The Missing Chapter

“Do you know if he did end the engagement?”

“No,” she said, rising partway up and tucking her legs under her. “I never asked.”

“Ms. Royce, you spoke a minute ago about the structure of your relationship with Mr. Childress. How would you define that structure?”

“Mm. Yes. Please call me Patricia. The only person who gets formal with me is the loan officer at my bank, and I don’t want to be reminded of him. I know it sounds like a newspaper gossip-column cliché, but Charles and I truly were good friends — nothing more. We first met years ago, lord, it’s been almost ten now, at a writers’ workshop up in Vermont. We hit it off immediately. We found we admired the same authors — and disliked the same ones, too. Back here in New York, we ended up growing into sort of a two-person support group, encouraging each other, propping each other up when the rejection slips came in. And they did, for both of us, before we started getting published. And we’ve bounced ideas off each other, and passed manuscripts back and forth for help in improving them. We were always comfortable together.”

“But there was no romantic aspect?”

She almost smiled. “Mr. Goodwin, have you ever been married?”

“First off, I feel the same way you do about nominatives of address. My handle of first choice is Archie, and I implore you to use it. Second, no, I have never taken that walk down the aisle. Why?”

“My guess is you have one or more close woman friends. Am I correct?”

I nodded. “You are, and I think I see where you’re headed.”

Now she really did smile, which was a welcome sight. “I’m sure you do, Archie. How often do you get asked, ‘When are you going to marry so-and-so?’ ”

“It has happened more times than I have thumbs.”

“Like you, I never have been married, although I was close on one occasion, and even now, more than eleven years later, I don’t know whether or not I’m sorry I backed out of it. But I do know it is possible to have a close relationship with a man without sex being its lodestar. I realize Debra Mitchell saw me as a threat to her relationship with Charles, but she needn’t have. Debra’s greatest enemy was her own personality.”

“Uh-huh. I gather you have a book of your own in the works right now?”

Her whole body sagged, and she shook her head. “I did — about half of a manuscript of a novel set in Scotland at the time of the last Stuart uprising, at Culloden. But, after... after... what happened, I couldn’t stand to even look at the stupid thing anymore. Everything in it reminded me of him, because I’d done so much of the work at his apartment.”

“So now it’s on hold?”

“Now it’s as dead as the House of Stuart,” she murmured. “I destroyed the disk. It’s gone — completely.”

“How does your publisher feel about that?”

She turned her palms up. “I haven’t told them about it, but of course I’ll have to. They weren’t expecting anything until the fall anyway, and my editor had never seen even a sample.”

“Seems like a shame. Patricia, can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill Childress? Or who would have profited in any way from his death?”

She shook her head vigorously. “No! And that’s why I can’t believe he was murdered. Mr. — Archie, Charles shot himself, it’s that simple. I know that doesn’t make it any less tragic than murder. But he had tried suicide one other time years ago after what he called his ‘Great American Novel’ got rejected by the seventh or eighth publisher. He turned on his gas stove and — well, a neighbor smelled the gas, and the building super came in just in time. Charles was in therapy for a long time after, but in all the years that I’ve known him since then, he never went more than a few months without slipping into some sort of very deep depression. He was a very creative, very troubled spirit.”

“I understand he had no close relatives.”

“Just an aunt or two and a cousin out in Indiana. He came from a place called Mercer. His mother died about two years back. I remember it because he was there with her for a long time, six months or more, while she lingered. He was different when he returned to New York.”

“In what way?”

She closed her eyes tightly and started rocking again, then blinked awake. “Oh, older, I guess, or more world-weary. Maybe that’s to be expected when the person closest to you dies. He was an only child, and his father had been dead for years, so he had to bear the whole strain while his mother slowly slipped away.” She shuddered. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to go and get morbid on you. It’s just that Charles never seemed the same after that; he quit laughing and smiling almost entirely.”

I’ll bet you don’t do a lot of either yourself, I thought as I looked at her, wondering how many times she’d been in therapy herself. “You mentioned that Childress had given you a key to his apartment. Speaking of keys, does this one look familiar?” I pulled out my newfound brass acquisition.

“No... no, I don’t think so,” she answered, taking it from my palm and peering at it. “Should it?”