Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Fifty-Three

“Her name is Lisa Karlin,” Holly said. “She was in Melanie Joan’s class. As besotted by Charles as we all were, and we were in competition for him, which he enjoyed thoroughly. It was part of his mystique, that the names of the girls would change, but the fighting over him never did.”

She shook her head.

“I sometimes thought it was as exciting for him as having sex with us,” she said.

We were back at the cottage by now, just the two of us. Tom Gorman had gone back to the paper to write his column about Charles Hall, after marveling at the way I’d run off Lisa Karlin.

“Let’s skip you finding out what a great boyfriend and fun date I am and just get married,” he said when I walked him to his car.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?” he said. “Am I punching above my weight?”

“Little bit.”

Holly asked if I wanted a drink. I told her I was leaving from here for Boston. She was still talking, almost as much for her benefit as mine, about the romantic life and times of the late Dr. Charles Hall.

“I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead,” I said, “and I know he was your husband, but he sounds like a predator to me.”

“I can see how you’d think that way,” she said. “But it was never an Epstein-type situation. It was almost like it was part of taking his course.”

“Sounds quite romantic.”

“You’re being sarcastic.”

“You think?” I said.

“I’m not explaining it well,” she said.

“Unfortunately,” I said, “you’re doing just fine.”

“It was just a different time,” she said. “A different world. Even looking back, it seems quite innocent to the nineteen-year-old me.”

“Sounds like he should have been teaching a course in daddy issues,” I said.

She had poured herself vodka over ice. She drank some of it.

“So all this time later, why does Lisa Karlin show up and give you a good smack?” I said.

“She’s still accusing me of stealing one of her stories,” Holly said, “as a way of ingratiating myself with Charles.”

“Did you?”

“No!” Holly Hall said. “I was never going to be a good enough writer to catch his eye like that. But she thought she was. A writer, I mean. Only at that time he only had eyes for Melanie Joan. He dumped me for her. Maybe Lisa thought if she wrote well enough he’d dump Melanie Joan for her. But it never happened. Because she couldn’t write well enough.”

“Could Melanie Joan have stolen someone like Lisa Karlin’s work?” I said. “Is it possible that’s the secret that Charles kept for her?”

“I guess anything is possible,” she said. “All I know is that at the time he had convinced himself that Melanie Joan was going to be a star, and that he was going to be known as the man who discovered her. One time he was reading aloud from another magazine story about her in which she said she never could have made it without him. And he said, ‘People don’t know the half of it.’ ”

“But he didn’t explain.”

She shook her head.

“She talked about him as if he had some sort of power over her,” Holly said. “And who knows? Maybe he did.”

Melanie Joan had married two controlling men. Her English professor and her therapist. Maybe if Richard Gross had dumped his wife for Melanie Joan and become her third husband, he would have fit the profile, too.

Holly finished her drink. I could tell she wanted another, and knew she’d have one as soon as I was out the door, and then another after that.

“So many memories today,” she said. “Good and bad. Maybe it was Lisa confronting me the way she did that triggered them even more vividly.”

“Hard to believe she still hasn’t gotten over not making the cut after all these years,” I said.

Holly sighed.

“At least she didn’t kill herself over him,” she said.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“It’s someone I hadn’t thought about in years and years,” Holly said. “Another one who didn’t make the cut, as they say, even before Melanie Joan and Lisa and I came along. Another one who thought she was going to be one of Charlie’s literary angels.”

“Do you have a name?” I said.

She told me that as a matter of fact she did.