by Sarah Shaber
"Make sure that you mention to Alex when you have this little conversation that he isn't tenure material under any circumstances," Clegg said.
"For a psychologist, you're not much of a diplomat," Jones said. The chairman left the room, followed by Thayer.
"Shit," Simon said. "Life sucks sometimes," Clegg said. "When my brother died in Vietnam, I felt like I was living outside my skin for three years. And I'm a psychologist. I'm supposed to understand this mental stuff."
"I was actually feeling pretty good, until about an hour ago."
"Alex is an ass. If he goes any further with this, he'll just look like an ass to more people. Forget about him. Come on, let's go get some bad food for lunch." "I'm not hungry, and I'd be terrible company."
"You call me anytime," Clegg said. "I'm a trained psychotherapist, you know. Electroshock is a hobby of mine."
"I wouldn't let you anywhere near my brain. God knows how you'd rewire it." After Marcus left, Simon was alone in the lounge. He stood up and inspected his armpits. He felt soaked. He walked over to one of the huge windows and opened it, standing in the damp breeze so that he could cool off and be able to walk out of the department with dignity. Rain was falling in big, heavy drops, knocking aside leaves and twigs as it fell straight down from the sky.
Simon wondered if he shouldn't resign despite what Walker Jones had said. If Andrus appealed further, everyone on campus would know the details of his personal misfortune. But wouldn't that happen anyway if he resigned? Why did he have to lose everything? Surely this, and worse, had happened to other people. It would pass when something hotter got everyone's attention. He would just have to manage the embarrassment as best he could until then.
He spent the afternoon in his office grading papers so he could return them to his four o'clock class. Alex Andrus walked back into the department in time to teach at two, then walked back out again. He didn't speak to anyone, much less apologize.
Back home for dinner, Simon contemplated the contents of his refrigerator with revulsion. He knew he couldn't get rid of his headache, Coke and pills notwithstanding, unless he put something in his stomach. He decided that scrambled eggs and toast might be gentle enough, but beating the glutinous eggs almost made him throw up. Once they were cooked, he managed to eat them, buffered as they were by a lot of toast and peach jelly.
His doorbell rang. Standing there was the little boy from next door, dressed in regulation Little League from head to toe and wielding a catcher's mitt and the Louisville Slugger Simon had given him for Christmas. Oh no, Simon thought.
"I can't, Danny, not now," Simon said.
"Please, Simon, you haven't pitched for me in ages. Please."
"I know, but I just don't feel like it. I'm sorry. Some other time."
The boy was too polite to whine, but he continued to stand at the door, waiting for a break in Simon's resolve. Simon remembered how little the boy saw his father, and what his mother had said Simon's attention meant to him.
"Sometime soon, I promise," Simon said.
"Sure," the boy answered.
Simon watched the boy despondently walk down his steps and back to his house, dragging his bat behind him. Great, he thought. What a time he had been having. He had almost fainted at the sight of a corpse in front of the Raleigh police and his best friend, been accused of incompetence by a peer at an open faculty meeting, and disappointed a small boy. What a guy he was. And it was just seven o'clock in the evening.
What he really wanted to do was go to bed and to sleep, to obliterate his problems at least for a few hours. But if he went to sleep now, he would wake up at three o'clock in the morning with nothing to do but think about his life—which was to be avoided at all costs.
Then he remembered his promise to Julia McGloughlan. He was supposed to find information somewhere that the medical examiner could use to identify Anne Bloodworth's body positively.
He was saved from Friday night television. Simon went upstairs to his library, where the index cards with notes for his book were stuffed into shoe boxes in the back of a closet. Unfortunately, the cards were no longer organized chronologically or by subject, but the way he had sorted them to write the book. He would have to go through them one by one to find what he was looking for. Simon sat cross-legged on the sofa and contemplated the four boxes.
Charles Bloodworth had left few papers that could have been called personal. The documents Simon had read were mostly business correspondence and a daily diary that listed his appointments along with a few personal comments. However, the disappearance of a daughter was obviously a momentous event, and Simon remembered several references to it in Bloodworth's diary and at least two letters on the subject, one of which was to Pinkerton's main office in Chicago. The problem was, he hadn't taken any notes on these. If he didn't want to reread Bloodworth' papers completely, he had to go through the cards and correlate what events he had documented with what transpired concerning Anne Bloodworth's disappearance. When he had located what he needed, he would have some dates and document numbers he could take over to Chapel Hill and the Southern Historical Collection. That way, he could quickly locate the files he needed. His hope was that somewhere in Bloodworth's business diary or in a letter, he had described his daughter in some way that would be helpful to the medical examiner.
Simon had used newspaper accounts to write the very brief section on her disappearance in the monograph on the house, and he had those references easily at hand. He could start rereading the newspaper files tomorrow.
Painstakingly, Simon went through every note card in every box. Three hours and a lot of CDs later, he had found several cards that he was sure would lead him in the right direction. He realized that he was starving, so he went downstairs and got a huge bowl of freezer-burned vanilla ice cream with some stringy, old chocolate sauce on it. It tasted wonderful. It was nearly eleven o'clock when Simon went to bed. He slept like a log for almost nine hours.
The next morning found Simon at the door of the Kenan library when it opened. It was crowded even on Saturday. Summer school was so compressed that students studied every free minute. A few faculty members were there, too, trying to stay one lecture ahead of their students.
Simon unlocked the door to his carrel. He hadn't been here in weeks. Books, papers, and file folders were strewn everywhere over the cheap wooden desk and bookshelf, but everything was coated in a thin layer of dust. Simon looked warily through the stack of stuff on his desk. He had a momentary fear that somewhere in this mess was a pile of student papers he hadn't graded and that neither he nor his students had missed. Apparently not. There was, however, a caustic note from the librarian that announced she had removed some long overdue materials and returned them to the stacks, and that he really should be more considerate. Simon hardly remembered what he had been working on when Tessa left. When he scanned the last few pages he had written, it seemed like someone else's work that had been accidentally left on his desk. This is one article that won't ever be finished, Simon thought. The hell with it. The world will hardly stop orbiting the sun. He dumped his briefcase on the chair, picked up a yellow pad and pen, locked the door behind him, and went to his favorite place, the microfiche reading room. Oddly, his heart was pounding.
He found the spool of microfiche labeled April-May 1926, unrolled it onto the spools on the reader, and flipped on the power. The process was so familiar and automatic that it had a tranquilizing effect on him. When he immersed himself in any kind of primary research, he tended to block out his own present and identify completely with his subjects. It was such an intense experience, he never discussed it with anyone, even other academics, because he worried that it was a little abnormal.
Anne Bloodworth's disappearance on April 9, 1926, had driven other stories about Byrd's expedition to the North Pole and the attempted assassination of Mussolini off the front page of the paper. In a tabloid style the National Enquirer would have been proud of, the paper dwelt on the mystery of Anne's disappearance,
the bafflement of the police, the grief of her father, and the desperation of her fiance. Apparently, Anne Bloodworth and her father, Charles, had been alone in their house—the live-in help had gone to a movie. Her second cousin and fiance, Adam Bloodworth, was on a fishing trip. She went upstairs to bed to read; Charles worked in his study. Before Bloodworth went to bed, he knocked on his daughter’s door to say goodnight. When there was no answer, he assumed she was asleep. The next morning, the maid taking her tea upstairs found that her room was empty and that her bed had not been slept in.
All hell broke loose. Motorcycle patrolman Peebles arrived at the Bloodworth home first. He described the scene as extremely confused—the wailing servants had the house in an uproar and "Captain Bloodworth" was prostrate. Dr. Zeb Caviness, who lived up the street, was plying him with sleeping salts to keep him coherent. Officer Peebles found, to his dismay, that Anne Bloodworth's room had been completely overturned by her father, who had been looking for some answer to the riddle of her disappearance. The back garden and orchard had been trampled by neighbors searching for her. This "well-meaning but unorganized search," said the reporter, "seems likely to have obscured important clues."
The entire Raleigh police force, on horseback and motorcycle, searched the city from top to bottom. The next day, Police Chief J. W. Bryan told readers that there was no trace of Miss Bloodworth anywhere in the city. They had even searched the saloons and whorehouses, he said, in case she had been abducted by white slavers. Telegrams had been sent to Charlotte, Charleston, and Richmond. She had not been seen at the train station, and she could have gotten no farther than Charlotte by motorcar. Bloodworth had hired the city's only detective, Robert L. Lumsden, of the Southern Detective Agency, to help search for her. The police of the time, Simon knew, were trained to keep law and order, not to detect.
By the end of three days, the story of Anne Bloodworth's disappearance had dropped to below the fold of the front page. Nothing had been heard from neighboring cities. Her fiance denied rumors that she had run off with a lover—their engagement was a devoted one, he said, and a wedding date had been set. No ransom demands had been made. The local detective agency had contacted the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The Pinkerton system of employing underworld informers and railroad spies held the last hope for finding her if she had been kidnapped or had run away.
For weeks, a full-page ad offering a five-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to her return ran in the newspaper. The picture that illustrated it was a line rendition of the same portrait that hung in the house. She was described as of medium height and weight, with black hair and brown eyes. She had a mole on her left cheek and was never without the cameo earrings and brooch she had inherited from her mother. Miss Bloodworth was an accomplished pianist, the ad said, had completed two years at Kenan Institute for Women, and intended to graduate. She was "unusually interested in intellectual matters for a woman," the article went on. There was nothing here that would help the medical examiner, but Simon photocopied the page anyway.
The last paragraph written about Anne Bloodworth's disappearance stated that her picture and description had been placed in all the major American newspapers, as well as in newspapers in London, Paris, and Rome. Her father vowed to search for her forever if necessary.
The glare of the microfilm screen and the persistent hum of the machine wore Simon out after about two hours. With relief, he turned it off, rubbing his eyes and stretching back in his chair. He reread the photocopy he had made of the advertisement offering a reward for the return of Anne Bloodworth. What did "unusually interested in intellectual matters for a woman" mean?
Simon's eyes hurt when he tried to focus on the clock on the opposite wall. It would take a few minutes for his far vision to return after reading blurred newsprint. Then he spotted Bobby Hinton through the open doors into the seniors' study room, and his body tensed.
Might as well get it over with, he thought. He got up and walked out of the reading room and over to Hinton. The boy was stripping his carrel. "Bobby, I want you to know that I believe the grade I gave you was fair, but I'm sorry about graduate school." The thin, longhaired blond boy stopped stuffing pens and papers into his backpack. Simon had never felt that he knew him as well as he did other students in the seminar. He often seemed to be somewhere else mentally. Now Hinton just grinned at Simon.
"Don't worry, Doc, Professor Andrus is more upset about that grade than I am. I knew I was just sliding through. I mean, I thought a B was automatic, but it was a stupid assumption."
"What are you going to do? Apply to a master's program, maybe?"
The boy slung his backpack over his shoulder. It was a nice backpack—black-tooled leather—definitely a cut above what most students bought at the student store. "I'm not sure graduate school is what I want at all, now. I'm not going to go anywhere, for a few years anyway."
"What are you going to do?"
"My mother owns a real estate firm in Charlotte. I figure all I have to do is sell one house a month to make ends meet. And I can go to the beach and play golf all I want." Damn Andrus, thought Simon as he watched Hinton walk away. The kid himself didn't care about the grade. "I told you," Marcus Clegg said when Simon joined him for lunch at the student union. "It's not the grade at all; it's the chance to get at you that Andrus is after. You have to hang in there."
"It's going to embarrass me if this gets around campus, Marcus," Simon said. Clegg leaned over his bowl of chili so Simon could hear him over the din of student conversation. "Be realistic. The academic community isn't any more discreet than any other small, intense, people-oriented environment. Everyone knows everything there is to know about you right now."
Simon's stomach began to react. "Like what?" he said. "Like your wife left you to go to the bright lights of New York City, and that you're upset as hell about it. You think this is a scandal? Have you watched daytime television recently?"
"It's mostly pride, I guess. I hate to screw up my life in public." "You didn't screw up your life," Carver said. "Your wife screwed it up. Let her go. And on that word of patronizing and unrealistic advice, I have to leave. My mousies need their next injection."
"Someday somebody from PETA is going to overhear you and you're going to wish you hadn't spent your career torturing small animals."
"Some torture. My subjects get all the food and sex they can handle just for pushing the red button instead of the green one. Our lives should be so good."
A MESSAGE FROM Julia McGloughlan was on Simon's answering machine when he got home. "Guess what," she said. "The police department here didn't even have a filing system until 1950! There are some filthy old boxes in the back of a storeroom that might have something on our case, the file gnomes tell me. I'm going to riffle through them this afternoon. Call me."
Simon carefully wrote down her number and silently rehearsed a message, if, as he expected, he got an answering machine, too. Simon loved answering machines. Communication without the distracting presence of the other person allowed one to tailor one's thoughts precisely. As the phone rang, he silently hoped that she didn't have a stupid message. He would have to scratch her name off his list if she did. She didn't.
When he got the beep, Simon did his best to sound like a grownup Pulitzer Prizewinning history professor entitled to her respect and even admiration. "This is Simon Shaw. I'm going over to Chapel Hill to the Southern Historical Collection this afternoon to look at Charles Bloodworth's papers. Want to meet for dinner and compare notes? If you do, meet me at the Chinese place across from Kenan at seven."
Chapter Six
SIMON ALWAYS LISTENED TO JAMES TAYLOR WHILE DRIVING TO Chapel Hill. It just seemed appropriate. He had New Moonshine blaring on this trip, but he wasn't hearing it. He was so preoccupied with the Bloodworth murder puzzle that he arrived on the outskirts of town without any recollection of the passage of time or of the landmarks he must have passed on the way. Automatic pilot brought him straight to the library, where h
e found a place to park only because it was too pretty a Saturday afternoon for anyone other than the most desperate students to bury themselves in the windowless stacks. Simon had a sudden urge to defect himself, but instead, he found his way to the Southern Historical Collection and presented his requests to the student in charge. She looked at his request slips in horror.
"Do you know where this stuff is?" she asked. "I don't usually work here." The girl was obviously in the middle of an intense cram session. She had bags under her eyes and her hair needed washing. Books and notes were piled at the desk where she had been working. She had probably planned to study during her entire shift.
"Exactly where," he said. "I've used these materials many times. Why don't you just let me go get them myself ?" "I'm not supposed to do that," she said. "The Southern Historical Collection stacks are closed. I'm supposed to find them and bring them to you." She didn't move, though, just looked at the slips of paper and then at the monster card catalog in the middle of the reading room.
"Look," Simon said. "Let me find them myself. I went to grad school here. I just need a few minutes. I'll use them right there in the stacks and put everything back. You don't need to do anything."
Still she hesitated.
"I'm a full professor at Kenan College," Simon said. "I'm not going to steal anything. I just want to look a few things up. I can do it and be gone before you could probably find the stuff. You can hold on to my driver's license as collateral."
"Okay," she said. She carefully looked around before unlocking the barred door that guarded the collection. Simon walked down two flights of steps and turned left into a regiment of shelves piled with file boxes. He found the aisle he was looking for, then pulled two of the boxes off a shelf. They were labeled CHARLES BLOODWORTH PAPERS, CHESAPEAKE AND SEABOARD RAILWAY. Bloodworth's papers were a small part of the huge inventory of files that the railway had given to the collection when its original Victorianstyle building had been torn down. The files covering the s had been an important source for Simon's thesis and book.