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

of piercings, black eye shadow, dressed in black. The Columbine look. Very prophetic, considering what happened.
    “She asked a number of intelligent questions about the filling of the Back Bay, how it was transformed from a marsh into a neighborhood, the construction of various houses by speculators…We all went out for espressos afterward, Zack, me, a couple of other students. Genevieve asked for Zack’s e-mail and, foolishly, he gave it to her. Big Mistake Number One.
    “Then she dropped in during his office hours and invited herself to dinner here at the House. Zack gave her permission to audit a few of his lectures, in ‘Post-Civil War America.’ That’s when she really glommed onto him.
    “She was from a troubled family. Her father was a sex offender and her mother had just died of breast cancer. She had a boyfriend she’d nicknamed Nosferatu. We never saw him. She was trying to dump him.”
    “Do you know the boyfriend’s real name?”
    She shook her head. “Sorry.”
    “You say she tried to kill Zack twice, his reputation—”
    “She implied Zack had made a pass at her, put his hand up her skirt. She was a liar, a scheming little liar. When Zack tried to shake her off, she spread lies, harassed him in person and via e-mail. ‘If you don’t see me, I’ll tell everyone everything you’ve done.’
    “Then, once, when he gave her a ride on his motorcycle, she tried to pull his hands off the handlebars, one day on Memorial Drive. She almost made Zack hit a truck.”
    “The time he died—”
    “There was a party in Jamaica Plain for a historian from NYU. Zack went and Genevieve showed up. She had a way of weaseling into parties. I had a strep throat and stayed home. It was a miserable night, rainy, the roads were slick. Genevieve needed a ride home. She had an exam the next day. She and Zack were the only two sober people at the party. Zack lost control of his motorcycle on the Jamiacaway. He hit the tree and died instantly.” She paused, glanced toward a photograph of her and Zack as a bride and groom outside what might have been Memorial Church at Harvard.
    Then the vehemence returned to her voice: “It was her, I know it. She must have asked him for something and when he refused, she fought him, hit him, made him lose control. She should have died in that crash, not my husband.”
    She had discussed her suspicions with the police, but couldn’t prove them. The evidence at the scene, the marks the tires had scored on the asphalt, the motorcycle wreckage, and the tree, provided no clues regarding a fight between the driver and passenger. Neither Zack nor Genevieve had been drinking, as confirmed by tests, via breathalyzer and the autopsy…This traumatized woman had been extraordinarily open in discussing her painful past, so much so that I hesitated to ask any more questions, except one: “Was Zack at all familiar with Mingo House?”
    “He was involved with the Victorian Society of Boston. On a purely informal level. He’d go to their programs. I think they had a lecture at Mingo House once. On the spiritualist movement in the wake of the Civil War. All those widows desperate to contact their dead husbands.” Here, finally, her voice faltered. “You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Winslow. Commencement makes for a long and emotional day.”
    Just talking about Genevieve Courson exhausted people. What could it have been like to know her well?

Chapter Eleven
    In the wake of the murder, attendance at Mingo House tripled. People asked the same questions, again and again: “Is that the room where the murder happened?” “Was the Victorian Girl found in that chair?” “Can you stay here overnight?” We actually trained three extra docents to handle the crowds. The
Boston Globe
named Mingo House one of the region’s ten best house museums;
The Early Show
did a segment on it. Nadia Gulbenkian kept hounding us all about the need to raise funds for the restoration of the roof, but Rudy kept