Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Fifty-One

Two days later I drove back to Whitesboro, New York, not so much to pay my respects to the widow Hall, but curious to see how many of his former female students would show up for his memorial service.

Particularly women, as they say, of a certain age.

“I had this friend,” Tom Gorman said to me outside the church, “who used to get around pretty good when he was young. With the ladies, I mean.”

“Ladies?” I said. “I thought that word had finally fossilized.”

Gorman grinned.

“Anyway,” he said, “one time I pointed out to this guy what a bad boyfriend he’d always been. And you know what he said? ‘Tommy, someday they’ll all put roses on my casket.’ ”

“What kind of boyfriend are you?” I said.

“Great!” Gorman said. “I can show you, you want.”

The Whitesboro Presbyterian Church was mostly filled with women, of all ages. It wasn’t a particularly long service. The pastor, who looked as old as Charles Hall had been, spoke briefly. Holly Hall spoke lovingly of her late husband, stopping a few times to compose herself.

At one point she paused and looked out at the congregation and said, “I forget where I read this, but it describes my husband perfectly. He was a good man, and a very bad boy.”

She paused again.

“Charles loved two things above all other,” Holly said. “He loved words, and he loved women.”

She smiled.

“In no particular order,” she said. “And I must tell you, as his wife, that I did find myself wishing he had loved words a little more and women a little less.”

And got a big, knowing laugh inside Whitesboro Presbyterian.

Tom Gorman and I were standing in back. He quietly began to sing as the organ music came up at the end.

“ ‘Of all the girls I loved before...’ ” he sang.

“No respect for the dead?” I said.

He grinned.

“From everything I’ve now learned about this guy,” Gorman said, “and even as old as he was, I’m shocked he didn’t die in the saddle.”

After Holly had traveled to the cemetery with the casket, she had arranged for a gathering in the gymnasium at the college. I planned to stay for that, and then drive home, having not even booked a hotel room for the night.

I didn’t know exactly what I expected to learn here, or from whom. But it defied both logic and common sense — neither strong suits of mine — that if someone had written the original version of A Girl and Not a God, she had to have been a student of Charles Hall’s back in the day, around the time both Melanie Joan and Holly had been trying to score more than good grades.

Tom Gorman and I grabbed plastic glasses of soft seltzer water and stood against the boarded-up bleachers, watching the church crowd slowly begin to reassemble.

“What you are lucky enough to be witnessing,” he said, “is the rock-solid foundation of my journalistic career.”

“And what would that be?”

“Lean against a wall and hope something interesting develops,” he said.

Holly Hall arrived a few minutes later.

As soon as she set foot inside the gym, one of the women of a certain age slapped her.