned a laptop, or a cell phone. He was a bit of Luddite that way, my Charles. Wrote longhand. Used an old Royal typewriter. There are boxes of pages downstairs in the basement. Correspondence, old students’ papers. Like that. Letters to former female students, ones from before Melanie Joan and I came along, that actually made me blush. But I have found nothing he ever actually did put to paper on Melanie Joan Hall.”

I said, “It’s ironic, when you think about it. She’s paid him for his silence all these years. And now he’s gone almost completely silent anyway.”

She stared past him now.

“There was this one night, maybe five years ago,” she said. “Charles liked his red wine, and was working on a second bottle of cabernet, and he was talking about why he loved teaching, the magic he’d feel when he realized there was someone in the room who understood the power of telling a good story. And I thought this might be the night when he might spill. So I asked him about Melanie Joan, something I hadn’t done in a long time, what kind of writer she’d really been when he met her. He smiled then. Even now, it’s such a wonderful smile, I hope you get to see it when I take you outside. We were sitting right here on this couch. He motioned me to come so close that I thought he was about to kiss me. Then he said, ‘Mellie wasn’t even the best one.’ ”

“When I asked him to elaborate, something rather sweet happened,” she said.

“What was that?”

“He started to cry.”

I had absolutely nothing to add in the moment.

“May I just go out and say hello to him?” I said.

“Before I take you out,” she said, “let me ask you a question, Ms. Randall: Why are you here, really? You’ve been quite vague about that, from the time we spoke on the phone.”

“It’s difficult for me to explain fully,” I said, “and still honor my own agreement about confidentiality with my client.”

“Don’t give me that fucking shit,” she snapped, the force of the words, and her language, surprising me. “Do you want me to sign a nondisclosure, too, Ms. Randall?”

“I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Perhaps insult is a better word,” she said.

So I told her about the threats against Melanie Joan, and the suggestion that the work on her first novel might not be her own. And about the death of Charles Gross, which Holly said she’d read about.

“Well, you can see that Charles can’t help you with any of that now,” she said. “Nor can I.”

We went through the double doors to the patio. The pen and the empty pad were still on the table. Holly Hall set up chairs like the one in which her husband was sitting, so we could face him.

It was the first time I had seen his face.

And Dr. Charles Hall, as old as he was, as absent from the world as he was, was gorgeous, even better looking than the images of him I had seen on the Internet.

I knew I was dating myself, but with his white hair and his own black-framed glasses, he looked the way Cary Grant did when he was old. That kind of gorgeous. His vacant eyes were the color of the sky.

“Charles,” Holly said gently, “you have a visitor.”

If he heard her, he didn’t acknowledge it. So I got out of my chair and crouched in front of him, and for some reason took his hands.

“So nice to meet you, Dr. Hall,” I said, smiling at him.

He looked down at his hands, and then at me.

Then something happened to his face suddenly, and his eyes, fear or shock or both.

“You came back!” he said.

“Charles?” Holly Hall said softly.

Her husband was agitated, shouting. Not lost in his own world at all. Very much in ours.

“Just like you promised you would!”

He got up then and out of his chair and started to say something else, the fear still in his eyes, his face red with effort. But the words wouldn’t come. He had to put his hands on my shoulders to keep himself from falling.

He put his face close to mine. I was afraid he might try to kiss me.

“I’m so sorry,” Dr. Charles Hall whispered.

I was afraid he might cry now.

He collapsed instead.