Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Sixty-Three

I felt like I had been in the car for twenty-four hours straight since leaving Boston, but decided to use the trip back productively, by making phone calls.

And as tired as I was, I felt as if I’d done some real detecting today. It felt very good, even if it dealt with such a sad and terrible story.

I knew that in the morning I would find out everything I possibly could about adoptive records in the state of Massachusetts, starting my search in the western part of the state and then expanding it from there. It would probably be a waste of time, just because the adoption may not have been in Massachusetts, as close as New Ashford was to New York and New Hampshire and maybe even Vermont. And I wasn’t sure how finding out what had happened to Jennifer Price’s child might get me to where I wanted to go.

Maybe I just wanted to continue to hope that she hadn’t killed that child before killing herself.

I tried Tom Gorman first, but the call went straight to voicemail, the purgatory of the technological world. Called the paper and was told that he had taken a rare vacation week. Cape Cod, his assistant said. I asked to be directed to his voicemail there and left this message:

“A vacation without me? And so close to Boston?”

Knowing that would get him going.

I called Melanie Joan then and told her about my trip to New Ashford and then about what I had learned from the widow Hall.

“I told you she was a royal bee-atch,” Melanie Joan said.

She sounded far more engaged about that than about the child Jennifer Price had had with her first ex-husband.

“I believe I’ve mentioned to you before that when it comes to men, you sure can pick ’em,” I said.

“You’ve actually mentioned that on multiple occasions,” she said. “But might I mention to you that making mean comments about the men in my life doesn’t get us any closer to finding out who is after me?”

“Well,” I said, “you’ve got me there.”

“Listen,” she said, “I’m about to go out to dinner with Spike and Samantha, and my face isn’t nearly done.”

She made it sound like a pot roast that wasn’t ready to come out of the oven.

I was past Springfield, and about to make one more gas stop, having forgotten to fill the tank before leaving Whitesboro.

“Before you run,” I said, “I’ve got one last question about your NDA with Charles Hall.”

“My God,” she said. “Are we back to that?”

“Somebody has been killing people around you and still might be coming for you,” I said. “Try to keep that in mind.”

“Do you honestly think it might be Holly?” she said. “Because I’m about to cut her off?”

“Just one more alternative theory,” I said. “It’s why I want to know exactly when your lawyers might have informed Holly that the money wasn’t going to keep rolling in forever.”

“I don’t remember when exactly,” she said. “But it was Richard who called one day and asked if I was aware that the money was to keep being sent unless one of us died. Does it matter?”

“I asked Holly if the money kept coming after Charles was dead when I became aware of the NDA,” I said. “She told me that there might be some dispute about that.”

“Then her lawyers didn’t read it closely enough,” Melanie Joan said.

“Or perhaps they did,” I said.

Then I said, “Melanie Joan, might Jennifer Price have written a book while she was Charles’s student?”

Her answer was loud enough that I immediately had to lower the volume on CarPlay.

“If she did, it wasn’t mine!” Melanie Joan said. “Now, goodbye!”

I stopped for gas and bought myself a giant Dunkin’ coffee, and decided to put on Springsteen for the rest of the ride home.

Even as I was driving up Storrow Drive my brain was back in New Ashford, at Elissa Salzman’s house, which had once belonged to Melinda, who had found the body of Jennifer Price at a small, isolated house in the woods. The same Jennifer Price who had once been Charles Hall’s pregnant mistress, and who might have written the book that eventually became A Girl and Not a God. Which Melanie Joan denied, just not to the death if I had anything to say about it. But if her first novel had really been Jennifer Price’s, then Melanie Joan had been lying to me from the start, trying to protect an ass that Hawk thought might be starting to head south.

I thought: Who was the friend who had come for Jennifer Price’s belongings, all those years after she’d died?

Bruce was singing “Thunder Road” by now. The song made me smile, for the first time all day. So did the knowledge, as I made the turn off Storrow, that Rosie the dog was waiting for me.