The Book of Common Dread

by Brent Monahan

  "You'll have to call for him out on the walks," the policeman said. The nightstick lowered to his side.

  DeVilbiss brushed himself off again, this time dramatically. "I'm not going to call him at all, Officer," he said, with injury in his voice. "He can jolly well freeze to death for all I care."

  The officer labored to hold back a smile. It was precisely what DeVilbiss had hoped for. Character role accomplished, he turned his back and walked with a dignified pace toward Nassau Street. He counseled himself that the best thief in the world would not have anticipated such an elaborate security system, that even despite this his foray had not been a total disaster. He had learned that he needed a key and an alarm access code… or a person who had both. As he rounded the corner onto the sidewalk his eyes fixed on the huge library. His next offensive would be foolproof.

  CHAPTER THREE

  December 14-15

  Thou hast power until the word is spoken; then it gains mastery over thee.

  -Saki, Bustan, ch. 7 (ca. 1252)

  Simon parked the borrowed pickup truck in front of the mansion and just stared. The whole of West Princeton was mildly obscene in its affluence. The average house sat on an acre and a half, had twelve rooms, three full baths, and three chimneys and went on the market at three quarters of a million dollars. The Vanderveen house was larger than average. Like most of the manses in the area, it had been built at the turn of the century and was more impressive for its size than its aesthetics. If his eclectic memory served him, Simon remembered this particular style as Federal Greek Revival, defined by Doric-columned pediments, white stucco exterior walls, half-moon-topped, ceiling-to-floor windows, and cracked, clay-footed pots awaiting summer planting.

  Darkness had begun to claim the cold earth. A bluish tint washed across the dusting of snow on the lawns. Simon glanced at his watch. Not even five o'clock. It was no wonder so many people became despondent around the winter solstice. He had once browsed a copy of Smithsonian that touched on the physiological effects of lack of light. Winter depression now had a clinical name-Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD for short. Scientists had recently discovered that humans need a minimal amount of natural light striking the eye's retina in order to suppress the release of a depressant hormone called melatonin. Maybe that was what Tommy Wheeler, the night guard at the library, had needed. Simon had been shocked at his suicide. Tommy had enthusiastically shared plans for his retirement with Simon only a week before. Maybe he had gotten bad news about his health. Now Tommy was part of the high December suicide statistic. Simon gathered up the sheets of notebook paper that lay on the passenger's seat and climbed out.

  It was difficult to imagine that this entire house was inhabited by one person. Simon found it even more difficult to picture Frederika as its mistress. It was a masculine dwelling, like a temple for a male deity. Her father had also lived in it alone, but that seemed proper. Frederik A. Vanderveen III, after all, had been something of an earthbound god. Simon vaguely recalled his death, sometime just before Simon had graduated. Vanderveen held an endowed chair at the university, which meant that his teaching load was minimal. As with Joyce Carol Oates in the program in creative writing, one of the main purposes of his appointment had been to enhance the already awesome prestige of the institution. Nominally a full professor in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, he had spent far more of his time on meridian-chasing jets. His expertise was in world hunger and its relief He had been for a time the United States' representative on the Council of FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. He had also served as a longtime advisor for Oxfam. His obituary had listed a spate of honorary degrees. The Daily Princetonian and the Princeton Packet had both expended great quantities of ink in praising the man and deploring his untimely death from a massive heart attack. From the cemetery marker, Simon remembered his age as merely fifty. Your basic beloved humanitarian and superhero, Simon thought, as he passed under the shelter of the massive portico.

  Simon noted that the house held no sign of the holiday season, not so much as a wreath on the front door. He reflected that it would have cost a small fortune in wreaths, lights, garlands, or whatever to turn this somber structure into a festive home. He rapped with the brass door knocker. A cough sounded from a distance within and then another, closer. Frederika opened the door. She wore jeans and a turtleneck pullover under an Icelandic sweater. A mid-length leather coat hung from her hand, dragging on the floor.

  Simon thrust forward the sheets of paper, like a teenager presenting his first prom corsage. "The translation."

  "Thank you." Frederika folded the pages carelessly with one hand and stuffed them into her pants pocket. "Let me help you with your things."

  "No, don't," Simon said. "You'd better not come outside with that cold."

  "It's okay," she insisted. "Anyway, I have to show you your entrance." She dug into her opposite pocket and took out a shiny key.

  "This is a furnished room, isn't it?" Simon asked. "Because I put my furniture in one of those public storage places."

  Frederika pressed the key into Simon's hand. "It's furnished." She pulled on her coat and headed for the pickup.

  Simon followed at a slower pace. His buddy, Neil, had made no mention of a separate entrance. Then again, Simon had no reason to suspect he would have free run of the place. He reminded himself to have no expectations, that the more he remained an aloof observer of Frederika Vanderveen the happier he would emerge from the episode.

  Frederika lowered the pickup's tailgate and hefted Simon's thirty-five-pound television set, one of the variety the Madison Avenue ad men had facetiously dubbed "portable."

  "No, that's too heavy for you!" Simon exclaimed.

  Frederika shot him a withering glance. "Do I look like I'm made of porcelain?"

  She looked precisely like that to him, but he made no further comment and let her stagger with the television toward the house and around its side, to the bottom of a steep set of iron stairs. There she set down her burden, to rest her arms. Simon lowered the pile of clothing he carried, surveying the climb. He studied the large wing over which the stairway ran. The walls were largely of glass, but draperies cloaked the inside from view.

  "Living room?" Simon inquired.

  "Ballroom," Frederika answered.

  Simon made no effort to conceal his awe.

  Frederika gamely hauled the television up the stairs to a balcony above the ballroom. Simon saw that the large room had an enormous skylight incised into its roof. No light came through its twelve panes, whose upper surfaces had not been washed in years. Just beyond the balcony rail, a downspout hung precariously from the wall, unattached to the gutter. Up close, Frederik Vanderveen's temple was not quite so impressive. The taxes on the place had to be close to Frederika's take-home pay. It seemed a Jumbo-sized white elephant. No wonder she accepted boarders from time to time, Simon thought.

  "I had the lock changed today," Frederika informed him. "The girl who last rented from me never returned her key."

  "That's very thoughtful," Simon acknowledged.

  Frederika looked as if she had more to say, but instead covered another cough with the back of her hand.

  Simon pushed the key into the lock and opened the door. "Thanks for your help, but I can bring in the rest of the stuff. You really should stay inside."

  Frederika lugged the television into the room and lowered it to the floor. She turned on the light and stepped aside. Simon entered. The room was of modest size and furnished with modern, utilitarian furniture. No antiques, no gigantic four-poster bed, as Simon had imagined. But it looked clean enough.

  "This was the nanny's room," Frederika revealed, moving to the opposite side of the bedroom. "The bathroom's out this door and to the right. It's all yours."

  "We didn't say anything about kitchen privileges," Simon pointed out.

  "Whatever you eat you bring in yourself. If you use the pots and pans, clean them immediately. You can
use the washer and dryer if you're neat."

  She spoke in a hurried monotone, as if annoyed at the trade he had engineered and anxious to be done with him. He felt like a transient in a flophouse, but he said, "Sounds fair to me."

  Frederika walked out the hall doorway. "Good night."

  Simon returned the wish, watching her departure with appreciation. Her blue jeans were not of the skin-grafted variety. She did not require the obvious to mesmerize. Simon reminded himself that having this room for a time was like viewing the shark at the aquarium. Totally safe, so long as he resisted diving into the tank.

  Frederika was twenty-four years old. That was one of perhaps a dozen facts Simon knew about her. She had gone directly from a Swiss boarding school to Vassar. She had held a few jobs in the Boston area directly after school, then returned to Princeton, where she had not lived since she was ten. She had worked at an entry-level position in the Firestone Library for a bit more than two years. The job had been offered to her, it was rumored, by a forty-seven-year-old assistant dean with whom she had slept, but Simon doubted that a mid-level administrator in Arts and Sciences had much hiring influence in Simon's corner of the campus. That she had slept with another member of the faculty Simon was sure, but the gossip mongers set the total in double digits. The same tongue-waggers had singled out prominent men in the town as well. All shared the characteristics of being at least ten years her senior, influential and self-assured. Most, it was rumored, had been one-night stands. The difference between Simon's precept-class lover and Frederika was that apparently the reference librarian wanted little tangible from any man. The longest relationship Simon knew of was with his friend, Professor Neil Yoskin, and that, by Neil's reckoning, had lasted six weeks. Simon credited the extra weeks to the psychologist's professional Id-handling skills. In every case, to Simon's knowledge, Frederika had been the one who ended the relationship. Simon had heard her called every manner of name, by envious and judgmental women and by men who despaired of receiving even her invariably fleeting attention. Slut, tramp, whore, bitch, and nymphomaniac were all epithets that people had attached to her behind her back. Neil's term was "vamp." He meant it not as an old-fashioned euphemism but in the original meaning of "vampire." She had an unquenchable hunger, he observed, that compelled her to drain attention and affection from each man as quickly as she could, then move calmly on to the next. He judged it "an infectious sickness," one that deeply scarred every man she touched.

  To her credit (and also unlike Simon's coed lover), Frederika Vanderveen had never been "the other woman"; all of the men she beguiled had been unmarried at the time. Simon had pressed his friend for his opinion on what caused her notorious behavior, but Neil had been professionally close-mouthed about her, even though she had not been his patient. It was obvious that the psychologist bore his particular collection of permanent scars. Neil did volunteer his certainty that it had something to do with her father. Whenever Neil had tried to unzip her mind, she became sullenly defensive and ultimately silent. She wanted nothing of his healing art.

  Great beauty, great pain, and great mystery. The proximity of it gave Simon a vicarious thrill. He realized just how boring and lonely his own existence was, how stagnant he had become while quietly waiting for the purpose of his life to find him.

  Simon walked to the door that connected his room with the rest of the Vanderveen house. He put his hand to the knob but changed his mind and left it open. He stared out at the barren, white hallway wall for a moment, then turned for the outside door, to finish relocating his things.

  ***

  Simon had been thinking about Frederika when the phone call came into his office. It was hardly a coincidence. He had thought about her fifty times before lunch. When he had left his rented room, he found no sign of her. The kitchen was spotlessly clean, with not even the lingering smells of food or coffee. He wondered if she took breakfast out or just skipped it. The library wasn't open at that hour. Perhaps she went out for a morning walk. He hadn't heard her coughing. He wondered if her cold was better. He had not seen her when he performed his morning ritual in front of the Reference area. He worried where she was. And on and on throughout the morning.

  Simon half-shifted his attention to the phone, lifting the receiver and muttering his name into it.

  "I deserve better than this," Lynn's voice came through. A controlled but furious edge was in it.

  "You probably do," Simon answered.

  "Not probably. Definitely. You shit."

  "Look, did you read my letter? It's all-"

  "Yes, I read your letter," Lynn interrupted. "The relationship was going nowhere because you're going nowhere."

  "Possibly. At any rate, neither of us is really happy."

  "You won't be happier just because you leave me. You'll see: six months from now you'll be twice as miserable. I'll be happier."

  "Then it'll still be for the good."

  Lynn sighed. "Simon, don't you understand that someone has to push you? Somebody's got to be the heavy, since you're clearly incapable of it yourself."

  Simon looked around the office self-consciously. Mercifully, neither Dr. Gould nor Reverend Spencer had yet caught the distressed tone in his near-whispers. "No, I don't see that."

  "Where are you staying?"

  "With someone on the university staff," he evaded.

  "Thanks for being so goddamned considerate. Half the living room's missing, and I have to run out in the dead of winter and buy a bathrobe. You couldn't wait until after the holidays to walk out?"

  "I just thought-"

  "Bullshit. You didn't think at all. For example, what is tonight?"

  Simon felt himself clearly on the defensive. The heat was pouring off his forehead. In another second the sweat would start to bead. "Tonight?"

  "I knew it. The J and J Christmas party, remember? My biggest account, and you want me to go alone."

  "I'm sorry. Can't you get a date? Barry?" Simon suggested.

  "Right. And I explain to him what you've just done. It's one-thirty, Simon. The party's in six-and-a-half hours."

  It was precisely what Simon had hoped to avoid. Instead of a clean, postmortem-free break, he was going to be subjected to a full evening of rancor and recrimination. "I'm really sorry, Lynn. If you need me to go I will."

  "Thanks so very much."

  "What time should I be over?" He hoped to God she wouldn't offer to pick him up, since he didn't own a car. The Vanderveen mansion would have her playing twenty questions with a vengeance.

  "Seven-thirty. That'll make us fashionably late."

  "I'll see you then."

  "Simon."

  "Yes?

  "Try to dress like you're somebody."

  The phone went dead. Simon exchanged the receiver for an original edition of Thomas a Kempis's Imitation of Christ. The retreat backward five hundred years was sorely needed.

  ***

  When Simon opened the inner door of his rented bedroom, he found the hallway dark. Light reflected faintly from downstairs, and the aroma of cooking pasta wafted up. He descended the curving oak staircase, nodding his respect at the long line of ancestral portraits. There were seven (all men), with Frederik the Third's, at the bottom, the largest. Kitchen light spilled along the central hall onto the foyer's Carrara marble floor. Simon followed it back toward its source.

  Frederika stood at the restaurant-sized stove, fishing a strand of spaghetti from a pot of boiling water. She turned as Simon entered. Her face was the color of the pasta.

  "Are you feeling okay?" he asked.

  "No, not really," Frederika replied, nasally. She tossed the spaghetti strand against the tile that backed the stove. It stuck.

  "I didn't see you at the library today," Simon observed, offhandedly.

  Frederika lifted the pot from the flames and dumped the contents into a colander in the sink. The steam gushed upward, and she lowered her face toward it. Without turning toward Simon, she said, "I had some Christmas shopping to d
o, so I took the day off. You're not the mother hen type, are you?"

  "No. Sorry."

  Frederika kept her face lowered. She inhaled the steam noisily, through a partially blocked nose. Simon was about to comment on that and her pale color but thought better of it. "You look quite handsome," she said, head still down.

  Simon glanced at himself. He wore the black velvet dinner jacket Lynn had given him the previous Christmas, along with a matching bow tie, a good cut of black woolen pants, and patent leather evening pumps. "Dinner party in New Brunswick," he explained. "Obligations."

  "You'll be out late?" she asked, finally looking at him again.

  Simon smiled. "Now who's the mother hen?"

  Frederika raised an imperious eyebrow.

  "I'll be home by one," he said. "I know… it's a school night."

  Frederika's laugh, although hoarse, was a strong, happy sound. "Have fun."

  Simon took one last look at her, then retreated.

  The walk across Princeton was a cold one. Simon had been unable to find his earmuffs, and the wind had his ears stinging a quarter mile from Hodge Road. He drew his greatcoat up tightly and plunged on. He found himself in front of the cemetery. He started across it, thinking of the night he had seen Frederika standing before her father's grave. He still had no idea what the significance was. Nor could he imagine how just renting a room in her house might shed any light. In the bleak night, with wisps of snow circling them, the grave markers were all the more soul-chilling.

  Simon's teeth chattered lightly as he knocked on Lynn's door. It opened almost immediately, swinging inward with force. Lynn appeared, looking attractive in a full-length lame party gown. She smiled grimly; her right hand remained on the doorknob.

  "Right on time," she said. "Punctuality is one of your few virtues."