An Uncollected Death

by Meg Wolfe

as many of the things were upstairs. She didn’t value these things in quite the same way, did not worry if they became damaged from damp. But for some reason she didn’t let go of them when she no longer liked them enough to use—much like myself, thought Charlotte. These were just the things Olivia was tired of or wanted out of the way, and to Charlotte they looked highly unlikely to contain the valuable notebooks. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Simon came back with the equipment and once again she was impressed by how quickly and efficiently he set it up. The smell of mothballs in the boxes with clothes and blankets was beginning to give her a buzzy headache, and the dark basement in general made her feel claustrophobic. She sighed, stretched her back and neck, and went back upstairs, where she helped Helene to successfully decipher the clue in the notebook (it turned out to refer to the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and the notebook was taped to the back of a framed poster of the film); by the time Simon finished with the videos of the basement and kitchen contents, they’d found three more volumes.

  Charlotte read the latest clue: “Painting the Music of Time.”

  Helene took it up. “This one sort of makes sense. The last one referenced Books Do Furnish a Room, which is part of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.”

  “So maybe we go look on the bookshelf?”

  Simon interrupted. “Poussin. There’s a painting of that name by him in the Wallace Collection in London. Got any Poussin?” He smiled ever so slightly.

  They went looking around the house again, but found no prints of the painting, not even among the stacks of jigsaw puzzles or among the art books on the bottom shelf in the living room.

  “Well!” sighed Charlotte. “We know there isn’t any music in the place, nor any Poussin paintings depicted in the things we can see up here. What about the basement, Simon? Did you spot anything worth looking at?

  “The only things I wonder about are a couple of boxes that aren’t labeled, that probably bear looking into.”

  Charlotte followed Simon down to the basement and helped him to uncover the boxes, which were stacked near the containers with Donovan’s model train set. Both boxes turned out to be full of books.

  One of the books was a worn-looking copy of The Paintings of Nicholas Poussin.

  “Huh,” said Simon. “The old spy Blunt wrote that.”

  The binding was broken, and pages appeared to be missing. As Charlotte went through it, she saw that it had been forced to hold one of Olivia’s notebooks.

  “There’s a couple of Seamus O’Dair books, too,” said Simon, as he checked the various titles. “Reprints, no first editions. But what have we here?”

  The small dark book he pulled out looked as if it had seen rough treatment, but was still intact. The gold leaf title was almost worn away: Faux Silence.

  Inside, the title was repeated, with the subtitle, Poèmes de la Résistance.

  The author: Olivia Bernadin.

  It was published in 1948 by the Sibylline Press, Paris.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the only copy,” said Charlotte, feeling as if she was holding the very essence of Olivia’s existence.

  “It’s nice to see it for real. Shame it was left down here.”

  “We should take these up to Helene. I bet she’ll be surprised.”

  “Check the clue in the notebook first. We might get lucky.”

  Inside the cover of the eighth book, Olivia had written: Wheel of Fortune!

  “The game show?” she wondered aloud.

  “Or the board game. A stack of them over here.” Simon moved to the end of the table and started looking.

  Charlotte recalled that Olivia didn’t remember if there were nine or ten notebooks. “You know,” she said, “if there’s no clue inside this next notebook, that means we’ve got them all, that there were nine, and not ten.”

  “Keep ‘em crossed, then,” he said. “Found it.” He pulled it out of the stack of other board games.

  The ninth notebook lay inside.

  And it’s clue: Snakes and Ladders.

  “That one ought to be here—”

  Charlotte was puzzled. “I don’t know that it’s right. I know there’s “Chutes and Ladders,” but not snakes.”

  Simon insisted. “You Americans have to rename everything. Everywhere else on the planet it’s called “Snakes and Ladders,” and it’s an old, old game. Here we are.” He found the game (and the cover said “Chutes and Ladders”), and pulled it out as well.

  There was no notebook inside the box, however.

  They both sighed.

  “That would have made it too easy, of course,” Simon grumbled.

  “Of course.”

   

  Helene was thrilled at their finds, and couldn’t stop looking through the little book of poems. “I can’t believe I’m actually holding this book. There were so few copies printed, you know. My parents had a copy, but I don’t know what happened to it. This might have been theirs. In fact, I think that box of books you found might have been my mother’s. Olivia got most of their things when they died, because Paul and I moved and traveled so much. I often wondered what happened to them.”

  This gave Charlotte an idea. “Could the copy of Least Objects that Donovan sold have been your parents’?”

  “Yes!” said Helene, nodding in agreement. “It’s very likely. My mother, especially, would have kept up with literature, and her preferences were high-brow. A Nobel-winning author would have been right up her alley, and in New York you could get any book the minute it came out.”

  “I’m going to bring those boxes up here,” said Simon. “You can have a look, then.”

  “Oh, Simon,” said Helene, “that would be wonderful, but maybe we should wait and not move anything until we find that last notebook. Just in case?”

  “Right. I forgot about that.” He opened up the ninth notebook and showed her the clue. “Does Snakes and Ladders suggest anything to you other than the game?”

  Helene shook her head. “Nothing other than pythons and stepladders.”

  “Plumbing snakes?” Charlotte speculated. “Ladders in pantyhose?”

  “How about sleeping on it?” Simon was looking at his watch. “I’ve got to get back to campus. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m uneasy about the two of you being here alone when the likes of Toley Banks and Mitchell are involved.”

  “Oh, I agree, Simon.” Helene rose from her chair, still holding the book of poems. “I need to put my feet up a while. You two are doing all the hard work, but it’s making me tired, anyway.”

  Charlotte wanted to plow through with finding the last notebook, but knew better than to argue with Simon and Helene. She would use the time to think and read.

  “I’d like to take the most recent ledger books with me, along with these notebooks. If there’s anything I need to double-check online, I can, and then maybe I can sort out what we know from what we are just guessing at.” She turned to Simon. “I could use a copy of your pictures and videos, too.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I’ll get it to you later on today, if that’s okay.”

  “Perfect.”

   

  Charlotte walked more slowly than usual back to her apartment, as her canvas messenger bag was heavy with notebooks and ledgers. As the blocks were covered, she still experienced the past overlaid with the present. To the right, for instance, there was the library, now doubled in size from the decade before, but she still felt the way the old front steps were spaced, and the way it felt to hold Ellis’ hand as they went into the lobby, then around the pillars to the children’s section. Further down the block, across the street, an architectural firm had renovated an old feed and seed store to serve as their offices. As she looked at it, she could still vividly remember the smell of fertilizer, the cool dampness of the bulk containers of seeds and bulbs, and the shiny troughs of the hanging scales.

  The smell of pizza, however, brought her firmly into the present, as it us
ually did. She was now across the street from The Good Stuff and her apartment, waiting for the “Walk” sign at the busy intersection. The pizza joint next to her beckoned, but she resisted, despite her watering mouth and growling stomach. There were still some good things to eat from Helene’s basket.  The “Walk” sign came on, and as she crossed the street, she could see the tuxedo cat in the shop window, watching her. She went into the shop, looking for Larry, but didn’t see him.

  The woman behind the counter looked up, then eyed her bulging messenger bag, as if Charlotte was a potential shoplifter. “Can I help you with anything?”

  “Um, yeah. What’s the cat’s name?”

  “Shamus. Why? You want him?”

  A rather unfriendly woman, thought Charlotte. Good thing there weren’t a lot of customers at the moment. “Well, he’s the shop cat, isn’t he?” Was it Shamus or Seamus, she wondered.

  “By default. One of Larry’s customers gave us the cat, and that was okay for a while, but our younger daughter is allergic. Larry won’t give him up, so we compromise by keeping the cat down here.”

  “Oh, you’re Larry’s wife! I’m Charlotte Anthony, I’ve taken the studio apartment.”

  “Yeah, he was telling me about you.” The woman was looking Charlotte up and down, as if she were a rival. “Wendy.” She didn’t proffer a hand, but at least set down the catalogue she was reading. “Thanks for taking care of the cleanup, ‘though I’m surprised he gave you that much of a break on the rent.”

  Her manner insinuated that Charlotte had done something more than clean up the apartment to get