Stephen L. Carter

by New England White

  And then she had it.

  Five months meant five numbers and letters in the combination.

  She punched 2, 2, C, 7, 3. The light turned green. A metallic click, wet and heavy in the chilly silence. She pulled the handle, and the massive door swung easily in her grasp.

  CHAPTER 58

  AUTOMATIC LEVELING

  (I)

  THE LIGHTS WERE OFF, but she had armed herself with a flashlight from the librarian’s desk. The windows in this part of the building were barred, too, and they gave on the parking lot, so, if she switched on the overheads, her chances of being spotted were not insignificant. She swung the beam through the darkness. It glittered off glass display cases holding valuable books and holograph documents, a touch she found amusing, given that nobody was allowed here. The elevator stood at the back of this weird little museum, an ordinary-looking door with a diamond-shaped glass window and a worn brass panel with one cracked plastic button and two lights: IN USE and NOT IN USE. The NOT IN USE light glowed faintly. One entered the elevator by opening the door manually, grabbing a handle, and sliding the gate aside. A silly system, hopelessly antiquated, but Claire Alvarez had not yet raised the money for the renovation. Closing all these contraptions behind her, Julia hesitated just a few seconds before pressing the button for the second sub-basement, where, according to Suzanne de Broglie, nobody ever went. Somewhere high up in the stacks, a motor whooshed and groaned. As the elevator creaked into motion, she thought she heard another sound, out in the workroom, but nobody could be there. The alarm would have sounded. She looked around the narrow elevator car. In her own student days, this part of the library had been part of the main stacks, accessible to anyone with a university identification. She remembered riding this same elevator to this same basement on another winter night, probably more nervous then than now, chasing down the great Lemaster Carlyle, eight years her senior, who had said he would be working late.

  After due deliberation, and a screaming argument with Tessa, she had decided to allow him to seduce her. Always impulsive, she had acted at once, and if he was in the library, well, then, the library would have to do—

  Pay attention to business, she ordered herself sternly, for that was a thousand lifetimes ago. She licked her lips. The elevator was very slow. A peeling red-and-white sticker at eye level warned the unwary: THIS CAR IS NOT CAPABLE OF AUTOMATIC LEVELING. EXERCISE EXTREME CAUTION WHEN EXITING. Great. If I were the kind of person who exercised extreme caution, I wouldn’t be here in the first place.

  Clutching her briefcase with both hands to try to make them stop shaking, Julia Carlyle rode downward, watching the floors creak by on the other side of the gate, and experienced for an awful instant the illusion that the elevator was bearing her downward to Hell, full penalty for her sins, and that she would never see her family again. And then she thought, although this, too, must be her imagination at work, that the sound she had heard just before the elevator began its descent was the double door upstairs rattling open.

  The Eggameese was coming for her, no question.

  No. It wasn’t. Only Rod Rutherford and Mrs. Bethe had keys. Rutherford had locked her in, and Mrs. Bethe would hardly come back to let her out. Therefore, nobody was upstairs. So stop it, Julia. Pay attention to business.

  Red warning sticker or no, Julia stumbled as she stepped off the elevator. Everything went tumbling. Picking up her briefcase and the scattered photocopies, she noticed that the floor of the car was almost two inches lower than the floor of the subbasement. NOT CAPABLE OF AUTOMATIC LEVELING, indeed.

  She closed the gate behind her and stepped out into the lowest level of the library stacks. A long time since last time. She paused, scenting the air, listening to currents, before deciding that she was alone.

  She walked along the rows of battleship-gray shelves, her steps ringing on the metal plates of the floor, scarcely noticing the aged books and old pamphlets, the neatly stacked folios of sermons and reports and letters and diaries and minutes that constituted a remarkable history of religion in New England. She did not look at the items on the shelves. She looked at the letters and numbers. This was right. She knew it was. Down here, in the underbelly of the divinity school, was where Kellen had hidden the missing pieces of his surplus. Covered by a code only Julia would understand, hidden in places only Julia could go. Unable to lure her out of her world during his life, the economist had ensured her presence in his world after his death.

  There were moments when she thought his goal was not justice but spite.

  “A little bit self-centered, Jules,” she said, scaring herself with the accuracy of her imitation of her husband’s gently correcting tone. “Not everything is about you.”

  “Kellen was about me,” she answered him, words she would never speak to Lemaster’s face. “Except when he wasn’t,” she admitted.

  She was close. The numbers were starting to catch up with the forms in her hand. Dust was everywhere. There had been a time when the collection was in constant use, when scholars and students thought there was wisdom to be gained from reading the words of the great thinkers of the past, in the actual texts in which the words were laid down: on the printed page, not the computer screen. Nowadays nobody seemed to care about places like this any more—nobody but a handful of traditionalists like her husband, people who like to hold the reflections of earlier generations solidly in their hands, as a reminder, perhaps, that the edifice of morality and reason they have spent their lives building is less transitory than those who zip through ideas with mouse and keyboard might imagine. Solidity implies time: nothing that lasts is ever built quickly.

  “Showtime,” Julia said.

  She had arrived at the first of Kellen’s locations, a dusty corner of the collection of eighteenth-century sermons. She matched the letter and number and pulled from the blue folder a dozen tightly handwritten pages, ink faded, penned by an obscure—

  A sound, in the shadows ahead of her.

  Instinctively she swung the beam into the aisle, but saw nothing.

  It was a bump. Julia was sure of it. The bump of a book falling from a shelf, as if, for example, knocked by a carelessly placed human hand. Not on this level, she decided. One floor up.

  Somebody else was in here.

  But when she shut off the flashlight and listened hard, there was only darkness and silence.

  Enough of this flashlight shit.

  She fumbled along the wall for a light switch, flicked it, then jumped back at the quick whooshing sound of a motor kicking to life.

  Her heart rate and breathing returned to something close to normal as she realized that it was just the sound of the clankety elevator, summoned to some higher level of the stacks.

  Nothing to do with her.

  Except that the stacks were closed, the archives door was alarmed, and nobody was supposed to be in here but her.

  All right. All right. Maybe the elevator was programmed to go back upstairs automatically. The motor stopped. The sliding manual door did not clank open: she would have heard it all the way down here.

  She was alone.

  Back to work.

  Tucked inside an obscure sermon by an even more obscure eighteenth-century preacher, she found a trim white envelope like the one Kellen had taped beneath the piano. Wedged into an early draft of a forgotten monograph on Aristotle’s concept of God by an unimportant religion scholar of a hundred years ago, she found another. And, snuggling puckishly inside the program from the annual student satirical show from the Kepler class of 1953, the year Kellen was born, she found a third.

  She had just stuffed the third envelope into her bag when she looked up sharply at a footfall on the metal stairs.

  “You must leave here at once,” murmured Roderick Ryan Rutherford, ghostly face, twisted into a mask of disapproval, floating above her in the darkened stacks. “Surely, Dean Carlyle, you realize you are not permitted in the stacks unescorted. Such conduct is absolutely against the rules.”

 
So was grabbing the archivist and kissing him on the cheek, but she did it anyway.

  (II)

  SHE WOULD NEVER KNOW WHY, Julia told herself, hurrying along the empty corridor toward her office. That Rod Rutherford had helped Kellen with his project was plain. He had transmitted the clues on her first visit, and then, when she returned with the authorization in hand, he had pretended to refuse her but left her inside the archives to go into the stacks. After a decent interval, he had returned to let her out again, and, although he refused absolutely to allow her to take the documents with her, he waited while she ran the photocopier—although he insisted on charging the copies to her university account. Her questions he politely but firmly refused to answer, citing confidentiality. When she departed, he was still inside, perhaps fussing around the stacks, putting everything back where it belonged.

  Why had he helped Kellen? Rod’s mother had been the Kepler librarian, first woman ever in that post, and he had helped out during the summers, developing his own interest in the field. He was too young to have courted Gina Joule, but not too young to have known her. Perhaps the Rutherfords and the Joules had been close. Perhaps the connection was more attenuated—or more obvious.

  She would never know, and Mr. Rutherford would never tell her. Confidentiality. Loyalty. Secrets. Lies. Was the entire world run this way, or was this some special New England collegiate thing? For, other than her brief sojourn in Manhattan, when she had learned the names of perhaps two of her neighbors, she had never really lived anywhere else.

  Perhaps partaking moderately of the archivist’s paranoia, she locked both the outer and inner doors of her office suite, then sat down at her desk with only the reading lamp for company, and examined her finds.

  The envelopes were conveniently numbered 1, 2, and 3 in Kellen’s sloping hand, so she started with the first, which happened also to be the thickest. A series of letters from Merrill Joule to his wife, who had taken herself off to Europe after Gina’s death. She read, and quickly became engrossed.

  April 4, 1973

  Dearest Anna,

  I hope that this note finds you well, and that you and Margaret are continuing to profit from your holiday abroad. Nothing has changed here. President Nixon continues to duck and weave but I think he will shortly go down. At the university, the weather has lately been too cold for any demonstrations against the war, but with the arrival of spring I imagine we shall again see our share. Here in the Landing, matters are settling, and in the direction you predicted. I salute your wisdom. Justice, I beg you to remember, comes in many forms. All our lives you and I have marched for a vision of justice that is distributive rather than retributive. Can we abandon that now, simply because a member of our family has died? The enemy is a bad system, not bad people. Eduard is right. Our task is not to seek further punishment but to improve the world to the best of our abilities. What is happening at that church is a good example. The important thing is to move on….

  That church: Miss Terry’s? The justice in many forms proposed that they had—what?—forgone vengeance in return for something better?

  Julia had no way of knowing how many letters had passed between the two before the next one Kellen culled from wherever he found them. But the tone had decidedly changed. Gone was the reassuring, almost condescending lord and master of the household, who barely acknowledged his wife’s grief, or his own; in its place was a man given to sudden panic.

  October 12, 1973

  Dearest Anna,

  I have only a moment to pen this note. I am sitting in Ken Steinberg’s office, and, yes, I know what you think of lawyers, but Ken is practically family, and, to be frank, I need his advice. The situation is changed. I am being watched. Yes, every paranoid believes this. But you know me, darling. I am not given to hyperbole. I am being watched. I feel their dark eyes on me even when I cannot see them. I sense their breath, passing nearby. They have done their part. They have pointed everyone in the wrong direction. They have obscured what should be obvious. I have given my word that I accept their vision of justice, and yet they do not believe I am going to keep my side of the bargain. I do not think they are able to break into the United States mails. Yet. But I urge you to beware. I believe you should extend your sojourn in Europe until I signal you that it is safe to return….

  Julia read the key sentences again. They have pointed everyone in the wrong direction. Manufacturing evidence? Manufacturing alibis? I am being watched. She shuddered. I sense their breath, passing nearby.

  “I know exactly how you feel,” she told the air.

  The third letter was dated nearly five months later. Vanessa had written in her paper that Anna Joule took an extended European tour after Gina died. Evidently, Anna had taken her husband’s advice.

  March 7, 1974

  Dearest Anna,

  Destroy this letter once you have read it. I am afraid it is coming apart. Nixon’s fortunes appear to be ours. Covering up is impossible. There is always an informer. Always. Again your wisdom was correct. Better to pursue the truth. I wish I had listened. Yet all is not lost. Unlike Nixon, we have options. Our friends have not deserted us. And here our lifelong struggle for justice stands us I think rather in good stead. We are good people, you and I. We are not monsters. We have made errors, but errors are not the same as evil, are they? Miscalculation need not pave the way to Hell—not if we have done the best we could with what we were given. We have done our best to ensure that our beloved daughter did not die in vain. If we are wrong, at least we have erred on the side of charity.

  To place the letters in context, she opened the second envelope, which turned out to be more pages from the diary of the constable:

  Neither of the college boys’ alibis check out, but we’re not to pursue it. Besides, with all this money floating around I can’t trust anybody. Not even my own people. Not even myself.

  Not enough. Surely this was not the sum total of Kellen’s evidence.

  With trepidation, she advanced on the final envelope. Another photocopy—

  Julia’s head snapped up. She heard the click of the outer door to her office suite opening, even though she was sure she had locked it. She remembered the sound of the elevator rising when she was in the basement, and how she had guessed it must be programmed to return to the main floor; only now did it occur to her that Rod Rutherford always took the stairs, and the rickety old elevator that served the archives was not likely to be capable of being programmed to do anything.

  There was nowhere to run. She sat perfectly still, waiting for the Eggameese to come lurching through the door.

  It swung wide, and Julia tensed.

  “You’re really something,” said Mary Mallard, grinning. “I mean, you’re good at this stuff.”

  (III)

  JULIA WAS ALREADY ON HER FEET, shoveling everything back into the envelopes.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “How did you get in?”

  Mary’s smile faltered. “I take it you still don’t trust me.”

  “I don’t want you anywhere near me.”

  “What’s the matter? I thought I was supposed to be your cheerleader.” Waving invisible pom-poms. “You know. Rah-rah?”

  “I think I sent you an e-mail telling you we shouldn’t see each other.”

  The writer grinned again. “Well, contrary to what you may have heard, I’m actually not all that easy to push around.”

  “So, Mary, what? You came up here and—what?—followed me around?”

  “Sort of.”

  Julia shook her head. “How did you get in here?” Julia repeated, keeping the desk between them.

  “In the building, that’s easy. I waited for a couple of students to come out, and they held the door for me. Nobody ever thinks a girl is up to no good.” She held up a key. “As to the office, well, I sort of picked your pocket in Boston, got the keys duplicated, slipped them back into your bag during our walk on the Common. Pretty cool, huh?”

  Julia’s mouth worked.
“That’s despicable.”

  “Okay, so I’m despicable, and I’m not charming. The kind of books I write, you learn to do a little bit of everything.”

  Julia looked past her, wondering what had happened to Jeremy Flew—or whether she had been wrong in her evaluation of his function.

  “You lied to me,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “The Black Lady. That was clever.”

  “What was?”

  “Pretending that way.” She had stuffed the envelopes in her briefcase. At the same time, she had palmed the chemical mace Lemaster made her carry. She had never used it before but was not about to let the materials pass into the wrong hands. She did not know who Mary was working for. She only knew she never wanted to see her again. “Now, please, Mary, I don’t want to talk to you or see you any more. Please get out of here.”

  The journalist spread her hands wide, the ducklike face pouty. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Julia.”

  “I’m talking about all that Black Lady bullshit. You had me conned from the start.”

  “No, Julia. I never conned you.”

  “No? Remember how you looked me up before the White House? Well, I finally got smart. I looked you up, too. Why didn’t you tell me you’re related to the President?”

  Mary’s face darkened. “You’re joking, right? You got that from some idiot Web site. We’re not related. We’re like eighth cousins once removed or something. That means we probably had a common ancestor who signed the Declaration of Independence. Come on, Julia. By that logic, my family’s related to pretty much all the Presidents.” A desperate smile. “Yours probably is, too.”

  “Just go.”

  “What’s in the envelopes, Julia? Who are you protecting?”

  “Nobody. I want you to go.”

  Mary shook her head. “I can’t do that. The Iowa caucuses are just a couple of weeks away.” She pointed. “We have to use what’s in there, Julia. We can’t let some guy who wants to sit in the Oval Office get away with murder.”