“You spend a lot of time here?” I asked.
“We weren’t lovers, if that’s what you want to know,” Amy said roughly. “We were friends-Harriet and I were close at Spelman, I used to spend Christmas with the family, so even though Marc was six years older than us, I knew him through the family. When he moved to Chicago three years ago to take the job at T-Square, I introduced him to people. He was quiet, not naturally outgoing, not like Harriet. Unless he was working on a story-then he would feel comfortable calling people and talking to them. Later he developed this interest in Ballantine, which began absorbing his spare time.”
I followed her through a dining room to the kitchen and the back stairs, our feet echoing on the uncarpeted floors. Whitby had masks from one of Ballantine’s productions on the living room wall, photographs from the Swing Mikado along the stairwell. He even had a pair of Ballantine’s toe shoes under a glass bell on his dresser.
He’d also been rehabbing his house bit by bit. The kitchen walls were
scraped and painted. He’d put in a new stove and refrigerator, but stacked all his pots and dishes on a trolley instead of buying cupboards.
The refrigerator held half a cooked, skinless chicken breast, skim milk, orange juice and a carton of eggs. No beer, no wine, was in sight; only a bottle of Maker’s Mark, about a quarter empty, stood on a shelf with spices and pastas.
“His drink,” Amy said when she saw the bottle. “Bourbon and branch.” He’d begun work on a bathroom, had finished two upstairs rooms, his bedroom and the study, but the rest of the house was still either half-built, or untouched. Books were housed neatly on board-and-brick shelves. Most dealt with black history and theater, or with African art and dance. He didn’t seem to read much fiction. Next to his bed, though, he had a library copy of Armand Pelletier’s A Tale of Two Countries, the first novel Calvin Bayard had published when he’d taken over the press-Bayard Publishing’s first nonreligious novel.
Amy was right about the search. In this bare place, it took very little time. I pulled latex gloves from my bag and handed her a pair.
“We’ll quarter the room,” I said. “Everything you touch, you put back exactly as you found it.”
“You think there’s been a crime.”
“He left on foot Sunday evening. How did he get to New Solway? If he went out there to die, surely he would have driven, instead of taking a train to a remote town, followed by a five-mile hike to that pond. No one goes to that much work to kill themselves.”
“Then-the police?”
“If I can persuade one of my acquaintances there. But first let’s check this out ourselves.”
Amy was a scholar, a dogged researcher. She was willing to collect data before pushing me into further action. She was thorough, not as fast as me on her first search, but careful and tidy. We went through the drawers, shelves, looked in the books, looked behind pictures, under the neat stack of sweaters in his closet. Nothing. Nothing about Kylie, about the Federal Negro Theater, about New Solway. No datebook. No notebooks. We logged onto his laptop. The word-processing files had been wiped clean. Nothing anywhere.
Back in the kitchen, Harriet had somehow persuaded Rita Murchison and her mother to a cease-fire. Ms. Murchison was making coffee, her lips a thin angry line. Mrs. Whitby was in the living room, staring blankly at a photograph of her son in front of the old Ingleside Theater.
I had only seen Marc Whitby dead, by flashlight. In the picture, he was smiling, pointing at the theater doors, but his essential seriousness was still evident. Despite having his father’s height, he looked very like his mother, with her slender bones and bronze skin.
“I took that,” Amy said. “We went on a walking tour of Ballantine’s haunts, and of FTP sites, and he liked this one particularly.”
Mrs. Whitby clutched it to her breast, her face finally cracking into grief. “My baby, my baby,” she crooned.
Harriet and Amy pulled her to a chair and knelt on either side of her. I went back to the kitchen to confront the angry housekeeper.
“Did anything in this house look different to you when you came in this morning?”
“Don’t start in on me about the dust, I’ve had it. If it wasn’t for Mr. Whitby being dead and me knowing him all this time, I wouldn’t stay around here to be insulted.”
“I don’t care about dust or no dust,” I said. “It’s the house. I’ve been looking for his papers; they’re gone.”
“If you’re accusing me of stealing-” She smacked the coffeepot down so hard the glass carafe broke. “Now see what you’ve done.”