by Clea Simon
Keeping her curiosity at bay, Dulcie followed the little clerk around to the back of the building. Sure enough, although two uniformed police were sitting in a cruiser by the rear entrance, neither stopped them as they came in. The guard, an older man Dulcie knew by sight, seemed somewhat flustered, but he watched them pass by.
‘You can’t – well, you know,’ he said. ‘The main floor and the stacks are closed.’
‘Of course,’ replied Griddlehaus, reaching behind him and pulling a small, nondescript key out of a nook in the wall. And before Dulcie could ask what that key was for, he led her off to the right where a closed door, with the word ‘Restricted’ painted on it, offered an unpromising sight. Black and dusty, it showed no sign of having been used recently – perhaps in years – and Dulcie wondered what kind of storage facility – mops, brooms, printer cartridges – it contained. As she started to ask, however, he had unlocked the door, giving it a slight shove with his shoulder.
‘After you, please,’ he said, standing back from the passage.
With a glance at her companion, Dulcie stepped through the darkened doorway, as the motion-sensitive lights flickered and went on.
‘Oh, my,’ she said, looking around. This was no storage closet. Instead, Dulcie found herself in a well-lit reading room, complete with leather chairs and a long wooden table that could function as a desk. Around the edges of the room, wooden shelves – so much nicer looking than the standard metal stacks – held a variety of volumes, and arching floor lamps added a warmer glow to the overheard fluorescents. Except for the lack of windows, it was as cozy a space as any in the main library.
‘What is this place?’ She stood and looked around as Griddlehaus removed his coat.
‘May I?’ He held out a hand for hers, and as she unbuttoned, he explained. ‘This is, now, one of the staff reading rooms. Formerly, it was an alternative entrance to the stacks. If you take a peek over by that floor lamp – yes, past the Aristotle – you may still be able to make out the outline of the old entrance.’
Dulcie gave him her coat and went to look. Sure enough, the wall was indented. A pedestal holding the bust of the philosopher made good use of the irregularity, which also held a low bookcase. Now that she was aware of it, Dulcie could see how the entire room was shaped like an anteroom or some kind of foyer.
‘Was this part of the duct work?’ She looked around, marveling. ‘I mean, for the air-conditioning?’
‘Oh, this quite predates that particular remodeling,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘My former colleague has always been rather budget conscious, you see. A hangover from his student days, I would assume.’
She looked around at the paneling and the floor-to-ceiling shelves. This room was a little jewel box. ‘Mr Griddlehaus, speaking of the old days, you were telling me of an earlier incident …’ She paused, curious but unwilling to push.
‘I should never have brought it up.’ He turned to her with a sigh. ‘You see, for years after, there was hope. Hope that all of the objects would be recovered.’
She waited, the question on her face.
‘I don’t know all the details,’ he continued. ‘But you already know the outline. One theory was that the books were never stolen at all. Simply misfiled – or misplaced, somewhere in library storage during the renovations. But there was also a theory that some very cunning thieves broke in, perhaps through the tunnels, what with all the construction work that was being done.’
‘Jeremy’s book.’ The realization hit Dulcie. ‘I mean, the book he was found with – He Could Not Tell Her.’
Griddlehaus nodded. ‘As I’ve said, many of the books were recovered, some of them still on university property, which lends credence to the possibility of misfiling, but it also led to speculation that the theft had been at least facilitated by somebody with access to otherwise restricted areas, hence my earlier reference to a so-called “inside job”. In fact, there was some talk that the Felix psalter that sold in January – well, the seller was able to provide a provenance – but there was some talk about other items in the same lot. Nothing came of it, of course, or we would have heard.’
‘How awful.’ Dulcie was aghast.
‘Not that unusual, I’m afraid.’ Griddlehaus leaned in. ‘We are not encouraged to talk about this, Ms Schwartz, but objects do go missing with some frequency. The bulk of them are found, of course. But not all.’
‘So that must be why there’s a task force?’
‘Lieutenant Wardley, of course.’ Griddlehaus cut her off. ‘He made his name with the so-called tunnel robbery. Well, within the university, of course. I don’t believe anyone was ever prosecuted, but his ability to keep the theft confidential was considered key to the retrieval of most of what was taken. Not that he seems to value books much.’
‘I guess he doesn’t have to for his job. As long as he understands how criminals think.’ Dulcie looked around. ‘This place is a wonder.’
Griddlehaus suddenly turned away and began taking papers from his leather holdall. ‘I hope it will suffice,’ he said. ‘I assumed that since your office was closed and we have been banned, however temporarily, from the stacks, such a refuge would be welcomed.’
‘It is.’ Dulcie smiled. ‘Thank you. I was just – I didn’t know this room existed.’
‘Not many do.’ He looked up, revealing his flush of pleasure. ‘This is one of the spaces we claimed for ourselves back, oh, not long after I came to work here.’
‘That’s right.’ Dulcie put her bag down but left it closed. Instead, she pulled up a chair opposite her friend, across the table. ‘You were telling me about that summer, only you never got to finish.’
‘Ah, that summer.’ Behind the large lenses, Griddlehaus’s eyes took on a dreamy look. ‘Yes, I originally saw the position as a temporary one. A way to fund what I believed would be my primary research.’
‘That was the summer you met Stuart Truckworth?’ Dulcie could imagine Thomas Griddlehaus as a young student. The clerk was still slight and his face had an open eagerness to it, despite his thinning hair and the oversized glasses that revealed the rings around his eyes. She was having a harder time with the facilities boss. He seemed like such a manager, with his khakis and gruff manner, the worry lines creasing his high forehead. She knew it was unfair, but Dulcie couldn’t help but see Truckworth as the kind of man who had been born middle-aged.
‘Why, yes,’ said Griddlehaus. ‘I gather he was in rather desperate straits, and there was so much that needed to be done.’ He paused. ‘I’m not sure if you know what was going on then, but the conversion to digital was primarily one of data entry. I had developed rather good typing skills from my own work and I had a decent working knowledge of the Dewey decimal system, and so that was where I was assigned.
‘It wasn’t the most thrilling work, I will confess,’ he said, his voice lowered a bit. ‘The work was more mindless than I had anticipated, merely copying what we had in the card catalog on to floppy discs. Of course, now we would simply scan a document.’ He waved his hand as if conjuring the magic. ‘And I do like to think I presented a more reliable alternative.’
‘Was Jeremy Mumbleigh part of all of this?’ Dulcie wasn’t clear on the timing, and so she wasn’t entirely surprised when Griddlehaus shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘He was firmly ensconced in his studies at that point. He’d made his mark the previous academic year, establishing the provenance of the Stavendish bequest, and the Dorchester Prize meant he didn’t have to scramble for work. I don’t believe he even taught that spring or summer.’
‘Wow.’ Dulcie tried to imagine it. Time to study and do your own research.
‘He was very happy.’ Griddlehaus sounded like he was caught up in his memories. ‘Quite gregarious. In a serious way, of course.’
‘Jeremy?’ Dulcie thought of the shy man. ‘Gregarious?’
‘Yes,’ Griddlehaus confirmed. ‘And really quite generous. He often had us over for pizza and beer. We’d sit up t
alking much of the night about books and provenance. He was so very excited about the Stavendish collection. I felt quite guilty for my role in what happened.’
‘Your role?’ Dulcie asked. ‘But – what did you do?’
‘Nothing explicitly to harm him, of course. But I was part of what was to come. You have to understand what was going on with the entire library system at that time, Ms Schwartz.’ He held her eye. ‘It was a complete overhaul. A modernization, if you will. The beginning of the contemporary library system as we know it. There was a great push in those days to adopt best library practices, not only in terms of handling data but also in new forms of care and preservation, and that really was what was behind the university’s decision to cull its collection. Not everything could be saved, you see. And with all the work that was being done, we were losing storage space – at least temporarily.’
He stopped there. They both knew what had happened.
‘The work was good,’ Griddlehaus said finally. ‘Necessary. By the end of the summer, in addition to the digitizing, the university had also begun overhauling the climate control that is so crucial to the care and preservation of so many of our materials. The library had been part of the university’s steam heat system for so long that to remove it – to disconnect from those antiquated steam tunnels – to give it its own circulatory system was a task as massive as – well, as a heart transplant. Or perhaps,’ he paused to consider his own metaphor, ‘a heart-lung transplant. At any rate, it was a monumental undertaking.
‘The air-conditioning crew, as HVAC was called back then, had the more demanding work. Physically, that is. It was a prime job for the larger types, those more capable of difficult labor, but still students.’ He stopped, clearly thinking back, but Dulcie could already see where this was headed.
‘Stuart Truckworth was on the crew?’ she asked.
‘Not only on it, but leading it,’ Griddlehaus confirmed. ‘No, not at first, of course. At first, he was simply a hired hand. You see, the installation required the emptying out of a good deal of storage space for the creation of ducts, tearing out insulation, moving large boxes, and what not. And at first, Stuart was simply an able-bodied young man capable of lifting those boxes. But he was, by all accounts, a hard worker, and he seemed to have some luck. By August, he was leading a team. When September came around, he was hired on as special contractor – a concession, I gather, to his lack of formal engineering training. I don’t believe he ever studied literature again.’
EIGHTEEN
Dulcie couldn’t remember the last time she had heard Griddlehaus talk for so long or in such detail. Even after he fell silent, apparently stunned by his own garrulity, she found herself caught up in questions.
‘Did you two fall out?’ asked Dulcie, narrowing them down to one.
‘What?’ Griddlehaus looked up, and she realized she had interrupted him. ‘Oh, well, not really. Stuart was really quite focused on learning the job back then. Whereas I …’ He paused to push his glasses up on his nose, a move Dulcie recognized as a sign of the little man’s shyness. ‘I was much more of a bon vivant. And now, if you don’t mind, Ms Schwartz, I really must focus on the work at hand.’
As much as Dulcie wanted to follow up on that intriguing lead, she caught herself. She had pushed a very private man out of his comfort zone.
Besides, she realized as she watched her companion huddle over a sheaf of papers, she had work to do too. Although she was in no way responsible for the hubbub that had gotten her kicked out of the library this morning, the reality was that she had now spent the greater part of the day unproductively.
‘Well, unproductive in terms of my dissertation, anyway,’ she said softly. Griddlehaus did not look up, but Dulcie couldn’t help thinking back to the cat she had seen – the cat she had found and which the experts might have overlooked were it not for her. That curve had done it – not a long snouty-type face, but the kind of pert feline profile that a Siamese might have. That, in fact, her dear Mr Grey had had. And those whiskers – slashes of silver – had the same long and graceful drape.
It was as if she had found Mr Grey – or some centuries-old depiction – hidden in the folds of an ancient manuscript.
‘My author would have liked that,’ Dulcie said to herself. In fact, she reminded herself, the passage she had been working on had referred to something hidden – a ‘secret Store’ where a manuscript could be hidden ‘safe from prying eyes.’
There it was: the idea of safety again, of concealment. The concept wasn’t unusual. Along with demons and ghosts, Gothic novels loved the motif of a hidden compartment. Some of that, Dulcie knew, was because so many English manors had such places – ‘priest holes’ – that had hidden if not actual priests then at least the sacraments that had to be concealed during the years of religious upheaval. Some of it, contemporary scholars had theorized, had deeper psychological roots. We all have a need for secrets, women authors and readers – the people who established the Gothic genre and kept it alive – perhaps more than most. More than a century later, Virginia Woolf would discuss the need for ‘a room of one’s own,’ in order to write or even to think freely. For an author like the one Dulcie was studying, that room might just be a hidden compartment in the wall of a library.
It might even, she thought, be inside a book itself. That cat had cheered her, helping her recover from the conservator’s bombshell – that the work she was studying – the very pages she was working so hard to decipher – had been used as filler. Paper stuffing to fill a back board and keep another, more important work safe. Yes, she knew that valuable works had been treated this way before. Only she couldn’t help but take it personally. And knowing Griddlehaus had known – and that he had kept this knowledge from her – amplified the shame. She was, she thought, a literary trash picker.
‘But you found me … ’ The voice came so clear that Dulcie looked up, expecting to see a stranger had entered the room. But no, her only companion was still Griddlehaus, and the little librarian remained hunched over his papers. He might even – Dulcie tried to peer around those big glasses – be asleep.
‘You found me in my hiding place.’ The voice was unmistakable, and Dulcie smiled.
‘Yes, I did.’ She kept her voice soft, barely enunciating the words. Not that it mattered. Clearly her spectral pet could understand her thoughts as well as her spoken words. ‘I saw you on that page, or one of your forebears – forekittens?’
‘Forepaws.’ The voice had a bit of a rumble in it: the hint of a purr, or perhaps a laugh. ‘As you’ve done before.’
The memories came flooding back. Mr Grey had been little more than a kitten. It had been a rainy night. Pouring actually, and she and Suze had been hurrying back to their dorm room, the pizza box they were carrying growing increasingly sodden with each block. Dulcie wasn’t sure what it was that had made her turn and look. They were passing an old triple-decker, its wooden stairs rotted through, when she saw him. Half under the stairs, taking shelter beneath a broken riser, he had looked more like a scrawny rat than a feline.
‘Come on,’ Suze had said. Her room-mate hadn’t wanted to make the pizza run and had only come out at Dulcie’s urging. ‘The pepperoni is going to float off.’
‘Wait,’ said Dulcie. ‘There’s something under there.’
‘Don’t!’ Suze had been alarmed. ‘It may bite!’ But as Dulcie had reached for the small, wet creature he had come out to greet her.
‘Dulcie.’ She blinked. No, he hadn’t spoken to her. Not like that, but this was now, and she was hearing him.
‘What?’ She asked the air.
‘You valued me then, small and discarded. You knew … ’ The voice was beginning to fade. Dulcie told herself it didn’t matter. She had gotten Mr Grey’s message: to uncover a treasure, even in the trash. To find value hidden away in a dirty corner. These were good things, traits to be prized. She would not think less of the novel she was assembling just because somebody else had used it as binding m
aterial. Instead, she would try to be grateful that these pages had been saved for her to study and, some day, for other readers to share.
With new determination, she opened her laptop and started to read through what she had written. She had time and a quiet place to work, thanks to her friend. She would honor that by doing the work she was made for. And not by bothering Griddlehaus with more questions.
‘Thank you, Mr Grey,’ she said. But the air had changed. He had left, she could tell. She was alone in the reading room with the librarian, who was now working away, the sound of pen on paper reminiscent of the gentle scrabbling of claws.
NINETEEN
That traitor Tear, so quick to flee her uncertain Eye, was just as swiftly whisked away. Though it sprang forth with intent, slipping the bonds of lashes and of Will, that erring Drop could not betray, its passage fleeting as cloud before the moon, obstructing even in its ephemeral presence only the briefest shades of light, and yet its Mark remained, its passage recorded e’er so briefly upon the paper like her Footstep on a Virgin Shore. Albeit like those very Marks to fade, to wash away not in lapping Tides but in their Lack, drying to an Absence, a mere Echo of those waves. The Page before her Warped in Memory so slight, for though she could yet Perceive the imprint it would serve only for her Eyes, a Memory, like the great Bark that had carried her and her own Safe unto these Shores, so too her Secret store would prove the vessel of Deliverance, bringing to a Future port these very Words …
‘These very words …’ Staring at the page, Dulcie tried to focus, conscious all the while of her companion, who still seemed to be quite absorbed in his own papers.
If only she could focus like that. Dulcie didn’t like to think of the time she’d spent in the conservators’ workshop as wasted. Didn’t want to think about how the revelation about her pages had derailed her – or nearly so. If it hadn’t been for that mark – the silver cat …