Chapter 8
“Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.”
Auguste Rodin
As soon as the short service in the chapel concluded, and the students dismissed to their dormitory rooms with the injunction to please not wander the grounds alone, Professor Currier left College Hall after a hurried stop in her first-floor classroom to collect her pocketbook and hat.
“Marigold? Are you leaving?” It was Aggie, coming along the corridor behind her.
“Yes, I—” How did one say that one was tailing a suspect, when one didn’t even know exactly what one suspected them of? Or if one had any authority to suspect them in the first place? But those were questions for a less fraught hour. “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”
“But President Irvine just said not to go out alone,” Aggie objected. “It’s nearly full dark.”
“I need to …” Marigold grasped for a plausible excuse. “I need to speak to Professor Currier. It’s urgent. But I do want to talk to you later, when I get back.” From wherever it was Professor Currier was going in such a very great hurry.
“Oh, well, in that case, I suppose I’ll see you at dinner? They can’t cancel that, can they?”
“Naturally.” Marigold did not wait to explain her haste—she had only enough time to realize her bicycle was likely still along the shore next to the boathouse where she had abandoned it before Professor Currier’s short, agitated stride took her out of sight, down the path toward the town.
Marigold hied after the woman, trying all the while to remember what she knew of the professor from taking her class two years ago.
She was a single lady—as all of their female professors were—and one of the few longtime faculty members who had survived President Irvine’s purge of underqualified instructors in an effort to raise the academic standard of the college.
Professor Currier’s undergraduate degree was from Wellesley itself, where she had graduated in the first class of seniors in 1878, before she took her master’s degrees in English and Rhetoric from Cornell.
She had returned to Wellesley to teach and had been on the faculty for something like fifteen years, which put her age somewhere close to forty.
She was physically quite small—Marigold wondered if she was any more than five feet tall—but she was known as a jolly and engaging teacher, even gregarious, very often taking meals with the members of the Forensic and Debate Society in the dining hall, though she lived off campus.
Which was where Marigold assumed the woman was going now.
She followed her as discreetly as possible down the carriage way, from each patch of gaslight to the next, stopping outside the flickering pools of lamplight once or twice, so as not to overtake the older woman.
But Professor Currier seemed not to notice—she was entirely absorbed with her own mission, passing by the college lodge gate, and what was presumably her own well-lit boardinghouse on Washington Street, where the voice of a woman hailed her from the shadowy porch.
“Evening, Imogen. You’re home early.”
The professor merely waved her off, hurrying onward up Washington Street to a tall, gaslit colonial-style clapboard house on the corner of Blossom Street, nearer the center of the town, where she knocked and was immediately admitted.
Marigold idled as inconspicuously as possible behind a large white-oak tree, its leaves already turned reddish-yellow with the fall, before she engaged the passing iceman, whose horse was plodding homeward at an autumnal pace. “I beg your pardon,” she called, “but whose house is this?”
The iceman was one of a particular breed of distrustful New Englander, squinting up one side of his face, as if he could better assess her character and trustworthiness with such an expression. “Why’d you wantah know?”
She combatted his native skepticism with a sort of over-bright, college-girl enthusiasm as she kept pace with his ice wagon.
“Well, you see, I’m studying the vernacular architecture of the town for a class, and I thought this a rather fine example of clapboard federal farmhouse.
” She turned as if surveying the house. “Don’t you think it fine? ”
“I ’spose.” The iceman eyed the house for a bare moment before he turned his narrow gaze back to Marigold. “You’ll be from up the college then.”
“Naturally.” Marigold rewarded him with an encouraging smile. “I suppose they must be a very old, distinguished Wellesley family, to have such an old, distinguished house?”
“Thayers live there” was the iceman’s response.
“Ah!” Marigold made a sound of interest. “And what do they do, to have such a fine house?”
The iceman scratched his bristling whiskers. “What do you call them philosophical kinds of religious think-ahs they’re talking about nowadays?” he asked in his rustic New England accent.
Marigold stretched her mind into current philosophical events to find an answer. “Universalists?”
“Ayuh,” he agreed with a sage nod. “Them, but more than them.”
“Transcendentalists?” she ventured, thinking of the philosophies and writings of Emerson and Longfellow and their ilk.
“Ayuh. That’s it.” The iceman was no less grim in his satisfaction. “Don’t matter what they’re calling it, it always amounts to the same thing. Them that has, keeps. Always have, always will, one after another. Way of the world.” And with that, the fellow harrumphed his mare onward and away.
But for all her sympathy with the fellow, Marigold knew that there were many different ways in the world, and that “them that had” were as vulnerable to losing it all as anyone else—more so if they were foolish.
And Professor Currier’s headlong rush appeared entirely foolish, not to mention culpatory—she was acting very guilty, if you asked Marigold.
But Marigold could only ask herself. And wonder if the girl she pulled out of the lake had been foolish. Some—the watchmen, certainly—would say she was obviously so, to get herself killed.
She could only ask herself if the girl had come from this fine, well-kept clapboard house with the two smoking chimneys to keep her warm and dry.
Or was she just a girl like Marigold, doing her best in the world, despite not having such a solid familial foundation as the big white house might imply?
What would someone think if they had pulled Marigold from the lake—or from Salem Sound, where she was meant to have been pushed overboard and left to drown last spring? Would that person think she had been foolish?
They would certainly think she was well-dressed by the House of Dana.
That brought Marigold’s mind back to the girl’s clothing, which might be brought to bear in learning her identity. Under Isabella’s keen gaze, an eight-dollar hat from Jordan Marsh, and a jacket from Madame Watteau would only be the beginning of the revelations the dead girl’s attire might offer.
Marigold consulted her watch pinned to her shirtwaist and decided she could no longer afford to linger if she wanted to make it back for dinner.
She would have to abandon Professor Currier, but she had just enough time to leg it up to the commercial district, where the wire office stood ready to send her telegram off to Isabella, before the dinner bell would ring.
She rehearsed several different messages in her head before settling on the most direct. “Need assistance, stop,” she dictated to the telegrapher. “Information regarding fashionable clothing, stop. Potential murder, stop.” she added in an ill-advised attempt to intrigue Isabella.
Ill-advised, because the clerk immediately eyed her from under his green cellophane visor. “Is it true then, what they’re saying happened at the college—there’s a girl dead?”
Marigold felt all the self-blame of so quickly and thoughtlessly contravening President Irvine’s plea for discretion. “It’s only a rumor,” she hedged.
She quickly counted out the required coins and headed back toward campus before the full fall of night made the walk dangerous.
But Professor Currier’s boardinghouse lay along the way, at the corner of Weston and Washington Streets.
And if the rumor she had so carelessly started regarding murder got out, she would need something—some progress or evidence against Professor Currier—to counteract her indiscretion.
The boardinghouse was a large, squat four-story edifice with rooms under dormers at the top, with a gaslit porch and balcony across the front.
A wooden placard hanging from the second-floor balcony declared it “Noanett.” Beneath that sign was another notice, posted on the screen door of the porch, nearest the carriage drive side of the house, advertising for a cook.
Marigold stepped into the carriage drive to get a closer look, when she was greeted by the same voice that had earlier hailed Professor Currier from the screened porch above. “There something you want?”
Marigold turned her eyes upward to find a stolid, middle-aged woman in rather dated clothing, with a tight knot of gray hair pulling her face as taut as a fireplace poker, staring down at her.
“Don’t have any rooms open, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No, ma’am,” Marigold replied with alacrity. “I was looking for my professor from the college—Professor Currier.”
The woman’s gaze narrowed. “Not home yet. Very regular in her habits, the professor. You girls, on the other hand …” The woman’s put-upon sigh gave her opinion of flighty college girls.
“Every hour of the day and night. Haven’t got the sense to come in out of the rain.
” She folded her arms across her ample chest. “Best get back there, if you ask me.”
Marigold had not asked her, and so did not mind staying put—and trying a new avenue of approach. “I see you’ve a notice up for a cook?”
“You cook? College girl like you?” Her scoff was huffed with laughter.