by Meg Perry
“Okay.” I recorded the word in our Clinton log.
At 3:00, I went back to my office and started in on the sorting task again. By the time 5:00 rolled around, I was exhausted. I was determined to get through today's mail, though; if I could keep up with the new stuff, I'd be able to chip away at the old stuff without anything else piling up.
I was just moving today's stack of mail to my desk when there was a knock on my door frame. I looked up into the deep brown eyes of Pete Ferguson.
When I first moved to LA, Pete was my brother Kevin's partner on the police force. After Dan broke up with me, I’d had a string of similarly short-term relationships, and Pete was one of them. He’d left the force by then, and was pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology at UCLA. We’d gotten along great. But Pete had a bad breakup in his past too, and we’d both been afraid of getting hurt again. Then Pete’s ex had come back and wanted a second chance, and Pete had reluctantly given it to him. By the time Luke and Pete had broken up for good, I’d moved on. Pete’s friendship with Kevin had kept us in contact, and we’d re-established a cautious friendship of our own.
Now here he was, standing in my doorway. I tried to smile; it must have looked more like a grimace. "Hey, what are you doing here?"
Pete smiled back. He had a nice smile. "I wanted to see if I could buy you dinner on your way home. Figured you'd be done for the day by now."
I was suddenly suspicious. "Did Kevin send you here?"
"No, I’ve been here doing research all afternoon. But it did occur to me that you might need some encouragement to leave work on time, and maybe I could entice you away."
“Doing research? I thought the point of taking a teaching job at a community college was so you didn’t have to do research.”
Pete laughed. He had a nice laugh too. “I don’t have to, but it does help with tenure. And the professor who was my dissertation advisor here has asked me to write a chapter for a textbook that she’s editing. So I need to do some research for that.”
“A textbook on what?”
“Abnormal psychology. My chapter’s on criminal psychology. And right now I’m criminally hungry. So whaddya say? How does Thai sound?”
I sighed. "Actually, it sounds great. I just want to go through this last stack of mail before I leave. Come on in, sit down."
Pete moved a stack off the chair and sat. "This place is a mess."
"No kidding. They've just been throwing my mail in here as it came."
"Nice. I hope there wasn't anything important in it."
"Probably not." I was tossing catalogs into my chair and important-looking mail in the direction of my inbox on my desk. None of it looked interesting, until I came to an envelope with a name I recognized. It stopped me in my tracks.
Holy shit. I must have had an odd look on my face. Pete noticed. "What's wrong?"
"This morning I found out that this guy I used to know died. And now here’s a letter from him. It’s postmarked the day before he died.”
"Who is it?"
"Dan Christensen. We started library school together. He's a medical librarian at Cedars now. Was a medical librarian. He died on Friday."
"Christensen. Why does that name sound familiar?"
"I was kind of - um - involved with him for a while. You might have heard me mention him." I looked narrowly at Pete. "That was almost six years ago, though. If you remember that, you've got an awfully good memory."
“Hey, I’ve always paid attention to your love life." He nodded at the letter. "What does he want?"
I looked at the letter again. It was postmarked Malibu. Malibu? Dan lived in Glendale and worked in LA. Why would he mail something from Malibu? I opened it and pulled out a sheet of paper.
It was just a page torn off a yellow legal pad, not hospital stationery. I read out loud. "Jamie - if anything happens to me, check this out." I stopped at what was below that sentence. "What the..."
"What is it?"
I handed the letter to Pete. "'If anything happens to me..' What's he talking about?"
Pete examined the note. "What's this at the bottom? It looks like journal citations."
It was. Below Dan's note, he had written two citations.
The first seemed to be in a foreign language:
Hughes, D., & Llewellyn, M. (2003). Nid yw symbylu'r celloedd bonyn embryonig dynol diwylliedig â hormonau ffoligl ysgogol yn arwain at ffurfio ofwm tebyg i gelloedd. Meddygol Cymru Journal, 17(9), 23-28.
The second was in English, but was nearly as incomprehensible as the first:
Oliver, T., Wray, A., & Goldstein, B. (2007). Stimulation of cultured human embryonic stem cells with follicle stimulating hormone leads to formation of ovum-like cells. Journal of Stem Cell Biology, 2(4), 15-22.
“This looks like medical stuff. How am I supposed to read this?”
“What language is that?”
“The names could be Welsh. And Cymru means Wales. I think it’s Welsh language.”
“Can you read it?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“You could run it through Google Translate to get an idea of what it says. Why would he send this to you? You’re not a medical librarian.”
“I don’t know. I might be the only librarian he knows in the UC system. Or maybe he thought…oh hell, I don’t know.”
“And those are just citations. Why wouldn’t he have sent you the articles themselves?”
“I have no idea. Maybe he couldn’t find the full text.” I grimaced. “This is creepy. Dan’s dead. Do you think someone might have done something to him?”
“Like what? Was there anything to indicate foul play?”
“No. The obituary just said he died suddenly. And what could be dangerous about a couple of medical articles?” I frowned at the paper in my hand.
“You could ask Kevin about it. He can get the police report and the autopsy results. See if there was anything off about it.”
I frowned again. “I guess. But that’ll take a while, won’t it?”
“Yeah, it won’t be a priority.” Pete picked up my computer bag from the floor. “Come on, I’m hungry. You can fill me in on this guy and those listings while we eat.”
We walked to a Thai place near campus. The hostess showed us to a booth, and Pete slid in across from me. We ordered beer and pad thai; our beers arrived almost immediately. Pete took a drink and leaned back. “Tell me about this Dan guy. I don't remember ever meeting him."
"You didn't." I took a long drink from my beer. "He never came home with me. We didn’t really date. It was mostly physical, and it only lasted for four months."
Pete studied me. "That doesn't sound like your kind of thing."
"It wasn't. But he was the first gay guy I met after I moved back here. And I hadn't been with anyone for almost a year since Ethan left, and no strings attached sounded really good to me at the time."
"You had met me."
"Yeah, but at first I didn't know you were gay. And there was the matter of Luke."
I couldn't interpret the look on his face. "Hmm. Back to Dan. Tell me more about him."
"What, you want to do a psychological profile?"
"Why not?"
"Yeah, okay, why not?" I took another drink. "Okay. Dan Christensen. Tall, skinny, Teutonic looking. I guess he was Scandinavian. He joined the army right out of high school, was a medic and got assigned to Germany. He was in five years then was in a really bad car accident over there, had a head injury, developed a seizure disorder and had to take a medical discharge. He came back here, went to nursing school on the GI bill, worked at County in the ER for four years, then decided to do library school. He still worked in the ER to put himself through school, so it took him longer and he graduated a year after me. He got the librarian job at Cedars as soon as he graduated. I'd see him around campus until then, but haven't seen him at all for three years."
"So it's really odd that he sent you this letter."
"Yep."
"Okay. What was
he like?"
I sighed. "He was…hard to read. He could be funny and joke around, then something would set him off and he’d fly off the handle. He had a lot of tattoos and piercings and was adding to them all the time. We didn't see each other on the weekends because if he wasn't working he was at the leather bars in West Hollywood. I always thought that might be a phase, like he was still figuring out what it meant to him to be gay. He was smart, very intelligent, but he just did enough in school to get by. He said library school was just a hoop to jump through to get the piece of paper that said you were a librarian, and there wasn't any point in straining himself to do well, he'd get the same piece of paper that the rest of us had."
“So he could be a jerk.”
“Yeah. He didn’t have a lot of friends at school.”
"And you broke it off after your first semester."
"He broke it off. He wanted to try out the BDSM clubs, and I wouldn’t go with him, so he chose that over me. But in March I met Nick, and I got over it."
“Which one was Nick?”
“Film student. Wore his hair in a braid.”
“Oh, yeah. So how bad was Dan’s seizure disorder?"
"I don't really know. He took meds for it. I don't think he was supposed to drive, but he did. I never knew of him having any seizures when we were in school, at least."
"Hmm. His personality fits that of someone who’s had a head injury. The outbursts, the socially inappropriate behavior, the risk taking. And maybe, based on that note, paranoia."
"Could be.” I reminisced for a moment. “I remember him saying that he didn't miss the army because he had gotten tired of taking orders from asshole officers, and he wouldn't miss the ER because he was tired of taking orders from asshole doctors. So he wasn't good at subordination, even though he was a sub at the BDSM clubs. It didn't match."
"Which was probably one of the sources of his anger. Confusion. Cognitive dissonance. Self-hatred. Possibly consistent with the piercings."
"I'm sure. Also, his family had completely disowned him when he came back from Germany and told them he was gay. His parents were strict Baptists or something and didn't want to have anything else to do with him. And he always said that was no big deal, but he still lived in Glendale where he had grown up."
"Lots of contradictions there."
"Yeah. He was a complicated guy."
"So - why do you think he sent you this letter? Why would it matter that you're a UC librarian?"
"Because I have access to resources that other librarians don't? That's the only thing I can think of."
Our food came then, and we dug in and talked about other things. Pete had parked on the street at our apartments, and we said goodbye at his car.
Neither Kevin nor Abby were home yet. No surprise there. I got undressed and got a beer out of the fridge, sat on the sofa, booted up my laptop, and opened Google Translate. I spread Dan’s letter in front of me and typed the first citation, minus the names and date, into the “From: Detect Language” box. Immediately the box changed to “From: Welsh-detected,” and the translation read:
Does not stimulate human embryonic stem cells cultured with follicle stimulating hormone leads to the formation of ovum-like cells. Medical Journal
I compared it to the second citation from the letter. The words were similar, but the sentence was so scrambled it was impossible to make any sense from it. I copied and pasted the two article titles and compared them side by side.
Does not stimulate human embryonic stem cells cultured with follicle stimulating hormone leads to the formation of ovum-like cells.
Stimulation of cultured human embryonic stem cells with follicle stimulating hormone leads to formation of ovum-like cells.
I leaned back and regarded the citations for a minute. The first one was like a jigsaw puzzle, or one of those jumble word games they put in the newspaper. I just needed to unscramble it. I started lining up phrases that matched, and finally had an order that made a little sense:
Stimulate cultured human embryonic stem cells with follicle stimulating hormone does not leads to the formation of ovum-like cells.
A couple of grammatical fixes later, I had:
Stimulation of cultured human embryonic stem cells with follicle stimulating hormone does not lead to formation of ovum-like cells.
I looked at the title from the second article again. The titles were identical, except for one word. Not. The first researchers found that their procedure didn’t work, and the second group found that it did. That didn’t sound unusual. Medical research was changing all the time. One week coffee was bad for you, the next week good for you. Why would this be any different?
I failed to see the mystery in this. What was Dan thinking?
At any rate, there wasn't anything else I could do about it tonight. And I was really tired. I saved the citations to Dropbox, shut down my laptop, and got ready for bed.
Once I was in bed, though, I couldn't go to sleep. My brain wouldn't shut down. Thoughts of Pete, Dan, and the letter kept swirling through.
For the first time since we’d dated, Pete and I were both single at the same time. Did he want to get back together? Did I? I didn’t think so. My latest boyfriend, Scott, had broken up with me while I was in the hospital two weeks ago. I was beginning to consider becoming a monk. They have libraries in monasteries, don’t they? I purposely hadn’t gotten very attached to any guy since Ethan so that when they left me, as I knew they would, it wouldn’t hurt. But the routine was getting old. I didn’t think I could maintain the detachment with Pete, and when he left me it would hurt a lot. So I just couldn’t go there.
I rolled from my side to my back, stared at the ceiling and thought about Dan. Was he just paranoid, and his death a weird coincidence? Or did he have reason to be paranoid? And why would he send the letter to me? Why make a dying request of someone you hadn’t contacted for years? Why not ask another medical librarian? I knew every history librarian in California; Dan had to know at least a few other medical librarians. Surely one of them would be better equipped to solve this puzzle than I would.
Maybe he had sent the letter to other people as well. But how would I know?
History has two functions: serving as a record of what happened and analyzing why it happened. I didn’t know why Dan sent me the letter, but I did have what he sent me. Two titles, separated by one word. On the surface, there was nothing suspicious about that. So if the answer to why wasn’t in the titles, maybe it was in the text of the articles.
That gave me a plan of action. Tomorrow, I’d look for the full text of the articles. If I was right in speculating that Dan had sent the letter to me because I was a UC librarian, then I’d put the power of the UC library system to work.
With that settled, I drifted off to sleep.
Wednesday May 30
I was feeling pretty good the next morning, and went for a swim before work. I had three goals in mind for the day. First, I had to finish going through the mail and get the interlibrary loan materials delivered. It wasn’t necessary to do that in person, but it was a good way for me to keep in touch with the history faculty, to remind them that they had their own subject librarian at their disposal. That took most of the morning, and it wasn’t until almost 11:00 that I was able to focus on my second goal: finding the full text of the citations Dan had given me.
I opened up our citation linker and typed in the second title first. It popped up, but only the abstract was available to me. I read it; I was unsure of some of the jargon, but it looked like a typical medical research article. For the full text, I needed a separate log in for the biomedical library, which I didn’t have.
I went back to the citation linker and typed in the first title, first in English and then in Welsh. No hits on either. So I was going to have to visit the biomed library.
I let Dr. Loomis know where I was going, and headed south. UCLA’s hospital and medical school complex is spread across the south end of campus, and the Research Libra
ry is at the north end, so it’s a nice walk. I went in the biomedical library and found the reference desk. I was glad to see Karen Lewis there. At least I knew her a bit. We’d served on a couple of committees together, and she’d always been cooperative. She spotted me and waved.
“Jamie Brodie! We are graced with the presence of the humanities!”
I laughed. “Social sciences, to be exact. Got a minute?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
I laid my printout of the two citations, including the translation of the Welsh title, in front of her. “I’ve got a little mystery to clear up, and I need the full text of these. Google Translate gave me the English version of this title, or at least a reasonable facsimile. The language is Welsh.”