by Clea Simon
That didn’t make the walk any less unnerving. The buzzing of the lights and the cool click as they turned off behind her left Dulcie with the impression that she was being followed. Once she even stopped and turned, expecting to see a figure in the shadows behind her, her inability to make out anything in the darkness spooking her further still. Almost, she felt, someone was lurking back there, hanging back. But try as she might, she couldn’t see anything in the recesses of the tunnel – and to return, in order to reactivate the lights, would simply have prolonged the trip.
Instead, she walked on, the sound of her footsteps drowned in the hum of the fluorescents overhead. ‘Utility A.’ She didn’t know where that was, but the reminder next to it – ‘Library,’ with an arrow – was heartening. Behind her, a soft click as the lights went dark.
Like any unwitted Hare in a trap, she was caught, her limbs clasped tight about her heaving sides by the Treacherous Beast, as her Lungs gasped out for liberty as essential as the very Air. No matter her desperate struggle, ’twas too late.
No, she was not going to think of that passage. Nobody was coming up behind her. Nobody was about to grab her. Nobody—
‘Dulcie!’ A hand on her shoulder. Holding her.
She screamed.
THIRTY-NINE
‘I’m sorry!’ Kyle stepped back, wide eyed, his hands raised. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘Kyle.’ Dulcie could have collapsed with relief. As it was, she reached out for the wall, its white paint smooth beneath her hand. ‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘I gather! I wasn’t sure it was you, or I would’ve called your name.’ He pointed back down the passage. ‘I was just coming from the utility room and I saw you up ahead – at least, I was pretty sure it was you.’
The click. She’d thought it was the lights.
‘I came down here through the conservation lab,’ she explained. ‘I didn’t realize there were so many entrances.’
‘There are a bunch.’ He pointed to another, labeled ‘Storage.’ ‘Some of them are blocked off now, but it used to be that you could get anywhere through these tunnels. Now we basically use them for maintenance work.’
She looked at him. The red-haired guard was dressed in his uniform coat and tie. ‘Not that kind of maintenance,’ he said. ‘We got the OK to turn the ventilation on level three back on, but there was a question about whether the circuits needed to be re-set. So they sent me, the errand boy.’
‘At least you’re back at work.’
‘Yeah, I guess.’ He didn’t sound pleased. ‘So, you’re going up to the library?’
‘That general direction.’ She shrugged, unsure of how much to share. ‘I was curious to see how much damage has been done. The leaks and the break in.’
He nodded. ‘It is something. You’re on three, right? We’ve pretty much cleaned that up. It’ll be a while before the smell goes away.’
She looked at him, waiting.
‘Mold,’ he said, his voice low. ‘Not the books – don’t worry – but they took down some walls and found rooms that have been there since the climate control system was added, at the very least.’
‘Did you find anything there?’
‘Tons of old plumbing. A coal shovel.’ He shook his head. ‘Some ancient insulation. You know what we didn’t find, though?’
She waited.
‘Rats.’ He shivered. ‘I was drafted to help haul away the trash, of course. My father says maybe we got lucky. He thought he saw a cat – must be a stray or something. At any rate, it seems that rat invasion we feared isn’t going to happen.’
‘Your father was there?’ She stopped walking and turned to look at Kyle.
‘Well, yeah.’ He looked at her as if she had sprouted a second head. ‘He is the head of facilities, why?’
‘Nothing.’ Dulcie kept walking. If she were right, then Stuart Truckworth might have already found Jeremy’s hideaway. If only she knew what they were looking for. ‘Can you show me where you took the walls down?’
‘You sure?’ He looked her up and down. ‘It’s pretty filthy down there.’
She took in her coat and jeans. Nothing that wasn’t washable. ‘Yeah, I’m sure.’
‘OK, then.’ He pushed open a door marked simply ‘Utilities’ and held it while Dulcie passed through. Right away, she saw the difference. If these walls had ever been painted white, that paint had long since gone grey, while the roughness of the floor was accentuated by shadows flung by the bare bulbs that had replaced the cool fluorescents. Kyle didn’t seem deterred, however, and had grown almost chummy as he led the way into the darkness.
‘Hey, did you see the report on spring training?’ he asked, bobbing along ahead of her.
‘No, how are the Sox looking?’ Dulcie had lived with Chris for long enough now that she knew the right noises to make. And so as Kyle went on about some pitcher – or perhaps it was a shortstop? – she found herself watching her footing and mulling over what he had told her. The newly exposed rooms were filthy, Kyle had said, and the hall he was leading her through was already noticeably dirtier. But Jeremy, as far as she could recall, had always been clean. Threadbare, yes, but presentable. Dulcie wasn’t sure his presence in the library would have been tolerated if his hygiene had been slack. Of course, that didn’t mean much. If a person were conscientious, she supposed, he could clean up in any of the public bathrooms in the Square.
‘I’m thinking bleacher seats?’ Kyle turned toward her like he expected an answer. Like he was trying to be friendly. They had just passed a turn-off, taking the left branch at a fork, the option that seemed to Dulcie to be even darker and danker than the right.
‘I’ll ask Chris,’ she responded, trying not to look too closely at the walls around them – or to think about Kyle and his changeable moods. As her companion strode on, his long strides keeping her on the edge of breathlessness, Dulcie told herself that he knew where he was going. That he was, indeed, a friend.
The presence of Stuart Truckworth might have meant nothing, either. As Kyle had pointed out, his father was the director of facilities and maintenance. Perhaps it made sense for him to be on site for a project this big. Besides, she thought with a growing sense of relief, if Truckworth had found what he was looking for, then there would have been no reason to trash Griddlehaus’s reading room only a few hours ago. No, she told herself, these storage rooms might reveal some interesting clues – but none of them were likely to be Jeremy Mumbleigh’s secret home.
If, she reminded herself as Kyle rambled on, the scrawny scholar had a secret home at all. Dulcie had let her fancy run away with her before. She had done it just now, when she had thought that Kyle’s hand was the grip of a demon or assassin. As much as she loved her novels, she had to remember that in the light of day – or under those bare bulbs – things were most likely just what they seemed.
FORTY
Dulcie felt her pulse begin to race as she followed Kyle through the tunnel. Her expectations grew as they climbed up into the library. When he picked up a flashlight and led her through a gap in the wall, her heart was in her mouth, along with a disturbing musty smell that had enveloped her as she followed him down another short passage. Then she remembered the excuse she had given the red-headed guard. He was, as she requested, showing her where the water main had burst open.
‘This is it,’ said Kyle, running his flashlight up and down the walls. Dirty brick made up the top half, the red-brown clay crumbling where moisture had seeped in. Dulcie could see where the trails of decay and mold had left a strange shimmer. Below the brick were huge, rough-cut stones. Foundation stones, she thought. This must be the lowest level of the library, maybe of any human involvement.
Although they were yards away from the tunnel, some ambient light had followed them into the enclosed space. Shadowy and dim, it illuminated enough so that Dulcie could see where she was stepping, although she needed the beam of Kyle’s flashlight to make out the details of the space. ‘At least wha
t we’ve found so far.’
‘Oh.’ Dulcie could hear the disappointment in her voice, but there wasn’t really much she could do about it. She should have expected the dirt floor, uneven and a bit muddy in the corner where the old pipe had leaked. The pile of detritus – some broken bricks, bits of metal, and a plastic bag of chips – were disheartening, too.
‘It’s so … dank.’ She couldn’t think of another word. It was that – the combination of dampness and dust – that convinced her that nobody lived here. Nobody could. Certainly not Jeremy who, for all his issues, seemed as fastidious as a feline.
‘Yeah, really.’ The red-haired guard kicked at a brick. ‘With all the leaks, the mold count must be through the roof. I don’t know why my father doesn’t just have these filled in.’
‘Is that an option?’ Dulcie looked at the guard with renewed interest. ‘Do you know why?’
Kyle shrugged. ‘He complains all the time about structural integrity, but then he insists on checking out each one of these we find. It’s like he’s a pack rat or something.’
Or a hound on a trail, Dulcie thought. Out loud, she posed another possibility. ‘Maybe he’s worried that if he closes one off, he’ll cut off access to another that will cause trouble.’
‘He worries, all right.’ The guard shrugged, sending the flashlight beam skittering.
Dulcie felt a stab of sympathy, though whether for the anxious manager or his moody son, she couldn’t tell.
‘What happened with your father?’ Dulcie asked, her voice soft. Something about the low lighting here made such a question possible. Maybe, she thought, because he would know that she couldn’t see his face as he answered.
‘You mean with my mom?’ She heard a sigh. ‘They split when I was so young. She always said he was haunted, but I don’t know more than that. And then he was so weird when I got out here. I don’t know.’
‘But he still loves you.’ She looked at him, barely able to make out his features in the gloom. ‘Wasn’t he trying to get the charges dropped?’
‘I’m still being investigated,’ he said. ‘Any clout my father might once have had, he’s not using it for me.’ He shrugged, and as he did, his flashlight lit up a pile of bricks.
‘What was that?’ Dulcie hadn’t been looking at the pile. Not directly, but she’d thought something had been reflected – or, no, sparkled when the flashlight hit it.
‘What was what?’ Kyle swung the light around. Another flash – silver in the dark.
‘There!’ Dulcie pointed. But as the lanky guard moved, the shadows shifted too.
‘Oh, hell!’ Kyle stepped back, bumping into Dulcie. ‘I thought they said there were no rats down here.’
‘I don’t think that was a rat.’ Dulcie started forward, only to find the guard’s arm in front of her, holding her.
‘Don’t, Dulcie.’ Kyle was pulling her back. ‘They bite.’
‘But we don’t know what that was.’ Kyle trained the light on the corner where a large crack had opened up.
‘It was probably only a shadow,’ he said. ‘Sorry if I spooked you.’
‘But you didn’t …’ Dulcie sighed. Whatever it was had gone. ‘Never mind.’
‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’ Kyle’s mood seemed to have shifted as well. ‘If you had been bitten … I mean, we shouldn’t be here.’
She had no heart to argue, and so she followed him out to where the repair crew had breached the library wall. She’d been planning on ditching him there so she could go back into the tunnels, but he put a stop to that.
‘No way, Dulcie.’ Back under the library lighting, he looked pale. ‘The flooding is going to get worse before it gets better. My father – well, he’s trying to control it, but there’s going to be more drilling tomorrow. They’re going to flush out the old steam tunnels so they can finally clean them up.’
She nodded and let him lead the way up the service stairs to the main floor. The only saving grace was that they came out in the hallway that led to the back entrance, and Kyle’s ID got them out the door without anyone stopping to question why she was in the building after hours.
‘Thanks, Kyle.’ She turned to thank the red-haired guard as he held the door open. ‘Are you heading home now?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve got too much work to do. Making up for lost time, you know.’ Dulcie might have been imagining it, but in the seconds before he ducked back inside, letting the door close behind him, she thought she saw something pass over his face. Something like fear.
FORTY-ONE
‘Kyle Truckworth knows something.’ Dulcie had picked up Chris’s call while walking home and was still relating the day’s events as she drew near their building. ‘He thinks his father is involved – he nearly said as much to me. I think his father is looking for Jeremy’s hideaway, and he’s got Kyle looking for it too.’
‘Dulcie, wait.’ Chris had been trying to cut in for several minutes now, Dulcie realized. Only she had had so much to tell him. ‘Dulcie, do you hear yourself?’
‘I do,’ she was quick to reply. ‘It’s all so logical. I can’t believe I didn’t see it.’
‘No. I mean what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘Look, I’m glad you picked up. I’m going out with some old high school friends later, and I was afraid we wouldn’t connect.’
Dulcie swallowed. She trusted Chris, she really did. Only she was lonely. And the way he was talking was making her feel more alone.
‘I understand that you’re sympathetic to Mumbles,’ he was saying. ‘I get that. And, OK, this guy Kyle is someone you know – someone you see in the library. But you don’t really know his whole story. He’s facing charges. Maybe that’s what’s got him worried. Maybe there’s a reason he’s scared. It doesn’t matter. None of it does, Dulcie. None of this has anything to do with you – with your work.’
‘That’s not true, Chris.’ She couldn’t believe he didn’t see it. ‘It has everything to do with my work – the thieves are after the same pages I am. I’m sure of it. And I think it may have something to do with the cat.’
As if on cue, Esmé mewed. Or, no – it was another call.
‘Hang on.’ She held the phone away from her face. ‘Never mind. It’s Lucy. I’ll call her back.’
‘Poor Lucy.’ Chris sounded mournful. ‘You have time for everybody but your mother. She misses you, you know.’
That mew again. Insistent.
‘I know.’ She knew her sigh would be audible in New Jersey. Still, talking to her mother just might be preferable to defending herself to her boyfriend when he was in this mood. ‘Maybe I should take this.’
‘You’re a good daughter,’ said Chris. That wasn’t what she had wanted. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow.’ Neither was that, but he was gone.
‘Lucy? Are you still there?’ Dulcie fished her keys out of her pocket and unlocked her door.
‘Where else would I be?’ When her daughter didn’t respond, Lucy kept talking, leaving Dulcie free to shed her coat and boots – and to grab Esmé who had come to greet her. ‘I’m worried about our last conversation. That I wasn’t clear.’
‘You don’t have to explain.’ Dulcie hefted the plump cat on to her shoulder and retreated to the living room. It would be easier to listen to Lucy’s explanations if she were sitting down. ‘I understand about the moon ceremony.’
‘No, it’s not that.’ Lucy paused, leaving Dulcie to wonder if her mother’s ramblings had made her unusually self-conscious. ‘It’s that I didn’t make my point. The point about the cat.’
‘The cat?’ It had to be coincidence. Cats were everywhere, and Lucy certainly knew of the feline who had begun to knead Dulcie’s lap.
‘Yes, the cat of moonlight,’ said Lucy. ‘The cat you’ve bonded with. The cat you found. You should follow that cat, Dulcie. That cat will save you both.’
FORTY-TWO
‘What do you want of me?’ She turned, eyes flashing, on He who had taken her. Under duress, he had forc
ed her halting steps further down the Shadow’d Passage, its very Darkness seeming to lend its cover to his nefarious purpose. Unable to protest, almost to even Breathe, she had proceeded as he brutally propelled her, through the umbra of that shade-bedecked Hall, along those familiar steps, and then into the room that once had been her Sanctuary, the home of her most secret Dreams and Aspirations. There, he had released his iron grip, permitting her first to partake of the cool, still air and then to turn upon him and to hazard that question on which all might depend. ‘What do you want of me?’ Willing herself not to allow her eyes to stray, not to with untrained gaze betray that very secret which she held most dear, she forced herself to hold his gaze. To stare into those deep green eyes, in which so much mystery remained …
‘Meh.’ Dulcie blinked awake to find herself confronted by green eyes. Round ones, with the distinctive feline iris of which she had grown so fond.
‘Esmé! Good morning.’ Dulcie sat up, discomfiting the cat on the pillow beside her. ‘Did you need me for something?’
The cat remained silent and began kneading.
‘Were you the reason I dreamed of those green eyes or …’ Dulcie let the question drop. For quite a while now, she had wondered about the significance of her dreams. Specifically about what they might or might not reveal about the author’s life – or her own connection to the novelist. While she hadn’t inherited Lucy’s green eyes, her mother often talked about how the mysterious color had been passed down the female line. Then again, she also talked about how her psychic abilities were matrilineal, too, so Dulcie wasn’t entirely sure how far to credit her mother’s sense of genetics.
Perhaps it was appropriate, then, that the little tuxedo ignored her query and concentrated on the pillow. If anything, Dulcie suspected, it was her way of saying that her human should emulate her industry.