Quincy hesitated. Then: “Are you a long-lost relative?”
“Of Mr. Wainwright’s? Oh, no.”
“A long-lost friend?”
“No. Not that either.”
“Well, then, I guess I don’t have to be delicate about this. Dr. Mitowski, I’m afraid that Palmer Wainwright is dead.”
“Dead!” she said, astounded.
“Well, surely you realized there was that possibility. He was never a well man, downright sickly. And you’ve obviously been out of touch with him for a long time.”
“Not all that long,” she said.
“Must be at least thirty-five years,” Quincy said. “He died back in 1946.”
The air at Grace’s back seemed suddenly colder than it had been an instant ago, as if a dead man had expelled his icy breath against the nape of her neck.
“Thirty-one years,” she said numbly. “You must be wrong.”
“Not a chance. I was just a green kid back then, a copyboy. Palmer Wainwright was one of my heroes. I took it pretty hard when he went.”
“Are we talking about the same man?” Grace asked. “He was quite thin, with sharp features, pale brown eyes, and a rather sallow complexion. His voice was several notes deeper than you’d expect from just looking at him.”
“That was Palmer, all right.”
“About fifty-five?”
“He was thirty-six when he died, but he did look twenty years older,” Quincy said. “It was that string of illnesses, one thing right after another, with cancer at the end. It just wore him down, aged him fast. He was a fighter, but he just couldn’t hold on any longer.”
Thirty-one years in the grave? she thought. But I saw him yesterday. We had a strange conversation in the rose garden. What do you say to that, Mr. Quincy?
“Dr. Mitowski? Are you still there?”
“Yes. Sorry. Listen, Mr. Quincy, I hate to take your valuable time, but this is really important. I believe the Bektermann case had a lot to do with the personal business I wanted to discuss with Mr. Wainwright. But I don’t really know anything about those murders. Would you mind telling me what it was all about?”
“Family tragedy,” Quincy said. “The Bektermanns’ daughter went berserk the day before her sixteenth birthday. Her mind just snapped. Apparently, she got it in her head that her mother intended to kill her before she turned sixteen, which was not true, of course. But she thought it was true, and she went after her mother with an ax. Her father and a visiting cousin got in the way, and she killed them. Her mother actually managed to wrench the ax out of the girl’s hands. But that didn’t stop the kid. She just picked up a fireplace poker and kept coming. When the mother, Mrs. Bektermann, was backed into a corner and was about to have her skull cracked open with the poker, she didn’t have any choice but to swing the ax at her daughter. She hit the girl once, in the side. A pretty deep cut. The kid died in the hospital the next day. Mrs. Bektermann only killed in self-defense, and no charges were brought against her, but she felt so guilty about killing her own child that she had a complete breakdown and eventually wound up in an institution.”
“And that’s the story that won Mr. Wainwright his Pulitzer nomination?”
“Yeah. In the hands of a lot of reporters, the piece would have been nothing but sensationalistic garbage. But Palmer was good. He wrote a sensitive, well-researched study of a family with serious emotional, interpersonal problems. The father was a domineering man who set extremely high standards for his daughter and very likely had an unnatural attraction to her. The mother was always competing with the father for the girl’s heart, mind, and loyalty, and when she saw she was losing that battle, she turned to drink. There were extraordinary psychological pressures brought to bear on the daughter, and Palmer made the reader feel and understand those pressures.”
She thanked Ross Quincy for his time and consideration. She hung up the phone.
For a while she just sat there, staring at the softly humming refrigerator, trying to make sense of what she had been told. If Wainwright had died in 1946, whom had she talked to in the garden yesterday?