Fifteen
As he mounted the steps to the library, Conrad’s knee buckled under him. He swore, then gathered up the books that had spilled from beneath his arm.
‘Good morning, Mrs Emerson,’ he said, approaching the front desk.
She looked up from the typewriter, peering at him over the top of her spectacles. ‘Mr Labarde. Returning, are we?’
‘Yes.’
‘Overdue, are they?’
‘How did you guess?’
She pulled the sheet of paper from the typewriter and handed it to him. He scanned it.
‘I was going for a note of mild outrage,’ she said.
‘Mild, huh?’
She smiled.
‘I’ve a confession to make,’ said Conrad.
‘Unless you want the whole town to know, I’m probably not the person to share it with.’
Conrad handed her one of the books. ‘I think I just broke the spine.’
‘No,’ she said, examining it. ‘You definitely broke the spine.’
‘I’ll replace it, of course.’
‘What, and deny Mrs Cartwright the challenge? She’s a whiz with the glue, you know.’
Conrad settled the fine, then asked where the back copies of the East Hampton Star were stored. Because the dates he was after were more than six months old, he was sent through to the Reading Room, Mrs Emerson appearing a few minutes later with two bound volumes on a trolley.
Conrad hefted them on to the table. He could see her itching to ask what he wanted them for, and he’d prepared an answer for her, but it wasn’t required. She fought her curiosity, returning to the front desk.
Conrad took a seat and stared at the spines: April-June 1946, July-September 1946. He found the initial newspaper report without any difficulty. News of Lizzie Jencks’ tragic death had, of course, made the front page of the Star. Two issues later, the story still warranted the front page, though it had been relegated to the bottom right-hand corner, rolling over into a handful of column inches on page three.
By now, Chief Milligan of the Town Police Department was reluctantly conceding that the investigation had produced no concrete leads in the past couple of weeks, and possibly never would. The incident had occurred on a Saturday night when the roads of the South Fork were notoriously infested with drivers who had flooded in for the weekend from up-island or New York City. Questions remained, however. The Medical Examiner had placed the time of death at somewhere between midnight and two o’clock in the morning, and no one seemed to know what a young girl was doing walking a country road at that hour of the night.
Come August, coverage of the story had all but petered out. The last mention Conrad could find of it was in an editorial that leveled its sights at the ‘people from away’ crowding this quiet corner of Suffolk County. The piece had the hollow report of a blind, scatter-gun blast into the night, the intruder long gone.
Conrad worked his way back through the newspapers, sifting for signs. The first issue with news of the incident had come out on the Thursday, young Lizzie already five days dead. In the same edition, there was a brief report of a wedding that had taken place in Sag Harbor on the Saturday in question. The festivities, complete with impressive fireworks display, had rolled on into the early hours of Sunday morning. The names of the happy couple, not known to Conrad, suggested summer people, the kind of society event Lillian might have attended.
The geography was wrong, though. There was no way you could end up on Town Lane when driving from Sag Harbor to East Hampton, not unless you had completely lost your way. Still, it was the best he could come up with, and certainly better than nothing.
He almost left it at that. Thankfully, he cast a quick eye over the Thursday issue from the week predating the accident. Buried on page seven was a small announcement, no more than a few lines, announcing the first dinner dance of the season at the Devon Yacht Club on Gardiner’s Bay, set to take place that Saturday night.
The Devon Yacht Club, one of Lillian’s favored haunts.
He experienced no surge of relief, no sense of elation. Rather, he felt a chill descend upon him, the stillness and clarity a hunter experiences when first sighting his quarry, his world narrowing to a point, the periphery blurring, all else forgotten.
He stared at the page for a good while, not focusing on the print, but deep in thought, weighing his various options. They shared one piece of common ground: whichever way he chose to proceed, it was time to start drawing Deputy Hollis into the hunt.