Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Sixty

To get to New Ashford you got off 90 not long after you passed Pittsfield. Waze said the trip would take two hours and forty-two minutes. I made it in two and a half. That would show them.

In the last census of New Ashford I could find, there were fewer than three hundred people living in what was described as the third-smallest town in Berkshire County. I wondered what the population was in the two that were smaller.

There was a town government, but no schools, children in New Ashford being bused to two adjacent towns. You constantly heard the expression about postcard New England towns. This one really was about the size of one. I was pleasantly surprised that there was a library. But there it was, a small, two-story building, down the street from the Purple Pub, not far from the Liberty Market and the cannabis store. With three hundred people living here, I assumed there was enough cannabis in there to get the whole town high.

I had booked a room at the New Ashford Motor Inn for the night, the place more like a small country inn, stopping there just long enough to throw down my bag before setting out to discover what I could discover about Jennifer Price, now dead since the 1980s. I figured that if I went door-to-door asking about her, I could cover the whole town in two days. Three, tops.

I started at the library. I loved libraries, had since I was a little girl. I hadn’t been very excited the first time my father had taken me to a ballgame at Fenway Park. But I could still remember the sense of wonder, the kind he’d wanted me to get from baseball, the first time he’d walked me into the Boston Public Library on Boylston Street.

And I’d spent a lot of my growing-up years in the stacks of the Newton Free Library. Phil Randall had always called all libraries capitals for dreamers.

Now I felt the same quiet magic at this place in New Ashford. The head librarian’s desk was right in front of me as I walked in. Her nameplate read Margaret Thompson.

I introduced myself and handed her one of my cards. She smiled.

“I’ll trade you a library card for one of those business cards,” she said.

“Only if you promise it will make me smarter,” I said.

“They always do,” Margaret Thompson said.

“I feel as if I may be tilting at windmills here,” I said.

She smiled again. Not a customer smile.

“Well, then,” she said, “you’ve come to the right place.”

I asked if she had ever heard the name Jennifer Price. She said she had not. I told her the sad story of Jennifer Price’s life and death, and when she would have worked at the library.

“That would have been when Katherine Baum was head librarian, not long after they decided to open this place,” Margaret Thompson said. “She was a bit of a local legend, still working here when she passed at the age of eighty-five.”

“I don’t suppose you have any sort of digital record on employees in the time she worked here,” I said.

Margaret Thompson laughed.

“Oh, wait,” she said. “You were serious.”

“The only reason I know she worked here at all,” I said, “is because Katherine Baum was quoted in the obit about her we dug up in the Springfield paper.”

“I wish I could help you more,” Margaret Thompson said. “But I didn’t come to work here until twenty years after you say Miss Price died.”

I had printed a copy of the obit and took it out of my bag and put it on her desk. Margaret Thompson read it.

“Mrs. Baum is gone and Jennifer is gone,” she said. “And I mean long gone.”

“Maybe Town Hall would have further information about her,” she said. “Tax records or something like that. I’m fumbling here.” I grinned. “One of my many specialties.”

“Did I pass the Town Hall on my way here from the motor lodge?” I said.

“It’s on Seven,” she said, “past us. Not more than a five-minute drive. But then nothing much in New Ashford is more than five minutes away.”

“Is there a local police department where somebody might pull up the file on Jennifer Price’s death?” I asked, having not seen one mentioned in my limited research on New Ashford.

“Cheshire,” she said.

I thanked her for her time, and for doing God’s work as a librarian, and went out to the car and called the paper in Springfield, known as The Republican. I asked if there was any chance that Dan Fimrite, who’d gotten the byline on Jennifer Price’s obit, still worked there. The woman who answered the phone said that Mr. Fimrite had died in 2009.

I drove over to Town Hall, a building even smaller than the library, and went to the office of the clerk, gave him Jennifer Price’s name and the year she had died. He managed to find the death certificate in his files, which felt like some kind of Christmas miracle to me.

The line for “Next of Kin” was blank.

It was as if there was as little record of Jennifer Price’s death as there was of her life. I’d spoken to Tom Gorman on my way to New Ashford and he said he’d actually tracked down a few of her classmates at Whitesboro College and said that not one of them had stayed in touch with Jennifer Price after she’d left school.

I sat in the car and called the Cheshire Police Department and told the officer who answered the phone that it was a nonemergency, that I was a licensed private investigator from Boston working on a case, even that I was the daughter of a BPD detective.

“That last piece of information just made you a new friend,” Officer Davenport said.

I told him about Jennifer Price and how her name had come up in a case I was working and how she had died. He said that because of the year, the record of her death would have been filed, not digitalized.

“And the world was better because of it,” I said.

“You can say that again, ma’am,” he said.

I told him that I’d wait for his call and if he ever ma’am-ed me again, we were going to have a problem.

He laughed.

“What are you really looking for?” Davenport said.

“Who found the body and called it in,” I said.

“You in a rush?” he said.

“I’ve got nothing going except a big night out in New Ashford,” I said.

“No such thing,” Davenport said.

It took him only fifteen minutes to find the report. He said the woman who found her was Melinda Salzman, and gave me her address.

“It’s not a big town,” I said.

“Picked up on that myself,” he said.

“Would you know if Melinda Salzman is alive or dead?” I said.

“She passed a while ago,” he said. “Couldn’t tell you what year, exactly.”

I was about to thank him for his time when he said, “But you’re in luck. Her daughter still lives here.”

“You know her daughter?”

“My cousin used to date her,” Davenport said. “Her dad, Melinda’s husband, was the only doctor in New Ashford. Her daughter ended up marrying the guy who’s now the best doctor around here.”

Small town, I thought, getting smaller all the time.

“Elissa, that’s her name, and she and her husband even live in the house she grew up in,” Davenport said. “You want her number?”

“The way my day has gone?” I said. “You have no idea how much.”

He gave it to me. I put him on speaker and punched it into my phone.

I said, “Turns out my father was right all along.”

“How so?” Davenport said.

“The policeman is my friend.”

He barked out another laugh.

“Serve and protect,” he said. “Even in the boonies.”

It was Elissa Salzman Stein who told me about the child.