The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  Tower Road and the sad house on it had not been hard to find with his Google map, and after arriving there he had knocked on the front door with no result. Crosetti had pushed the unlocked door open and called out, “Hello! Anyone home?” and felt the hollow sense of an empty house. Inhabited, though: messy but not filthy, toys on the floor, little cars and a plastic gun, a TV tray with an empty plate set up in front of the large-screen TV. They had satellite too-behind the house a white dish scanned the heavens. In front of the TV a La-Z-Boy lounger in brown vinyl attended a sagging chenille-covered couch. A narrow mantelpiece held photographs in frames, but Crosetti could not see them from the door and did not wish to venture within. No dogs barked, which he thought was strange. Didn’t all rural households have dogs? Another clue to he knew not what. He walked around the house. In the backyard there was a plastic playground set much faded by the sun and sized for very young children. In the center of the yard stood a clothes-drying contraption of the kind that resembles an inverted parasol. It was empty, and several of the lines had broken away and dangled, waving feebly in the light breeze. On the back porch stood an elderly cylindrical washing machine. He checked it; dry and spidery.

  After his brief exploration he sat in the car and thought about all this and also how really dumb it had been to drive all this way because of a postcard he’d found in the street. He had no idea whether Carol Rolly had any connection whatever to this house. She could have picked the card up off the sidewalk or found it marking an old book. No, he thought, don’t think about that. Let’s go with the gut. This has something to do with her and that photograph of the two women and the kid. Well, there was a kid here, a boy. He took the photo and looked at it once again. He judged that it had been snapped around five or so years ago, given the apparent age of Carolyn’s face in it, and so the boy would be around eight or nine by now. Crosetti studied a bicycle tossed casually down on the driveway. That would fit a kid of that age, and the various toys scattered around the house and yard suggested the same. There were no girl toys in sight, nor was there another bike, and Crosetti wondered what had become of the baby girl in the photograph…no wait, there in a sandbox attached to the playground set, a single, weathered, naked Barbie. So that checked out too, unless Barbie had been dropped by a visitor. Or stolen.

  He considered the backyard. A sunny day, a Saturday, no clothes on the dryer and it in disrepair, nor had he spotted an electric dryer exhaust, nor did the washer look much used. Which meant that probably there wasn’t a woman in residence. The guy lived here with his kid (or kids), and on Saturday he went to town and did his laundry in the Laundromat, because it was ignoble for a man to do laundry at home, and by going to town on a Saturday he got to meet women and advertise his availability, and maybe he’d go across to the VFW and have a couple of beers while the dryer spun. The kid(s) could play video games at the 7-Eleven and get a Slurpee.

  Crosetti caught himself spinning this tale and wondered where it came from even while he understood that it was as true as if he had made a documentary of the life of H. Olerud. That he was the child of a legendary police detective and a well-known research librarian did not at the moment present itself as an explanation, for he had always made up stories about people, even as a kid. It was one reason why he wanted to make movies, and why he thought he’d be good at it. He took his powers of observation and inference for granted, much as natural musicians think little of causing an inert appliance to sound the secret music they hear in their heads

  He hadn’t eaten since a gas stop at ten and now it was close to four and he was feeling hungry. He thought he would drive back to town and get a bite, and was about to start his car, when he saw a plume of dust coming from the direction of town, which soon resolved itself into a green pickup truck that slowed, passed him, and turned into the driveway of 161 Tower Road. He saw with some satisfaction that the cab contained a man and a boy of about nine, whose small head just showed above the dashboard. The truck was going a little too fast as it made the turn, and its off-front wheel crashed into the boy’s bike that lay in the driveway.

  A bellow of rage from the driver as he slammed on his brakes and a shrill cry from a child. The driver’s door of the truck flew open and out jumped a stocky man a few years older than Crosetti, dressed in jeans and a clean white T-shirt. He had a sizable gut, and a reddish buzz cut topping a tight flat red face of the kind that always seems a little angry. He ran to the front of the truck, cursed again, kicked the bike out of the way, and jerked the passenger door open. From the cab came shrill screams, and Crosetti realized that there was another, younger passenger, and also that the man had not secured either of the children with seat belts. The man reached in and yanked the boy out by his arm. Still holding the arm he batted the boy several times across the head, heavy blows that made awful meaty noises Crosetti could hear from where he sat, all the while demanding of the boy how often he had told him not to leave the fucking bike in the fucking driveway and also whether he thought he was ever going to get a new bike or anything new ever again you little piece of shit.

  Crosetti was wondering in a helpless sort of way whether he should take some action, when the man stopped beating the boy and reached again into the cab of the truck and pulled out a girl of about four. The child’s face was bright red and screwed up in a paroxysm of pain and fright. Some of the red was blood from a wound on her mouth. She squirmed like a lizard in the man’s grasp, her back arched. The man told the child to shut up, that she wasn’t hurt, that if she didn’t shut up this minute he’d really give her something to yell about. The screaming subsided into horrible wheezing gasps, and the man strode into the house with the little girl.

  Shortly thereafter Crosetti heard the sound of a television going at considerable volume. He left his car and walked over to the boy, who lay crouched on the ground where the man had flung him. He was crying in a peculiar way, sucking in great gasps and letting them out in strangled almost noiseless sobs. Crosetti ignored the child and squatted down to examine the bicycle. Then he walked up the drive to where the sedan was under repair, selected a few wrenches and a heavy pliers from the tools scattered about, and addressed the injured bike. He removed the front wheel, straightened the handlebars, set his foot on the front fork to straighten that as well and used the pliers to bring the front wheel spokes into some semblance of their original alignment. He felt the boy’s eyes on him as he worked and heard the child’s sobbing die away to sniffles. He twisted the rim back into approximate circularity by eye, set the wheel back on its fork, and with the bike upside down, he gave it a spin. It wobbled but spun freely around its axle. Crosetti said, “Some say a wheel is just like a heart, when you bend it, you can’t mend it. You’re going to need a new wheel there, partner, but it’ll ride if you don’t go over too rough of a road. What’s your name?”

  “Emmett,” said the boy after a pause, and wiped his face with the back of his hand, making an ugly smear of tears and dust. Bingo, thought Crosetti, the name on the postcard, and examined the child with interest. He was a good-looking kid, if a little too thin, with wide-spaced intelligent-looking blue eyes, and a thin-lipped mouth whose genetic provenance Crosetti thought he knew. His hair was cropped so short that it was hard to tell what color it was.

  Crosetti said, “My name’s Al. Look, Emmett, would you like to help me out with something?”

  The boy hesitated, then nodded. Crosetti took an enhanced printout of Carolyn Rolly’s photograph from his back pocket, and unfolded it for the boy.

  “Do you know who these women are?”

  The boy studied the photograph, his eyes wide. “That’s my mom and my aunt Emily. She used to live with us but she died.”

  “This is your mother?” Crosetti asked with his finger on the younger Rolly.

  “Uh-huh. She run off. He locked her in the cellar but she got out. She got out at night and in the morning she wasn’t there. Where did she go, mister?”

  “I wish I knew, Emmett, I really do,”
said Crosetti absently. His mind had been set whirling by the boy’s appearance and this confirmation of his guess, and his belly churned with tension. To his shame, what he was thinking of was the single night he had spent with Rolly and what she had done and what he imagined she had felt, and whether she had done the same for her husband, that brutal man, in the bedroom of this crummy little house. A powerful urge seized him, to get away from this place and also (although this would be more difficult) to vacate the place in his heart occupied by the person he knew as Carolyn Rolly. He was sorry for the children, stuck with this father, but there was nothing he could do about that. Another blot on Carolyn’s record.

  He started to walk away and the boy called out to him, “Did you know her? My mom?”

  “No,” said Crosetti, “not really.”

  He got into his car and drove off. The boy ran forward a few steps, with the photograph flapping in his hands, and then stopped and was lost in the dust of the road.

  Crosetti found a McDonald’s and had a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke. He finished the junk and was about to order more but checked at the counter. He ate when he was upset, he knew, and if he didn’t watch it he was going to look like Orson Welles, without that person’s early achievement to balance out the flab. He tried to calm himself, an effort hampered by the fact that he’d somehow lost his MapQuest driving directions and made a couple of wrong turns on the way back.

  When he was on the right interstate at last, he composed in his head the script of the film Carolyn Rolly; not a bad title, and he could probably use it without a release because Mrs. Olerud had probably fabricated her name too. Okay: brutal childhood, use that, the girl-in-the-cellar angle, although maybe the uncle’s serial rape business was a little too X-rated. Let’s make Uncle Lloyd a religious fanatic who wanted to keep his niece from the corruption of the world. He dies or she escapes and there she is at seventeen, say, knowing nothing, having had zero contact with mass culture, a little homage to Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser there. There’s some local celebrity around the weird case, and let’s say the cop who found her falls in love with Carolyn, he falls for her purity, her innocence, and marries her, which she goes along with because she’s all alone, she knows nothing about how the world works, and they set up house. He’s a control freak, a cop after all, Crosetti knew guys like that on the cops, but she submits, and that’s the first act.

  Then we show her life, she has the kids and then she starts taking them to the local library, where she meets the wise librarian and the librarian turns her on to art and culture and it lights her up, and then there’s a traveling exhibit of fine books that the librarian gets her to go to without her husband’s knowledge, maybe they go to Chicago (they would shoot it in Toronto, of course), and she realizes she wants to make books, she wants books all around her, but what can she do, she’s got two kids, she’s trapped, but she decides to apply for a bookbinding course by mail and her husband finds out and beats her up, and after that it gets worse and worse, and he locks her in the cellar just like her uncle did, and she escapes and that’s the second act. Then in the third act she goes to New York and…no, you couldn’t do that, the male lead has to come in earlier, you’d have to show the backstory in flashback, the humble clerk who maybe has a past of his own, he’s an ex-cop maybe, and they get together and fall in love and she disappears and…

  Why does she disappear? Crosetti didn’t know, and he found he could not generate a fictional reason that would hold water either. Was she kidnapped? No, too melodramatic. Did she see an opportunity to get enough money so that she could get the kids away from the bad dad? That made more sense. She’d run off with Bulstrode in pursuit of the Shakespeare manuscript. There was a clue in the Bracegirdle letter, Bulstrode had found it, and they were off to England to where X marked the spot. Hundreds of millions, Fanny had said. That had to be it, and the next thing was for the hero to work out the clue himself and find where they’d gone and confront them there in England, you could fake that in Canada too, right, and there’d have to be a subplot, someone else looking for it, and the cruel dad cop also in there somewhere and they’d all come together in the old castle, in the dark, grabbing the briefcase with the manuscript in it away from one another, with plenty of business about false briefcases, a little reference to the Maltese Falcon, of course, and the only last-act problem would be the hero and Rolly, would he save her, would she save him, would they get out with the treasure, or would it be lost? Or maybe the cruel dad would get killed and she’d give up the treasure to be with the hero and the kids…

  He didn’t know how he’d end it, but the more he thought about it, about the intersection between fiction and the real, the more he thought that he had to get some advantage over Bulstrode, the Shakespeare expert, and the best way to do that was to crack the cipher, because with all his expertise, that was one thing Bulstrode did not have. So besides having to learn a lot more about Shakespeare, he had to decipher and read Bracegirdle’s spy letters. Such were Crosetti’s thoughts during the long drive back to the city, peppered by the usual fantasies: he confronts the angry husband, they fight, Crosetti wins; he finds Carolyn again, he acts wry, cool, sophisticated, he has understood all her plottings and forgives; he earns a fortune via the manuscript and explodes upon the cinematic world with a film that owes nothing to commercial demands yet touches the hearts of audiences everywhere, obviating the necessity for a long apprenticeship, cheap student films, playing gofer to some Hollywood asshole…

  He arrived back in Queens at around eight on Saturday evening, fell immediately into bed, slept for twelve hours straight, and awoke vibrating with more energy than he’d felt in a long time and frustrated because it was Sunday and he would have to wait before getting started. He went to mass with his mother therefore, which pleased her a good deal, and afterward she made him a colossal breakfast, which he consumed with gratitude, thinking of the scrawny kids in that house and being frankly grateful for his family, although he knew it was totally uncool to have such thoughts. While he ate he told his mother something of what he had learned.

  “So it was all lies,” she observed.

  “Not necessarily,” said Crosetti, who was still a little entranced with the fictional version he had concocted. “She was obviously on the lam from a bad situation. Parts of it could have been true. She changed the location and some of the details, but this guy actually locked her in a cellar, according to the kid. She could have been abused as a child and fallen into an abusive situation.”

  “But she’s married, which she didn’t bother to mention, and she ran out on her kids. I’m sorry, Allie, but that doesn’t speak well for her. She could have gone to the authorities.”

  Crosetti abruptly rose from the table and brought his plate and cup to the sink, and washed them with the clattering movement of the angry. He said, “Yeah, but we weren’t there. Not everybody has a happy family like we do, and the authorities sometimes screw up. We have no idea of what she went through.”

  “Okay, Albert,” said Mary Peg, “you don’t have to break the dishes to make a point. You’re right, we don’t know what she went through. I’m just a little worried about your emotional involvement with a married woman you hardly knew. It seems like an obsession.”

  Crosetti turned off the faucet and faced his mother. “It is an obsession, Mom. I want to find her and I want to help her if I can. And to do that I have to decipher those letters.” He paused. “And I’d like your help.”

  “Not a problem, dear,” said his mother, smiling now. “It beats playing Scrabble in the long, long evenings.”

  The next day Mary Peg began rounding up cryptography resources from the Web and through her wide range of contacts in libraries around the world, via telephone and e-mail. Crosetti called Fanny Doubrowicz at the library and was heartened to learn that she had puzzled out Bracegirdle’s Jacobean handwriting and entered the text of his last letter into her computer. She had also made a transcript of the ciphertext of the spy letters and sent a
sample of the paper and ink from those originals to the laboratory for analysis. It was, as far as the lab could determine, a seventeenth-century document.

  “This Bracegirdle tells quite a story, by the way,” she said. “It will make a revolution in scholarship, unless it is a pack of lies. If only you had not been so foolish as to sell the original!”

  “I know, but I can’t do anything about that now,” said Crosetti, expending some effort at keeping his voice pleasant. “If I can find Carolyn I might be able to get it back. Meanwhile, has anything surfaced on the library grapevine? Blockbuster manuscript found?”

  “Not even a peep, and I have called around in manuscript circles. If Professor Bulstrode is authenticating it, he is being very quiet about his doings.”

  “Isn’t that strange? I figured he’d be calling press conferences.”

  “Yes, but this is a man who has been badly burned. He would not want to go public with this until he had made absolutely sure. However, there are only a few people in the world whose word on such a manuscript would be probative, and I have spoken to all of them. They laugh when they hear Bulstrode’s name and none have heard from him recently.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe he’s holed up in his secret castle, just gloating. Look, can you zap those documents over by e-mail? I want to get to work on that cipher.”

  “Yes, I will zap now. And I will also send the number of my friend, Klim. I think you will need help. I have looked a little and it does not seem to be a simple thing, this cipher.”

  When he had the e-mail, Crosetti made himself print out Fannie’s transcription of the Bracegirdle letter instead of reading it immediately on the screen. Then he read it several times, especially the last part, about the spying mission, and tried not to be too hard on himself for letting the original go. He almost sympathized with Bulstrode, the bastard-the discovery was so huge that he could well appreciate what was going through the guy’s mind when he saw it. He did not allow himself to think about the other, larger prize, as Bulstrode had obviously and immediately done, nor did he keep Carolyn and how she was connected to all this uppermost in his thoughts. Crosetti was an indifferent student most days, but he was capable of intense focus when he was interested in something, like the history of movies, a subject on which he was encyclopedic. Now he turned this focus onto the Bracegirdle cipher and on the tall stack of cryptography books his mother had brought home from various libraries that evening.