Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Fifty-Four

I was about two hours into the ride back, just crossing over into Massachusetts on the turnpike, when Tom Gorman called.

“I’m starting to feel a connection here,” he said. “You must be feeling it, too.”

“Lie down,” I said. “I’m certain it will pass.”

“As we continue to get to know each other,” he said, “you’ll start to look more favorably upon my persistence.”

“We’re not going to continue to know each other,” I said.

I looked in the rearview mirror, saw myself smiling. I liked him. But that was for me to know.

“You asked me for help, remember,” he said.

“So I did,” I said. “Must have slipped my mind in all the excitement of the day.”

He had already managed to do a lot with what Holly Hall had told me about the young woman named Jennifer Price. She had enrolled at Whitesboro College a couple years before Holly had. She had taken Charles Hall’s writing seminar her second semester junior year.

She had not, Gorman informed me, come back for her senior year.

“But I’m burying the lead,” he said. “For which I apologize.”

“Accepted,” I said.

“Two years after Jennifer Price would have graduated,” Gorman said, “she was found dead in the house she’d been renting in New Ashford, Massachusetts, where she’d been working as an assistant librarian.”

“How did she die?”

“Slit her wrists in the bathtub,” he said.

He didn’t say anything right away. Neither did I.

Finally he said, “Let me tell you what else I got, not that it’s a hell of a lot.”

He said that in what little coverage of her death he could find, there was no next of kin listed, the one obit he’d read in the Springfield paper saying that both of her parents were dead. She was single, according to the obit, and had been living in a cabin in the woods.

“The only quote in the story,” Gorman said, “was from the head librarian, now deceased. She described Jennifer Price as a sweet, fragile creature of this earth who loved books as much as anybody she’d ever met.”

“Once you learned the librarian had passed away, you called the town,” I said.

“Cops in and around small towns know a lot of stuff,” he said.

“What about the library?”

“No one working there now was working there then,” he said. “It’s not like you’re dealing with the Boston Public Library. It appears to be a pretty small operation, then and now.”

“Thank you for doing this,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” he said. “You want me to keep digging?”

“Just to keep the connection between us strong,” I said.

“You said there wasn’t a connection.”

“I might have spoken in haste.”

“Should we think there might possibly be a connection in the long-ago between Jennifer Price and Melanie Joan Hall?” Gorman said.

“Why not?” I said.