The Man Who Wasn't All There by David Handler (book recommendations website TXT) 📕

I couldn’t blame her. I felt like whimpering, too. But I’m a semi-mature adult male and we’re not supposed to whimper, so instead I got busy. Went back in the house. Fished my address book out of my briefcase. Sat down at Merilee’s writing table in the parlor and phoned an old friend.

SEVEN

Megan Marshack.

That’s who Donna Willis reminded me of.

I don’t blame you if the name doesn’t ring a bell. For you to remember Megan Marshack you’d have to be someone who lived in New York City on January 26, 1979 and the possessor of a voracious appetite for tabloid gossip. If you’re neither of the above then please, please allow me to jog your memory. It was Megan Marshack, a twenty-seven-year-old aide to former US Vice President and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who had the misfortune of finding herself stark naked directly underneath a similarly stark naked Rockefeller in the townhouse he’d bought her at 13 W. 54th Street when Rocky suffered a massive heart attack and died while in the saddle. The New York tabloid press was intensely eager to portray the much younger mistress of the married Rockefeller as a slinky sexpot. Unfortunately, the file photos of her standing in the background behind Rocky at press conferences were those of a big-boned, plain-faced young woman wearing thick glasses and unflattering office attire. The tabloids couldn’t bear to describe Megan as homely, because it took all of the sizzle out of the story. So the word they eventually settled on, no doubt after spending a tortuous hour at the copy desk poring over Roget’s Thesaurus, was ‘sturdy.’ It was such an odd choice of words that it made readers snicker. And it stuck.

It certainly stuck with me.

The Donna Willis who opened the door to her parents’ handsome white center chimney colonial on Sill Lane – one of the choicest historic lanes in Old Lyme – was sturdy indeed. About five feet eight, big-boned and the possessor of thighs like beer kegs. Plain-faced as well. Too much jaw, not enough forehead. Her dark brown hair was cropped in a short, unflattering style that looked as if she’d cut it herself in the bathroom mirror.

‘May I help you?’ she asked, noticing Lulu’s bandaged paws as we stood there on her front porch. ‘My goodness, what happened to your dog’s …?’ Then she noticed the bandage atop my partially shaved head. ‘You’re Stewart Hoag, aren’t you? The man who that lunatic took hostage.’

‘I am. I was hoping we could talk for a few minutes.’

Donna’s gaze drifted to the Jag in the driveway, puzzled. ‘About what?’

‘I understand from the resident trooper that you were victimized by Austin Talmadge, too. That he pulled you over one night, pawed you and said all sorts of awful things to you. I guess I just need to talk to someone else who understands what it feels like.’

‘Oh, I understand, believe me,’ she said angrily. ‘I filed a complaint against him, and I was incredibly pissed when the state police refused to follow up on it. Especially because it wasn’t the first time that psycho had accosted me. Last month, he chased me away from the moss I was studying on Mount Creepy. Threw rocks at me like an eight-year-old boy, bruised my shoulder and screamed obscenities at me until I finally left because he was making it impossible for me to do my field research. The state police did nothing that time either. I won’t speak to them again. Ever.’ She paused, softening a bit. ‘But of course I’ll speak to you. Come in, please.’

As with many of the antique houses in the area, the inside and outside were centuries apart. It was circa-revolutionary war on the outside and circa-1962 inside, as in shag carpeting, Danish-style furniture and walls filled with an eclectic array of abstract art. Or some people would call it art.

‘Lovely house,’ I said as Donna led us into a book-lined study off of the living room. She offered me a seat on the sofa, which faced windows that looked out over the Lieutenant River.

‘It’s been in my dad’s family for generations. Mom and Dad have taken off for their condo in Vero Beach. They leave in late October and stay there for precisely six months and a day so that they can declare themselves Florida residents and avoid paying the governor’s new Connecticut state income tax, thereby starving our public schools, transit system and highways of much needed revenue. It’s a perfectly legal loophole, but it makes me sick. Mind you, they think I’m a socialist. Do you think I’m a socialist?’

‘No, I think you’re ethical.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, noticing that Lulu was delicately sniffing the cuffs of her jeans. ‘Why is she doing that?’

‘I don’t know. She doesn’t always tell me everything.’

‘I’ll bet she smells my Deet. I spray it all over myself by the gallon when I go into the woods because I hate deer ticks. Lyme disease is one of the occupational hazards of being a botanist. I’ve had it twice and it’s not a lot of fun, believe me. Right now’s one of their peak seasons. They’re looking for a warm body to latch on to.’

After Lulu decided she was done sniffing at Donna’s jeans she moved away, stretched out on the floor and yawned. Evidently it wasn’t Donna’s Deet that she’d gotten a whiff of when Austin was marching us up that mountain.

‘Did you hike up there today?’ I asked her.

‘No, I just took a quick three-mile jaunt in the Champlain Farms preserve at the end of Library Lane. I needed to clear my head of this,’ she said, waving a meaty hand over the messy heap of books, notepads, and printed-out manuscript pages that were on the desk as she sat down there. ‘My thesis. I’m a grad student at Cornell. I came down here to focus since I have the whole place to myself. It didn’t exactly turn out the way I planned.