Read Online A Pinchbeck Bride by Stephen Anable - Free Book Online Page A

focused on their star graduate. I found myself in a common room not unlike such spaces at my prep school, with wallpaper murals of the Revolutionary War, saggy furniture, and a flat-screen TV. Many college-age young people were milling about, but, when asked, they proved to be siblings and cousins of students. Then I found an Indian girl from the subcontinent who confessed she was a senior, graduating and going to medical school in the fall. She knew Zack Meecham only by sight, but pointed to a trim blonde woman in a hot-pink Oxford cloth shirt, khaki pants, and espadrilles. “That’s his, um, widow.”
    I certainly didn’t expect this Ivy League Casanova would be married—and to such a prim and preppie spouse. Her clothing appeared ironed and starched, as though she never sat down and risked a wrinkle. She was holding a clipboard, helping a family negotiate a trunk down some challenging steps. “A little to the right and you’ll be fine. Well, Susan, the very best of luck.”
    “Thanks so much, Mrs. Meecham,” the slightly weepy girl managed to say.
    “Mrs. Meecham?” I asked.
    She turned with her eyebrows raised, her kiwifruit-green eyes aglitter.
    “My name is Mark Winslow. I was a friend of a student I believe your husband mentored. From Shawmut College, Genevieve Courson.”
    Her tone had less warmth than a Baffin Island winter. “She had friends? How extraordinary.” She had the debutante diction you might first think was British; it was that crisp and clipped.
    “Well, I worked with her at Mingo House.”
    She simply stared, a basilisk in a pageboy haircut.
    I had to spend all my capital. “I was the person who found her dead.”
    She had the frozen expression of a much older woman who’s had too many facelifts, whose stiffened skin becomes a kind of desert, without emotion. But she was 28 at most. “All I can say is good riddance. Good riddance.”
    “I’m just curious about the murder—”
    “Hers or my husband’s? I consider Genevieve Courson responsible for my husband’s death. She’d harassed him for months, with phone calls and intimidation. She’d harassed him in the most public, inopportune places, in class, on the subway, on his motorcycle. And being sweet-natured, Zack always forgave her. For what, in my mind, was unforgivable.”
    She stepped toward me, a bit too close. “There is no doubt, in my mind, that Genevieve Courson caused my husband’s crash by her own actions. She pulled his hands off the controls—she had done it before—and killed him.”
    Her claim was so extraordinary that I found myself shaking my head.
    “Oh, you doubt me, do you? Well, she could be charm itself. Why, when I first met her, I thought she was wonderful too.”
    The Indian student now returned. “Mrs. Meecham, is there a dolly we can use?”
    “I’ll show you.”
    Surely, now, I would lose her, but she told me, “Don’t go away.”
    When she returned, she led me up a slate-floored staircase to her apartment. Scattered throughout the quarters were photographs of Zack, a bearded man with one unbroken, caterpillar of an eyebrow and a high-wattage grin: with his wife at a red-lacquered Shinto shrine, outside Westminster Abbey, in a drenched orange windbreaker while whitewater rafting. She served us tart, homemade lemonade.
    “I apologize for the outburst. It’s just that I can’t discuss this with the students and my colleagues have heard it ad infinitum. But it still hurts. She tried to kill Zack twice, first his reputation and then physically.
    “Zack tried to be a mentor to any student who needed it. And God knows Genevieve was a needy girl. She was a veritable black hole of need. Zack had a hard time saying No, and, when he did, that little parasite wouldn’t take No for an answer.”
    “How did your husband meet Genevieve?”
    “At a lecture on nineteenth-century urban planning. Here at Harvard. It was free and open to the public. I was there. Genevieve was in her Goth phase, with lots